The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is currently dealing with the condition of two Azerbaijanis who are being detained in Armenia, Ilaha Huseynova, head of the public relations department of the Azerbaijan representative office of the comm
Day: December 6, 2023
On the night of December 3 to 4, a brutal mass shooting of dogs took place in Ganja again. This was witnessed by a Turkish citizen, who not only filmed what was happening, but also posted on social networks with a comment about his shock at what he…
The U.S. religious freedom body USCIRF on Tuesday released a new report that provides an update on religious freedom conditions in Azerbaijan, TURAN’s Washington correspondent reports.
“Although Azerbaijan has in recent years ceased some problematic practices regarding state interference in its people’s practice of their religion or beliefs, the government…
Top Biden administration officials. including Secretaries of State and Defence, as well as Ukraine’s key national security leaders on Tuesday appeared before American lawmakers to lobby on following through on support for Ukraine, TURAN’s Washington correspondent reports.
The move came just a day after the White House had sounded the…
Муниципальная инспекция Тбилиси демонтировала в районе Самгори более 20 недостроенных зданий, незаконно построенных на землях, принадлежащих государству и муниципалитету. Об этом сообщает Мэрия Тбилиси. «В последний период участились случаи незаконного занятия государственных земель и строительства на них без разрешения зданий различного назначения приняли систематический характер, и это осуществляется организованными группами с полным нарушением закона, с […]
One of the political trends of the past few years has been an expanding disconnect between political unity rhetoric and the increasing disharmony politicians’ proposals create.
The root of this beltway cognitive dissonance is the rapid increase in government power. Unity rhetoric helps mobilize candidates’ political bases and can sway some independents, helping win elections. However, their postelection expansion of government power into areas where people have dramatically or even diametrically opposed beliefs about Washington’s legitimate role, combined with the fact that government can give nothing it does not first take, guarantees growing disharmony. Once such choices are appropriated into government hands, there is only the question of whose preferences will be imposed on others.
One person who has adroitly analyzed this issue is Frédéric Bastiat, one of history’s most dedicated defenders of freedom. Whether government created social harmony or social disharmony was a major theme in his unfinished (because of tuberculosis) book Economic Harmonies. Because of the large and often dictatorial involvement of government in virtually every area of American life, which has robbed many Americans of rights, freedoms, and property to benefit others, it is worth reconsidering some of those insights, particularly well-presented in Economic Harmonies’ opening chapter:
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All men’s impulses, when motivated by legitimate self-interest, fall into a harmonious social pattern . . . the practical solution to our social problem is simply not to thwart those interests or to try to redirect them.
Coercion . . . [has] never yet done anything to solve the problem except to eliminate liberty.
If you consider individual self-interest as antagonistic to the general interest, where do you propose to establish the acting principle of coercion? . . . For if you entrust men with arbitrary power, you must first prove that . . . their minds will be exempt from error, their hands from greed, and their hearts from covetousness.
Socialists . . . felt that men’s interests are fundamentally antagonistic, for otherwise they would not have had recourse to coercion . . . they have found fundamental antagonisms everywhere: Between the property owner and the worker . . . capital and labor . . . the common people and the bourgeoisie . . . the producer and the consumer. . . . Between personal liberty and a harmonious social order.
The economist school, on the contrary, starting from the assumption that there is a natural harmony among men’s interests, reaches a conclusion in favor of personal liberty.
It is not necessary to force into harmony things that are inherently harmonious.
The economists observe man, the laws of his nature and the social relations that derive from these laws. The socialists conjure up a society out of their imagination and then conceive of a human heart to fit this society.
[Liberty] is practical, for certainly no maxim is easier to put into practice than this: Let men labor, exchange, learn, band together, act, and react upon one another . . . there can result from their free and intelligent activity only order, harmony and progress.
The question is whether or not we have liberty . . . not profoundly disrupted by the contrary act of institutions of human origin.
Under the philanthropic pretext of fostering among men an artificial kind of solidarity, the individual’s sense of responsibility becomes more and more apathetic and ineffectual.
This is exactly the tendency not only of most of our governmental institutions but . . . to an even greater degree of those institutions that are designed to serve as remedies for the evils that afflict us.
Social order, freed from its abuses and the obstacles that have been put in its way—enjoying, in other words, the condition of freedom—[is] the most admirable, the most complete, the most lasting, the most universal, and the most equitable of all associations . . . the present social order has only to achieve freedom in order to realize and go beyond your fondest hopes and prayers.
However much we may admire compromise, there are two principles between which there can be no compromise—liberty and coercion.
If the laws of Providence are harmonious, they can be so only when they operate under conditions of freedom. . . . Therefore when we perceive something inharmonious in the world, it cannot fail to correspond to some lack of freedom or justice. Oppressors, plunderers . . . cannot take your place in the universal harmony.
The state always acts through the instrumentality of force. . . . The question then amounts to this: What are the things that men have the right to impose on one another by force? Now, I know of only one, and that is justice. I have no right to force anyone to be religious, charitable, well educated, or industrious; but I have the right to force him to be just: this is a case of legitimate self-defense.
Now there cannot exist for a group of individuals any new rights over and above those that they already possessed as individuals. If, therefore, the use of force by the individual is justified solely on grounds of legitimate self-defense, we need only recognize that government action always takes the form of force to conclude that by its very nature it can be exerted solely for the maintenance of order, security, and justice.
All government action beyond this limit is an encroachment upon the individual’s conscience, intelligence, and industry—in a word, upon human liberty.
Accordingly, we must [turn] . . . to the task of freeing the whole domain of private activity from the encroachments of government. Only on this condition shall we succeed in winning our liberty.
Will the power of government be weakened by these restrictions? On the contrary: to restrict the public police force to its one and only rightful function . . . is the way to win it universal respect and cooperation. Once this is accomplished . . . from what source could come all our present ills . . . which teach the people to look to the government for everything . . . to the ever increasing and unnatural meddling of politics into all things?
All these and a thousand other causes of disturbances, friction, disaffection, envy, and disorder would no longer exist; and those entrusted with the responsibility of governing would work together for, and not against, the universal harmony.
Harmony does not exclude evil, but it reduces evil to the smaller and smaller area left open to it by the ignorance and perversity of our human frailty, which it is the function of harmony to prevent or chastise.
If man can only win back his freedom of action . . . his gradual, peaceful development is assured.
Men’s interests are harmonious; therefore, the answer lies entirely in this one word: freedom.
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In Economic Harmonies, Frédéric Bastiat made the case that freedom was the key to economic harmony and progress, and that such freedom required a government “that by its very nature . . . can be exerted solely for the maintenance of order, security, and justice.” In contrast, because “all government action beyond this limit is an encroachment upon the individual’s conscience, intelligence, and industry—in a word, upon human liberty,” it is the expansion of government beyond its limited defensible role, with consequent reductions on citizens’ freedoms, that expands disharmony rather than harmony.
The 2024 election circus, already well underway, looks to be a particularly interesting election year with regard to unity. The likely major party candidates have in the past promised unity but produced results far from it. Those deviant results have featured contractions in Americans’ liberty as well as their economic well-being, where the closest thing to general unity in the country at the moment seems to be a common distrust of or disgust about both candidates, where the primary disagreement is who would be worse.
In facing the need to make such judgement, citizens need to be particularly on the lookout for proposals that only unify particular groups in divisive battles to impose their will on those who disagree. And in evaluating those efforts, we could benefit by remembering that harmony is a synonym for unity, and ask, with Bastiat, whether the coercive proposals advanced will expand or erode harmony.
This article was published by the Mises Institute
In their recent military campaigns, America and Israel have waged what to the inexpert, keen observer is largely old-fashioned, Third-Generation Warfare—a blitzkrieg, by any other name, against civilian populations.
The ostensible use of “tanks, mechanized infantry, and close air support” to “collapse an enemy’s defenses” are really unthinking, disproportionate shows of brute military force, reliant on massive amounts of materiel.
Yet when military mavens predicted and depicted the next form of warfare; it was the contours Fourth-Generation Warfare that they were tracing. Fourth-Generation Warfare was to be the distinguishing characteristic of the modern military. Boosted by technology, “advanced” armies would be relying on “small, highly mobile elements, composed of very intelligent soldiers, armed with high technology weapons.” These precision units and attendant weapons were expected “to range over wide areas seeking critical targets.”
In addition to technology; predicted and depicted was a military whose central impetus was augmented by ideas. In America, the controversial changing of hearts and minds, historically, has included fomenting coups around the world with the connivance afforded by psychological operations.
Near as I can tell, Fourth-Generation war was meant to be smart; to see Mind dominate and direct materiel.
What is underway in Gaza, at 2023’s end, however, is the very opposite. I see madness for what it is. Dead in the ruins of Gaza is the Israeli collective conscience—together with thousands-upon-thousands of Gaza’s civilians; dead or displaced for decades to come. The razing and ethnic cleansing of Gaza by Benjmain Netanyahu, abetted by Joe Biden, his Uniparty accomplices and a complicit West: This appears to capture the kind of Third-Gen “capability” delivered by the modern, standing, Woke military.
By an odd reversal, the Gaza offensive will do nothing to eradicate Hamas, for Hamas is not ISIS (Islamic State). ISIS is an international terrorist organization. Hamas is not. Dimly, Israeli propagandists like Dan Gillerman—former ambassador to the UN—have implied that Hamas was the same as ISIS. This particular agitator bamboozled an American news anchor, on November 30, by rasping at him that, “We are fighting for you as well as for us.” Contra Gillerman, however, Hamas had no global aspirations. While ISIS is an international terrorist organization, like it or not,
Hamas is indigenous—it is of the Palestinian People, by the Palestinian People, and for The Palestinian People, at least as these people perceive it
Israel’s blithe butchering of Gazans may change that. “Operation Swords of Iron” in the Gaza Strip not only guarantees Hamas recruits in Gaza and the West Bank for posterity; but may just see Hamas go global, given the Western world’s refusal to stop 58 days and counting of depravity.
Most Republicans and Democrats, Israel Firsters all, deploy a squalid little phrase—our “democratic values”—to allay the American taxpayer’s misgivings over the fact that we’re funding the destruction of the lives of millions of defenseless people.
The Israel Defense Forces is a deserving military partner, they intone at us, because Israel shares America’s “democratic values” (my tongue here is firmly in my cheek). Into this category falls a pillar of American virtue known as Woke. The Israeli military is Woke alright. To wit, right after October 7, the Knesset quickly minted new legal rights for gay partners, who will forthwith enjoy the financial windfall that comes with being widowed. Omer Ohana can now claim a widow’s benefits from the Israeli military following the tragic October-7 death of his betrothed partner, Sagi Golan.
Indubitably, Israel would never deprive any Palestinian man of marrying another. So far, however, the due-process rights of Palestinian detainees are spectral. In the wind, perhaps?
Most of the Palestinian prisoners released, reports the intrepid Nima Elbagir, “were held under a murky military justice system that theoretically allows Israel to hold people for indefinite periods without trial or a charge. Israel has been operating two distinct justice systems in the West Bank since it captured the area in 1967. Palestinians living there fall under the jurisdiction of Israel’s military court system, where judges and prosecutors are uniformed Israeli soldiers. Meanwhile, Jewish settlers there are subject to civilian courts.”
Have I come among lunatics? For how does indefinite “Administrative Detention,” absent due process of law, comport with the values instantiated by the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution?
Force-fed the fiction of the IDF as the most ethical fighting force in the universe, I set about to conduct a proportional, if limited, comparison. I compare like with like, albeit in limited but significant theatres of war: Israel’s offensive in Gaza against “Hamas,” in late 2023, to America’s onslaught in Fallujah against the Iraqi resistance, in 2004.
The battle in Fallujah is considered “the deadliest battle involving U.S. Marines since Vietnam.” “Eighty-two U.S. servicemembers died during the street-by-street, house-by-house effort to clear Al Qaeda from the city.” Officially, it is described as a “battle to retake the key city of Fallujah from a violent insurgency that was taking root across Iraq after the U.S. ousted Saddam Hussein.”
Before the American invasion of Iraq, Fallujah was a compact city of about 400,000 people. “Around 700 Iraqi civilians were killed over the course of the 2004 fight for Fallujah.”
Gaza’s population is about 2.4 million strong. The administrative chaos in war-time Gaza would hamper accurate records-keeping. That considered—and not counting individuals buried beneath the rubble—approximately 15,000 Gazans have been killed by Israel. (Haaretz, Israel News, Friday, December 2, 2023)
Let’s extrapolate:
Were Fallujah as populated as Gaza (2.4 million), the United States Marines would have killed approximately 4,200 Iraqi souls. This is a far cry from the Israel Defense Forces’ butcher’s bill of 15,000 civilians dead in Gaza—and climbing.
Were Gaza as small as Fallujah (400,000); the Israelis, befitting their butcher’s bill so far, would still have killed at least 2,500 souls to our Marines’ 700. Ceteris paribus, naturally.
Let that sink in.
On the numbers, I have been exceedingly charitable to the Israelis, given that their victims, buried beneath the rubble, are still mostly unaccounted for, and considering that the IDF resumed hostilities against civilians on December 1.
Both the Israeli and the U.S. militaries come in here for rough treatment. The fulminations of the Israel Firsters stateside aside, however, some American patriotism is owed amid the sorrow over Israel’s barbaric blitzkrieg.
Damning with faint praise though this may be, Americans, in the persons of our U.S. Marines in Fallujah—in the dubious theater of another unjust war—were righteous, compared to the monstrous Israel Defense Forces in Gaza.
This article was published at Ilana’s Mercer’s Barely A Blog
By Azem Kurtic
Civil society organisations in Bosnia’s mainly Serb-populated Republika Srpska entity are counting down the days until lawmakers begin debating a bill to restrict the work of non-profit organisations that receive foreign funding.
Critics of the bill, which appears inspired by similar legislation in Russia, say it smacks of authoritarianism and will have a major impact on the work of non-governmental organisations trying to protect democracy, media freedom, and human rights in Republika Srpska, one of two entities that make up Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The draft was adopted by the Republika Srpska government in late September and will go to the assembly once a public consultation period closes in mid-December.
If adopted by MPs, the legislation will create a special register of non-profits that receive funding from foreign entities, “regulating conditions and procedures for ensuring transparency in their operations”.
In practice, such organisations will have to submit semi-annual and annual financial reports detailing how much money they receive and from whom. Such organisations will be prohibited from engaging in political “activity” and gives the government discretion to declare them “agents of foreign influence”.
Experts say the move will have a devastating effect on civil society in Republika Srpska, as the latest restriction of rights under Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik.
“Any proposal to change a law, any human rights activity, any research, any comment on political decisions could be defined as political activity,” said Jovana Kisin-Zagajac, a Banja Luka-based lawyer.
Under the current law, NGOs are prohibited from direct participation in elections, but a ban ‘political activity’ could be applied to a much broader range of work, such as rights advocacy.
“In essence, that is the most problematic part of this law, as it adds a new way of regulating non-profit work.”
Minister’s right to ban
According to the draft, the justice ministry, in collaboration with the tax service, will monitor the finances of non-profits.
It defines a ‘foreign entity’ as “a government, executive body of another state, a foreign political party, or a person without citizenship of Bosnia and Herzegovina and residence in Bosnia and Herzegovina, or a legal entity or a group of legal entities organised according to the regulations of another state or with headquarters in another state.”
The draft gives the minister of justice the right to ban a non-profit if it is deemed to have broken the law.
“It is legally unacceptable that an individual has such a right,” said Kisin-Zagajac.
It also envisages financial penalties ranging from 1,000 to 5,000 Bosnian marks, of 500-2,500 euros.
Defamation
Currently, there are 25,646 NGOs listed in a state-level justice ministry database.
The current draft does not regulate the work in Republika Srpska of organisations registered in Bosnia’s other entity, the mainly Muslim and Croat Federation, but Kisin-Zagajac said this may change before the bill is put to the vote.
The changes will, however, apply to international organisations registered in Republika Srpska.
“If, let’s say, Transparency International is registered in Banja Luka, they will have to submit all these reports,” Kisin-Zagajac said. “But another discriminatory fact of this law is that if, for example, I apply for a project funded by international donors, and someone else on the same project, just funded by some state-level ministry, they will not have to submit these reports.”
Sinisa Vukelic, head of the Banja Luka Journalists’ Club and editor-in-chief of business portal Capital, said the bill spells trouble on several fronts.
“This is a clear continuation of the repression of freedom of speech, especially after defamation was criminalised again,” Vukelic told BIRN, referring to criminal punishments for defamation reintroduced in July 2023. Capital, which is registered as a non-profit, will also be subject to the law.
If the bill passes, all activities funded by foreign donors will have to be marked as “financed by foreign influence”.
“We would have to post that sentence on all of our investigative articles, every social media post, anything we do which is supported through project money,” said Vukelic.
Currently, the draft does not regulate foreign grants given via third parties registered in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Vukelic said the Republika Srpska government might still see its “mistake” and include this too before the draft comes to a vote.
Media impact
Criticising the criminalisation of defamation as “a substantial regression”, the European Commission, in this year’s report on Bosnia’s progress towards membership, said the foreign agent bill “would constitute another unfortunate and undeniable step backward”.
Vukelic told BIRN: “We are hoping that the criticism coming from local and international critics will be heeded and that the draft will be rejected, but that is unlikely to happen.”
The information field is one of a raft of areas that the draft does not classify as ‘political activity’, but critics say they fear the media will be targeted anyway.
“The new media law which is currently being drafted will further limit the work of non-profit media, in addition to the registry bill which will for sure,” said Kisin-Zagajac.
Small media outlets, frequently registered as non-profits, and investigative outlets will suffer most, said Vukelic.
“We’re making plans on how to protect ourselves when it comes to the legal side, as we don’t want to publish the ‘foreign agents’ mark next to everything we do,” he told BIRN.
“But we still want to keep it low-profile. If they [the government] see it, they will try to include that part as well before the final law is voted on.”