THE QUOTE OF THE DAY: "It seems to me a certainty that the fatalistic teachings of Mohammed and the utter degradation of the Arab women are the outstanding causes for the arrested development of the Arab. He is exactly as he was around the year 700, while we have been developing." -- Gen. George Patton (From Blackfive)

Burchill Lets Loose

Good for Julie Burchill. She's had enough of the Guardian and is going out with phasers on full stun:

If you take into account the theory that Jews are responsible for everything nasty in the history of the world, and also the recent EU survey that found 60% of Europeans believe Israel is the biggest threat to peace in the world today (hmm, I must have missed all those rabbis telling their flocks to go out with bombs strapped to their bodies and blow up the nearest mosque), it's a short jump to reckoning that it was obviously a bloody good thing that the Nazis got rid of six million of the buggers. Perhaps this is why sales of Mein Kampf are so buoyant, from the Middle Eastern bazaars unto the Edgware Road, and why The Protocols of The Elders of Zion could be found for sale at the recent Anti-racism Congress in Durban. [The emphasis is redundant]

And, da*m she can write. So read the whole (short) thing. (Hat tip LGF.)

Whew

I thought I was having a bad dream that the liberals were on their way to supporting stoning women for adultery. After all, you would have thought that if there's anything beyond the pale maybe that would qualify. Whoops -- it turns out nothing is too depraved for liberals.

A Reprise To Frost Your Stuffing

At Solovki, one of earliest Gulag camps, Soviet administrators put up a sign that expressed the Communist program: "With an Iron Fist, We Will Lead Humanity to Happiness." That slogan captures the murderous nature of the utopian vision of the hard left.

Austin Bay

strikes again:

Klaus, interviewed by the always trenchant Arnaud de Borchgrave, was specifically addressing the EU's failure (for the ninth straight year) to certify its budget. The extensive problems led Klaus to suggest "democratic accountability" can't exist "in anything bigger than a nation state." That's a smart guy's slap at the glazed brains who believe the Brussels government will morph into a superpower utopia of eternal peace and easy prosperity. Frustrating, isn't it, that European intellectuals like Klaus get zip air time with Peter Jennings.

Klaus' comments also have resonance for the United States and the entire "Western world," and not merely in terms of echoing classic democratic propositions like the government that governs best governs least or the more "local" the democratic action the more accountable.

Klaus touches on "the West's" most troublesome strategic weakness: the fat cats' lack of will and courage. The "dream world" of wealth and leisure is dandy as long as someone with courage and competence is policing the real world's vicious nightmares.

The United States didn't sleep during the 1990s. Washington fought a slow war with Saddam. Al Qaeda, however, declared war on the United States, and until 9-11 Washington thought it could keep that war "over there." On 9-11, responsible Americans woke up, though two years on, a predictably irresponsible clan willfully buries its fossil hippie head in pillows.

Klaus recognized the War on Terror implications of his insight when he added: "It is quite normal that the principal targets of Al Qaeda are the U.S. and the U.K., as they have taken the lead to do something about those who launch the terrorist attacks. ... We understand the fragility and vulnerability of today's world, and we know these attacks are coming close to us, but as someone from a small country, I have a tendency to take domestic issues first and then look at the external ones."

Translation: You do what you can do, but recognize the sacrifice of those doing the most.

I love it. "buries its fossil hippie head in pillows". Perfect.

The Memory Hole, X-rayed

Wow. Just plain WOW:

Haynes: Jamie, many of those you speak of live in a different reality from that of the rest of us. Psychologically, they do not see what you see. They see the present and the past through a special lens. What is overwhelmingly clear to them is an imagined future collectivist utopia where antagonisms of class and race have been eliminated, the economic and social inequalities that have driven people to crime have been removed, poverty does not exist and social justice reigns, world brotherhood has replaced war and international strife, and an economy planned by people like them has produced economic abundance without pollution or waste. Coupled with this vision of the future is loathing of the real present which falls woefully short of these goals and hatred for anyone or anything that stands in the way of their illusion of the radiant future.

At Solovki, one of earliest Gulag camps, Soviet administrators put up a sign that expressed the Communist program: "With an Iron Fist, We Will Lead Humanity to Happiness." That slogan captures the murderous nature of the utopian vision of the hard left.

Jamie, you look at Soviet history and see the Gulag, the executions of the Terror, the pervasive oppression, and the economic failure. Psychologically, the leftists you speak of see little of that. They see a Communist state that articulated their vision of the future and which sought to destroy the societies and institutions they hated. They cannot see the horror that communism actually created. They look on that horror and see something else because they cannot admit to themselves that their vision is beyond human grasp. The German Communist playwright Bertolt Brecht, when challenged that thousands of innocents had been sent to the Gulag by Stalin, replied, "the more innocent they are, the more they deserve to die." To you or I this remark is disgusting, but to the hard left it reflects their eager willingness to kill any number of persons without concern for innocence or guilt if it might assist in bringing about the socialist future.

The idealized future that has not happened is more real and more important to them than the past that really did happen. Because the imagined future is more real and important to them, they seek to remold history (human understanding of the real past) to the service of the future. In his distopia 1984, George Orwell gives the Ministry of Truth of his totalitarian state the task of rewriting history. Orwell's point was that those who control the politics of the past (history) also control the politics of the present and thereby the future. The academic left, like the Orwell's Engsoc ideologists, believe that history is malleable and can assist in legitimating current politics and bringing about the utopian future.

You will get few mea culpas from hard left academics because they feel no guilt. You think they should regret getting the facts of history wrong. They care not at all about the facts of history, only about the politics of the future. They feel they got the politics right and so no mea culpa is due.

The facts of history that they got wrong can be, in their view, rationalized, redefined, minimized, or otherwise set aside in service to the idealized future they seek. Many have learned no lessons from the failure of communism; they will ardently pursue the same goals by the same means, albeit under new names.

You note the incongruity of hearing historians who are supposed to care about the past dismiss new information from Soviet archives as useless concern for "old ghosts" and "engaging in necrophilia." But those who say such thinks are not really historians, they are propagandists for the future left utopia who camouflage themselves as historians. They are interested in the past only when it can be put to the service of the future they seek. The flood of information out of Communist archives does not serve their goals, thus they define those matters as, as you noted, "ancient" and of no interest. [Emphasis added]

DEFINITELY A READ THE WHOLE THING!

Obscenity of the Day

How depraved and utterly irrelevant have our feminists become when pictures like this are not deplored with non-stop deconstruction and ostracism:



(That possible person on the left in the black bag is supposed to be his wife. But don't worry there's no evidence whatsoever that the person on the right is a HATEFUL MYSOGYNIST. None whatsoever. Come to think of it, I think I'll just go put a black bag over my wife's head right now and see how she reacts. Ugggghhhhh.)

Instead we're supposed to believe that this practice is for the protection of his wife. This is a steaming plate-full of garbage to only be believed by mental midgets.

Our feminists have become utter hypocrites. And collection-plate filling members of the "Church of the Left".

The bottom line is that the radical feminists live in a tinfoil-hat fantasy world imagining hateful oppression by their fellow countryfolk -- and are therefore completely blind to what a real "enemy" looks like. And the enemy has taken double advantage of it by the terrorist tactic of hiding in civilian populations and claiming to be "just another group oppressed by hateful whitey".

No Different Than Pat and Jerry...

Another classic that I managed to miss! Check this out -- I starts out like a blow to the plexus and never relents:

Sometime during the past thirty years, liberalism stopped being a mere political perspective and turned into a religion. I mean that literally. Liberalism now functions for substantial numbers of its adherents as a religion: an encompassing worldview that answers the big questions about life, lends significance to our daily exertions, and provides a rationale for meaningful collective action.

It wasn't supposed to be that way. Liberalism arose as a solution to the destructive religious wars of Europe's past, and succeeded because it allowed people of differing religious perspectives to live peacefully and productively in the same society. Designed to make the world safe for adherents of differing faiths, liberalism itself was never supposed to be a faith. But that is exactly what liberalism has become. And this transformation of liberalism into a de facto religion explains a lot about what we call "political correctness."

Have you ever wondered why conservatives nowadays are so often demonized, even by mainstream liberals? No matter how balanced, well-reasoned, or rooted in long-established principle conservative objections to, say, affirmative action or gay marriage may be, conservatives are still likely to find themselves stigmatized as racist homophobes. By the same token, reasonable conservative ideas are regularly deemed unfit for reasoned debate. This preference for ostracism over engagement amounts to a brilliant strategy on the part of the Left, but the demonization of conservatives can't be explained as a mere conscious tactical maneuver. The stigmatization of conservatives only works because so many people are primed to respond to it in the first place.

So why have conservatives been demonized? Maybe it's because the religion that liberalism has become is so badly in need of demons. Traditional liberalism simply laid out ground rules for reasoned debate and the peaceful adjudication of political differences. One of the main reasons why politics in a liberal society could be peaceful was that people sought direction about life's ultimate purpose outside of politics itself. But once traditional religion ceased to provide modern liberals with either an ultimate life purpose or a pattern of virtue, liberalism itself was the only belief system remaining that could supply these essential elements of life. [Emphasis added, but once more not needed]

Hitchens has pointed out rather eloquently in his "Against Rationalization" the similarities of the radical, pro-Saddam left with the likes of Falwell and Robertson:

But the bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about "the West," to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state. Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by Falwell and Robertson, and exhibits about the same intellectual content. [Emphasis added]

So the answer to the question: what happens to the Liberal sheep? ... Lies in plain sight! Kurtz continues:

The young students who now live in "multicultural" theme houses, or who join (or ally themselves with) multicultural campus political organizations are looking for a home, in the deepest sense of that word. In an earlier time, the always difficult and isolating transition from home to college was eased by membership in a fraternity, or by religious fellowship. Nowadays, multicultural theme houses, political action, and related coursework supply what religion and fraternities once did. But if the multicultural venture is truly to take the place of religion, it must invite a student to insert himself into a battle of profound significance. The fight for slave reparations, and the unceasing effort to ferret out examples of "subtle" racism in contemporary society, are techniques for sustaining a crusading spirit by creating the feeling that Simon Legree and Bull Conner are lurking just around the next corner. Conservative opponents of affirmative action or slave reparations simply have to be imagined as monsters. Otherwise the religious flavor of the multiculturalist enterprise falls flat, and the war of good against evil is converted into difficult balancing of competing political principles and goods in which no one is a saint or a devil. [Emphasis added -- but superfluous]

By now you've figured out you need to READ THE WHOLE THING. AND NEEDLESS TO SAY IT JUST GOT ADDED TO THE CLASSIC LINKS RIGHT YONDER...

MORE EURO NIRVANA:

Czech President Vaclav Klaus said Europeans are living in a "dream world" of welfare and long vacations and have yet to realize "they are not moving toward some sort of nirvana."
The Czech Republic is a candidate for European Union membership, but Mr. Klaus, who was elected president in February, made clear in an interview his distaste for the organization.

...

EU auditors could vouch for only 10 percent of the $120 billion the bloc spent in 2002. It was the ninth successive year the auditors were unable to certify the budget as a whole.
Europeans have not yet faced up to such "serious underlying issues," Mr. Klaus said, because "they are still in the dream world of welfare, long vacations, guaranteed high pensions and cradle-to-grave social security."

More Hateful Garbage

Brian Anderson has a masterful evisceration of the recent companion volume to Mien Kampf that goes by the title of "Empire". My sincerest of apologies to Brian for not finding this sooner -- it was published in early 2002 but stands as a timeless classic.

The stuff of "Empire" is the penultimate icon of what can only be described using Hitchens' phrase "hateful garbage". Those moderates on the left either really don't understand what they're standing shoulder to shoulder with or need to re-examine their premises and friendships -- and they can do it none too soon:

Apolitical abstraction and wild–eyed utopianism, a terroristic approach to political argument, hatred for flesh and blood human beings, nihilism: Empire is a poisonous brew of bad ideas. It belongs with Mein Kampf in the library of political madness.

Do Empire’s many fans really believe their own praise? Does Time really think it’s “smart” to call for the eradication of private property, celebrate revolutionary violence, whitewash totalitarianism, and pour contempt on the genuine achievements of liberal democracies and capitalist economics? Would Frederic Jameson like to give up his big salary at Duke? To ask such questions is to answer them. The far left’s pleasure is in the adolescent thrill of perpetual rebellion. Too many who should know better refuse to grow up. The ghost of Marx haunts us still.

For all its infantilism, the kind of hatred Hardt and Negri express for our flawed but decent democratic capitalist institutions—the best political and economic arrangements man has yet devised and the outcome of centuries of difficult trial and error—is dangerous, especially since it’s so common in the university and media. It seems to support Islamist revolutionary hopes, the increasingly violent anti–globalization movement, and kindred political lunacies. September 11 has reminded us of the fragility of our freedom and prosperity. But the continued influence of the far left, which some mistakenly dismiss as inconsequential, can weaken our collective will to protect ourselves from our enemies. Why fight for a political and social order that is so contemptible?

The journalist Andrew Sullivan, writing in the Wall Street Journal, argued that one consequence of September 11’s terrorist assault will be to discredit permanently the views of those who, like Hardt and Negri, despise democratic capitalism every bit as much as the Taliban does. I hope he’s right, but I’m not so optimistic. After all, Empire is the “Next Big Idea” after a century in which more than 125 million people lost their lives because of antibourgeois political movements. A few thousand murdered Americans may not be enough to end the hold the radical left still has on elite culture. [Emphasis pointlessly added.]

And no closing comments necessary. READ THE WHOLE THING, IT JUST GOT ADDED TO MY CLASSICS LINKS.

Hitchens on the Turkish Synagogue Bombings

Sit down -- you'll need to. You will read this but here's the closer lest there be any chance whatsoever of you missing it. For this is what a true master of reality can visit upon brainwashed midgets:

In a way, this effort doesn't quite meet the standard of moral cretinism that I had suggested. It actually fails to make any link at all between the actions of the murderers and the policy of Bush and Blair. Rather, it simply assumes that the victims are to have their deaths attributed in this fashion. The prevalence of this assumption, along with its facile appearance in the pages of a great liberal newspaper, is something worth noting.

As the author undoubtedly knows—she elsewhere demonstrates some knowledge of Turkish Jewry—and as I reminded readers yesterday, the Neve Shalom synagogue has been lethally attacked before. The last occasion was in the late 1980s. At that time, the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher governments had for some years taken a pro-Saddam Hussein "tilt" in the Iran-Iraq war. I can't remember what the excuse of the Jew-killers was on that previous occasion, but it most certainly wasn't their hatred for regime change. Maybe they didn't come up with an excuse, imagining that the action spoke for itself. Anyway, why bother with a justification when there are so many peace-loving and progressive types willing to volunteer to make the excuses for you? [Emphasis added, but once more not needed]

Thanks Chris. Pour me another one soon.

The Americans Love Pepsi-Cola

Mark Steyn knocks another one out of the park:

If you're so inclined, you can spend the week listening to long speeches by George Galloway and Harold Pinter. Or you can cut to the chase and get the message from Maulana Inyadullah. In late September 2001 Mr Inyadullah was holed up in Peshawar awaiting the call to arms against the Great Satan and offered this pithy soundbite to the Telegraph's David Blair:

"The Americans love Pepsi-Cola, we love death."

That's it in a nutshell - or in a nut's hell. And, like Mr Inyadullah, if it's Pepsi or death, the fellows on the streets of London this week choose death - at least for the Iraqis. If it's a choice between letting some carbonated-beverage crony of Dick Cheney get a piece of the Nasariyah soft-drinks market or allowing Saddam to go on feeding his subjects feet-first into the industrial shredder for another decade or three, then the "peace" activists will take the lesser of two evils - ie, crank up the shredder. Better yet, end UN sanctions so Saddam can replace the older, less reliable shredders, the ones with too many bits of bone tissue jammed in the cogs.

...

The fanatical Muslims despise America because it's all lapdancing and gay porn; the secular Europeans despise America because it's all born-again Christians hung up on abortion; the anti-Semites despise America because it's controlled by Jews. Too Jewish, too Christian, too Godless, America is also too isolationist, except when it's too imperialist.

...

Two years ago, NBC held a discussion on the growing alienation of the Muslim world: the al-Munaif family who, after the Kuwaiti liberation, had "slaughtered sheep in tribute to one President Bush", were now disenchanted and had named their newborn son "Osama". While the Arabists on the NBC panel chewed over the problem thoughtfully, on this page I was more insouciant: there's no point trying to figure out which way a guy who sacrifices sheep will jump. That's the way I feel about this week's polls and protests. The Min of Ag has already sacrificed all the sheep, but, that detail aside, much of Britain is now about as rational on America as the al-Munaif family. My advice to Bush is: make sure you know where the exit is and try to avoid eye contact. [Emphasis added -- but not needed for the sane human]

Weeeehaawww! Go Mark! And you go read the whole thing.

MORE ON DE-NIHILISM:

Not even the Romans faced such an enemy, through centuries of patrolling their most distant frontiers; and probably no other people previously encountered nihilism in so extreme a form. An enemy for whom the "suicide bomb" is not even a weapon, but an aesthetic gesture. Whose only purpose is to advance Armageddon. And who captures the imagination of the young.

We couldn't surrender, even if we wanted to. We must instead find new ways to fight. [Emphasis added]

David Warren keeps earning his link. The Left wants us to surrender. The great irony is that the harder they fight for surrender, the greater the catastrophe we will be required to inflict on the enemy in proportion to that which they will be allowed to inflict on us. If the hard left were actually people of rational good will instead of the nihilist heirs of Kant and Stalin, they would be able to understand this truth...

Miles to Go Before He Sleeps -- Welcome!

A beautiful followup over at Spock's. This from a Spaniard after reading DenBeste's article about the US being a Non-European country:

Now the thing is, that all this time I have felt as if I was "in the wrong place". Being the only one with one idea, while virtually all the people around me (in fact, all the europeans) is against it, makes me feel as if I was not from there. But then, if not Catalan, Spanish or European, what am I???

I haven't had the complete answer to this question until today, when I read your article. Now I do know it.

I'm American. In the wrong place, far from home, but American.

Welcome brother! Get on the boat like my ancestors! As Spock says in the same article "It is more important what you stand for than who you stand with."

But don't get complacent; our leftists are far down the road to an "It's not cool to be smart" culture. In fact, let me buy your plane ticket -- we need you!

But No Complaints About Auschwitz

This is just fascinating. The Red Cross, bombed by terrorists, thinks the U.S. remains the font of all evil and feels sorry for the terrorists. Here's a commentary that starts to put it in perspective:

The continuing detention of captured al Qaeda and Taliban members at Guantanamo is fast becoming the favored cause of international activists opposed to the aggressive prosecution of the war on terror. Even the International Committee of the Red Cross, which has traditionally maintained "neutrality" on such questions (declining even to publicly criticize the Third Reich's death camps during World War II), recently attacked the U.S. for failing to establish a timetable for trying, or freeing, the Guantanamo detainees. A few points should be made in defense of the administration's policy.

The ICRC's primary complaint is that "after more than 18 months of captivity, the internees still have no idea about their fate." As the ICRC knows very well, this is the case with respect to all captured enemy combatants in every war. The laws of war permit such individuals to be held for the entire duration of the conflict--primarily to ensure that they cannot rejoin the fight. Contrary to the claims of the ICRC, other activist groups and even some U.S. allies, the detainees are not being held "indefinitely." The length of their confinement is purely a function of how long the war lasts. The administration's critics might reflect how Churchill would have reacted if, during the Battle of Britain, the ICRC had asked him how long his Axis prisoners would be held. [Emphasis added]

Oh I forgot -- there was no Holocaust. And no Auschwitz you liar! That's hate speech to impugn Hitler's reputation. He's just misunderstood! Yeah, that's it. Burn down a few more Holocaust museums and there'll be no more proof. Jooooos go to Palestine! No wait -- JOOOOOOS OUT OF PALESTINE! The JOOOOOOS are Nazis! No wait, the Nazis were misunderstood... [Ed: You should be starting to understand who the real intellectual midgets are by now.]

WHO SAID THIS?

George Bush blew that war. I think he'd had only 300 Americans killed and I think he felt at the end of the war that day, it would be a great record. So he didn't want to go on one more day. If he'd gone on one more day there might not have been 100,000 Iraqi killed. But in any event, war is merely one of the horrors that face us. If you're going to take an absolute liberal position, as for instance Victor did, and said let's do it through the UN, the fact of the matter is the UN is not competent to find out where all the nuclear things are buried. We're going to miss the KGB before it's all over because they were good at that. The CIA is probably pretty good at that. You need that kind of information.
We're entering an extraordinary world where all the old signals are off. It used to be that Third World countries were wonderful little places that were terribly exploited. Now they're ugly places that are run by maniacs very often. We have to face that fact. If you keep using liberal jargon forever you will finally die in your own platitudes.

Now click through to see a near jaw-dropper...