In 1933, the Oxford Union - a debating society and one of the strongholds of liberal elite opinion - held a debate on the resolution "this House will in no circumstances fight for king and country." The resolution passed. Margot Asquith, one of England's leading liberal lights, wrote that same year, quite sincerely: "There is only one way of preserving peace in the world, and getting rid of your enemy, and that is to come to some sort of agreement with him. . . . The greatest enemy of mankind today is hate."
Churchill disdained the new liberalism, mocking one of his opponents as part of "that band of degenerate international intellectuals who regard the greatness of Britain and the stability and prosperity of the British Empire as a fatal obstacle. . . . " So deep was this liberal loathing of empire that even as the first shots of World War II were being fired, Churchill's private secretary, Jock Colville, witnessed at a theater "a group of bespectacled intellectuals" who, to his shock, "remain[ed] firmly seated while 'God Save the King' was played."
These elites could see evil only at home. The French intellectual Simone de Beauvoir did not believe that Germany was a "threat to peace," but instead worried that the "panic that the Right was spreading" would drag France, Britain, and the rest of Europe into war. Stafford Cripps, a liberal Labor member of Parliament, feared not Hitler, but Churchill. Cripps wrote that after Churchill became prime minister he would "then introduce fascist measures and there will be no more general elections"...
The liberal opponents of the British Empire were proved wrong, but their misplaced disillusionment was enough to sap the vitality of imperial confidence. After rising one last time to fight Nazism, the sun set on the British Empire.
Likewise, it is pleasant to believe that the crisis of confidence in today's liberal elites won't affect the outcome of our war with Islamist extremism. The greater worry concerns what happens next. Will protestations of liberal elites become mainstream diffidence about America's place in the world? Will we, too, stop believing that America stands firm, as a great force for good - and then see our place in the world diminish?
History, it turns out, can be both a comfort and a caution.
#2
Sometimes the parallels with Rome are scary - the influx of immigrants who micro-colonize rather than assimilate; the disparaging of traditional values and beliefs by self-loathing intellectuals; the utter demolition of public insititutions by foolish judicial fiat; and most troubling, the moral relativism that cannot fathom that some cultures, values, ideals and nations are in fact more valuable than others. I believe in America, but the pugative we will have to endure to overcome the messes internally and externally we have allowed to fester through sloth and timidity are not going to be pretty or pleasant...... diversity of culture is not a strength, and most importantly, Islam is a dangerous poison that grows in the shadows becasue we think it is not more dangerous than being a Methodist........
Posted by: Just About Enough! ||
10/23/2005 1:06 Comments ||
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#3
The singular parallel is that these traitorous socialist toolfools repeat the same program of lies endlessly, generation after generation. That they can even exist as parasites disproves the idiocy they spout. Freedom, true freedom, allows true tolerance, even tolerance of sedition, and that tolerance breeds another crop of these cretins.
No institutional memory or no shame? I tend to believe it doesn't matter. They are trendy self-satisfied vampires who have broken Rule #1: Never buy your own bullshit. They suck the lifeblood out of great countries, the few bastions of freedom, tainting public discourse, sewing confusion and sedition, producing nothing of value, nothing worthy of the security they enjoy and work tirelessly to undermine. Safely protected within the bosom of their victim, they pronounce themselves elite intellectuals, logrolling for each other, spreading their asinine memes, insinuating themselves into the foci of the information system, poisoning yet another generation. They are as obviously pathogenic to freedom as the totalitarians, whether religious or communist or whatever the trendy flavor may be, zealots that should be eradicated, not coddled.
I recommend hunter / killer teams. Make the lists, check them twice, and off the pricks before they so weaken us from within that we lose the will to survive. CWII this way comes.
Some would say, "Would that we had Churchill with us today. Or Maggie with all her faculties intact." Indeed, that would be grand, splendid, quotable... The public would "get it" more readily, respond more favorably to the tasks Bush has set for himself and our nation. The odd thing is, despite all of his deficiencies as an orator, Bush does the things that need to be done. The proof of that assertion? Simple: that he displeases so many here at home fades into embarrassment when we are (accidentally?) allowed by the media to see how the troops respond to him - and to Rummy, and Cheney, and the rest of the administration. Greater enthusiasm and adulation is damned hard to imagine. I find that a very interesting contradiction.
Gosharoonies, could it be that they see a very different President Bush than the one we (are allowed to) see? Somehow, with even less MSM exposure, they know, even while serving at the point of the spear, the spear he wields as CINC, what is debated endlessly by the voyeurs - the public... they know that Bush has it right, is doing the right things, is making a difference, is writing history, and protecting each and every one of us. Must be more there than meets the eye sadly limited to viewing the MSM images delivered up for our consumption. Must be something about the man, the guy our troops have come to know, that so inspires them. Would that the voyeurs, the chattering classes, the ankle-biting single-issue fools - you'll recognize them as the one wearing blinders - could see it, too. Wouldn't that be grand?
No, they willfully destroy history. When there is no history, then they can make it up as the go along. That is why the old books were tossed in our school systems. That is why the marxists dominate the history departments of our universities. It requires constant attention and censorship to stop true historical research and understanding. Orwell forwarned you.
This just really ruined my morning. Nothing makes me more sick than hypocrisy. Especially when the left buy into the sympathy for the enemy crap. We all heard the whining recently when PSYOPs broadcast the burning of taliban bodies.
Seems that if it is against their religion to desicrate dead bodies this way, that it does not apply to live bodies? Or does it just not apply to us infedels period? I'm sick of the PC crowd bowing to the enemy in sympathy. They are our weak link people. The enemy doesn't have this problem. They just do whatever they want.
The commander said the four men â identified by the Telegraph as employees of the Halliburton Co. subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root â realized their convoy had taken a wrong turn and were desperately trying to escape from the town when their vehicle was attacked by insurgents.
Two contractors who were not killed in the initial firing were dragged from their vehicle, and one was shot in the back of the head, the newspaper said. The crowd âdoused the other with petrol and set him alight. Barefoot children, yelping in delight, piled straw on to the screaming manâs body to stoke the flames,â according to the report.
The crowd then âdragged their corpses through the street, chanting anti-U.S. slogans,â the newspaper reported.
Notice one difference? These contractors were burned alive!! Excuse me while I go punch the wall.
#3
Remember after the Blackwater killings at Fallujah, the Blackwater people set up a vicious counter-ambush, in which terrorists thought they could attack the Blackwater position and slaughter them? The Blackwater people then killed the better part of a hundred such cannibals, with their own helicopter gunship support, while the US military kept a respectful distance and let them do their thing.
I just hope the KBR people make it a point to pay a return visit to this little hamlet and give each of their employees a tomb of a hundred head.
#4
Anonymoose -
I had never heard that story - is there any way you can provide more details?
Best regards,
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
10/23/2005 19:50 Comments ||
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#5
http://tinyurl.com/7rtfj
The Blackwater revenge was set up at the US Headquarters in Najaf, about a week after the Fallujah killings. Only one US Marine was on site when a large-scale attack commenced on the Blackwater security personnel guarding the place.
It was a very defensible location, with long KZs on the approaches.
The Blackwater people burned through a hell of a lot of ammo, and were eventually resupplied by a Blackwater helicopter, who evacuted out the wounded Marine. Several of them were wounded, but they had slaughtered Jihadis like there was no tomorrow.
3 1/2 hours later, the Special Forces showed up to bring several cases of cracklin'-cold Pabst which the Blackwater people were in dire need of.
Login Req'd: nypost.com@dodgeit.com / buggit
We'll soon reach a total of 2,000 dead American troops in Iraq. You won't miss the day it happens. The media will pound it into you.
But no one will tell you what that number really means â and what it doesn't.
Unable to convince the Bush administration or our troops to cut and run, the American left is waging its campaign of support for Islamist terror through our all-too-cooperative media. And you're the duck in the anti-war movement's shooting gallery.
Breathless anchors and voice-of-God columnists will suggest that 2,000 dead is an exorbitant price to pay in wartime, that reaching such a threshold means we've failed and that it's time to "support our troops and bring them home."
All lies. Certainly, the life of every American service member matters to us. But the left's attempt to exploit dead soldiers and Marines for partisan purposes is worse than grave-robbing: Ghouls only take gold rings and decaying flesh; the left wants to rob our war dead of their sacrifices and their achievements, their honor and their pride.
Those who died in Iraq have not died in vain. Even should Iraq fail itself in the end, our courageous effort to give one Middle-Eastern Muslim population a chance to create a rule-of-law democracy has been worth the cost â for their sake, but also for ours. Without a transformation of the Middle East, we shall see no end of terror.
As a former soldier whose friends still serve under our flag, I'm especially disgusted by the pretense on the part of those who never served and who wouldn't dream of letting their own children serve that they speak for the men and women in uniform.
Our troops speak for themselves. By re-enlisting. And returning to Iraq, to complete the mission for which their comrades gave their lives or suffered life-altering wounds.
Two generations of politicians and pundits suffer from their avoidance of military service. They speak of war in ignorance and view our troops â whom they quietly despise â as nothing more than tools of their own ambitions. After deploring body counts during their Vietnam-era protest years, today our leftists revel in the American body count in Iraq.
The left has been infuriated by its inability to incite an anti-war movement in our military â forgetting that this is an all-volunteer force whose members believe in service to our country. The best the Democrats can do is to trot out poor Wes Clark, an ethically challenged retired general who will say anything, anywhere, anytime in return for five more seconds in the spotlight.
As for that "unacceptable" number of casualties, let's put it in perspective:
Our current loss rate in Iraq from combat and non-combat deaths is 765 per year. That's painful for individual families, but we would have to remain in Iraq, taking casualties at the same rate, for 76 years to rival our loss of more than 58,000 Americans in Indochina.
And Vietnam wasn't remotely as important to our national security. The terrorists we face today are more implacable than any of the enemies from our past. Even the Germans didn't dream of eradicating our entire population. The Japanese hoped to master Asia, not to massacre every man, woman and child in America.
We would need to continue our efforts in Iraq and the greater War on Terror for 532 years to suffer the 407,000 dead we lost in less than four years in World War II.
And what about our greatest struggle, the American Civil War? We would have to maintain the status quo in Iraq for 470 years just to rival the number of Union dead and for 729 years to equal our total losses, North and South.
Even our Revolutionary War, in which fewer than 5,000 Americans died in combat (many more, unrecorded, fell to disease) has to be judged in terms of the population at the time â just over 2 million. Equivalent losses today would be over 500,000 dead Americans.
The point isn't to play hocus-pocus with statistics. That's what the pro-terrorist left is trying to do â betting that you know nothing of military history. Two thousand dead isn't a magic number. Our first loss was as important as the last. We must not make a mockery of our fallen by treating them as political rag-dolls to be tossed around the media playroom. Great causes incur great costs.
In historical terms, our losses in Iraq have been remarkably light, given the magnitude of what we seek to achieve. The low casualty rate is a tribute to the skill and professionalism of our troops and their battlefield leaders. None of us should breathe a word that undercuts them while they're fighting our war.
If the American left and its media sympathizers want someone to blame for our combat losses, they should begin with themselves. Their irresponsible demands for troop withdrawals provide powerful encouragement to Muslim fanatics to keep on killing as many American service members as possible. On the worst days the terrorists suffer in Iraq, our "anti-war" fellow citizens keep the cause of Islamist fascism alive. Their support is worth far more to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi than any amount of Saudi money.
It would be wonderful to live in a world in which war was never necessary. But we don't live in such a world. And there are no bloodless wars. We should honor every fallen American. But we also must recognize that, on this maddened earth, only the blood of patriots shed abroad allows us to live in safety here at home.
I yield to no one in my disdain for the United Nations and all its works, but I did find myself warming up to UNICEF the other day. Just over a week ago, on Belgian TV, the U.N. children's agency premiered the first adult movie featuring the beloved children's cartoon characters (beloved by Belgians anyway) the Smurfs. By ''adult,'' I don't mean it was a blue movie. Only the characters were blue. But it was an adult movie in the sense that the Smurfs were massacred during an air strike on their village, until in the final scene only Baby Smurf is left, weeping alone, surrounded by wall-to-wall Smurf corpses. It's the first Smurf snurf movie.
Well, I thought, say what you like about the U.N., but any organization that wants to bomb the Smurfs can't be all bad. Not like those wimps at that British municipal council who banned Piglet the other day because some Muslim found him offensive. Why didn't they just make a blockbuster video nuking the Hundred Acre Wood and leaving Pooh to die in a radioactive Heffalump pit?
My mistake. Apparently UNICEF made the short film as a fund-raiser to highlight how children are the principal victims of war. As Baby Smurf wails amid the shattered ruins, we see the words: ''Don't let war affect the lives of children.''
Oh, well. It's not clear from the Smurf carnage whether their village is a sovereign jurisdiction -- the ultimate blue state -- or whether they're merely some hapless minority within a multiethnic nation, the Kosovars to Spongebob Squarepants' Slobodan Milosevic. But either way the warplanes come and blue body parts are exploding all over the village.
Good luck to UNICEF and all. But I can't help thinking that, if you're that concerned for children in war zones, you might have done something closer to what real conflict's like in those places. In Rwanda, Sudan and a big chunk of West Africa, air strikes are few and far between. Instead, millions get hacked to death by machetes. Even on the very borders of Eutopia, hundreds of thousands died in the Balkans in mostly low-tech, non-state-of-the-art ways.
In 2003, Charles Onyango-Obbo wrote a fascinating column in the East African musing on the resurgence of cannibalism, after reports that Ugandan-backed rebels in the Congo were making surviving members of their victims' families eat the body parts of their loved ones. ''While colonialism is bad,'' he said, ''the colonizer who arrives by plane, vehicle or ship is better -- because he will have to build an airport, road or harbor -- than the one who, like the Ugandan army, arrived and withdrew from most of eastern Congo on foot.'' Just so. If you're going to be attacked, it's best to be attacked by a relatively advanced enemy. Compared to being force-fed Grandfather Smurf's genitals, having his village strafed in some clinical air strike is about the least worst option for Baby Smurf.
Why would UNICEF show such an implausible form of Smurficide? Well, whether intentionally or not, they're evoking the war that most of their audience -- in Belgium and beyond -- is opposed to: the Iraq war, where the invader did indeed have an air force. That's how the average Western ''progressive'' still conceives of warfare, as something the big bullying Pentagon does to weak victims.
But this week is a week to remember that there are worse things than war that ''affect the lives of children.'' If I were Papa Smurf, I wouldn't want Baby Smurf to grow up in Saddam's Iraq. I don't mean just because we'd be the beleaguered minority of Smurfistan, to be gassed and shoveled into mass graves. Even if we were part of Saddam's own approved class living in the Smurfi Triangle, it's still a life permanently fixed between terror and resignation in which all a parent's hopes for his children are subordinate to the whims of a psycho state.
That Iraq is gone now -- not because of UNICEF and the other transnational institutions that confer respectability on dictatorships, but because America, Britain, Australia and a few others were prepared to go to war. Needless to say, for the media moaners, the approval of the new constitution was just the latest disaster. ''For the Bush administration, the apparent approval of Iraq's constitution is less of a victory than yet another chance to possibly fashion a political solution that does not result in the bloody division of Iraq,'' wrote Glenn Kessler in the Washington Post, sufficiently rattled by happy scenes of millions voting at least to hedge his bets. Not so Australia's beloved comic doom-monger Paul McGeough, whose post-referendum Sydney Morning Herald dispatch was apocalyptically headlined: ''Iraqi Experiment Splitting Apart At The Seams.''
Whatever. It's not about what either we ''diehards'' or the media whine-hards think anymore. Peripheral though they may be to the concerns of the ''peace'' crowd, it is in the end about the Iraqi people. Unlike press predictions of ''civil war'' (now 2-1/2 years behind schedule), the American timetable has been stuck to, usually because at the 11th hour the fractious Iraqis manage to rouse themselves and get it together. Sixteen out of Iraq's 18 provinces -- including Sunni-majority ones -- voted for the most liberal, democratic, federal and pluralist constitution in the Middle East. A disaster for the media, but worth a gloat from everyone else.
Whatever the Bush administration got wrong, it got one big thing right: that, if you persevered, Iraq had the potential to function as a free society in a part of the world where no such thing has ever existed. That was a long shot, and much sneered at. But Washington judged correctly: Given the radicalization of the Arab world, and the Arabification of the Islamic world, and the Islamification of much of the rest of the world, in the end you have to fix the problem at the source.
Sometimes war is worth it. And, if you don't think so, look at the opening scenes of that UNICEF video -- Smurfs singing, dancing, gamboling merrily -- and try to imagine living in a Smurf enclave in a province that wants to introduce Sharia. "Bam!" - Emeril
#1
A while back, a live-action commercial against land mines showed a bunch of young girls playing soccer while their parents watched. Then one of them stepped on a land mine to resultant carnage.
Sort of a "see, it could happen in a peaceful society in a middle-class neighborhood, too!" message, I guess.
Anyway, some wit added a text message at the end of the commercial which said, "Finally! Someone came up with a version of soccer which isn't boring!"
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
