90 Miles From Tyranny

Sunday, April 17, 2022

Riots spread in Sweden amid right wing plans to burn Koran

Mobs of youths clashed with police and set fire to vehicles in a bid to disrupt an anti-immigration party’s rallies

Chants of ‘Allahu Akbar’, police cars set on fire, and officers injured – this is what the run-up to Easter looked like in multiple towns and cities across Sweden this week, after the authorities gave a far-right anti-immigration group the go-ahead to stage rallies, which included plans to burn the Koran.

Unrest broke out on Thursday in the city of Linkoping, where gangs of youths clashed with police, injuring three officers. At least two people were detained.

The violence was sparked by the Swedish authorities’ decision to grant permission for a series of anti-Islam rallies. Organized by Rasmus Paludan – a right-wing Danish politician who has spent time in prison on racism-related charges – the events in various places across Sweden were intended to feature the burning of Islam’s holy book, the Koran.

Tensions came to a head on Friday when the Danish firebrand descended on the city of Orebro.

While Paludan and his supporters were initially allowed to hold their rally, it eventually had to be “dissolved” in light of the “serious security situation.” Mobs of rioters protesting against the far-right group pelted police with stones and set fire to four law enforcement vehicles.

So tense was the situation that police had to fire warning shots at one point, as confirmed by a police spokesperson to Swedish media.

While the local police department initially spoke of four injured officers and a bystander, it later updated that number, saying that “about ten colleagues” had sustained injuries.
According to the authorities, some of the policemen taken to the hospital had been hit on the head, while others had suspected arms fractures. Police described the events in Orebro as a “violent riot.”

Similar scenes played out in Sweden’s capital, Stockholm, as well as Malmo and Norrkoping.

On Saturday, unrest was reported in the town of Landskrona, with dozens of youths setting fire to vehicles, tires, and trash cans. According to the local police, none of the law enforcement personnel deployed in the town were harmed as a result. Officials noted that tensions were gradually dying down.

According to the Expressen newspaper, Paludan did manage to burn at least...

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The Other Fednapping Plot

The same FBI operation that ginned up the phony kidnapping plot in Michigan also tried to coax a Virginia man to participate in a similar scheme against Governor Ralph Northam.

n the spring of 2020, President Donald Trump posted three tweets in a row aimed at Democratic governors continuing to impose draconian lockdowns amid the COVID-19 pandemic. “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” Trump tweeted on the morning of April 17, 2020. A few moments later, he tweeted “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” and “LIBERATE VIRGINIA!”

His tweets coincided with anti-lockdown rallies in several states, including a blockade around the Michigan Capitol building in Lansing a few days prior. As usual, the media expressed shock and horror at the innocuous tweets, insisting the president was encouraging violence against his political rivals.

“One shudders to contemplate what sorts of actions right-wing protesters might take if they interpret Trump’s call for them to ‘LIBERATE’ their states seriously,” perpetual drama queen Aaron Rupar wrote at Vox. Over at the Washington Post, Mary McCord, a former top official for Obama’s Justice Department who now serves as a legal advisor to the January 6 Select Committee, claimed Trump advocated “the overthrow of democracy” and “incited insurrection” with his tweets—a stunningly prescient observation considering how the events of January 6 would later be described.

“The president is fomenting domestic rebellion and spreading lies,” Washington Governor Jay Inslee tweeted on April 17, also foreshadowing terms subsequently applied to the Capitol protest.

Less than six months later, Trump’s critics appeared vindicated when law enforcement authorities arrested several men for conspiring to kidnap and possibly kill Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer ahead of the 2020 presidential election, a plan now exposed as a case of FBI entrapment. A Michigan jury acquitted two defendants last week and could not reach a verdict on two other defendants in what the government considered one of the largest domestic terrorism investigations ever. (The Justice Department just announced it will retry Adam Fox and Barry Croft, Jr., who remain in jail.)

Defense attorneys successfully argued that multiple FBI agents and informants attempted to induce the men to commit the crimes and blasted the government in closing arguments.

“That’s unacceptable in America,” Fox’s attorney, Christopher Gibbons, told the jury on April 1. “That’s not how it works. They don’t make terrorists so we can arrest them.”

But the government not only attempted to manufacture “terrorists” in the Whitmer kidnapping hoax—the same FBI operation also tried to coax a man in Virginia to participate in the same sort of plot against Virginia Governor Ralph Northam. That scheme didn’t fully materialize, but the FBI’s attempt to pull off a similar stunt in Virginia reveals just how far agents were willing to go to bolster FBI Director Christopher Wray’s false warning that domestic extremists planned to “kill and assassinate” public officials.

In summer 2020, Dan Chappel, the main informant in the Whitmer fednapping who was compensated at least $60,000 by the FBI for his services, targeted a man named Frank Butler, a disabled veteran in his late 60s and an alleged militia member. Taking instructions from Jayson Chambers, one of his FBI handling agents, Chappel used the same playbook in...

Is it too late to restore our civilizational nerve and morale?

Ukraine’s scenes of urban rubble, streams of refugees, and piles of slaughtered civilians redolent of World War II. Continuing masks and lethal lockdown protocols of the Covid plague. Record levels of inflation and gasoline nearly $6 a gallon. Unchecked hordes of illegal immigrants and criminals penetrating our southern border. Mayhem, murder, and brazen theft stalking and defacing our cities.

Amidst these portents of apocalypse, it’s instructive to think of W.B. Yeats’ prescient poem “The Second Coming,” and its lines “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,” and to wonder with the poet, “What rough beast, its time come round at last,/ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Such intimations of doom, of course, have been regular episodes in the last hundred years, the “rough beasts” ending up as pretenders. But we can’t rely on the cycles of history to prevent devastating changes in our way of life that will make the previous decades seem like the golden age.

Yeats published his poem in November 1920, when the flawed Versailles settlement of the Great War made optimism for the future difficult. Some knew, moreover, that none of the dysfunctions that had led to war had been corrected. Supreme Allied Commander Marshall Foch prophesized about the Versailles Treaty, “This is not peace. It is an armistice for twenty years.” Communism, Nazism, and Fascism arose, and the Great Depression was the crisis these three vicious political religions did not let go to waste.

Throughout the interwar period, the portents of doom appeared in popular novels and “next war” theorists. “Trench reminiscences” proliferated, keeping alive the novel horrors of the war like poison gas, machine-guns, and artillery lobbing monstrous shells as heavy as a ton. The aerial bombing of the war’s last years inspired numerous warnings about the even more devastating possibilities of destruction from the air in the next war. Theorists wrote of a “knockout blow” on a nation’s capital that would decapitate the government and turn the streets into “one vast raving bedlam,” as historian J.F.C. Fuller put it.

This obsession with the “next war” created a “never again” mentality that contributed to the anxiety and low morale of the period, stoked by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin who famously said, “The bomber will always get through.” Years later Prime Minister Harold Macmillan would write, “We thought of air warfare in 1938 rather as people think of nuclear warfare” during the Cold War. All this fear contributed to the mentality of appeasement manifested in Munich.

But the end of times didn’t come. The war that followed was won because the steadfast opponent of appeasement Winston Churchill managed the war, and with his rousing patriotic rhetoric restored confidence and morale by rejecting what he called the “unwarrantable self-abasement” that defined the Thirties.

Another apocalyptic moment occurred in the Seventies. The squandering of the lives of nearly 60,000 American soldiers that followed Congress’s denial of aid to South Vietnam, and the cruel abandonment of our Vietnamese allies, damaged American prestige abroad and emboldened its nuclear rivals like the U.S.S.R. The ginned-up Watergate affair led to Richard Nixon’s resignation, and in a few years the election of Jimmy Carter. Carter’s sermons about America’s “recent mistakes,” his counsel that Americans should not “dwell on remembered glory” but should “recognize its limits,” and his confession that the nation should “simply...