In the video posted Tuesday morning, CEO Bryan Fair said the probe focuses on bringing potential charges against both the organization and individuals connected to the group."The focus appears to be on the SPLC's prior use of paid confidential informants to gather credible intelligence on extremely violent groups," he said."This use of informants was necessary because we are no stranger to threats of violence. In 1983, our offices were firebombed, and in the years since, there have been countless credible threats against our staff," he said. "For decades, we engaged in unprecedented litigation to dismantle the Klan and other hate groups. In light of that work, we sought to protect the safety of our staff and the public. We frequently shared what we learned from informants with local and federal law enforcement, including the FBI. "The probe comes as the Justice Department has stepped up its scrutiny of nonprofits that it accuses of being involved with or funding "domestic terrorism." It was not clear if the criminal investigation is related to that initiative, and a spokesperson for the SPLC did not know the Justice Department's legal theory behind the probe.
As we meet today, it is unclear whether these principles will endure. At the beginning of the 20th century, a new set of first principles of government was introduced into the American mainstream. The proponents of this new set of first principles, most prominent among them, the 28th president of our country, Woodrow Wilson, called it progressivism.Since Wilson's presidency, progressivism has made many inroads into our system of government and our way of life. It has coexisted uneasily with the principles of the Declaration. Because it is opposed to those principles, it is not possible for the two to coexist forever.Progressivism was not native to America. Wilson and the progressives candidly admitted that they took it from Otto von Bismarck's Germany, whose state-centric society they admired. Progressives like Wilson argued that America needed to leave behind the principles of the founding and catch up with the more advanced and sophisticated system of relatively unimpeded state power, nearly perfected.He acknowledged that it was a foreign science speaking very little of the language of English or American principle, which offers none but what are, to our minds, alien ideas. He thus described America still stuck with its original system of government as, quote, slow to see the superiority of the European system. Progressivism was the first mainstream American political movement, with the possible exception of the pro-slavery reactionaries on the eve of the Civil War, quote, to openly oppose the principles of the Declaration.Progressives strove to undo the Declaration's commitment to equality and natural rights, both of which they denied were self-evident. To Wilson, the unalienable rights of the individual were, quote, a lot of nonsense. Wilson redefined liberty, not as a natural right attendant and assedent to the government, but as, quote, the right of those who are governed to adjust government to their own needs and interests.In other words, liberty no longer preceded the government as a gift from God, but was to be enjoyed at the grace of the government. The government, as Wilson reconceived it, would be, quote, beneficent and indispensable. Progressives such as John Dewey attacked the Framers for believing that their ideas were immutable truth, good for all times and places, when instead they were, according to him, historically conditioned and relevant only in their own time.Now Dewey and the progressives argued those ideas are to be displaced. Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence and hence our form of government. It holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God but from government.It requires of the people a subservience and weakness incompatible with a constitution premised on the transcendent origin of our rights. You will not be surprised to learn that the progressives had a great deal of contempt for us, the American people. Before he entered politics, Wilson would describe the American people as, quote, selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, and foolish.He lamented that we do too much by vote and too little by expert rule. He proposed that the people be ruled by administrators who use them as tools. He once again aspired to be like Germany, where the people, he said admiringly, were docile and acquiescent.The century of progressivism did not go well. The European system that Wilson and the progressives scolded Americans for not adopting, which he called nearly perfect, led to the governments that caused the most awful century that the world has ever seen. Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao all were intertwined with the rise of progressivism and all were opposed to the natural rights on which our declaration are based.Many progressives expressed admiration for each of them shortly before their governments killed tens of millions of people. It was a terrible mistake to adopt progressivism's rejection of the declaration's vision of universal, unalienable natural rights. Wilson's claim that natural rights must give way to historical progress could justify the greatest mistake in our history...
They say our 18th century declaration has prevented us from progressing to higher forms of government, but we were fortunate not to trade our Lockean bonds for the supposedly enlightened world of Hegel, Marx, and their followers. Fascism, which after all was National Socialism, triggered wars in Europe and Asia that killed tens of millions.The socialism of the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China proceeded to kill more tens of millions of their own people. This is what happens when natural rights give way to the higher good of notions of history, progress, or as Thomas Sowell has written, the visions of the anointed. None of this, of course, was an improvement on the principles of the declaration....
If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the government, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.
Emphasis added, but only because emphasis is warranted.
It is my sincere hope that your work to revitalize the teaching and research of Western civilization and the American constitutional tradition will lead the way in the reform of our nation's colleges and universities. And I hope that your example will help to rejuvenate our fellow citizens' commitment to the principles of the Declaration of Independence....[A]ll too often the sentiments [voiced by the common culture] tend toward cynicism, rejection, hostility, and animus toward our country and its ideals. With the foregoing in mind, I would like to begin by addressing my first encounter with the principles of the Declaration of Independence.It is perhaps not what you would immediately think. The second paragraph of the Declaration proclaims, We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. Throughout my youth, these truths were articles of faith that were impervious to bigotry and discrimination.The American Heritage Dictionary of English Language defines self-evident as obviously true and requiring no proof, argument, or explanation. Whether they had a divine source or a worldly one, they were never questioned. They were the Holy Grail, the North Star, the Rock, immovable and unquestioned.Despite the multiplicity of laws and customs that wreaked a bigotry, it was universally believed among those blacks with whom I lived and who had very little or no formal education that in God's eyes and under our Constitution, we were equal. This was also the case with my nuns, most of whom were Irish immigrants. At home, at school, and at church, we were taught that we are inherently equal, that equality came from God, and that it could not be diminished by man....Somehow, without formal education, the older people knew that these God-given or natural rights preceded and transcended governmental power or authority. When you lived in a segregated world with palpable discrimination and the governments nearest to you enforced laws and customs that promoted unequal treatment, it was obvious that your rights or your dignity did not come from those governments, but rather from God. Though not a literate man, my grandfather often spoke of our rights and obligations coming from God, not from architects of segregation and discrimination.Men were not angels. They were subject to the constraints of antecedent rights, and we were not subject to those men, even as we were subjected to their whims. We knew that life, liberty, and property were sacrosanct....Arguably, those men committed treason against the king, risking death at the hands of an empire far mightier than the newborn United States. They thus concluded with the memorable final sentence, and I quote, and for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. I will say it again.We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. Recently, I came across a definition of courage that is attributed to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear.In essence, the signers of the Declaration were saying that they were willing to die for the principles they were asserting, the supreme act of courage. Those principles were more important than their fear. Nothing in the Declaration of Independence, I now realize, matters without that final sentence.
This is an address that merits reading and consideration throughout.
On April 18, 1775, about 700 British Regulars in Boston, under Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith, received secret orders to capture and destroy colonial military supplies reportedly stored at Concord. Through effective intelligence gathering, Patriot leaders received word weeks before the British expedition that their supplies might be at risk and had moved most of them to other locations. On the night before the battles, several riders, including Paul Revere, William Dawes and Samuel Prescott, warned area militias of the British plans and approaching British Army expedition from Boston.The first shots between Patriot militiamen and Regulars at Lexington were fired at sunrise on April 19. Eight militiamen were killed and ten wounded. Only one British soldier was wounded. The outnumbered militia quickly fell back and the Regulars proceeded to Concord, where they split into companies to search for supplies. At the Old North Bridge in Concord, approximately 400 militiamen engaged 100 Regulars at about 11:00 am, resulting in casualties on both sides. The outnumbered Regulars fell back and rejoined the main body of British troops in Concord.
Initially inconclusive, but it was the 'shot heard around the world.' It set the stage for the destruction of many empires, the liberation of peoples, and the principle that no free man shall ever accept being disarmed.
Pirate’s Booty Corrects a Myth About West African GoldCenturies-old European tales about Gold Coast traders adulterating precious metals hundreds of years ago are challenged by the famous Whydah Gally shipwreck.[Introductory paragraphs] Sometimes all that glitters is, in fact, real gold. But it would have been difficult to sell that idea to the many European traders who journeyed along the coast of West Africa during the age of exploration.As their vessels plied what was known as the Gold Coast, records of the era show that the English, Dutch, Swedish and other Europeans often viewed their trading partners with suspicion. There was a longstanding belief that people in that part of Africa were intentionally mixing their gold with lesser metals like silver or copper, or even with bits of glass.“It’s a recurring theme that they’re stretching the gold,” said Tobias Skowronek, a geochemist who studies archaeology at the University of Bonn in Germany.But a recent study of artifacts recovered from the wreck of a pirate ship suggests that the West African traders were not passing off adulterated gold....[Deep down at paragraph 15] The researchers found that the 27 artifacts ranged from 70 to 100 percent gold by weight.When an artifact wasn’t pure gold, the most common metals present were silver, copper, iron and lead.While it’s true that some objects were far from pure gold, these results don’t imply that West African traders were being deceitful, the team concluded.
So, in other words, the European traders were precisely right all along. The study only concludes that the admixture was probably due to a lack of skill in separating the ores, which occur together naturally in that part of Africa.
Since the Second World War the idea of anarchism has enjoyed a certain revival.... [Each of an impressive list of thinkers] has attempted to draw attention to the excesses of the modern nation-state and advocated, in one way or another, the decentralization of the state's political, economic and military power.The importance of anarchism lies in the fact that it is alone among contemporary political doctrines in opposing the institution of the state, stressing the danger while denying the necessity of centralized authority. Socialism, Communism, and what is at present called Democratic Capitalism (the Welfare State) have, on the other hand, both accommodated themselves to and actively encouraged the growth of the national state. Thus supported from within and without (through international rivalry) the state has become the paramount institution of modern civilization, and exerts an increasing degree of control over the lives of all who live beneath its domination.[A]s the state continues to grow, assuming to itself not only political and military power but also more and more direct economic and social power, the average man of today finds his role subtly changed from that of citizen to that of functionary in a gigantic and fantastic ally-complex social machine. This development takes place no matter what the official ideology of the state may be, so that we may now observe a gradual convergence of ends and means In the historical evolution of such [typically] modern states as the U. S, A* and the U. S. S, R., which tend to rese[m]ble each other more and more with each passing year despite the fact that the two states originated under greatly unlike circumstances and attempted to guide their progress by official political philosophies which, in most important respects, are sharply opposed. This process of growth and convergence cannot be satisfactorily explained through the use of such conventional concepts as Democracy versus Communism, or Capitalism versus Socialism; the peculiar relevance and appeal of anarchism consists in this, that it offers a possible theoretical key to the understanding of historical developments which seem to have little connection with their customary labels.Statement of the Problem:The idea of anarchism is embarrassed, however, by its traditional association with illegality and violence.
Emphasis added.
"Illegality" is not really a cause for concern, since the state itself sets the laws and naturally enough outlaws the questioning of its existence or necessity. Even the United States, in spite of the protections of the First Amendment -- protections greatly strengthened, as we know, by the effects of the anarchist movement in the early 20th century -- outright bans advocating or teaching the idea, at least if the abolition of the government (expressly to include any subset of government) is tied to an endorsement of violence. So really, as Abbey realizes quickly enough, it's just the violence that is the problem.
The inquiry is worthy; the conclusion that violence has not been shown to be justified even by those who were most open to the idea of using violence is predicated on the fact that the idea that abolishing the state was a desirable end is something that anarchists haven't adequately persuaded enough people to believe yet (or hadn't, at least, in the 1950s). If it's not something that most people agree is desirable, no war to accomplish it is really possible; only terrorist acts and murders, rather than the spark of a genuine revolution. That's a fairly pragmatic, consequently characteristically American, and quite plausible conclusion.
Inevitably it requires us to consider not only what Christians believe but what the Islamic equivalent to Just War -- the doctrine of Jihad -- actually teaches. In many ways the two are as different as chalk and cheese. In the first place Christianity is a nonstate religion while Islam aims to be a “universal religion and a universal state”. From this arises a host of differences.In Just War, the core intention of hostilities is the “righting of wrongs.” Bellum has an earthly origin. Heads of states do not to go to war with the intention of pleasing God but to do particular things. This is not the case with the Jihad, which clearly states that the core intention to wage war must be to please Allah. Just War is a human creation while Jihad is a divine one.
For example, the 'jihadist' ideology taught by the so-called "Islamic State" (ISIS) can be contested, but it has to be conceptually severed from the protected freedom of religion, including the practice of Islam. Yet the conceptual roots of 'jihadism' are in the faith, and will come to be known to anyone who studies it closely; and anyone who studies the great scholars of Islam will find much support for the idea. Avicenna, that great philosopher, describes jihad as a kind of double good in his Metaphysics of the Healing, because it brings one closer to God's will while also providing you access to practical goods like slaves captured in the war. The philosopher Averroes, in a reflection on Plato's Republic, agrees with Plato that the best kind of women should be admitted to a kind of equality with the best kind of men, and that this equality means that they should be allowed to join in jihad and the taking of slaves and wealth. The Reliance of the Traveler, one of the great medieval works of Islamic jurisprudence, is a favorite example of Andy McCarthy's (who came to know it while prosecuting the World Trade Center bomber, an earlier example of mass killings by bomb).Apart from not suppressing Islam, you can't suppress (and ought to encourage) the study of Avicenna, especially. In any case, the 'road map' certainly can't be suppressed without trying to drive Islam out of the world. The best you can do is to acknowledge it, and work with those within the community of Muslims who oppose people pursuing violent jihad to try to convince as many people as possible that it's not a legitimate path. Ultimately, though, some will be convinced, and in part because the other side probably has a better case to make about what Muhammad and his companions really meant; certainly about what the great philosophers of his tradition meant.
Just War Theory is a Western tradition, originally a kind of gift that the Catholic Church gave to a warring Europe. It grew out of the Peace and Truce of God movements, which were attempts to restrain the brutal warfare of the Medieval period first against the Church itself, and then against noncombatants within the broader society. It invokes religion, and takes authority from Jesus' own words on the subject of peacemakers being blessed. Traditionally, it also accepts that secular lords are likely to war upon each other for many reasons, and tries to set limits on when new wars can be started.
I don't see how a war against a regime that murders its own citizens by the tens of thousands can ever be unjust, myself. But within the tradition it always comes down to who the aggressor is (jus ad bellum); and that is never resolvable because it always turns on differential claims from history. I thus don't find the tradition useful as a pragmatic approach to ethics.
(Another bias of mine: In general, the only thing our government does that I really approve of is overthrowing other, even-worse governments. Any government that violates the natural rights of its citizens is righteously overthrown according to the principles of the Declaration of Independence; I see nothing wrong with giving a helping hand to citizens who can't quite manage it themselves, as the French did for us once upon a time.)
If you are advocating for Iran being aggressed-against, you have to ignore the constant violence they have engaged in against us since 1979. Yet if you want to argue that Israel is the aggressor in the current war in Gaza, you argue that Israel is the aggressor in spite of the October 7th attacks because of a longstanding tradition of war and oppression and imperialism etc. The Iran aggression is measured from Trump's first act, excluding everything that came before; Israel's, from the very beginning of it or even earlier during the British Mandate. Very often the same people make both arguments on the same day, and at the same time. We never get to a resolution that provides anything pragmatically useful.
It is perfectly possible to make either argument under JWT, as well, which is another weakness of it as a pragmatic mechanism. The gift the Church keeps giving by continuing to raise it is not that it provides a pragmatically-useful ethical standard. It is, as it was from the beginning, that it provides a brake on the warlike impulses of the powerful secular lords of the world.
What it has never done is provide even a brake on governments like the Revolutionary Islamic Republic of Iran. It's not even fair to judge them by it; it was never a standard to which they even aspired. They have a standard of their own. It has been very clearly articulated and defended by them for four decades. There is little excuse for refusing to acknowledge and engage with it in trying to understand the moral structure of this conflict. To exclude it as a consideration is folly: perhaps self-centeredness, perhaps simply a refusal to take seriously their ideas in spite of their manifest willingness to live by and die for them (coupled with our own leadership's unwillingness to live or die by any standards, only to talk about them as if the things really mattered).
So: perhaps all of this is an exercise in confirmation bias by me, and it is fair to consider that. Still, for whatever it's worth, I think Wretchard has a good point here.
