Saturday, February 25, 2006
Willi Munzen...Who?
As Eric was pointing out rather stunningly, your knowledge of contemporary world history is ... umm ... a bit dated if you haven't read this.
QOTD 2/25/06
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. --F. Scott Fitzgerald
Guess (Cuck)Who?
"They just don't get it," he told an audience in Bushehr earlier this month. "They think that because they pass a resolution everyone is obliged to obey them. Our message is simple: Pass resolutions until you are blue in the face! We are guided by what the Hidden Imam tells us, not what you dictate in your resolutions.""
Taheri is warming us up for his next column. Which will hopefully appear before the Cuckoo of the Hidden Imam decides to warm us up to a million degrees or so...
Taheri is warming us up for his next column. Which will hopefully appear before the Cuckoo of the Hidden Imam decides to warm us up to a million degrees or so...
Tinfoil, Lockstep And Light Sabers
Ed takes on Bill with a little history lesson. No, not his favorite target Bill -- a quite different one.
But don't worry, the right marches in lock step behind Karl Rove. Did I forget to mention again that I control Karl Rove?
< tinfoil_hat >
But speaking of tinfoil hats, as I was going through one of the exhibit rooms at the local university's physics open house today with the boys, I overheard one lady talking ever so "scientifically" to another that the damage to the Pentagon on 9/11 was caused by lasers and there was no plane that crashed into it.
Having noticed the Holocaust remembrance week posters scattered around campus as we walked to the open house, I couldn't resist pitching in and telling her companion that "there was no Holocaust either you know" and promptly moved on after noticing how it opened the eyes of the lunatic's companion. I sensed a subtle hint of the companion's agreement with my derision but chose not to linger and be blinded by the (virtually phosphorescent) glare from the lunatic's (virtual) tinfoil hat -- and risk spoiling what turned out to be a fun day with the boys.
< /tinfoil_hat >
Lasers and light sabers you know...
But don't worry, the right marches in lock step behind Karl Rove. Did I forget to mention again that I control Karl Rove?
< tinfoil_hat >
But speaking of tinfoil hats, as I was going through one of the exhibit rooms at the local university's physics open house today with the boys, I overheard one lady talking ever so "scientifically" to another that the damage to the Pentagon on 9/11 was caused by lasers and there was no plane that crashed into it.
Having noticed the Holocaust remembrance week posters scattered around campus as we walked to the open house, I couldn't resist pitching in and telling her companion that "there was no Holocaust either you know" and promptly moved on after noticing how it opened the eyes of the lunatic's companion. I sensed a subtle hint of the companion's agreement with my derision but chose not to linger and be blinded by the (virtually phosphorescent) glare from the lunatic's (virtual) tinfoil hat -- and risk spoiling what turned out to be a fun day with the boys.
< /tinfoil_hat >
Lasers and light sabers you know...
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
The Wolfe File Again
Another one from Raymond for Wolfe's "fascism is always descending on America but landing on Europe" file: (HT Glenn)
In the banlieus and elsewhere, Islamist pressure makes it certain that sooner or later the West is going to vomit Stalin’s memes out of its body politic. The worst way would be through a reflex development of Western absolutism — Christian chauvinism, nativism and militarism melding into something like Francoite fascism. The self-panicking leftists who think they see that in today’s Republicans are comically wrong (as witnessed by the fact that they aren’t being systematically jailed and executed), but it is quite a plausible future for the demographically-collapsing nations of Europe.
The U.S., fortunately, is still on a demographic expansion wave and will be till at least 2050. But if the Islamists achieve their dream of nuking “crusader” cities, they’ll make crusaders out of the U.S., too. And this time, a West with a chauvinized America at its head would smite the Saracen with weapons that would destroy entire populations and fuse Mecca into glass. The horror of our victory would echo for a thousand years.
I remain more optimistic than this. I think there is still an excellent chance that the West can recover from suicidalism without going through a fevered fascist episode and waging a genocidal war. But to do so, we have to do more than recognize Stalin’s memes; we have to reject them. We have to eject postmodern leftism from our universities, transnational progressivism from our politics, and volk-Marxism from our media.
The process won’t be pretty. But I fear that if the rest of us don’t hound the po-mo Left and its useful idiots out of public life with attack and ridicule and shunning, the hard Right will sooner or later get the power to do it by means that include a lot of killing. I don’t want to live in that future, and I don’t think any of my readers do, either. If we want to save a liberal, tolerant civilization for our children, we’d better get to work.
RTWT.
UPDATE: Eugene has an excellent recent post on Wolfe's little gem:
Support [for Wolfe's view that fascism wasn't coming to America] came from a quarter I hadn't counted on. It was Grass, speaking in English.
"For the past hour, I have my eyes fixed on the doors here," he said. "You talk about fascism and police repression. In Germany when I was a student, they come through those doors long ago. Here they must be very slow."
Grass was enjoying himself for the first time all evening. He was not simply saying, "You really don't have so much to worry about." He was indulging his sense of the absurd. He was saying: "You American intellectuals — you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted!"
He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.
In the banlieus and elsewhere, Islamist pressure makes it certain that sooner or later the West is going to vomit Stalin’s memes out of its body politic. The worst way would be through a reflex development of Western absolutism — Christian chauvinism, nativism and militarism melding into something like Francoite fascism. The self-panicking leftists who think they see that in today’s Republicans are comically wrong (as witnessed by the fact that they aren’t being systematically jailed and executed), but it is quite a plausible future for the demographically-collapsing nations of Europe.
The U.S., fortunately, is still on a demographic expansion wave and will be till at least 2050. But if the Islamists achieve their dream of nuking “crusader” cities, they’ll make crusaders out of the U.S., too. And this time, a West with a chauvinized America at its head would smite the Saracen with weapons that would destroy entire populations and fuse Mecca into glass. The horror of our victory would echo for a thousand years.
I remain more optimistic than this. I think there is still an excellent chance that the West can recover from suicidalism without going through a fevered fascist episode and waging a genocidal war. But to do so, we have to do more than recognize Stalin’s memes; we have to reject them. We have to eject postmodern leftism from our universities, transnational progressivism from our politics, and volk-Marxism from our media.
The process won’t be pretty. But I fear that if the rest of us don’t hound the po-mo Left and its useful idiots out of public life with attack and ridicule and shunning, the hard Right will sooner or later get the power to do it by means that include a lot of killing. I don’t want to live in that future, and I don’t think any of my readers do, either. If we want to save a liberal, tolerant civilization for our children, we’d better get to work.
RTWT.
UPDATE: Eugene has an excellent recent post on Wolfe's little gem:
Support [for Wolfe's view that fascism wasn't coming to America] came from a quarter I hadn't counted on. It was Grass, speaking in English.
"For the past hour, I have my eyes fixed on the doors here," he said. "You talk about fascism and police repression. In Germany when I was a student, they come through those doors long ago. Here they must be very slow."
Grass was enjoying himself for the first time all evening. He was not simply saying, "You really don't have so much to worry about." He was indulging his sense of the absurd. He was saying: "You American intellectuals — you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted!"
He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.
A different view to port... And did I mention that this is what really should be topic #1 and would be if it wasn't for the port ruckus?
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
"Fourth, we can believe that freedom of speech is important for people everywhere, and oppose oppressive regimes everywhere, including on the Arabian peninsula, for their intolerance of people who believe and speak inconsistently with the powers that be. Setting aside questions of feasibility and courage -- this option would require much sacrifice if it is to be backed by more than words -- how many Westerners today would support this option as desireable, even in the abstract? Libertarians of the right surely would, but how many Western leftists believe that the right of free speech is just another vestige of Occidental imperialism, another dead right discovered by dead white men?"
Strategy Page is leaning toward civil war again while Michael points to an emerging Kurdish oasis of sanity just to the north of the Sunni nutballs.
Monday, February 20, 2006
Lewis Fingers My Buddy Again
Bernard strikes again: "The New Anti-Semitism". MUST. READ. NOW. SMALL EXCERPT:
Then came the Third Reich, with connections to the Arab world and, later, to other Muslim countries. Now that the German archives are open, we know that within weeks of Hitler’s coming to power in 1933, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem got in touch with the German consul general in Jerusalem, Doctor Heinrich Wolff, and offered his services. It is interesting that the common image of the Germans pursuing the Arabs is the reverse of what happened. The Arabs were pursuing the Germans, and the Germans were very reluctant to get involved. Dr. Wolff recommended, and his government agreed, that as long as there was any hope of making a deal with the British Empire and establishing a kind of Aryan-Nordic axis in the West, it would be pointless to antagonize the British by supporting the Arabs.
But then things gradually changed, particularly after the Munich Conference in 1938. That was the turning point, when the German government finally decided that there was no deal to be made with Britain, no Aryan axis. Then the Germans turned their attention more seriously to the Arabs, responding at last to their approaches, and from then on the relationship developed very swiftly.
In 1940 the French surrender gave the Nazis new opportunities for action in the Arab world. In Vichy-controlled Syria they were able for a while to establish an intelligence and propaganda base in the heart of the Arab East. From Syria they extended their activities to Iraq, where they helped to establish a pro-Nazi regime headed by Rashid Ali al-Gailani. This was overthrown by the British, and Rashid Ali went to join his friend the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in Berlin, where he remained as Hitler’s guest until the end of the war. In the last days of Rashid Ali’s regime, on the first and second of June 1941, soldiers and civilians launched murderous attacks on the ancient Jewish community in Baghdad. This was followed by a series of such attacks in other Arab cities, both in the Middle East and in North Africa.
While in Berlin, Rashid Ali was apparently disquieted by the language and, more especially, the terminology of anti-Semitism. His concerns were authoritatively removed in an exchange of letters with an official spokesman of the German Nazi Party. In answer to a question from Rashid Ali as to whether anti-Semitism was also directed against Arabs, because they were part of the Semitic family, Professor Walter Gross, director of the Race Policy Office of the Nazi Party, explained with great emphasis, in a letter dated October 17, 1942, that this was not the case and that anti-Semitism was concerned wholly and exclusively with Jews. On the contrary, he observed, the Nazis had always shown sympathy and support for the Arab cause against the Jews. In the course of his letter, he even remarked that the expression “anti-Semitism, which has been used for decades in Europe by the anti-Jewish movement, was incorrect since this movement was directed exclusively against Jewry, and not against other peoples who speak a Semitic language.”
This apparently caused some concern in Nazi circles, and a little later a committee was formed that suggested that the Führer’s speeches and his book Mein Kampf should be revised to adopt the term “anti-Jewish” instead of “anti-Semitic” so as not to offend “our Arab friends.” The Führer did not agree, and this proposal was not accepted. There was still no great problem in German-Arab relations before, during, and even for a while after the war.
The Nazi propaganda impact was immense. We see it in Arabic memoirs of the period, and of course in the foundation of the Ba’ath party. We use the word “party” in speaking of the Ba’ath in the same sense in which one speaks of the Fascist, Nazi, or Communist parties—not a party in the Western sense, an organization for seeking votes and winning elections, but a party as part of the apparatus of government, particularly concerned with indoctrination and repression. And anti-Semitism, European-style, became a very important part of that indoctrination. The basis was there. A certain amount of translated literature was there. It became much more important after the events of 1948, when the humiliated Arabs drew comfort from the doctrine of the Jews as a source of cosmic evil. This continued and grew with subsequent Arab defeats, particularly after the ultimate humiliation of the 1967 war, which Israel won in less than a week.
The growth of European-style anti-Semitism in the Arab world derived in the main from this feeling of humiliation and the need therefore to ascribe to the Jews a role very different from their traditional role in Arab folklore and much closer to that of the anti-Semitic prototypes. By now the familiar themes of European anti-Semitism—the blood libel, the protocols of Zion, the international Jewish conspiracy, and the rest—have become standard fare in much of the Arab world, in the schoolroom, the pulpit, the media, and even on the Internet. It is bitterly ironic that these themes have been adopted by previously immune Muslims precisely at a time when in Europe they have become an embarrassment even to anti-Semites.
What encouraged this development was what one can only describe as the acquiescence of the United Nations and, apparently, of enlightened opinion in the Western world. Let me cite some examples. On November 29, 1947, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the famous resolution calling for the division of Palestine into a Jewish state, an Arab state, and an international zone of Jerusalem. The United Nations passed this resolution without making any provision for its enforcement. Just over two weeks later, at a public meeting on December 17, the Arab League adopted a resolution totally rejecting this UN resolution, declaring that they would use all means at their disposal, including armed intervention, to nullify it—an open challenge to the United Nations that was and remains unanswered. No attempt was made to respond, no attempt to prevent the armed intervention that the Arab League promptly launched.
The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. That would be Arafat's mentor Haj Mohammed Amin Al-Husseini. But you won't be hearing about him on 60 Minutes either. Just all about how the Danes are worse than BusHitler and risible attempts at forgery presented as Gospel.
And I think I already pointed to who's really on Hitler's side. Just like my buddy Bernard has. But what does he know anyway?
Then came the Third Reich, with connections to the Arab world and, later, to other Muslim countries. Now that the German archives are open, we know that within weeks of Hitler’s coming to power in 1933, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem got in touch with the German consul general in Jerusalem, Doctor Heinrich Wolff, and offered his services. It is interesting that the common image of the Germans pursuing the Arabs is the reverse of what happened. The Arabs were pursuing the Germans, and the Germans were very reluctant to get involved. Dr. Wolff recommended, and his government agreed, that as long as there was any hope of making a deal with the British Empire and establishing a kind of Aryan-Nordic axis in the West, it would be pointless to antagonize the British by supporting the Arabs.
But then things gradually changed, particularly after the Munich Conference in 1938. That was the turning point, when the German government finally decided that there was no deal to be made with Britain, no Aryan axis. Then the Germans turned their attention more seriously to the Arabs, responding at last to their approaches, and from then on the relationship developed very swiftly.
In 1940 the French surrender gave the Nazis new opportunities for action in the Arab world. In Vichy-controlled Syria they were able for a while to establish an intelligence and propaganda base in the heart of the Arab East. From Syria they extended their activities to Iraq, where they helped to establish a pro-Nazi regime headed by Rashid Ali al-Gailani. This was overthrown by the British, and Rashid Ali went to join his friend the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in Berlin, where he remained as Hitler’s guest until the end of the war. In the last days of Rashid Ali’s regime, on the first and second of June 1941, soldiers and civilians launched murderous attacks on the ancient Jewish community in Baghdad. This was followed by a series of such attacks in other Arab cities, both in the Middle East and in North Africa.
While in Berlin, Rashid Ali was apparently disquieted by the language and, more especially, the terminology of anti-Semitism. His concerns were authoritatively removed in an exchange of letters with an official spokesman of the German Nazi Party. In answer to a question from Rashid Ali as to whether anti-Semitism was also directed against Arabs, because they were part of the Semitic family, Professor Walter Gross, director of the Race Policy Office of the Nazi Party, explained with great emphasis, in a letter dated October 17, 1942, that this was not the case and that anti-Semitism was concerned wholly and exclusively with Jews. On the contrary, he observed, the Nazis had always shown sympathy and support for the Arab cause against the Jews. In the course of his letter, he even remarked that the expression “anti-Semitism, which has been used for decades in Europe by the anti-Jewish movement, was incorrect since this movement was directed exclusively against Jewry, and not against other peoples who speak a Semitic language.”
This apparently caused some concern in Nazi circles, and a little later a committee was formed that suggested that the Führer’s speeches and his book Mein Kampf should be revised to adopt the term “anti-Jewish” instead of “anti-Semitic” so as not to offend “our Arab friends.” The Führer did not agree, and this proposal was not accepted. There was still no great problem in German-Arab relations before, during, and even for a while after the war.
The Nazi propaganda impact was immense. We see it in Arabic memoirs of the period, and of course in the foundation of the Ba’ath party. We use the word “party” in speaking of the Ba’ath in the same sense in which one speaks of the Fascist, Nazi, or Communist parties—not a party in the Western sense, an organization for seeking votes and winning elections, but a party as part of the apparatus of government, particularly concerned with indoctrination and repression. And anti-Semitism, European-style, became a very important part of that indoctrination. The basis was there. A certain amount of translated literature was there. It became much more important after the events of 1948, when the humiliated Arabs drew comfort from the doctrine of the Jews as a source of cosmic evil. This continued and grew with subsequent Arab defeats, particularly after the ultimate humiliation of the 1967 war, which Israel won in less than a week.
The growth of European-style anti-Semitism in the Arab world derived in the main from this feeling of humiliation and the need therefore to ascribe to the Jews a role very different from their traditional role in Arab folklore and much closer to that of the anti-Semitic prototypes. By now the familiar themes of European anti-Semitism—the blood libel, the protocols of Zion, the international Jewish conspiracy, and the rest—have become standard fare in much of the Arab world, in the schoolroom, the pulpit, the media, and even on the Internet. It is bitterly ironic that these themes have been adopted by previously immune Muslims precisely at a time when in Europe they have become an embarrassment even to anti-Semites.
What encouraged this development was what one can only describe as the acquiescence of the United Nations and, apparently, of enlightened opinion in the Western world. Let me cite some examples. On November 29, 1947, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the famous resolution calling for the division of Palestine into a Jewish state, an Arab state, and an international zone of Jerusalem. The United Nations passed this resolution without making any provision for its enforcement. Just over two weeks later, at a public meeting on December 17, the Arab League adopted a resolution totally rejecting this UN resolution, declaring that they would use all means at their disposal, including armed intervention, to nullify it—an open challenge to the United Nations that was and remains unanswered. No attempt was made to respond, no attempt to prevent the armed intervention that the Arab League promptly launched.
The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. That would be Arafat's mentor Haj Mohammed Amin Al-Husseini. But you won't be hearing about him on 60 Minutes either. Just all about how the Danes are worse than BusHitler and risible attempts at forgery presented as Gospel.
And I think I already pointed to who's really on Hitler's side. Just like my buddy Bernard has. But what does he know anyway?
Sunday, February 19, 2006
Wasn't a Holocaust. Was a Holocaust. Wasn't a Holocaust. All perfectly logical and consistent. Well, if you're nuttier than a Cuckoo clock that is...
... "shari'a does not forbid the use of nuclear weapons." Unfortunately, this is likely much more timely than most suspect...
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