By Olivia Pierson
[First published on Insight@theBFD 24/10/19]

Politics is essentially philosophical in nature for it addresses the ethics of a social system by posing the question: how ought men to be governed?

This question of how men relate to each other has lain at the very heart of all human civilisations, from the ancient Sumerians to the modern American Republic and everything in-between, instructing us that above all things, ideas matter, since getting them wrong can wreak destructive havoc on the human spirit, to say nothing of human lives. 

But this question of a social system also draws on other philosophical disciplines, specifically the nature of reality (metaphysics) and the nature of how man acquires knowledge (epistemology).  If a civilisation believes that in ultimate reality man is the play-thing of the gods, gods who demand propitiations to be appeased in order to stave-off plagues and pestilence or cause man’s crops to grow, then bloody human sacrifices can be rationalised, as they have been in many early civilisations, such as the Sumerians, the Carthaginians, the Incas, the Aztecs and the Native American Indians. 

If some leaders believe as the communists do: that individuals exist for the sake of the State (or the collective, or society) instead of for their own independent happiness, then individual human rights are worth nothing and such leaders will sacrifice – without a moment’s hesitation – whole groups of individuals to be slaughtered for their own “more noble” aims, as we saw in the 20th Century under the regimes of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Tojo and Hitler. 

The individual rights of citizens furnish a civilisation with the principles of liberty. At their most essential these rights are: 

 -the right to freedom of speech and the open exchange of ideas, 
 -the right to a fair trial and due process under the laws of a sovereign nation (not        the UN), 
 -the right to defend oneself and one’s property against force and theft, 
 -the right to practise one’s own religion (or not to) without interference, 
 -the right to create an honest livelihood and keep the fruits of one’s labour. 

Without these important rights, our civilisation would be just another shit-hole.  With them intact and jealously guarded, we inherit a cultural climate of incomparable value. 

But these rights are now constantly under bombardment. 
 
There are many examples of this constant attack, but to cite just one: in New Zealand last year, two speakers from Canada, Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern, were blocked from speaking to a paying audience when Phil Goff the Mayor of Auckland arrogated himself to the position of Lord and Master presiding over which ideas New Zealand citizens can and cannot hear in a council-owned venue, the Bruce Mason Theatre.

When a privately owned venue was on the agenda for the two speakers, as it had done with the original public venue, Auckland Peace Action (NZ’s version of Antifa – a thuggish, fascistic, activist group of the Left) threatened noisy blockades and protests, which turned the proposed event into a “health and safety” concern. Leaders from the Muslim community had already called on Immigration NZ to ban the pair from entering the country to speak, so Peace Action stood in solidarity with them.

In other words, bullies threatened chaos and possible violence, and everyone cowered to them. Molyneux and Southern never got to speak.

Though not one single member that I know of either agreed with, or even liked Molyneux and Southern (I actually do, though had no intention of going to the event), the Free Speech Coalition then formed in order to uphold an important cornerstone principle of our democracy by taking Regional Facilities Auckland (RFA) and the mayor to court for:

1. Violating the right to free expression in this country, a right enshrined in our Bill of Rights
2. Setting the precedent of a “thug’s veto” by allowing controversial speech to be shut down on the basis of so-called “health and safety” concerns, perceived or imagined.

The appalling upshot of this High Court case was decided a few weeks ago. 

Regional Facilities Auckland won on the basis that they operate as a “private” commercial concern rather than as a public one.  Their clever-dick ownership structure shielded them from public and legal accountability, despite the fact that RFA are subsidised by citizen ratepayers to the tune of 24 million dollars per year in order to serve the public via its venues.
 
Member of the FSC, Dr. David Cumin, wrote:

“This High Court decision sets a dangerous precedent for free speech and provides a blueprint for other public bodies to control public platforms by hiding them under the guise of trusts and CCOs. The High Court basically said that because the venues weren’t owned directly by the Council, they don’t have to consider freedom of speech or the rights of Aucklanders to hear from whom they want to.”

The Free Speech Coalition is appealing this decision, seeking to have it overturned in recognition that this legal precedent in our country bodes extremely poorly for the future of one of our most precious civilisational principles.  

Disgustingly, some libertarians came down on Goff’s side.  

Peter Cresswell of NotPC blogspot (who ought to change its name to VeryPC), wrote that this debacle was never about free speech, then doubled down on that line of argument on the basis of “property rights" after the High Court case was decided. 

The great irony of Cresswell’s argument is that he tries to draw on an example laid out by Ayn Rand in the 1960s (these people can’t fart without a written doctrine prescribed by Rand) when the Berkeley University free speech protests erupted on campus. Cresswell parrots Rand’s view that in a “mixed economy” - as opposed to a fully privatised one - the principle of ownership is “unresolvable” when it comes to the use of a public venue which is funded by the rate-payer. Ownership in these situations is deemed ambiguous.  

Foolishly then, in this shady copse of ambiguity, Cresswell came down firmly in favour of less free speech, rather than of more, which is very sinister when one considers that Goff was hysterically petitioned by the Federation of Islamic Associations of NZ (FIANZ) to have Molyneux and Southern decidedly muzzled. The culture of Islam is hardly famous for its tolerance toward freedom of speech, but we ought to have seen a much more vociferous stand for liberty from so-called libertarians, not hair-splitting quibbles about ownership ambiguities in the face of threatened violence.   

To make matters much worse, Cresswell’s multiple posts writing in agreement with Goff having the two speakers de-platformed said not a word about the "thug’s veto," which saw the pair shut-down from speaking in the private venue of Auckland’s  Powerstation.  

The thug’s veto was always the most ominous factor in this whole controversy, but a leading libertarian didn't see fit to pass any public comment on it until October this year, after the FSC lost the case. What really beggars belief is that I’ve just seen a post on his website in which Cresswell recently writes Free Speech Under Attack: “The Thug’s Veto” where he promotes a new book that he has written some chapters for and cites the Molyneux/Southern debacle!  I guess this was about free speech all along, and the very peecee NotPC blogspot happened to be AWOL on it in real time. 

It is up to every free man and free woman to demand that our representative politicians stand up for our essential rights – and more than that – we must each stand up for them ourselves whenever they are disparaged, overridden or not understood, for the world can only ever be what we as individuals make it.

If silent acquiescence is the default position of many peaceful folks who think about liberty enough to know they’re lucky to have it, but flaccidly shrug “whaddya do?” when they see it squelched, then get used to speaking about our civilisation in the past tense as it dies a quiet death from passive neglect. The price of liberty has always been eternal vigilance – and vigilance is the very antithesis of passive apathy.

If exhortations to vigilance are not enough, about the only thing I can repair to is a line of poetry, in this case from the heart of Dylan Thomas, who contemplated all things pertaining to death quite a lot – as poets have a tendency to do:

“Do not go gentle into that goodnight. Rage, rage against the dying of the light!”

If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book "Western Values Defended: A Primer"
​

By Olivia Pierson
[First published on Insight @theBFD 15/10/19]

It has been nothing short of outlandish to watch the round condemnation by Democrats and Republicans this week of President Trump’s decision to withdraw US forces from Syria in the face of a Turkish incursion over Turkey’s southeastern border. 

The US does not have a large combat force there.  If it were to send one in, the US would be fighting against the territorial integrity of greater Syria, Assad’s country, which is currently propped up by Russia and Iran.  The US never agreed to fight a mission to help the Kurds create and maintain their own autonomous homeland, not for one minute. 

To make war with Turkey, a NATO ally, on behalf of the Syrian Kurds, is an entirely new mission which, if it were considered properly, ought to be put to a vote in Congress.  That way, all the war-mongers within the Democrat and Republican ranks who are currently baying for a war and accusing Trump of “green-lighting an upcoming genocide” can put their names to their convictions by the power of a vote and be prepared to stand by it forever.

It is true that the Kurds, both Iraqi and Syrian, have been staunch allies in the fight against ISIS, serving as a brave ground force on the front lines. Between the two countries, there exist as many as 90,000 captured ISIS fighters in prisons and detention camps, a figure which also includes their multiple wives and thousands of their children. In detention are also large numbers of “foreign fighters” which abandoned their European homes to fight for the brutally medieval caliphate. 

In Syria the actual numbers of captured ISIS fighters vary wildly - I’ve read reports that there are between 1,000 to 10,000 fighters held in custody and guarded by the Kurds.

The base of the Syrian Kurdish administration is a city named Qamishli in North Eastern Syria. 

The Kurds adopted a lenient attitude toward their ISIS captives, believing that rehabilitation would be a better deterrent than revenge. In the Qamishli prison, ISIS captives live in air-conditioned comfort watching television re-runs of Arabic soap-operas and even receive art instruction. Khaled Barjas Ali, a senior judge in the terrorism courts run by the self-proclaimed Kurdish administration in northeastern Syria, stated:

“If I sentence a man to death, I am spreading hate. We want to give people reasons to trust us. If you take revenge, people will be radicalised. But with reconciliation we are sure we can finish the problem.”

In the the northeast lies the detention camp of al-Hol, also overseen by the Kurds. Full of displaced women and children from Iraq and Syria, the camp saw its population explode from 2,000 to 73,000 between the months of December 2018 and April 2019. After the ISIS stronghold of Baghouz village fell, this influx of ISIS wives brought violence and murder to the camp. Some of the women used the sharp edges of tuna cans to slice into tents and attack others, such as those who expressed regret about joining the caliphate.  Women from Europe reside in this camp too, including Um Safia, a 27-year-old French woman from the city of Marseille:

“We want to live under Islamic law and pray for the Islamic State’s return.”

As a finale to the complicated 2003 US invasion of Iraq, which President Trump never agreed with in the first place, the US set out to “smash ISIS” and kill all their fighters, not see them languish around in prisons and camps on an extended holiday making papier-mâché birds and trees under the eyes of their forgiving Kurdish overseers.  

To acknowledge an incredible layer of complexity to this theatre of war, apart from just the alphabet soup of their various organisations, the Kurd’s major party happens to be a Marxist terrorist group, the PKK (the Kurdistan Workers Party), which morphed into the YPG (the People’s Protection Units) and SDF (the Syrian Democratic Forces).  Also included in this mix of raw freedom fighters, hell-bent on a sovereign Kurdish state along Turkey’s border (following the example of Iraqi Kurdistan), is the TAK (the Kurdistan Freedom Hawks) who claimed responsibility for the 2016 bombing of Ankara which killed 30 people and injured 60. The TAK is a breakaway group from the PKK, the main difference between them being that the PKK say they only target military facilities and personnel, never civilians. 

To acknowledge an even greater level of complexity in this theatre of war, the Syrian Kurds are not the indigenous people of Northern Syria, the land which they are now claiming for themselves and fighting tenaciously to rule. 

The original inhabitants of this large swath of land are the Aramean Christians who still speak Aramaic, the language of Jesus Christ, which originated in Mesopotamia under the Assyrian Empire in 1000 BC and spread right through Anatolia (Asia Minor), modern-day Turkey; the language itself is known as classical Syriac.  The city of Qamishli was founded in 1926 by Arameans fleeing Turkey after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. 

In 2016, the World Council of Arameans (WCA) made an urgent appeal to media, politicians, embassies and human rights organisations to draw attention to the human rights violations they were being subjected to at the hands of the Kurds, who are a Sunni-Muslim majority.  

The Arameans consider themselves to be Syrian and a united Syria is their ideal, but the Kurds have other ideas. 

The appeal from the WCA stated that over the last century, the Kurds have been cleansing northern Iraq and southeast Turkey of the Aramean population: 

“On 2 November 2015, 16 Christian organizations issued a statement that condemned the Kurdification of northeast Syria by the PYD (Democratic Union Party). The intended transformation of this part of Syria into Kurdistan included the enforcement of the Kurdish language and of curricula in schools; enforcing special taxes on and recruitment of non-Kurds; occupation of Aramean owned buildings, etc. In June 2014 and October 2015, Human Rights Watch reported a number of YPG crimes, including but not limited to forced displacement, demolition of homes and the seizure and destruction of property."

The forced closing of all the Aramean schools in the Qamishli provinces by the self-imposed, now-ruling Kurds emboldened by their alliance with the US, was the result of Arameans resisting changes to their school curriculum. But not before Mr. Isa Rashid, a 60 year old teacher and the director of the Nsibin Institute responsible for the Aramean curriculum, was attacked and violently beaten with baseball bats until his head was smashed open and he was left for dead.  Who committed this despicable act? The Arameans say it was members of the YPG/PYG. 

There exists another problem with the Syrian Kurds and it directly affects the US.

In an interview with a retired CIA Station Chief and the President of Americans for Intelligence Reform, Brad Johnson, he explains his intel that the Kurds have been training Antifa members, who travel from the West to northern Syria to help fight ISIS, then return to the US to cause havoc wherever they can.  We know that Antifa in Western countries (in NZ they call themselves Peace Action) are the radical-Left, responsible for violent protests and cancel-culture.  In the US, these are the nihilistic protest squads spitting on, and throwing urine at, policemen deployed outside massive Trump rallies, as we just saw in Minneapolis a few days ago. Receiving training in thuggery from Marxists in the Middle East would be a natural fit for Antifa. Whether or not the Kurds know what Antifa do back in the US is anyone’s guess and another matter entirely, but I imagine that they wouldn’t care too much considering the enormity of their own immediate struggles.

President Trump just averted America from another major war in the Middle East.  Obama originally took the US into Syria in a covert effort to oust Assad by supporting militant groups opposed to his rule, but ended up putting weapons in the hands of the most diabolical terrorist groups on this planet.  The US then began to aid the Kurds in eradicating ISIS. That mission is done - the surviving fighters should’ve been executed, not given art classes and air-con in a misguided act of forgiveness.  This is war. 

President Erdogan of Turkey is hosting three million odd Syrians and Iraqis in refugee camps inside Turkey, often threatening to unleash them all into Europe.  These camps are recruitment pools for ISIS and other terrorist groups.  Erdogan wants to create a “safe-zone” in Northern Syria to repatriate these refugees back into their own country - and who can blame him?

President Trump has said unequivocally that if Turkey starts ethnically cleansing the Kurds in Syria - there also happens to be 15 million of them residing inside Turkey - he will smash Turkey’s economy with brutal sanctions, as he is currently doing to Iran. It won’t surprise me in the least if it comes to this.  Erdogan is not a man to be trusted, but this is a Middle Eastern problem that needs to be solved by the countries in the region. 

The Syrian civil war has always posed an incomprehensibly complex threat to world peace, but since Assad remains its president, it is to him, not the US, that the Kurds must appeal for protection and any chance they may have at future autonomy (though I imagine that dream is over). They also need to lay-off the heavy-handedness with the peaceable Arameans. 

I note today that Assad has sent forces into the northern region to help the Kurds fight against the Turkish forces.  This is as it should be, for it is his country that the Turks have just invaded.  It is not America’s job to fight for a free Kurdistan against the forces of Assad, Erdogan, Putin and Rouhani.  That would be an eternal quagmire too dire to even contemplate. 

If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book "Western Values Defended: A Primer" ​​​​​​​​​​​​​