TimeGhost History
Published 26 Feb 2025In 1946, liberal democracy has outlasted fascism but faces fresh challenges from communism — and from within its own ranks. Thinkers like Karl Popper and Hannah Arendt question the foundations of natural rights, free speech, and the reach of government. As the UN debates universal human rights and colonies demand equality, a new liberalism emerges. Will it fulfill its ideals or crumble under the weight of global upheaval?
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February 27, 2025
1946’s Biggest Lie: How the World Misread “Universal Human Rights”
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Reining in the ATF
J.D. Tuccille on the ATF’s immediate future with FBI director Kash Patel as the newly appointed acting head of the bureau:
Kash Patel, 9th Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
… it’s impossible to credibly argue that the ATF doesn’t need a shakeup. After all, this is a federal agency that ran guns to criminal gangs in Mexico as part of a bizarre and failed “investigation”, manipulated mentally disabled people into participating in sting operations — and then arrested them, lost thousands of guns and gun parts, killed people over paperwork violations, and unilaterally reinterpreted laws to create new felonies out of thin air (which means more cause for sketchy investigations and stings). The federal police agency obsessively focused on firearms has long seemed determined to guarantee itself work by finding ever more things to police.
But what about putting the same person in charge of both the ATF and the FBI? How does that make sense?
Well, there’s a lot of overlap in the responsibilities of federal agencies. During the ATF’s “Operation Fast and Furious” gunrunning escapade in Mexico, it coordinated — badly — with the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). During its 2012 investigation of that fiasco, the Justice Department Inspector General “conducted interviews with more than 130 persons currently or previously employed by the Department, ATF, the DEA, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)” on its way to identifying “a series of misguided strategies, tactics, errors in judgment, and management failures that permeated ATF Headquarters and the Phoenix Field Division”.
[…]
Done right, you wouldn’t need as many agents for the combined agency, and you would have lower overhead. But — and this is a big concern — done wrong, you’d end up with a supercharged federal enforcement agency with all the hostility to civil liberties its old components embodied when separate, but now with lots more clout.
When he took charge of the FBI, Patel became the leader of an agency that has long served as a sort of political police. Its abuses date back decades and never seem to go away, just to morph into new ways of targeting anybody who criticizes whoever is currently in power.
“The FBI entraps hapless people all the time, arrests them, charges them with domestic terrorism offenses or other serious felonies, claims victory in the ‘war on domestic terrorism’, and then asks Congress for more money to entrap more people,” John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer and whistleblower, wrote in 2021.
That means there’s already a problem that needs to be addressed, or it could infect a combined agency rather than taking the sharp edges off the ATF.
Also troubling is that before his nomination to head the FBI, Patel made comments suggesting he wants to target his own political enemies. He’s backed off those threats, telling the Senate Judiciary Committee he’s committed to “a de-weaponized, de-politicized system of law enforcement completely devoted to rigorous obedience to the Constitution and a singular standard of justice”. But it’s worth watching what he does with his roles at the separate FBI and ATF before combining the two agencies into something more dangerous.
Or maybe the Trump administration won’t take the next step of formally integrating the ATF and the FBI. Self defense advocates have long called for ATF leadership that isn’t actively hostile to gun owners. If all Patel does is rein in the ATF so that Americans get a few years of relief from that agency’s abuses, that’s a victory itself. But eliminating a much-loathed federal agency would be even better.
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Getting Elected in Ancient Rome
toldinstone
Published 8 Nov 2024The chief officials of the Roman Republic were chosen through one of history’s most chaotic electoral systems.
Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:33 The Roman Republic
1:33 Cursus honorum
2:08 Comitia Centuriata
2:58 Comitia Tributa
3:49 “Optimates” and “Populares”
4:22 Campaigning
6:19 Political graffiti
7:06 Romanis Magicae
7:51 Election day
9:11 The end of elections
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QotD: The ANC, the Inkatha Freedom Party, and the Zulus during Apartheid
… one underappreciated fact is that [South Africa] was handed over to Leninists. Before reading this book, I think I had in the back of my mind some vague sense, probably absorbed from racist Twitter accounts, that Nelson Mandela had some sort of communist affiliation, but the reality is so much worse than I’d imagined and very curiously unpublicized. Mandela’s African National Congress was a straightforwardly revolutionary communist party during their decades of exile, with leaders constantly flying to the Soviet Union and to East Germany to be wined and dined, and to get lessons on governance from the Stasi.
Those lessons were enthusiastically put into practice — the ANC set up a network of death camps in Angola at which traitors and enemies and just plain inconvenient people were worked or tortured to death. They also founded a paramilitary terrorist army called uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK) that waged a brutal dirty war, supposedly against the apartheid government but actually against anybody they didn’t like. The vast majority of the victims of MK were black people who happened not to support the ANC, especially Zulus in their tribal homeland in what’s now KwaZulu-Natal province, who were subjected to regular massacres in the 80s and early 90s.
The ANC and the MK had a special hatred for the Zulus. In part, because the ANC’s leadership was disproportionately Xhosa, and their ancestors had suffered during King Shaka’s wars of expansion in the 19th century. But this ancient ethnic grudge wasn’t the fundamental problem, and indeed it was later papered over. The real problem was that the Zulus dared to engage in political organization outside the ANC and its subsidiary, the South African Communist Party (SACP). The preferred Zulu political vehicle was the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), which was associated with the Zulu monarchy and the traditional amakhosi (chieftains). This made it an independent base of power within black South Africa, and a competing claim on the loyalty of Zulu citizens. The ANC considered this situation unacceptable.
Like many avowedly communist organizations, the ANC was allergic to political competition of any sort. Internally, the party practiced an especially harsh form of democratic centralism — most policy decisions were made by a tiny and incestuous central committee, and members were expected to be totally submissive in the face of party discipline. This extended even to the point of party permission being necessary for senior members to marry. Externally, the party had an entitled attitude common to successful revolutionary organizations from North Korea to Albania — they were the incarnation of the aspirations of the South African people and the vanguard of their brilliant future, so all other political organizations were ipso facto illegitimate. Can you guess what happened when these people were handed power?
John Psmith, “REVIEW: South Africa’s Brave New World, by R.W. Johnson”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-03-20.
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