So How is That Lovely Anarchy Working Out in NYC?

New York Magazine has an interesting article entitled: "The Organizers vs. the Organized in Zuchotti Park" in which the "order" that is supposed to arise organically from the bottom up is not exactly producing a society of love, harmony, equality and peace. I read Orwell's Animal Farm a month or so ago and it occurs to me that it is no wonder that book has been so widely read. Life resembles it. [my comments in square brackets and in red]

All occupiers are equal — but some occupiers are more equal than others. [Remember? "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others?"] In wind-whipped Zuccotti Park, new divisions and hierarchies are threatening to upend Occupy Wall Street and its leaderless collective. [divisions and, gasp!, hierarchies arising spontaneously in the midst of people who deny that hierarchies are necessary - say it ain't so, Uncle Karl!]

As the protest has grown, some of the occupiers have spontaneously taken charge on projects large and small. But many of the people in Zuccotti Park aren't taking direction well, [you don't say!] leading to a tense Thursday of political disagreements, the occasional shouting match, and at least one fistfight.

It began, as it so often does, with a drum circle. The ten-hour groove marathons weren’t sitting well with the neighborhood’s community board, the ironically situated High School of Economics and Finance that sits on the corner of Zuccotti Park, or many of the sleep-deprived protesters.

“[The high school] couldn’t teach,” explained Josh Nelson, a 27-year-old occupier from Nebraska. “And we’ve had issues with the drummers too. They drum incessantly all day, and really loud.” Facilitators spearheaded a General Assembly proposal to limit the drumming to two hours a day. “The drumming is a major issue which has the potential to get us kicked out," said Lauren Digion, a leader on the sanitation working group.

But the drums were fun. They brought in publicity and money. Many non-facilitators were infuriated by the decision and claimed that it had been forced through the General Assembly. [Forced? You mean like unpopular health care legislation being forced through Congress? But, I thought this was the alternative to that . . . I'm confused.]

“They’re imposing a structure on the natural flow of music," said Seth Harper, an 18-year-old from Georgia. “The GA decided to do it ... they suppressed people’s opinions. I wanted to do introduce a different proposal, but a big black organizer chick with an Afro said I couldn’t.” [She wasn't named Nancy Pelosi, was she? It could have been a disguise.]

To Shane Engelerdt, a 19-year-old from Jersey City and self-described former “head drummer,” this amounted to a Jacobinic betrayal. “They are becoming the government we’re trying to protest," he said. "They didn’t even give the drummers a say ... Drumming is the heartbeat of this movement. Look around: This is dead, you need a pulse to keep something alive.” [I feel like occupying something to express how much I ache for the poor, oppressed drummers.]

The drummers claim that the finance working group even levied a percussion tax of sorts, taking up to half of the $150-300 a day that the drum circle was receiving in tips. “Now they have over $500,000 from all sorts of places,” said Engelerdt. “We’re like, what’s going on here? They’re like the banks we’re protesting." [Can you say anything worse to a person in that movement? A low blow indeed.]

All belongings and money in the park are supposed to be held in common, but property rights reared their capitalistic head when facilitators went to clean up the park, which was looking more like a shantytown than usual after several days of wind and rain. [Is it just me or do I detect a faint note of sarcasm in this sentence? I mean, this is the mainstream media, after all. They are not supposed to take the Revolution lightly or fail to support it in every possible respect.] The local community board was due to send in an inspector, so the facilitators and cleaners started moving tarps, bags, and personal belongings into a big pile in order to clean the park.

But some refused to budge. A bearded man began to gather up a tarp and an occupier emerged from beneath, screaming: “You’re going to break my f******* tent, get that s*** off!” Near the front of the park, two men in hoodies staged a meta-sit-in, fearful that their belongings would be lost or appropriated.

Daniel Zetah, a 35-year-old lead facilitator from Minnesota, mounted a bench. “We need to clear this out. There are a bunch of kids coming to stay here.” One of the hoodied men fought back: “I’m not giving up my space for f******* kids. They have parents and homes. My parents are dead. This is my space.” [I don't think he understands socialism. So many people don't at the moment they are being asked to sacrifice for the Revolution.]

Other organizers were more blunt. “If you don’t want to be part of this group, then you can just leave,” yelled a facilitator in a button-down shirt, “Every week we clean our house.” Seth Harper, the pro-drummer proletarian, chimed in on the side of the sitters. “We disagree on how we should clean it. A lot of us disagree with the pile.” Zetah, tall and imposing with a fiery red beard, closed debate with a sigh. “We’re all big boys and girls. Let’s do this.” As he told me afterwards, “A lot of people are like spoiled children." [Light shines into the darkness!] The cure? A cold snap. “Personally, I cannot wait for winter. It will clear out these people who aren’t here for the right reasons. Bring on the snow. The real revolutionaries will stay in -50 degrees.”

“The sunshine protestors will leave,” said “Zonkers,” [Is he for real, or is he a refugee from a comic strip?] a 20-year-old cleaner and longtime occupier from Tennessee. (He asked that his name not be used due to a felony marijuana conviction.) “The people who remain are the people who care. You get a lot of crust punks, silly kids, people who want to panhandle ... It disgusts me. These people are here for a block party.”

Another argument broke out next to the pile of appropriated belongings, growing taller by the minute. A man named Sage Roberts desperately rifled through the pile, looking for a sleeping bag. “They’ve taken my stuff,” he muttered. Lauren Digion, the sanitation group leader, broke in: “This isn’t your stuff. You got all this stuff from comfort [the working group]. It belongs to comfort.” [It belongs to the pigs. They hold it in trust for all the animals.]

And as I spoke to Michael Glaser, a 26-year-old Chicagoan helping lead winter preparation efforts, a physical fight broke out between a cleaner and a camper just feet from us.

“When cleanups happen, people get mad,” Glaser said. “This is its own city. Within every city there are people who freeload, who make people’s lives miserable. We just deal with it. We can’t kick them out.” [Its true - irony is dead!]

In response to dissatisfaction with the consensus General Assembly, many facilitators have adopted a new “spokescouncil” model, which allows each working group to act independently without securing the will of the collective. “This streamlines it,” argued Zonkers. “The GA is unwieldy, cumbersome, and redundant." [Oh my goodness; they have already got bureaucracy! That is obviously making their lives better and happier.]

From today’s battles, it’s not yet clear who will win the day: the organizers or the organized. But the month-long protest has clearly grown and evolved to a point where a truly leaderless movement will risk eviction — or, worse, insurrection.

As the communal sleeping bag argument between Lauren Digion and Sage Roberts threatened to get out of hand, a facilitator in a red hat walked by, brow furrowed. “Remember? You’re not allowed to do any more interviews,” he said to Digion. She nodded and went back to work. But when Roberts shouted, “Don’t tell me what to do!” Digion couldn't hold back.

“Someone has to be told what to do," she said. "Someone needs to give orders. There’s no sense of order in this f******* place.” [But once you abolish "civilization" and demolish hierarchies, the order will bubble up spontaneously from below and it will be better, much better, than what we have now. It's true. I read it on a website.]

If You Want to Spout Modernist Heresy, Leave Jesus Out of It

I was recently asked by a reader about the website, "Jesus Radicals" and their teaching on anarchism. So I went there and did some reading. Here is what jumped out at me.

1. Socialism: Under the "Economics" tab they say:

Classical anarchism is socialist. That means the the means of production should be owned by the workers and all decisions that affect their work (salaries, what to produce and how, etc) should be made by the workers as well, not a boss. These two pillars would significantly reduce the gap between rich and poor and and also go a long way towards a more egalitarian and democratic society.

A recent example of anarchist economics is developed by Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel in the late 1990′s, called participatory economics (parecon for short). They envisioned this economic model as an alternative to capitalist market economies as well as state-based socialism. Participatory economics would strive for human and worker solidarity (rather than isolation and selfishness), equality (rather than disparity), and self-management (rather than having a boss) . . .

This type of anarchist vision is in stark contrast to capitalist free market economies where workers have little say in their own pay, hours, what they produce, and experience an instability in their work since their jobs could be moved at any time if a more profitable location were discovered by the owners, who exploit their labor for profit.

This is the exact opposite of the truth. Ask the workers of the former Soviet Union how much choice workers have in where they work and working conditions under socialism. Under capitalism, workers can individually choose to move from job to job according to what wages and benefits are offered and working conditions. Under socialism these decisions are made by groups over which the individual worker has virtually no control. Socialism is an idea that does not work in reality.

Socialism is bad for everybody. Wherever it has been tried the result has been increased poverty, atheism and tyranny. Socialism is old news; these folk need to get out of the 19th century.

2. Civilization: On this topic the so-called "Jesus Radicals" reach back behind Marx to another figure who is highly influential on modern thought: J. J. Rousseau.

We risk the extinction of all species so we can have momentary comforts. Thus, “green anarchism,” or “anarcho-primitivism,” traces the origins of the problem lie far back in human history with the first domestication of plant and nonhuman animal life. Repeating much of what anthropology has known for years, green anarchism shows that agriculture was the first step in human exploitation of the earth and one another. It was out of this sedentary existence that patriarchy, war, and other forms of social domination arose. As such, we ought to be looking at what anthropologists have found out about nomadic bands. Though not completely free from all violence, many of these bands have never known warfare and are arranged in an egalitarian fashion. There are no kings and rulers amongst them who dominate.

Thus, civilization is a target of green anarchism because at its root, civilization is inherently violent and sets up various relationships of domination.

This is utter, romantic, heretical nonsense. It is actually a heretical doctrine of the Fall of man, in which the Fall occurred not because of disobedience to the law of God but because of the rise of civilization. Thus the nature of sin is relocated from the human heart to the structures of society. Thus, social reform can overcome sin and that is why anarchism advocates the tearing down of the carefully built up structures of civilization that prevent social destructiveness.

People who advocate tearing down civilization are enemies of the people. They are dangerous, but fortunately not numerous enough to put their destructive ideas into practice. But they bearing watching.

Conclusion:
Much of what is on this site is inconsistent with the historic Christian faith. All of it is derived from modern thought, which has been drifting further and further away from the Bible and orthodoxy for centuries now.

I saw nothing on this site dealing with Jesus' substitutionary death on the cross for our sins or the need to confess, repent and believe the good news that Jesus died for us so we could be saved. I saw nothing about the need to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ, but plenty about typical, boring, secular, left-wing ideas from environmentalism to feminism to revolutionary politics.

So what do they mean by Jesus? Is it the Jesus of the New Testament? Is it the Jesus of the orthodox creeds? Is it the Jesus of traditional Christianity? No, "Jesus" here is a symbol used to baptize left-wing secular thought. "Jesus" as used on this site means "an evocative religious word that symbolizes to us the best intentions of modern radicalism."

But the road to hell is paved with our best intentions.

Lazy, Self-indulgent Moralism: That is What it Means to Be Left-wing Today

By now you may have heard of the protest in New York: Occupy Wall Street. In reading about this phenomenon I was reminded of the recent George W. Bush fiasco at Tyndale. Why? Because both protests are juvenile, shallow and purely destructive rather than constructive. Such "protests for protest's sake" cost nothing, solve nothing and mean nothing.

Kelly McParland of the National Post captures the cheerful nihilism of the protesters when he writes:

The biggest challenge for “Occupy Wall Street,” the nascent protest organization that is trying its best to create some trouble somewhere, anywhere, may be to figure out what they’re against. Or what they’re for. If anything.

The Toronto Star reports that the protests are spreading to Canada. Oh goody.

Organizers from a group called Occupy Toronto plan to descend on the city’s financial district on Oct. 15 at 10 a.m. The event is inspired by Occupy Wall Street, a group of demonstrators which has camped out near New York’s Financial District for two weeks. . . .

Like Occupy Wall Street, the group has yet to spell out a clear objective. Protesters in New York have spoken out against corporate greed, social inequality, global climate change and other concerns.

“We have a lot of critics and skeptics about the fact that currently, there are no goals,” spokesperson Bryan Batty said. “But it comes down to corporate greed. That’s the one thing that everyone is unified on right now,” he said, adding that the group’s democratic process will elicit more specific goals.

Aren't those critics harsh? Who needs details like "specific goals" when you have a chance to change the world? (By the way, is that last name for real? Batty?)

Tim Stanley writes a post at the Daily Telegraph entitled: "If the Wall Street protesters really want to reform capitalism they should join the Tea Party."

After a few days of banging drums and annoying locals, the Wall Street protests have finally incurred the wrath of New York City. Around seven hundred were arrested over the weekend and Mayor Bloomberg has spoken ominously about clearing the streets. They’ve put on a good show but the general feeling is that they’ve failed to engage a sceptical public. Given the scale of America’s economic and political crises, this is surprising. But then the protesters and their message are doomed to fail. There’s something oddly un-American about both.

Polls show that more than two-thirds of Americans think corporations and banks have too much power. They are correct. For example, liberal commentator Sally Kohn points out that “members of the congressional supercommittee charged with reaching a bipartisan deficit reduction solution have received $41 million from the financial sector during their time in Congress … At least 27 current or former aides to supercommittee members have worked as lobbyists for financial sector interests.” Congress has become a trading floor upon which influence is bought and sold for the price of a campaign donation. It’s about time someone kick started a revolt.

But the Wall Street protesters are the wrong crowd to do it. This photo, of a lady sitting next to a sign titled “Corporate Freeloaders!” while having her photograph taken with an IPad, goes to the heart of the problem. Never trust the political rhetoric of young white hippies: it is undermined by their fabulous wealth and their complete detachment from reality. They travel the world from riot to riot – a cause on every continent, a ring in every orifice. They might have the diet of a North African peasant, but these spoiled brats are professional agitators financed by a generous trust fund.

They may yet join the Tea Party. But first they will have to grow up.

This view of the protesters as self-indulgent, moralistic, self-righteous and profoundly ignorant of the real issues is echoed by another Daily Telegraph blogger who self-identifies as a left-winger, Brenden O'Neill. He writes in a post entitled: "The teenage moralism of the Occupy Wall Street hipsters almost makes me ashamed to be Left-wing:"

Occupy Wall Street, the gathering of angry actors, graphic designers and various other hipsters in the financial districts of New York City, might just be the most degenerate Left-wing movement of recent times. Its weird demands, plastered across tongue-in-cheek placards and on super-cool, self-pressed t- shirts, capture the descent of the modern Left into the cesspool of victimology, conspiracy-mongering and disdain for mass society and its allegedly dumb inhabitants. Far from representing anything that I, a Leftie, would recognise as progressive and humane, this gaggle of rich kids spouts little more than snobbery and fear, seemingly incapable of deciding whom they loathe the most: greedy fat bankers or the dumb fat public.

Occupy Wall Street claims to be a mass workers’ movement, but it’s nothing of the sort. It is in fact a tiny, self-selected group of self-righteous, mostly middle-class activists who have failed to win over large sections of the American public to their “cause” – which isn’t surprising when you consider that on the rare occasion that these trendy banker-bashers talk about the American public, they do so with a metaphorical peg on their snouts. An article on the Occupy Wall Street website claims “the working class in this country has been brainwashed by MSM, Fox News and the Right-wing propaganda machine”. It says everyday Americans, being stupid, do not understand what socialism is, because “they have been emotionally brainwashed against it”. And so it falls to the cool, fashionable, oh-so-enlightened activists of Occupy Wall Street to help “de-programme people against the brainwashing they’ve experienced”. That is, the oiks must be re-educated by the hipsters. The little people must have their minds cleaned out by their moral and fashion superiors. Occupy Wall Street mashes together the outlook of Kim Jong-Il with the politics of Susan Sarandon, giving rise to a weirdly hippyish yet authoritarian gathering of slackers-cum-elitists.

Hippy authoritarianism indeed. It reminds me of the phrase invented to describe the New Left that arose in the 1960s: "Libertarian Socialism." That is the best possible description of the kind of society described in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

But I would bet that there is not one protester on Wall Street today who has the nerve and will to be a Mustapha Mond. They would all dutifully trot off to work at government assigned jobs, go to the feelies at night and chant "Community, Identity, Solidarity."

Protesters? Give me a break - they are more like spoiled sheep bleating indignantly.

If you really want to be counter-cultural, stand up and tell the government to back off and get out of the business of controlling our lives. Stand on your own two feet and begin to build a life starting with building a family. (I am really encouraged to see so many of my students embrace the discipline of marriage at an early age and act as if they were responsible to shape the future instead of passively waiting for life to happen to them.) Drifting downstream with the big government, high-tax welfare state is not an admirable human life; it is a degrading form of voluntary serfdom.

To be counter-cultural today means being able to distinguish between real capitalism and the phoney, crony-capitalism practiced by both Republicans and Democrats. The Tea Party is as much a threat to the Republican establishment as it is to the Democrats because it views big business as being in bed with big government and as complicit in the betrayal of free enterprise. That is why anti-regulation sentiment is as high as anti-high tax sentiment. Regulation, written by big business in cooperation with big government, is a sneaky, back-door way of stifling competition from up and coming companies. It is a conspiracy against small business clothed in preachy moralism.

Capitalism is about small businesses becoming big businesses but is it antithetical to the "too big to fail" philosophy of the Obama administration. The fact that GM and Chrysler are still in business is a moral scandal. They should have gone bankrupt long ago and been replaced by smaller, more competitive companies that would provide more jobs and create value for their shareholders. Instead, the federal government deemed them too big to fail and protected the interests of the unions over the interests of tax payers and shareholders. That is not free enterprise or capitalism; it is cronyism. The unions bought and paid for the Obama administration and the result is injustice and inefficiency. The end result will be the destruction of the American auto industry, but in the meantime the unions and their purchased politicians will party on.

If the protesters wanted to protest something and make a positive difference, they would protest the big-government and big-business alliance. If they had real vision they would advocate for free enterprise, real capitalism and allowing failing businesses to fail so that something better could emerge. If they were serious about making the world a better place they would be just as suspicious of big government as they are of banks and corporations. Ironically, the people they demonize frequently move back and forth between government and Wall Street. People like Bill Daley apparently cease to be demons and become saints overnight just by taking a government job!

The problem with the Wall Street protesters is not that they are too radical; they only think they are radical. The problem is that they are too gullible; they are like sheep.

What makes the Augustinian Christian vision of the world superior is that, unlike the shallow, unrealistic Marxist view, it sees the problem of sin in every individual heart as the root cause of injustice. Therefore, any social arrangement that would be better than the status quo has to take account of the propensity to selfishness built into every single one of us. Ultimately that is why the shallow narrative of "big government good - big business bad" will never lead to a better world.

Only a social order that takes account of original sin and seeks to discipline the individual through civilizing social institutions in civil society (like the traditional family, the church, free markets and freely-embraced moral absolutes) can make a tolerably good society out of bad people. Parliamentary democracy, free enterprise and limited government informed by and based upon a Christian worldview including the Ten Commandments as the heart of morality have been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to be the best possible set of social institutions for a civilized and prosperous society.

And all these moralistic, self-indulgent, "protesters" want to do is tear down and destroy these institutions in the name of a romantic, unrealizable, shallow Utopian vision of "peace, justice and the environment."

Anarchy and Communism

Ed West has some thoughts on the recent (highly organized) "anarchist" activities in central London over the weekend. He asks the questions inquiring minds want to have answered: "Shouldn't anarchists be in favour of cutting the size of the State?"

The irony is that here are self-proclaimed “anarchists” protesting against a reduction in the size of the state. Aren’t anarchists supposed to be in favour of smashing it?

Well, to an extent. According to the Whitechapel Anarchist Group, the most prominent of the various organisations: “Anarchy is a highly organised form of society that is clearly the only morally sensible way to run the world where everybody is the master of their own destiny.”

“The Anarchist solution… would be a society where there is no State, all wealth is owned in common by the people, relationships are non-exploitative, work is shared and decisions made in the knowledge of all.”

Or in other words, they wish to create all the conditions for Communism, while hoping that a Communist dictatorship won’t emerge, despite overwhelming evidence that it would.

Read the rest here.

My only quibble with West's analysis is that I think he is a bit generous in taking seriously the protestations of the anarchists that they don't want Communism. Classic Marxist theory requires chaotic conditions leading to revolution before the classless society can come to be, so anarchism is just stage one Marxism. You need anarchy in order to get Communist dictatorship.

Granted, there may be some "useful idiots" among the anarchists (and there certainly are many in the labor movement) who still swallow the line that the goal of all this anti-Capitalist protest is a nice, egalitarian, social justice Utopia. But they are being played like a fiddle by the real core of hard leftists who are guiding the movement toward violence and chaos.

Anarchists come in two varieties: Communist Anarchists and Stupid Anarchists.

Mobs Ransack London as the Socialists Protest Fiscal Sanity

The Daily Telegraph reports on mob violence in supposedly civilized London today by anti-capitalists and anarchists (which is how Communists describe themselves these days):

Police fought mobs of masked thugs who pelted officers with ammonia and fireworks loaded with coins.

The anti-capitalists started fires and smashed their way into banks, hotels and shops, bringing chaos to Britain’s busiest shopping street.

The violence began as Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, addressed a TUC rally of at least 250,000 peaceful protesters in Hyde Park who had marched from Westminster to demonstrate against government spending cuts.

As he spoke, an apparently co-ordinated attack began on shops and police in Oxford Street as a mob tried to storm into shops including Topshop, BHS and John Lewis.

MPs and retailers said the scenes damaged Britain’s reputation around the world.

The move was the first of a string of actions by anarchists in which:

• There was violence last night in Trafalgar Square, with protesters setting banners ablaze and throwing missiles including broken bottles at police officers. As police contained protesters around Nelson’s Column, there were running battles in Strand. Close to Charing Cross railway station, a fire was started near shops;

• Fortnum and Mason, the department store, was occupied by 200 “anti-cuts” protesters who smashed windows and knocked over displays;

• A huge fire was started in the centre of Jermyn Street, the Ritz hotel was attacked with dustbins and a “Trojan horse” set on fire in Oxford Circus;

• Banks were broken into, their windows smashed and daubed with graffiti reading “smash the bank”;

• Windows were smashed in New Bond Street and running scuffles took place on Piccadilly, where a Porsche car showroom was attacked.

Let's be clear: these people are the enemy of humanity. They hate our prosperity and they hate liberty. They are spoiled children of an overly-generous welfare state and they do not fear the police, the judicial system or any authority whatsoever. If they are not put down they will bring poverty, chaos, killing, oppression and finally totalitarianism.

Liberals think these people can be reasoned with and charmed into being nice. They can't. Not everyone wants to be civil, argue reasonably and participate in democracy. Some just want to smash things up because of their own inner rage and emotional problems. They need to be jailed so ordinary people can be safe.

The Brits should be concerned; they haven't even started with the pain that will be necessary to avoid bankruptcy because of decades of overspending and deficits. And they have hitched their wagon to the failing European Union and will suffer for the sins of others as well as their own. The future looks rather bleak for broken Britain. Having brought so much enlightenment, prosperity, peace and order to the world, it is sad beyond words to see Britain on her collective knees being beaten up by thugs.

Ron Paul Jumps the Shark

Ron Paul has officially crossed the border between Reality and Insanity by coming out in support of Julian Assange's release of government secrets designed to hurt the United States of America and its capacity to keep its citizens safe and conduct diplomacy. Assange is acting out a technological version of the anarchists who travel the world to break windows and set cars on fire every time the G-20 meets.

Politico reports:

Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) is taking a stand as one of Julian Assange’s few defenders in Washington, arguing that the WikiLeaks founder should get the same protections as the media.

Attorney General Eric Holder said this week that the Justice Department is examining whether Assange can be charged with a crime for posting hundreds of thousands of leaked government intelligence documents and diplomatic cables.

Many Republicans have gone even further in their attacks on Assange, especially former Arkansas GOP Gov. Mike Huckabee, who said this week that the source who leaked to the WikiLeaks founder should be tried for treason and executed if found guilty.

But in a Thursday interview with Fox Business, Paul said the idea of prosecuting Assange crosses the line.

“In a free society we're supposed to know the truth,” Paul said. “In a society where truth becomes treason, then we're in big trouble. And now, people who are revealing the truth are getting into trouble for it.

How can he say that truth can never be treason? Does he think that trading nuclear secrets to the Soviets in the 1940s would not be treason just because the revealed information was true? It is OK for people to tell America's enemies all about America's plans to foil terrorist plots just because those plans are true? Actually, it has to be true in order for it to be treason!

Ron Paul is a libertarian and here he crosses the last boundary marker separating him from anarchy and the far left. It is time to shut down Julian Assange and launch an investigation into his connections to George Soros. We would all be better off with both of them out of commission.

The Injustice of G20 Protesters

Well, after weeks of unrelenting pro-protester and anti-capitalism coverage, the Toronto Star today suddenly discovers that there is actually another side to the story. In the story, "Angry Merchants ask: "Why did G20 protesters attack us?" the Star reveals the brutality and senseless violence of the socialist thugs against innocent store owners who are just trying to make a living.

The story notes that many of the store owners who lost days of business and had windows broken by the protesters were immigrants to Canada from places like Afghanistan and China. It also notes that many of the employees were college students working at summer jobs and some were terrified as the vandals attacked.

All this is supposedly in the name of opposing rich countries and big corporations. Just what makes rich countries and big corporations bad is unclear in itself. But dont' ask how terrorizing college kids and small business owners trying to build a life in Canada as immigrants advances that agenda anyway - because there is no answer to such a question. If you are going to use logic in the fight against postmodern socialists/anarchists you are using weapons against unarmed people - just like they did on Yonge St. last weekend.

The G-20 Summit "Protests"

I flew out of Toronto in the middle of the G-20 so I was spared the "bloodbath." To hear the whiny-leftist fellow-travelers of the adolescent violence addicts who broke windows, burned police cars and acted like anti-social jerks talking in the media you would think that (1) Toronto had descended into lawless anarchy and desperation and (2) that Toronto also had turned into a police state with all human rights abolished forever by a military government. How the two scenarios go together is something no can understand. The whiners need to get their stories straight. It was not a big deal; it just criminals out in the daylight for a change.

I planned to write something on the "protester" but Rex Murphy was more eloquent than I and hit just the right note in his piece in the National Post: "Hooligans Coddles for Too Long."

For this set of malcontents — they’re not protestors; protestors have moral standing — the deliberations of heads of government in a time of crisis are merely a background stage on which to engage in violent and arrogant abuse of the idea of civic action.

They degrade protest.

Don’t buy their muddled mendacious rhetoric either. They care as much about the general well-being of the rest of us as the stone or brick in their hand, or that hammer cares for the well-being of the Starbucks window.

Some people are saying that Toronto shouldn’t have hosted the summit of world leaders — because this crowd would cause trouble. Absolutely wrong.

Cities and governments don’t choose to do or not to do things because a couple of hundred hit-and-run artists put up a smarmy threat of “direct action.” The splinter doesn’t direct the oak.

Yesterday’s mini-riot had one irony that will be very hard for some to digest. It gives at least partial cover for the extraordinary one $1-billion cost that went into security for the G20 meeting here in Toronto.

The Black Bloc, and you can bet they will love this, is Stephen Harper’s best political friend today.

For very long the pseudo-anarchists have been coddled and played with.

The costs of that approach showed up in the images of Toronto broadcast all over the world yesterday — Toronto the mild looking like Toronto the war zone.

Insofar as it is at all possible, those who are responsible for the criminal activity and damage to property should be arrested and charged. They should be banned for good from any like event in future. Penalties should be heavy.

Toronto is a decent, civilized city — hooligans and thugs should never be allowed to twist those virtues into a shield for their own ignorant and dangerous ends.

To the extent that the protesters have any ideology it amounts to little more than nostalgia for the Communism of the Soviet Union. They deserve no sympathy from the public, no leniency from the courts, and far harsher treatment than they received from the police.

Using Tiller's Murder to Attack the Pro-life Movement

The fears of many that the Tiller murder would be used as a way of attacking the pro-life movement have indeed materialized.

Pro-Legalized Abortion Groups Attack the Pro-Life Movement

Not wishing to "waste a good crisis," and sensing an opening, the pro-legalized abortion forces have launched an attack on the pro-life movement by trying to blame it for the murder of George Tiller last Sunday. (See, for example, Margaret Wente in The Globe and Mail). But their effectiveness has been blunted by the speed, clarity and eloquence of the condemnation of the killing by all pro-life groups, including Operation Rescue. One of the first, best and clearest statements came for Dr. Robert George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University. It has been quoted and endorsed widely on the web since Sunday.

"Whoever murdered George Tiller has done a gravely wicked thing. The evil of this action is in no way diminished by the blood George Tiller had on his own hands. No private individual had the right to execute judgment against him. We are a nation of laws. Lawless violence breeds only more lawless violence. Rightly or wrongly, George Tilller was acquitted by a jury of his peers. "Vengeance is mine, says the Lord." For the sake of justice and right, the perpetrator of this evil deed must be prosecuted, convicted, and punished. By word and deed, let us teach that violence against abortionists is not the answer to the violence of abortion. Every human life is precious. George Tiller's life was precious. We do not teach the wrongness of taking human life by wrongfully taking a human life. Let our "weapons" in the fight to defend the lives of abortion's tiny victims, be chaste weapons of the spirit."

This statement is clear, unequivocal and biblical; it represents what the mainstream pro-life movement believes and I endorse it heartily. Even fair-minded outsiders to the pro-life movement think likewise. For example, an article by James Kirchick in the Washington Post refutes the liberal slander that the Religious Right is responsible for the murder of Tiller and is just as dangerous as Muslim terrorists. As he says, the largely Christian pro-life movement does not glorify, revel in or call for violence against abortionists. Instead, it condemns it. Murderous acts like the shooting of Tiller are the work of a tiny, fringe group or isolated individuals. This is the plain truth, as uncomfortable as it might be for those wishing to utilize every opportunity to demonize and marginalize the pro-life movement.

A Pacifist Criticism of the Pro-life Movement

Sadly, certain pacifists who themselves claim to be pro-life, but who take advantage of every opportunity to distance themselves from the pro-life movement, have put forward arguments that give aid and comfort to those who are attempting to blame the pro-life movement for Tiller's murder. For example, this post argues that:

"As such, I submit that there is no consistent way to be pro-life and at the same time condemn the murder of abortionists — unless one is a pacifist. Only if you truly believe that violent action cannot be morally used in the service of life and peace does it make sense for pro-lifers to condemn murdering abortionists. And to my knowledge and experience, the majority of pro-lifers, at least in America, are quite hawkish and would never be caught dabbling in pacifism. This majority brand of the pro-life position is rightly caught in a moral conundrum. They have no consistent moral ground to oppose violence against abortionists so long as they affirm the morality of any and all defensive violence. As such, you can’t be a consistent as a pro-life condemner of actions like Roeder’s unless you are a pacifist."

So here is the argument:

Major Premise: Some pro-lifers believe in justifiable killing such as just war.
Minor Premise: Individuals shooting abortionists is a form of killing
Conclusion: Pro-lifers are self-contradictory and logically should support murdering abortionists.

The argument is, of course, obviously invalid because, while shooting abortionists is a form of killing, it is not a form of justifiable killing. All, or nearly all, pro-lifers, (along with just about everybody else in the world), distinguish between justifiable and unjustifiable killing.

The hidden premise in this argument is a belief that all killing is unjustifiable. Such a belief may be rooted in a form of anarchism that views all killing and all violence as morally the same, whether it is carried out by deranged individuals or through the judicial process of the State. But this radical political philosophy is rejected by everybody except a few pacifists who also happen to be arnachists. Therefore they bear the burden of proof in demonstrating that all killing is unjustifiable. Sheer assertion is insufficient here.

Pacifism, however, need not be anarchist. Yoder's Christological Pacifism acknowledges that the State becomes God's instrument for punishing evil-doers through His providence, according to Romans 13, and holds that this is true even though the Church is called to refuse to be involved in killing, even State-sanctioned killing.

God may (and does) order the violence of the State to enforce an imperfect form of justice in this fallen world, but Christians ought to allow the state to exercise its monopoly on violence and refuse to take matters into their own hands. This is why Christian Christological Pacifists reject violent revolution (while still striving for justice using all available non-violent means). The murder of Tiller would be similar to violent revolution precisely in its lawless - the individual taking into his own hands the state's perorogative to punish evil. Christians must not do this: not with an isolated case of a noterious late-term abortionist, not in a violent revolution, and not in the use of violence in any way to advance justice. The Christian response to abortion, which is consistent with Christological Pacifism, is to use all available non-violent means to change the laws and save lives.

As far as non-pacifist pro-lifers are concerned, there is no inconsistency in them opposing the murder of an abortionist. Even if a non-pacifist pro-lifer were to think that violent revolution (eg. in Hitler's Germany) was morally licit in theory, it would not be licit in just-war terms today unless all possible alternatives were exhausted. But this is certainly not the case in 21st century America.

America was a slave nation for 80 years and has been an abortion nation for 40 years. In the last election, the Republicans were leading in the polls in early October and if the economic crisis had come three months later than it did we might very well have President McCain about to replace David Souter on the Supreme Court with a 5th anti-Roe vote. If there had been a 4% vote swing in the last election the same scenario could be in place. This means that the pro-life movement is very close to making giant strides toward the reducing of abortion through non-violent means and that eventual victory is not unforseeable. So no conditions exist that would justify a resort to violence, even for those with a just war position.

Conclusion
I draw three conclusions.

1. Christological pacifist pro-lifers can condemn the murder of Tiller as wrong because only the State, and not individuals, has the right to punish injustice in this age.
2. Just-war pro-lifers can condemn the murder of Tiller because individuals do not have the right to take justice into their own hands except in extreme situations that do not currently exist.
3. It is not the case that the pro-life movement, as an alliance of pacifist and just-war Christians, is inconsistent in condemning the murder of Tiller and to say so is to criticize unfairly the one movement in the Western world that stands up for the protection of the most vulnerable among us.