• North Korea also has worked assiduously to develop ballistic missiles of ever-greater range. In 1998, Pyongyang demonstrated the ability to fabricate and launch a three-stage missile. With further improvement, such a system could be used to blackmail or even attack the United States with weapons of mass destruction.

• Meanwhile, North Korea’s Stalinist system has combined with several years of drought to create widespread agricultural failure and economic privation. Rather than reallocate resources from the military, Kim Jong II has condemned millions of his countrymen to horrible suffering, starvation diets and even death.

• Pyongyang is assiduously exporting its ballistic missiles and technology relevant to the weapons of mass destruction they might carry. In fact, such exports represent the North’s only reliable hard-currency-earning commodity. Recipients include virtually every one of the world’s most dangerous rogue states. Worse yet, as Bush suggested, the deadly capabilities being thus acquired may be migrating via such states to terrorist organizations and cells determined to do us harm.

      Unfortunately, for much of the last decade, the U.S. government has chosen to look the other way at such certifiably "evil" North Korean behavior. After initially announcing that the North would not be allowed to get nuclear weapons, President Bill Clinton backed away from a confrontation. Instead, he authorized negotiations with Pyongyang.
      These, in turn, produced an agreement whereby the United States, Japan and South Korea would provide two new nuclear power plants in exchange for Kim’s promise that his government would honor its obligations under the Nonproliferation Treaty to remain non-nuclear—and give up two older reactors associated with his covert program to get the Bomb. (Unfortunately, as President Ronald Reagan’s science adviser, William Graham, has pointed out, the amount of weapons-usable fissile material that the new reactors will generate is likely to be much greater than that produced by the two they are replacing.) Until such time as these West-supplied facilities could be built and brought on-line, the United States is supposed to send vast quantities of fuel oil to help meet North Korea’s energy needs.
      This "breakthrough" helped propel to office in South Korea longtime peace activist and dissident Kim Dae-jung. Once installed as president, Kim Dae-jung adopted his so-called "Sunshine Policy" aimed at creating trade, tourist and diplomatic openings between the two Koreas, if not full-fledged normalization of relations.
      Not to be outdone, Clinton dispatched various 

emissaries to negotiate improved ties between the United States and North Korea. A prime focus of this effort was to dissuade Pyongyang from further testing long-range ballistic missiles—thereby allowing Clinton a chance to fend off the rising demand at home for missile defenses capable of protecting the United States against an attack wrought by such weapons. The U.S. became the largest single provider of foreign assistance to North Korea, including many millions of dollars worth of food aid. Albright even traveled to the North Korean capital in the hopes of laying the groundwork for a visit there—and a bid for the Nobel Prize—by Clinton before he left office.
      It now is clear that the principal effect of these U.S. and South Korean "sunshine" initiatives was to legitimate one of the world’s most dangerous—and, yes, "evil"—regimes. A bona fide pariah state has been delivered from its virtually complete isolation to the point where an increasing number of Western nations are establishing diplomatic relations with Pyongyang. They and others now perceive Kim Jong II to be a man with whom business can be done responsibly, or at least profitably.
      To his credit, when Bush assumed office, he did not embrace this view. He (properly) was deeply skeptical of North Korean intentions and actions. He pointedly repudiated Secretary of State Colin Powell when the latter announced that the United States would, under Bush, "pick up" where the Clinton administration had left off in its effort to rehabilitate North Korea. Instead, the Bush team embarked on a lengthy review of U.S.-North Korean relations and future options.
      Regrettably, this review came to reflect less the president’s skepticism than the State Department and Kim Dae-jung’s insistence that the "peace process" with North Korea should continue. While lip service was paid to the principle of reciprocity—specifically, the notion that the North should stand down and thin out its highly mobilized forces along the DMZ—the bottom line was an okay from Bush to resume the "dialogue" with Pyongyang.
      North Korea chose not to play ball, however, preferring the South’s "no-strings-attached" terms for normalization to the president’s desire for an actual diminution of the threat posed by the North’s military to South Korean and U.S. forces there. For the last six months, there has been no movement on the U.S.-North Korean negotiating front.
      What has been going on, however, reinforces the wisdom of Bush’s original attitude toward Kim Jong II and his regime and confirms his depiction of North Korea under their rule as a member in good standing of the "axis of evil." As the Washington Post reported on Feb. 2:
      "In the last six months, North Korea has continued to buy raw materials and components for its ballistic-missile production facilities, particularly through firms based in China, according to an unclassified CIA report to Congress made public Wednesday. At the same time, the report said, ‘Pyongyang continued its attempts to procure technology worldwide that could have applications in its nuclear program.’ North Korea signed an agreement in 1994 under which it promised to end efforts to develop nuclear weapons, although U.S. intelligence has reported in the past that the 

No Fitting Memorial

Recently, a geologist acquainted with the Institute was conducting a survey of potential ore sites near Magadan and in the nearby Kolyma river valley. These are in the far north and east of Russia, atop the Sea of Okhotsk. The geologist had been little aware of the grim history of the place, until he kept noticing human remains scattered about campsites and survey locations. There are millions of shallow graves in the region, and the frost is forever bringing bones and skulls up to the surface—as if the dead are begging to be remembered. But few people visit this lonely area and almost nobody wants to recall who the dead were and why they died.
      Auschwitz (or more properly, the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex of paired camps) is well remembered. Statesmen who visit Poland are expected to visit the site of the old Nazi death camp and it is a symbol of the many other sites that served the same function—the systemic degradation and destruction of huge numbers of human beings. Other sites associated with the Nazi’s mass murders are commemorated or preserved in one degree or another. Hundreds of histories record what was done, and what was done at Auschwitz will probably be recalled for centuries to come.
      There is no such memorial for the victims of Soviet Communism. Their history has been chronicled—such as can be pieced together—but it has not been seared into anyone’s consciousness. Solzhenitsyn, who survived a term in a Soviet labour camp, was exiled for describing the Gulag archipelago. Most of the other books on Soviet mass murder have been written by foreigners, a very few of whom had first-hand experience of the system.
      In addition to civilians killed during military operations or as hostages for acts of resistance, the Nazis deliberately murdered 10.5 million Slavs (Poles, Belorussians and Russians mostly), 5.3 million Jews, and 260 thousand Gypsies. All in all, according to Prof. R.J. Rummel—a leading scholar of mass murder—they murdered 20.9 million people. The Soviets were far worse.
      From the very first days of Lenin’s rule, until the last days of the regime in 1991, the Soviet system was a deadly one. While more likely to commit homicide through depraved 

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Islam Confronts the West

"Terror struck into the hearts of the enemies is not only a means, it is an end in itself. Once the condition of terror into the opponent’s heart is obtained hardly anything is left to be achieved. It is the point where the means and the end meet and merge. Terror is not a means of imposing decision upon the enemy, it is the decision we wish to impose on him"
—Bridagier S.K. Malik, The Quranic Concept of War (Pakistan, 1979)

One of the impulses that shaped the Second World War was the Nazi belief that a total transformation of society could only be achieved in an all-encompassing war. Once this war began, the Frontgemeinschaft of the front-line troops would lead to the building of a Volksgemeinschaft of all Germans. This ideological impulse might arguably be as much of a cause of the Nazi invasion of the USSR as any other consideration.
      Now, 57 years after the end of the Nazi threat, the West faces a new ideology that hopes war can achieve a total transformation of Islamic society while damaging ours. The terror unleashed in the autumn of 2001 is designed with the same purpose that the Nazis hoped for; external violence to cause internal change.
      Ideologies cannot be defeated, they must be either totally discredited—in the minds of those the ideologues purport to lead—or they must be destroyed. The iron glove that slapped the faces of the Western democracies in WWII is back, with a different fist inside it. For the West, the choice is the same—achieve survival in victory or our own destruction in defeat. However, the Islamic Fundamentalists have parallels beyond Nazism.
      In the Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union, the West faced an ideological opponent that had an attitude "What’s mine is mine, what’s yours is up for negotiation." The attitude had simple roots—peace was only possible when the final society, communism, was universal. Accordingly, areas controlled by the Soviet Union were a part of the world that belonged to the emerging final society and were thus at peace, and everyone else would inevitably come to know peace only when they also became properly communist as well.
      The Islamic faith has a similar construct. Islamic societies are part of the final society, everything else is just a matter of time. Islamic societies do have a place for Christians and Jews, as more heavily taxed second-class citizens in law and in status. Everyone else is to be converted, enslaved, or killed. Christian and Jewish governed societies are not yet a part of Islam and therefore retain their place on the "to-do" list of places to conquer.
      In the end, the Soviet ideology was thoroughly 

discredited and defeated. Things may be more difficult this time. For a start, Islam is a religion and has been around a lot longer than either Nazism or Communism.
      The Islamic World knows that it has problems, but only a few rare figures within it have ever recognized that their problems result from the faith that created them. Islam is one of the three largest religions in the World, but unlike Christianity and Buddhism, it is often incapable of dealing with the world in which its adherents must live.
      Buddhism does not recognize the ‘reality’ of the world and whatever one does in the world—regardless of position—is important only in terms of the ‘merit’ it allows one to achieve on the path to enlightenment and escape. Christianity has been immensely flexible in its 2,000 year history, in that its structure and organization has constantly evolved while leaving the core tenets intact. Also, the Christian is expected to view the world as a place where faith and conduct contribute to an individual’s eternal reward later.
      Buddha and Christ never dictated the structure and shape of society. Mohammed certainly did, and much of the Quran is the outline for relationships and structures in human society. In the three centuries after his death, religious jurisprudence (clergy and judges are the same people) cemented the rest of the law into place and largely put a final seal on the evolution of Islamic institutions.
      The aggressive component of Islam is very real. When Osama Bin Laden fulminated about Western "Crusaders" he wasn’t being honest with himself or his listeners. Western Crusaders did temporarily occupy Palestine and Lebanon in the Middle Ages: But perhaps the Spanish term Reconquista—a reference to the long wars to vanquish the Muslim realms in Spain—is more accurate in describing the Crusades. Islam was spread almost entirely by the sword and overran Christian Egypt, Christian North Africa, most of Christian Spain; Christian Syria and much of Christian Byzantium before Urban II called for the First Crusade in 1096.
      Since the end of the Crusades, Islamic nations conquered the rest of what is now Turkey, overran much of the Balkans and twice put Vienna under siege. They also menaced all of the Mediterranean littoral until defeated at the Battle of Lepanto and at the siege of Malta. Muslim pirates raided most of the Mediterranean until 1830 when the French—tired of centuries of Maritime rapine and robbery—occupied Algiers and Tunis. If Bin Laden wants to play ‘historical grievances’ he really ought to recall that the rules of this game can work both ways. Moreover, if Christianity operated by the same rules that Islam does, Islam might not exist right now except as a minor cult in a corner of Arabia and an obscure historical footnote.
      Since the attacks of September 11th, a lot of commentators have made apologies for Islam and called it one of the World’s great religions (which, by dint of its 

numerous adherents, it is), and a peaceful faith—which it certainly is not. Even today, violent Muslim persecution of Christians continues in Indonesia, Nigeria and the Sudan. Again, what is Islamic must remain Islamic and what is not is up for negotiation.
      Christianity has a long and spotted history too—but it has some important characteristics that are not shared with Islam. First, the use of Christianity to justify violence is antithetical to Christianity itself. While violent men have used Christianity to justify themselves, they have only done so by violating its true nature—a point often remarked on by their own contemporaries and by history. In Islam, the faith itself justified violent wars of aggression from the very beginning of the religion. Christ admonished Peter for picking up a sword; Mohammed directly encouraged murder, massacre and battle during his own lifetime.
      Secondly, Christianity (like Buddhism) is ultimately about individuals. Christ talked about single human beings and told them to behave decently to one another. He gave respect to lepers, tax collectors, prostitutes, and a foreign soldier. Islam is a religion of very comprehensive laws derived from the Quran: the Sunna (the collections of hadith—traditions of Mohammed): the qiyas which are the body of opinions written by qadi and mufti, who are religious judges; and the Ijma which is the consensus of a group of judges representing the community.
      The difference is evident over centuries of evolution. Christianity has created a series of institutions—most notably the Catholic Church—and a series of communities, but these institutions and the accretion of customs and laws they have generated are always subject to change. The core beliefs that define Christianity were first listed in 325 AD (the Nicene Creed) and have not changed since—they don’t need to—while Christian institutions have continually evolved and shifted. Islamic doctrine, and the faith itself, has remained more or less static since 1000 AD because the Quran, the Sunna and the Qiyas finished development around then.
      To be fair, Islam did run into trouble in the next three hundred years as the Islamic heartlands faced invaders from the North (the Turks), the East (the Mongols) and Crusaders from Europe. The crises toppled existing political elites and their replacements made the bid for legitimacy to support their tenuous authority by literally being "holier than thou." This example has continued down through the centuries as ambitious leaders have embraced a rigorous interpretation of Islam as a tool of governance and societal domination—a tactic displayed once again in Afghanistan by the Taliban.
      The net result of this unhappy history is that Islam has

become moribund and is probably beyond reform. It certainly has a limited place in the modern world. The Islamic nations are the most violent in the world today—both in terms of internal warfare and state vs. state conflicts. In December, 2001 Freedom House—which monitors political and economic freedom as well as human rights around the world—observed that these tend to be at their lowest ebb in Muslim countries. Of the 10 most "unfree" countries in the World, seven are Islamic nations. The rest of the world is making progress towards individual freedom, the Muslim world is not.
      This is not to say that there is no individual merit to Islam—hundreds of millions of perfectly ordinary and decent human beings practice it and observe most of the duties demanded of them: Prayer, alms-giving, fasting (during Ramadan particularly). The fourth duty is that of Pilgrimage (Haj) to Mecca although jet travel has made this less of an ordeal than it used to be. Jihad (or exertion) is the firth duty. This fifth duty does not necessarily entail war-making, but its most usual interpretations imply protecting the faith, overcoming non-believers, and purifying those who have fallen away from conformity.
      This last point is the most sinister. While there is a long history of violent enforcement of conformity in Christianity—this was usually collective action against a very recognizable heretical movement (like the Cathars or Arians) that might have destroyed Christianity itself if unchallenged. In other cases, particularly during Christianity’s most shameful era in the 14th to the 16th Centuries, the enforcement of conformity was normally a legal matter—often practiced with a diligence and fairness that exceeded contemporary civil legal practices. It also says much that we remain disturbed by the misuse of religious authority that appeared in those years.
      In Islam, Jihad is a ready-made tool for the destruction of moderate or secular leaders by any individual who cares to undertake it. A liberal Muslim (of whom there have been many) who determines that perhaps it is time to re-interpret the older writings and that attitudes towards others should become moderated, can be harassed, persecuted and killed by any individual who feels ready to justify it on theological grounds. This is another reason why Islam has not evolved in any considerable manner over the last few centuries.
      In the end, Islam’s inflexible nature and violent foundations will ensure that Islamic nations remain unstable at home and uneasy about the outside world. Nazism and Soviet Communism may turn out to have been simple challenges in comparison.
      —The Mackenzie Institute Newsletter, January 2002

Selling public broadcast radio and television stations could net the taxpayers billions—even enough to pay for America’s new war on terrorism.
      The sale of such public assets could also solve other problems. Many Americans are angry that taxpayers are forced to fund radio and TV programs that promote a far-left, socialist agenda diametrically opposed to their values.
      When the taxpayer-funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting allowed its mailing lists to be used by Democratic Party fundraisers, it was a clear signal of PBS’ political leanings.
      Arguably, PBS has some excellent documentaries and arts programming. But abolishing PBS or selling off its stations doesn’t mean that will come to an end.
      Public broadcasting is not completely dependent on federal money, which now provides just 11.6 percent of the funding for public broadcasting. This means there is adequate funding for PBS to continue as a solely private organization, either commercial or non-profit, and broadcast like other media over TV airwaves, cable or on the Web.
      Unlike the situation in 1967 when PBS was created, today there are many alternatives to commercial and institutional media, including cultural stations like the History Channel, Ovation and many others, inexpensive microradio, Internet TV and radio, and satellite TV.
      Without federal funding, the best PBS programs would continue to be produced as they are today: with corporate and university sponsorship.
      Meanwhile, selling the 1,000 PBS stations nationwide would give taxpayers a windfall—and could raise over $30 billion—enough to write every low-income taxpayer a check for $1,200.
      Ending federal funding of public broadcasting and the strings that come with it would produce both more and better local TV and radio programming—encouraging a renaissance of the arts and humanities in the media, while saving beleaguered taxpayers over $345 million a year.
      Recent PBS scandals are a clear and loud warning that something is fundamentally wrong with government support of local media. Here’s just a snapshot of problems:

• Ultra-liberal Pat Mitchell took over as head of PBS in March 2001. She’s a member of the founding board of Global Green USA, an affiliate of communist and former Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev’s Green Cross 

International. Major goals of Green Cross include a 90 percent reduction in the world’s population and a new world environmental political order that would supersede the sovereignty of the United States.
      Pat Mitchell is also a member of the board of trustees of the Sundance Institute, and in that capacity created a documentary, sent to schools across the U.S., which depicts the Cold War as a conflict in which there was no moral difference between the communist, totalitarian Soviet Union and the free American constitutional republic.

• In July 2001—just four months after Mitchell became head of PBS—it was revealed that PBS stations were sharing donor lists with Democratic Party fundraisers. That’s a clear conflict of interest for an organization that receives substantial funding from taxpayer dollars.

      These recent problems pale in comparison, however, with the long-term damage done to community radio and TV by PBS.
      The original idea behind the Public Broadcasting System was to elevate the broadcast media by creating a third alternative to (1) commercial radio and TV and (2) corporate-dominated institutional radio and TV. Thus was born the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), created by Congress in 1967.
      Federal appropriations and grants funneled through the CPB have increased exponentially, from just $5 million in 1969 to over $340 million in 2001—a 6,800 percent increase—all paid for by your tax dollars.
      An additional $279 million is given to public broadcasting by state governments and over $57 million by local governments—a total of over $681 million.
      Despite a 6,800 percent increase in federal appropriations for public broadcasting, the original PBS goal of media free from influence by either business and other powerful special interests has been long forgotten.
      According to the CPB’s own figures, in 1999 businesses, colleges and foundations contributed over $938 million to public broadcasting. PBS members, large contributors, product sales and commercials provide contributed $829 million, for a total of $1.77 billion—compared to just $681 million in government funding.
      Even though government now contributes only a minor share of PBS funding, strings attached to that money have created big problems for many independent radio and TV stations.

      Those financial strings are the reason that even many liberals are turning against government funding of public broadcasting and the reason why Stephen Dunifer of Free Radio Berkeley calls the Corporation for Public Broadcasting the "Agent Orange of grassroots radio."
      As Seattle journalist Jesse Walker explains in his study for the Cato Foundation: "CPB aid has brought with it incentives to professionalize, to centralize, to shy away from diverse programming. Whatever its effect on individual stations, its net effect on community radio has been poor."
      Walker continues: CPB’s Healthy Stations Project (HSP) "consistently called for reducing the power volunteers had over both station management and the content of their shows. HSP stations were also to embrace predictable strip programming. Their music would be more homogeneous, more ‘consistent.’ Oddball shows that didn’t immediately fit the new format—the new ‘mission’—would be dropped no matter how popular they were."
      In other words, CPB rules for obtaining government money penalize independence, diversity, innovation and community participation.
      In 1967, when the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was created by Congress, proponents of government funding for local radio and TV could reasonably argue that there was no third alternative to commercial and institutional broadcasting. Since then, the broadcast world has changed profoundly.

• Rather than the three major TV networks we had in 1967, there are nearly a dozen competitive networks, including Fox, Turner, Disney, UPN, Lifetime, the Christian Broadcast System and, of course, the Home Shopping Network. In addition, thanks to cable, viewers across the country can enjoy the History Channel, ESPN, C-SPAN, Ovation, Discovery, A&E and dozens of other channels of quality arts, sports and public affairs programming.

• Cable and satellite TV make available 50-200 channels of programming to viewers throughout the U.S. Thanks to these innovations, viewers can also see the best the rest of the world has to offer, including British Broadcasting System channels and TV direct from every continent on earth. At the opposite extreme, most cable systems also offer local access TV to anyone in the community, on which you can watch such fare as local dance recitals and political commentary direct from your neighborhood bar.

• Thanks to the Internet, anyone can now launch a broadcast. There are now hundreds of channels of TV available through the Internet bringing Internet users everything from live scholarly discussions of the latest developments in particle physics to voyeur dorms on which you can watch your favorite co-ed 24 hours a day.

• Hundred of cities, small and large—as well as universities and corporations—now have their 

own radio and TV programs. There are thousands of micro-and miniradio stations available throughout the U.S.

      Given this enormous and growing wealth of media alternatives, there is no longer any reason for you to be forced to subsidize radio and TV stations 3,000 miles from where you live that broadcast programs you don’t care about or, indeed, may passionately dislike.
      An easy way to end government subsidies of public broadcasting is to simply auction off the existing 1,000+ PBS stations nationwide, at the rate of say, 50 a year to avoid flooding the market. How much would the sale of PBS stations bring in?
      In 1995, the sale of WNYC-TV—a PBS station owned by New York City—brought in over $200 million. That same year, the sale of PBS stations owned by Sinclair Broadcasting in Buffalo and Albany brought in $56 million.
      Using a conservative valuation of $30 million per PBS station, selling PBS would raise over $30 billion in current dollars.
      Given the huge level of public and private support for non-commercial, alternative media, it is time we ended federal subsidies for handpicked stations, with all of the government control and corruption that inevitably entails.
      It’s time to abolish the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PBS.
      —NewsMax.com, March 2002, p. 34

continued from page 3

indifference (e.g. through starvation and exposure), the Soviets killed somewhere around 61.9 million people according to Rummel’s estimates.
      The bone-studded valleys and forests in the remote Kolyma region are not the only neglected gravesites in the former Soviet Union. The "archipelago" described by Solzhenitsyn was a large one that arched over the whole of the Soviet Union, and most major cities had a nearby site where the security forces could dump hundreds of thousands of bodies. But the Kolyma-Magadan camps were the nadir of the whole system and even Solzhenitsyn feared to describe it.
      In 1991, the museum at the Auschwitz-Birkenau site estimated that between 1.2 and 1.5 million people were murdered at the camp, including some 800,000 Jews. Auschwitz remains an enduring symbol of Nazi atrocity and mass murder. The remote labour camps of Magadan and the Kolyma were an interconnected complex that probably claimed 3 million lives—according to the best estimate of Robert Conquest in his book on the subject.
      Germany has apologized over and over again for what it did. The vast majority of Germans feel a degree of shame for what was done, and the legacy of places like Auschwitz will hang over them for generations to come. In Russia, the legacy of the Gulags is seldom remarked on in public and most sites are left to decompose unmolested by mourners or monuments. It is extremely unlikely that the Germans will ever repeat the crimes they committed in the 1940s. This cannot be said for the peoples of what was the Soviet Union. Perhaps the soundless warning from the skulls in Kolyma is that the unacknowledged dead can always be joined by more.
      —The MacKenzie Institute Newsletter, January 2002