From Killing the Rich to Taxing The Rich

[T]he suppression of the minority of exploiters, by the majority of the wage slaves of yesterday, is a matter comparatively so easy, simple, and natural that it will cost far less bloodshed… and will cost mankind far less.

Lenin wrote this in The State and Revolution (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) .

In the end, 66 million people were killed in the USSR between 1917 and 1959: tortured, shot, starved, frozen or worked to death. This figure was calculated by Professor of Statistics I. A. Kurganov and quoted by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) .

Others say that the figure is 45 million, still others 20 million. The lower figures may be due to the fact that they only refer to deaths caused by Stalin, and don’t include the pre-Stalin and post-Stalin periods of the Soviet Union.

None of them includes the tens of millions of deaths of the Second World War.

If 60 million were indeed killed from 1917 to 1959, an average of 2 million were killed during each year of Stalin’s horrendous rule – or 40,000 every week (even during “peacetime”).

If the real number is 20 million, that still means 1,830 deaths every single day.

And they were not just “the minority of exploiters”, as Lenin put it. They were peasants, workers, middle class people.

That eventually was the blood and human cost that Lenin considered “natural” and negligible.

It’s useful sometimes to remember the sources of the ideas of people who are currently in the political arena. It makes it easier to make sense of what they say, which at times would seem incomprehensibly against common sense.

Thursday’s Question Time program on BBC1 hosted among its panel Labour's MP and Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper. On that occasion the Labour Party, Lenin's heirs, showed through their representative how to adapt the Bolshevik leader's ideas to our modern – for them regrettably less revolutionary and cloak-and-dagger - times.

"Kill the rich!" has been replaced by "Tax the rich (to death if possible)!”

After all, one of the first punishments that Lenin recommended just after the October Revolution was "confiscation of all property”, along with confinement in prison, forced labour and all the other niceties.

Lenin's grandchildren have to content themselves with 40-45 (50 at most when they are in government) per cent of people's income. How small and disappointing it must seem to them! But they bravely react to disappointment by pushing for more, as they always do on Question Time.

Some panellists on Thursday reassured us that the well-off will not feel the difference if more money is extorted out of them, sorry I meant top tax rates increase.

I suppose it must be the same way of thinking of conscientious thieves when they decide to burgle a wealthy household: steal the money where it is and where there is so much of it that its absence won't have consequences.

Ah the joys of democracy, where two wolves and a lamb can vote on what to have for dinner.

But what Labour doesn't disclose is that new and higher taxes initially introduced for top earners trickle down to the middle classes and even the working class. An example is the Stamp Duty tax, whose burden has increased on UK low and middle income families trying to buy a new home.

A couple of people in the audience claimed that they would be happy to pay more tax, if it helps children, disabled and such.

If they were telling the truth, the easy solution would be not that taxation is increased - as these people can't expect to impose their preferences on others - but that they give to charities. In that way they will be surer that their money does go to finance their chosen goal and not, like taxpayers' money, into redundancy payments of hundreds of thousands pounds, salaries for optimisers, facilitators, equality commissioners, communication officers, other assorted bureaucrats and various useless public sector employees.

One of the main reasons why anything run by the government is hopelessly cost-ineffective is because the state invariably employs many more people than are necessary for the job.

It does so because it's a way to increase its power, which is its main goal. The more public sector employees, the greater the public sector and the more people dependent on the state. That also translates into more votes. Parasitism and clientelism are the name of the game.

The broadcast ended on a humorous note, when a totally useless panelist (impossible to fathom why he was invited), the ridiculous - but unfunny – comedian Omid Djalili admitted that he hadn't understood the last question from the audience, but in all truth he hadn't got the others either.

Indian Church Destroyed, Arson Suspected

A church was destroyed by fire in India in a suspected arson attack:

A mysterious, early morning fire destroyed one of East Delhi's big churches, St Sebastian's Church in Dilshad Garden, prompting allegations of foul play by the Christian community.

Police have registered an FIR against unknown persons under section 436 (mischief by fire with intent to destroy house) of IPC.

The blaze started in the early hours of Monday and reduced to ashes the church's interior, including the altar, the Holy Bible, Cross and all images and statues. Several churchgoers stood outside the charred remains of the 13-year-old shrine the entire afternoon, protesting against what they believed was a planned assault.

Delhi archbishop Anil Couto has in a memorandum to PM Narendra Modi and home minister Rajnath Singh demanded a judicial inquiry into the incident. Couto also alleged that the police took a long time to react to the fire and were late in sending officers and forensic units to collect evidence.

Archbishop Couto, in his memorandum, demanded that the government must repair the building before Christmas, ensure that policemen guilty of dereliction of duty are punished and that special police investigation teams are set up to trace the guilty.

Members of various churches held a candle light vigil on Monday evening, and about 2,000 Christians protested outside the church on Tuesday morning.

A statement from the the Delhi Catholic Archdiocese said that the entire interior of the Catholic St Sebastian's Church, which was built in 2001, was reduced to ashes and that forensic samples retrieved from the inside of the church still smelt of fuel oil.

"The Christian community... and civil society have decided to protest at the offices of the police commissioner... to focus attention on the attempts to polarise the people in Delhi state, which goes to the polls soon, and the continued persecution of Christians in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and other tribal and rural areas," the press release added.

Several phone calls to police officials went unanswered.

One of the first to arrive on the scene, around 6.30 in the morning, was the parish priest, Father Antony Francis. Another priest of the church, Father Stanley, said that there was an overwhelming stench of kerosene in the entire church when he arrived there, and explained: "Traces of it could be seen floating on water with which fire tenders had flushed our church. Undoubtedly this was planned vandalism."

Local Christians, about 1,500 families, recall one instance of vandalism against the same church. "In 2010, this church was stoned by some people. We still don't know why. So this assault is not new but is still terribly upsetting," said Roby Matthews, a regular at St Sebastian's.

Persecution of Christians in India is not new but indeed recurring, amidst authorities' inaction. Below is just a very brief, incomplete sample of past attacks.

RECURRING ANTI-CHRISTIAN VIOLENCE IN INDIA

Only a few days ago, some 25 Hindu fighters broke into the Calvary Apostolic Church congregation in the town of Bangarapet, in southern India, during a Sunday church service.

The church was vandalised, and 8 worshippers were injured in the attack, some seriously.

"The whole scene of a mob assaulting my believers was shocking and very frightening," described Pastor Robert Solomon D'Souza. "First they destroyed the furniture in the church and then started beating up believers who were gathered in the church for worship."

In June, a couple was hacked to death after converting to Christianity.

Last March, a court in India found 3 people guilty over the rape of a Catholic nun. The nun was raped by a Hindu mob in Kandhamal district, Orissa state, in 2008, days after riots caused by the death of a Hindu religious leader.

Although Left-wing Maoist rebels in the state claimed responsibility for the killing, hard-line Hindu groups blamed the minority Christian community for the death.

More than 30 people were killed in the anti-Christian violence, dozens of churches and Christian institutions were vandalised, and clergymen attacked. More than 25,000 Christians were made homeless by the violence.

Further back in time, AP reports:

In 1999, an Australian missionary and his two sons, aged 8 and 10, were burned to death in their car in the eastern state of Orissa following a Bible study class. In 2007, violence against Christians flared again in Orissa, with at least 3 people killed.

Black Deaths Matter only if the Killer Is a White Cop

On 18 October, black 29-year-old Jermaine Jones was standing with a few friends on a street in Berkeley, next to Ferguson, Missouri, when he was shot dead.

Three witnesses - his black friends, also wounded - told the police that an unknown black male fired shots at them.

Jones’s sister, Margaree Dixson, was also fatally shot a half-mile away a few hours earlier, and the police suspect another unidentified black man for her murder too.

Why aren't Ferguson protesters who are holding banners saying "Black deaths matter" protesting these African-American siblings' deaths? Because they were caused by fellow blacks and not white cops.

Fox News contributor Deroy Murdock has created the chart above, based on FBI figures and research by University of Missouri–St. Louis criminologist and former LAPD officer David A. Klinger.

From 2003 through 2012, Klinger counts 1,265 murders in his city. In about 90% of cases the murder victims were black.

Among these 1,138 decedents, roughly 90 percent (1,025) were slain by other blacks. Klinger found 32 blacks killed by cops, with 22 of them shot dead by white officers. So, across 10 years, white cops killed a whopping 2 percent of St. Louis’s black homicide victims. Investigations indicated that all of these police killings were legally justified.​

“While I understand the people are concerned about the use of deadly force by the police, by far — about 50 to 1 — more blacks in St. Louis are killed by other blacks as compared to white police officers,” Klinger told KMOX-TV.

World's Worst Animal Sacrifice Is Hindu

We rightly criticise Islam, but in doing so we must not forget the barbarism of some other non-Christian religions.

While, after the coming of Jesus, in the parts of the world that adopted Christianity animal sacrifices have disappeared, they are still practised elsewhere to this day.

The largest-scale massacre of animals is not to be found in the Islamic world but - this may be a surprise for some - in Hiduism.

Perhaps we should think of this next time we hear that Eastern religions are good for animals.

What animal equality campaigners have called a "slaughterhouse under the open sky" and "the world's largest mass animal sacrifice" is a religious festival to honour the Hindu goddess of power Gandhimai, that was held over the weekend at her temple in the remote village of Bariyapur in Nepal, near the Indian border.

Sword-wielding Hindus poured into Bariyapur, where the Gadhimai killing started on Friday at midnight and lasted two days, Friday and Saturday.

On the previous occasion in 2009, the "festival" of blood attracted a million Hindu worshippers from India and Nepal and an estimated 300,000 animals were killed, either by having their heads chopped off or by having their throats slit. This year the number of animals massacred was expected to be over half a million.

It always begins with the ritual killing of five animals: a goat, rat, chicken, pig, and pigeon. Buffaloes are then slaughtered throughout the first day.

As animal campaigners say and common sense tells, the untrained butchers cause a great deal of suffering to animals.

On Friday, thousands of animals' dead bodies and severed heads started piling up in a large field near the village where devotees were carrying out the sacrifices. The reason for the bloodbath lies in the Hindu belief that the goddess Gadhimai, pleased through the suffering and death of these animals, will give their killers health and prosperity.

"It is very festive here, everyone is excited," maintained Mangal Chaudhary, the head priest at the slaughter site.

"It is very bloody... you can hear the animals moaning," Rameshwor Mehta, 50, who was waiting to offer his prayers, told the media.

Sita Ram Yadav, a 55-year-old farmer, said the atmosphere was "like a carnival". He added: "I am offering a goat to Gadhimai to keep my family safe. If you believe in her, she grants your wishes."

Manoj Shah, a 45-year-old Nepali driver who has been attending the event since he was 6, explained: "It is the traditional way. If we want anything, and we come here with an offering to the goddess, within 5 years all our dreams will be fulfilled."

Animal campaigners and human beings with a minimum of compassion have denounced the brutality with which thousands and thousands of animals find death in the Gadhimai festival.

The director of the Indian branch of the Humane Society International describes the scene thus: "Pools of blood, animals bellowing in pain and panic, wide-eyed children looking on, devotees covered in animal blood, and some people even drinking blood from the headless but still warm carcasses."

Animal Welfare Network Nepal was is in Bariyapur to protest against the barbaric ritual, while a campaign to ban the massacre has attracted support from British actress Joanna Lumley and French cinema legend Brigitte Bardot, who has petitioned Nepal's president to end the "cruel tradition" .

Pope's "Dialogue" with Muslims Is One-Way

Our guest writer Cassandra has written another article for this blog.

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The BBC reported that the Pope visited the Blue Mosque in Istanbul as part of a three-day visit to Turkey. According to the BBC reporter, the Pope offered a moment of “silent prayer...next to the Grand Mufti.” The BBC man said that it was, “a moment of rich symbolism in terms of the inter-faith dialogue” that the Pope is trying to promote. And it certainly was!

For some reason the BBC didn't see fit to report on the Pope's visit to the Orthodox Christian basilica of Hagia Sophia. The basilica was converted into a Mosque following the Turkish invasion and occupation of Constantinople in 1453, and is now a museum. This is a pattern that Muslims have followed throughout history after invading other peoples' land in order to show the supremacy of their religion – see also the conversion into a mosque of the Basilica of John the Baptist in Damascus, and the Dome of the Rock, located on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The rock at the heart of the Dome, called the Foundation Stone, has great significance for Jews, Christians and Muslims, and the Dome is believed to have been built on the site of the Second Jewish Temple.

Of course, as all good jihadis will tell you, the conquest of Constantinople was foretold by Muhammad, the founder of the "religion of peace", who promised the Muslims that, after stealing the Christian city of Constantinople, with Allah's help they would steal Rome as well. A promise that the Islamic State, those "hijackers of the peaceful religion of Islam", would like to realise.

The Turkish paper Hurriyet Daily News, however, did report on the Pope's visit to Hagia Sophia from which two points stand out for me. Firstly, that “the Pope left Hagia Sophia without praying,” and, secondly, that “the Islamic call of prayer from the speakers of nearby mosques was heard in the historic building.” A visit rich in symbolism indeed!

Why didn't (or couldn't) the Pope say a prayer in what was for centuries a Christian place of worship? Would it have caused the Muslim Turks offence for a Christian to make any sort of a claim on a building that they stole from Christians?

Secondly, why was the Islamic call to prayer played from the speakers while the Pope was in Hagia Sophia? Was it by coincidence that the Pope's visit to the basilica coincided with it? If so, it is a rather common coincidence. It reminded me of the Mass that the same Pope held during his visit to the Holy Land, which was similarly interrupted by the loud playing of the Islamic call to prayer. It's funny how the call to prayer always coincides with events like these. For those who don't know, these are the words of that prayer:

Allah is Greater! Allah is Greater!
Allah is Greater! Allah is Greater!
I witness that there is no god but Allah.
I witness that there is no god but Allah.
I witness that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.
I witness that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.
Come to worship. Come to worship.
Come to success. Come to success.
Allah is Greater! Allah is Greater!

[From (The Third Choice: Islam, Dhimmitude and Freedom (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) by Mark Durie, 2010, page 17]

A visit rich in symbolism indeed! But the symbolism is probably lost on both the Pope and the BBC.

The problem with Muslim-Christian “inter-faith dialogue” is that the aim of the “dialogue” is almost always nebulous. From the Christian perspective it always seems to amount to something like “let's hang out together, and say nice things to each other so that everybody feels good.” Which is all good and well, but it does nothing to resolve the tough issues such as Muslim persecution of Christians around the world which (silly me) I would have thought was the point of “dialogue”.

Rather than tackling the root cause of such persecution - the Islamic texts – the “dialogue” revolves around deflecting blame from those texts to things like “hunger and poverty” or “Islamophobia”; or else yammering on about what Christians and Muslims have in common, for example the fact that both groups reverence Mary or that both groups believe that Jesus had a miraculous birth and performed miracles. That's all good and well but it ignores the fact that Muslim persecution of Christians does not originate from Muslim and Christian unawareness of the fact that they both share similar beliefs, nor from “Islamophobia”, hunger or poverty.

Re-read that call to prayer. The problem stems from Islamic supremacism which is writ large in Islamic law and psychology, and which in turn originates from the texts of Islam. Muhammad is told in the Qur'an: “He it is Who hath sent His messenger with the guidance and the religion of truth, that He may make it conqueror of all religions however much idolaters may be averse.” (Qur'an 61:9) While Christians are taught to be humble, Muslims are taught the supremacism of Islam over other religions, which explains why, after invading other peoples' land (which it is their divine right to do), they find it difficult not to commandeer other peoples' places of worship for Allah.

It explains why, when a Christian man has the audacity to marry a Muslim woman, the Muslim mind sees fit to punish all Christians in the area for that “crime”. Since in Islamic law Muslim men are free to marry Christian and Jewish women, why should Christian or Jewish men marrying Muslim women cause such reactions? Well, it is because the former is meant to ensure that the number of Muslims increases in a society since the children of such unions are invariably raised as Muslims. The latter cannot be allowed because it would mean that the children of such unions (following the religion of the father) would be Christians or Jews, and the number of Muslims in the society would decrease. The notion that Christians and Jews share an equality with Muslims is foreign to Islamic law.

Christians, like the Pope, following their teacher's command to be humble believe that they are building good will with their Muslims counterparts, but fail to see that Muslims, following Muhammad's teaching that they are the best people (Qur'an 3:110), while Jews and Christians are the “worst of created beings” (Qur'an 98: 6), view Christian obeisance towards them as being in the normal order of things, and not something that requires any sort of reciprocity.

The Pope's visit won't stop the Turkish government supporting the Islamic State by, for example, allowing them to use Turkish territory to launch attacks.

But none of that really matters anyway, because ending wrongdoing on the part of Muslims, through an honest examination and repudiation of certain ideas in the Islamic texts, is not the point of “inter-faith dialogue”.

UK University Rejects Pro-Abortion Bullying

Younger generations are fighting back.

Yesterday, the Cardiff University Students' Union, in Wales

voted down a motion that would have made the Students' Union officially pro-choice and effectively banned pro-life activities.

Clauses within the motion included preventing "affiliated societies and groups from taking part in anti-choice protests or rallies outside of abortion clinics and under the banner of the student’s union," with another part saying:

"Any information about abortion or contraception disseminated, distributed or presented in union or university buildings must be unbiased and not shame those who choose to have abortions, and must be academically referenced."

The motion would have also committed the Students' Union to campaigning against protests outside abortion clinics and opposing "any restrictions to abortion or contraceptive rights being passed through Parliament or the National Assembly for Wales." [Emphases mine]

The motion, clearly pro-abortion, was an attempt to prevent members of the students' union from expressing dissident views from it, prompting alarm about freedom of speech on campus.

Jonathan O’Connell, president of Cardiff Students for Life, said:

“This motion simply cannot be allowed to pass. The university environment has long been a bastion of free speech, which the proposed motion seeks to attack. There are huge implications in enforcing a single ideology or political viewpoint across the whole student populace; not least of all it restricts students’ freedom of expression as well as directly limiting the religious freedom of certain student groups.

“Declaring the university officially pro-choice is akin to declaring the university affiliated with a single political party, which obviously in the 21st century would be totally unthinkable.”

Alithea Williams, vice-chair of the Alliance of Pro-Life Students, called the motion a "censorious and illiberal attack on free speech" which “seeks to impose a uniform ideological viewpoint on the entire student body, and tramples upon the right to freedom of speech and expression of those who disagree". She added that “all views, including the pro-life voice, must be allowed to be heard.”

Those who concocted this motion are true heirs to Stalin. The motion was heavily defeated. The "Keep Cardiff Uni Free" Facebook page declares that it has been rejected by an overwhelming show of hands, with no official count needed.

This victory is particularly welcome as the the situation of UK universities is getting pretty dire.

Last week a debate about abortion at Oxford University was cancelled.

The debate would have been between journalists Tim Stanley, anti-abortion, and Brendan O'Neill, pro-abortion, debating the motion "This house believes abortion culture harms us all".

It was cancelled simply because angry feminists (when are they not angry?) didn't like the fact that the pro-life position was given a chance to be aired and not totally suppressed. So they set up a Facebook page threatening to disrupt the event.

The Wall Street Journal found this so disgusting that it published an editorial on it, "Intolerance at Oxford", mauling student leaders who can’t tolerate hearing different opinions from their own.

In September, Dundee University Students' Association banned the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) from its Freshers' Fayre, of which SPUC had been part in previous years.

And Oxford University Students' Union banned anti-abortion group Life from advertising at the university.

It's not just pro-life organisations that are under attack from student unions, it's UKIP too. Yesterday the University of East Anglia stopped an event from going ahead because it would have featured UKIP speakers. The Students' Union justified this move with claims that it would have alarmed or frightened students and caused a "breach of the peace".

Ferguson Mob Stops People Going to Work



The situation has got out of hand. The protests about the Ferguson verdict have become absurd, resembling a mental asylum, and the protesters have lost all sense of reality and proportion.

In the video above, dozens of students blocked I-5 North, a major thoroughfare near San Diego, California.

The protest blocked thousands of commuters, stuck in traffic and unable to get to work, who angrily started shouting.

One of them in particular, caught on the video, badly pushed a protester to the side of the road and stole his megaphone. Furious, he explained that if he couldn't go to work he would be fired and he had six kids to feed.

Other drivers voiced their frustration, amidst calls for the arrest of those obstructing the highway. A woman in nursing scrubs said: "We have doctors and nurses that have to save lives here."

The crowd dispersed only when the police arrived. Nobody was arrested.

A commenter, replying to the question of why no-one in the mob was arrested, said: "It's liberal democratic controlled California you really don't expect them to get arrested do you?"