AUSTRALIA

He’s not a US citizen and US can’t try Assange for treason

The Sydney Morning Herald, 

LETTERS

December 15, 2021 — 

I have seen Julian Assange portrayed as a journalist, a whistleblower and as a traitor by the US government (“In a decent society, Assange is entitled to justice”, December 14). The fact is that neither he, nor any other Australian citizen, has ever had any formal requirement or commitment of loyalty or allegiance to the US government. It would therefore be an incredible stretch to describe his actions as treasonous. For the US to claim sovereignty over the globe and seek to apply their law to anyone anywhere in the world at will is sheer arrogance. The arrogance succeeds only because of the meek complicity of governments such as ours and that of Britain. Assange released material showing US forces committing atrocities during the Afghan war. This material made the US government look bad. They didn’t like it, expressed confected and selective moral outrage and hunted Assange down. Even if the extradition fails, the US government will have succeeded in warning off any other potential whistleblowers. 

John Slidziunas, Woonona

Congratulations to Joyce for the most rational statement I’ve heard from him in a long time. I applaud his statements such as “rights … apply equally … to those who have been less fortunate” and “you can judge a society on whether the protection … is actively pursued in a form where all are truly equal”. I could not help thinking, though, that it is his government that has denied those rights to whistleblowers, Aborigines, and refugees, many of whom, although guilty of no crime, have been held in prison-like conditions for years. 

Ron Pretty, Farmborough Heights

Maybe if Assange played top tennis, and preferably doubles, he’d currently be getting high-volume support from many more of all our nakedly hypocritical politicians and governments in the “free” West. Apparently, human rights and associated moral outrage are not universal but can be selectively applied when politically expedient – and when it suits. 

Peter Bower, Naremburn

The Deputy PM has said that Julian Assange should either be put on trial in Britain or brought back to Australia. However, a trial outside the US is not likely. The alleged crime was against the United States and courts do not have authority to try someone except for violation of local criminal laws. Julian Assange was indicted in June 2020 by the US Federal Grand Jury in Virginia on multiple counts of criminal conspiracy. It is simply not a crime in Britain or Australia to violate the United States Code and British courts may not try someone for violating American criminal conspiracy laws unless the activity also happens to be a crime in Britain and then the trial would be under British criminal laws. 

Harry Melkonian, Vaucluse

Assange embarrassed the US and is paying a high price for doing so. There is no question deals have been done to keep Assange incarcerated without any conviction. According to the present Australian Coalition government, your Australian passport is not worth the paper it is written on. 

David Goldstein, Balgowlah

Assange broke no law on American soil and should not be tried for a crime there. 

Ron McQuarrie, Budgewoi

The Deputy PM’s stance on Assange is commendable. There is too much political pressure in the US to assure Assange a fair trial in that country. Being tried in Britain or Australia seems a just outcome for all parties.

 Clive Hughes, Freshwater

Judging by the newfound power of logical thinking articulated in Joyce’s opinion piece on Assange, maybe self-isolation and a mild dose of COVID-19 should be mandatory for all politicians.

 Col Burns, Lugarno

Extradiction of Assange Darkens Human Rights Day: Russia Says

WikiLeak founder Julian Assange, London, U.K. | 

Photo: Twitter/ @ToddRoy48029477

Over the last 12 years, the U.S. has persecuted the Australian journalist for having denounced the crimes committed by its troops and security agencies in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On Friday, Russia’s Foreign Affairs Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova harshly criticized the decision of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales to approve the extradition of WikiLeaks Julian Assange to the United States.

RELATED:
British Court Authorizes Extradition Of Assange To The US

"The U.K. High Court has authorized Julian Assange's extradition to the United States. This shameful verdict as part of the political case is yet another manifestation of the Anglo-Saxon tandem's cannibalistic worldview… What a 'fitting' way for the West to mark the Human Rights Day and the end of the 'Summit for Democracy',” Zakharova pointed out.

Previously, the UK High Court upheld a motion presented by the US Department of Justice on the extradition of Assange, who has been held in London's Belmarsh prison since April 2019. Over the last 12 years, the United States has persecuted the Australian journalist for having denounced the crimes committed by U.S. troops and security agencies in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

For defending press freedom, Assange could receive sentences of up to 175 years in the United States, a country which accuses him of crimes against its "National Security."

“Julian Assange's extradition is being sought for such revelations as the collateral murder gunning down of civilians, including children and two Reuters journalists by the U.S. in Iraq for which they tried to evade accountability,” WikiLeaks recalled.

In January, the British courts ruled against his extradition. Now, however, the judges authorized it, arguing that the U.S. government had promised not to subject Assange to harsh detention conditions.

"The English decision to extradite Assange to the United States is ignoble. It is a murder under judicial guise. Shame on those who let it happen," said French socialist leader Jean-Luc Melenchon, who asked his country to grant him political asylum.

 

On Why We Should Oppose The Persecution Of Julian Assange

Tuesday, 14 December 2021
Article: Gordon Campbell

Julian Assange is a polarising personality. Admired by many for his work as a whistle-blower, Assange is famously loathed by other people who still hold him accountable for the sexual assault charges that the Swedish authorities finally dropped back in November 2019. All along, Assange and his legal team argued that the Swedish prosecution had the ultimate aim of getting him extradited back to the United States. At the time, Assange’s critics claimed that those fears of extradition were merely an excuse to evade prosecution in Sweden.

Well, it turns out that Assange’s fears about extradition were soundly based. The US continues to seek his extradition to face charges under the US Espionage Act that on conviction carry up to 175 years in prison. Last week – on December 10, Human Rights Day! - the UK courts took a giant step to making that outcome possible. The High Court overturned a previous ruling that Assange’s health and likely treatment (solitary confinement in a US Supermax facility) were sufficient grounds for refusing his extradition.

Not any more. After receiving cross-your-heart promises from the US (a) that Assange, if convicted, would have his physical and mental health needs adequately met and (b) that he might not be sent to a Supermax and might be allowed to serve some of his sentence in an Australian prison, the same UK judge who had made the earlier decision changed his mind, and gave the extradition the green light. This ruling will now be appealed to the UK Supreme Court where – hopefully – the wider issues raised by his case might be revisited. It will take at least two years to go through this process, during which time Assange will continue to be held in Britain’s Belmarsh prison. Assange has now spent almost ten years in confinement, after he first sought refuge in Ecuador’s embassy in London in 2012.

For those hung up on Assange’s celebrity status – hero or villain, altruist or narcissist? – His personality traits are beside the point. His prosecution, imprisonment and extradition proceedings amount to a wide-ranging attack on freedom of speech, on press freedom and on the ability of the media to hold governments to account. As the Guardian recently pointed out, the High Court decision is not only a blow for his family and friends, who fear he would not survive imprisonment in the US. It is also a blow for all those who wish to protect the freedom of the press:

The case against him relates to hundreds of thousands of leaked documents about the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, as well as diplomatic cables, which were made public by WikiLeaks working with the Guardian and other media organisations. They revealed horrifying abuses by the US and other governments which would not otherwise have come to light

Assange’s alleged “crime” was to publish on Wikileaks a trove of documents and cables obtained by Chelsea Manning, a US soldier stationed in Iraq. The material included evidence of war crimes committed by US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The diplomatic cables contained hundreds of examples of US diplomats being engaged in clandestine activities without the knowledge or consent of the public at home, or in the countries affected. The public interest served by revealing such activities should be obvious. Revealing the atrocities, lies and deceptions of the powerful is what journalism exists to do, in a free society.

Uniquely though, Assange has been prosecuted for doing so, as the American Civil Liberties Union pointed out in 2019:

For the first time in the history of our country, the government has brought criminal charges under the Espionage Act against a publisher for the publication of truthful information. This is a direct assault on the First Amendment.

The Columbia Journalism Review made the same point a year ago:

…This case is nothing less than the first time in American history that the US government has sought to prosecute the act of publishing state secrets, something that national security reporters do with some regularity. While many of the charges [contained in the Assange indictment] involve conspiracy or aiding and abetting, three counts are based on “pure publication”—the argument that Assange broke the law just by posting classified documents on the Internet.

And furthermore:

Read literally, the Espionage Act criminalizes the solicitation, receipt, and publication of any government secret, not just the names of informants. The Justice Department has long taken the position that it can prosecute the act of publishing classified information. But it has not done so, until now, because of concerns that it would open a Pandora’s box of media censorship.

With Assange, Pandora's box has now been opened. If Assange can be prosecuted for publishing leaked information – on the grounds it was “stolen” and because the disclosures (in the state’s opinion) damaged “ national security” then any other journalist is at risk of the same fate for doing their job. The CJR article gives an interesting example of how these things used to be handled. In the mid 1970s, the Ford administration decided not to prosecute the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh for revealing (in a front page New York Times story) the full details of a secret US submarine programme. On that occasion, the US Justice Department chose to go straight to the NYT publishers and quietly remind them it would be in everyone’s best interests if they took national security more seriously next time around.

Thankfully, the Internet has made those sort of cosy arrangements impossible. Yet if Assange is successfully extradited, the precedent cannot avoid having a chilling effect on any revelations about government wrong-doing, given that the documents proving it will almost certainly belong to the state. The evidence will always have been “stolen” and “national security” is a conveniently elastic term. Truth and the public interest don’t provide any defence at all. Governments can always claim that what the public may be interested in isn’t always in their best interest to know.

What To Do

To date, the Australian government has refused to make any critical comment about this ongoing abuse of the legal process to prosecute/persecute one of its citizens abroad. This silence allegedly, is out of “respect” for the legal proceedings. No doubt, the New Zealand government would use the same excuse to avoid taking a stand. Let the court process run its course etc. etc.

Yet only last week PM Jacinda Ardern participated in an online democracy summit hosted by US president Joseph Biden, in which Biden posed as a sterling defender of press freedom:

Opening his Summit for Democracy this week, Joe Biden urged his guests to “stand up for the values that unite us”, including a free press. The US president boasted of his new initiative for democratic renewal, including measures to support an unfettered and independent media: “It’s the bedrock of democracy. It’s how the public stay informed and how governments are held accountable. And around the world, press freedom is under threat.”

You bet it is, including by the Biden White House.(At the same online gathering US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken described a free press as an ‘’indispensable” part of a modern democracy.) With those fine words still ringing in her ears, Ardern surely has a mandate to remind Biden that the US needs to practice what it has just preached – by- for instance, dropping the Assange prosecution.

There’s more. Over the course of the past two decades, the Clark and Ardern governments have made much of New Zealand’s reliance on a rules based international order based on shared norms. One of those norms that has existed for the best part of 200 years, is that you don’t extradite people for offences of a political nature, and (especially) you don’t send them back to where they will be treated inhumanely, for actions and expressions arising from their political opinions.

This is a platform readily available to Ardern to comment on the Assange case. Supposedly we look to the United Nations to take the lead in establishing and defending the rules-based international order. Well, in the Revised Draft Model for Extradition Law that the UN recommends that its member states should adopt, Articles 3a, 3b, and 3f say this:

Article 3: MANDATORY GROUNDS FOR REFUSAL
Extradition shall not be granted in any of the following circumstances:
(a) If the offence for which extradition is requested is regarded by the
requested State as an offence of a political nature….

(b) If the requested State has substantial grounds for believing that the
request for extradition has been made for the purpose of prosecuting or
punishing a person on account of that person's race, religion, nationality, ethnic
origin, political opinions, sex or status, or that that person's position may be
prejudiced for any of those reasons; [bolded emphasis mine]

(f) If the person whose extradition is requested has been or would be
subjected in the requesting State to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading
treatment or punishment or if that person has not received or would not receive
the minimum guarantees in criminal proceedings, as contained in the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, article 14…

Sure, this is only a model treaty. No-one has signed it. Yet it strongly indicates what principles with respect to extradition law that the UN wants and expects its member states to adopt and uphold. My point being, our declared support for a rules based international order give us grounds to urge the US to cease its attempts to extradite Assange - because (contrary to UN principles) that extradition is clearly for an offence of a political nature, is held to be motivated by his political opinions, and will result in degrading and inhumane treatment within the US prison system.

Ultimately, if it truly believes in the UN and the international rule of law, New Zealand should not be standing passively on the side-lines while an injustice of this magnitude is being perpetrated - especially given the precedent that Assange’s conviction and continued imprisonment has for the role of the media, here and abroad.

Footnote One: The US government offensive against leakers and journalists who publish leaked information did not begin with Assange, even though his case has taken that campaign to new heights. Barack Obama was the main offender:

President Barack Obama, in fact, set a record for any president with his number of prosecutions against leakers using the Espionage Act. Some observers fear that Obama’s crackdown on leaks paved the way for Trump to do the same.

Footnote Two: Over the years, only a handful of US soldiers have been convicted for war crimes committed during service in Iraq or Afghanistan. See here and also here and also here for some of those examples. Even on the even rarer occasions when a conviction results, the punishment has often been of little deterrent value. For example : the group of US soldiers eventually prosecuted for prisoner torture and maltreatment at Bagram air base in Afghanistan were either acquitted, or fined and demoited, or in the most extreme case, imprisoned for five months.

In a couple of instances (eg Sgt Clint Lorance and Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher) the uniformed murderers in US war zones abroad were pardoned by US President Donald Trump. The rarity of these prosecutions (and the issuing of a presidential pardon to someone as noxious as Gallagher) underlines the double standard being displayed by the dogged US pursuit of Assange:

As Agnès Callamard, secretary general of Amnesty International, has noted: “Virtually no one responsible for alleged US war crimes committed in the course of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars has been held accountable, let alone prosecuted, and yet a publisher who exposed such crimes is potentially facing a lifetime in jail.”

On the evidence, the US regards the publishing of the evidence of its war crimes to be a worse offence than committing such crimes in the first place.

Footnote Three : There’s a lucid brief history here of the “political offence” exemption in extradition requests, and of the three main ways- the US, the UK and the Swiss models – that the exemption has evolved over the centuries.

Footnote Four : You might be wondering why Julian Assange can be held liable for the content on Wikileaks, when the famous section 230 ‘safe harbour ‘provision (Available under US telecommunications law), protects other online platforms like Facebook and Youtube from legal liability for the content they carry, and regardless of any harms caused by that content. Moreover, the case law on section 230 extends that safe harbour protection extraterritorially, regardless of where the Wikileaks “head office” (if there is such a thing) is located.

The difference seems to depend on the “stolen” status of the Wikileaks content, and the “national security” harms allegedly caused. Clearly though, the disclosures by Wikiieaks were in the public interest, and it is open to argument as to whether in the long run they did more good than harm to America’s genuine national security concerns. All too often, government use the claim of “national security” like a blanket thrown over a parrot cage, with the aim being to keep the bird in the dark, and silent.

© Scoop Media

Urgent need to address mental health effects of climate change, says report

Offers recommendations for building resilience and taking action by individuals, communities

Reports and Proceedings

AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION

With a large majority of Americans concerned about climate change and an increasing number expressing alarm and distress, it is past time to address this burgeoning public health crisis at the individual, community and societal levels, according to a report from the American Psychological Association and ecoAmerica.  

“Our climate is changing at an unprecedented and alarming rate with profound impacts on human life,” said the report, entitled, “Mental Health and Our Changing Climate: Impacts, Inequities, and Responses.” “Climate change-fueled acute disaster events are causing deleterious impacts on human health. Longer term climate change leads to temperature-related illness and mortality, spread of vector-borne disease, respiratory issues and allergic response, compromised fetal and child development, and threats to water and food supply and safety — among other impacts.” 

The effects of climate change on humans, however, go beyond physical health.

“Climate change is one of the most crucial issues facing our nation and the world today, and it is already taking a huge toll on the mental health of people around the globe,” said APA CEO Arthur C. Evans Jr., PhD. “Psychology, as the science of behavior, will be pivotal to making the wholesale changes that are imperative to slow – and, we hope, stop – its advance.”

The report, an update to a 2017 report also issued by APA and ecoAmerica, is intended to inform and empower health and medical professionals, community and elected leaders and the public to pursue solutions to climate change that will support mental health and well-being. This is particularly important as world leaders proceed with climate negotiations at COP26, the United Nations Climate Change Conference.

Over three-quarters of Americans report that they are concerned about climate change, and about 25% say they are “alarmed,” nearly double the percentage who reported feeling alarm in 2017, according to the latest report. 

The most immediate effects on mental health can be seen in the aftermath of increasing disaster events fueled by climate change, such as hurricanes, wildfires and floods. These effects can include trauma and shock, post-traumatic stress disorder, feelings of abandonment, and anxiety and depression that can lead to suicidal ideation and risky behavior. At the community level, these disasters can strain social relationships, reduce social cohesion and increase interpersonal violence and child abuse.

In the long term, climate change has equally profound mental health impacts. Rising temperatures can fuel mood and anxiety disorders, schizophrenia and vascular dementia, and can increase emergency room usage and suicide rates, according to the report. Changes in the local environment can cause grief, disorientation and poor work performance, as well as harm to interpersonal relationships and self-esteem. People displaced by climate change events, such wildfires or droughts, can experience loss of personal identity, among other more severe impacts. Ultimately, mass migrations spurred by long-term climate change can lead to intergroup hostilities, political conflicts, terrorism and even war. 

Concern about climate change coupled with worry about the future can lead to fear, anger, feelings of powerlessness, exhaustion, stress and sadness, often referred to as “eco-anxiety” or “climate anxiety.” Studies indicate this anxiety is more prevalent among young people; it has been linked to increases in substance use and suicidal ideation.

The destructive effects of climate change are likely to fall disproportionately on communities that are already disadvantaged by historic and current social, economic and political oppression. For example, discriminatory housing policies, such as redlining and racially restrictive covenants, mean that people of color are significantly more likely to live in areas prone to risk. Indigenous people, children, older adults, women, people with disabilities or existing mental health conditions, and outdoor workers are additional groups that may be more prone to mental health difficulties from a changing climate. These impacts can include PTSD, behavioral problems, cognitive deficits, reduced memory, poorer academic performance and lower IQ, higher exposure to violence and crime, and higher rates of incarceration.

“Like climate change itself, these mental health implications and the related inequities cannot be ignored,” said Meighen Speiser, executive director of ecoAmerica. “We need to surface and address them immediately, and we can. America and Americans have the will and wherewithal to protect our climate and our future.” 

The report offers a series of constructive solutions that can be applied by individuals and whole communities to help mitigate the mental health impacts of climate change. Key among them is encouraging resilience, or the ability of a person or a community to function, survive and even thrive in the face of adversity. Strategies include fostering a sense of optimism, bolstering social connections, and incorporating personal items that can preserve or strengthen mental health into emergency preparedness plans (e.g., religious items, toys for small children, favorite foods), among many additional recommendations.

Communities should also involve mental health professionals in expanding or strengthening plans for mental health care and support in response to local and regional disasters, according to the report. Mental health professionals can help with plans to increase social cohesion in the community, such as social programs and infrastructure planning to increase communal parks and other green spaces. The report likewise recommends that members from the community, including from a diversity of backgrounds, cultures, and abilities, be included in resiliency planning to account for varying needs.

And while efforts to boost resilience are necessary to protect physical and mental health in the face of climate change, the report also emphasizes the need to address the root of the problem by enacting policies to mitigate climate change at all levels of governance. National and local policymakers, businesses and nonprofits, mental health and other professionals and individuals can all help to bring forth these policies while also advancing climate resilience and action. The report outlines these opportunities and provides related tools and resources.

The report was written by Susan Clayton, PhD, Whitmore-Williams professor of psychology, College of Wooster; Christie Manning, PhD, director of sustainability and assistant professor of environmental studies, Macalester College; Meighen Speiser, executive director, ecoAmerica; and Nicole Hill, ecoAmerica.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UGLY WAR
Tigray: Eritrean troops disguised as Ethiopian military are blocking critical aid

By Nima Elbagir, Barbara Arvanitidis and Eliza Mackintosh 

Video by Alex Platt and Mark Baron, CNN 

Axum, Ethiopia — Eritrean troops are operating with total impunity in Ethiopia's war-torn northern Tigray region, killing, raping and blocking humanitarian aid to starving populations more than a month after the country's Nobel Peace Prize winning leader pledged to the international community that they would leave.

© Alex Platt/CNN Eritrean soldiers are captured on a hidden camera at a checkpoint in the hills above Adigrat, as they block access to the road to Axum.

© Alex Platt/CNN USAID distributes supplies in Hawzen, central Tigray, where residents hadn't received aid for two months.

A CNN team traveling through Tigray's central zone witnessed Eritrean soldiers, some disguising themselves in old Ethiopian military uniforms, manning checkpoints, obstructing and occupying critical aid routes, roaming the halls of one of the region's few operating hospitals and threatening medical staff.

© Nima Elbagir/CNN Seven-year-old Latebrahan lies on a gurney at Axum University Teaching and Referral Hospital, where she's being treated for malnourishment.

Despite pressure from the Biden administration, there is no sign that Eritrean forces plan to exit the border region anytime soon.

On April 21, a CNN team reporting in Tigray with the permission of Ethiopian authorities traveled from the regional capital Mekelle to the besieged city of Axum, two weeks after it had been sealed off by Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers. An aid convoy also made the seven-hour journey.

Ethiopia's government has severely restricted access to the media until recently, and a state-enforced communications blackout concealed events in the region, making it challenging to gauge the extent of the crisis or verify survivors' accounts.

But CNN's interviews with humanitarian workers, doctors, soldiers and displaced people in Axum and across central Tigray -- where up to 800,000 displaced people are sheltering -- indicate the situation is even worse than was feared. Eritrean troops aren't just working hand in glove with the Ethiopian government, assisting in a merciless campaign against the Tigrayan people, in some pockets they're fully in control and waging a reign of terror.

The testimonies, shared at great personal risk, present a horrifying picture of the situation in Tigray, where a clash between Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and the region's ruling party, the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), in November has deteriorated into a protracted conflict that, by many accounts, bears the hallmarks of genocide and has the potential to destabilize the wider Horn of Africa region.

Ethiopian security officials working with Tigray's interim administration told CNN that the Ethiopian government has no control over Eritrean soldiers operating in Ethiopia, and that Eritrean forces had blocked roads into central Tigray for over two weeks and in the northwestern part of the region for nearly one month.

As the war and its impact on civilians deepens, world leaders have voiced their concern about the role of Eritrean forces in exacerbating what US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, according to spokesperson Ned Price, has described as a "growing humanitarian disaster." In a phone call with Abiy on April 26, Blinken pressed Ethiopia and Eritrea to make good on commitments to withdraw Eritrean troops "in full, and in a verifiable manner."

© Alex Platt/CNN A sign at Axum University Teaching and Referral Hospital reads: "Blood Campaign, for mothers, for children, for all those that need it."

CNN's efforts to reach Axum were thwarted by both Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers multiple times over several days.

On one of the first attempts, the CNN team encountered what it later learned was the aftermath of a grenade attack, where a group of local residents were flagging down cars, warning passersby not to go any further. But before we reached the scene, a large army truck drove up and parked sideways, blocking the road. Our cameraman got out of the car and started filming only to be confronted by Ethiopian soldiers, who threatened the team with detention, demanding that we hand over the camera and delete the footage. But we refused and were able to conceal the footage until we were eventually released.

© Alex Platt/CNN Hannibal, 7, is treated at Axum Teaching and Referral Hospital for a gunshot wound to the leg, which he received from soldiers' gunfire as he was sitting on his mother's lap.

On another occasion, CNN was turned back by an Ethiopian National Defence Force (ENDF) Command operating out of a former USAID distribution center in the outskirts of the city of Adigrat, where several trucks laden with sacks of desperately needed food sat languishing in the hot sun. The aid, bound for communities in Tigray's starved central zone, had been stopped from going any further despite daily phone calls from humanitarian workers pleading for access.

Even after being granted entry to Axum by the Ethiopian military, CNN's path was obstructed by Eritrean troops controlling a checkpoint on a desolate mountain top overlooking Adigrat. The forces were wearing a mixture of their official light-colored Eritrean Defence Forces (EDF) fatigues and a woodland camouflage with a green beret, which military experts verified as tallying with old Ethiopian army uniforms.

It is one of the first visual confirmations of reports -- relayed in recent weeks by the UN's top humanitarian official Mark Lowcock and US ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield -- that Eritrean soldiers are disguising their identities by re-uniforming as Ethiopian military, in what Thomas-Greenfield described as a move to "remain in Tigray indefinitely."

CNN was informed by aid agencies that they had also been turned back by Eritrean soldiers manning the same checkpoint. Ethiopian military sources in the region confirmed to CNN that Eritrean soldiers were in control of key checkpoints along the route to Axum. The military sources said they had requested multiple times for the Eritreans to allow cars and convoys through, but had been refused.

CNN has reached out to the Ethiopian and Eritrean governments for comment.

After repeated phone calls to Ethiopian central government and senior military officials, CNN was finally allowed into Axum on its fourth try. On the same day, international medical humanitarian organization Medecins Sans Frontieres demanded that the 12-day blockade of the road into Axum be lifted.

Many aid agencies are still being barred from the besieged city, where one of the few hospitals operating for miles is running out of essential supplies, including oxygen and blood, humanitarian workers working in the region told CNN.

On arrival at the Axum University Teaching and Referral Hospital, patients are greeted by a sign asking for blood.

The medical staff we spoke to asked not to be named for fear of reprisals, but requested that CNN identify their hospital -- they say that they want people to know that they are still here.

Inside one of the under-resourced examination rooms, a malnourished 7-year-old was lying on a gurney, wrapped in a blanket to cushion her fragile skin. Latebrahan's emaciated legs could no longer hold her weight and she lay wide-eyed, staring up at the crowd of doctors gathered around her bed.

The medical team were doing their best to keep her alive, but they had run out of a therapeutic feeding agent due to the blockade, the only way to help her gain weight without disturbing her delicate system.

Latebrahan's father, Girmay, who asked to be identified only by his first name, told CNN the journey from their home in Chila, around 60 miles north of Axum, near the border with Eritrea, had been dangerous and costly.

"There is no help, no food, nothing. I didn't have a choice though -- look at her," Girmay said.

Like many other rural border towns, Chila has been blocked off from receiving aid since the conflict began six months ago. Humanitarian workers say famine could have already arrived there and they would have no way of knowing.

"Based on guesswork there is a sense that in these areas that we are not able to access, out in the countryside for instance, places are falling into pockets of famine. But we're not able to verify that and that's part of the problem," Thomas Thompson, the UN World Food Programme's emergency coordinator, told CNN.

The fighting erupted during the autumn harvest season following the worst invasion of desert locusts in Ethiopia in decades. The conflict has plunged Tigray even further into severe food insecurity, and the deliberate blockade of food risks mass starvation, a recent report by the World Peace Foundation warned. The Ethiopian government itself estimates that at least 5.2 million people out of 5.7 million in the region are in need of emergency food assistance.

Eritrean soldiers have been blocking and looting food relief in multiple parts of Tigray, including in Samre and Gijet, southwest of Mekele, according to a leaked document from the Emergency Coordination Centre of Tigray's Abiy-appointed interim government obtained by CNN. In a PowerPoint presentation dated April 23, the center states that Eritrean soldiers have also started showing up at food distribution points in Tigray, looting supplies after "our beneficiaries became frightened and [ran] away."

That report was corroborated by humanitarian workers in Tigray, who said they had "protection" issues around distributing aid in some areas as civilians were later robbed of the aid by Eritrean soldiers. Emily Dakin, who leads the USAID Disaster Assistance Response Team in Tigray, also told CNN that she had received reports of health centers being looted, which was "contributing to some of the dysfunctionality of the hospitals."

Eritrea's Minister of Information Yemane Meskel has rejected these claims.

Eritrea's power in the region feels absolute even in the Axum Teaching Hospital, where Eritrean soldiers are among the gun-toting troops roaming the corridors, dropping off wounded soldiers and threatening medical staff. It is a terrifying scene for patients, many of whom say they were injured either directly or indirectly by soldiers.

One doctor, who asked not to be named, told CNN that the siege had prompted a surge in patients. In addition to cases of malnutrition like Latebrahan, doctors and nurses are treating a grim array of trauma from shrapnel, bullets, stabbings and rapes. In a desperate attempt to keep pace with demand, medical workers have also begun donating blood.

But despite this, there wasn't enough blood on hand to save one young woman, who had been attacked by soldiers who tried to rape her.

The doctor treating the woman told CNN that the hospital had seen a spike in sexual assault cases over recent weeks, but that the rise was just "the tip of the iceberg," as many were too scared to seek medical services.

An alarming number of women are being gang-raped, drugged and held hostage in the conflict, in which sexual violence is being used as a weapon of war and its use linked to genocide. According to one agency's estimate, almost one-third of all attacks on civilians involve sexual violence, the majority committed by men in uniform.

An autopsy photo of the young woman seen by CNN showed her internal organs spilling out from a wound in her lower abdomen.

"She came to our emergency department and she had a sign of life initially. [But] if you find blood for a patient, it's only one or two units and one or two units could not save this woman. She bled [out] and she died," the doctor said haltingly, overcome with emotion.

He took a deep breath, then added, "I see this woman in my dreams."

This reporting would not have been possible without the support of dozens of Tigrayans, who shared their stories at great personal risk. CNN is not naming them to protect their safety. It also builds on a series of investigations into massacres and sexual violence in Tigray by CNN's Bethlehem Feleke, Gianluca Mezzofiore and Katie Polglase. Read CNN's full Tigray coverage here.

 

Improving water quality could help conserve insectivorous birds -- study

Scarcity of insect prey in disturbed lakes and streams drives decline of birds

FRONTIERS

Research News

 

A new study shows that a widespread decline in abundance of emergent insects - whose immature stages develop in lakes and streams while the adults live on land - can help to explain the alarming decline in abundance and diversity of aerial insectivorous birds (i.e. preying on flying insects) across the USA. In turn, the decline in emergent insects appears to be driven by human disturbance and pollution of water bodies, especially in streams. This study, published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, is one of the first to find evidence for a causal link between the decline of insectivorous birds, the decline of emergent aquatic insects, and poor water quality.

Human activities, such as urbanization and agriculture, have adverse effects on aquatic ecosystems. In the US, 46% of streams are in poor condition, while 57% of lakes suffer from strong human disturbance. The immature stages of aquatic insects, especially stoneflies, mayflies and caddisflies, are known to be highly sensitive to pollution, which is why they have often been used as biomonitors for water quality. But the authors of the present study predicted a priori that emergent insects - whose adult flying stages are important sources of food for birds, spiders, bats and reptiles - should likewise be powerful biomonitors for the health of terrestrial ecosystems. This prediction is borne out by the new results.

"The massive decline in bird fauna across the USA requires that we adopt new paradigms for conservation. Currently, most management and conservation agencies and plans are separated into aquatic and terrestrial divisions. However, aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems are inextricably linked through a suite of ecological connections," says author Dr Maeika Sullivan, associate professor in the School of Environment and Natural Resources and Director of the Schiermeier Olentangy River Wetland Research Park at Ohio State University.

Sullivan and colleagues analyzed data from multiple open-access surveys monitoring water quality, aquatic invertebrates and 21 species of aerial insectivorous birds from the contiguous United States. "The task of putting together these big data sets, collected by different US agencies with different goals and objectives, revealed several new questions and challenges which will require interdisciplinary thinking to resolve," says corresponding author Dr David Manning, assistant professor in the Department of Biology, University of Nebraska at Omaha.

First, the authors show that water quality is a good predictor for local relative abundance of emergent insects. Then they show for the first time that water quality and the associated abundance of emergent insects explains a moderate but significant proportion of the variation in local abundance of aerial insectivorous birds in the US, including both upland and riparian (i.e. foraging on river banks) species.

Not all bird species were equally negatively impacted by declines in the abundance of emergent insects, suggesting that factors such the birds' microhabitat and foraging strategy may also play a role. The western wood pewee (Contopus sordidulus, an upland bird species), the olive-sided flycatcher (C. cooperi, which facultatively lives in riparian zones), and the Acadian flycatcher (Empidonax virescens, which almost exclusively occurs near water) depended most strongly on the local abundance of overall emergent insects. The eastern phoebe (Sayornis phoebe), violet-green swallow (Tachycineta thalassina), tree swallow (Tachycineta bicolor), eastern wood-pewee (C. virens), barn swallow (Hirundo rustica), and chimney swift (Chaetura pelagica), were specifically sensitive to the relative abundance of stoneflies, mayflies and caddisflies.

The authors emphasize the need for interdisciplinary research to develop new conservation and biomonitoring strategies focused on the effects of water quality on endangered birds and other terrestrial wildlife.

"We need a better understanding of the common mechanisms that could drive declines in both aquatic insects and many bird species. We would like to explore some of these shared mechanisms in future research, but at a much larger scale than previously. Tackling these questions will require collaboration among freshwater ecologists, ornithologists, landscape ecologists, entomologists, data scientists, and others," says Manning.

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Belloc's Anti-Capitalism

A tip o' the blog to the Distributist Review. A blog that links here. A collective effort has an interesting piece on the British Christian Distributist; C. K. Chesterton, and his discovery by the post-Marxist and Neo-Leninist Slavoj Žižek They also link to this Hillarie Belloc excerpt from Athanasius Contra Mundum His is a particularly pointed alternative view of why capitalism evolved as it did, and one can see the similarity with, and appeal it would have to, those who advocate market socialism, the ideas of cooperative capitalism and guild socialism, the mutualist and volunteerist libertarians.

Consider in what way the industrial system developed upon Capitalist lines. Why were a few rich men put with such ease into possession of the new methods? Why was it normal and natural in their eyes and in that of contemporary society that those who produced the new wealth with the new machinery should be proletarian and dispossessed? Simply because the England upon which the new discoveries had come was already an England owned as to its soil and accumulations of wealth by a small minority: it was already an England in which perhaps half of the whole population was proletarian, and a medium for exploitation ready to hand. When any one of the new industries was launched it had to be capitalized; that is, accumulated wealth from some source or other had to be found which would support labor in the process of production until that process should be complete. Someone must find the corn and the meat and the housing and the clothing by which should be supported, between the extraction of the raw material and the moment when the consumption of the finished article could begin, the human agents which dealt with that raw material and turned it into the finished product. Had property been well distributed, protected by cooperative guilds, fenced round and supported by custom and by the autonomy of great artisan corporations, those accumulations of wealth, necessary for the launching of each new method of production and for each new perfection of it, would have been discovered in the mass of small owners. Their corporations, their little parcels of wealth combined would have furnished the capitalization required for the new process, and men already owners would, as one invention succeeded another, have increased the total wealth of the community without disturbing, the balance of distribution. There is no conceivable link in reason or in experience which binds the capitalization of a new process with the idea of a few employing owners and a mass of employed non-owners working at a wage. Such great discoveries coming in society like that of the thirteenth century would have blest and enriched mankind. Coming upon the diseased moral conditions of the eighteenth century in this country, they proved a curse. Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State

An audio version of the Servile State can be downloaded from Yahoos for American Freedom. A variety of digitalized editions are available for download here. Belloc is embraced by the post WWII new right whether by the YAF or Murray Rothbard, as a conservative.

Book Review: The Servile State by Hilaire Belloc

By Leonard P. Liggio Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) was indeed an Edwardian Radical as described in John McCarthy's biography (also published by Liberty Press). The Servile State represented Belloc's disgust with politics after serving in the House of Commons. He found politicians in control of organizing any new industries; cabinet officers determining which businessmen would control new industries. If capitalism were absolutely recognized, according to Belloc, government-created monopolies could not continue. But, from inside parliament, he saw “executive statesmen” determining which group of businessmen would operate that sphere of industry. The system described by Belloc in 1913 emerged most fully as the corporatism of the 1930s; it extended from Berlin to Washington. F. A. Hayek in The Road to Serfdom saw Belloc as a prophet; and Robert Nisbet, in his introduction to this edition, notes “just as Belloc predicted, we find the real liberties of individuals diminished and constricted by the Leviathan we have built in the name of equality.”

It is a view that is also shared by Catholic apologists and promoters of a Catholic Third Way between socialism and capitalism. Which in Canada is reflected in the ideology of Elizabeth May's Green Party.

Hilaire Belloc "and All the Rest of It"

In Land and Water, his speculations on the developments of the First World War won accolades from the Times. In his classic The Servile State, is there not an anticipation of that socialist choking of individual liberty as is evidenced in post-war Western governments? Already in 1913 Belloc seemed to see the coming Keynesian model of state control of the economy through money and taxes when he forecasted:

The future of industrial society... is a future in which subsistence and security shall be guaranteed for the proletariat, but shall be guaranteed at the expense of the old political freedom and by the establishment of that proletariat in a status really, though not nominally, servile.³

From a personal viewpoint, and within the narrow latitude of my knowledge of English letters, I would put forward that next to Maritain’s seminal work on the philosophical implications of Luther’s revolt,⁴ Belloc’s thesis of the after-effects of the Reformation, in a socio-political context, were very accurate and not so outlandish as some of his critics have contested

Hilaire Belloc and the Liberal Revival

There is arguably a parallel liberal tradition in Britain which has usually been independent of the Liberals or Liberal Democrats.

It is recognisably Liberal in its commitment to individual freedom and local self-determination, but it has included Radicals (Cobbett), Tories (Ruskin, or so he said), Socialists (Morris) and Greens (Schumacher). And though both traditions have influenced each other in every generation, they have rarely come together in Parliament.

The exception - and it was a brief exception - was in the political career of the writer, poet and historian Hilaire Belloc, Liberal MP for South Salford from 1906 to 1910.

And although the Roman Catholic political doctrines that so influenced Belloc seem pretty dusty in the UK these days, it was Pope Leo XIII who first coined the concept of 'subsidiarity' in his encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1896. It was this idea that was taken up by Belloc, turned into a political creed in Distributism, rescued from obscurity by Schumacher - only to pop up again as the central tenet of Euro-ideology, and the part that knits Liberal Democrat European policy with its enthusiasm for decentralisation.

Though at the time of his publishing the Servile State in 1912, the American Marxist; Daniel De Leon declared Belloc a communist anarchist. Of course it was a backhanded compliment, since De Leon himself was strongly opposed to communist anarchism, being a party man. His party the Socialist Labour Party, had attempted unsuccessfully to align the IWW with it as their party union, which was rejected by the membership through a counter campaign organized by the anarchists.

Socialism and the Servile State By Daniel De Leon There reached us some time ago from England a pamphlet containing the verbatim report of a debate on “Socialism and the Servile State,” which took place at Memorial Hall, London, on May 5, 1911, between Hilaire Belloc, Liberal member of Parliament in 1906–1910, and J. Ramsay MacDonald, then and still a Social-Democratic member of Parliament. The sender accompanied the pamphlet with a request for a review. Recent dispatches from London, reporting the Labor Party’s proposal for the nationalization of mines, give actuality to the debate. So far as Belloc’s economic views are concerned, he may, or may not, be a Socialist. Hard to tell. MacDonald not unjustly charged his remarks with obscurity. From certain sentiments that he dropped, we should judge that, notwithstanding that he was a Liberal member of Parliament as late as 1910, Belloc belongs—not at all an uncommon thing among the intellectual bourgeois—in the category of communist anarchy, a theory of small cooperative communities brought about by a cataclysm through despair. This, however, matters little to the subject. Belloc was not treating socialism, its merits, or demerits, its principles and its tactics. He spoke to a thesis, and that he elaborated with sufficient clearness. Belloc defined the “servile state” as a condition of society in which the mass of the people, although enjoying a minimum of economic “security and sufficiency,” are “permanently dispossessed of the means of production.” With the servile state thus defined, Belloc maintained that the Socialists, meaning the Socialists typified in Parliament by MacDonald, are drifting ever further away from socialism, and ever nearer to the idea or perfect servile state. In other words, Belloc’s contention is that the Labor Party makes for a social system in which, schooled in the school of experience, a capitalist oligarchy, possessed of the means of production, will wisely “leave well enough alone”; will wisely rest content with an abundance without toil, instead of striving after a superabundance; and will secure their rule by drying up the headspring of revolt through a system of organization that will “humanely” give security through economic sufficiency for the masses.

His definition of Belloc's political economy as communist anarchy, is correct.It is the same same political economic stateless 'socialism' as espoused by Kropotkin as well as Proudhon and Tucker. And as Marx pointed out America was the ideal of this producers alternative to capitalism; production based on use value rather than exchange value. Belloc has influenced both the right and the left, and so while he is no libertarian we could call Belloc, a conservative anti-capitalist in much the same way Marx applied that appellation to Proudhon. The belief in a nation of small, independent landowners, craftsmen and merchants. Belloc and Proudhon,viewed their ideal as a cooperative guild socialism one influenced as it was by the role of the guilds and co-fraternities in Catholic Europe and their later corporatization in England as I have written about here. And here is the critical part of Belloc's work, his Catholic view of Europe, was that of the medieval guilds and the fact that a different kind of society could have evolved out of feudalism, rather than capitalism. Based on the ideals of the guilds and co-fraternities, an alternative had always existed to both feudalism and capitalism. Not unlike Kropotkin who posits such as movement as well in the free city states, that existed outside of the State's control. While embraced by the right, Belloc's 'communist anarchism' appealed to Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement.

"The Servile State" By Dorothy Day The Catholic Worker, July August 1945, 1, 3

On the eve of Hilaire Belloc’s seventy-fifth birthday, the Servile State was ushered into Great Britain with Prime Minister Attlee taking the place of Churchill. Contrary to the opinion of most conservatives, the new government is not a step toward collectivism, but a solidifying of capitalism, with the sop thrown to the proletariat of social security, health laws, education laws, etc. The State has taken possession of the masses, with their approval. Most people look upon the new regime as the lesser of two evils, and a step forward in progress.

And while the right wing likes to claim Belloc's critique of the state is an attack on socialism, it isn't. Rather it is an attack on the liberal capitalist state. A state that developed after WWI, in response to the Bolshevik Revolution. A state that capitalism needed to halt a world wide revolutionary movement. As a result capitalism instead of collapsing as predicted by vulgar Marxists, embraced the state as its savior heralding the historic era of state capitalism.

Distributivism

But today the future of the Keynesian arrangement seems in doubt. In both Europe and America, the costs of government seem ready to outstrip the ability of society to support them. Further, the willingness of corporate interests to continue the arrangement is ending; they have invested great sums and great energies in seeking an end to the system and their efforts are paying off. Corporations are seeking to externalize social costs that have heretofore been part of the wage system, such as medical insurance, pensions, and unemployment costs. However, it is doubtful that shifting these responsibilities can be accomplished without introducing the very insecurities that occasioned the arrangements in the first place. Thus the Keynesian system seems to be caught in a conundrum, the very conundrum pointed out by Belloc. It cannot continue its Keynesian bargain (and this is especially so in the face of global competition), and it cannot drop it without risking chaos. John P. McCarthy, Hilaire Belloc: Edwardian Radical. Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1978. 373 pp. $2.00. This book I have read only in cursory fashion, but I have picked up enough to know why Tolkien and Lewis are indebted to him. Tolkien was educated at the same school at Cardinal Newman's Oratory in Birmingham, but Belloc was not nearly so taken with the sacred image of Saint John Henry as Tolkien was. On the contrary, his hero was Cardinal Manning, the author of Rerum Novarum and champion of the small property owner. Newman, in Belloc’s estimate, was allied with the Old Catholics who were quite content to remain a noble and dignified minority, but Manning was an Ultramontane Catholic who championed the immigrant workers and converts. Yet Tolkien and Belloc were agreed in being Little Englanders who feared foreign alliances, not from xenophobia but because they were opposed to all nationalistic accretions of state power to defend interests abroad. Belloc is thus, like Chesterton a curious paradox: a radical Tory (323), an admirer of both the Catholic Middle Ages and the French Revolution, a hater of capitalism and a lover of private ownership of property. But Belloc is far from being mere inane contradiction. He was opposed to all privileges and monopolies in society: ownership of land, religious establishment, and local government. He wanted to extend the personal freedom and economic liberty won by the petit bourgeoisie to the entire populace: “What the radicals hoped to achieve was the extension of economic freedom attained by the middle-class entrepreneur to the population at large. They sought to correct the economic plight of the poorer classes while remaining within the laissez-faire system. They sought to put workers in more competitive relation with their employers by controls on child labor, graduated income taxes, and workmen's compensation. But in no way were these negative restraints meant to discourage savings or enterprise, nor to put industries in the hands of the state as the socialists wanted.” Such were also the original aims of the old Victorian Liberals: John Ruskin and William Morris, John Bright and John Morley, Richard Cobden, William Cobbett and Benjamin Disraeli. It was Lloyd George who first betrayed this vision. He changed an essentially negative vision of government as putting restraints on privilege to a positive vision of the welfare state as providing for all the basic needs of society. And George also linked this new omnicompetent state to an increasingly bureaucratized party supported by a plutocracy far worse than the old landowners. The party also spent most of its energy on popular elections that appealed entirely to the collectivist voter fighting for his mere economic interests: “Belloc saw the new style of mass politics and the collectivist new liberalism as closely intertwined, and subservient to the interests and needs of the newer privileged class, the capitalist plutocrats, who had come to replace the landed aristocracy.” But because these New Liberals wouldn't go all the way over to outright socialism, the Labor Party was founded to realize the full-fledged welfare state. Belloc was more opposed to the Liberals than the Fabians because he saw the former as producing a benignly servile state "where the proletariat masses would be reassured as to their economic security and sufficiency, and protected against cruelty by the owners of capital, but where at the same time they would be 'permanently dispossessed of the means of production'" (288-89). Thus did Belloc think Liberalism far more dangerous than the overt socialism of the Fabians.

The Roads to Serfdom by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal Spring 2005

In fact, Hilaire Belloc, in his book The Servile State, predicted just such a form of collectivism as early as 1912. Like most intellectuals of the age, Belloc was a critic of capitalism, because he held it responsible for the poverty and misery he saw in the London slums. His view was static, not dynamic: he did not see that the striving there could—and would—lift people out of their poverty, and he therefore argued that the liberal, laissez-faire state—“mere capitalist anarchy,” he called it—could not, and should not, continue. He foresaw three possible outcomes.

His preferred resolution was more or less the same as Carlyle’s half a century earlier: a return to the allegedly stable and happy medieval world of reciprocal rights and duties. There would be guilds of craftsmen and merchants in the towns, supplying mainly handmade goods to one another and to peasant farmers, who in turn would supply them with food. Everyone would own at least some property, thereby having a measure of independence, but no one would be either plutocrat or pauper. However desirable this resolution, though, even Belloc knew it was fantasy.

The second possible resolution was the socialist one: total expropriation of the means of production, followed by state ownership, allegedly administered in the interests of everyone. Belloc had little to say on whether he thought this would work, since in his opinion it was unlikely to happen: the current owners of the means of production were still far too strong.

That left the third, and most likely, resolution. The effect of collectivist thought on a capitalist society would not be socialism, but something quite distinct, whose outlines he believed he discerned in the newly established compulsory unemployment insurance. The means of production would remain in private hands, but the state would offer workers certain benefits, in return for their quiescence and agreement not to agitate for total expropriation as demanded in socialist propaganda.

Unlike Orwell or Beveridge, however, he realized that such benefits would exact a further price: “A man has been compelled by law to put aside sums from his wages as insurance against unemployment. But he is no longer the judge of how such sums shall be used. They are not in his possession; they are not even in the hands of some society which he can really control. They are in the hands of a Government official. ‘Here is work offered to you at twenty-five shillings a week. If you do not take it you shall certainly not have a right to the money you have been compelled to put aside. If you will take it the sum shall stand to your credit, and when next in my judgment your unemployment is not due to your recalcitrance and refusal to labour, I will permit you to have some of your money; not otherwise.’ ”

What applied to unemployment insurance would apply to all other spheres into which government intruded, Belloc intuited; and all of the benefits government conferred, paid for by the compulsory contributions of the taxpayer, in effect would take choice and decision making out of the hands of the individual, placing them in those of the official. Although the benefits offered by the government were as yet few when Belloc wrote, he foresaw a state in which the “whole of labour is mapped out and controlled.” In his view, “The future of industrial society, and in particular of English society . . . is a future in which subsistence and security shall be guaranteed for the Proletariat, but shall be guaranteed . . . by the establishment of that Proletariat in a status really, though not nominally, servile.” The people lose “that tradition of . . . freedom, and are most powerfully inclined to [the] acceptance of [their servile status] by the positive benefits it confers.”

An Essay on the Restoration of Property, by Hilaire Belloc

In this essay, Belloc presents an alternative to the dehumanising obsession with money, and the monopolistic capitalist power that so often flows from it. That alternative is, as the title suggests, the restoration of property; in a word, "distributism."

"The evil [industrial capitalism] has gone so far," Belloc tells us, "that the creation of new and effective immediate machinery [to counteract it] is impossible." Therefore, the restoration of property - whether it be in the shape of families farming small parcels of land, self-reliant businesses, independent craftsmen, and so on - must be the result of a new mood. "It must grow from seed planted in the breast," he says. And to have a chance at success, the distributist vision "must everywhere be particular, local, and in its origins at least, small."

Restoration of Property is, perhaps, Belloc's most famous distributist tract. It is his roadmap, guiding us through the distributist vision of things, what a distributist society looks like, and how it might be achieved and preserved.

And what benefit does Belloc see at the core of that vision? In his words: "The object of those who think as I do in this matter is not to restore purchasing power [for the average working man] but to restore economic freedom."

Of course to be set free of something, one must first be bound by something. That "something" in this case is what, in Belloc's early 20th century world, he refers to as the "servile state," i.e., that capitalist society where all men (except for the few powerful controllers of wealth) are securely nourished "on a wage, or, lacking this, a subsidy in idleness."

That description, though obviously unknown to Belloc at the time, describes a society remarkably like most of the industrialised Western world of the 21st century.

Moreover, there are indications that Belloc's notions about economic freedom for the common man, and the evils associated with the acquisition of unlimited wealth and power, were not merely reflective of the times in which he wrote.

Consider this comment from Samuel Francis in a recent issue of a popular journal of American culture: "The economic trend in the United States today, aided by the political trend of the federal government, is toward the concentration of economic and political power in fewer and fewer hands".

Welfare in the Servile State' In our century, we have recognised totalitarianism as a system of enslavement. In 1912 Hilaire Belloc, responding to the Lloyd George budget of 1909 thought he detected the emergence of something called "The Servile State".

It was this phrase which the philosopher John Anderson took up in Sydney during the last war, in 1943, in the course of diagnosing the development of regimentation and servility in Australia. In 1961, Michael Oakeshott took up a similar theme in "The Masses in Representative Democracy". I want to make some comments on these last two writers.

Anderson in 1943 was in the process of liberating himself from "the worker's movement" - though not from a belief in the reality of "movements". But what he wanted to insist on was that workers are different from slaves: different both economically and politically, and the difference lies in the moral fact he called "enterprise".John Anderson, "The Servile State" in Studies in Empirical Philosophy, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1962, p. 329. What did he mean by "enterprise"? The most obvious thing he meant by enterprise was opposition. "The servile state", he remarks at the end, "is the unopposed state". But then opposition is a relational term, and depends rather on what one is opposing. Anderson was happy to live in a world of abstractions and did not much go into concrete practical matters. But it is clear that in Anderson's view a worker on strike would be enterprising as long as he was striking for some sort of principle, exhibiting independence. If he were striking for higher wages, or a better society, on the other hand, and thus exhibiting ends-means rationality, he would (on my reading of Anderson) be exhibiting the spirit of servility. "...the attitude of putting the economic first' "(he wrote) "leads straight to that servility whose growth Belloc undoubtedly deplores."Anderson, pp. 330 - 331.For Anderson at this point was a follower of George Sorel. The point of strikes was opposition itself, for its own sake, and any idea of "betterment" was just, as Sorel put it, a myth. By myth he did not mean anything so vulgar as a lie, but a passionate if unreal belief which generated heroic action.

Following this line, Anderson attacked the "propaganda" of social improvement. His target was wartime solidarism, the notion that we must all pull together in order to achieve victory, and that all other activities ranging from education to art and science must be subordinated to this aim. " Servile" is thus a term properly applied to " those States which are marked by the suppression of all political opposition and thus of all independent enterprise." Anderson, p. 333.He recognises that in wartime many voluntary sacrifices will be made, and such spontaneity is in his view a sign of the strength of free societies. It is always repression, direction, central planning which he dislikes, partly for the Hayekian reason that " the anomalies and confusions of directed work are only too apparent." Anderson, p. 335.And for Anderson, the moral suasion of a feeling that one ought to do something is part of that repression. He is at heart an anarchist. That is perhaps why he is so exhilarating.

ORIGINALLY WRITTEN JULY 2007