The arms-bearing Swiss and EU gun laws

The New Neo Posted on by

The Swiss have a long tradition of gun ownership. And they are not part of the EU.

However, the EU will get you one way or another. The Swiss are part of what’s known as the Schengen Area, in which people can travel without the old-fashioned restrictions of visas. Here’s the way it’s described:

Schengen Area, signifies a zone where 26 European countries, abolished their internal borders, for the free and unrestricted movement of people, in harmony with common rules for controlling external borders and fighting criminality by strengthening the common judicial system and police cooperation.

Schengen Area covers most of the EU countries, except the UK, Ireland and the countries that are soon to be part of: Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia and Cyprus. Although not members of the EU, countries like: Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and Lichtenstein are also part of the Schengen zone.

It may have seemed like an innocuous thing to do way back when the idea was first being proposed. But it’s one of those foot-in-the-door phenomena that has meant that Schengen Area countries have had difficulty controlling entry by “migrants,” and now we see that gun control is part of the bargain as well, even for non-EU-member countries. The threat by the EU is to throw the non-complying country out of the Schengen Area, and thus hamper its tourism and perhaps a lot more.

Back in May (although I missed the news at the time) the Swiss voters opted for Schengen convenience over the right to bear arms, in one of those referendums we’ve heard so much about. In this case, the results of the referendum have stood, because the Swiss voted just the way the EU and their government wanted them to:

Almost 64% of voters in Sunday’s referendum supported tougher restrictions on semi-automatic and automatic weapons, final results show.

Switzerland is not an EU member, but risked removal from the open-border Schengen Area if it had voted “no”.

Nearly 48% of Swiss households own a gun – among the highest rates of private ownership in Europe.

The EU had urged the country to tighten its laws in line with rules adopted by the bloc following the 2015 Paris terror attacks.

The rules restrict semi-automatic and automatic rifles and make it easier to track weapons in national databases.

The EU’s initial proposal sparked criticism in Switzerland, because it meant a ban on the tradition of ex-soldiers keeping their assault rifles.

Swiss officials negotiated concessions, but some gun activists argued that the rules still encroached on citizens’ rights.

So, reading between those lines, my guess is that the proposal was sold on the strength of two things—to prevent terrorism (which seems highly unlikely to me; au contraire) and that it would be only a small change that wouldn’t affect too many people.

Till the next time. And the next.

The Democrats’ quest for one-party rule

The New Neo Posted on by

From a Kevin D. Williamson article in National Review:

They [several writers, but really much of the Democratic Party today] do not understand the United States as having two legitimate competing political camps but as suffering from a kind of infection in the form of the Republican party, which inhibits the normal and healthy — meaning Democrat-dominated — political life of the United States. They believe that something they call the “New America” has an unquestionable natural moral right to rule and that the Republican party is not a competing pole but a blockage. To write as Greenberg does that the Democratic party is to be liberated by the practical elimination of the Republican party, and hence able to operate unencumbered, is to embrace not only the end of the GOP but the end of ordinary political opposition.

This is an important point, one I was alluding to in this recent post titled “Why the left can’t accept defeat.”

Another way to put it is that in my lifetime the Democratic Party has morphed from being predominantly liberal to being predominantly leftist. Liberals (at least the kind I remember from my youth, and the shrinking number who still exist) are fine with an opposition party on the right which every now and then will win an election. Those liberals believe voters on the right to be people of goodwill who are just misguided.

The left, on the other hand, is the group described in the Williamson article. They want not just to defeat the opposition most of the time, they want to obliterate it. This obliteration can come through legal means, or semi-legal means, or it can come (ultimately, as we have seen in many Communist countries) from a never-ending and brutal attempt to kill anyone perceived as being opposed—or dangerous or extraneous in any way—and to terrify the rest of the populace into obedience.

There always were leftists among the Democrats, of course, and there still are old-fashioned liberals in today’s Party. But the balance has shifted in recent years. I believe the major part of the shift occurred from around the time of the 2000 election on. Leftism has been actively and more openly encouraged during the Obama administration and by now the shift is not the least bit secret or hidden.

Williamson writes of the American Left (in other words, of the majority of Democrats these days) that their desire to do away with the opposition takes many forms:

The only way to achieve that [political dominance they crave] would be through the political suppression of those with dissenting political views.

Which, of course, is the Left’s current agenda, from deputizing Corporate America to act as its political enforcer by making employment contingent upon the acceptance of progressive political orthodoxies to attempting to gut the First Amendment in the name of “campaign finance” regulation — it is the Democratic party, not the moral scolds of the Christian Coalition, that proposes to lock up Americans for showing movies with unauthorized political content — to grievously abusing legislative and prosecutorial powers to harass and persecute those with nonconforming political views (“Arrest Climate-Change Deniers”) and declaring political rivals “domestic terrorists,” as California Democrats have with the National Rifle Association.

Which is to say: It is not only the Republican party as a political grouping they dream of eliminating: It is Republicans as such and those who hold roughly Republican ideas about everything from climate change to gun rights, groups that Democrats in agencies ranging from state prosecutors’ offices to the IRS already — right now, not at some point in some imaginary dystopian future — are targeting through both legal and extralegal means.

The Democrats who are doing this believe themselves to be acting morally, even patriotically, and sometimes heroically. Why? Because they believe that opposition is fundamentally illegitimate.

I disagree somewhat with that last sentence. I think it’s true of some leftists. But I don’t think most leftists care about the legitimacy of their opponents or of opposition itself. That’s the sort of thinking the right indulges in far more frequently: who or what is legitimate and lawful?

No, the left doesn’t really care whether the opposition is legitimate. In fact, the more legitimate their opponents are, the more the left can justify using whatever means necessary to crush them.

I believe that the promotion of quibbles about “legitimacy”—for example, the idea that Trump is illegitimate because the Russians (ironic, isn’t it?) rigged the election, or because only the popular vote should matter, or whatever other reason the election of a Republican might be deemed illegitimate—is for the “useful idiots” who remain in the Democratic Party. They are the ones who might still care about niceties such as “legitimacy,” so these assertions are trotted out to get them onboard. But the true believers, the leftists who are activists and who plan to be in charge when they achieve their goals, do not give a hoot about legitimacy. The only coin of their realm is power.

[NOTE: This article about how Texas is in play sent a chill down my spine. Recall that the Beto O’Rourke did pretty well there against Ted Cruz in 2016. That O’Rourke was a strong candidate anywhere, much less in Texas, is extremely disturbing.]

Nationhood: why Brexit hasn’t happened

The New Neo Posted on by

A number of people have recommended this article by Christopher Caldwell that appeared in the Claremont Review of Books, entitled “Why Hasn’t Brexit Happened?”

It’ well worth reading. A few excerpts:

In Britain as elsewhere in the world, the struggle [reflected in Brexit] has been unleashed by innovations in administration that have arisen since the Cold War. These shift power from electorates and parliaments to managers of information, inside government and out. From thousand-year-old constitutional ideas to five-year-old ones. From habeas corpus to gender identity. Because it was Britain that did the most to construct the ideal of liberty which is now being challenged, Brexit clarifies the constitutional stakes for the world as nothing else…

Many statesmen warned from the outset that British ideas of liberty would not survive a merger with the E.U. The most eloquent early diagnoses came from the Labour Party, not the Tories. That is because the fundamental disposition of the E.U. is to favor technocratic expertise over representative government, and the Tories have not generally been the British party that placed the highest priority on the passions of the masses.

So there’s a reversal, one I noticed earlier, in which the democratic referendum is currently being championed by the right rather than the left.

Continued:

The E.U. destroyed the system of parliamentary sovereignty at the heart of Britain’s constitution. For all its royalist trappings, Britain has traditionally been a much purer representative democracy than the United States, because it excludes courts from reviewing legislation on any grounds. British politicians tried to calm the public with assurances that, where British law and E.U. law clashed, British law would prevail. But the acknowledgement of E.U. legal supremacy in the treaties meant that E.U. law was British law…

Here’s the portion of the article that summarizes what I consider the most important aspect of the Brexit battle and what it means for a nation to become a member of the EU:

From the outset there was a dangerous asymmetry of motives. Britain had nothing against its neighbors on the continent—it sought only the right to make its own decisions again. The E.U.’s leaders, however, had an incentive to inflict maximum hardship on Britain. In most member countries the E.U. was being blamed for stagnating economies, dizzying inequality, and out-of-control immigration. If Britain were granted a pain-free exit, others would follow suit…

Brexit is an epochal struggle for power, and an exemplary one. It pits a savvy elite against a feckless majority…

…[T]he [Brexit] vote had been about not just a policy preference but also an identity. It raised the question for each voter of whether he considered himself an Englishman or a European, and of whether it was legitimate to be ruled by one power or the other. As such it made certain things explicit.

If you think about the history of Europe, you might observe that some European countries are relatively recent. For example, Italy only became a united Italy in 1861, Germany in the 1800s and in particular in 1871 (and of course there was the recent split into East and West, and the reunification). I’m not going to tackle France—it’s complicated. But we saw how fragile the unity of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia were.

That doesn’t mean that countries such as Germany and Italy don’t have a strong sense of national unity. The UK is even older as an entity, but actually not all that old either:

The medieval conquest and subsequent annexation of Wales by the Kingdom of England, followed by the union between England and Scotland in 1707 to form the Kingdom of Great Britain, and the union in 1801 of Great Britain with the Kingdom of Ireland created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Five-sixths of Ireland seceded from the UK in 1922, leaving the present formulation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.[note 12] There are fourteen British Overseas Territories, the remnants of the British Empire…

England itself has a far more ancient feeling of nationhood, having become a unified state by the 10th Century. Gilbert and Sullivan expressed it in a somewhat humorous way, but it’s something very real (or used to be, anyway):

I’m no history expert, but all that national history I went into is a way to indicate that the concept of a nation and the history of a nation isn’t the same for all nations, and some are apparently more willing and eager to give up their sovereignty to an entity such as the EU. In addition, the EU wasn’t originally sold as having as much control as it subsequently has exerted. Many people are resentful and afraid at giving up so much autonomy to elitist bureaucrats they haven’t even chosen themselves, and I believe their fear is fully justified. And yet it stands to reason that those very same elitist bureaucrats who seek more power are loathe to give it up just because the people want them to do so.

And it is no accident that one of the major beefs (although by no means the only one) that people have with the EU is its dictating of the terms of immigration to countries that used to be allowed to decide such things for themselves, which is an essential function of nationhood.

[NOTE: I explore the origins of the European war on nationalism in this post.]

9/11 and the NY Times: the airplanes were the guilty parties

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a tweet posted today by The New York Times that has since been taken down, probably because they got too much criticism for it:

Eighteen years have passed since airplanes took aim and brought down the World Trade Center. Today, families will once again gather and grieve at the site where more than 2000 people died.

During the days and months following 9/11, the Times was a good source for news about it. At least, that’s what I recall. The destruction of the WTC was many things, depending on the perspective of the observer, but one of the things it was was a story that took place in New York, a local story in addition to its enormous national and international dimensions.

Originally, the Times knew who perpetrated the terrorist crime and was not shy about using their names or ascribing agency to them. (I’m doing this from memory at the moment, but I think that’s correct.) The Times may have used a certain amount of dodging and hedging, and I’m not sure it talked a whole lot about fanatical Islamic fundamentalists and all the background. But I believe it’s a mark of how far the Times has come towards leftist gobbledygook that a tweet ascribing the agency to airplanes could get by whatever passes for an editor there these days.

Note that the tweet didn’t just say “since airplanes brought down the World Trade Center.” That phrasing would have been bad enough, but the Times couldn’t rest with that. These airplanes were sentient beings or programmed guided missiles, and they took aim. No terrorists—much less terrorists with a coherent philosophy that dictates the mass killing of innocent Americans in a way intended to strike fear into our hearts—were involved.

That tweet is emblematic of the changes that have occurred in the MSM—not just the Times—during the last eighteen years. It’s not a total transformation, because the MSM was already at least halfway there before 9/11. But now the problem is worse.

9/11: eighteen years

The New Neo Posted on by

Eighteen years is a long time.

On September 11th of 2001, many of the people about to vote in 2020 hadn’t yet been born, and others were so young they don’t remember a time before 9/11. The attack has always been included in their mental landscape.

And perhaps that’s one small part of what’s wrong with the US today. The once-unacceptable has become background noise, hardly audible. That’s good in a way, because one wouldn’t want the wounds of that day to continue to be as raw and agonizing as they were in the attacks’ immediate aftermath. But over time we have lost the sense of the threat, and we’ve also lost the illusory and temporary and incomplete solidarity of the post-9/11 days. Since then, we’ve gone on to stranger, stupider, and sillier internal conflicts.

When I think deeply about what actually happened that day I still get a shock. But even those who, like me, were already middle-aged or even older when 9/11 happened, have over time incorporated it into our worldview.

A new book to remind us what the day was like is an oral history called The Only Plane In the Sky:

Now, in The Only Plane in the Sky, award-winning journalist and bestselling historian Garrett Graff tells the story of the day as it was lived—in the words of those who lived it. Drawing on never-before-published transcripts, recently declassified documents, original interviews, and oral histories from nearly five hundred government officials, first responders, witnesses, survivors, friends, and family members, Graff paints the most vivid and human portrait of the September 11 attacks yet.

[NOTE: Here is my personal 9/11 story.

Bolton gone as National Security advisor (plus Trump and the Taliban)

The New Neo Posted on by

I can’t say this comes as a surprise, because it seems to me that Bolton and Trump had some serious disagreements on general policy regarding US involvement in certain areas:

This may be as good a time as any to say that the “negotiating with the Taliban” story is a strange one. Why did Trump state he would do it in the first place? And given that his reason for withdrawing the offer was that the Taliban did something of the type they have done before, why did he withdraw it? There is something that doesn’t make sense to me here.

Of course, people who hate Trump have an easy explanation: he’s stupid and he’s evil. I don’t think he’s either. But I certainly think he’s capable of making an error of judgment. Was his original offer a big mistake, and did he correct it? And why did he make that error in the first place? Was it part of some less obvious strategy? Or was it just part of a steep learning curve?

I’m not into the “3-dimensional chess” explanation of Trump’s every move, but I do think he’s often (not always) an intelligent and a canny negotiator. Take a look at his tweets on this score, and it does seem as though a fairly elaborate game is being played here by Trump:

“Unbeknownst to almost everyone, the major Taliban leaders and, separately, the President of Afghanistan, were going to secretly meet with me at Camp David on Sunday. They were coming to the United States tonight,” Trump tweeted.

“Unfortunately, in order to build false leverage, they admitted to an attack in Kabul that killed one of our great great soldiers, and 11 other people. I immediately cancelled the meeting and called off peace negotiations. What kind of people would kill so many in order to seemingly strengthen their bargaining position?”

Trump continued: “They didn’t, they only made it worse! If they cannot agree to a ceasefire during these very important peace talks, and would even kill 12 innocent people, then they probably don’t have the power to negotiate a meaningful agreement anyway. How many more decades are they willing to fight?”

Is he trying to humiliate them? I have no idea, but this doesn’t seem to me to be a simple “I changed my mind” communication. Plus, if the talks were so secret to begin with, why even mention the change of mind? Something about this incident reminds me a bit of the back-and-forth with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, which was highly criticized as being destructive but doesn’t seem to have been so at all.

[ADDENDUM: I agree with this opinion of Ace’s about how Bolton’s leave-taking was handled.]

Does the Democrat establishment want to promote or discourage Biden’s nomination?

The New Neo Posted on by

I think they dearly wish they had a better crop of candidates.

But given that they don’t, who are they trying to promote?

Is a smattering of articles questioning Biden’s mental fitness and history meaningful and part of a concerted effort to tear him down? Or are these articles anomalies? Or are they meant to finesse similar criticism if Biden does become the nominee, and to indicate that those issues have already been successfully dealt with and put to rest?

I don’t know the answer. Perhaps it’s six of one and half dozen of the other.

I believe that the left wants to win above all else. The real question is whether Biden would be the most likely to win of all the 2020 Democratic candidates or whether there are others more well-positioned than he to beat Trump.

I don’t think they know the answer, although no doubt they’re polling madly to determine it. There’s a delicate balancing act for the more obviously leftist candidates in the group: how far left to go to placate the base, and where to stop in order to remain viable as a candidate in the general.

This is a variant of a theme that’s been played out on left and right (although on the right it’s been “how far right to go…”) for decades. But at the moment the game is being played at a more extreme level, because the Democrats have moved so far to the left so fast.

Joe Biden is, among other things, a sort of political dinosaur. He’s very old in political terms. And—unlike someone like Trump, who is pretty old himself but not as old as Biden—he’s been in politics on the national level since he was very young indeed. But although Biden was also vice president for eight years, he never was popular in his own right and several earlier bids of his for the presidential nomination of his party never went far. If it weren’t for Obama choosing him as a “safe” VP choice, Biden would be a nearly-forgotten senator-for-life. The fact that he’s in a position to run at all is due almost entirely to Barack Obama.

I don’t think the Democratic Party has quite figured out whether Biden will be their deliverer or their destroyer in 2020. However, I think that they think he will be plenty malleable if he manages to become president, and that they will be able to shape him to their will without much resistance from Biden himself.

Now they’re talking about impeaching Boris Johnson

The New Neo Posted on by

It was almost inevitable, wasn’t it?

The British left is taking a leaf from the US left, although impeachment is less common in Britain than it has been here:

British Members of Parliament are threatening to impeach Boris Johnson after reports their prime minister would sidestep the legislature with an eleventh-hour Supreme Court showdown to drive through Brexit.

The latest dramatic twists in the long-running saga prompted fresh speculation that the tousle-haired populist, who is frequently compared with Donald Trump, is following the American president’s playbook, right down to goading his opponents into trying to throw him out of office.

On Monday, opposition figures called for the prime minister to be impeached if he pushed ahead with a plan to ignore a new law demanding that he seek to delay Brexit. “No one is above the law,” said Liz Saville Roberts, Westminster leader of Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party. “Boris Johnson shouldn’t risk finding that out the hard way.”

Impeachment remains on the statute book despite not having been used since 1806…

That’s all very interesting, but the article doesn’t illuminate the legal basis on which this “11th-hour Supreme Court showdown” would be brought, which is what interests me far more than the left’s “impeachment” cries. It goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway) that the left would be applauding a leftist who used the methods Johnson is employing, but is flabbergasted and outraged when the right plays by those rules of engagement.

As happens here as well.

I figure—with the caveat, as always, that the workings of the British government are somewhat opaque to me—that a court challenge would have something to do with whether Parliament has the power to block what is supposed to be a move governed by some other branch of government or some other procedure.

I found this terse explanation in another article:

The U.K. government contends that a no-deal Brexit is the default outcome of the Article 50 process for a state leaving the EU, and so cannot be legally blocked.

Judge Bernard McCloskey said he would deliver his verdict Thursday. Whichever side loses will almost certainly appeal, with the case set to be heard with similar claims at the U.K. Supreme Court next week.

A lot of articles mention a legal challenge but don’t describe it in great detail. It seems that the Benn Bill, which attempts to force Johnson to delay any attempt to leave the EU, is the main issue. Since the UK doesn’t have a constitution, the Court won’t be deciding whether that is constitutional, but my guess is that the question will involve whether Parliament is allowed to tie Johnson’s hands like that under these particular circumstances.

I did find this older article, written before Benn was passed, but I confess that my eyes glazed over with typical “British government is impossible to understand” befuddlement as I read it. You are welcome to try to relate it to the present situation, or to state any other elucidation you might be able to offer.

One thing I do know is that Johnson seems determined to push Brexit through, and that the majority of people in the British Parliament—and the British press, as well as the EU—are at least equally determined to stop him.

Neo’s other articles, in case you’re wondering

The New Neo Posted on by

Recently commenter “Tom Grey” wrote this:

I actually think your writing should ALSO be in some more conservative media group site like PJ Media / Townhall / Breitbart? / OAN? but I can imagine even asking them to pay you is hard for you to do.

I appreciate the thought. But I did write for PJ (and they paid me, although of course not a ton) for 9 years. I wrote about 90 articles there, I think, or something like that. However, they re-organized a few years ago and stopped wanting my pieces. It also has become difficult to access my old articles there. Here’s one that came up just now in a search, but although they used to have them all indexed under my name—first under “neo-neocon” and then later ones under “Jean Kaufman”—that index doesn’t seem to be operating any more.

What I really should do is find them all and put up something with links to them all. That’s a lot of work, though, and not my top priority right now. But it is one of the things on my lengthy “to do” list.

I also wrote for the online version of the Weekly Standard, although not nearly as often. Just now, trying to access those articles, I discovered that they are gone (although I saved them a while back and they’re on my hard drive—somewhere). However, curiously enough, those articles are now on a page at the Washington Examiner. How odd! They were originally written for the Weekly Standard. I can’t figure that one out, but I’m very glad they exist somewhere online.

Here’s the link to the articles at the Washington Examiner.

Debunking Howard Zinn

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, it’s about time this book was written. It’s called Debunking Howard Zinn:

Not only is Grabar’s book a thoroughly researched and exquisitely compiled refutation of Zinn’s book, but she covers the historical analysis in an approachable, flowing style that keeps you fully engaged with her discussion.

I haven’t read the book, but anything that could cut into the influence of the pernicious Zinn text A People’s History of the United States is worth taking a look at. Thing is, will the people who need to take a look at it be doing so? Grabar’s book’s subtitle is Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation Against America,” and that’s a mouthful—although, actually, I’d revise it and say that Zinn’s book helped to turn several generations against America. And it had a lot of help.

After all, Zinn’s magnum opus was written in 1980, and it received considerable attention and plaudits from the start:

A People’s History was a runner-up in 1980 for the National Book Award. It frequently has been revised, with the most recent edition covering events through 2005. More than two million copies have been sold.

In a 1998 interview, Zinn said he had set “quiet revolution” as his goal for writing A People’s History. “Not a revolution in the classical sense of a seizure of power, but rather from people beginning to take power from within the institutions. In the workplace, the workers would take power to control the conditions of their lives.”

The Marixist premises of Zinn’s vision are clear. 1980, of course, was the year Ronald Reagan was elected. He may have been elected, but Zinn may have had the last laugh.

Zinn’s book had plenty of help, as I’ve mentioned. Look, for example, at Wikipedia’s excerpts from laudatory book reviews when the work first came out. Of course, there was also criticism (Wiki offers excerpts from some of that, too). But Zinn’s was the book a lot of leftist educators were waiting for, and it became a standard in many classrooms in the US, to great effect, and was embraced by many teachers.

Even before Zinn wrote his book, there was a movement to tear down the way American history had been taught before. I am reminded of the observations of Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind and in some ways Zinn’s opposite. In this previous post of mine I offered a quote from Bloom describing how long this has been going on, and from how many sources.

So Zinn’s book fell on fertile ground, and without that encouragement I doubt it would have had the widespread effect it did. Most of us (and that includes me) weren’t paying much attention at the time. That’s how it was possible that the book’s influence became so widespread. At this point, can a counterbook such as Grabar’s have much effect? It seems to me that the tide against which it is swimming is very very strong.

Why the left can’t accept defeat

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, I may or may not be a “serious scholar,” but I’ll give it a go. I don’t think it’s so mysterious, either.

(1) The left believes the march of history is inevitably on their side. Maybe that’s the “religious” part he’s referring to.

(2) The left believes they’re smarter than everyone else.

(3) The left believes the right cheats (because the left cheats?) because the right is evil and unscrupulous.

(4) Many people on the left, particularly those who live in blue urban enclaves, don’t know anyone on the right and can’t quite imagine how they think and why they vote the way they do.

(5) The left runs strongly on feelings and many on the left feel they should always win because they’re the good guys. Therefore if it doesn’t happen, it must mean that there’s been foul play.

(6) The MSM and the left regularly tell Democrats they should win and if they don’t it must mean there’s been foul play.