Two thirds of American voters want a Congressional investigation into Benghazi.
The election was stolen through administration and media lies, and corruption on several fronts.
Category Archives: War Commentary
The Bloodshed In Venezuela
Here are seven people to blame for it. Note that Barack Obama is one of them.
But she left off Jimmy Carter, who is going to visit, as though they haven’t suffered enough.
[Update a few minutes later]
Venezuelan violence, the farce of Cuba, and Marco Rubio’s best speech. He does seem to be about the best extemporaneous speaker out there.
Ukraine
Let it vote for partition.
I’ve never heard a good explanation of why we should hold this artificial “nation” together. Let the Europeans go with Europe, let the Russians go with Russia.
[Update a few minutes later]
The populist media campaign for the Eurasian Union is now in the hands of Dmitry Kiselyov, the host of the most important talk show in Russia, and since December also the director of the state-run Russian media conglomerate designed to form national public opinion. Best known for saying that gays who die in car accidents should have their hearts cut from their bodies and incinerated, Kiselyov has taken Putin’s campaign against gay rights and transformed it into a weapon against European integration. Thus when the then German foreign minister, who is gay, visited Kiev in December and met with Vitali Klitschko, the heavyweight champion and opposition politician, Kiselyov dismissed Klitschko as a gay icon. According to the Russian foreign minister, the exploitation of sexual politics is now to be an open weapon in the struggle against the “decadence” of the European Union.
Following the same strategy, Yanukovych’s government claimed, entirely falsely, that the price of closer relations with the European Union was the recognition of gay marriage in Ukraine. Kiselyov is quite open about the Russian media strategy toward the Maidan: to “apply the correct political technology,” then “bring it to the point of overheating” and bring to bear “the magnifying glass of TV and the Internet.”
Why exactly do people with such views think they can call other people fascists? And why does anyone on the Western left take them seriously? One line of reasoning seems to run like this: the Russians won World War II, and therefore can be trusted to spot Nazis. Much is wrong with this. World War II on the eastern front was fought chiefly in what was then Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Belarus, not in Soviet Russia. Five percent of Russia was occupied by the Germans; all of Ukraine was occupied by the Germans. Apart from the Jews, whose suffering was by far the worst, the main victims of Nazi policies were not Russians but Ukrainians and Belarusians. There was no Russian army fighting in World War II, but rather a Soviet Red Army. Its soldiers were disproportionately Ukrainian, since it took so many losses in Ukraine and recruited from the local population. The army group that liberated Auschwitz was called the First Ukrainian Front.
The other source of purported Eurasian moral legitimacy seems to be this: since the representatives of the Putin regime only very selectively distanced themselves from Stalinism, they are therefore reliable inheritors of Soviet history, and should be seen as the automatic opposite of Nazis, and therefore to be trusted to oppose the far right.
Again, much is wrong about this. World War II began with an alliance between Hitler and Stalin in 1939. It ended with the Soviet Union expelling surviving Jews across its own border into Poland. After the founding of the State of Israel, Stalin began associating Soviet Jews with a world capitalist conspiracy, and undertook a campaign of arrests, deportations, and murders of leading Jewish writers. When he died in 1953 he was preparing a larger campaign against Jews.
This all points out the meaninglessness of “right” and “left” in Eurasia, and the nonsense of the notion (as Jonah Goldberg is always quick to point out) that fascism is “right wing.” Both Nazism and Stalinism are perversions of Marxism (not to imply that Marxism can ever be applied in the real world unperverted). Their differences are trivial relative to their similarities.
[Update a while later]
This seems sort of peripherally related: “Time travelers, don’t kill Hitler.”
I disagree with the notion that the Holocaust was the Worst Thing Ever, or even uniquely evil. The notion that it is is largely squid ink to distract us from the much greater crimes of Stalin, Mao, and other communist monsters, whom much of academia either wants to downplay as unrepresentative of “true” Marxism, or actually admire.
[Update late morning]
No, fascism and socialism still aren’t opposites.
Blame It On The Video
It was a fraud and a lie in Egypt as well as Benghazi.
It’s lies all the way down with this gang.
Kiev
“I am a Ukrainian.”
I want us to be free, too.
The Rushdie Fatwa
It’s been a quarter of a century:
Most analyses of the Rushdie Rules focus exclusively on the growth of Islamism. But two other factors are even more important: Multiculturalism as practiced undercuts the will to sustain Western civilization against Islamist depredations while the Left’s making common political cause with Islamists gives the latter an entrée. In other words, the core of the problem lies not in Islam but in the West.
Yes, and there is a deep rot in our universities, as demonstrated by groups like the American Studies Association.
Well-Connected Ignorami
It sure would be nice if our so-called “elites” were actually elite in something.
“Yes, We Can Say That”
Mark Steyn continues his free-speech crusade (and I use that word deliberately):
I don’t care for all this beyond-the-pale stuff, because the pale is already way too shrunk. And, aside from anything else, once you get into the habit of banning and proscribing, your critical thinking goes all to hell. Many of us have seen one or two of those ill-advised shows on al-Arabiya or al-Jazeera in which some fire-breathing imam invites on a despised, Westernized, apostate woman in order to crush her like a bug, only to have her run rings round him. The Syrian émigré Wafa Sultan famously did it to Faisal al-Qassem and Ibrahim al-Khouli. It’s hardly surprising that a culture that puts so much of life beyond discussion renders its inmates literally speechless — to the point where, faced with, say, a school teddy bear innocently named Mohammed, the default opening gambit at the local debating society is to shriek “Allahu Akbar!” and start killing.
We’re not at that point yet. But, raised in the cocoon of conformity that is American academe, the Left is increasingly showing all the critical-thinking skills of your average dimestore mullah. The other day, in between its ongoing complaints about Michael Douglas’s “homophobic” awards acceptance speeches, Salon ran a story by one of its many pajama boys headlined “Ted Nugent Writes Insanely Racist Op-Ed.” Apparently, Ted had written a “vile rant” at “the batshit insane right-wing fever swamp of a site known as WorldNetDaily.” “Even for Ted Nugent,” cautioned Elias Isquith in his opening sentence, “this is bad.” Alas, poor old Ted couldn’t quite live up to his batshit-insane billing: There followed a few unexceptional observations about black crime and broken families maybe a smidgeonette more heated than one might hear from, say, Bill Cosby or Juan Williams. More to the point, the hapless pajama boy didn’t even attempt to explain what was so objectionable about Nugent’s “rant.” As the Canadian blogger Kathy Shaidle put it, “Salon calls out Ted Nugent’s ‘racist’ MLK Day column — without refuting his points. Must be Friday.” All Mr. Isquith can do is reprise Ted Nugent’s words and then shriek “Batshit insane!” and “Insanely batshit!” over and over, like Lady Bracknell with Tourette’s.
Which brings us to Michael Mann, the fake Nobel laureate currently suing NATIONAL REVIEW for mocking his global-warming “hockey stick.” Of the recent congressional hearings, Dr. Mann tweeted that it was “#Science” — i.e., the guy who agrees with him — vs. “#AntiScience” — i.e., Dr. Judith Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. That’s to say, she is by profession a scientist, but because she has the impertinence to dissent from Dr. Mann’s view she is “#AntiScience.” Mann is the climatological equivalent of those bozo imams on al-Arabiya raging about infidel whores: He can’t refute Dr. Curry, he can only label her.
Read all.
Barry Rubin
His voice will be missed.
[Update a couple minutes later]
More thoughts from Dave Swindle.
[Update a while later]
Roger Simon remembers him as well:
The phrase Tikkun olam – to repair the world — is often used in the Jewish tradition, sometimes by people Barry did not think the best of, and for good reason. But Barry himself embodied that tradition more than anyone I can think of. He indeed was a “repairer of the world,” the conscience of the White City. To say that he will be missed is a cliché not worthy of him.
But he will be.
OPEC
Why and how we should break it now.
It’s been a major thorn in the world’s side for decades, including fueling Islamic terrorism.