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U.S. Foreign Policy Isn’t Even REMOTELY Explained By Stupidity…

Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War

By 

Mises.org

October 4, 2019

Lindsey A. O’Rourke
Cornell University Press, 2018
330 pages

Lindsey O’Rourke has given us a devastating indictment of the foreign policy of the United States during the Cold War and after. O’Rourke, who teaches political science at Boston College, is not a principled non-interventionist in the style of Ron Paul. To the contrary, she sympathizes with the “Offensive Realism” of John Mearsheimer, under whom she studied at the University of Chicago. Accordingly, she does not oppose the efforts of states to increase their power over other states but rather regards this as inevitable.

Her argument is that a key element of American foreign policy has failed to achieve its purpose. The United States has often aimed at “regime change,” both overt and covert. The latter type of regime change has been especially unsuccessful, and, to show that this is so, the bulk of the book analyzes in detail a number of instances of covert regime change during the Cold War.

She states her conclusion in this way: “The vast majority of America’s overt and covert regime changes during the Cold War did not work out as their planners intended. Washington launched these regime changes to resolve security-oriented interstate disputes by installing foreign leaders with similar policy preferences. American experiences during the Cold War, however, illustrate that this was often quite difficult in practice. Thirty-nine out of sixty-four covert regime changes failed to replace their targets, and because America’s role in most of these failed attempts generally did not remain a secret, they further soured Washington’s already negative relationship with the target state. Even nominally successful covert operations — where the US-backed forces assumed power — failed to deliver on their promise to improve America’s relationship with the target state.”

Readers of Ludwig von Mises will at once recall this pattern of argument. Just as Mises argues that economic interventions such as minimum wage laws fail to achieve the stated goals of their proponents, so does O’Rourke maintain that regime change, especially of the covert variety, suffers from the same flaw. Again, just as Mises does not challenge the stated goal of higher wages without unemployment, so does O’Rourke accept the goal of an increase in the power of the United States.

In order to grasp the way O’Rourke reaches her conclusion, we must first understand her use of terms. By “regime,” she means “either a state’s leadership or its political processes and institutional arrangements.” A covert regime change “denotes an operation to replace the political leadership of another state where the intervening state does not acknowledge its role publicly. These actions include successful and failed attempts to covertly assassinate foreign leaders, sponsor coups d’état, influence foreign democratic elections, incite popular revolutions, and support armed dissident groups in their bids to topple a foreign government.”

We have so far stressed how Mises and O’Rourke argue in a similar way, but now a crucial difference requires our attention. Mises showed by a priori reasoning that intervention must fail, but O’Rourke does not do this. She says instead that a detailed examination of many cases shows that the covert regime changes in fact tend to fail.

A few examples will illustrate how she proceeds. In the beginning years of the Cold War, the United States tried to “rollback” Communist regimes in Eastern Europe through covert operations. “The Anglo-American operations in Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania … were doomed to failure from the start. As early as October 1945, MGB (Russian Ministry for State Security) counterintelligence officers captured Latvian infiltrators carrying Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) codebooks and radios. Forcing the infiltrators to collaborate, the MGB was able to provide false intelligence and identify the time and location of future infiltrations. Ultimately, Soviet forces set up two fictional resistance movements, which the United States and the United Kingdom covertly supported until 1954.”

Operations in Southeast Asia succeeded no better. Notoriously, “although the 1963 US-backed coup in South Vietnam successfully overthrew [Ngo Dinh] Diem’s government, it still did produce the results the planners had hoped for. Contrary to policymakers’ predictions, the leaders who took over after Diem were unstable, unpredictable, and incompetent, which in turn hampered South Vietnam’s ability to defend itself without US assistance and encouraged the Viet Cong to escalate their attacks.”

Covert regime change was likewise ineffective in Latin America. “To combat the [Dominican Republic’s] chronic political volatility, Washington backed General Rafael Trujillo’s authoritarian regime after he seized power in a 1930 coup. By the late 1950s, however, US leaders began to question Trujillo’s increasingly erratic and brutal rule. Concerned that his regime might spark a popular revolt similar to the one that had toppled Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, Eisenhower authorized a covert campaign to overthrow Trujillo in 1960. But the operation misfired. Trujillo was assassinated in 1961, but his fall brought his equally cruel son to power, which in turn led to a series of coups.”

Given this sorry record, the question naturally arises: why did the United States, again and again, pursue covert regime change? O’Rourke’s own explanation is along realist lines: nations see regime change as a way to enhance their power, and the pursuit of increased power is a constant in the international system. “I argue that states pursue regime change for motives akin to the ones that Realist scholars have provided to explain war … there is no single security motive driving states to intervene, and operations may have multiple overlapping motives. Nevertheless, the security motives that drove the United States to intervene can be grouped into three ideal types: offensive, preventive, and hegemonic. Each aimed to increase America’s relative power in a different way.”

If a key thesis of realist theory is right, though, regime change is unlikely to succeed. “[O]ne of the central tenets of Neorealism is that the specific composition of a state’s domestic leadership is irrelevant for explaining its international behavior because great powers behave in similar predictable patterns given their relative share of material power and geostrategic position.” If this is true, the newly installed government after a regime change is unlikely to shift its foreign policy in the way the intervening state wants. But states, avid for power, persist in this mistaken policy. (For this argument to work, O’Rourke’s claim about the predictable patterns of great powers must apply also to smaller powers since most efforts at regime change are not directed at great powers.)

O’Rourke criticizes other explanations of the pursuit of regime change, and her criticism strikes at the heart of democratic peace theory, a frequent rationale for an interventionist foreign policy. “According to normative variants of DPT [democratic peace theory], democracies do not go to war with other democracies, because liberal norms shape how democratic policymakers view one another and choose to resolve conflict.” If this hypothesis were correct, we would expect a democratic United States to support other democracies. But if covert operations are taken into account, this hypothesis fails. “American covert operations habitually violated norms of justified intervention: Washington installed brutal dictators. It broke international law. It collaborated with many unsavory organizations, including … numerous groups known to have committed mass killings.”

O’Rourke, one gathers, hopes that the United States will learn from the failure of covert regime change and instead pursue the inevitable grasp for power in a more rational manner. In this, she resembles her mentor John Mearsheimer, who hopes that America will abandon ideological crusades in favor of “offshore balancing.” Those of us who, like Murray Rothbard and Ron Paul, favor a noninterventionist foreign policy will not be satisfied with this. Instead, we need to ask deeper questions. Is the pursuit of power in the international system indeed inevitable? Does it not depend rather on human free choice? If so, the time has come to abandon completely a failed policy. “Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground?”

From LewRockwell.com, here.

Milton Friedman’s Bias Against the Gold Standard

Read Rothbard and deSoto

By 

May 24, 2008

The story you are about to read is true. The names have not been changed to protect the innocent. But first, a little background material is called for.

The Federal Reserve System was granted a monopoly over monetary policy on December 23, 1913, when the Senate voted to pass the House’s bill, which had been passed on December 22. President Wilson signed the bill into law that evening.

Ever since that fateful day, economists have done their best to get their opinions on monetary policy accepted by the FED. The only exception to this generalization is the Austrian School of economics. Their members, who are few in number and are generally without influence, do not believe that a government-licensed monopoly is capable of setting monetary policy without distorting the free flow of capital, especially the most crucial form of capital: information. So, they do not attempt to influence staff economists at the FED. They know it is a waste of time.

RIVAL SCHOOLS OF OPINION

There are several views of how monetary policy should be conducted. The most famous view is that of Milton Friedman. He argued for decades that the gold standard is a waste of gold, since governments must store gold in vaults. This valuable commodity could be used for productive purposes.

He wanted every nation’s central bank to produce money at all times at a constant rate. He never decided on a rate. He suggested a range: 3% to 5% per annum. This view was the conservative opinion when I was in graduate school.

Keynesian economists argue for monetary policy to accompany fiscal policy. It must be subservient to fiscal policy. The central bank should partially finance government deficits in times of economic recession, when governments are supposed to run massive deficits. The central bank should buy government debt with newly created money. Its staff economists should decide which rate of inflation is the best at any given time.

This is also pretty much the view of supply-side economists, who argue that government deficits don’t matter. They recommend reduced marginal income tax rates and corporate tax rates, but they almost never argue in public during a recession that the government should also cut spending to match reduced taxation. They also do not argue that the central bank is unwise to expand money in a recession. As long as marginal tax rates are cut, they don’t care much about monetary policy. A few of them call for a strange kind of gold standard, one which doesn’t issue money that allows everyone to demand payment in gold by the Federal government at a price fixed by law. Why, I don’t know. It is a pseudo-gold standard.

These groups agree on one thing: there should never be a central bank policy of monetary contraction. This means that the central bank should never sell government debt without purchasing an offsetting asset of some kind.

This is the monetary ratchet. The money supply never falls. Whenever it rises, due to central bank policy, this increase becomes permanent.

Austrian School economists are in fundamental opposition to all three majority schools of opinion. They believe that money should be private, that contracts promising to pay in a monetary unit of account should be enforced, that no bank should be given a monopoly by the government, and that the public should decide what constitutes money through their dealings, not through legislative fiat. The civil government should get out of money production altogether.

To illustrate the conflict between the Austrian School and the Chicago School, Mark Skousen designed a test. I was present when he conducted this test — or, as the case may be, sprang the trap. I reprint the following without alteration.

I sent this document to Skousen on the day I wrote it. He agreed with me at the time that this account is an accurate summary of what he did and why.

SKOUSEN’S TEST OF MONETARY THEORY

I am writing this on October 17, 1998

On the evening of October 15, I went out to dinner with Mark Skousen, Van Simmons, and Milton and Rose Friedman. It was at Mark’s invitation. We went to the Commander’s Palace in New Orleans. We were in town for the annual Blanchard Seminar.

Mark had arranged to have Van Simmons bring a U.S. gold coin, dated 1912, which was Milton Friedman’s year of birth. He is in the rare coin business. It had been hard to locate. The year is rare. He had it sent from Switzerland by Federal Express overnight that same day. The Swiss contact had only one such coin.

Before the evening had gone more than a few minutes, Friedman brought up the issue of our (the Austrians’) ideological commitment to the gold standard. The fact is, there is no ideological commitment to the gold standard among Austrian economists, since they don’t think the government should have any monetary standard except for tax payments. They do not think governments should be in the money-production business. Mises believed in free banking.

Rothbard believed in 100% reserve banking, as does Friedman’s economist brother-in-law, Aaron Director. As to which metal the free market adopts as its monetary standard, the Austrian doesn’t care, although he thinks gold is the most likely for international trade. Silver is second.

The important thing for the Austrian is that there be no legal tender laws and no price control schemes setting the exchange rate of one currency or metal in relation to another. There should be no legal compulsion over money, other than to enforce contracts. The Rothbardians do argue that the fractional reserve system is fraudulent and therefore should be prohibited. But their problem is: Prohibited by whom? They do not believe in the State.

Friedman had said at least twice that he did not understand why there is an ideological commitment to gold by us, meaning Mark and me. Perhaps 15 minutes later, Mark brought out an old $20 gold paper note, issued by the government (pre-1913). It was a written contract: to pay gold to the bearer. He asked Milton to pull out a $20 bill and read the contact. It makes no such promise.

Then Mark took Friedman’s bill and tore it up. Milton looked at the bill’s remains, lying on the table. He was silent at first. Mark then handed him the $20 gold piece. But Friedman pushed it away. “I don’t want it. I want the $20. I didn’t authorize you to tear it up.” This was of course true. But there had been compensation economically, at about 30 to one.

Mark was trying to make a point about broken contracts: the government’s abandonment of gold pre-1934 gold contracts. The point was lost on Friedman.

Friedman then said it was wrong to tear up a $20 bill, because doing so passed some appreciation to all other holders of paper money. In theory, this is correct. Empirically, it would be impossible to measure or prove.

After a few minutes, Friedman calmed down. Mark had to give him a replacement $20 bill to calm him down. Friedman did like the coin, with his birthdate on it. He decided to keep it.

What struck me after the dinner was over was Friedman’s ideological commitment to paper money. A $600 coin was nothing; that lost $20 bill was everything. The tearing up of that bill was almost like an act of sacrilege in his eyes. The coin did not compensate him. Only a replacement bill did. He has spent his career arguing for paper money and against a metallic standard. Before the coin incident, he had repeated several times his old argument that digging up metal is a waste of scarce resources. He has never understood that the costs of digging up metal — that portion of gold used for money rather then jewelry or industry — in the legal world of a gold standard is a very cheap way for society to restrict governments from inflating. If governments are in the money production business, then they should be limited by the costs of producing the money metals. These costs chain their lust for spending fiat money and avoiding direct taxation.

Men often do not see their own ideological commitments. They see only their opponents’ ideologies.

I shall not publish this report in Friedman’s lifetime. He has done yeoman service in battling price controls and taxation. No need to embarrass him. But in money matters, he was ideologically committed to the State as the final arbiter of money. He just wanted the bureaucrats to run the system by his recommended 3% to 5% increase in money per year. They refused.

— end of report —

WHAT IS THE SOLUTION?

The solution is freedom. I have outlined the solution in my 1987 book, Honest Money. You can download it here.

The free market can be trusted in monetary affairs. Anyone who defends the free market in most areas of the economy and then insists that the civil government can be trusted to conduct a fair and efficient monetary policy needs to explain his reasons. I have found that the economists who defend central banking do not explain why a cartel in banking is in the public interest but cartels in every other area of the economy are not in the public interest.

The most free market oriented of all first-year college economic textbooks is the one written by Gwartney and Stroup. This is the only one written by members of the “public choice” school of economics, which is famous for arguing that every government employee is governed by the same self-interest as anyone else, including capitalists. In the 4th edition (1987), we read:

Central banks are charged with the responsibility of carrying out monetary policy. The major purpose of the Federal Reserve System (and other central banks) is to regulate the money supply and provide a monetary climate that is in the interest of the entire economy (p. 281).

The authors then devote ten pages of text to a description of the operations of the FED, without one word of criticism, and openly denying the private legal status of the system: “In reality, it would be more accurate to think of the Fed and the executive branch as equal partners in the determination of policies designed to promote full employment and stable prices” (p. 283). Equal partners? I have a few questions.

What happened to Congress, which the Constitution assigns exclusive power over the purse?

What happened to the laws of economics?

What happened to self-interest?

What happened to the economic analysis of monopoly, which the authors apply to every other area of the economy?

The authors do not even hint at the possibility that any of these issues is relevant. They continue.

Public enterprises can thus be expected to use at least some of their monopoly power, not to benefit the wide cross-section of disorganized taxpayers and consumers, but as a cloak for inefficient operation and actions to advance the personal and political objectives of those who exercise control over the firm. Government ownership, like unregulated monopoly and government regulation, is a less ideal solution. It is not especially surprising that those who denounce monopoly in, for instance, the telephone industry seldom point to a government-operated monopoly — such as the Post Office — as an example of how an industry should be run (pp. 466—67).

The authors by this stage in their textbook had already pointed to just such a government monopoly (as they incorrectly and misleadingly defined it), the most powerful and profitable monopoly of all, the monopoly over money creation and monetary policy: central banking. They discussed the FED in Chapter 12, “Money and the Banking System” before they presented Chapter 19, “Monopoly and High Barriers to Entry.”

The authors expect the reader to fail to notice this theoretical discontinuity as if there were some economic justification of the inapplicability of Chapter 19’s analysis to Chapter 12. This is a safe assumption. Most students do not notice. Neither does Congress.

If there is any area of the economy that cannot safely be trusted to the government or a government-licensed central bank it is monetary affairs. This is licensed counterfeiting. The authority to counterfeit money to increase government purchases — through the sale of government debt — will be misused.

The best book on this is by de Soto, Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles (2006), published by the Mises Institute. You can download it for free here, but it’s wise to buy it in hardback.

SOVEREIGNTY

The intellectual battle over monetary theory is ultimately a battle over the issue of sovereignty. Which agency possesses lawful sovereignty — a final say — over the operation of the monetary system?

The answer of the vast majority of economists is this: the state. They believe that sovereignty over money is an inherent aspect of civil government. But they never admit to their readers that sovereignty is the supreme issue, nor do they admit that they have taken a stand in favor of state sovereignty. They never discuss the reasons for their commitment to state sovereignty in monetary affairs.

They also do not use the argument for efficiency. Why not? Because in the rest of their writings, they have exposed the fallacy of the concept of government efficiency. It would be difficult for them to make the case for a cartel as the preferred engine of efficiency.

What remains? Ethics. They must show that, because of the issue of right and wrong, of good vs. evil, the state must have a monopoly over money, and not just a monopoly, but a transferable monopoly. They must show that the cartel of profit-seeking counterfeiters has a moral claim of this delegated sovereignty over money. They never do this. They never raise the issue of ethics in money.

There is one exception: Murray Rothbard. He placed ethics front and center in his discussion of monetary policy. His textbook on money and banking, The Mystery of Banking, is the only textbook by an economist that does this. This is one reason why no college or university has assigned it in over two decades. You can download it here.

Rothbard showed why the cartel over money is immoral. He also showed why it is inefficient if by “efficient” we mean “not inflating, not creating recessions, and not redistributing wealth from those who trust the government to skeptics who know the game is rigged against the common man.”

CONCLUSION

We do not have a free market in money. We have a self-interested cartel. This cartel will do whatever it can to protect its lucrative monopoly over money.

You would be wise to assume, as in all other areas of the economy, that the following offer is suspect:

“I’m from the government, and I’m here to help you.”

From LRC, here.

Succot: Rejoicing in the Midst of Instability

Sukkot and Living in the Age of Insecurity

Sep 30, 2017

by

Throughout the ages Jews experienced risk and uncertainty, yet they still rejoiced while sitting under the shadow of faith.

What exactly is a sukkah? What is it supposed to represent?

The question is essential to the mitzvah itself. The Torah says: “Live in sukkot for seven days: All native-born Israelites are to live in sukkot so that your descendants will know that I had the Israelites live in sukkot when I brought them out of Egypt: I am the Lord your God” (Lev. 23: 42-43). In other words, knowing – reflecting, understanding, being aware – is an integral part of the mitzvah. For that reason, says Rabbah in the Talmud (Sukkah 2a), a sukkah that is taller than twenty cubits (about thirty feet or nine meters high) is invalid because when the sechach, the “roof,” is that far above your head, you are unaware of it. So what is a sukkah?

On this, two Mishnaic sages disagreed. Rabbi Eliezer held that the sukkah represents the clouds of glory that surrounded the Israelites during the wilderness years, protecting them from heat during the day, cold during the night, and bathing them with the radiance of the Divine presence. Rashi in his commentary takes it as the “plain sense” of the verse.

Rabbi Akiva, on the other hand, says sukkot mammash, meaning a sukkah is a sukkah, no more and no less: a hut, a booth, a temporary dwelling. It has no symbolism. It is what it is (Sukkah 11b).

If we follow Rabbi Eliezer then it is obvious why we celebrate by making a sukkah. It is there to remind us of a miracle. All three pilgrimage festivals are about miracles. Pesach is about the miracle of the exodus when God brought us out of Egypt with signs and wonders. Shavuot is, according to the Oral Torah, about the miracle of the revelation at Mount Sinai when, for the only time in history, God appeared to an entire nation. Sukkot is about God’s tender care of his people, mitigating the hardships of the journey across the desert by surrounding them with His protective cloud as a parent wraps a young child in a blanket. Long afterward, the sight of the blanket evokes memories of the warmth of parental love.

Rabbi Akiva’s view, though, is deeply problematic. If a sukkah is merely a hut, what was the miracle? There is nothing unusual about living in a hut if you are living a nomadic existence in the desert. It’s what the Bedouin did until recently. Some still do. Why should there be a festival dedicated to something ordinary, commonplace and non-miraculous?

Rashbam (Rashi’s grandson) says the sukkah was there to remind the Israelites of their past so that, at the very moment they were feeling the greatest satisfaction at living in Israel – at the time of the ingathering of the produce of the land – they should remember their lowly origins. They were once a group of refugees without a home, living in a favela or a shanty town, never knowing when they would have to move on. Sukkot, says Rashbam, is integrally connected to the warning Moses gave the Israelites at the end of his life about the danger of security and affluence:

Be careful that you do not forget the Lord your God … Otherwise, when you eat and are satisfied, when you build fine houses and settle down, and when your herds and flocks grow large and your silver and gold increase and all you have is multiplied, then your heart will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery … You may say to yourself, “My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.” (Deut. 8: 11-17)

Sukkot, according to Rashbam, exists to remind us of our humble origins so that we never fall into the complacency of taking freedom, the land of Israel and the blessings it yields, for granted, thinking that it happened in the normal course of history.

However there is another way of understanding Rabbi Akiva, and it lies in one of the most important lines in the prophetic literature. Jeremiah says, in words we recited on Rosh Hashanah, “‘I remember the loving-kindness of your youth, how as a bride you loved me and followed me through the wilderness, through a land not sown” (Jer. 2:2). This is one of the very rare lines in Tanakh that speaks in praise not of God but of the people Israel.

“How odd of God / To choose the Jews,” goes the famous rhyme, to which the answer is: “Not quite so odd: the Jews chose God.” They may have been, at times, fractious, rebellious, ungrateful and wayward. But they had the courage to travel, to move, to leave security behind, and follow God’s call, as did Abraham and Sarah at the dawn of our history.

If the sukkah represents God’s clouds of glory, where was “the loving-kindness of your youth”? There is no sacrifice involved if God is visibly protecting you in every way and at all times. But if we follow Rabbi Akiva and see the sukkah as what it is, the temporary home of a temporarily homeless people, then it makes sense to say that Israel showed the courage of a bride willing to follow her husband on a risk-laden journey to a place she has never seen before – a love that shows itself in the fact that she is willing to live in a hut trusting her husband’s promise that one day they will have a permanent home.

Pesach represents the love of God for His people. Sukkot represents the love of the people for God.

If so, then a wonderful symmetry discloses itself in the three pilgrimage festivals. Pesach represents the love of God for His people. Sukkot represents the love of the people for God. Shavuot represents the mutuality of love expressed in the covenant at Sinai in which God pledged Himself to the people, and the people to God.

Sukkot, on this reading, becomes a metaphor for the Jewish condition not only during the forty years in the desert but also the almost 2,000 years spent in exile and dispersion. For centuries Jews lived, not knowing whether the place in which they lived would prove to be a mere temporary dwelling. To take just one period as an example: Jews were expelled from England in 1290, and during the next two centuries from almost every country in Europe, culminating in the Spanish Expulsion in 1492, and the Portuguese in 1497. They lived in a state of permanent insecurity. Sukkot is the festival of insecurity.

What is truly remarkable is that it is called, by tradition, zeman simchatenu, “our time of joy.” That to me is the wonder at the heart of the Jewish experience: that Jews throughout the ages were able to experience risk and uncertainty at every level of their existence and yet – while they sat betzila de-mehemnuta, “under the shadow of faith” (this is the Zohar’s description of the sukkah: Zohar, Emor, 103a) – they were able to rejoice. That is spiritual courage of a high order. I have often argued that faith is not certainty: faith is the courage to live with uncertainty. That is what Sukkot represents if what we celebrate is sukkot mammash, not the clouds of glory but the vulnerability of actual huts, open to the wind, the rain and the cold.

I find that faith today in the people and the State of Israel. It is astonishing to me how Israelis have been able to live with an almost constant threat of war and terror since the State was born, and not give way to fear. I sense even in the most secular Israelis a profound faith, not perhaps “religious” in the conventional sense, but faith nonetheless: in life, and the future, and hope. Israelis seem to me perfectly to exemplify what tradition says was God’s reply to Moses when he doubted the people’s capacity to believe: “They are believers, the children of believers” (Shabbat 97a). Today’s Israel is a living embodiment of what it is to exist in a state of insecurity and still rejoice.

And that is Sukkot’s message to the world. Sukkot is the only festival about which Tanakh says that it will one day be celebrated by the whole world (Zechariah 14: 16-19). The twenty-first century is teaching us what this might mean. For most of history, most people have experienced a universe that did not change fundamentally in their lifetimes. But there have been rare great ages of transition: the birth of agriculture, the first cities, the dawn of civilization, the invention of printing, and the industrial revolution. These were destabilizing times and they brought disruption in their wake. The age of transition we have experienced in our lifetime, born primarily out of the invention of the computer and instantaneous global communication, will one day be seen as the greatest and most rapid era of change since Homo sapiens first set foot on earth.

Sukkot, the festival of joy, is the ultimate antidote to fear.

Since 9/11 2001, we have experienced the convulsions. As I write these words, some nations are tearing themselves apart, and no nation is free of the threat of terror. There are parts of the Middle East and beyond that recall Hobbes’ famous description of the “state of nature,” a “war of every man against every man” in which there is “continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” (Hobbes, The Leviathan, chapter X111). Insecurity begets fear, fear begets hate, hate begets violence, and violence eventually turns against its perpetrators.

The twenty-first century will one day be seen by historians as the Age of Insecurity. We, as Jews, are the world’s experts in insecurity, having lived with it for millennia. And the supreme response to insecurity is Sukkot, when we leave behind the safety of our houses and sit in sukkot mammash, in huts exposed to the elements. To be able to do so and still say, this is zeman simchatenu, our festival of joy, is the supreme achievement of faith, the ultimate antidote to fear.

Faith is the ability to rejoice in the midst of instability and change, travelling through the wilderness of time toward an unknown destination. Faith is not fear. Faith is not hate. Faith is not violence. These are vital truths, never more needed than now.

From Aish.com, here.

HINT, HINT: Jew-Hatred Soars, but American Jews Still Living in Denial

Jews Fight Back!

September 27, 2019
By Rabbi Aryeh Spero

The rash of physical attacks against Jews in Brooklyn and Manhattan began almost a year ago.  We have cellphone and street camera footage of many of the attacks, and they are coming from assailants bellowing “Allahu Akbar” and from younger black and Hispanic men often yelling “dirty Jew.” They sneak up on Jewish-garbed citizens using bricks and stones, breaking bones and smashing eyes. There was no mainstream media discussion about this until a few weeks ago, and the major Jewish establishment organizations were basically silent as well. Even now, none of these Jewish organizations are flexing their muscles or evincing anywhere near the type of outrage we should expect.

You can be sure that if the attackers were white or Jewish and the victims Black, Muslim, or Hispanic, the establishment alphabet Jewish organizations (ADL, AJC, NYF, JCRC, Conference of Presidents, and Federations) would be the very first organizing protests against racism and pontificating about something rotten within American society.

My grievance is not why general society is doing little, since most Americans have no clue about what is happening in Boro Park, Williamsburg, or Crown Heights. But the major secular Jewish organizations do know! Nor am I perplexed about why this is not at the top of the list of many officeholders and politicians. After all, the “machers” from the Jewish organizations are not knocking down their doors nor raising Cain — something Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, CAIR, and Ocasio-Cortez would certainly do if their people were being assaulted by outsiders. Beyond doubt, the establishment Jewish organizations would themselves be knocking down doors right alongside them. They, as they always do, would be proclaiming “how the most important Jewish value is the protection of minorities and fighting racism.” Actually, it is President Trump who has made more of an issue over anti-Jewish remarks coming from the mouths of high-profile members of minority communities than our own Jewish establishment “leadership.”

Many of those running Jewish organizations and non-Orthodox synagogue and temples have for decades made helping other minorities the centerpiece of their ideological life and, thus, will never spotlight the anti-Semitism coming from members of the minority community, since it would shatter all they believe in. It might get in the way of “dialogue,” which is their most precious template, though it usually is a dialogue of what we Jews can do for you and not what you can also do for us. Years after the 1992 Crown Heights pogroms, the ADL finally acknowledged that its unwillingness to defend the Lubavitch community was a fear of jeopardizing their loyalty to the Black civil rights movement.

Many American Jewish leaders, including rabbis, consider these issues more important than mere tribal Jewish concerns, while others have convinced themselves that it constitutes Judaism itself, universalism taking precedence over those matters of Jewishness that are labeled “parochial” and “tribal.” For them, more important than Jewish survival is the survival of progressivism and left-liberalism, their guiding light. They have redefined Judaism as leftwing progressivism. This is their “religion” and they are zealots for it. Even the few Jewish holidays observed have been stripped of the uniquely Jewish component and replaced by universalist themes that abhor the Jewish particular.

A people in constant need to display to others or affirm their own moral superiority will eventually not defend itself and puts its survival at risk. Virtue signaling is but another form of social climbing.                                                                                                                                    

II

This devaluing of things specifically Jewish explains how Jewish organizations have allowed Jewish children on college campuses to be bullied, spat upon, harassed, and forced to renounce support of Israel. The ADL and big-city federations have the funds to counteract the BDS movement on campuses, the know-how in doing so, and the clout and savvy to demonize the movement and the Muslim students behind it as full-fledged racists not acceptable on campus. But they haven’t. In fact, the ADL has assertively come out against those states proposing legislation against BDS.

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From American Thinker, here.

‘Cherut’ – Negative Liberty Leads to Positive Liberty

On the Etymology of חרות

SUNDAY, MARCH 24, 2013

The appearance of the root /חור/ with the meaning of nobleman, aristocrat, or elder appears mostly in the later books of Tanakh. Melachim I 21:8, 11 and Kohelet 10:17 juxtapose חורים with elders or contrast them with youth. Nechemiah (2:16; 4:8, 13; 5:7; 7:5; 13:17) consistently juxtaposes חורים with nobleman or priests (see also 6:17). Yeshayahu 34:12 and Yirmiyahu 27:20, 39:6 similarly place חורים in the context of royalty and is commonly translated as “nobleman.” In Rabbinic literature חור came to mean freedom (e.g. Gitten 4:4; Targum on Shemot 21:2; Bereishit Rabbah 92). Daat Mikra, however, understands חורים as aristocrats who were free from paying taxes throughout Tanakh (e.g. Melachim I 21:8; Nechemiah 2:16).

However, the original meaning of the root /חור/ appears too have been “white.”[1] In Bereishit 40:16, R. Saadia Gaon interprets חרי as “white bread,” a symbol of royalty (see Ramban).

Yeshayahu 29:22 uses יחורו as pale, and is understood by multiple commentators as being the Aramaic equivalent of “white” (Radak, Metzudot Tzion and Ramban on Bereishit 40:16; see Daniel 7:9). Being pale-faced may be a symbol of royalty since it implies that one is at leisure to stay in-doors protected from the sun.

Esther 1:7, 8:15, and Yeshayahu 19:9 (according to Ibn Ezra and Radal; see especially R”I Karo) use חור as “white linen,” especially in the context of royalty (Esther Rabbah on 1:6; see Jastrow on חור). It is possible that חור/white linen is related to, and possibly derived from, חור/hole (Rashi on Bereishit 40:16 and Yeshayahu 19:9 relates חור to wicker and nets).

Thus, three etymologies may be suggested: 1) the white bread-royalty connection; 2) the pale-royalty connection; and, 3) the white linen-royalty connection. Either way, it is not surprising that חור is a common name among the royalty (e.g. Shemot 31:2; Divrei ha’Yamim I 4:1; Yehoshua 13:21)

Hirsch (Shemot 32:16) threads the disparate meanings of /חור/ into one conceptual whole, and relates it to the well-known rabbinic dictum (Avot 6:2):  “Do not read engraved [חרות] but free [חרות], for there is no person who exemplifies freedom as one who engages in Torah study.”

“Now חור means white, free and open, from which we get the meaning of opening and hole. The basic meaning seems to be “unhindered.” Hence: free, open, and the unhindered i.e. unbroken, rays of light: white. So that חרות   could also mean “opening” in the sense of the stone being bored clean through, or actually “freedom,” and in this sense חרות על הלחות would mean “in free mastery over the Tablets” and thereby express that ם” וס” שבלוחות בנס היו עומדים. The Tablets did not bear the writing but the writing bore and held the Tablets. Then the sentence in Avot 6:2 אין לך בן חורין אלא מי שעוסק בתורה , that the Torah makes “free,” would be a literal fact, brought home to one’s mind by a glance at the writing of the Tablets. Just as the writing of the Divine Evidence was not only independent of the material but raises the material serving it to its own level of freedom above the ordinary laws of Nature which govern matter, in the same way human beings, who take upon themselves the spirit of this writing and make themselves the representatives of this spirit, are raised, borne and held by the very spirit itself, above the blind force of ‘you must,’ the lack of free will which clings to all matter, i.e. they become “free.” (See Maharal, Derech Chaim, for a similar interpretation).

[1] As is common in all languages, the concrete becomes a metaphor for more abstract concepts. Thus, “white” becomes “clear” and “logical” as in מחוור

From BM’EI HA’DAGA, here.