The latest form Orson Scott Card is getting quite a bit of well deserved mockery from the liberal blogosphere and quite a bit of understandable praise form the right. The book, a story about a leftist Army taking over New York City and precipitating a civil war, is badly written right wing wish fulfillment. In appears to contain every lazy stereotype and fantasy the more deranged on the right harbor about their neighbors on the left. The fact that Instapundit loves it is telling. Brad and Roy have the best takes, as usual, but I have seen more than a few references to the rumor that Card didn’t write his best novel, Ender’s Game. I don’t buy it: Card has always had streak of militarism and “kill em all and let God sort em out” in his writing, even in Ender’s Game.
The best argument for Card not having written Ender’s Game is just how much better it is than almost anything Card has written since. In fact, Card’s technical writing ability seems to have steadily declined. Just take this awful, awful passage from his new book:
You look pissed off,” said Malich.
“Yeah,” said Cole. “The terrorists are crazy and scary, but what really pisses me off is knowing that this will make a whole bunch of European intellectuals very happy.”
“They won’t be so happy when they see where it leads. They’ve already forgotten Sarajevo and the killing fields of Flanders.”
“I bet they’re already ‘advising’ Americans that this is where our military ‘aggression’ inevitably leads, so we should take this as a sign that we need to change our policies and retreat from the world.”
“And maybe we will,” said Malich. “A lot of Americans would love to slam the doors shut and let the rest of the world go hang.”
“And if we did,” said Cole, “who would save Europe then? How long before they find out that negotiations only work if the other guy is scared of the consequences of not negotiating? Everybody hates America till they need us to liberate them.”
“You’re forgetting that nobody cares what Europeans think except a handful of American intellectuals who are every bit as anti-American as the French,” said Malich.
This is representative: chapter two is nothing more than an extended Mary Sue sequence where Card’s alter ego really sticks it to all those liberal, American hating hoity-toity professors. The whole thing almost makes me pity Card. Almost. There is nothing remotely that bad in Ender’s Game. But I don’t take that as evidence for the contention that Card didn’t write Ender’s Game In fact, the sample chapters actually work to tie Empire back to his first work.
Put aside for the moment the stale dialogue, the horrible clichés, and the fantasy about Europeans and “anti-American” liberals. This conversation happens literally a few minutes after a terrorist attack kills most members of the Executive — including the President and the Vice President — and a few moments after the two men involved in this had decided that the Army, and perhaps they themselves, were going to be framed for the attack. And yet what really makes them mad is the fact that European intellectuals will think that this proves they are right about the value of military might in the world. Real people don’t act like this. Real people would be worried about their country, about the possibility of more attacks, about the safety of their friends and family, about the possibility that they were going to be framed for the greatest terrorist attack in the country’s history, about what they should be doing right now to help put things back together again. But Card hasn’t written real people; he has written talking point spewing robots. And Empire is not a real story, it is a polemic to the joys of Might:
“Nothing,” said Reuben immediately. “They respect us now because we have a dangerous military. They adopt our culture because we’re rich. If we were poor and unarmed, they’d peel off American culture like a snake shedding its skin.”
“Yes!” said Torrent. The other students registered as much surprise as Reuben felt, though Reuben did not let it show. Torrent agreed with the soldier?
Remember that — there is nothing good or valuable in American ideals or culture. They only thing that keeps America from being ignored is the power of her military. Might is right, Might is good, Might is all. It is a similar message to at least one of the themes that runs through Ender’s Game.
As a brief synopsis of the relevant portions of Ender’s Game:(and apologies for the lack of quotes — I don’t have the text in front of me) Ender is a child the military raises to be the ultimate strategists and battlefield commander and thus lead the Earth to victory over its alien enemies. Ender accomplishes this by committing genocide on the aliens, genocide that the military has maneuvered him into committing. Before that, however, the military manipulates Ender’s life so that he needlessly kills two boys (though Ender doesn’t know they are dead until long after the fact) and that he is abused and oppressed by others in order to impress upon him the fact that only overwhelming violence is the answer. When Ender is given his first student command, Ender treats his best subordinate in the same fashion in order to get similar results. At no point is any of this played as even morally ambiguous: the torture of Ender is justified, as are the deaths, as is Ender’s own torment of his subordinate as Good and Right and Necessary. Ender is explicitly forgiven his actions several time sin the text — even the genocide, even the murder of one boy where he clearly went farther than was required to take himself out of danger — in part because he was manipulated, but in part because overwhelming, destructive violence is a necessary part of human and human/alien relations. Even the men who manipulated Ender into genocide and murder are exonerated both by the text and the courts of Earth. Might is right, Might is good, even if Might is not yet all. There are other themes in the book, and the question of genocide is dealt with with more complexity than it might seem from this summary, but the
A common thread runs through Ender’s Game and Empire, then, even if it is much more developed in Empire. And that last is the primary difference: Ender’s Game is a story; Empire is not. Ender’s Game tries to be a good story; that is, it tries to build realistic characters and have them react realistically to the situations they find themselves in. It attempts to mirror how real humans behave because it is, like all good stories, interested in telling us something about people. Empire does not have real characters because it is not interested in telling us a story. It is interested in making a political point and it will make that point, realism,. believability, character be damned. The difference between Empire and Ender’s Game are not the result of different authors. They are the results of differences in authorial intent.
Okay, so this is OSC’s entry into neo-con porn, a badly written book that amounts to nothing more than material for the 101st Keyboarders to wank off to. Why spend so much time on it, aside from the unintentionally hilarious prose? Because I believe the distance between Ender’s Game and Empire illustrates one of Dave Neiwart’s points: extremism can be mainstreamed.
In the late eighties, Orson Card was a writer with authoritarian leanings who wrote decent stories. Then came sixteen years of Rush Limbaugh and his ilk’s demonization of the left wing. That demonization only increased after 9/11, turning in some cases to explicitly eliminiationist rhetoric; Dave’s site has the details. And at the end of the time, Orson Card has morphed into full blown right wing lunatic who writes a political polemic flecked with spittle and pours bile on leftists of all stripes. Now, a person’s growth is never as simple as A caused B, and obviously I am not privy to what goes on in Card’s head. But the similarities are so striking as to be compelling. Leftists, in the world of Limbaugh and Coulter and Malkin, are vile things: anti-Military, closed-minded, smug, superior, elitist, anti-American, violent, incapable of reasoned though, practically traitors. Leftists, in Empire, are vile things: anti-Military, closed-minded, smug, superior, elitist, anti-American, violent, incapable of reasoned though, actually traitors. America, in the world of Limbaugh and Coulter and Malkin, is always right (even when it acts as an Empire it’s not really acting as an Empire) and its correct course of action is always to show the world who is boss. America, in Empire, is always right (even when it acts as an Empire it’s not really acting as an Empire) and its correct course of action is always to show the world who is boss.
In just five short chapters, Empire contains almost every vicious strawmen that people like Limbaugh have constructed to represent the Left in their minds and the minds of their followers. Ender’s Game had none that I can think of, and was only tentatively authoritarian. It is possible, of course, that Card came to his conclusions about liberals years after that Limbaugh and his imitators built strawmen that look precisely like those conclusions. But forgive me if I think that the road from Ender’s Game to Empire went through the cesspool that is the world of Limbaugh and Coulter and Malkin.
So Bush says we are going to stay until the mission is complete, even as Sadarists leave the Iraqi coalition government. I have a question though: what defines victory? This isn’t snark or sarcasm — this is a legitimate question. I have no idea what defines victory in the minds of the right wing war supporters. It cannot be democracy, because there have now been two rounds of elections that went pretty well and there is the form of parliamentary democracy in the country. If it is “security” or “securing the democracy”, then someone needs to explain what that would look like. A given level of violent deaths? An Iraqi Army able to defeat the militias? The defeat of the militias? Without a solid definition of what victory looks like we as a people have no means to judge the steps our government is taking to achieve that victory. Just as importantly, we have no way to say to our politicians: “Okay, we have reached the point you said was victory — now come home or give us a damn good explanation for why you won’t”. In other words, no clear definition of victory can mean never leaving, or not leaving as long as one political faction thinks it has an advantage by staying. And that is not acceptable in a functioning democracy.
So: just what, precisely, constitutes victory? And why won’t the Bush Administration answer this simple question?
It’s like there’s some kind of permanent, rotating stupidity championship under dispute at Townhall, and everyone there is constantly striving to win it.
Dennis Prager goes bull-goose loony over somebody else’s religion, natch, in today’s column - a hate-filled orgasm of ignorance and prejudice that is simply staggering to behold.
The United States has no ability to affect the outcome of the war in Iraq any more. It hasn’t for quite some time, but now its official:
The U.S. military is no longer able to defeat a bloody insurgency in western Iraq or counter al-Qaeda’s rising popularity there, according to newly disclosed details from a classified Marine Corps intelligence report that set off debate in recent months about the military’s mission in Anbar province.
The Marines recently filed an updated version of that assessment that stood by its conclusions and stated that, as of mid-November, the problems in troubled Anbar province have not improved, a senior U.S. intelligence official said yesterday. “The fundamental questions of lack of control, growth of the insurgency and criminality” remain the same, the official said.
The Marines’ August memo, a copy of which was shared with The Washington Post, is far bleaker than some officials suggested when they described it in late summer. The report describes Iraq’s Sunni minority as “embroiled in a daily fight for survival,” fearful of “pogroms” by the Shiite majority and increasingly dependent on al-Qaeda in Iraq as its only hope against growing Iranian dominance across the capital.
The troops we have in place cannot do anything about this, and, absent a draft that we all know will not happen, there are no more troops to send. Many generals think too many troops will just inspire more opposition anyway. The fate of Iraq is now in the hands of the worst sorts, the militias and deathsquads that our stupid invasion allowed to come to power.
As I said earlier, the Bushes lost this war almost before they began fighting it:
Bush lost this war a long time ago; they lost it when they invaded with a force so small it couldn’t be careful; they lost it when they put tens of thousands of armed men out of work; they lost it when they ignored Sistani; they lost it when they went to war with an army that had no counter-insurgency tactics; they lost it when they refused to plan for the occupation; they lost it when they didn’t provide security to Baghdad in the days immediately after the invasion; they lost it when they decided that the proper response to the murder and humiliation of four contractors was to level an entire city.
The only thing the US can do now is help its allies and the people who want something the Kurds, Shiite and Sunni militias will not offer get out:
“Withdrawal means that the United States will have to watch Iraqis die in ever greater numbers without doing much of anything to prevent it, because the welfare of Iraqis will no longer be among our central concerns. Those Iraqis who have had anything to do with the occupation and its promises of democracy will be among the first to be killed: the translators, the government officials, the embassy employees, the journalists, the organizers of women’s and human rights groups. As it is, they are being killed one by one. (I personally know at least half a dozen of them who have been murdered.) Without the protection of the Green Zone, U.S. bases, or the inhibiting effect on the Sunni and Shia militias of 150,000 U.S. troops, they will be killed in much greater numbers. To me, the relevant historical analogy is not the helicopters taking off from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, leaving thousands of Vietnamese to the reeducation camps. It is the systematic slaughter by the Khmer Rouge of every Cambodian who appeared to have had anything to do with the West.
If the United States leaves Iraq, our last shred of honor and decency will require us to save as many of these Iraqis as possible. In June, a U.S. Embassy cable about the lives of the Iraqi staff was leaked to The Washington Post. Among many disturbing examples of intimidation and fear was this sentence: “In March, a few staff approached us to ask what provisions would we make for them if we evacuate.” The cable gave no answer. The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad does not issue visas. Iraqis who want to come to the United States must make their way across dangerous territory to a neighboring country that has a U.S. Embassy with a consular section. Iran and Syria do not; Jordan has recently begun to bar entry to Iraqi men under the age of 35. For a military translator to have a chance at coming to the United States, he must be able to prove that he worked for at least a year with U.S. forces and have the recommendation of a general officer–nearly impossible in most cases. Our current approach essentially traps Iraqis inside their country, where they will have to choose, like Osman, between jihadists and death squads.
We should start issuing visas in Baghdad, as well as in the regional embassies in Mosul, Kirkuk, Hilla, and Basra. We should issue them liberally, which means that we should vastly increase our quota for Iraqi refugees. (Last year, it was fewer than 200.) We should prepare contingency plans for massive airlifts and ground escorts. We should be ready for desperate and angry crowds at the gates of the Green Zone and U.S. bases. We should not allow wishful thinking to put off these decisions until it’s too late. We should not compound our betrayals of Iraqis who put their hopes in our hands.”
Let them all come, even if it is in the millions. There is plenty of land in Texas, Utah, Idaho, and Mississippi. It is quite literally the least that we can do. Failure to plan for this will be as great a moral disaster as failing to plan for the original occupation.
Does it make me a bad person that I am glad? Nothing against the old coach personally, but he was wrong for the new NHL. He was trying to win games 2 to 1, and the new rules make that very hard to do. He certainly didn’t have the defensive or goaltending talent to win that way, but that didn’t keep him from trying. He even brought back a version of the trap — the defensive alignment that almost killed the game and the new rules are designed to eliminate. He might have had the talent to win games 6 to 5, but he kept poor defensive players who could skate and score (or, at least, who could skate and score in the AHL) on the bench in favor of mediocre defensive players who couldn;t do much of anything. The new coach, a former offensive standout, will hopefully correct that. With the Hawks best offensive player scheduled to return from injury in the next game or two, he will certianly have a good oppurtunity to make headway with an offense-first style.
What?
No — hockey. Guys on ice with sticks? Dude at each end dressed like Jason from Halloween? Hockey? Canadians love it?
What?
No — Canada. Whole other country? That land between us and the North Pole? Home of Molsen and moose?
UPDATED: A new number five, and a new dishonorable mention. UPDATE 2: How could I forget Babs? She makes the bottom five, relegating Here Comes Santa Claus to the dishonorable mentions. See her entry for a “bonus” surprise. UPDATE 3: It’s that time of year again, so I’ve dusted this off from last year.
It’s that time of year, when radio stations switch to all Christmas music all the time (actually, around here, that happened two weeks before Thanksgiving). What better time to count down the worst Christmas songs of all time? I’m giving my “bottom five,” along with a couple of honorable mentions. Most are version specific, but some transcend versions and are awful no matter who sings them. As commenters remind me of other awful songs, I reserve the right to modify the list.
Here we go:
(DIS)HONORABLE MENTIONS:
Santa Baby by Everclear: Sorry, but a guy should never, ever sing this song. I don’t care if he’s gay or not (and I don’t think the dude from Everclear is, but I could be wrong), it’s just wrong to hear a guy sing it.
A Wonderful Christmas Time by Paul McCartney: The song’s actually not all that bad, as pop-star Christmas songs go, but years working in retail scarred me.
Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, any version: With a title like that, don’t you think the could have at least tried to make the song merry? Instead, we get a depressing dirge. Kevin says this was a World War II era song, and because the boys were overseas, the melancholy tone was intentional. But then why say “merry” at all? Isn’t melancholy what I’ll Be Home For Christmas is for?
The Christmas Song, any version not sung by Nat King Cole: In large part because I’m a huge fan of the Cole version, the others are just wrong to me. And as a side note, how is it possible to have such a smooth voice when you smoke eight packs of cigarettes a day?
Here Comes Santa Claus, verses 3 and 4: I don’t mind Christian Christmas songs (in fact, I like many), and I don’t mind secular songs, but when somebody bastardizes the two, and does it poorly, as in those last two verses, it’s just like a train wreck. Piecing together:
Santa knows we’re all God’s children
That makes everything right
So let’s give thanks to the Lord above
‘Cause Santa Claus comes tonight
That’s right kids! Give thanks to the Lord, not because the messiah’s born or because our eternal salvation has been enabled, but because a fat guy’s going to bring you wooden toys! Lovely message for the little ones.
THE BOTTOM FIVE:
5. Carol of the Bells, by The Trans-Siberian Orchestra: How could I forget this? Talk about something that just screams “we’re trying to be cool!” Admit it guys, you’re Savatage on steroids. I vaguely remember thinking this was cool at one time, but can’t for the life of me remember why. I just wish Metallica’s S&M had done a better job permanently destroying the idea that mixing symphony with heavy metal is ever a good idea…
Far too many people spew about what Christianity is or is not without appearing to have actually read the Bible or any o the commentaries on its translations. As a public service, we here at Lean Left will attempt to educate these poor souls. A brief FAQ:
What qualifies you to do this? Believe it or not, tgirsch was a theology student. KTK is an ethicist, and thus has a deep understanding of Christina morals and ethics and the foundation of those morals and ethics. I have no qualifications aside from having read the thing. Which, really, is the point: this is mainly going to deal with statements about the meaning of Christianity that can only have come form someone who has not actually read the whole thing or thought much about what he/she was reading.
Isn’t this a bit arrogant? I am sorry, did you notice this was a blog? Besides, the entire text of the Bible, numerous commentaries and its translation history/controversies are all available in English. This isn’t some esoteric branch of human knowledge, like rocket science, brain surgery, or Kremlinology.
Why should I listen to your opinions when scholars, ministers, etc have studied these things for years? The argument is all that matters — if any of the arguments in this series are wrong, then it should be easy to find learned commentary to refute them.
Onto our first example, a relatively easy one, Mark Steyn. All emphasis mine:
“No,” agreed Bishop Kate. “It’s probably the opposite. We encourage people to pay attention to the stewardship of the earth and not use more than their portion.”
Now, that may or may not be a great idea, but it’s nothing to do with Christianity, only for eco-cultists like Al Gore.
The bolded statement is either a bald-faced lie or born of such deep ignorance about Christianity that it calls into question the writer’s ability to adhere to the actual tenets of the faith. Genesis gave man dominion over the environment, broadly speaking, but dominion does not have to mean exploitation. It is not hard to find commentary that treats dominion as a reasonability to stewardship of God’s creation. In fact, the Bible itself re-enforces this notion.
In Leviticus, Israel is told how to deal with the land:
1. The LORD then spoke to Moses at Mount Sinai, saying, 2. “Speak to the sons of Israel, and say to them, ‘When you come into the land which I shall give you, then the land shall have a Sabbath to the LORD. 3. ‘Six years you shall sow your field, and six years you shall prune your vineyard and gather in its crop, 4. but during the seventh year the land shall have a Sabbath rest, a Sabbath to the LORD; you shall not sow your field nor prune your vineyard. 5. ‘Your harvest’s aftergrowth you shall not reap, and your grapes of untrimmed vines you shall not gather; the land shall have a sabbatical year. 6. ‘And all of you shall have the Sabbath [products] of the land for food; yourself, and your male and female slaves, and your hired man and your foreign resident, those who live as aliens with you. 7. ‘Even your cattle and the animals that are in your land shall have all its crops to eat. 8. ‘You are also to count off seven sabbaths of years for yourself, seven times seven years, so that you have the time of the seven sabbaths of years, [namely], forty-nine years. 9. ‘You shall then sound a ram’s horn abroad on the tenth day of the seventh month; on the day of atonement you shall sound a horn all through your land. 10. ‘You shall thus consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim a release through the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you, and each of you shall return to his own property, and each of you shall return to his family. 11. ‘You shall have the fiftieth year as a jubilee; you shall not sow, nor reap its aftergrowth, nor gather in [from] its untrimmed vines. 12. ‘For it is a jubilee; it shall be holy to you. You shall eat its crops out of the field.
8. Woe to those who add house to house [and] join field to field, Until there is no more room, So that you have to live alone in the midst of the land! 9. In my ears the LORD of hosts [has sworn], “Surely, many houses shall become desolate, [Even] great and fine ones, without occupants. 10. “For ten acres of vineyard will yield [only] one bath [of wine], And a homer of seed will yield [but] an ephah of grain.”
Jesus himself speaks of His Father’s love for all of His creation:
26. “Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns, and [yet] your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they? Mat 10:29. “Are not two sparrows sold for a cent? And [yet] not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.
And those are just the obvious parts. Galatians commands us to treat all men kindly. Is it kind to poison the air that your neighbor breathes, to delete the fish that feeds them, to heat the plant to the point that glaciers melt and flood his country? No, anyone with even a passing knowledge of the Bible knows that God cares for all of his creation and that man’s dominion over it is a responsibility. One could argue about the relative importance of such stewardship, but no one who knows anything at all about Christianity could claim that the responsible stewardship of God’s creation — environmentalism — has “nothing to do with Christianity”. Anyone who does is a liar or an ignorant fool.
UPDATE [tgirsch]: A much more thorough scriptural case for environmentalism is given here. While many Christians (and in particular, the conservative variety) are likely to disagree with much of it, I think it’s more than sufficient to debunk Steyn’s argument that environmentalism has “nothing to do with Christianity.”
This last week, I was on vacation, vivsiting relatives. I was away from my normal means of news gathering — the internet — for that entire week. Without the internet, I was comletely clueless about current events. My folks don’t get a newspaper delivered, but I did glance at the local paper once or twice. It was awful — completely sensationalized and completely without context. Spending the holiday weekend around children meant that news gathering on CNN or MSNBC was hit or miss. Even when I did turn them on for a bit to catch up, they were almost as useless as the local newspaper: no context, trivial stories, dueling talking heads calling each other liar without any sense of what was truth and what was spin, obvious logical problems being glossed over, and trite sounding cliches tossed around as revealed wisdom. In a literal sense, even for people who care, if you get your news primarily from local newspapers or national television, it is extremely difficult to be a well informed citizen.
I am not entirely sure what to do about it, but that right ther eis the core of so many of the problems in this country. You cannot run a democracy if the voters do not have a clear understanding of reality. And the voters cannot have a clear understanding of reality with a news culture as sick and useless as most of ours.
So, that went fairly well: one fight (that didn’t even involve me!), one dead turkey, one Cowboy’s victory, and only one trip to the emergency room (and, again, not my fault in any way whatsoever! The family member in question is fine — nothing serious). Also, the term “spotty” has apparently been redefined to mean “never”. Who knew?
Hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving and regular posting will resume shortly.
Seriously - is there something in their drinking water, or what? Why did the nutjobs suddenly and simultaneously go whackadoo over penguins? Is this one of their dog-whistle codewords that only right-wingers get, like when Bush answered a question about abortion with a reference to Dred Scott in the first presidential debate? (”Yes, Brother BillyBob - it’s the penguins! You know . . . [nudge, wink] the penguins!” “Oh - right. Yeah, Brother Hezekiel! The penguins! Getting into our precious bodily fluids!”) Did somehow the word go out from James Dobson that they’re all going to boycott penguins this year? (”Well, that ‘War on Christmas’ thing last year made us all look like fools. Gotta change tactics. . . . I got it! . . . Boys, I see it before me . . . now, just hear me out . . . .”)
Wow, wow, wow . . . . I’ve seen the YouTube videos of the comedy-club disaster and his Letterman-show “apology”. They’re both startling, in different ways. (If you haven’t seen them, go find them - it’s not hard.)
I’m interested in the responses to the incident, however. There’s been a lot of commentary on how inappropriate he was, and how lame his later apology was - both of which seem so obvious to me as not to qualify as any kind of contribution to understanding the situation. There’s also been a lot of derisive hooting at his “I’m not a racist - that’s what’s so crazy” remark on Letterman - which is certaintly deserved, but not, I think, for the simplistic reasons given in much of the commentary. While, at bottom, the incident and its aftermath tell us mostly something about Richards, they offer a useful opportunity to get a fuller sense of how racial animosity enters into cross-racial interactions, or more properly white reactions to other races. There’s a lot going on in both the Richards videos, and the commentary I’ve seen so far seems mostly to focus on simply labeling it (”racist”, “not racist”) or judging it (”justified”, “not justified”), which I think misses most of the real substance.
One persistent problem among liberals is their fratricidal tendencies, born of an insistence on ideological purity so intense it becomes competitive. Liberals are forever so busy criticising each other for tiny doctrinal differences that they can’t get any work done.
These officers thought that tasering this kid over and over was an appropriate use of force. They tasered him — an excruciatingly painful event that can and has lead to deaths — in front of several witnesses, witnesses who they threatened with tasering for the crime of, well, witnessesing. They did this to a kid on the campus of a school whose population is largely from affluent background. The cops thought they were doing nothing wrong otherwise they would not have doe what they did under the set of circumstances present in this event. That apparent belief in the correctness of their behavior should be enough to give anyone pause. This was obviously business as usual; this deliberate, repeated infliction of horribly painful, possibly lethal tasering in a non-violent, non-dangerous situation in front of witnesses in an affluent, privileged setting was perfectly normal to the officers involved. Think about what that says about the culture at that department.
And then think about what officers infected with that culture do to people when there are no witnesses around and the victims are those society does not grant the benefit of the doubt?
Frankly, this is an area where I sincerely hope I’m wrong. Nothing would make me happier than to learn that our invasion of Iraq was not a counterproductive waste of life, and did not further destabilize an already-unstable region of the world, and did not further fan the flames of anti-Americanism and Islamism. If standing on a mountaintop and proclaiming “Hitchens was right, I was wrong!” made it so, and made the sacrifices worthwhile, and made the war winnable, I would do it in a heartbeat. But that’s looking more and more like wishful thinking.
Sen. Trent Lott, ousted from the top Senate Republican leadership job four years ago because of remarks considered racially insensitive, won election to the No. 2 post Wednesday for the minority GOP in the next Congress.
Lott returned to the center of power by getting the position of vote-counting GOP whip, nosing out Sen. Lamar Alexander. Sen. Rick Santorum told reporters that Lott beat Alexander by a 25-24 vote.
After an intense evening in which both men lobbied colleagues during floor votes, the Republican caucus elected Lott, a one-time whip and majority leader, by secret ballot. Lott will be the GOP’s second-in-command to Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who was elected unanimously to be the Senate minority leader in the new Congress.
Here is what Senator Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi, said yesterday at Senator Strom Thurmond’s birthday party, according to ABCNEWS’ O’Keefe. “I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had of followed our lead we wouldn’t of had all these problems over all these years, either.”
“I want to tell you, ladies and gentleman, that there’s not enough troops in the army to force the southern people to break down segregation and admit the Nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.”
—Strom Thurmond, then-governor of South Carolina, in a speech from his 1948 “Dixiecrat” presidential campaign. To hear an audio clip, click here.
And, by the way, Trent Lott wrote for and/or allowed to his writings to appear in the magazine of a racist organization in the 1990s.
This is the man the GOP Caucus in the senate choose as their number two leader. So much for the new GOP.
This weekend, I’ll be going down to New Orleans to visit a friend who lives there. It will be my first trip down there post-Katrina. One of the things my friend suggested we do is take a quick drive through some of the hardest-hit areas, so I can see it first-hand, understand it on a better level, get a better feel for the scale of the tragedy, and see just what has and has not been done in the fifteen months since.
My question for the peanut gallery is, at what point does this cross the line from education and understanding into exploitation and voyeurism? What’s appropriate and what’s not? Feel free to comment with your thoughts.
I’ve already given my reactions to the “Borat” film (below). Another consequence of it, for me, was an interesting conversation I had about it at a party this past weekend. After I mentioned having seen the film, a number of people wound up discussing it at some length. Among us were an actor, a writer, a graduate student in history with a focus on political activism, and a graduate student in philosophy with a focus on ethics. It was startling to me how different were the various perspectives each person brought to the subject. It’s not surprising that people with such backgrounds would have different takes on any contentious question, but it was amusing to see everyone playing to type so obviously, and yet with really valuable insights from those different perspectives.
The prospect of being forced to face the colossal collapse of the dreams of a New and Improved American Empire has apparently driven some on the right quite mad with bloodlust:
Americans simply do not wish to suffer, and do not have the senses of patriotism, pride, and honor that buffered such suffering for earlier generations. It is true, I think, that these qualities are less evident now than they were in the past. The ability of a society to see through grinding conflicts like the Philippines Insurrection or the Boer War augers well for its future, lest it lose the mere capacity to conquer, and be susceptible to humiliation by any small power with no advantage save mental fortitude. It is indeed difficult to imagine now the methods that transformed the Philippines for us, and South Africa for the British, from bitter foe to steadfast friend being applied in Iraq. Would that they were. But patriotism, pride, and honor are nonetheless still present in the American character. It is the American political class that lacks them in corresponding measure.
n 1908, Manuel Arellano Remondo, in a book entitled General Geography of the Philippine Islands, wrote: “The population decreased due to the wars, in the five-year period from 1895 to 1900, since, at the start of the first insurrection, the population was estimated at 9,000,000, and at present (1908), the inhabitants of the Archipelago do not exceed 8,000,000 in number.”[26]
U.S. attacks into the countryside often included scorched earth campaigns where entire villages were burned and destroyed, torture (water cure) and the concentration of civilians into “protected zones” (concentration camps). Many of the civilian casualties resulted from disease and famine. Reports of the execution of U.S. soldiers taken prisoner by the Filipinos led to savage reprisals by American forces. Many American officers and soldiers called war a “nigger killing business”.
… From almost the beginning of the war, soldiers wrote home describing, and usually bragging about, atrocities committed against Filipinos, soldiers and civilians alike. Increasingly, such personal letters, or portions of them, reached a national audience as anti-imperialist editors across the nation reproduced them.[27]
Once these accounts were widely reproduced, the War Department was forced to demand that General Otis investigate their authenticity. For each press clipping, he forwarded it to the writer’s commanding officer, who would then convince the soldier to write a retraction.
Private Charles Brenner of the Kansas regiment resisted such pressure. He insisted that Colonel Funston[28] had ordered that all prisoners be shot and that Major Metcalf and Captain Bishop enforced these orders. Otis was obliged to order the Northern Luzon sector commander, General MacArthur, to look into the charge. Brenner confronted MacArthur’s aide with a corroborating witness, Private Putman, who confessed to shooting two prisoners after Bishop or Metcalf ordered, “Kill them! Damn it, Kill them!” MacArthur sent his aide’s report on to Otis with no comment. Otis ordered Brenner court-martialed “for writing and conniving at the publication of an article which… contains willful falsehoods concerning himself and a false charge against Captain Bishop.” The judge advocate in Manila convinced Otis that such a trial could open a Pandora’s box, as “facts would develop implicating many others.”
These had originally been set up for refugees whose farms had been destroyed by the British “Scorched Earth” policy (burning down all Boer homesteads and farms). However, following Kitchener’s new policy, many women and children were forcibly moved to prevent the Boers from resupplying at their homes and more camps were built and converted to prisons.
This was not the first appearance of concentration camps. The Spanish used them in the Ten Years’ War that later led to the Spanish-American War, and the United States used them to devastate guerrilla forces during the Philippine-American War. But the concentration camp system of the British was on a much larger scale.
There were a total of 45 tented camps built for Boer internees and 64 for black African ones. Of the 28,000 Boer men captured as prisoners of war, 25,630 were sent overseas. So, most Boers remaining in the local camps were women and children, but the native African ones held large numbers of men as well. Even when forcibly removed from Boer areas, the black Africans were not considered to be hostile to the British, and provided a paid labour force.
The conditions in the camps were very unhealthy and the food rations were meager. The wives and children of men who were still fighting were given smaller rations than others. The poor diet and inadequate hygiene led to endemic contagious diseases such as measles, typhoid and dysentery. Coupled with a shortage of medical facilities, this led to large numbers of deaths — a report after the war concluded that 27,927 Boers (of whom 22,074 were children under 16) and 14,154 black Africans had died of starvation, disease and exposure in the concentration camps. In all, about 25% of the Boer inmates and 12% of the black African ones died (although recent research suggests that the black African deaths were underestimated and may have actually been around 20,000). However the precise number of deaths is unknown. Reports have stated that the number of Boers killed was 18,000-28,000 and no bothered to keep records on the number of deaths of the 107,000 Black Africans who were interned in Concentration Camps.
Any mistakes that happen to occur in the process of such “methods” will, of course, be regretted. But one must keep one’s eye on what is really important: preserving the neo-Con dream of Pax Americana. And, really, aren’t a few tens or hundreds of thousands of non-American lives worth the prize? Think of it: with just a little more torture and a concentration camp here and there, Iraq could be completely remade into a paradise. What could possibly go wrong? Who, aside from the Blame America First crowd and Saddamite dead-enders, could possibly object? Just a little more blood, people, just a little more Iraqi blood and all will be right with the world.
