Category: Historical Commentary
It’s Time to Break Up the FBI

It’s Time to Break Up the FBI

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On August 8, 2022, the FBI, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the Biden Administration declared war on the principle of equal justice for all citizens, and told at least half the American population that they are persona non grata. With the unprecedented FBI raid on the home of a former President, we witnessed the most evident sign yet of the Sovietization of America that is already in advanced stages. With that declaration of war, it is time for the gloves to come off in resisting this mortal threat to our democracy and if there is to be any chance of saving what is left of what once was America.

There are numerous steps that are essential to win the war to save the country, and the first and most urgent is the dismantling of the corrupt organization known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI has been out of control for years, and the agency’s previous commitment to the equal administration of justice is long gone. With the raid on Mar-A-Lago by at least 30 FBI agents and DOJ attorneys, there isn’t even a pretext of that remaining. It is the single largest lawless element in the U.S. today, largely as a result of the agency’s politicization at the highest levels.

I don’t like to predict future events, but this raid and the abuse of power it represents has galvanized opposition to Biden and the Dems — already at record levels — and has further galvanized support for Donald Trump. Trump is almost certainly going to announce his candidacy for the presidency — making the raid not just on a former president, but on a future candidate for president. Even more certainly, the Dems are going to lose control of the House by a significant margin in November, and very possibly the Senate as well. While the Republicans have shown themselves on more than one occasion as capable of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, one hopes they will be as energetic at rooting out the very real corruption and unequal administration of justice as the Dems have been in pursuing their chimeras and bogus conspiracy theories over the past six years. All with the complete and knowing complicity of their co-conspirators in the mainstream media.

Dismantling the FBI

The first substantive post on this blog, Threading the Needle Badly, which appeared on June 9, 2017, recounted the malfeasance committed by former FBI Director James Comey. I continued to report on that malfeasance, which included commission of felonies by Comey, both before and after President Trump relieved Comey of his duties. Comey’s successor, current FBI Director Chris Wray, has further weaponized the Bureau against Trump supporters and opponents of the Biden regime (a legitimate word to use now — calling it an administration is a euphemism, at best).

The first step in rooting out the rot should be dismantling the FBI, starting at the top and working down. The organization, over the past six years and beyond, has shown itself as beyond reform and incapable of dealing with its own wrongdoers. Congress, once the Republicans gain control, needs to make reorganization of the FBI its first, but not only, priority.

This would not be without precedent. In the 1970s, the Church Committee, headed by Democratic Senator Frank Church of Idaho, investigated abuses committed by the intelligence community, the CIA, NSA, and FBI. That was a different time, when Democrats were concerned about abuses and civil liberties, a far cry from their highly politicized position today. Another case of agency reorganization was the merger of the United States Information Agency (USIA) into the State Department in 1999.

While the FBI and DOJ conduct their ongoing witch hunts against Trump and his coterie, the blatant criminality of the Biden family is blithely ignored. Just as the egregious criminal offenses committed by Hillary Clinton are ignored. It is only if your name is Trump that the heavy hand of justice is mustered against you. The concept of equal justice under the law no longer applies in this country, which should be a cause for concern for every American.

Once the FBI is dealt with, attention should be focused on cleaning out the rot in the CIA and the rest of the intel community, which has declared itself by its actions as a government unto itself. That has no place in our democracy. And yes, I am a former intel officer (in the State Department), and at that time I was always told there was a bright line between intelligence and policy. That line is now obliterated, and that merging of the two poses a mortal threat to the country on a number of fronts.

The Dems’ War on Ordinary Americans

The raid on Mar-A-Lago is not the only front in the Dems’ war on America. This week they also managed to push through, on a purely partisan vote, their fraudulently named Inflation Reduction Act. A key feature of that law is provision of $80 billion for the IRS to double in size, adding 87,000 new agents and other employees. Part of the fraud is the claim that these new agents will be to conduct audits on the uber wealthy, when in fact they’re coming after you and me. Most audits, by a wide margin, are done on people earning under $200,000 a year, and it is estimated that 60% of the audits to be conducted by the new agents will be on taxpayers earning less than $75,000 a year.

Add in skyrocketing crime rates in cities nationwide, an open border that has allowed a record number of illegal aliens, along with a flow of deadly drugs, terrorists, and human traffickers, to enter the country, and the targeting of parents unhappy with their childrens’ non-education — branded as “terrorists,” by the slimy Merrick Garland and the DOJ — and it’s clear the Democratic Party has set its sights on altering life in America as we’ve known it. And their vision is not a pretty one.

Four years ago I realized I could no longer vote for Democratic candidates, reversing what had been my voting pattern through most of my life. With the sell out of West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin and Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema on the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, we see clearly that there are no trustworthy Democrats. If you vote for someone with a D after their name, you are voting for the Sovietization of the country’s justice system and the destruction of our way of life. Sorry, there is no way to sugar coat that. That’s where we are today. We each have to pick our side — I know which side I am on — and the present and future of the country hang in the balance.

Featured Image: The American flag burns, Lukas Gojda via Shutter Stock. Used under Fair Use.

Keeping America in the dark on illegal entries, Adrees Latif/Reuters, via the New York Post. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Subscribe here, and there, and share this piece.

Summer Solstice
That Time of Year Again: Thoughts on “the Longest Day in the World”

That Time of Year Again: Thoughts on “the Longest Day in the World”

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This piece initially appeared five years ago, on June 21, 2017, the Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere. I originally posted this piece on this blog, and it became an annual event to post it each year on June 21. Two years ago I began posting it on my fiction blog, Stoned Cherry. This year it will appear on both blogs and on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Today, June 21, 2022, it is once more the Summer Solstice, and the actual solstice officially occurs at 5:14 a.m. EDT/09:14 a.m. UTC. The time and other references and weather comments in the piece are as they were five years ago, when the post first appeared. I’m no longer living on the boat, and there have been other changes. This year it has been 53 years, more than half a century, since my father’s death, and Sunday was Father’s Day here in the U.S. I hope you enjoy the piece. And play the music at the end.

It’s June 21, the day of the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, the winter solstice in the Southern Hemisphere. It’s a day that holds various meanings for different peoples, and its significance goes back millennia. The solstice, whether summer or winter, officially took place at 12:24 a.m. U.S. Eastern Daylight Time this morning, or 04:24 UTC.

Just to set the record straight and dispel any questions about my scientific knowledge, I know it’s not the longest day in the world. It’s the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, the shortest day in the Southern Hemisphere. But we’ll get to this a bit later.

It’s been a mixed bag today here on the West Coast of Florida. We’ve been having a lot of rain, something we didn’t have much of over the winter, and the rainy times are interspersed with sunny breaks. Right now, as I look out the window of my boat, the sun is mostly out but I’m looking at the light through rain-drop spattered glass. At least we’re not getting the effects of Tropical Storm Cindy, which is much further west and at this moment dumping lots of water on the upper Gulf Coast.

In this country, the summer solstice marks the official beginning of summer, though in other places and other cultures it marks the middle of summer, as indicated by the name Midsummer Night, which can occur anywhere from the 20th to the 24th of June. And really it is midsummer, since the days, which have been lengthening since the equinox three months ago, now will start to grow shorter, the nights longer.

The sun has reached its apogee in this hemisphere, as it stands today directly over the Tropic of Cancer. I feel summer ending, we already are on the downhill side, the side that will take us through the hot coming months but already on the slide back into winter, the cold time of year. Just as in the Southern Hemisphere the days will begin to grow longer as the seasons move back to summer.

A year ago on this day I was in Alaska, where there never really was a night. Where I was, well below the Arctic Circle, the sun went down sometime around midnight, but there was a kind of twilight that lasted until the sun rose again a few hours later. Above the Arctic Circle on this day, the sun never sets, and it truly is the Land of the Midnight Sun.

My thoughts turn to other things on this day. Someone asked me the other day, which was Father’s Day in the U.S., what thoughts I had of my father on that Sunday. But really, I think of Father’s Day as a commercial holiday. I also remember the last Father’s Day I had with my father, and how my mother did her unwitting best to create conflict between me and my father. While I may wish a happy day to the fathers I know on Father’s Day, it is today, the day of the solstice, that I think of my father. June 21 was his birthday, which in most years coincides with the solstice. I was told as a child that it was the longest day of the year, which I translated in my own way into it being the longest day in the world, and I would go around telling everyone who would listen that it was.

“It’s the longest day in the world!” I’d exclaim each year on his birthday, from morning until night.

I think today of my father on this day, the 21st of June. Gone now, for nearly 48 years. And I think back to the day of his birth, June 21, 1913. One hundred and four years ago. Even had he not died young as he did, just 56 years old, it is hard to imagine that he would still be alive today had he not died when he did. A prolongation of the inevitable.

A factoid I learned earlier is that today is not the longest day in the history of the world, as one might imagine it to be given that the earth’s rotation on its axis generally was slowing. Rather, the longest day in the history of the world is believed to be June 21, 1912, and things like the earth’s tides and recession of the glaciers have caused a slight increase in the rate of the planet’s rotation since then. My father was born a year later, which arguably could have been the second or third longest day in the history of the world, if not the actual longest day in the world.

I wonder what it was like on that June day, the day of the solstice, the longest day of the year, the day my father was born, in Jersey City, New Jersey. Did his father and mother, his Italian parents, my grandparents that I never knew, know it was the solstice? Did they even know of the solstice? Regardless, I’m inclined to think they did not think of it, if for no other reason than that they had something else on their mind that day. And then I think of the things people from then knew and were taught and how many of those things have been lost today, in these encroaching new Dark Ages in which we find ourselves, and I have to wonder. Perhaps they knew, better than most people today know. Or care to know. And they did note the auspicious day on which their son was born.

I’ll think of my father again on July 27, the anniversary of his death, and by then even our summer, the summer as we define it, will be half over.

The solstices, like the equinoxes, serve as a kind of punctuation for me. I watch the ebb and the flow of the days, the seasons, the years, and they mark the passage of time, time that increasingly slips by way too quickly. All of life is punctuation, I think. Slowing. Stopping. Breaking things, even waves on the water, into different parts, different pieces, different rhythms and fugues and movements and phrases and sentences. It is through such punctuation that we mark our lives, mark our transit through summer and back into winter, from day into night, from life into death. Watching, as a reader of a story does, while the time of our lives flows past. When we lose that punctuation, everything blends into one big mass, and we feel lost in the current, flailing and drowning as we’re pulled inexorably along. At least I do.

Enjoy this song, which I found today amid my files, and with which I end this post, and enjoy the time that nature and life give us.

 

Click here if song doesn’t play.

Elon Musk accepts Axel Springer Award Berlin December 2020
Turning Twitter Around: A Battle Won in the War for Free Speech?

Turning Twitter Around: A Battle Won in the War for Free Speech?

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Unless you’ve been living in an ice cave deep in the far reaches of the Antarctic continent for the past couple of weeks, you’re aware of the battle between Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest human, and the guardians of the septic system known as Twitter. You’re probably also aware that on Monday this week the battle was ceded by Twitter’s board and, pending government regulator approval and a vote of the shareholders, Musk will acquire all of Twitter’s stock and take the company private.

With an offer of $54.20 a share — a price encapsulating a subtle hidden message — the deal, valued at about $44 billion, was achieved with finance from Morgan Stanley and some other banks. Musk, worth an estimated $268 billion, is expected to put in about $21 billion in equity, the balance coming from debt and margin loan finance.

“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said in a statement following announcement of the deal. In a recent public presentation, he also said, “Having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization. I don’t care about the economics at all.”

One would think that those for whom free speech should mean a great deal — people like the journalists, commentators, writers, academics, politicians, and other members of the chattering class that populate the platform — would be buoyed by those words. And sadly, tragically, one would be disappointed, hearing the great outpouring of blather criticizing both Musk and his ideas about the importance of free speech. For those people, the only free speech that matters is that which promotes their own leftist, woke, elitist, and establishmentarian view of the universe, and anyone who disagrees with it can stuff it. That is the state of discourse in this country and beyond, Twitter being but a distilled version of it.

The wailing and gnashing of teeth

Judging by the wailing and gnashing of teeth, ranging from Twitter employees, themselves responsible for so much of the repression of free speech on the platform, to commentators on CNN and MSNBC, to so-called celebrities, both known and unknown, one would think Musk’s acquisition of Twitter was akin to the death of unbiased speech, instead of its — far more likely — liberation. But in a time when “misinformation” equals anything that doesn’t support the official party line, however ludicrous and discredited that line might be, and when the epithets “racist” and “homophobic” can be bandied about like beads at a Mardi Gras parade, a true supporter of free speech might take heart at Musk’s intents.

While one can factually argue that Facebook and Google are both far bigger platforms and far more repressive of free speech than Twitter, Twitter is — as Musk describes it — “…the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.” So in that sense, it is where the society’s gatekeepers and opinion setters gather and, for that reason, it holds far more power over the direction the society takes. And those who have benefited the most from holding sway over that direction are now panic-stricken that their oversized power and prestige and position might be threatened.

Actress Jameela Jamil who, pardon my ignorance, I confess I’ve never heard of, tweeted, “Ah [Musk] got twitter. I would like this to be my what lies here as my last tweet. I fear this free speech bid is going to help this hell platform reach its final form of totally lawless hate, bigotry, and misogyny. Best of luck.”

Not to be outdone, an “activist” named Shaun King deleted his Twitter account after posting, “At its root, @ElonMusk wanting to purchase Twitter is not about left vs right. It’s about white power….He’s upset that Twitter won’t allow white nationalists to target/harass people. That’s his definition of free speech.”

Huh?

George Takei OOOH MYYY

Irony, irony, and more irony

Not a huge surprise, given contemporary realities, that the left, once married to principles of free speech, now dread, fear, and even condemn it. Irony? Or the result of the relentless erosion of traditional liberal values? Both you say?

Being unintentionally ironic, Star Trek actor George Takei, whom I’ve at least heard of, had this to say: “I’m not going anywhere. Should this place become more toxic, I pledge to strive even harder to lift up reason, science, compassion and the rule of law. The struggle against fascism, misinformation, and hate requires tough fighters. I hope you stay in the fight, right beside me.”

One has to wonder if “reason and science” include blocking and de-platforming, as Twitter has done, any questions that COVID-19, arguably the biggest story of the past two years, might — might — have originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China, or if they include the possibility that the COVID vaccines maybe aren’t all they were cracked up to be. One also wonders if “the rule of law” and “the struggle against fascism, misinformation, and hate” could extend to the criminal activities of the Biden crime family, given that Twitter not only blocked but locked out the accounts of those reporting, or even linking to the articles, on the Hunter Biden laptop, the so-called Laptop From Hell, and the damning evidence it contained in the days leading up to the pivotal 2020 presidential elections. Or possibly the “Russia hoax” story and all the hatred it generated, which Twitter and much of the mainstream media were more than eager to promote as “truth” (and still do, despite the proof we now have that it was a manufactured lie promulgated by the Hillary Clinton campaign).

Similar questions might be raised about the tweet of Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, founder of the World Health Network. who wrote, “Just a thought–next time we have $44 billion laying around, can we please spend it to solve the pandemic, climate change, hunger, poverty, and malnutrition?” Maybe, one might think, some honest debate on those subjects can lead to more reasoned understanding of them, rather than treating them as tenets of religious faith.

None other than the nearly canonized Barack Obama told Stanford University students last Thursday that not more, but less free speech is needed to combat dreaded “misinformation” (read: anything that disagrees with the ruling class and official orthodoxy) on social media platforms. This coming from a world-class spreader of “misinformation” in the form of promulgating the Russia hoax, among other falsehoods. Of course, this view encapsulates Obama’s inherent distrust of the ordinary citizen to make his or her own judgments when faced with conflicting information.

Some of the silliest outcries were raised by those who said billionaires shouldn’t own tech companies or media. Do they mean people like billionaire Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame, who owns The Washington Post, or Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, who owns a significant chunk of The New York Times? Or perhaps they mean billionaire Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, or Google billionaire founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, or possibly billionaire Twitter founder Jack Dorsey? One suspects not, given the liberal tilt of all those billionaires. It’s just the billionaires, like Elon Musk, of a libertarian and free-speech tilt that they don’t approve of. Apparently lacking any sense of irony, one WAPO columnist went so far to say it was “dangerous” when billionaires buy media, seemingly oblivious to his own boss’s net worth.

And of course, behind much of the angst is the fear that the dreaded Orange Man, Donald Trump, might be allowed back on the platform. The horror! That a former president of the United States with tens of millions of supporters might be allowed to speak his mind. But those afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome — which should be a bona fide mental illness listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM — might take comfort in Trump’s announcement that he didn’t plan on returning to Twitter but would stay with his own new platform, TRUTH Social.

A disclaimer

In the interest of fairness and honesty, things not much found on Twitter, let me offer a disclaimer of my own. Actually, two disclaimers.

First, I am not now nor have I ever been a member of Twitter. Even before it fully descended into the sewer of hatred and venom and bias in which it now wallows, I found it to be unconducive to effective communication. I wrote about this several years ago, and my opinion of it has not changed, except in a negative direction, since. Actually, it was back in 2015 when I had this to say in my comment about Twitter.

I am sure I could more effectively promote my own work, which continues to languish in obscurity, were I to take a place on Twitter, but I feel I have to deal with enough negativity in life without diving into the waves of mindless invective that permeate Twitter and, in truth, just about every other place online where people express their views, no matter how mindless and hateful. I fully acknowledge that that trend might continue, and possibly accelerate, if and when Musk takes the halters off the platform, but that is the price of free speech. Of course, as Twitter in its current manifestation demonstrates, it’s also the price of repressed speech.

I’ve long been a believer in the view expressed by Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in his concurring statement in the 1927 case of Whitney v. California: “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”

My second disclaimer concerns Elon Musk. There is much about Musk I admire — his brilliance, his acute business acumen, his successful track record in creating effective private access to space. I also admire his mouthiness and willingness to not to take guff from anyone, whether it’s the head of the Russian space program, Elizabeth Warren, or the raving critics of his acquisition of Twitter. On the other hand, I’m not a huge fan of Tesla and EVs in general, but especially since Tesla is arguably more a Chinese than an American company. I also strongly disagree with Musk over the role of hydrogen, which Musk calls “incredibly dumb,” as the fuel of the future. Further, I’m not a fan of naming one’s child X Æ A-12, as he and current wife Grimes, AKA Claire Elise Boucher, named their son, youngest of Musk’s six children. But I try not to be too judgmental of peoples’ parenting.

One can take heart in Musk’s invitation to his fiercest critics to remain on Twitter.

“I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter,” he tweeted, “because that is what free speech means.”

The war to preserve free speech is far from over, but this could be an important win on the battlefield of ideas.

 

Featured image: Elon Musk accepts Axel Springer Award, Berlin, December 2020, Britta Pedersen/Pool, via Getty-Images. Used under Fair Use.

George Takei, OOOH MYYY, ed7, Giphy.Com. Used with permission.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Subscribe here, and there, and share the piece.

Elie Wiesel
A Time When the World Needs Elie Wiesel

A Time When the World Needs Elie Wiesel

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Seeing the scenes of devastation, cruelty, and inhumanity — one might call it barbarity — coming out of Ukraine, and especially witnessing the hundreds of dead, tortured, and raped men, women, and children in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, I was reminded of my encounter with Elie Wiesel, modern times’ foremost advocate for the oppressed, some twenty-three years ago. I met Wiesel when assigned as his control officer during his visit to Albania, sent by President Bill Clinton as his personal envoy to look into the state of the Kosovo refugees finding safe harbor in the country and in neighboring Macedonia.

In his report on the visit, WIesel, a Holocaust survivor, wrote, “What I saw and heard there was often unbearable to the survivor that still lives in my memory. In fact, I never thought that I would hear such tales of cruelty again.”

And yet, here we are, again. Twenty-three years later and just 700 miles (1,120 kms) distant, and once more we’re witnessing the imposition of unspeakable cruelty by one people upon another.

In the lingering heat at the end of a long Albanian June day, I vividly recall Wiesel expressing to me his biggest fear, that the hatred being engendered by the terror wreaked on the victims would only lead to a desire for revenge and, he feared, that revenge would carry over to future generations. Already now we’re hearing mention — perhaps remarkably restrained given the horrors these people have suffered and witnessed — of a new hatred for the Russians uttered by Ukrainian refugees and those who stayed behind amid the violence and destruction and killing. As Wiesel wondered in 1999, whether the world had learned anything, and concluding, “I am not so sure,” we can say today that the world, and its evil-doers, has learned pitifully little.

Wiesel died on July 2, 2016. His loss is inestimable. Indeed, the world would benefit if it could hear his voice today. This is a time when the world needs Elie Wiesel. And if it can’t hear his voice, it can look back at his words spoken during his life.

I wrote the piece below, and it appeared on the first anniversary of Elie Wiesel’s death, July 2, 2017. I think it worth republishing it now, and the horrors and the inhumanity Wiesel and I heard recounted in 1999, and his concerns for the future, apply equally, if on an even bigger scale, today.

Remembering Elie Wiesel

The news of Elie Wiesel’s death reached me on the car radio last July 2 as I was driving through Banff and Jasper national parks in Alberta. The sun had come out after a very rainy Canada Day the previous day, but the news of Wiesel’s passing arrived as a shock that darkened even that bright Saturday. I had a most personal and moving encounter with the Holocaust survivor, Nobel laureate, author, teacher, and renowned advocate for the oppressed 17 years prior, and I knew I needed to write something of my memories of him. Unfortunately, circumstances were not conducive that day or in subsequent days as I made my way back to the U.S. and to Florida, and the months that followed proved far more tumultuous and challenging than I had imagined. But now, on the anniversary of his death, I feel it’s finally time I share my thoughts on this man who touched my life so profoundly.

In June of 1999 I was again posted to the U.S. Embassy in Tirana, Albania, returning there on TDY at my request from my then-permanent station in Brasilia. I couldn’t bear to read any more accounts of what the Serbs were doing to the Kosovar Albanians during their onslaught on the province of Kosovo – perhaps in part due to my own partially Albanian ancestry – and I asked to be sent on temporary duty back to Tirana, where I arrived in mid-May and was to remain through most of July.

It was during the first week of June 1999 that Elie Wiesel was sent as a personal representative of President Bill Clinton to visit the refugee camps housing the displaced Kosovar Albanians in Macedonia and Albania. The President wanted to get a first-hand read on what was going on, and what the state of the refugees was, and so he turned to the man who had spent so much of his adult life speaking out for the oppressed of the world. The man who himself had survived internship, at the age of 15, at two of Nazi Germany’s most notorious death camps, Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

Perhaps because I constituted a significant part of the embassy’s collective memory, having been posted to Tirana from 1995 to 1997, including during Albania’s own internal descent into temporary madness following collapse of the country’s massive pyramid schemes, I was assigned as control officer to Mr. Wiesel. What that meant was that I was to accompany the visitor wherever he went, look after his safety and well being, oversee the translators, drivers, and other personnel assisting in the mission, serve as liaison to the embassy and whatever relevant agencies to assure that his requests were met, answer his questions about the country and the situation to supplement what knowledge he was garnering on his own, and to generally provide whatever support the President’s envoy might need or want. It struck me then as a great honor to be selected to fill this role, and it still strikes me that way.

Interestingly, in his report to the President, Mr. Wiesel said he was “accompanied by three able US government officials” during his visits to the two countries, and in acknowledging the role played by the embassies and the U.S. government agencies that assisted with the visit, he said, “They went out of their way to be helpful. They bring honor to our country.”

In truth, I felt that it was he who brought honor to us through his visit and, more than anything, the serious, sensitive, and intense manner in which he approached his role and the kindness he showed to everyone he came in contact with.

June brings heat to Albania, and the tents housing the thousands of refugees who had fled their homes in Kosovo were hot in the June sun. Elie Wiesel never faltered for a moment as we went from camp to camp, interviewing dozens of people in each camp, conducting the interviews in the tents, working through a translator, and listening intently to the unrelenting accounts of personal horror and loss that poured out. I sat in on most of these interviews, and hour by hour and day by day the strain and the sadness grew.

We got out into the areas where the camps had been set up, and this provided me with the occasion of my first-ever helicopter ride, aboard a U.S. Navy Sea Stallion that carried our entourage west out of the capital to our first stop. The schedule we kept up would have been grueling all by itself, but Wiesel was unstopping in his quest to speak with as many of the refugees as he could, seemingly disregarding any jet lag he might have picked up coming from New York, even at the age of 70 at the time.

We set up individual interviews as well as, as I recall, one or two group sessions, always in the big white refugee tents. For hours upon hours we heard women tell of watching their husbands and sons taken away and gunned down by the Serbs. We heard of parents separated from their children, of children watching their parents killed before theirs eyes, of the difficult and dangerous trek over the mountains and out of Kosovo to relative safety in Albania.

As Wiesel wrote in his report to President Clinton, “I listened to their tales of senseless cruelty and inhumanity which characterized Milosevic’s army and police; they have been reported in the international media. Still, it is different to hear it first-hand. One feels frustrated and powerless in their presence. And embarrassed. Pristina and Pec, Djakovica and Cecelija, Mitrovica and Glogovac, Kuraz and Izbica: eyewitnesses brought back harrowing detailed graphic reports from Kosovo’s killing fields. They go on and on. Forced expulsions, houses looted, villages burned, insults, threats, imprisonment, repeated rapes of young women, beatings of young men, separation of men and women, summary executions: everywhere, the process is the same. And the tormentors – who are they? Most of them are former neighbors.”

He heard again and again how it was former neighbors who were inflicting these cruelties, and I remember the interview Wiesel cites in his report: “ ‘A policeman came with his 5-year-old son,’ a man with an extraordinarily kind face told me. ‘He pointed at us and asked the boy to choose the prisoner to be beaten that morning.’ ”

When we took breaks, or when it was time to head back to Tirana at day’s end, we would watch the refugee children playing their games between the tents, as children will do.

“In this haunted world of Kosovo refugees, adults wept,” Wiesel writes in his report to the President. “Children did not. They sang. They played games. They laughed. And I no longer know what hurt us more: the children’s laughter or their parents’ tears.”

But what is not contained in those words is what we saw, again and again, which was children not just laughing and singing, but also pretending in their play to capture and execute one another, having picked up perhaps all too well what they had witnessed back home. I remember being at dinner in an open-air restaurant with embassy colleagues the evening of our camp visits and trying to describe what I had witnessed. But I was unable to get past the image of children forming guns with their fingers and using them to play-shoot their playmates in the back of the head, and breaking down at the table, not able to go on. The memory still haunts me and brings tears to my eyes even as I write these words.

It’s relevant to recall the details of Elie Wiesel’s life, being born into a town in Transylvania, a part of Romania that was transferred to Hungarian control for several years during World War II. And from there being hauled off with his family to the Nazi concentration camps as part of the Holocaust. Only Elie and two older sisters survived, their parents and younger sister killed in the camps, and the only reason Elie survived was by lying about his age, saying he was 18 and so able to work and prove useful to his captors. His life since then was marked with concern for the oppressed, and working to see that something like the Holocaust could never be repeated.

I think hearing the Kosovar refugees tell of the horrors that they were subjected to and witnessed brought back too many bad memories to Elie Wiesel. I could see it in his face, a look I can still see today, the effect all this was having on him. And in a low voice what he conveyed to me was his fear that this terror the refugees experienced was just going to carry on, was going to engender hatred and a desire for revenge, and the adults and the children playing their games were going to return to Kosovo with a desire to inflict on the Serbs what the Serbs had inflicted on them. It was this fear for the future that concerned him the most.

He writes in his report, “What I saw and heard there was often unbearable to the survivor that still lives in my memory. In fact, I never thought that I would hear such tales of cruelty again.”

His fear was that the victims would become the victimizers, seeking to wreak back onto the Serbs what their Serb neighbors had done to them. Toward the end of his report Wiesel expresses his concern for the future: “Their bitterness, indeed their hatred for [Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic] and his subordinates, will not fade away.”

When Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, the Norwegian Nobel Committee called him “a messenger to mankind.” But at the entrance to the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, it is Wiesel’s words that are carved in stone: “For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.”

Other words spoken by Wiesel must give us pause for thought, though. Lamenting that his father had no grave at which he might grieve, he said, “What can I tell him? That the world has learned? I am not so sure.”

In June 1999 and afterward, Elie Wiesel bore witness to the suffering and cruelty brought down on the Kosovar Albanians, and I think it added to his uncertainty that the world had changed since the Holocaust. But for me, a lowly embassy control officer, I will never forget his presence or his concern. In those couple of days, my life was truly touched by him.

Read Elie Wiesel’s full report to President Clinton here.

Photo by Remy Steinegger, World Economic Forum. Used with permission.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Subscribe here, and there, and share the piece.
Twisted Up in Our Own Shoelaces

Twisted Up in Our Own Shoelaces

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“There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.” — George W. Bush

“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.” — George W. Bush

It’s a sad day when we have to go back to former President George W. to illustrate how befuddled our current so-called “leadership” is, but somehow his linguistic faux pas seem to best encapsulate the current confused state of affairs in this country. Besides, the present occupant of the White House, once King of the Gaffe, now seldom makes enough sense to even come up with a colorful misquote. He just presents as ornery and mean and overwhelmingly somnolent, and most of his words, such as they are, are fed to him by others on a teleprompter. At least George W. made a stab at it on his own, as ill-fated some of those attempts were. If you want to hear equally nonsensical statements, you have to turn to our allegedly second in command (sic), VP Kamala Harris.

As I write this, we’re seeing the results of our feckless approach to dissuading Russian President Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine. There are reports of explosions, likely from Russian cruise missiles landing in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, as sirens sound and tens of thousands of people flee the city, removing the doubts and questions of recent weeks whether Putin planned on invading Ukraine or not. Now we know.

While a masked Harris, looking more like some comical representation of a cartoon dog than a leader of the Western world, prattled on about “unity” in the aftermath of a security meeting in Munich a few days ago, Putin was lining up his ducks and getting them ready to quack. In a big way. Following a diplomatically polite meeting with Harris, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky laid out the reality in more clear terms.

“We don’t need your sanctions after the bombardment will happen,” Zelensky said, “and after our country will be fired at or after we will have no borders or after we will have no economy or parts of our country will be occupied. Why would we need those sanctions then?”

The prescience of Zelensky’s fears have now been made manifest. Whether the Nightmare Scenario I postulated previously will come to pass remains to be seen, but clearly Russia and China are in close touch, and China is observing closely what transpires in Ukraine. But as I predicted, Putin held back until after the Beijing Olympics had ended to make his move.

Giving Aid and Comfort to the Enemy

Biden (shown in the photo above with photos of media representatives, the friendly ones he was “supposed” to call on circled, at a rare press event) has done everything possible to aid and abet Putin’s plans while hindering our own ability to counter, in real terms, Russia’s threat, not just to Ukraine but to the U.S. and the rest of the world.

Right from the beginning of his administration, Biden deliberately took America from the energy independence that had been a cornerstone of Donald Trump’s economic policy to returning the country to dependence on foreign sources of oil, including Russia. In 2021, the U.S. imported about 250 million barrels of oil from Russia, tripling the 2020 amount and setting a new record. While canceling the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have carried Canadian oil to refineries in the U.S., and now  canceling oil leases on U.S. public lands and blocking all new drilling in this country, Biden lifted sanctions and greenlighted Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline to carry Russian natural gas under the Baltic Sea to Germany.

Given that petroleum and gas exports are key elements of Russia’s economy — which, with nearly two and a half times the population, is smaller than Italy’s, or with nearly five times the population, is smaller than that of Texas — there is little Biden could have done that would not have been a bigger help to Russia and bigger hurt to the U.S. While Trump argued Germany and Western Europe should not be dependent on Russia for their energy needs, Biden encouraged it. Good work, Squinty Joe. Now we know who Putin’s real pooch is.

While Americans are now paying $4, $5, $6, and more for a gallon of gas — often spending north of $100 to fill their tank — compared with under $2 while Trump was president, Biden has cautioned that sanctions against Russia will incur further costs in the form of still higher energy costs to this country. Brilliant plan. With fuel prices at an eight-year high and inflation at a 40-year high, now Americans are told to buck up and pay up. And of course, the usual media toadies are blaming all this on the Ukraine situation, when in fact those issues were well underway and established long before Ukraine popped up as a crisis. Along with Russia, OPEC, and Iran, the real beneficiaries of this administration’s obtuse policies are the special interests who stand to profit from a so-called “green” economy, much as they did under Obama, when Biden was Vice President.

Biden’s strategic failures are numerous, but none bigger or more notable than his disastrous and scandalous surrender and withdrawal from Afghanistan. It was like giving a green light to Putin, Xi — with his eye on taking back Taiwan — and every other power-hungry despot in the world. And don’t forget: Biden declared climate change (when he wasn’t blaming white supremacy) as the biggest threat to U.S. security. I wonder how many Ukrainians, or even Americans, would agree with that assessment.

We shouldn’t be surprised by any of this. The same old merry band of morons that were in charge the last time Russia took a bite out of Ukraine, annexing the Crimea in 2014, is back in charge, and Putin knows that. And he knows he can play them like a balalaika.

I’m reminded of the game of chicken we used to play when I was a kid. One kid draws a line in the dirt with his foot and says, “I dare you to cross this line.” The other kid goes, “Oh, yeah?” He steps across the line and says, “There– what are you gonna do about it?” The first kid laughs and announces, “Now you’re on my side.”

What are Russia’s Real Objectives?

Putin and Russia couldn’t be more clear about at least some of Russia’s priorities and how sanctions won’t deter it from pursuing those priorities.

“Excuse my language, but we don’t give a shit about sanctions,” Russia’s ambassador to Sweden, Viktor Tatarintsev, told the Swedish daily Aftonbladet earlier this month. “The expansion of NATO is the biggest threat to Russia.”

Russia’s ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Antonov, using more polite language, reiterated the same point to CBS’s Face the Nation this past Sunday.

“We would like to put everything on the paper, we would like to see legally binding guarantees for Russian security,” Antonov said. “We sent our package of proposals, what should we do? We don’t want to see next wave of expansion of NATO. We would like you not to use any Eastern and Central European countries, as well as Baltic states, to deploy their new weapons. We don’t want INF [Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces] missiles deployed in Europe.”

The INF Treaty was signed between President Ronald Reagan and then-Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev in December 1987, but President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the treaty in 2019, citing Russian non-compliance, and also concerns about a Chinese arms buildup in the Pacific, since China is not a signatory to the treaty. Subsequently, Putin also suspended Russia’s treaty obligations.

Some in this country, such as former Democratic Congresswoman and one time presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, adhere to the theory that making it clear that Ukraine will not become a member of NATO would have caused Putin to back off on his threat to the country. If one puts the current crisis in the context of the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, where the U.S., under President John F. Kennedy, faced down Soviet ships carrying nuclear missiles to Cuba, 90 miles off our shores, Russia’s concern about NATO expansion on its borders makes sense. A little heralded part of the resolution of that crisis was the unpublicized agreement by the U.S. to withdraw its Jupiter missiles from Turkey, on the Soviet Union’s border, revealing the reciprocal nature of not placing nuclear threats right on an adversary’s border.

Russia’s concerns about NATO expansion certainly are real, but whether they tell the whole story or are simply a red herring for concealing Putin’s expansionist aims may have been answered by Putin himself during a lengthy monologue, delivered on February 21. In that monologue, described by some as “surreal” and historically “revisionist,” Putin claimed that Ukraine has no right to exist as an independent country and merely is part of the old Russian empire. In the same speech, Putin announced he was recognizing two predominantly Russian rebel regions in the eastern part of Ukraine, the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic” and “Luhansk People’s Republic.” Putin later ordered troops to cross the border to those two districts, under the guise of being “peacekeepers.”

For his part, Biden issued an executive order putting sanctions, not on Russia, but on the two breakaway regions. You can’t make this stuff up.

“Ukraine is a test of western resolve. It’s not just about Putin,” said former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Nikki Haley. “The Chinese communists and Iranian jihadists are watching too. It’s a major leadership moment for Biden. So far, he’s failing.”

Following launch of his invasion of Ukraine overnight, Putin issued the most dire threat yet to the U.S. and the West.

Speaking at 6 a.m. Moscow time this morning, Putin threatened “consequences greater than any you have faced in history” should Western countries become involved in Ukraine.

What these “consequences” might consist of were left deliberately ambiguous. Might they include massive cyber attacks? Invasion of the Baltic states? Nuclear retaliation? It is relevant to recall that, following resolution of the Cuban missile crisis, both Kennedy and Khrushchev said they had madmen on their side urging them to push the nuclear button. One has to wonder, given his increasingly erratic and aggressive behavior and his twisted world view, whether Putin would not have been one of those arguing for nuclear Armageddon. Or that he is not now capable of it.

How much further Putin’s view of returning Russia to what he sees as its former greatness will go, we will have to wait to see. We don’t have to wait to see Biden’s failure. We’ve seen plenty of evidence of that, all through this administration. Now we’re seeing more of it, and where it leads.

Featured image: Twisted Shoe Laces. Pixabay. Used with permission.

Befuddled Biden with press photos. EPA/Oliver Contreras/Pool Photo. Used under Fair Use.

Putin and his pooch. Reuters, from Esquire.com. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Subscribe here, and there, and share the piece.