Children of the Monolith
Michael Totten describes nearly getting mugged — or perhaps kidnapped — in Tunisia, which he was visiting in order to see how the Arab Spring had played out there. But the life of a nation in aggregate is one thing. At the individual level it is always another. Even in the best of countries, individuals live, die or face danger mostly alone.
As is typical outside the United States, shady individuals approached me in the airport and asked if I wanted a taxi. They’re supposed to wait in line at the taxi stand, but the impatient and unlicensed will venture into the terminal and prowl for tired arrivals like me.
I almost always wave these people off. Some of these guys aren’t even taxi drivers. They use their own private cars and charge exorbitant rates. You are well advised to avoid them.
But I was more tired than usual after crossing the Atlantic this time, so when a decent-looking sort asked if I needed a taxi, I figured, what the hell, I’ll hire him as long as he actually has a taxi and will use the meter.
Before he even started the car, he placed a call on his cell phone. That right there tripped my threat radar … I didn’t understand everything he said to his friend on the phone, but I did hear him say he had an American in his car. This was not good. Why would he call someone just to say that? And did he think foreigners understand no Arabic whatsoever?
I secretly fished my house and car keys out of my carry-on bag and placed them in my hand in my coat pocket. You can seriously damage someone if you punch them in the face with a key sticking out of your fist. …
“Come,” he said. “We’re getting in a new car.”
Oh no we’re not, I thought, but I didn’t say anything. I first needed him to open the trunk so I could take out my suitcase …
Everything was wrong with this scenario. I needed to grab my suitcase from him, but he was heading straight for the freeway. I jogged up to him. …
Just then someone yelled at him from behind us. We both turned and looked. It was a police officer pointing at his car. My “driver” had double parked in the lot and the cop was ordering him to move.
This was my moment … “I’m not getting in another car with you,” I said and began walking briskly back toward the terminal, leaving him to deal with the policeman on his own ..
I’m telling you this story for a reason. Last year the Tunisian government declared a state of emergency in the wake of a rising crime wave. Five times in the last year—including a week after this incident happened—the Tunisian government extended the state of emergency. Crime is out of control, at least compared with the country’s normal low level.
But crime is no respecter of places. One grandma in Georgia, USA shot it out with two armed robbers when they came up to her car after she dropped off her grandson at her daughter’s at 2 am. Although the incident happened a world away from Tunisia, it is interesting to note the psychological points of similarity; to look at what goes through a person’s mind when they are in imminent danger.
Looking at Lulu Campbell’s bullet-riddled silver Toyota Tundra, common sense says the 57-year-old grandmother should be dead. … There are eight bullet holes in the Tundra’s hood, another in the front grill, and both front-seat side windows have been shot out. There’s also a single bullet hole through the front windshield, when Campbell shot back at one of the assailants …
As she pulled into her daughter’s driveway on English Avenue, her grandson went inside. As an afterthought, Campbell said, she wanted to call him to make certain the house was secure. … “I was looking for my phone.”
Campbell said she couldn’t find it, got out and checked the truck’s backseat to look for it in her purse. As she searched, she said she heard a voice in her head whisper to her to get into the front seat and lock the door. She immediately did, and she said that likely saved her life.
Seconds later, two men carrying guns approached her. One of them, later identified by police as Brenton Lance Spencer, 32, started to shout at her through the front passenger door to open the vehicle up and give him her money. The other, whom Macon police have identified as Dantre Horatio Shivers, 30, stood in front of the truck, also pointing a gun.
“(Spencer) shouted, ‘Give me the f—— money and open the f—— door!’ ” Campbell said. “I said, ‘Oh my God, somebody is going to rob me.’ I said, ‘Baby, you’re going to kill me anyway, so I don’t have to open it!’ ”
Campbell said she reached for her .38-caliber revolver just as Spencer allegedly fired at her. She felt Spencer’s bullet whiz by her chest as she fired back. Her shot hit Spencer in the chest.
“I hurt my back (pushing the seat back to avoid the shot),” she said. “I saw the guy in front of me, and I said, ‘Oh my God, there are two of them.’ I said I’m going to take one of them with me. That’s what was in my head.”
Michael and Lulu’s experience have several points in common. The first commonality is the moment of presentiment. This is the time when danger is first perceived as fact. In Michael’s case it came together when he heard the driver make a phone call. Lulu Campbell’s case is more curious. She experiences something like a Sixth Sense in operation, what she would probably call the kutob — which is a Tagalog word for a funny feeling you get in the moments immediately preceding an event.
The second commonality is what might be called the decision point. It is the moment when the resolution to act in a certain way takes hold. Michael decides he’s going to make a break for it, and improvises some brass knuckles. He wants to keep the possible kidnapper ignorant of his perception of danger as long as he can. In Campbell’s case there is no point in being coy. Rather, she adopts the very typical form of bahala na. It is almost a perfect atavism. “I’m going to take one of them with me.”
Each thinks in slightly different way. Grandma Lulu operates with an almost bicameral brain. Later she would say that God and the spirit of her recently deceased son were watching over her, which is also a pretty common idea among Filipinos. And I would not doubt that she could actually have heard voices. By contrast, the action in Michael Totten’s head is self-consciously rational. The voice he heard was his own.
Despite their differences, you might argue that they were essentially the same human thought processes viewed through different prisms. One that of an American and the other that of a Filipina of the old school. Why these particular differences? One of the interesting questions about such memories is whether we add structure to them in the immediate aftermath of the event. Primo Levi, an Italian Jewish chronicler of the Holocaust wrote:
Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument. The memories which lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to become erased as the years go by, but often they change, or even increase by incorporating extraneous features.
But perhaps Levi is only half-right. Revisionism may happen with the years but it may not require any time at all. Different people may constitute their recollections differently to begin with. Memories can be instantaneously different at the moment of perception.
But ultimately the importance of memory is less to do with retrospective accuracy than the way it in which it forms our present day instincts. Michael Totten notes that the memory of Tunisia’s glorious and tolerant past may not save it from dangers of extremism.
It’s hard to say, though, if a moderate mainstream culture by itself can inoculate a country from violent upheaval. The average Algerian wasn’t interested in seeing his country drown in fire and blood, but it happened anyway. The average Iraqi didn’t want his local marketplace car-bombed on a regular basis, but it happened anyway.
Tunisia developed a Salafist problem almost at once after Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia. Salafists are the worst of the worst—political totalitarians who wish to impose an iron Islamist state and at least a regional caliphate if not a global one.
Possibly that is because moderation itself — with its emphasis on tolerance and rational cogitation — is vulnerable to violence in ways that the raw human instinct is not. The moderate Tunisians are far too well mannered to act against extremists. Like tolerant people the world over, they withhold judgment until the last. Their moment of presentiment never happens; rational thought is retrospective to start with and the decision point may come not at all.
The basic man still has some advantages over the supreme intellectual in the immediate face of danger. What saved Michael and Lulu Campbell was not their education or refinement. It was the memory of living in dangerous places and the instincts formed thereby. Levi understood that education as much as anything else, prepared many Jews to voluntarily walk into the gates of Auschwitz. They could not conceive of something as awful, as barbarous as that death camp, even as they passed it portals. Only the men who had seen others at their worst could perceive the danger and ready themselves to resist what rational man could not apprehend. Levi wrote:
Logic and morality made it impossible to accept an illogical and immoral reality; they engendered a rejection of reality which as a rule led the cultivated man rapidly to despair. But the varieties of the man-animal are innumerable, and I saw and have described men of refined culture, especially if young, throw all this overboard, simplify and barbarize themselves, and survive. A simple man, accustomed not to ask questions of himself, was beyond the reach of the useless torment of asking himself why.
This video clip from a recent movie shows the Japanese Victory Parade following the defeat of Nanking. The defeated Chinese must watch it and realize, if they hadn’t thought of it yet, that they are less than nothing. Their very existence from that moment forward depended entirely on the caprice of others. It’s in an illogical thought to a moderate person, but true withal. The Chinese learned that the price of not winning isn’t second place. It’s no place at all.
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The danger is growing even more here as it is in Tunisia, here it will be ether a race riot of people proclaiming justice at the price of Mob rule emboldened by our progressive leaders who won’t prosecute his people or maybe now that the War on Terror is over from a large police incident where another sky scraper is destroyed or perhaps a Mall is bathed in blood by local improvised and White Man suppressed minority of Middle Eastern heritage
Does anyone here know what the Japanese were shouting in the clip? Did they do that in Manila as well?
Wow. That video clip had a terrible beauty.
Sorry — I understand its context. These victors are celebrating one of the greatest atrocities ever — matched only by the rape of Manila in the closing months of the Pacific Theater.
That is one inspiring essay Richard. And just in time, the “Lead from Behind” admin is getting ready to declare the end of the “War on Terror”. Like their “just declare victory and leave” forebears, they only have to decree it and it will be so. We won’t need the kutob or presentiment, it will be bred out of us. Our intellectual betters will make the hard decisions for us ahead of time and leave us to the dreary union assembly line defined benefit existence they advocate as some sort of state of grace.
I never had to shoot anyone, yet. But I served 22 years in an extremely dangerous specialty and lost many friends, even in peacetime. I have to tell you, I never felt freer than when I was out there on the edge of doctrine with nothing but my instinct, training and the skill of my crew. The Left hates that. People who have lived like that do not bend to dependency or vote for it.
Totten is a fool. Memory may or may not serve him well – but his ignorance of Islam, (he once admitted to me he wasn’t really that interested in Islam) may truly endanger him. As one of the chorus here at PJM cheering on the Arab Spring, it would be very ironic if it bit him in the ass. I began seriously doubting his perspicacity when he wrote a bunch of nonsense about Kosovo entitled “Kosovo, the Israel of the Balkans” several years ago at Reason, I believe. That Jihad mini-State was born under the heinous war crime conducted by Clinton & formalized under Bush2. Their ignorance of Islam ushered in a Jihad beachhead in a region that had successfully if imperfectly fended off Islam’s bloody onslaught for centuries. Totten’s conflation of Israel with Kosovo was so obscene its difficult to fathom. And his brittle, Charles-Johnson-esque diatribes and comment editing and suppression with anyone who disagreed served only to solidify my contempt for him.
Wretchard — is the movie “City of Life & Death”?
Saw another Chinese movie recently — “1911″ — about the (pre-Communist) Chinese revolution led by Dr. Sun Yat Sen which led to the abdication of the Chinese Emperor. Wonder if making movies about Chinese history before Mao is fundamentally a revolutionary act in today’s China?
5. Morton Dodslag: re Kosovo, Palestine, etc.
Yes, I have never understood why the Left in this country champion the Islamic cause, especially when they would destroy the enclaves the left hold so dear, i.e., homosexuality, women’s rights, etc.
We know enough about Islam now to know their intent of global domination and the demand of submission from non-believers. Islam is a virus which must either be destroyed or allowed to consume its host, but at the very least, contain its spread. There is also the hope of reformation but I would not hold my breath on that one.
The video is strangely beautiful. The martial dance evokes the dance of the Maori warrior. The word Maori meant normal as in normal people in the same way as the Lakota Sioux refered themselves as the people. We as Westerners imbue such tribal triumphalism as noble and just self recognition to a degree that we deny such manifest destiny to ourselves. We romanticize the mere fact that immigration in days past was conquest where there were winners and losers and as sure as men died young women became pregnant with the victors seed. We romaniticize the American indian, attuned to nature and flagellate ourselves with disturbing natures balance when natures balance has always turned on survival of the fittest. The reverence for the last victim has willfully blinded us to the science that is now being told through DNA alone. The bones of Kennewick Man have been swept back into the grave where his ancestory cannot be questioned. Our sense of justice cannot find root in fact. It must be preordained and in the past nature preordained “to the victor goes the spoils”. Now a days it does not suffice to be victorious. We are no longer in control of our own narrative, “to the victim goes the spoils”. Nary an improvement. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had its justification born in such places as Nanjing and Manila. It is funny how America has been crucified for those sins. Now Japan can tarry on guilt free except for the weary eye of the Chinese to keep them on the verge of contrition.
It is fundamentally a good thing to be tolerant and civilized. But in order for civilization to work, barbarism must be constantly kept at bay. In the state of nature tolerance is repaid with death. Hence, it is the duty of the King’s Justice to keep totalitarian influences in check in order to preserve the luxury of civility. You need a fund of safety in order to afford to be decent. Run out of safety and you run out of civility.
Tolerance spent wastefully may eventually so empower extremists that it will destroy the tolerance itself in the long run. So while tolerance is good it must shelter beneath a roof through which the rain must never pour.
Barbarism was defeated so thoroughly 70 years ago that most of the Western World think it is just a boogeyman story; something that never existed except in the stories of old people to scare children today. They feel so secure they can’t comprehend the dangers of letting the plague get a foothold again. It is unfortunate they cannot conceive of the Design Margin running out.
The bad old days are never truly gone. They are just under the surface. Man lives with his other self, as Dr. Jekyll lived with Hyde. He is never far away, Mr. Hyde, and he is clever too. The Nazis and Imperial Japan were very capable, intelligent and full of strange, but great beauty. They had a vision that was magnificent in its own way, provided you weren’t on the receiving end of it.
It is easy to think of history as destined to work out as it did. But happy endings were not foreordained. If things turned out better than it could have, much of that is due to the slight edge that basic human decency has over equally basic cruelty. The Second World War was decided by the heart and courage of man and not in some ivory tower. As grandma Lulu knows, it always pays to look behind you in the night. There is always something out there.
I see Totten threw a hissy fit (as usual) when commenters more knowledgeable than he joined the thread to try to explain to him that he was not likely in any danger. He really is an innocent abroad. I suspect he’s a lot safer in Tunis than in most American cities. Of course Totten thinks because he doesn’t know anyone who was a victim of violent crime in Portland (“Whitopia”) that that is typical of the US!
The Chinese learned that the price of not winning isn’t second place. It’s no place at all.
Is that how they think? They certainly have a different attitude on trade to the American “free trade will lift all boats” mentality.
I purchased the DVD of “City of Life and Death (Nanjing! Nanjing)” as soon as it became available. It is quite good, but it doesn’t go far enough in depicting the horrific fate of Nanking and its population. The reality was far, far worse than its cinematic depiction.
Relatedly, I was working with Iris Chang on a book about the fall of the Philippines when she committed suicide. We used to talk about the similarity of psychological reactions to writing books about massacres (my book covered the Holocaust in Poland). Iris told me that working on her Nanking book had occasioned bouts of severe depression. I told her that the same thing happened to me and that I had resolved never again to write about the massacre of unarmed civilian and prisoners. After writing the Holocaust book I became known in the community of Jewish Holocaust survivors and book several survivors offered me substantial payment to write their memoirs. I declined them all. Instead I wrote a book about a combat Marine in the Pacific War. I also developed, as a result of my writing, the attitude that I would go down fighting anyone who came to harm me or those I loved. I might be killed, but I would refuse to be massacred.
“Never again” can mean many things. I know what it means to me.
How gullible must we be, to see on the silver screen this dramatic contrivance by some feverish folk dance choreographer as the formal ‘conquest of Nanking’? When in hell did the Imperial Japanese Army ever indulge in such silliness?
Yes, yes, folklorists love taiko dramatics and they stage well, boom-boom pose-pose. I suppose that a well-rehearsed ensemble could have been transported into Nanking to stage this double-shuffle for a few beaten Chinese and their defunct relatives, but what’s the point? The raping and deaths went on for six weeks. Enter Tarzan at the climax, to beat his chest and howl?
“Tolerance spent wastefully may eventually so empower extremists that it will destroy the tolerance itself in the long run. ”
As usual, well said. This is one of my major beefs with all the tolerators of Islam among us, it’s not the only one, but it’s a big complaint. They have no clue, willfully turn away from ample and easily obtained evidence that where Muslims reside, where they take their Islam seriously, intolerance flourishes. Are there “nice” Muslms? I’m sure there are! That is, if those amuslims don’t take their Islam too seriously… And why not? I’m sure there were “nice nazis” too in the same mold.
The other thing that really chaps me about the Islam apologists is their pious recourse to accusing those who warn about Islam of hatefulness and nazism. Totten does this frequently, wallowing in his own shallow righteousness. Little is more revolting than watching idiots preen about their moral superiority, especially when they themselves are ignorant and amoral on a topic. But reality has a way of mugging that type of fool, and if they are lucky, they survive the assault and attain a higher level of knowledge. The true amoral idiot doubles down, and reaps a richly deserved whirlwind.
Totten endorsing Yon’s book makes me wary of him… Yon the “journalist” who claimed AQ cooked kids for dinner and served them to parents with nil evidence or followup.
Roughcoat – newer movies like City of Life and Death have been formulaic and heavy on CGI. Older films (some of them in really rough shape unfortunately) do better justice to humanity and the history of that period. Red Sorghum is a good one, and there are many more that will never be justly recognized.
Jules said:
Is that how they think? They certainly have a different attitude on trade to the American “free trade will lift all boats” mentality.
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Funny but YOU bring it up, we give them dollars. LOL.
With that said, I know of nothing better than free trade. Perhaps we could let the UN determine prices?
Barbarism was defeated so thoroughly 70 years ago that most of the Western World think it is just a boogeyman story; something that never existed except in the stories of old people to scare children today. They feel so secure they can’t comprehend the dangers of letting the plague get a foothold again. It is unfortunate they cannot conceive of the Design Margin running out.
The above sounds like the securalisation of Puritan millenarianism – permanent progress towards the perfectibility of man.
Slightly OT it reminds me of an essay written by Samuel Francis, published following the crisis in American foreign policy after Carter. Francis argued that Southerners with their historical memory of defeat, occupation, poverty, and racial strife had a more realistic, perhaps even cynical, view of the world and foreign policy in particular that was in some respects closer to the Old World and beyond than to the innocent optimism of the northeastern elite in the US. It’s called “Foreign Policy and the South” and can be read in full at Google Books (Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservartism) for those who might see parallels between now and the late 70s. I can see someone from Portland believing in Hollywood happy endings on all fronts but surely Southerners have retained their, dare I say, realism about the human condition?
The average Iraqi didn’t want his local marketplace car-bombed on a regular basis, but it happened anyway.
…
It is fundamentally a good thing to be tolerant and civilized. But in order for civilization to work, barbarism must be constantly kept at bay. In the state of nature tolerance is repaid with death. Hence, it is the duty of the King’s Justice to keep totalitarian influences in check in order to preserve the luxury of civility. You need a fund of safety in order to afford to be decent. Run out of safety and you run out of civility.
Islam has no such concepts and no such history.
Their tradition is for the most violently crazy to set the mode, if not every day, then every few years. It is the role of the educated to live within the framework the violent and crazy allow. Without minimizing the role of force in the west, this is still virtually the inverse of any western traditions.
Only brutal, secular suppression by the likes of Saddam Hussein or Hosni Mubarak has any modern traction in any Arab country, in keeping things in line.
So I cry no tears for the average Iraqi who after Saddam fell was only too eager to earn a few shekels by attacking their liberators, or to countenance their sons and brothers who would do it for them.
Barbarism was defeated so thoroughly 70 years ago that most of the Western World think it is just a boogeyman story; something that never existed except in the stories of old people to scare children today.
I must have missed that story, do you have a link?
There was just a single locus of barbarism on the planet, and it was unilaterally defeated by the forces of good? Glad to hear it. Think I’ll go have a drink and celebrate.
…
rust never sleeps, even in the glorious, enlightened west.
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It was the memory of living in dangerous places and the instincts formed thereby.
Regarding the two stories, yes, I’d say this. They both had their radars up, even if Totten had let his guard down for a few minutes. I was a kid in some semi-tough neighborhoods in New York, and the habits learned so young last a long time, never really go away.
My father saw the actual entry of Homma’s forces into Manila in 1941. They came up through what is now Pedro Gil Street (then Calle Herran) in Paco/Santa Ana District. They were bearded and unkempt from the forced marches and their tread had a distinctive sound because their shoes were iron shod to keep them from wear.
Geography being invariant, the same avenue of approach would be followed by US troops four years later. They swung around the built up section of the city which was concentrated by the seafront to the west by crossing the Pasig river upstream in the east at place called Nagtahan. The Japanese fought delaying actions centered around the Paco railway station, but eventually the US troops swung west and surrounded the defended core.
Dad lived just outside the outer ring of the Japanese defenses on what was then Pennsylvania Avenue. Had he been three hundred yards further west he would have been inside the defended core, which began on Taft Avenue, and you would not be reading these words. The Japanese dug into a built up area of reinforced concrete buildings and old Spanish fortifications measuring about 2.5 miles long x 1 mile wide. Within that were the poshest districts of pre-war Manila. The odds of surviving inside that rectangle were very small.
Some Europeans took refuge in embassies, like the Spanish or Italian, thinking they would be safe from the Japanese as aliens whose governments were friendly to Nippon. They were wrong. Ironically the American clergy were mostly interned in Los Banos, where they would be rescued by the other Great Raid (the first being in Cabanatuan and which has been made into a movie) involving an amphibious assault across the Laguna Lake. So the German, Spanish, Italian and other Europeans who were not interned would mostly die in the Battle of Manila while the British, French and American clergymen would live. The rich and middle class died too, in extraordinary numbers, the consequence of living in the best part of the city — which was in the inner defense ring.
Although I don’t think there were many ceremonial dances in Nanking, the scene effectively conveys the bleak reality of defeat. Defeat as experienced by the Germans when the Soviet Army took Berlin. The civilian population is defenseless. It’s a world without Human Rights. You would laugh even to think of it. No large American city, except Manila, which was technically American, experienced occupation in that sense.
Interestingly enough, the survivors of the Battle of Manila never call it that. They call it the Liberation. And in that word you can learn all you need to know about the attitude of the population. But whatever you call it, it was brutal.
My father remembers how the guerrillas hunted down Japanese stragglers. Teenage soldiers, really. They would be tied to poles and hundreds of people would line up to smash them with stones. Human rights goes right out the window in times like that.
The Japanese died almost literally to the last man. Of the ten thousand or more Japanese marines who formed the defense, I think 25 eventually survived, some of them because they were found unconscious by US forces. That is probably as close to annihilation as anything in military history. Just how tenacious they were beggars belief.
Years later I made the acquaintance of Colonel J.A. of the Philippine Air Force. His job was to operate the radar station on Lubang Island. While there J.A. became aware of and was later part of the hunt for Hiroo Onoda and was actually shot at by Onoda. Onoda was the last Japanese soldier of the Second World War to surrender when ordered to do by his commanding officer, who was flown to Lubang, in 1974. He had held out for 30 years.
Excellent piece, powerful point: “… the price of not winning isn’t second place. It’s no place at all.”
Already true in much of the world, and more and more, it describes the state of affairs here, too. With luck and a little kutob, like Lulu, I intend to take at least one of them with me.
Lee Smith has an article describing the White House’s new approach to genocide. They’ve created the Atrocities Prevention Board.
This really goes right to heart of the Human Rights paradox. It is not always true to argue that “violence never solves anything”. In fact you could make the case that the M1 Garand was the most successful implement for promoting Human Rights in the 20th century.
Violence is unfortunately as much a part of the peacekeeping toolkit as human rights tribunals or dramatizations are. The trick is knowing when to use it and on whom. The ultimate effectiveness of force as a human rights tool depends crucially on a correct political judgment. An Atrocities Prevention Board can do nothing by itself. The ultimate Atrocities Prevention Board is a well functioning foreign policy, backed up by a judicious use of force when necessary.
If the Obama administration is incompetent, Samantha Powers cannot save it from itself. Her Board cannot serve as a substitute for a capable foreign policy. That is a sad commentary on human affairs, but there it is.
“No large American city, except Manila, which was technically American, experienced occupation in that sense.”
Richmond, Charleston, Atlanta, and quite a few other well known names would beg to differ.
Some years ago in South Carolina law enforcement authorities were summoned to the rural residence of an elderly woman. They found a dead man, shot, in a bedroom.
They asked her what happened. She replied that she had been reading her Sunday school lesson when she heard a noise coming from her bedroom. She then discovered a man climbing though the window, got her gun, and shot him.
The law enforcement men asked her when this had occurred. She replied that it had happened earlier that evening, at about 7:30 PM.
They noted that the call for assistance had not come in until some minutes after 8 PM and asked her about the delay.
“Well,” she replied, “I had to finish reading my Sunday school lesson.”
To that lady shooting an intruder and reading her Sunday school lesson were both completely normal activities, and the gunplay could not interfere any more than necessary with her religious studies.
This sounds contradictory, but it’s not really. The Bible is a book that teaches morality but there’s plenty of examples of people dying “because he needed killin’.” Inherent in morality is its enforcement.
Roughcoat #11:
I thought it was great that when they opened the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC they began by honoring some of the soldiers who liberated the camps. One of those old troops so honored said “Shucks, we didn’t do anything but walk through the gates.” And in reply was told “But think about all you and you friends had to go through to get that far.”
I take heart in the fact that the camps were not liberated because the Nazis got tired of it all or it became unfashionable. They were liberated by armed free men.
“The Chinese learned that the price of not winning isn’t second place. It’s no place at all.”
Or as the sign above the entrance to one WWII pilot training base put it:
“It takes a lot to win a war. It takes everything you’ve got to lose one.”
There are a few old Japanese military veterans scattered around. One of the Japanese newspapers sent a reporter out to Thailand and asked one why he never returned to Japan. He said in essence he couldn’t go back and face his family after what he had done to the Chinese. He couldn’t reconcile following orders with his particular Buddhist beliefs. He felt that he was a coward and an animal.
The political history in Japan between the two wars is another interesting study about how a culture can be perverted and controlled by the few.
My belief is that man is susceptible to mob mentality and will turn into a rabid pack with little encouragement. The left thinks poverty is the cause but you can find the middle class in the mob, often directing it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
9. Wretchard: “Barbarism was defeated so thoroughly 70 years ago that most of the Western World think it is just a boogeyman story; something that never existed except in the stories of old people to scare children today. They feel so secure they can’t comprehend the dangers of letting the plague get a foothold again. It is unfortunate they cannot conceive of the Design Margin running out.”
Indeed, but in mitigation and to profitably enjoy a modern, “real” scare and demand everyone’s resistance to it, they instead conjure up the boogeyman of runaway, human-caused global warming.
1/ Totten is a metro-sexual minor travel writer who typically fearfully over dramatizes.
-Turning his a hang nail into fake a heart attack-what a drama queen!
2/The history of the Japanese in Manila and elsewhere in WW 11 is a largely untold tale.
This was a result of MacArthurs suppression of war crimes trials.
9. Wretchard: “Barbarism was defeated so thoroughly 70 years ago that most of the Western World think it is just a boogeyman story; something that never existed except in the stories of old people to scare children today. They feel so secure they can’t comprehend the dangers of letting the plague get a foothold again. It is unfortunate they cannot conceive of the Design Margin running out.”
This is only true as a matter of perception. If the intelligentsia had not convinced most of the West that the Soviet Union were not barbarians on par with the Axis, then the defeat of barbarism would not have been realized until 1990(ish). However, as Wretchard so eloquently put it barbarism didn’t die, it was lurking in our culture and institutions the whole time until we realized the infection was so widespread it had reached 1600 penn.
#18 wretchard
“They call it the Liberation”
similar to the French ,who refer to the D-day invasion of France as ” the landings”, the invasion having taken place 4 years earlier.
this, is an interesting thread –
Hawaii was placed under full Martial Law for the duration of the War in the Pacific – my ancestors were there, some went east, some went west – navy, army, air force, Marines – other – was an interesting time –
a few came back
I maybe wrong, but I believe Sun Yat-sen – was granted a Hawaii birth certificate. Which may have some relevance, even now, interestingly.
RWE #22
I thought it was great that when they opened the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC they began by honoring some of the soldiers who liberated the camps. One of those old troops so honored said “Shucks, we didn’t do anything but walk through the gates.” And in reply was told “But think about all you and you friends had to go through to get that far.”
I take heart in the fact that the camps were not liberated because the Nazis got tired of it all or it became unfashionable. They were liberated by armed free men.
Thank you for that remembrance. My father, God rest his soul, was one of those soldiers. And he never got over what he saw when his unit liberated one of the camps.
Wretchard #20
An Atrocities Prevention Board can do nothing by itself. The ultimate Atrocities Prevention Board is a well functioning foreign policy, backed up by a judicious use of force when necessary.
Just ask Roméo Dallaire how well UN peacekeeping worked in Rwanda.
Apropos of the M1 Garand, my dad got his in basic training at Fort Belvoir in 1942. The M1 is still used by the Marine Corps Silent Drill Platoon. Here is the platoon performing its drill at the sunset ceremony at Fort Henry in Ontario:
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=7416d6b0ea&c=1
On Samantha Powers and Obama’s Atrocities Prevention Board, via Wretchard @ 20 — the good & the bad.
First the bad:
Ms. Powers apparently got the gig because she wrote a book — ‘A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide’. From the Amazon.com review — “After much research, she discovered a pattern: “The United States had never in its history intervened to stop genocide and had in fact rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred,” she writes in this impressive book.” Ms. Powers is certainly a fully paid-up member of Barak Obama’s ‘I Blame America’ club.
Now the good:
Ms. Powers’ tome can be acquired via Amazon for the princely sum of 1 cent — and worth every penny!
I love it when we unworthy peons get the opportunity to vote with our wallets.
PA Cat #29:
The Nazis never got over your what your father did, either. And you can be very proud of that. We can take pride in that it took orders of magnitude more effort to liberate those camps than it did to create them.
A number of years ago I saw a Discovery Channel show that described a Jewish woman’s life in one of the camps. When she heard that the Americans had come she went to find them, since she could speak English.
She found an American soldier, went up to him and said “I am Jewish.” He replied “So am I.” She told him there were a number of woman who needed help immediately and he asked her to take him to them.
When they got to the building he opened the door and held it for her. She had to stop and stare at him. It was a man, in uniform, carrying a gun, and he was holding the door for her rather than pointing his gun at her. She said “At that moment I knew that civilization had returned.”
The Left sees sexism in that common act of courtesy and wants to get rid of it. In so doing they want to get rid of the civilization that liberated the camps.
Mac Arther gave a pass to the Japaneses war crimes and genocide of millions.
Truman gave a pass to the USSR war crimes and genocide which killed 20+ million
Why?
Hitler was a minor holocaust/genocide criminal– compared to Hirohito and Stalin.
please read about who Samatha Powers is and then re read what you have written.
Read her “bio”
Are we “fooled” again by BO ? I believe he just wants to find a job, any job for his ideological friends.
Tolerance is probably best expressed as “live and let live” but it has clearly defined limits and it is a two way street.
Tolerance has limits because some of the ways people choose to live may be barbaric and should not be tolerated, or those in charge define arbitrary limits. Tolerance is a two way street because when someone tells us, “no you can’t live as you choose; you must become our chattel or you must die” they cannot be tolerated. They may force submission but they can’t be tolerated. Forced or coerced submission is not tolerance. For the barbarian or the master of coercion, it’s a one way street; his one way street.
Like all else, the waters of tolerance are muddied depending upon who sets the limits. For example in England the Toleration Act of 1689 gave all non-conformists except Roman Catholics freedom of worship, thus rewarding Protestant dissenters for their refusal to side with James II. Every flavour of Protestantism was tolerated but Catholics were not.
Fingerspitzengefühl is the phrase that came to my mind. It’s good to know a Tagalog analog.
“If the Obama administration is incompetent, Samantha Powers cannot save it from itself. Her Board cannot serve as a substitute for a capable foreign policy.”
Powers is part of the administration and one of the foremost incompetents within that administration. She is Senior Director of Multilateral Affairs on the Staff of the National Security Council. In March of 2011, the NYT reported that she was an adviser to Obama on foreign policy.
“She is clearly the foremost voice for human rights within the White House,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, “and she has Obama’s ear.”
Arguably, Power is one of the administration’s formulators of our foreign policy.
Her ‘board’ and the mind-set it represents is our foreign policy.
“Just give it a chance, it’ll work, you’ll see” say the children in the disguise of adults.
toadold 23,
“… you can find the middle class in the mob, often directing it.”
Nazism was or is middle class socialism. It was based not on industrial labor but small tradesmen and hired functionaries.
RWE 31,
Thank you for that fine story.
This is a fine thread in the best BC tradition.
@ 14 (baobo) >>”…Yon the “journalist” who claimed AQ cooked kids for dinner and served them to parents with nil evidence or followup.>
Yon made no such claim.
He said that he was told this story by Iraqis, and even said that he couldn’t verify the authenticity of the report. And I took the point to be about what the Iraqis in that area thought of AQ, and how they were willing to characterize AQ to a westerner.
It’s a matter of record, you can go look it up for yourself.
Of course youth does not know that our culture is infested with small manners that history endows with significance beyond the actual action. Each time we hold a door or walk on the outside of a lady on the sidewalk we remember, somewhere deep in our communal cultural all the acts that lead to our civilised society.
Forty odd years ago my wife and I took our first overseas holiday together in Tunisia. We hired a car, in those days an adventurous decision, and drove to towns on the edge of the desert. We stopped at a car park next to the souk in one and a twelve year old offered to “Guard your car” in excellent English, “so no one will take it.” When we got back two hours later he was still there. There was never any chance anyone would take it, the county was almost entirely crime free but it was a dollar very well spent.
We were in Yugoslavia a year before the country fell apart. Again a courteous and civilised country. Unutterably sad for the citizens of these countries and scary to know that chaos and death lie just a whisker away from our civilised life.
Some historical perspective is needed here. Barbarism extinguishes civilizations who abandon the “rough and ready men who stand ready to do violence upon civilization’s behalf”. But without a sustaining ideology, such as Islam, barbarism and those who use violence to take what they wish, cannot impose that violence indefinitely.
They cannot because civilized men have an inherent and unmatchable advantage over violent men. Civilization requires cooperation, barbarians tear down civilizations. Material progress requires long term cooperation. Barbarianism can only sustain itself through parasitism. Which is why Islam floundered, when it ran out of more advanced civilizations to plunder. (Islam’s current success is illusive & temporary, it cannot survive another century of exposure to the West)
No matter how often barbarians tear down civilizations, new ones always arise because the cooperative impulse is a more evolved response, it is simply a more adaptive response. ‘Friendly’ or ‘civilized’ competition is simply cooperation placed within the context of a ‘contest’ (which inspires individual initiative) to see who shall excel at providing what society ( a cooperative entity) desires.
In the action movies that our society loves so much, the one thing writers get right is the intolerance of failure by the ruthless, resulting in the inevitable winnowing of the prior resources available to the barbarian. Consequentially the ruthlessly winnowed never gain the experience necessary to maturity. As time goes by, the ruthless elite are winnowed in a fierce struggle for survival and inevitably the barbarian’s strength is lessened. Think about what killing Rommel cost Hitler.
The reason why we accept the movies romantic notion that the good guy will win is because the good guy is a symbol for what we all sense, that in the long run, cooperation is a better strategy for more of us getting what we want and so we subconsciously recognize that which the symbol represents, cooperation, has triumphed over the centuries, over and over again. So, in the end, the good must triumph over the evil, which is compelled by its very nature, to “shoot itself in the foot”.
And that it seems to me is why, over the centuries, civilizations have, through starts and stops, progressed upward in man’s understanding and control of his environment.
Why would it stop now?
The historic causes of conflict and war are fairly well understood. Power, economics, religion, vast cultural differences. Modern conflicts are adding a new and large player–the unintelligent. In the modern, connected world, it is not possible for the unintelligent to be unaware of their disadvantage. Many of those peoples see Islam as their ticket to equality, and many in an equality mad world will help them, like Cicero’s traitors within the gates.
STOP THE PRESSES!
Feds make first arrest in BP oil spill http://tinyurl.com/83tw7rg
Now Eric Holder has done it! He has bumbled into Algebra Land!!!!
Okay class, pull out your calculators and follow along.
Q) If each barrel of oil is 42 gallons, and the total flow was “200 million gallons”, what was the total flow in barrels rounded off to the nearest barrel?
A) 200,000,000 / 42 = 4,761,905 barrels
Q) If the oil was flowing into the sea for 84 days (the rig sank on the morning of Day 3, April 22, 2010, starting the flow of oil on BP’s account per presiding Federal Judge Barbier, and the flow was stopped on the afternoon of Day 87, July 15, 2010) what was the average daily flow of oil that the government alleges took place?
A) 4,761,905 / 84 = 56,689 barrels per day
Q) By how much did Mix underestimate the flow of oil according to the mathematicians of the Justice Department?
A) 56,689 – 15,000 = 41,689 barrels per day
So to prove his case, Eric Holder will have to prove, under oath, that there actually was a flow of 56,689 barrels per day when BP had estimated it at only 15,000 barrels per day. His estimate is 3.78 times as high as Mix’s. Want to guess who is going to be proven to have been closer to the truth?
CHU LIED, DOLPHINS DIED!!!!!!!
Hmmmmmmmmm! How’s this for a new Romney campaign slogan?
IT’S THE ALGEBRA, STUPID!
or maybe
I AM GOOD AT MATH!
+1 for the Julian Jaynes allusion, Wretchard!
It was quite something for JJ to take a speculative step (swing?) out along the branch and publish that book. A very courageous decision, as Humphrey Appleby would have said. But he had tenure and was at the tail end of a distinguished career.
Less filtering, more of the feedstuff for auto-didacticism – perhaps the blogosphere and inter tubes will result in more JJs, not to mention Jerry Pournelles…. ignoring for a moment that Hitler and Stalin were both largely autodidacts. Now where did I misplace that monolith?
38- Yon’s disclaimer only serves my point. The story was hideous and graphic enough to demand investigation, which he didn’t provide. It was casually dropped like “I heard there’s a sale at Macy’s!”
Rather like Kelly Mcevers’ reporting on Homs atrocities… she pathetically chokes back tears while admitting the news is third-hand and uncertain. Would you also defend Marie Colvin’s career?
Michael Yon has problems. He’s a sick man if he made up “baked children”, and almost as bad if he didn’t.
I’m hoping I live long enough to see the west have it’s moment of presentiment about Islam. As long as there are fools like Totten, Civilization will be in danger from the barbarians of Mohammed. To recognise the danger is too negate it.
I still think my ‘Y’ plan is the best solution.
The Rape of Nanking — 1937 [i.e., NOT caused by us Americans]
“The Japanese were infuriated by the strength of Chinese resistance, and when China’s Nationalist capital Nanking fell in December 1937, Japanese troops immediately slaughtered thousands of Chinese soldiers who had surrendered to them.
“The Japanese then rounded up about twenty thousand young Chinese men and transported them in trucks outside the city walls where they were killed in a massive slaughter. Japanese troops were then encouraged by their officers to loot Nanking, and slaughter and rape the Chinese population of the city.
“For six weeks, life for the Chinese in Nanking became a nightmare. Bands of drunken Japanese soldiers roamed the city, murdering, raping, looting, and burning at whim. Chinese civilians who were stopped on the street, and found to possess nothing of value, were immediately killed.
“At least twenty thousand Chinese women were raped in Nanking during the first four weeks of the Japanese occupation, and many were mutilated and killed when the Japanese troops were finished with them.
“The Japanese troops were encouraged by their officers to invent ever more horrible ways to slaughter the Chinese population of the city. When the bodies of murdered Chinese choked the streets and the gutters ran red with their blood, the Japanese were forced to refine their methods of slaughter in the interest of preventing the spread of disease.
“Batches of Chinese civilians were rounded up and herded into slaughter pits. Here the grinning Japanese soldiers would either bury them alive, hack them to death with their swords, use them for bayonet practice, or pour petrol on the victims and burn them alive. The bodies of thousands of victims of the slaughter were dumped into the Yangtze River until the river was red with their blood. After looting Nanking of anything of value, the Japanese started fires that gutted one third of the city.”
But hey! the Smithsonian Institute wanted to put up an “evenhanded” (i.e., Jap apologist) exhibit about the A-bomb. That was barely deflected by still-living Pacific Theater vets and the Chinese. But when their generation is gone, expect the Japs and the Nazis to get full rehabilitation treatment by the Quisling Left.
We should train our children and selves to think how to survive danger. Look at the Norway massacre. The killer relates how victims stood still and stared as he reloaded. Then he killed them. Evil is not unthinkable.
wws @ 21
Never forget.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Selma
“Jubilant Union troops looted the city that night, and many businesses and private residences were burned. Wilson’s men spent the next week destroying the arsenal and naval foundry. Finally, they left Selma and moved on to Montgomery and fought the Battle of Columbus, Georgia on Easter Sunday, and finally marched to Macon, Georgia, when they learned of the war’s end.”
11 “Relatedly, I was working with Iris Chang on a book about the fall of the Philippines when she committed suicide. We used to talk about the similarity of psychological reactions to writing books about massacres (my book covered the Holocaust in Poland). Iris told me that working on her Nanking book had occasioned bouts of severe depression.”
Iris was a close friend of mine and as she requested I did a film treatment of the book for her after Sony put a kibosh on the project. I encouraged her to do the project on Hedy Lamarr’s contribution to the war effort after Nanking–hoping it would lighten life up a bit–but instead she went toward the Bataan Death March.
Few people are able to look fully into the face of death without flinching. Dear Iris was not one.
Wretchard,
Thank you for this fine and timely post. So many seem to think “it can’t happen here” and “but, we are different”. So close to the razor’s edge.
Thomas Sowell wrote “Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.” Our enemies understood this all too well, and as a result of “progressive education” we are no longer the people we once were. There is nothing in our genes that makes us Americans as we once were. The traditions and viewpoints that made us what we were are so diluted now that it seems unlikely that we will respond well if the danger looming all around comes out of the shadows. There are still some Americans in the old sense, but so few, so few. And just being born here has little to do with it.
I’m afraid that the United States has lost sight of the dangers of barbarism. It hasn’t been bred out of us. It has fallen off the back edge of our collective experience. I suspect that I’m young by the standards of this crowd — 45 years old. I am too young to remember the Martin Luther King riots. I remember the Rodney King riots, but those happened 20 years ago. Now we have an entire generation of young people being groomed and prepared for violent riots this summer. The OWS mobs. The Zimmerman mob. They seem to be mostly in their early 20s so they have no memory or experience of the reality of any civil unrest. From the President organizing the Zimmerman lynch mob to OWS preparing to kill the wealthy, to the conservatives buying guns and ammunition and vowing to defend themselves and their communities with everything they’ve got, there is entirely too much of a feeling of inevitability about this. we seem to be preparing for civil war not because of any injustice that could possibly be solved by civil war, but simply because it’s been too long since our nation has done this to itself for us to understand what we are doing. The next 8 months may turn out to be the greatest national crisis faced by this generation.
49. Lucy
Iris was wonderful. Incidentally, we were working together on a book about the Provisional Tank Group (192nd and 194th Tank Bns) on Bataan, not the Bataan Death March per se. I had already done much work on this subject prior to her contacting me, and I made several of my interview tapes available to her. I also gave her contacts and advised her on tank warfare in general and the employment of M3 light tanks on Luzon in particular–operations, tactics, etc. We spoke on the phone several times in this regard and also about our respective projects (Holocaust, Nanking). And then suddenly I didn’t hear from her anymore. Weeks later I received a phone call giving me the terrible news.
Afterward I considered proceeding with the project but decided against it. Now I’m thinking of going forward with it again. Still have many, many hours of interviews on tape plus personal letters and suchlike.
“If the Obama administration is incompetent, Samantha Powers cannot save it from itself. Her Board cannot serve as a substitute for a capable foreign policy. That is a sad commentary on human affairs, but there it is.”
The Jewish people have long memory. That is a key to survival. The Exodus from Egypt could have been yesterday for me because it has been preserved in our calender and service. After thousands of years in exile Jersusalem was always right over the next hill. On one of those hills sits Yad Vashem. Senator Barak Obama was there in 2008.
In my lifetime a new day has been added to the Jewish calender – Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial Day and if the rest of the world forgets what happened 70 years ago, the Jewish people will not.
In an act of extreme chutzpah the American president showed up at the Holocaust museum in DC 5 days late to mark the observence. He used the event as another campaign speech, crowing about the creation of his new board. That board is to be headed by Samantha Powers. Yes, the same Samantha Powers who has called for the US military to be deployed against Israel and the creation of a robustly armed US funded Palestinian military. A military which would have only one purpose, to destroy the Jews and drive them from their refuge.
He says these things without the slightest hint of doubt or shame. He descrates the memory of the fallen and anything we may have learned from it by appointing someone who would happily plant the seeds, even provide the bullets, to do it again.
It is not anger I feel at this slap in the face it is sadness that it has come to this state of affairs where common decency is not only violated, it does not seem to exist in the first place. “Dont worry Jews, Samantha Powers has your back” Heh, we have our own backs to watch Mr President.
Senator Obama said some nice words and wore a white yarmulke at Yad Vashem, another photo-op. He speaks well but he missed an opportunity to listen to the silent voices within that place, i dont think he is capable of that.
re 50. John Work
“Thomas Sowell wrote “Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.” Our enemies understood this all too well, and as a result of “progressive education” we are no longer the people we once were.”
appropos of the Sowell’s observation:
“A proposal from the Obama administration to prevent children from doing farm chores…a rule that would apply child-labor laws to children working on family farms, prohibiting them from performing a list of jobs on their own families’ land.
…would also revoke the government’s approval of safety training and certification taught by independent groups like 4-H and FFA, replacing them instead with a 90-hour federal government training course.”
http://dailycaller.com/2012/04/25/rural-kids-parents-angry-about-labor-dept-rule-banning-farm-chores/
GB@40 “And that it seems to me is why, over the centuries, civilizations have, through starts and stops, progressed upward in man’s understanding and control of his environment.
Why would it stop now?”
I would say that it would stop because the so called progressives have gotten inside of societies OODA loop. They have effectively re-educated an entire demographic into believing that societies self-interest no longer resides within itself but within the environment in which it lives so in that sense your question contains the seed to the answer. Leftists successfully blame industry and capitalism in our educational institutions in a relentless broadcast of self-affirming mistruths. I have been a victim of these anti-human rants throughout the course of my adult education so know. Industry is bad, capitalism is bad, conservatism is bad, Republicanism is bad… this has become a state religion. One need not go as far as the Sierra Club or Pita to realize that the true believers of that faith assure its adherents that mankind itself is bad. Conversely, environment is good and must be protected from civilization.
We are a nation founded on the universal rights of man and it is being converted, through extra-constitutional law into a nation that respects only the universal rights of Gaia. At least a few of the posters here are good with that perhaps in mans perfection we are to realize that God makes mistakes after all, and the new laity must be appropriately armed to set it right.
Wretchard@20: “If the Obama administration is incompetent, Samantha Powers cannot save it from itself. Her Board cannot serve as a substitute for a capable foreign policy. That is a sad commentary on human affairs, but there it is.”
The Obama administration has gone beyond mere imcompetence. It is now better described as either outright treasonous or moonbat delusional, depending on how optimistic you are.
54. Jay & 50. John Work
Ronald Reagan also spoke to this with prescience:
“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.
We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream.
It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same,
or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children
and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States
where men were free.”
About Islam, I’ve studied it a bit and left a comment about Robert Spencer’s new book on whether Muhammad existed or not at Zombie’s blog. Spencer obviously got his material from “The Hidden Origin of Islam”, Karl-Heinz Ohlig and Gerd-R. Puin, eds. That is a book I’d highly recommend to the readers here at the Belmont Club. (It’s too scholarly and “dry” for average folks.)
But Islam–you know, I don’t think we appreciate all its madness “from within” well enough; i.e., what could possibly be its attraction? Anarchy. The thrill of the old-time bomb throwers. The exhilaration of the old-time anarchists felt when they envisioned a world fundamentally free of “civilized” restraints. The thrill I experienced when I did insane things with my hot rod back when I was a (-n otherwise boring) kid.
Anarchy can be very, very tempting. Loosing the bonds of “civilized” men, living a total adrenaline rush with a handful of like-minded bros. Those dirt bags who attacked Lulu probably felt it. I’m sure it explains a lot of violent behavior by people who otherwise have to traction in society. Barbarism calls to such people, “Come on! Take down the man! They’ll never let you into the good life, so take it from ‘em!” Mr. Hyde, indeed.
Vanguard of the Commentariat at 4., when he wrote: “I have to tell you, I never felt freer than when I was out there on the edge of doctrine with nothing but my instinct, training and the skill of my crew,” knew the feeling in its good sense, but it can be conjured up by doing evil as well as fighting the good fight. Islam, I think, conjures it up, full-bore. I think that is why Islam is successful, ultimately. Why go from being a wage slave drudge living in air conditioning to what is essentially a murderous bum living in a cave? Well…the wage slave rarely has that adrenaline rush.
In other words, I don’t think we can fight Islam easily, at least not intellectually, because it speaks to that wolf inside every domesticated dog, as it were. It gives our intellects something to thrill to that otherwise we cannot get, unless we shoot up grandmas.
The ancient Greeks, at least, could yearly participate in the “Mysteries” where they wound themselves up into a frenzy and went truly “out of their minds” like the kids did in “The Secret History”. For those of you who read that haunting novel, remember how Henry was never the same afterwards he ripped that chicken farmer apart out in the woods, while running mad, out of his mind, literally, with the god Dionysus in company. Had Henry not killed himself, he definitely would have added to his tally of murders.
Islam is the Dionysian frenzies lived full-throttle whenever you want to want the rush.
And the rush is addictive.
An Préachán
Samantha Powers will never read or understand, blinded as she is by her ideology, the following report:
www1.rollingstone.com/extras/RS_REPORT.pdf
In her mind, the Americans are utterly responsible for the barbarism inflicted upon the Iraqis by AQI in the same manner that we are responsible for starving people in North Korea. She sits at the feet of Jimmy Carter.
I would request Wretchard peruse the article for the other matters covered. Your insight would be valued.
A tragic heroine of Nanking:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnie_Vautrin
Wilhelmina (Minnie) Vautrin (September 27, 1886 – May 14, 1941) was an American missionary renowned for saving the lives of many women at the Ginling Girls College in Nanjing, China, during the Nanking Massacre.
When the Japanese army invaded Battle of Nanjing in December 1937, she and the other foreigners in the city, including John Rabe, worked to protect the civilians in the Nanking Safety Zone. Ginling Girls College became a haven of refuge, at times harboring up to 10,000 women in a college designed to support between 200 and 300. With only her wits and the use of an American flag, Vautrin was largely able to repel incursions into her college.
Minnie recounted the horrors of the war in her diary in 1937:
“There probably is no crime that has not been committed in this city today. Thirty girls were taken from language school last night, and today I have heard scores of heartbreaking stories of girls who were taken from their homes last night—one of the girls was but 12 years old. Food, bedding and money have been taken from people. … I suspect every house in the city has been opened, again and yet again, and robbed. Tonight a truck passed in which there were eight or ten girls, and as it passed they called out “Jiu ming! Jiu ming!”—save our lives. The occasional shots that we hear out on the hills, or on the street, make us realize the sad fate of some man—very probably not a soldier.”
On 19 December :
“In my wrath, I wished I had the power to smite them for their dastardly work. How ashamed women of Japan would be if they knew these tales of horror.”[1]
In 1938, she wrote in her diary that she had to go to the Japanese embassy repeatedly from December 18 to January 13 to get proclamations to prohibit Japanese soldiers from committing crimes at Ginling because the soldiers tore the documents up before taking women away.[2]
In 1940, weary and stressed, Vautrin took a furlough again from her work. A few months later, haunted by the images she saw and feeling responsible for not being able to save more lives, Vautrin committed suicide by turning on the stove gas in her small apartment in Indianapolis.[3]
After the war, Vautrin was posthumously awarded the Emblem of the Blue Jade by the Chinese government for her sacrifices during the Nanjing Massacre. Her work saving the lives of Chinese civilians during the massacre is recounted in the biographical book, American Goddess at the Rape of Nanking, written by historian Hua-ling Hu.
An Préachán @58 “Anarchy can be very, very tempting. Loosing the bonds of “civilized” men, living a total adrenaline rush with a handful of like-minded bros.”
I try not to preoccupy myself with doomsday scenario thinking but something that recently did come to mind was what uniforms do the enemy wear? What came to mind was this, anyone who wears their pants down below their @sses are a self identifying enemy. They may indeed be wanna-be’s but even wanna-be Comanche’s were shot on sight. Distributed across the US are armed citizens that have watched in fear as the rule of law has been subverted by our politicians. It is like OJ Goes to Washington. Our courts have parsed the 10 commandments into varying shades of what “is” is. When the thrill seeking youth start terrorizing the neighborhoods their ranks will swell. Especially in the victim class neighborhoods where children are allowed by their elders to murder. By the time however that they make their way into the bedroom communities of middle America they will be shocked at the ferocity in which they are hunted and killed on sight.
Naturally the guv will step in to protect the little murderers. That is when liberty will be at its greatest peril. Can liberty survive an armed OWS?
Christianity teaches us that we are stewards of our environment. Now the guv is the sole steward of the environment… and us.
I don’t claim to understand all this.
If you follow and act out your violent instinct to fight are you therefore correct to assume that the end justifies the means? In the face of imminent mortal danger that sounds right, but not in other situations. Fine for Grandma Campbell, but would it have been OK to assassinate Hitler in 1937 (maybe)…or in 1944 (yes)? Or how about Obama today (no).
It all sounds much like Stewart’s approach to pornography: you can’t define it but you know it when you see it. The mechanisms — whether ‘presentiment’ or Filpina cultural memory or, maybe, the martial beat of the taiko drum — don’t seem to matter much. But the paralysis of analysis can certainly kill you. Likewise the inability to damn the torpedoes and steam ahead. We should always rely on that old reptilian brain stem, maybe.
AP @ 58: In other words, I don’t think we can fight Islam easily, at least not intellectually, because it speaks to that wolf inside every domesticated dog, as it were. It gives our intellects something to thrill to that otherwise we cannot get, unless we shoot up grandmas.
But we do “fight Islam” every day, in order to be of western mind, we have already fought and won that battle.
When you buy into any culture, any group (any pack!), you gain that power. One of Islam’s best tricks is to suppress any power but itself, one of the points Bernard Lewis makes about Islam is the suppression of any secular groups, no boy scouts, no bridge club, no baseball teams, no government schools, no political parties, no separate secular government at all, if you give them their say. Frank Herbert notes this in Dune as well, that accurate insight into Islamic culture written well before 9/11, that combining the religious and secular authorities creates a juggernaut.
And of course, the western fantasy of the perfection of the state of nature is our version of Islam – submission to nature! Which Hobbes answered so long ago. Yet this remains a core assumption to modern leftism as well – join the “liberal” pack and be by association superior, elite, your will overrides written law, your judgement overrides precedent, your immediate pleasure justifies eating the seed corn, etc.
I’m leafing through another of Barbara Tuchman’s books, “The March of Folly”, that tells three stories: How the medieval popes motivated the reformation, how Britain lost the American colonies, how America “betrayed itself in Vietnam”. Tuchman is an excellent writer, but it’s painful reading her stuff now, she wrote as a “liberal” back when that was still respectable (I believe it stopped being respectable after two events, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the accession of the Clintons to Washington). So, Tuchman is unrestrained in her sanctimony, in her assumption of how things could have been better as any clear-thinking person could see. She makes her points, but rather presumptuously even then. ANYWAY, I bring this all up in the context of the Rape of Nanking. Seriously, what did the Japanese think was going to happen, what could the benefits of such actions be? Well, perhaps we can imagine some rationales, which I think we have to judge in the event failed, but my further point is the effect this has even today on China/Japan relations. Could be another case for Ms. Tuchman. Barbarism, yes, and there’s nothing much uglier than a failed barbarism in retrospect. Though, Tuchman’s main focus is on failed stupidities in retrospect, not necessarily the same thing, though there’s a lot of overlap.
58. An Préachán
Anarchy can be very, very tempting. Loosing the bonds of “civilized” men, living a total adrenaline rush with a handful of like-minded bros. Those dirt bags who attacked Lulu probably felt it. I’m sure it explains a lot of violent behavior by people who otherwise have to traction in society. Barbarism calls to such people, “Come on! Take down the man! They’ll never let you into the good life, so take it from ‘em!” Mr. Hyde, indeed. … Islam, I think, conjures it up, full-bore. I think that is why Islam is successful, ultimately.
It also explains why Islam is spreading like wildfire among the prison population. When your violent, murderous inclinations and criminal behavior are sanctioned by Allah, it’s a natural fit. Islam was founded by desert bandits and caravan raiders.
63. Josh
Josh, Tuchman was terrific writer and storyteller, but her understanding of history and historical processes was decidedly Marxian. Her scholarship is thus often fatally compromised by her ideological views. And she stumbled in other areas as well. In “The Guns of August,” for instance, she completely misinterpreted what happened in those opening weeks of the Great War, crediting Gallieni as France’s savior on the Marne when in fact it was Joffre–calm, decisive, unafraid–who saved his nation from a catastrophic defeat. “The March of Folly” is, IMO, well-nigh unreadable.
It seems to me that after slaying the last of their dragons and consigning the lessons and dangers to fading memories and myth, every materially successful civilization of men eventually goes about the business of building their very own Tower of Babel wherein they strive to lift themselves up as the equal of their god[s]…Only to have the whole edifice collapse around their ears in a struggle to communicate through the babble of a thousand different tongues.
Cooperation turns to rubble when a people speak irreconcilable gibberish in argument over irreconcilable moral frameworks resting upon degenerate foundations that have been fundamentally transformed and atomized into liquifacting sand.
Hubris in self-destruction is the mortal curse of godmen.
Annoy Mouse @ 55,
The potential collapse of the West to the ‘barbarians’ of the left will not prevent other civilizations from arising, nor extinguish the cooperative impulse. The left has an ideology, the requisite for long term oppression but that ideology is anti-reality, which means it contains the seeds of its own collapse.
‘Cooperation’ does not equate to the essential slavery that the left’s “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” ideology demands. The premises underlying the left’s indoctrination of our societies children cannot withstand the test of time. How successful can any society be whose members believe that they have a right to a lifetime of free support from society?
Therefore any society created in affirmation of the left’s bromides must in time collapse. Look to Europe for confirmation.
The West may indeed collapse but Islam will not emerge triumphant. Three reasons; wretchard’s Three Conjectures, Russia, China. Neither Russia nor China are susceptible to pacifism. The day that Islam seriously threatens China is the day Mecca turns into a glass parking lot.
The most probable faction to emerge ‘at the top of the heap’ in a collapse of the West scenario is China. Historical perspective however reminds us that China lacks the societal infrastructure to effectively rule over disparate cultures, so fears of China ‘taking over the world’ are misplaced. China’s communist ideology is anti-reality too, so it will either continue to change or eventually extinguish itself.
In any case, IMO the rise of the West in the age of Enlightenment was not a historic accident but inevitable. Truth, which is simply objective reality, impels civilizations upwards. However much certain aspects of human nature seek to derail that process, resulting in the alternating periods of enlightenment and dark ages mankind experiences, history demonstrates that taken as a whole, civilizations trend upward as they rise and fall.
Mankind responds to truth and those individuals whose insights inspire the cooperative impulse in men. Even should America fall, the ‘self-evident truth’s’ contained in our Declaration and their formulation into our Constitution shall endure because they are really concepts of what reality consists and how best to govern in harmony with objective reality. The more accurate the conception of reality, the more enduring the idea because over a long enough period of time, reality always emerges triumphant. It is, what it is.
Look at the Norway massacre. The killer relates how victims stood still and stared as he reloaded. Then he killed them. Evil is not unthinkable.
Modern Scandinavians are ‘Eloi.’ If I recall correctly, H.G. Wells described the Eloi in a way that they could be said to look Scandinavian, or at least Nordic.
The Danes may be different from their northern cousins, to be fair.
About that “Atrocities Board:”
The very name and designation of “board” shows the unseriousness of the initiative. In turn this lack of seriousness shows how contemptuous the Left really is of the victims of genocide. A ‘board’ is somethig one forms to deal with municipal issues, like waste management or police-civilian relations, or sewage control. Samantha Powers doesn’t really give a flying rat’s ass about the actual slaughters; she’s simply interested in being in charge of a process pretending to be a solution.
I believe she was the prime motivator behind the unconstitutional Lybian military misadventure.
“every materially successful civilization of men eventually goes about the business of building their very own Tower of Babel wherein they strive to lift themselves up as the equal of their god[s]…Only to have the whole edifice collapse around their ears”
Yet civilizations continue to arise more advanced than the prior highest standard. Not merely technologically but ethically. Not in every way but significantly enough to deserve that assessment.
Athens was more advanced than Ur, Rome more advanced than Athens, Victorian England more than Rome and American civilization is more advanced than Victoria’s England.
None of that denies the human impulse to ‘fly too close to the sun’ and build our towers of babel but everything has its lifetime and freedom is a two edged sword. We have the right to make bad decisions as well as good ones.
So civilizations rise and fall, mankind experiences periods of enlightenment and darkness and the struggle between good and evil continues onto the ‘end of the world’. As terrible as “man’s inhumanity to man” is, mankind increases in his understanding and control of his environment. It continues upwards and must, at some point, lead to an adaptive mutation; the singularity…(which cannot be merely technological, think of the movie 2001), which shall be the end of history (as we know it).
spindok@53,
Not as long as they act as if they have no memory, and keep trying to climb into bed with those who will destroy them.
Remembering history does not save people from repeating it.
One huge difference between today and the days of WWII is that our fathers and grandfathers had a firmly anchored common moral platform on which they could stand together and recognize the evil on the horizon.
That platform, the Judeo-Christian Tradition, under constant atttack by the relativists is no longer common enough or big enough to support a shared experience of good and evil. What person shall define good and evil in the absence of tradition? Samantha Powers?
When the California Supreme Court declared Prop 8 unconstitutional the majority opinion contained a section that said that not only was opposition to homosexual marriage wrongheaded but that merely holding such a belief was “dangerous” to society. Did you get that? The highest court of the most populous state has declared that Catholic teaching and beliefs are a danger to society.
Does that make Catholics subversives? That seems to be the trend.
70. Geoffrey Britain
True, true.
Although I suspect the hope offered in knowing the certainty of that distant future incremental step up the ladder is of little use or consequence to the shell-shocked remnants consigned to inherit the newest endarkenment.
Every step up the rungs to greater heights increases the depths of the concomitant fall to the concrete floor.
One day human technology may prove to have allowed us to reach such a height that the grounding may prove terminal.
56. Ignominious
outright treasonous or moonbat delusional
Great phrase, captures everything but the snickering.
r @ 65: Tuchman was terrific writer and storyteller, but her understanding of history and historical processes was decidedly Marxian. … “The March of Folly” is, IMO, well-nigh unreadable.
Seems that way to me, too, which is why I just said I’m leafing through it, to get an idea of her basic assumptions, then try to read and deconstruct her views mainly on Vietnam. But Marxian … I dunno about that, progressive, and rationalist, which Marxism also purports to be, but not especially either pro or anti-communist. Just good ol’ soft-headed western liberalism which, again, I think one has to read differently now than one might have twenty years ago.
I picked up the book along with “First Salute” that I just read, and the introductory chapters, about how the first naval salute to the US flag came from a Dutch port, rather oddly distorts the trends and movements of the Renaissance and the differences (and similarities) between the American story and previous events. OTOH she gets around later on, in a more conventional telling of the later Revolutionary War, to telling things straight, plus or minus any confusions of fact. Both books were written very late in her career, and seem a little disjointed generally, though she’s still a great wordsmith.
GB, I grant that you have taken the long view and are correct. My only regret is that I might not be around to enjoy it. But what you describe can be fairly explained as the pendulum of common belief. It is sad that it cannot linger in the median state before swinging to the margins of rationality. In that sense it is possible that our so-called progressive society in Western culture is merely a blow-back from the excesses of WWII. Our current crop mark human progress by impugning the status quo of past generations to the extent that they obsess with the ethical short comings of our forefathers. Progress is undeniable but progressive thought seeks to relegate our foundational ethics like the constitution itself to obsolescence. I’d rather think that some ethics are hard to improve upon.
75. Josh
Tuchman often, in most of her works, states explicitly or makes implicit references to “History” as if it is a thing with a will and a direction, operating autonomously and sentiently. As if History itself was an engine of events, running on its own power, self-pertuating, self-determining, and thus functioning as a determinant of other aspects of life. That’s a Marxian concept (not Marxist, necessarily; I didn’t say she was a Marxist, although she may been; or at the least she may have been extremely pink bordering on red). See especially in this regard “A Distant Mirror.”
Most liberals nowadays are Marxian (not Marxist) to a greater or lesser degree, the more so as liberalism has moved leftward. Which is why it actually makes sense for liberals to think of themselves as progressives: the notion that “History” (with a capital H) is moving, inevitably, ever forward. But history does not move in any direction: it just happens. It is not a living creature with a destiny. And nothing about it is inevitable. History with a small-h is supremely contingent. Ergo, free will.
Which is not to say there isn’t a narrative arc to existence. As a Catholic, I believe there is. But the narrative–i.e., the drama of good and evil that will all be resolved at the end of time–should not be confused with the Marxian/Marxist concept of capital-H History.
51. jms: “we seem to be preparing for civil war not because of any injustice that could possibly be solved by civil war, but simply because it’s been too long since our nation has done this to itself for us to understand what we are doing.”
Respectfully, you are wrong. If there is widespread bloodshed, it will be because of a difference in ideologies. One side believes in personal property, personal responsibility and rule of law without prejudice. The other side believes in State control of all property, no personal responsibility and rule by fiat. Our only peaceful way back is a return to Constitutional government as proscribed in the document and strictly enforced. I don’t worry about which side will win, liberals are cowards at heart. I worry more about the circling vultures, waiting for a weakened defense to exploit.
r @ 77: Marxian
Is that actually a word? Google seems to deprecate it, and the first entries it turns up don’t give a coherent definition that I can differentiate from a generic Marxist/Marxism.
I once explained to a boss that we’d have to switch from assembler coding to Pascal because of Historical Necessity. You can imagine how well that went over!
If Tuchman speaks in those terms I gather it’s similarly more of a rhetorical flourish than a philosophical statement, though I claim no particular expertise on Tuchman, Marx, Hegel, history, or History. Marx for me is exemplified by, “Hello, I must be going!”
There is an instability in civilization.
In that it is helpless before nihilism, nihilism which is inevitability bred into some of civilization’s members.
As Mr Britain points out (#40), nihilism is unable to exist without civilization. Hence the ever escalating oscillations between the development of civilization and its consequent pruning.
Annoy (#55) The pruning has to be so extreme as uproot the entire Leftist educational system.
I am optimistic that the oscillations are ratcheting upward, but not that I will live to see it.
79. Josh
It is a word. Thomas Sowell uses it. I learned it from him. With Tuchman it is no mere rhetorical flourish. And Google is Marxian.
Roughcoat @ 77 – But history does not move in any direction: it just happens. It is not a living creature with a destiny. And nothing about it is inevitable. History with a small-h is supremely contingent. Ergo, free will.
Geez, I spent an entire hour preparing a analysis of the ‘Absalom Revolution’ against King David as an illustration of how free will is not in conflict with the divine hand that controls the direction and outcome of the travails of mankind. Guess it was not efficacious.
The missing variable in the calculations of mankind is the spiritual component. Psychiatrists and psychologist, for example, cannot fathom that all mankind is bipolar in nature, due to the influence of the contamination from the garden, the knowledge of good and evil resident in the soul as the sin nature.
But, but, people are basically good. Yes, many chose to follow that path, but there is also in each one capacity for great evil.
Most important for the present issue that, in a manner that does not violate the free will of mankind, God manages to control the outcome. He (formal use of 1st person masculine) knows how it will all unfold and, in fact, is steering the course toward a specific outcome.
Ask yourself, as you contemplate this, why Israel, and the middle east has always been the caldron of conflict, never suffering permanent resolution. Prophesy says something interesting about a huge conflict near Megiddo in the Valley of Jezreel.
History of mankind will unfold exactly as prophesied, unfortunately, much has been omitted. Perhaps that’s to keep us guessing.
AM @ 76,
“what you describe can be fairly explained as the pendulum of common belief. It is sad that it cannot linger in the median state before swinging to the margins of rationality.”
It is tragic until one considers that real progress requires the movement of the pendulum. Otherwise an object at rest tends to remain at rest until acted upon by an outside force.
Impugning the status quo of past generations first came to my attention in Oct of 1985, I was just 27 and the rock group ‘Jefferson Starship’ had a no.1 hit, “We built this city” whose “lyrics describe a city built on rock n’ roll music. The lyrics explicitly mention the Golden Gate Bridge and refer to “The City By The Bay”". Tony Bennett must have been amused at the hubris. I found the lyrics offensive, as they denigrate the generations who had toiled and sacrificed to bequeath, to an ungrateful boomer generation, a great nation and city.
“some ethics are hard to improve upon”
Indeed, how does one improve on the truth? ‘Truth’ being defined as that which seeks to ever more faithfully describe reality?
52. Roughcoat
Iris was indeed wonderful in many ways.
She was on a terrible treadmill that was moving just a little bit faster than she was.
some @ 62 – If you follow and act out your violent instinct to fight are you therefore correct to assume that the end justifies the means?
Others here could do a better job, but since they have not taken up the task, I will give it a go.
Let’s take a look. Do all ‘ends’ justify all ‘means’? Have to say, absolutely not. Are you justified in killing someone who is attempting to kill you? Depends, doesn’t it? You are not justified if you kill the duly appointed executioner who attempts to execute the penalty imposed by law.
You are justified to destroy the criminal who lacks authority and, in fact, is unlawfully attempting to end your days.
Therefore we can conclude that the ‘ends’ and ‘means’ must be qualified before justification can be ascertained.
Example, Hushai deceiving Absalom to undermine Ahithophel’s advice. Later, the woman in Bahurim hidding Jonathan and Ahimaaz in the well and misleading Absalom’s troopers. Lying and deception. These folks were momentarily recruited in the hasty spy network that David devised.
Are you justified in killing someone who is attempting to kill you?
In a purely self-defense scenario one is trying to stop the attacker from killing — causing the attacker’s death is not the prime objective. An effective self defense against someone intent on killing, or causing serious enough harm that one may die, has a high probability of killing the attacker. That is almost certainly the scenario in the Zimmerman/Martin case, for instance.
Don @ 86 – Yes, you are quite right. In my enthusiasm, I selected words poorly.
Training for concealed carry emphasizes that the goal is to stop the attacker. In the case of the felling of Sammy Charles Long, his defender was attempting to “save the officer’s life” and the grand jury returned “no bill of indictment”.
It is recommended to anyone who, unfortunately, finds himself in the situation of wounding or dispatching an assailant, to request counsel before making statements to the responding peace officers.
When questioned, one is well advised to politely decline to make a statment until counsel can be consulted. You can do great harm by speaking freely on such occasions.
Many thoughts may be rattling around in your brain after tramatic events such as these. Don’t let any of them out until you have had time to decompress.
No matter how amiable the questioners seem to be, or what compulsion they exert, remember, they are not your friends. They may, in fact, have a biased opinion concerning the events that transpired and any statement may be interpreted in that framework.
Roughcoat #77:
I call that the “Era” theory of history. People confuse the way in which historians divide up history for convenience purposes with actual causes of events. Things happen because “its time.” Other things are not done because “We don’t do that any more.” It’s a way to replace actual thought with PC attitudes. It’s a way to shout down people who bring up flaws in ideas by telling them they are out of date, and behind the times, and shaddup.
When Saddam invaded Kuwait in August 1990 it was amusing to view the stunned silence in DC. Military cutbacks were already under way. We were out of that era. People just did not DO that sort of thing any more.
” The Jewish people have long memory. That is a key to survival.
Not as long as they act as if they have no memory, and keep trying to climb into bed with those who will destroy them.
Remembering history does not save people from repeating it.”
I have Jewish friends in my local arts community: not one of them believes the Torah; and hence, not the miracles of God that delivered them throughout their history. Their socialism and disbelief are what unite them: they have already made their compact with death.
GB – I find your optimism heartening. Keep it up!
Sorry to run so far a field from, the original post, but as regards “history” with a capital “H” …
If you watch closely you will observe that for most practical purposes “history” occupies the place in the mind of most athiest leftists that one would normaly reserve for one’s god. It oversees their eschaton, it judges people (often after they have died – though no afterlife is necessarily implied) and individuals and peoples must act in certain ways now to if they are to receive the benefit if its favor later.
You can take nearly any statement by a leftist that uses the word “history” and just swap the word “god” into its place and the meaning in the mind of the leftist will be virtually unchanged – or perhaps even made clearer. Seen in this light the elevated status of journalists & media types as a sort of clergy makes more sense, they are the keepers of the memory hole.
Also the dust bin/ash heap of history is the left’s equivalent of hell. And when they say things like “History will vindicate such and such a policy/program/person” they are acknowledging the holiness (in their mode of thinking) of the subject of the sentence. I’m sure they have a whole liturgical vocabulary that one could catalog if one had the time.
Regardless of how one feels/felt about GWB it is amusing to note that when the left spoke in grave terms about him “suffering the verdict of history” that they were actually threatening him with their version of damnation.
Atheist … Ha!
PS. If you ever hear a leftist talk about the USSR “being resigned to the dust bin of history” (which you seldom will, that kind of talk comes mostly from conservatives) it is reasonable to cast it in the same light as A. Hitler condemning the german volk of his day as being weak and unworthy of the glorious third reich.
El_Heffe,
I am optimistic in the long term but very pessimistic in the short term.
“The first commonality is the moment of presentiment.”
I get those from time to time. Mostly 3 days in advance. You need to be internally quiet and clear. Other wise you will not feel them until much closer to the action.
“I have to tell you, I never felt freer than when I was out there on the edge of doctrine with nothing but my instinct, training and the skill of my crew.”
You can get the same thing from a few years as an outlaw biker.
Re: Islam
“Their tradition is for the most violently crazy to set the mode, if not every day, then every few years.”
Read a chapter from Wm. Burrough’s “Naked Lunch” – Islam Inc. It can be found on the ‘net. It was written about 1950. Nothing has changed.
http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2006/04/islam-inc.html
“The traditions and viewpoints that made us what we were are so diluted now that it seems unlikely that we will respond well…”
Ruger can’t keep up with the demand for guns. It may be bloody but we will come out fine. Odds are there will be more unAmerican dead than American.
A gun behind every blade of grass. I like that idea.
Michael Totten is not simply an idiot, he is a very useful idiot for Islamic Jihad and conquest of Europe. His reporting on Kosovo reminds Walter Duranty’s whitewashing of Stalin’s crimes. How on Earth a man can claim expertise on Middle East without any knowledge and even interest in obtaining such knowledge about all-important factor of the realm: Islam and its teachings? The shameful Clinton’s policies in Bosnia war was a real treason to Western values and heritage. To throw Serbian Christians under bus to appease Muslims was a high treason which will be never forgotten and never forgiven by anybody who cherish Christian faith.
A city built on Rock ‘n Roll is infinitely more civilized than a city built on rap. Some of those rollers were actually classically trained.
The rollers wrote paeans to love. The rappers to hos.
I know which I prefer.
When Europe would be engulfed in bloody civil war with its Muslim population (and this is not a question of “if”, only of “when”), these much-maligned Serbian snipers will be in great demand and honor.
#86 and #87 – In principle, you are both correct; the idea is to stop an attacker. However, in practice if you severely wound someone attacking you it is much better to finish the job. The perp may come after you again if he survives, so may his friends, and perhaps worst of all so will the law.
In some circumstances, the best way of avoiding any of this involves a shovel.