← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Sertorius
Thread ID: 19955 | Posts: 30 | Started: 2005-09-02
2005-09-02 16:25 | User Profile
August 26, 2005, 9:09 a.m. The Paranoid Style Iraq: Where socialists and anarchists join in with [B]racialists and paleocons.[/B]
It is becoming nearly impossible to sort the extreme rhetoric of the antiwar Left from that of the fringe paleo-Right. Both see the Iraqi war through the same lenses: the American effort is bound to fail and is a deep reflection of American pathology.
An anguished Cindy Sheehan calls Bush "the world's biggest terrorist." And she goes on to blame Israel for the death of her son ("Yes, he was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel").
Her antiwar venom could easily come right out of the mouth of a more calculating David Duke. Perhaps that's why he lauded her anti-Semitism: "Courageously she has gone to Texas near the ranch of President Bush and braved the elements and a hostile Jewish supremacist media."
This odd symbiosis began right after 9/11. Then the lunatic Left mused about the "pure chaos" of the falling "two huge buck teeth" twin towers, lamented that they were more full of Democrats than Republicans, and saw the strike as righteous payback from third-world victims.
The mirror-imaging fundamentalists and censors in turn saw the attack as an angry God's retribution either for an array of our mortal sins or America's tilting toward Israel.
In Iraq, the Left thinks we are unfairly destroying others; the ultra-Right that we are being destroyed ourselves. The former alleges that we are bullying in our global influence, the latter that we are collapsing from our decadence.
But both, in their exasperation at George Bush's insistence on seeing Iraq emerge from the Hussein nightmare years with some sort of constitutional government, have embraced the paranoid style of personal invective.
They employ half-truths and spin conspiracy theories to argue that the war was unjust, impossible to win, and hatched through the result of a brainwashing of a devious few neocons.
I'll consider four diverse attacks (by a socialist, anarchist, racialist, and paleocon) on my support for the removal of Saddam Hussein, and the effort to prompt constitutional government in his place, that are emblematic of this bizarre new Left/Right nexus, shared pessimism, and paranoid methods.
I. The Cabal In the current issue of The American Prospect, Harold Meyerson ââ¬â hitherto known as the polemicist who compared President Bush to the secessionist, pro-slavery Jefferson Davis (e.g., "The American president ââ¬â though not of the United States ââ¬â whom George W. Bush most nearly resembles is the Confederacy's Jefferson Davis"), Sen. Zell Miller to Joseph McCarthy, and the voting of the California white middle class to a "riot" ââ¬â charges that a number of pundits are responsible for what he sees as a catastrophe in Iraq, specifically Tom Friedman, Christopher Hitchens, Charles Krauthammer, Bill Kristol, and myself. (
The chief complaint of Meyerson's is his belief that Iraq has ruined almost everything:
"As anti-war sentiment began to mount, Hanson dismissed it. 'We are told,' he wrote contemptuously in February 2002, 'an attack against Iraq will supposedly inflame the Muslim world. Toppling Saddam Hussein will cause irreparable rifts with Europeans and our moderate allies, and turn world opinion against America.' What to Hanson was nonsense looks like pretty fair prophecy today."
Hardly. After a surge of anti-Americanism, continental Europeans, from the Dutch to the French, are now certainly more involved in the war against terror than they were in February 2002, as are the British.
Anti-Americanism in the Arab world was at an all time high well before Iraq. In early 2002, 72 percent of the Kuwaitis, whom we saved in 1991, expressed a dislike for the United States. Two thirds in the Arab world insisted that Osama bin Laden had nothing to do with September 11.
I thought that the radical Islamic world was "inflamed" on September 11, when Palestinians danced in the streets on the news, Saddam Hussein praised the murderers, and mothers starting naming their children "Osama."
Yet Osama bin Laden's popularity is less now than it was then as well; there is no more Hussein dynasty; and Mr. Abbas is asking for American help. We have never been as close to moderate allies as we are now ââ¬â whether we define such friends as India (where over 70 percent express admiration for America) or Japan. Elections in France, Holland, and soon in Germany do not bode well for anti-American, EU leftists.
Yes, the long corrupt and murderous Middle East is aflame. But that is precisely because after Iraq, the Syrians have left Lebanon, the Egyptians are convulsed over novel elections, democratic Iraqis and Afghans are killing terrorists, a no longer secure al Qaeda is fragmented after losing Afghanistan, we are pressuring Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Libya to reform, and after 25 years of somnolence the United States is finally fighting back against Islamic fascism. By Meyerson's logic, 1942 was far more disastrous than 1939, when the sway of prewar autocracies was unquestioned and we were at peace.
How odd that Meyerson, a vice chairman of a national socialist organization, has become a harsh critic of American support for democratic reform in the Middle East.
But then we remember that the prime directive of the hard Left is to be against anything that Bush is for ââ¬â even if it means praising the hyper-capitalist, commodities speculator George Soros, whose machinations once nearly ruined the Bank of England along with its small depositors. In Meyerson's gushing praise: "[Soros] made his money the old-fashioned way, on Wall Street."
I also plead guilty to Meyerson's other two charges: Abu Ghraib really was blown way out of proportion and was not simply, as Ted Kennedy slurred, a continuation under new management of Saddam's gulag where tens of thousands perished.
And, yes, Iraq can craft a constitutional government as it is now doing, and that will make the Middle East both a more humane place and less a risk to the security of the United States. The only flickers of hope right now in the Middle East for an end to the old autocracy and fanaticism are in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Egypt ââ¬â and all such movement is due solely to the United States' removal of the Taliban and Saddam and pressure on Mubarak.
Aflame? Perhaps, but at least there is hope where there was none before.
II. The Anarchist Howl But if Meyerson's skewers facts and twists progress into abject failure, take the example of someone using the name Gary Brecher of Encore magazine. In an article called "Victor Hanson: Portrait of an American Traitor, " Brecher became incensed about a suggestion that neither the formal education nor the autodidacticism of the Hollywood elite granted them any privileged wisdom about American foreign policy:
"That column got me so furious I daydreamed about driving down Highway 99 to Hanson's farm and setting all his orchards and vineyards on fire. I kept thinking of what the Spartans said when one of their neighbors threatened them: "Your cicadas will chirp from the ground," meaning, "We'll burn your f...ing olive orchards if you mouth off again."(*
To understand the mindset of the anarchist, consider his similar fury right after 9/11.
"The best war is when you can hate both sides, and that's how it was with the WTC. I cheered those jets...Until those planes hit the WTC nobody dreamed you could knock down an American corporation building. Nobody ever thought one would come down. And when they did, damn! It was like the noche triste, when Aztecs made the Conquistadors bleed for the first time and said, "Hey these aren't magic six-legged metal monsters, they're just a bunch of victims like us."
"Hate both sides" in fact, is not quite accurate, since in reality more often the invective is reserved only for the United States ââ¬â as when he cheers for the terrorists on 9/11, not for us. But then compare the recent antiwar hysteria that equates Abu Ghraib with Saddam's death jails, Guantanamo with the Gulag and Nazi death camps, and the terrorist killers in Iraq with Minutemen.
III. It's About White People? Then there is the racialist Right, whose tactic is to turn to the old neoconservative slander and prattle on about betrayal of the foundations of the white American republic at war with a darker other.
In their view, trying to foster democracy in the Islamic world, rather than dealing with the same oil Realpolik, is, well, connected with (yes, you guessed it) a general betrayal of the American race, and equivalent to some sort of love of perpetual war.
So one F. Roger Devlin writes in something called The Occidental Quarterly. In his article, "The Case of Victor Davis Hanson: Farmer, Scholar, Warmonger," he argues that we are wasting our time trying to promote democracy in Iraq, and that, more importantly, I never understood the role of race, both ancient and modern:
"If the valleys of Dark Age Greece had been inhabited by the present citizens of Equatorial Guinea, whose average IQ is said to be 59, the result would not have been the classical city-state, self-rule under law, tragedy, philosophy, and the Parthenon. Hanson, unfortunately, has milked the "antiracial" aspect of his own thesis for a great deal more than it is worth. He never misses an opportunity to reiterate that Western Civilization is a matter of "culture, not race" ââ¬â as if informed racialists were unaware of anything besides biology... And whatever Hanson may think, race is no exception to the rule that one ought to know something about a subject before endeavoring to instruct others. Sadly, Hanson knows less about racial differences than I do about raisin production."
In Devlin's world, race is the key to everything. Only those who don't understand racial superiority would attempt such a fool's errand at promoting democracy abroad.
IV. America as bin Laden? In an online magazine called LewRockwell.com (article titles in the online magazine range from "Heil, Abe" to "I Hate Rudy Giuliani"), one Gene Callahan takes off from where Devlin ended.
Once again one is derided as a lover of war for suggesting that the United States, when it goes to war against fascists, should defeat them, insist on their unconditional surrender, and stay on to promote democratic reconstruction.
In the past, Callahan (who predicted that after our October strike against the Taliban in Afghanistan there would be "thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of deaths this winter due to massive famine") has questioned the need for fighting both the Confederacy and Hitler, and now turns his anger in "Hanson Agonistes" to my conclusion that dropping the bomb on Hiroshima probably saved millions of lives.
"Among pundits currently urging Americans to embrace an eternal state of war, I find Victor Davis Hanson one of the most disturbing. .. His recent column defending the atomic bombing of Hiroshima reveals the Mr. Hyde lurking within our Dr. Jekyll. "
Callahan ignores the fact that the bomb ended, not perpetuated "eternal" war, abruptly saving millions of casualties on both sides. Only unconditional surrender discredited the militarists and thus allowed democracy to emerge ââ¬â and with it more than a half century of Japanese prosperity, security, and liberal government. And in the security of the present he forgets that the allies much earlier had tried a negotiated, rather than unconditional surrender and subsequent occupation of the enemy homeland in 1918 ââ¬â and got Hitler and another war later as thanks.
"Hanson would claim that the US had to demand unconditional surrender in order to prevent the possibility that a revived Japan might undertake aggression again in the future. (One wonders how near he believes that future must be ââ¬â can one wipe every member of an enemy nation to ensure safety from it forever?) But realistic worries on that front can be worked out in peace negotiations."
He slurs the United States military of WWII by suggesting the logic of forcing Japan to surrender leads to "wipe (sic) every member of an enemy nation". In this world of moral equivalence, rightwing dictatorships are usually always bereaved victims of leftwing American imperialism. So Callahan continues on his screed that we should have negotiated with the militarists of imperial Japan:
"That does not mean both sides in the discussion have the same voice. Japan was willing to discuss its terms of surrender, and was not demanding that of the US."
Tell all that to the Chinese in Nanking or those who fought on Okinawa. In such a world of relativism it makes no difference who starts wars, much less whether they are fought by fascists or democracies. Indeed, to Callahan, the United States in World War II operated on the same premises that bin Laden does now:
"Note that this sort of thinking is exactly how Osama bin Laden justifies striking civilian targets in the US, Britain, or Spain. We must grant that the conduct of modern warfare blurs the line between combatants and non-combatants ââ¬â on which side of it are the workers in a bomb factory? But as blurry as we might make it, an infant in Hiroshima or a new immigrant delivering a sandwich to the World Trade Center are obviously non-combatants."
Ponder that: Dropping a bomb on the headquarters of the Japanese 2nd Army to force a military cabal to surrender during a war they started that was taking 250,000 Asian lives a month is the same as blowing up an office building full of civilians at a time of peace.
Such a strange, strange world we live in now of David Duke praising Cindy Sheehan's scapegoating Israel.
George Bush who risked his presidency to free millions of Iraqis is to be the moral equivalent of Jefferson Davis ââ¬â but perhaps is just as hated by the unhinged Right because he is not enough like their beloved Jefferson Davis.
Forcing imperial Japan to surrender is the same as terrorists blowing up the World Trade Center.
And stopping the genocide of Saddam and promoting constitutional government are warmongering.
And all this nonsense transpires in the midst of a war in which the only way we can lose is to turn on each other and give up.
*I should preface my remarks that every fact that Meyerson adduces is incorrect. Take the following:
"Soon after 9-11, the San Joaquin Valley classics professor began writing regularly for The National Review, demanding we go into Iraq, imparting martial lessons from Greece and Rome to an America abruptly at war. In short order, Hanson became a fellow at Palo Alto's Hoover Institute (sic), a dinner companion of Bush and Dick Cheney, and the most unswerving defender of administration policies."
I wrote regularly for the National Review Online, not National Review. I never "demanded" that we go into Iraq, but urged that we do so after considering both the pros and cons of that difficult choice. The Hoover Institution is not "Palo Alto's" but affiliated with Stanford University, whose administration must approve senior fellow appointments in a lengthy process that is not done "in short order." I have never on any occasion been "a dinner companion of Bush." Nor have I been an "unswerving defender of administration policies" but criticized many of its stances from immigration and farm subsidies to deficit spending and current policy toward Saudi Arabia.
** How strange that about the time that Mr. Brecher's article appeared, someone in fact did try to torch our vineyard, but managed only to scorch about 20 vines near the road before the nearby Mid-Valley Fire Department arrived to put out the fire.
ââ¬â Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com. [url]http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200508260909.asp[/url] ================ **[I]WHAAAAAAHHH!!!![/I][/B] :biggrin:
2005-09-03 03:27 | User Profile
I love how Hanson and other neocon bastards conveniently forget that the initial reason given for the invasion of Iraq was WMDs. Since everyone with a brain now knows all the talk about WMDs was BS -- in fact, that was clear even prior to the invasion, thanks to indicators such as the forged documents pertaining to Nigerian uranium -- the neocons are now trying to sweep that under the rug and replace the phony WMD pretext with the "spreading of democracy."
If the neocons care so much about spreading democracy and human rights, then why aren't they shouting for a US military invasion of Sudan, where all kinds of horrific atrocities far worse than what went on under Saddam are taking place on a daily basis? The answer: Because the situation in Sudan is not important to Israel.
Even if it were true that Iraq was invaded to spread democracy, that is not a valid excuse for war in the mind of any genuine conservative.
Monsters to Destroy John Quincy Adams, 1821
And now, friends and countrymen, if the wise and learned philosophers of the elder world, the first observers of nutation and aberration, the discoverers of maddening ether and invisible planets, the inventors of Congreve rockets and Shrapnel shells, should find their hearts disposed to enquire what has America done for the benefit of mankind?
Let our answer be this: America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government. America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity.
She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights.
She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own.
She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart. She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right. Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. **But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.
She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.
She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.**
She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.
She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force....
She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit....
[America's] glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield is, Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her Declaration: this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice. [url]http://www.thisnation.com/library/jqadams1821.html[/url]
2005-09-03 03:31 | User Profile
Couldn't all of this just be shortened to "non-Kahn-sehvatives?"
The smelly hypocrisy, double-talk, and outright lies propagated by the neocons never fail to amaze me. Soon they'll find out just how irrelevant they really are.
2005-09-03 10:25 | User Profile
Angler,
VD would probably find the quote of John Quincy Adams' you posted above to be seditionist. He sure as hell wouldn't agree with it. While some of the folks he quoted are just as screwed up as he is, some are on target and it is good to see him sqaull over being nailed for the ass that he is.
2005-09-03 10:54 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Sertorius]August 26, 2005, 9:09 a.m. [B]The Paranoid Style[/B] Iraq: Where socialists and anarchists join in with racialists and paleocons.
........But both, in their exasperation at George Bush's insistence on seeing Iraq emerge from the Hussein nightmare years with some sort of constitutional government, have embraced [B]the paranoid style of personal invective.[/B] [B]They employ half-truths and spin conspiracy theories [/B] to argue that the war was unjust, impossible to win, and hatched through the result of a brainwashing of a devious few neocons.
I'm not sure if anyone realized it or not, but the title of this article is an obvious reference to Harvard historian Richard Hofstader's famous Frankfurt School based work, [I]The Paranoid Style in America Politics[/I].
I forget the exact way it worked in fact, but I think if I recall that some things about this general methodology in pathologizing political dissidence also was found to be threatening by the New Left in certain quarters as well.
Hanson obviously is trying recreate this imagery. He obviously is not a very original thinker. [QUOTE]The mirror-imaging fundamentalists and censors in turn saw the attack as an angry God's retribution either for an array of our mortal sins or America's tilting toward Israel.[/QUOTE]Another interesting use of a MacDonald term - "mirror-imaging". Anyway, he could have also noted that certain evangelical supporters also seemed to think that 9/11 was God's punishment on America for not supporting Israel enough, although I think most were smart enough not to say this publically (Oklahoma's Senator Inhoffe being the exception)
Anyway a lot of paleo's seem to be turning against Hanson, like Vdare and the writer of [URL=http://www.originaldissent.com/forums/showthread.php?t=19733&highlight=hanson]Victor Hanson, portrait of an American traitor[/URL]
Probably I just think there's a limit to how far you can go against the neocons at NR (like FR). Just like John Robinson said at FR "you could be anti-Israel and pro-immigration, or anti-immigration and pro-Israel, but not anti both". The same thing seems to hold true at NR. John O'Sullivan comes to mind (although even he was notably demoted anyway).
2005-09-03 11:02 | User Profile
Okie,
Am I misreading this? [QUOTE]Anyway, he could have also noted that certain evangelical supporters also seemed to think that 9/11 was God's punishment on America for not supporting Israel enough, although [u]I think most were smart enough to try to say this publically[/u] (Oklahoma's Senator Inhoffe being the exception)[/QUOTE] Or do you mean "not to say this publicallly"? [QUOTE]Just like John Robinson said at FR "you could be anti-Israel and pro-immigration, or anti-immigration and pro-Israel, but not anti both"[/QUOTE] I remember RimJob jr. saying this. I didn't believe him then and I know it isn't true now.
2005-09-03 11:19 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Sertorius]Okie,
Am I misreading this?
Or do you mean "not to say this publicallly"? I'd caught that too. Beat me to it.
I remember RimJob jr. saying this. I didn't believe him then and I know it isn't true now.[/QUOTE]Well it does make sense, as something someone would say privately to a doubter (remember this was written in a private e-mail which the guy chose to publicize.) Its sort of like saying you can be anti-neocon a little bit, but there are limits.
Personally I think we all know that being anti-neo even a little bit marks you at FR of course, but JR on the other hand has always allowed some token diissent to stir up debate a little and make FR seem more representative of grass-roots conservatism.
2005-09-03 11:21 | User Profile
I see what you mean now.
2005-09-03 15:35 | User Profile
Leaving aside the juvenile rant, let us take the substance--which lies behind the post-9/11 phrase Idiotarian, i.e. an alleged alliance of loony left and loony right against the vast neocon middle. That talks the talk ok, but does it hunt?
I am reminded of another episode in our history that looks awfully like the neocon escapade of the last few years. That is, the simultaneous rise of the second Klan in American political life and the WW1 propaganda. Paleocon and Neocon are slippery terms, but one of the more reliable indicators is assessment of Lincoln. To some extent this is calculated. Neocons probably don't care much about Lincoln, but politically most people have been taught he was a great man, and speaking against what he did you might as well burn a Bible for all the good it would do you in a political race. In Politics, God is on the side of the Big Lies.
What shocked me most about Birth of a Nation (and I haven't seen the movie), is the pro-Lincoln bias. To be honest, it looks a lot like Wilsonian propaganda cooked up to whip Middle America into fighting trim, to get them go hunt the monsters, abroad and at home. After a fashion, it is highly nationalist (we must all unite behind Lincoln's legacy and "take our country back".) Combined with the new persuasive medium, the movies, this particular four way arrangement--militarist left and right in the "middle" vs. fringe left and right on the edges, sparked the cascade of events that led to the depression. The Neo-cons of that era were the Wilsonian Dems in alliance with the Aldrich Republicans (think "Federal Reserve"), and the Klan manipulated into an "anti-ferner" patsy of this Gang.
In the American Middle West in the 20s, you might say something about the patriotic pro-Klan anti-German majority in the middle, and the "lunatic fringe" of socialists and anti-Klan conservatives. But later history has a different message. Are the Neo-cons right to call their Left-Right synthesis the Center? Is their alliance of "conservatives"--of patriotic nationalists enlisted behind their banner in a foreign adventure, with a slap-dash of pro-Lincoln, pro-Money, pro-War, propaganda really the Center? Or is it more like where Middle America was in the 1920s. Patriotic, certainly, but in perpetual agricultural depression, soon to become a city phenomenon as well.
Now, it is not my intent here to evaluate the second Klan against the Neo-cons, to praise and blame. Here, the Neo-cons might be on the loosing end--their sham and calculated appeals to patriotism aside--when measured against the plusses and minuses attending the second Klan.
Yet, one might say that for Middle America to be patriotic in the 1910s and 1920s and follow Wilson's wars, accept Aldrich's reforms, and be a "good American"--that to be member of the Klan might be rather illusory and not much of a consolation by 1933. Certainly the America First movement made the "lunatic fringe" of 1916 into something much more mainstream--won back some Middle Americans to the paleo side. Evangelical Christians today, wrapped up as they are in the mind-world being generated for them with seductions of patriotism, end-time rhetoric, and unfulfilled promises of "social conservatism"--will one day be ashamed of having thrown in their lot with the small Neocon cabal.
The Neocons are not a mass movement. They are a secret organization, with its own ends--a sort of Klan, really--though not ours it would seem. To call such a Klan "the Middle"--even when it has a majority support for the nonce--is short sighted. Crowds and mobs melt away when their work is done. Leadership and movements live on in history books. But the verdict of history is harsh, like Justice, her scales are finely balanced, and her sword sharp, and her eyes blind and ears deaf to the scrawlings and screams of propagandists.
2005-09-03 17:32 | User Profile
Macrobius,
The only "Red-Brown" alliance that idiots like David Horowitz and Frontpage are hollering about that I know of is the one they created themselves, i.e., you have Trotskyites like David Horowitz and Zionist Fascists like Michael Ledeed working together. Leave it to these people to accuse someone of something they themselves are guilty of.
2005-09-04 03:46 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Sertorius]Macrobius,
The only "Red-Brown" alliance that idiots like David Horowitz and Frontpage are hollering about that I know of is the one they created themselves, i.e., you have Trotskyites like David Horowitz and Zionist Fascists like Michael Ledeed working together. Leave it to these people to accuse someone of something they themselves are guilty of.[/QUOTE]
When RimJob, Jonah Goldberg, Michael "Savage" Weiner and Horowitz bray about Islamofascist Fifth Columnists the accused are undoubtedly nobler than the accusers... :jester:
2005-09-04 03:51 | User Profile
Howard,
The term "Islamofascist" is as silly and as stupid sounding as "homocide bomber". When I hear someone using them I know I am listening to an idiot. Speaking of idiots, Savage claims to have coined the term "Islamofascist". I thought it was Stephen Schwartz.
2005-09-04 04:03 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Sertorius]Howard,
The term "Islamofascist" is as silly and as stupid sounding as "homocide bomber". When I hear someone using them I know I am listening to an idiot. Speaking of idiots, Savage claims to have coined the term "Islamofascist". I thought it was Stephen Schwartz.[/QUOTE]
Sert,
That absurd zionist propaganda phrase shows colossal ignorance of the fact that Islam and secular Fascism/Nationalism are sworn enemies in the Middle East.
Only the droolingist FReaker toads bought Junior's line that Osama and Saddam were in cahoots... :dry:
2005-09-13 09:14 | User Profile
September 7, 2005 What Victor Davis Hanson Does to History Bard of the Booboisie [url]http://counterpunch.com/werther09072005.html[/url] By WERTHER*
Let us stipulate straightaway: Victor Davis Hanson is the worst historian since Parson Weems. To picture anything remotely as bad as his pseudo-historical novels and propaganda tracts, one would have to imagine an account of the fiscal policies of the Bush administration authored by Paris Hilton.
Mr. Hanson, Cal State Fresno's contribution to human letters, is the favorite historian of the administration, the Naval War College, and other groves of disinterested research. His academic niche is to drag the Peloponnesian War into every contemporary foreign policy controversy and thereby justify whatever course of action our magistrates have taken. One suspects that if the neo-cons at the American Enterprise Institute were suddenly seized by the notion to invade Patagonia, Mr. Hanson would be quoting Pericles in support.
Once we strip away all the classical Greek fustian, it becomes clear that the name of his game is to take every erroneous conventional wisdom, cliche, faulty generalization, and common-man imbecility, and elevate them to a catechism. In this process, he showcases a technique beloved of pseudo-conservatives stuck at the Sean Hannity level of debate: he swallows whatever quasi-historical balderdash serves the interest of those in power, announces it with an air of surprised discovery, and then congratulates himself on his boldness in telling truth to power.
This is a surprising and rather hypocritical pose by someone who reportedly sups at the table of Vice President Cheney. For Mr. Hanson is one of a long and undistinguished line of personalities stretching back into the abysm of time: the tribal bard, the court historian, the academic recipient of the Lenin Prize. Compared to him, politically connected scribes such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., resemble Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Like a Hellcat aviator at the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot, one hardly knows where to fire first, so target-rich is the Hanson opus. But let us take, exempli gratia, a recent contribution to human understanding in the pseudo-conservatives' flagship publication, National Review. Mr. Hanson's philippic, "Remembering World War II: Revisionists Get It Wrong," [1] is an extended and unsourced whine obviously written from a deep sense of grievance that America's contribution to World War II is somehow underappreciated, if not deliberately slighted.
One blinks in disbelief at such a statement. World War II is the subject of an avalanche of more books and films than any other historical subject, most of them if anything overstating, mainly by implication, the precise American contribution to Allied victory. Has Mr. Hanson never heard, that far from being unheralded, General Patton was the laudatory subject of an Oscar-winning film that is a staple of Turner Classic Movies? Did the overwhelmingly favorable public response to Saving Private Ryan bounce off his consciousness like so many Swedish peas off a steel helmet? [2]. Was there no notice of the recent dedication of the World War II Memorial in Reader's Digest or other publications appropriate to Mr. Hanson's Rotarian tastes? The History Channel is All World War II, All The Time - largely from the American perspective; Mr. Hanson is apparently too busy watching Fox News to notice.
Perhaps Hollywood, otherwise a perennial target of America's moralizing jihadists, is not to blame so much as that bugbear of pseudo-conservative rage, the Liberal Education Establishment. Mr. Hanson believes that chalky pedagogues are inserting poison into innocent American youths' crania in the same manner that Claudius dispatched Hamlet's father. Only, rather than killing them, these pied pipers of Trotskyite academia endeavor to turn them into Old Glory-burning zombies.
We have before us at this moment our daughter's high school history textbook. Contra Hanson, there is no mention of the internment of Japanese-American civilians. Mr. Hanson's strange obsession with this subject invites speculation. Does his complaint about the alleged academic emphasis on this episode mean he would have opposed internment, or that it was merely a regrettable but necessary expedient best left unmentioned?
Naturally, he cannot restrain himself from commenting, as if we didn't know, that Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Earl Warren were the instigators of the internment. Does that make it illicit? If Wendell Wilkie had been elected president and duly ordered internment would it have been unexceptionable? Or does Mr. Hanson's reasoning run along the lines of, "we were fully justified to imprison American citizens without due process as a wartime measure, and people shouldn't bring it up, but my political enemies ordered it, so I can have it both ways." Perhaps Mr. Hanson can resolve this conundrum of who was loyal by paying a visit to the office of the senior Senator of Hawaii: Japanese-American, winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor, and infantry soldier who left a limb on the killing fields of World War II fighting for his country. [3]
On the other hand, the textbook contains a long extract from Reichsführer S.S. Heinrich Himmler's 4 October 1943 speech in Posen outlining the intent of the German government to undertake its Final Solution. Hanson, by contrast, suggests that the Liberal obsession with World War II revisionism and the alleged faults of the United States have resulted in the diminution of appreciation for the Axis' killing of innocent civilians. Really?
The number of books, articles, films, commemorations, and newly-opened museums having the holocaust as its subject is a veritable deluge. [4] Somehow, this fact has escaped Mr. Hanson's curiosity. And one doubts, again contra Mr. Hanson, that there are many editorials in American newspapers decrying the bombing of Hamburg. The sole example we can find is a piece by the British (not American) author Niall Ferguson, which is more ambivalent than denunciatory. [5]
Having disposed of Mr. Hanson's assorted red herrings and straw men, the gravamen of his argument is bosh. Seven-eighths of all Wehrmacht combat-division-months (i.e., one division spending one month in combat) during World War II occurred on the Russian Front.[6] It was the Red Army, as Churchill admitted, which "tore the guts out of the German Army." Without diminishing the courage of the assault troops of D-Day, the successful operation in Normandy would have been impossible in 1944 without Stalingrad and Kursk.
Can human imagination encompass the fact that there were 27 million Russian deaths in World War II? That fact was a demographic catastrophe from which Russia has never recovered. Yes, Stalin was a swine, and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was an act of treachery. But that does not entitle comfortable court historians to simulate outrage at how the American role in World War II has allegedly been belittled by (uncited) Marxist scribblers. Equally, the memoirs of German veterans of the Russian Front generally regarded a posting to the West as virtual salvation compared to the relentless meat grinder of the East. Their testimony has more credibility regarding the Russian contribution to World War II than the jeremiad of a shallow intellect.
For supporting evidence (nowhere seen in Hanson's diatribe), we cite Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett. These establishment military historians, whose musings ordinarily would not ruffle the serenity of Bohemian Grove or the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, aver that the Soviets' little-known Operation Bagration of June 1944 was an operational triumph that the Western allies did not replicate. [7]
Yes, the Red Army was horribly profligate with human life. But was the United States so daintily economical with its own sons because of its wise policies and whiz-bang technology, as Mr. Hanson says? Read Belton Y. Cooper's Death Traps, or Paul Fussell's Wartime. Both books are tours de force about the wartime experience, and both defy summary in the space allotted here. And both gentlemen were junior officers in the killing time of 1944-45, a qualification conspicuously absent from the resumes of many a publicity agent who would send other mens' sons into mortal combat.
As for Mr. Hansen's other distortions and examples of suggestio falsi, the History Channel has already reprised for the umpteeth time that the capture of Iwo Jima potentially saved the lives of more B-29 aircrews than were lost in the amphibious assault, contrary to the asseverations of the Cal State Fresno Thucydides. Are putatively failed strategy and tactics at Iwo really a subject of current Left-wing historiography that Mr. Hanson feels impelled to refute? That may be true, but one is entitled to entertain a healthy skepticism.
To tap the last nail into the Mr. Hanson's reputational sarcophagus, we cite a little-known but seminal work which demonstrates that victory in the Second World War was largely a matter of geology. In Oil And War: How The Deadly Struggle For Oil in World War II Meant Victory Or Defeat, co-authors Robert Goralski and Russell W. Freeburg argue that World War II was not only won by the allies through possession of oil, it was, to an extent far greater than received history admits, about oil.
Mustering a huge, oil-hungry army, the Germans' oil production was always less than a tenth of that of the United States. Japan was in even worse straits, and Italy could not even send its fleet to sea for much of the war for lack of fuel. Pearl Harbor, however large it looms in American iconography, was an important but basically a subsidiary operation to help secure the main thrust towards the oil fields of the Dutch East Indies and Burma. The Germans' Fall Blau of 1942 was largely an oil offensive to reach the fields beyond the Caucasus. Many German operations in North Africa were predicated on capturing British stocks of oil.
Given that 95.9 percent of oil refining capacity lay outside Axis control [8], victory in a war characterized by corps-sized tank thrusts and thousand-bomber raids was a very long shot for the Axis. Mr. Hanson, however, argues without evidence that the inherent virtue of the ordinary American was what turned the tide for the Allies. While by no means discounting the tremendous heroism of the GI, other factors may loom even larger in the correlation of forces: the Allies' huge industrial capacity, a sea of oil, and the self-sacrifice of the Russian Muzhik.
Turning from Mr. Hanson's preposterous history to his political agenda, it appears that his labored apologia to United States government policy 60 years ago serves as a defense of United States government policy now, anno 2005. [9] Don't let those ungrateful foreigners criticize us, he seems to say, after all, didn't we win World War II? Aren't all our wars just? What are all those Krauts and Frogs bitching about? How convenient when the invasion of Iraq (which Mr. Hanson fervently supports) has manifestly faltered and requires rhetorical support from an alleged man of learning, a species otherwise nowhere in evidence in the administration's camp. How convenient, given that the Bush administration sought to rain on Russia's 9 May 2005 victory parade and excoriate Yalta, in a manner not seen in official circles since the gin-fueled diatribes of Senator Joseph McCarthy. [10]
We briefly pass over Mr. Hanson's other non-sequiturs and illogicalities: his seeming dismissal of the Chinese contribution (the implication that the PRC's butchering its citizens after the war somehow negates the Chinese role in winning it) ignores the fact that the bulk of the Japanese Army was tied up in China throughout the war. Likewise, most American advisors stated it was Mao's guerrillas, not Henry Luce's darling, Chiang Kai-shek, who put up the stoutest resistance to the Japanese.
We pass over these matters with no more than an embarrassed cough, and lurch into what really peeves Mr. Hanson. Here is the summation of his bill of indictment:
" . . . the beneficiaries of those who sacrificed now ankle-bite their dead betters. Even more strangely, they have somehow convinced us that in their politically-correct hindsight, they could have done much better in World War II.
"Yet from every indication of their own behavior over the last 30 years, *we suspect that the generation who came of age in the 1960s would have not just have done far worse but failed entirely."* [italics in original]
The reader seeks specificity. To whom is he referring, when he talks of the generation which came of age in the 1960s? The 57,000 names on the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial, who had little say in the matter, but who suited up and went into combat as bravely as the World War II generation? Or is he writing them off as failures? Or perhaps Vice President Richard B. Cheney, dining companion of Mr. Hanson and owner of four Vietnam War deferments? The author fails to explain.
This essay has barely covered Mr. Hanson's historical fatuity. His errors in interpreting his purported specialty, ancient Greece, are so legion as require an extended treatise. Suffice it to say that he does not praise the Greeks for philosophy, geometry, or literature remotely as much as he whoops it up for their war-making, conveniently ignoring the manifold disasters of the Peloponnesian War. A revealing Freudian slip is his approving and oxymoronic reference to Greece as an "imperial democracy,"[11] no doubt reflecting how his administration benefactors would conceive of our own form of government.
A leitmotiv of pseudo-conservatives is the allegation that public education has gone to hell in a handbasket. As Victor Davis Hanson demonstrates, they may be right.
Postscript
Before this piece went to press, a correspondent apprised me of yet another Mr. Hanson effusion in the National Review, this one an incoherent gallimaufry of attacks on every political point of view that does not favor the present crusade for civilization in Iraq.
In this diatribe, Mr. Hanson affects to denounce his opponents for possessing the "Paranoid Style."[12] This unattributed reference to a work by the late Richard Hofstadter lays bare Mr. Hanson's intellectual shallowness. For Hofstadter's use of the phrase was intended to delineate precisely the kind of mentality that Mr. Hanson and his neoconservative confreres embody: the self-righteous, "ignorance-is-strength" 100-percent Americano who relentlessly conjures threats abroad, sniffs out subversion at home, and, in general, acts like a hybrid of Billy Sunday and General Jack D. Ripper.
But this summary barely conveys Mr. Hanson's tirade. Exhibiting the paranoid style himself (and concentrating particularly on writers who had the impudence to expose his errors), Hanson sees a tacit Hitler-Stalin pact within an assortment of leftists, paleo-conservatives, racists, and anarchists. It does not help his case that he does not cite a single living paleo-con, instead misidentifying the libertarian Lew Rockwell as a paleo.
Further confusing matters, Mr. Hanson refers to the Democratic Socialists of America (affiliate of the Socialist International) as a "national socialist organization." Goatee'd nerd in the coffee shop, meet your soul-mate Reinhard Heydrich!
Likewise, Mr. Hanson misidentifies the publication of online columnist Gary Brecher. It is Exile, not Encore.
Having thankfully assumed we had lurched to the end of this bill of indictment, our hopes were cruelly dashed. The concrete-like slab of The Washington Post Sunday edition thunked on our doorstep only a few hours ago, and with it the latest effluent from the Sage of Fresno himself as a featured op-ed: "Why We Need to Stay in Iraq." [13] Note the sheer chickenhawk effrontery of that "we," and the almost ghoulish tastelessness of whooping it up for endless foreign deployments as the dead of New Orleans remain uncounted.
Notes
[1] [url]http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200505130808.asp[/url]
[2] It is ironic that the most recent controversy surrounding the film was the effort to bowdlerize it for television screening * not by some moth-eaten Leftist professors at Brown or Oberlin, but by the Bible-toting gorgons of the American Family Association. And the objection was less about the graphic violence than their horrified discovery that men in combat use profanity. Mencken, thou shoudst be living at this hour.
[3] The Hon. Daniel K. Inouye.
[4] Again, the only discouraging word about the movie Schindler's List came from The Hon. Tom Coburn, R, Oklahoma, a clean-living Senator duly chosen and sworn, rather than some putative Left-winger. Apparently the good burghers of the Tornado Belt regard the sight of disrobed, elderly prisoners being led to a gas chamber as disturbing, but not for humanitarian reasons. Instead, their objection lies in the deep-seated sexual prurience of those who would speak in behalf of the national morality.
[5] Mr. Ferguson is admittedly an eccentric. He has at excruciating length decried British participation in World War I as a pointless butchery which destroyed the country's solvency; but, somewhat irrationally, he initially supported the United States governments's lunge for empire in the Middle East in 2003. He appears lately to have recanted this opinion with a muffled cough behind the hand. "VE Day * A Soiled Victory," The Los Angeles Times, 10 May 2005,
[6] Dirty Little Secrets of World War II: Military Information No One Told You, by James F. Dunnigan, 1996.
[7] A War To Be Won: Fighting The Second World War, by Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett, 2000, p. 483.
[8] Goralski and Freeburg, p. 338.
[9] His outpouring of flatly inaccurate predictions about the U.S. occupation in Iraq, replete with inaccurate analogies involving World War II, the Civil War, and classical Greece, is published in the National Review: "Critical Mass," 12 December 2003,
[10] A curious irony: Senator McCarthy also defended Waffen-SS Obersturmbannführer Joachim Peiper, convicted of ordering the massacre of more than 80 U.S. soldiers at Malmedy, Belgium. In addition, Colonel Peiper's unit in Russia was known as the blowtorch battalion for its habit of incinerating Russian villages along with their inhabitants. Senator McCarthy's otherwise inexplicable act of defending an American-killing convicted war criminal on behalf of his crusade against the Bolsheviks may be resolved thus: Catholic prelates in post-war Germany had mounted a campaign for the relief of incarcerated war criminals; a public official in the Upper Midwest, which contained many German Catholics, might be attentive to their arguments. Colonel Peiper was ultimately paroled.
[11] "Critical Mass."
[12] [url]http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200508260909.asp[/url]
Not a bad column by "Werther", the exception here being the commonly accepted view about Peiper in the footnote, which I believe is in error. He not only nails VD as a court historian, but shows up the rest of neoconmania as well. Willianm S. Lind and others have made use of his commentary on the Defense and the National Interest website.
"Yet from every indication of their own behavior over the last 30 years, *we suspect that the generation who came of age in the 1960s would have not just have done far worse but failed entirely."*
I wonder who this "we" is, VD refers to? Maybe "Edward Gibbon" here might wish to take a stab at this one. If "we" means folks like VD's dinner host Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, or himself, then, I would say he has a point. If he means some of the people I knew that served over in Viet Nam, then he is dead wrong and does them a disservice.
2005-09-13 18:18 | User Profile
[QUOTE]One suspects that if the neo-cons at the American Enterprise Institute were suddenly seized by the notion to invade Patagonia, Mr. Hanson would be quoting Pericles in support.[/QUOTE]If Bibi the Jackal has his way Iran will be invaded by the United States requiring the loss of American life. Bibi wants to soften up Iran by showing pornography, a specialty of his tribe. Obviously, Bibi has noticed the moral decay in America.
[QUOTE]This is a surprising and rather hypocritical pose by someone who reportedly sups at the table of Vice President Cheney. For Mr. Hanson is one of a long and undistinguished line of personalities stretching back into the abysm of time: the tribal bard, the court historian, the academic recipient of the Lenin Prize. Compared to him, politically connected scribes such as [I]Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.[/I], resemble Dietrich Bonhoeffer.[/QUOTE]As bad as Hanson is, Schlesinger and now his son reek more noxiously
[QUOTE]Mr. Hanson's philippic, "Remembering World War II: Revisionists Get It Wrong," is an extended and unsourced whine obviously written from a deep sense of grievance that America's contribution to World War II is somehow underappreciated, if not deliberately slighted.[/QUOTE]Unfortunately Hansonââ¬â¢s view is dominant in America.[QUOTE]One blinks in disbelief at such a statement. World War II is the subject of an avalanche of more books and films than any other historical subject, most of them if anything overstating, mainly by implication, the precise American contribution to Allied victory. Has Mr. Hanson never heard that far from being unheralded, General Patton was the laudatory subject of an Oscar-winning film that is a staple of Turner Classic Movies?[/QUOTE]Patton was portrayed as a loudmouth buffoon, not as a learned man in military history. It was a malicious caricature.[QUOTE]We have before us at this moment our daughter's high school history textbook. Contra Hanson, there is no mention of the internment of Japanese-American civilians. Mr. Hanson's strange obsession with this subject invites speculation. Does his complaint about the alleged academic emphasis on this episode mean he would have opposed internment, or that it was merely a regrettable but necessary expedient best left unmentioned?[/QUOTE]As I wrote the Japanese internment could only be compared to the behavior of the Japanese in Asia only by American academics:[QUOTE]Today over a half-century after the war ended some American textbooks have attempted an equivalence in the treatment of American prisoners and the Rape of Nanking by Japanese with Japanese-Americans being held in camps. These conditions are described as internment in concentration camps. This was written while knowing full well that very few died in America. Not to excuse the incarceration of Japanese-Americans, but to attempt to regard the two actions as morally equivalent has illustrated the depths to which American academia has sunk. One book purporting to ask some of history's trickiest questions dismissed the death of one-third of the Allied prisoners on the Bataan Death March from starvation, disease, or brutal murder as a consequence of the Japanese being not supplied to handle such a huge force of prisoners. [/QUOTE]
[QUOTE]Perhaps Mr. Hanson can resolve this conundrum of who was loyal by paying a visit to the office of the senior Senator of Hawaii: Japanese-American, winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor, and infantry soldier who left a limb on the killing fields of World War II fighting for his country.[/QUOTE] Check my website for the fraudulence of the Medals of Honor for the Nisei: [url]http://richardearley.net/[/url] under Current Writings for lying on behalf of Japanese-Americans[QUOTE]On the other hand, the textbook contains a long extract from Reichsführer S.S. Heinrich Himmler's 4 October 1943 speech in Posen outlining the intent of the German government to undertake its Final Solution. Hanson, by contrast, suggests that the Liberal obsession with World War II revisionism and the alleged faults of the United States have resulted in the diminution of appreciation for the Axis' killing of innocent civilians. Really?[/QUOTE]I ask that even the extremely intelligent to look at a map of Europe to confirm that Russia was, and continues to be, much closer to the camps where Jews were held. The United States was quite far away. Why have the Russians never been berated for not freeing the camps?[QUOTE]The number of books, articles, films, commemorations, and newly-opened museums having the holocaust as its subject is a veritable deluge. Somehow, this fact has escaped Mr. Hanson's curiosity.[/QUOTE]Yes far, far too much has been made of the deaths of Jews while the deaths of much greater number of Chinese have been deliberately forgotten. I suspect this will not continue much long. Check out the advertisement on the Op-ed page of the New York [I]Times [/I] of September 13, 2005. The Chinese are starting to react. Americans were far more complicit in the deaths of Chinese than the deaths of Jews.[QUOTE]Having disposed of Mr. Hanson's assorted red herrings and straw men, the gravamen of his argument is bosh. Seven-eighths of all Wehrmacht combat-division-months (i.e., one division spending one month in combat) during World War II occurred on the Russian Front. It was the Red Army, as Churchill admitted, which "tore the guts out of the German Army." Without diminishing the courage of the assault troops of D-Day, the successful operation in Normandy would have been impossible in 1944 without Stalingrad and Kursk.[/QUOTE]I believe that when the British under Montgomery were fighting 60,000 Germans under Rommel in North Africa the German forces in Russian were almost 3,500,000. No serious reader can doubt the war was won and lost on the eastern front.[QUOTE]Equally, the memoirs of German veterans of the Russian Front generally regarded a posting to the West as virtual salvation compared to the relentless meat grinder of the East. Their testimony has more credibility regarding the Russian contribution to World War II than the jeremiad of a shallow intellect.[/QUOTE]General Blumentritt stated that in both wars the German soldier preferred to fight on the western front.[QUOTE]Yes, the Red Army was horribly profligate with human life. But was the United States so daintily economical with its own sons because of its wise policies and whiz-bang technology, as Mr. Hanson says? Read Belton Y. Cooper's [I]Death Traps[/I], or Paul Fussell's [I]Wartime[/I].[/QUOTE]Fussell has written at least one book too many. Cooperââ¬â¢s [I][B]Death Traps [/B] [/I] I previously commented on: [url]http://www.originaldissent.com/forums/showthread.php?p=85334#post85334[/url][QUOTE]Given that 95.9 percent of oil refining capacity lay outside Axis control [8], victory in a war characterized by corps-sized tank thrusts and thousand-bomber raids was a very long shot for the Axis. [/QUOTE]The much remembered Battle of the Bulge had the Germans attacking with about 100 tanks. We barely confined that thrust. At Kursk the Germans had nearly 3000 and the Russians more.[QUOTE]Mr. Hanson, however, argues without evidence that the inherent virtue of the ordinary American was what turned the tide for the Allies.[/QUOTE]Unfortunately Americans and Jews assume ââ¬ÅMoral Superiorityââ¬Â assures victory. Perhaps Attila and Genghis Khan felt the same. From my book:[QUOTE]One should not be surprised to find Israeli Jews along with the New York variety considering Americans, not so much as stupid, as lucky to be chosen from all the peoples on earth to contribute to the Israeli nation where heaven on earth, or as close as an omniscient God may allow, will be built. This was to be accomplished according to Mr. Ben-Gurion by having the finest army in the world and by Jews of Israel having "[B]moral superiority[/B]". Sigmund Freud speculated on the historical trait of Jews assuming they were more noble than their neighbors and surmised this trait may have contributed to the unpopularity of Jews among their neighbors. Earley, [I][B]War, Money and American Memory[/B][/I], p194[/QUOTE][QUOTE]While by no means discounting the tremendous heroism of the GI, other factors may loom even larger in the correlation of forces: the Allies' huge industrial capacity, a sea of oil, and the [I][B]self-sacrifice[/B] [/I] of the Russian Muzhik.[/QUOTE]Far more Slavs were butchered by Stalin before the German attack than killed by them. From my book:[QUOTE]Yet in August 1942 Stalin confessed to Winston Churchill that the struggle against the kulaks was worse than the war at that time. At that time the German advance had not been blunted, and the tide was still with the Nazis.
In the American press the prime mover of this sordid state of reporting was Walter Duranty of the New York [I]Times[/I]. That Duranty was a long time liar and apologist for the Soviets has long been known, but what does bother to this day was the purblind faith which justified his treachery to the faithful. These vile apologists were people who believed progress demanded smokestacks, an industrial approach to all life situations and an abiding hatred and contempt for those who talked of virtues of a slower paced rural life.[/QUOTE] [QUOTE]How convenient, given that the Bush administration sought to rain on Russia's 9 May 2005 victory parade and excoriate Yalta, in a manner not seen in official circles since the gin-fueled diatribes of Senator Joseph McCarthy.[/QUOTE] Drunk or sober Joe McCarthy was right, and his enemies wrong.[QUOTE]We briefly pass over Mr. Hanson's other non-sequiturs and illogicalities: his seeming dismissal of the Chinese contribution (the implication that the PRC's butchering its citizens after the war somehow negates the Chinese role in winning it) ignores the fact that the bulk of the Japanese Army was tied up in China throughout the war.[/QUOTE]There was not much land in the Pacific for the Japanese army. The Japanese army participated in butchery in China on a scale Americans resist knowing. We will be held accountable soon. Our failure to try the Japanese as the Germans were was a historical mistake of the first magnitude. [QUOTE]Likewise, most American advisors stated it was Mao's guerrillas, not Henry Luce's darling, Chiang Kai-shek, who put up the stoutest resistance to the Japanese[/QUOTE].The Chinese, either Reds or ours, did not fight very much.
2005-09-13 18:45 | User Profile
[COLOR=DarkRed][FONT=Arial][I][B] - "The much remembered Battle of the Bulge had the Germans attacking with about 100 tanks. We barely confined that thrust."[/B][/I][/COLOR] [/FONT] Are you sure? Didn't Germans really have more than that? [COLOR=DarkRed][FONT=Arial]
[B][I] - "The Japanese army participated in butchery in China on a scale Americans resist knowing."[/I][/B][/FONT][/COLOR]
What exactly was the overall scale? Do you know any reliable figures?
Petr
2005-09-13 18:57 | User Profile
Petr,
I bet that is a typo. I've read around 900-1000 tanks and assault guns, depending on the source.
2005-09-13 19:43 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Sertorius]Petr,
I bet that is a typo. I've read around 900-1000 tanks and assault guns, depending on the source.[/QUOTE]I believe there were only about 100 tanks under Peiper, who supposedly was going to penetrate to the ports. Manstein stated the offensive had no chance to succeed, but German troops behaved nobly in sacrificing for their comrades. My mistake.
From the BBC:[QUOTE]Between them, Dietrich and Manteuffel fielded 28 divisions, ten of them armoured. In the armoured divisions were concentrated 1,250 of the 2,600 tanks and assault guns amassed for the Ardennes offensive, now code-named Autumn Mist.[/QUOTE] [QUOTE]Autumn Mist had inflicted 19,000 casualties on US 12th Army, and had taken 15,000 American prisoners. But the cost to the German Army had been 100,000 men killed or wounded and 800 tanks destroyed - losses which could not be made up.[/QUOTE][url]http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache:XpQo9Nm9RToJ:www.bbc.co.uk/history/war/wwtwo/battle_bulge_04.shtml+battle+bulge+german+tanks&hl=en[/url]
2005-09-15 10:00 | User Profile
Unlike JFC Fuller or Basil Liddel-Hart and other notable military historians, I don't believe Mr. Hanson has ever served in the military or led troops. See his personal website [url="http://www.victorhanson.com/"]Victor Hanson[/url]. He just went to a bunch of leftie west coast schools. A Colonel Blimp, armchair general at its worst.
2005-09-15 14:38 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Sertorius]The term "Islamofascist" is as silly and as stupid sounding as "homocide bomber". When I hear someone using them I know I am listening to an idiot. Speaking of idiots, Savage claims to have coined the term "Islamofascist". I thought it was Stephen Schwartz.[/QUOTE]
Wiener was using that term before anyone else had started to use it, to the best of my knowledge, although Comrade Sandalio may have put it into print first. They are both San Francisco Jews and are well aware of, and actively dislike each other; no doubt one coined it, and the other stole it. Difficult to say which one of the two maggots was also the plagarizing thief & self-promoting liar in that particular instance....
2005-09-15 14:59 | User Profile
Kevin,
Thank you for the enlightenment. Let me ask you this. Is there any truth to Savage's claim to have coined the term "compassionate conservative"?
2005-09-15 17:47 | User Profile
As best as I can recall, Savage has been using the term since he went on the air in '95. I know he claimed Bob Dole stole the term from him.
2005-09-15 18:58 | User Profile
Thanks, Stanley.
2005-09-17 01:41 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Stanley]As best as I can recall, Savage has been using the term since he went on the air in '95. I know he claimed Bob Dole stole the term from him.[/QUOTE]
'94, actually--when Wiener-Savage's broadcast was confined to two hours on Saturday nights on KGO...
2005-09-17 01:51 | User Profile
They put up an billboard ad for that fag's show on 101 on the peninsula. Aghh...
2005-09-17 02:15 | User Profile
[QUOTE=madrussian]They put up an billboard ad for that fag's show on 101 on the peninsula. Aghh...[/QUOTE]
Bro', we need to borrow mischief tactics from the Anarchists to "beautify" that sucker... :1eye:
2005-09-17 02:36 | User Profile
Howard,
There used to be a billboard advertising Hannity's show near a jobsite I was working on years ago. One night, someone succeeded in hurling numerous eggs at the smiling image of the stupidest man on the radio, (next to the bulk of his callers) really defacing it in a very noticible way. Hannity "laughed" about it the next few days, but I could tell that he was pissed.
No, I didn't do it. I would have hurled sheetrock mud at the mouth if I were that sort.
2005-09-17 03:15 | User Profile
Sarge,
Once knew a fellow who'd hollow out eggs, refill 'em with brown and blood-red paint and launch said eggy-wegs with unerring accuracy with a short, concealable lacrosse stick...
For a buck's worth of supplies you could negate the obnoxious propaganda poisoning of a $5,000-a-month billboard. This guy once "scored" fifty tobacco billboards in a long, moonless night. :batman:
2005-09-17 03:30 | User Profile
Howard,
Don't tempt me...
2005-09-17 03:42 | User Profile
O.K.
But I might remind you during the next Faux ad blitz...