Gun nut Caleb jokes that if the Democratic party were truly interested in preventing violence, they’d ban family games of Monopoly:
Actually, they’ll probably try to ban Monopoly sooner than later, because it teaches capitalism.
The funny thing is that Monopoly was originally designed as a piece of anti-capitalist propaganda, but it backfired terribly when people clearly enjoyed bankrupting each other more than sharing.
John Derbyshire discusses the sexual harassment panic surrounding our modern military:
Men who join the military are responding to widespread, innate male urges — the urge to break things and kill people, for example. Women who join the military are, by contrast, outliers in their sex. They are eccentric and prone to behave eccentrically. As a designated victim group, they are especially susceptible to the associated pathologies, e.g., victim hoaxes for attention, spite, or cash reward.
Read the whole thing and follow his many high-quality links — especially the last one.
As a science fiction writer and a student of history — and an American conservative — Orson Scott Card spins a scenario about how, like Augustus Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolph Hitler, and Vladimir Putin, Barack Obama could become lifetime dictator without any serious internal opposition:
Keep in mind that he already governs unconstitutionally, with czars and without a budget. He bullies his opponents, and ignores crimes by his own team. He treats Congress with contempt — both Republicans and Democrats.
Having been anointed from the start of his career because he was that magical combination — a black man who talks like a white man (that’s what they mean by calling him “articulate” and a “great speaker”) — he has never had to work for a living, and he has never had to struggle to accomplish goals. He despises ordinary people, is hostile to any religion that doesn’t have Obama as its deity, and his contempt for the military is complete.
You’d think that such a man could not possibly remain in office past the Constitutional limit of two terms — but I think the plan is already in place.
Look at how Hillary Clinton is being set up as the fall guy on Benghazi. Her lies under oath will destroy her in the run-up to the 2016 election, while the press will never hold Obama’s feet to the fire.
This is because Michelle Obama is going to be Barack’s Lurleen Wallace. Remember how George Wallace got around Alabama’s ban on governors serving two terms in a row? He ran his wife for the office. Everyone knew Wallace would actually be pulling the strings, even though they denied it.
Michelle Obama will be Obama’s designated “successor,” and any Democrat who seriously opposes her will be destroyed in the media the way everyone who contested Obama’s run for the Democratic nomination in 2008 was destroyed.
But the plan goes deeper than this. Barack Obama, like Hitler and the Iranian dictators, announced his plan, though the media (as with Hitler) has “forgotten” it.
Barack Obama needs to have a source of military power that is under his direct control. Like Hitler, he needs a powerful domestic army to terrify any opposition that might arise.
Obama called for a “national police force” in 2008, though he never gave a clue about why such a thing would be necessary. We have the National Guard. We have the armed forces. The FBI. The Secret Service. And all the local and state police forces.
The trouble is that all of these groups have long independent histories and none of them is reliably under Barack Obama’s personal control. He needs Brown Shirts — thugs who will do his bidding without any reference to law.
Obama will claim we need a national police force in order to fight terrorism and crime. The Boston bombing is a useful start, especially when combined with random shootings by crazy people.
Where will he get his “national police”? The NaPo will be recruited from “young out-of-work urban men” and it will be hailed as a cure for the economic malaise of the inner cities.
In other words, Obama will put a thin veneer of training and military structure on urban gangs, and send them out to channel their violence against Obama’s enemies.
Instead of doing drive-by shootings in their own neighborhoods, these young thugs will do beatings and murders of people “trying to escape” — people who all seem to be leaders and members of groups that oppose Obama.
Already the thugs who serve the far left agenda of Obama’s team do systematic character assassination as a means of intimidating their opponents into silence. But physical beatings and “legal” disappearances will be even more effective — as Hitler and Putin and many other dictators have demonstrated over and over.
All the abuses of the Patriot Act that Bush was accused of, but never actually did, will be the standard operating procedure of Obama’s personal army, the NaPo.
But the media will cover all the actions of the NaPo as if it were merely a full-employment program for unemployed urban youth. Or if they finally wise up (maybe after a few reporters disappear), they’ll be cowed into submission very quickly.
Meanwhile, Obama will use the NaPo to whip the U.S. military into shape. The armed forces are largely recruited from among the half of American society that doesn’t vote for Barack Obama. So they will be relentlessly underfunded and disarmed; prominent generals who might become foci of resistance to Obama will be destroyed as Petraeus was.
As for gun control, it will hardly be necessary. Obama already has his program of ammunition control. Guns without bullets are decorative. And he will have armored cars for the NaPo, precisely so that right-wing militia types can’t use snipers against them.
These are simple steps, but they have worked for every dictator ruthless enough to use them. Most people want only to be left alone; Obama will leave them alone as long as they shut up and do what they’re told.
But it won’t be just the NaPo. Once the government has firm control of health care, we’ll find that the families of his opponents don’t qualify for expensive medical care. Their children and parents will be medical-care hostages.
Once we get the clear idea that people or groups — or even regions — that oppose Obama simply don’t get any medical care, it will rarely be necessary to send in the NaPo armored cars.
By the election of 2018, both parties will only field candidates approved by Obama’s people. And since polling places will be supervised closely by the NaPo, people casting — and counting — the votes will know what is expected.
The Congress will become the rubber stamp that Obama already treats them like. There will be no more subpoenas. No more testifying before committees that sometimes ask hard questions.
The Supreme Court justices who might oppose him will retire, or suffer medical accidents, and be replaced by judges who think the Constitution means whatever politically correct opinion needs it to mean.
And if some brave congressmen or local governments try to oppose him, they will be put on trial on trumped-up charges — to which they will usually plead guilty, in exchange for continuing medical care (or employment) for their families.
By the time Michelle has served her two terms, the Constitution will have been amended to allow Presidents to run for reelection forever. Obama will win by 98 percent every time. That’s how it works in Nigeria and Zimbabwe; that’s how it worked in Hitler’s Germany.
And you can be sure that those unionized teachers who spewed venom and hatred in Wisconsin will be ready to brainwash America’s children about the glories of Obama-style “freedom.” Any teachers who don’t follow the union program will be fired.
Almost all the mechanisms are already in place. It just takes a tweak here and there, and America is ready to be the country that is worthy of a Beloved Leader like Barack Obama.
All right, the game is over. We don’t seriously think any such thing will happen.
But if we learn anything from history, it’s this: Anything can happen. American democracy, already a pale shadow of what it once was, is only a couple of centuries old.
Like the Roman Republic, it will be easy for people to conclude that a Constitution written for a bunch of backwater provinces simply can’t meet the needs of the World’s Only Superpower.
The editorial writers at the New York Times and Washington Post are ready right now to talk warmly about “post-democratic America” and explain why it’s about time we eliminated the ability of primitive Republicans, with their neanderthal reliance on “guns and religion,” to obstruct the onward march of Enlightened government.
They already hate democracy. They already demonize anyone who opposes them, and believe that their opponents have no right to be heard, and that courts should force their program on the ignorant masses.
They are already fascists in their hearts. They love Barack Obama precisely because his arrogance is so emblematic of their own sense of superiority.
Hitler came to absolute power because the military and businessmen of Germany saw him as the one to put their opponents in their place.
That’s how the American elites — the educational establishment, the unions, the media — already see Obama. Like Hitler’s allies, they won’t understand what a monster they’ve created until his power is so entrenched that he can turn it against them. And then it will be too late.
That’s what history teaches us — it can happen anywhere. And when the historians write about it after the fact, they will point out how obvious all the signs were from the start — the way they write about Hitler now. Why did so many people go along with him?
Because his allies thought they could control him. They thought he would serve their goals. Obama has been put into power by idiots who think they control him even now. They think that because he’s so phenomenally uneducated and lazy, they are smarter than he is. That he is their puppet.
But then, without such fools, history wouldn’t be such interesting reading.
Will these things happen? Of course not. This was an experiment in fictional thinking.
I recently read Hitler’s declaration of war against the US and some of his other speeches and writings, after realizing that we never read anything by the most infamous man in history in our history classes in school.
Commenter Wobbly though I might enjoy the BBC documentary, The Nazis, A Warning From History, and I did find it thought-provoking.
If you read what Hitler actually said and wrote, he does obsess about the Jews, and he does equate them with Bolsheviks — which is odd if they’re also a race of scheming bankers. The first episode explains where this “crazy” idea might have come from. For one thing, the leadership of the Munich Soviet Republic was almost entirely Jewish:
Hitler’s rise to power follows a familiar formula. Moderate conservatives need his far-right stormtroopers to keep far-left Communists in line, a crisis costs the moderates their credibility, and soon the most extreme wing of the (right-wing) revolution takes over — rather bloodlessly, in this case.
Once Hitler takes over as dictator though, he doesn’t do much dictating. For all the later complaints by the German generals that Hitler micromanaged the war and later excuses by war criminals that they were just following orders, Hitlers leads, for the most part, by simply providing the vision and letting his subordinates vie for his approval under their own initiative.
In fact, the warning from history appears to be that the Nazis did very little themselves. There were only a few dozen Gestapo for a region of millions of Germans, for instance, and there were always plenty of collaborators later in conquered territories. At the very least, people were happy to take Jewish homes, shops, winter coats, etc.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The Rise of the Third Reich is fascinating, because Hitler seemed to solve Germany’s problems and to solve them quickly. He put men to work, and he restored Germany’s prestige. No one wanted to start another war over, say, German troops moving back into Rhineland. When Hitler moved his troops into Austria, crowds cheered them in the streets — and again in the Sudetenland. I suspect he could have made a move for the ethnically German portions of Poland, too — if he hadn’t seized the rest of Czechoslovakia first and given up all credibility as a simple uniter of the German people.
I suppose the Polish invasion seemed like a great victory at the time, and it seemed such an odd thing to push the French and British over the edge. Oops.
Set aside some time and heed the warning:
The makers of Sesame Street have designed “an educational outreach initiative for families with children (ages 3–8) who are coping with a parent’s incarceration,” called Little Children, Big Challenges: Incarceration.
Baby names reveal parents’ political ideology:
The results revealed that overall, the less educated the parent, the more likely they were to give their child either an uncommon name (meaning fewer than 20 children got the same name that year in California), or a unique name (meaning only one child got that name in 2004 in California). When parents had less than a college education, there were no major ideological differences in naming choice.
However, among college-educated whites, politics made a difference. College-educated moms and dads in the most liberal neighborhoods were twice as likely as college-educated parents in the most conservative neighborhoods to give their kids an uncommon name. Educated conservatives were more likely to favor popular names, which were defined as names in the top 100 in California that year.
For boys, 46 percent got a popular name in conservative areas, compared with 37 percent in liberal areas. For girls, 38 percent were given a popular name in conservative neighborhoods, compared with 30 percent in liberal neighborhoods.
Notably, the kinds of uncommon names chosen by upper-class liberals differed from the unusual names picked by people of lower socioeconomic status, Oliver said. Lower-status moms tend to invent names or pick unusual spellings of common names (Andruw instead of Andrew, for example).
“Educated liberal mothers are not making names up,” Oliver said. “They’re choosing more culturally obscure names, like Archimedes or Finnegan or, in our case, we named our daughter Esme.”
The sounds of liberal and conservative names varied, too. For both boys and girls, liberals tended to pick more feminine-sounding choices, such as Liam, Ely and Leila names that include lots of L sounds and soft-A endings, including popular choices Ella and Sophia.
Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to pick names with more masculine-sounding Ks, Bs, Ds and Ts, such as Kurt. A couple of famous national political families demonstrate that pattern, Oliver said: The liberal Obamas named their daughters Sasha and Malia, both names heavy on As and Ls, whereas the conservative Palin family picked more masculine-sounding names for both their boys and girls, particularly Track, Trig, Bristol and Piper (although third daughter Willow got a softer-sounding moniker).
The Fukushima disaster has had an incredible death toll — zero. And no one’s likely to die, either:
The committee has had two years to build a fuller picture of radiation dosages (measured as mSv) and impacts. It finds most Japanese in the first and second years were exposed to lower doses from the accident than from natural background radiation’s 2-3 mSv a year.
Also, “No radiation-related deaths or acute effects have been observed among nearly 25,000 workers involved at the accident site. Given the small number of highly exposed workers, it is unlikely that excess cases of thyroid cancer due to radiation exposure would be detectable.”
Those workers, who were allowed a maximum short-term dose of 250 mSv, have been closely monitored. Of 167 exposed to more than the industry’s recommended five-year limit of 100 mSv (a CT scan exposes patients to up to 10 mSv), 23 recorded 150-200 mSv, three 200-250 mSv and six up to 678 mSv, still short of the 1000 mSv single dosage that causes radiation sickness, or the accumulated exposure estimated to cause a fatal cancer years later in 5 per cent of people.
So, not even one case of radiation sickness to report.
A swift evacuation of 200,000 residents within a 20-kilometre radius of the plant helped protect them – WHO estimated most residents of Fukushima prefecture received doses of 1-10 mSv in the first year. By August 2011, however, the dose rate at the plant boundary was only 1.7 mSv a year.
The rapid decay of most of the radioactive material (iodine-131, which reduced to a 16th of its original activity in a month) also means the evacuated area has not been permanently blighted. Many residents have returned, although some areas have restricted entry until radiation drops below the 20 mSv-a-year threshold, expected in 2016-17.
Nor has the environment been devastated. The report says: “The exposures on both marine and terrestrial non-human biota were too low for observable acute effects.”
The quake and tsunami damage is the real catastrophe.
About 1000 deaths have been attributed to evacuations. About 90 per cent were people older than 66, who suffered from the trauma of evacuation and living in shelters. Sadly, those of them who left areas where radiation was no greater than in naturally high background areas would have been better off staying.
Let’s be clear, Fukushima was hit by a worst-case scenario: the world’s fifth-most-powerful earthquake since 1900, a tsunami twice as high as the plant was built to withstand, and follow-up quakes of magnitudes 7.1 and 6.3. A Japanese commission of inquiry described it as a “man-made disaster” because of regulatory failure and lack of a safety culture.
This “perfect storm” hit a nuclear plant built to a 50-year-old design and no one died. Japan moved a few metres east during a three-minute quake and the local coastline subsided half a metre, but the 11 reactors operating in four nuclear power plants in the region all shut down automatically. None suffered significant damage. (The tsunami disabled Fukushima’s cooling system.)
Yet such is the imbalance of dread to risk on matters nuclear that this accident was enough to turn public opinion and governments against nuclear power. Never mind that coal mining kills almost 6000 people a year, or that populations of coal-mining areas have death rates about 10 per cent higher than non-mining areas, or that coal emissions drive global warming.
And surely the fact that the more modern Onagawa nuclear plant was twice as close to the quake epicentre and shut down as designed, without incident, counts for something.
Does a stronger military make us safer? Sometimes it doesn’t, which leads pacifist-libertarian Bryan Caplan to conclude that generally it doesn’t:
I would suggest that a good defense deters war, while a good offense may not. A mountain nation where every man’s a rifleman has good defense and very little offense.
David Simon is shocked — shocked! — to find the government collecting all raw data involving telephonic and internet traffic by Americans:
Having labored as a police reporter in the days before the Patriot Act, I can assure all there has always been a stage before the wiretap, a preliminary process involving the capture, retention and analysis of raw data. It has been so for decades now in this country. The only thing new here, from a legal standpoint, is the scale on which the FBI and NSA are apparently attempting to cull anti-terrorism leads from that data. But the legal and moral principles? Same old stuff.
Allow for a comparable example, dating to the early 1980s in a place called Baltimore, Maryland.
There, city detectives once began to suspect that major traffickers were using a combination of public pay phones and digital pagers to communicate their business. And they took their suspicions to a judge and obtained court orders — not to monitor any particular suspect, but to instead cull the dialed numbers from the thousands and thousands of calls made to and from certain city pay phones.
Think about it. There is certainly a public expectation of privacy when you pick up a pay phone on the streets of Baltimore, is there not? And certainly, the detectives knew that many, many Baltimoreans were using those pay phones for legitimate telephonic communication. Yet, a city judge had no problem allowing them to place dialed-number recorders on as many pay phones as they felt the need to monitor, knowing that every single number dialed to or from those phones would be captured. So authorized, detectives gleaned the numbers of digital pagers and they began monitoring the incoming digitized numbers on those pagers — even though they had yet to learn to whom those pagers belonged. The judges were okay with that, too, and signed another order allowing the suspect pagers to be “cloned” by detectives, even though in some cases the suspect in possession of the pager was not yet positively identified.
All of that — even in the less fevered, pre-Patriot Act days of yore — was entirely legal. Why?
Because they aren’t listening to the calls.
It’s at that point, people, that law enforcement requires a full-throated argument of probable cause. It’s at that point that privacy rights must be seriously measured against the legitimate investigate needs of law enforcement. And it’s at that point that the potential for authoritarian overreach becomes significant.
I suggest we append “according to the government” to that last bit.
And we should note that quantity has a quality all its own, once you shift from manually tracking these things to automatically tracking and cross-referencing them via computer. An FBI with limited human resources is very different from one with effectively unlimited computing resources.
George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones has many real-life inspirations. The conflict between Starks and Lannisters clearly pays homage to the Wars of the Roses, between Yorks and Lancasters:
Both English families were branches of the House of Plantagenet who vied for the throne after the deposition of the last Plantagenet king, Richard II, in 1399 and before the establishment of the Tudor dynasty in 1485. There’s no one-to-one correspondence between the characters in “Game of Thrones” and actual historical figures, but Martin was clearly inspired by Edward IV in creating, say, Robert Baratheon, the great, strapping warrior who became a stout, ailing king. There’s a dash of Edward, too, in Rob Stark, a brilliant commander who makes an impetuous, disadvantageous marriage.
Cersei Lannister, Robert’s ambitious, conniving widow, is thought by many to have been inspired by the hot-headed Margaret of Anjou, wife of Henry VI, the king Edward IV helped depose. Henry’s bouts of insanity left him frequently unable to rule, and Margaret, a leading Lancastrian, fought ferociously against those she saw as threatening her family’s hold on the crown. Historians view her as a prime driver in the Wars of the Roses, just as Cersei is substantively responsible for the War of the Five Kings in “A Clash of Kings.” Cersei also resembles Isabella of France, an earlier medieval English queen, who conspired with her adulterous lover to dethrone, and possibly to murder, her (bisexual) husband, Edward II, in the 1300s.
Cersei is a crude, incompetent politician, however, which cannot be said of Isabella. Although unpopular in England, where she was nicknamed “the She-wolf of France,” Isabella has acquired some sympathizers over the years, including the indefatigable Alison Weir, who wrote a contrarian biography of her in 2006, “Queen Isabella: Treachery, Adultery, and Murder in Medieval England.” Weir has also written novels about various women in the Tudor era, no doubt aspiring to the success of Philippa Gregory, whose romantic historical novels routinely land on the New York Times Bestseller List.
For her own part, Gregory has already published three books in a series set during the Wars of the Roses, “The Cousins’ War” (an apt title, given the intricate blood relationships among the many combatants). The most recent of these, “The Lady of the Rivers,” may even be infused with enough magical elements to appeal to some “Game of Thrones” readers: In it, the character of Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford, possesses psychic abilities (the real duchess was tried for witchcraft by her political enemies) and is initiated into the mysteries of alchemy by her first husband. For those who prefer a more grounded view, Gregory collaborated with two historians, David Baldwin and Michael Jones, on a nonfiction book, “The Women of the Cousins’ War: The Duchess, the Queen, and the King’s Mother,” published last year.
You may have noticed that most of these books are about women, despite the fact that, with very few exceptions, the women of the Middle Ages had little power. Much of today’s popular historical fiction about the rulers of the Middle Ages is read by women who are primarily interested in the lives and problems of women. Since the historical record contains next to no information on this topic, fiction has stepped in to fill the breach.
Another, more manly, popular contemporary historical novelist, Bernard Cornwell, has set a series of novels, “The Grail Quest,” during a slightly earlier period. His hero, an archer named Thomas of Hookton who gets caught up in the Hundred Years’ War, is an entirely fictional commoner in search of that fabled relic. What Cornwell’s novels lack in historically based, Machiavellian aristocrats they make up for in action-packed, blood-soaked battle scenes.
For the ultimate in medieval scuttlebutt, however, you can’t do better than Barbara Tuchman’s prizewinning 1978 history, “A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century.” This account of the Hundred Years’ War centers around the life of a French nobleman who married an Englishwoman, but it’s more expansive than any novel, taking in such fascinating details as the bizarre fashion for long-toed shoes in court (so long, they had to be tied up with strings and were inveighed against by puritanical clergymen) to the legendarily brutal rampages of British mercenary John Hawkwood through Italy. If you really want to know how the peasants fared while their rulers skirmished, the peculiar challenges of sewage-management in a stone castle, what the real agenda was behind the Crusades, or just how dastardly the highborn and royal can behave when it suits them, then look no further.
As a kid, I caught part of a movie that featured a team of commandos infiltrating an enemy outpost — and what stuck with me is that they used a crossbow and cyanide-tipping quarrels to take out the sentries.
I now know the movie was The Wild Geese:
Like The Dogs of War, The Wild Geese takes place in post-colonial Africa. It may be even more “Hollywood” — perhaps ironic, because it was a British production — with at least as many gasoline explosions and automatic weapons fired from the hip. And, again, cyanide-tipped crossbow quarrels.
The story was inspired by a mysterious plane load of mercenary soldiers that had landed at Kariba Airfield in Rhodesia in 1968, supposedly with an African president.
America is handling a rising power poorly, William S. Lind argues:
Much is made of the analogy between the relationship of the U.S. to China today and that of Great Britain to Imperial Germany before World War I. Just as Germany had risen quickly to become a world economic power, so has China. Germany, driven by nationalism, sought commensurate military, naval, and diplomatic power, as does China. As young powers, both Germany then and China now were sometimes brash in ways that were not in their own interest. Both challenged the dominant power at sea, though they had no pressing need to do so.
But there is another side to the analogy, one that cautions Washington. Britain handled Germany’s rise poorly. She waged aggressive war on the Boers, a people the Germans regarded as close kin, and alienated German public opinion. The Kaiser was left in the awkward position of being more pro-British than his people. In the Entente Cordiale, Britain entered into an extra-constitutional and strategically unnecessary alliance aimed at containing Germany. In 1914, while Kaiser Wilhelm II did not want war, some important Britons did, including Churchill and, disastrously, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey.
[...]
Conservatives’ old friend realism offers a device for bringing harmony to Chinese-American relations: spheres of influence. As China’s expands, ours can contract, within the shared framework of upholding order. One Chinese admiral jokingly proposed drawing a north-south line through the Pacific, demarcating our respective spheres of influence. We should take him up on it, and add that as China continues its rise, the line will shift.
If this proposal seems radical, it in fact reflects the way Britain accommodated a rising United States. The possibility of war between America and Britain was taken seriously by both sides well up into the 20th century. But instead of clashing, as British power weakened after World War I and, more dramatically, after World War II, London incrementally passed the task of maintaining order to the United States. Britain eventually did this even in areas she had long regarded as vital to her interests, including the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf.
I can think of at least one good reason why Britain might accommodate a rising US better than the US might accommodate a rising China.
I recently read Hitler’s declaration of war against the US, which struck me as a peculiar mix of reasonable and unreasonable, and commenter FNN wondered aloud about my reference to “Jewish and Negroid blood mixture,” which seemed like the kind of phrase someone might attribute to Hitler, whether or not he actually said it.
Hitler did reference “Jewish or Negroid blood mixture,” I noted, but a quick search of Hitler.org — I should have known there’d be a Hitler.org — reveals that FNN was right; he doesn’t use the phrases “master race” or “super man” — even if he routinely references the Aryan race, at least in the early years, and blames the Jews for most everything.
This, by the way, is his first writing on Jewry, from 1919:
If the threat with which Jewry faces our people has given rise to undeniable hostility on the part of a large section of our people, the cause of this hostility must be sought in the clear recognition that Jewry as such is deliberately or unwittingly having a pernicious effect on our nation, but mostly in personal intercourse, in the poor impression the Jew makes as an individual. As a result, antisemitism far too readily assumes a purely emotional character. But this is not the correct response. Antisemitism as a political movement may not and cannot be molded by emotional factors but only by recognition of the facts. Now the facts are these:
To begin with, the Jews are unquestionably a race, not a religious community. The Jew himself never describes himself as a Jewish German, a Jewish Pole or a Jewish American, but always as a German, Polish or American Jew. Jews have never adopted more than the language of the foreign nations in whose midst they live. A German who is forced to make use of the French language in France, Italian in Italy, Chinese in China does not thereby become a Frenchman, Italian, or Chinaman, nor can we call a Jew who happens to live amongst us and who is therefore forced to use the German language, a German. Neither does the Mosaic faith, however great its importance for the preservation of that race, be the sole criterion for deciding who is a Jew and who is not. There is hardly a race in the world whose members all belong to a single religion.
Through inbreeding for thousands of years, often in very small circles, the Jew has been able to preserve his race and his racial characteristics much more successfully than most of the numerous people among whom he has lived. As a result there lives amongst us a non-German, alien race, unwilling and indeed unable to shed its racial characteristics, its particular feelings, thoughts and ambitions and nevertheless enjoying the same political rights as we ourselves do. And since even the Jew’s feelings are limited to the purely material realm, his thoughts and ambitions are bound to be so even more strongly. Their dance around the golden calf becomes a ruthless struggle for all the possessions that we feel deep down are not the highest and not the only ones worth striving for on this earth.
The value of an individual is no longer determined by his character or by the significance of his achievements for the community, but solely by the size of his fortune, his wealth.
The greatness of a nation is no longer measured by the sum of its moral and spiritual resources, but only by the wealth of its material possessions.
All this results in that mental attitude and that quest for money and the power to protect it which allow the Jew to become so unscrupulous in his choice of means, so merciless in their use of his own ends. In autocratic states he cringes before the ‘majesty’ of the princes and misuses their favors to become a leech on their people.
In democracies he vies for the favor of the masses, cringes before ‘the majesty of the people’, but only recognizes the majesty of money.
He saps the prince’s character with Byzantine flattery; national pride and the strength of the nation with ridicule and shameless seduction to vice. His method of battle is that public opinion which is never expressed in the press but which is nonetheless manages and falsified by it. His power is the power of the money, which multiplies in his hands effortlessly and endlessly through interest, and with which he imposes a yoke upon the nation that is the more pernicious in that its glitter disguises its ultimately tragic consequences. Everything that makes the people strive for higher goals, be it religion, socialism, or democracy, is to the Jew merely a means to an end, the way to satisfy his greed and thirst for power.
The results of his works is racial tuberculosis of the nation.
And this has the following consequences: purely emotional antisemitism finds its final expression in the form of pogroms. Rational antisemitism, by contrast, must lead to a systematic and legal struggle against, and eradication of, the privileges the Jews enjoy over the other foreigners living among us (Alien Laws). Its final objective, however, must be the total removal of all Jews from our midst. Both objectives can only be achieved by a government of national strength and not one of national impotence.
The German Republic owes its birth not the united national will of our people, but to the underhand exploitation of a series of circumstances that, taken together, express themselves in a deep, universal dissatisfaction. These circumstances, however, arose independently of the political structure and are at work even today. Indeed, more so than ever before. Hence, a large part of our people recognizes that changing the structure of the state cannot in itself improve our position, but that this can only be achieved by the rebirth of the nation’s moral and spiritual forces.
And this rebirth cannot be prepared by the leadership of an irresponsibly majority influence by party dogmas or by the internationalist catch-phrases and slogans of an irresponsible press, but only by determined acts on the part of nationally minded leadership with an inner sense of responsibility.
This very fact serves to deprive the Republic of the inner support of the spiritual forces any nation needs very badly. Hence the present leaders of the nation are forced to seek support from those who alone have benefited and continue to benefit from changing the form of the German state, and who for that very reason become the driving force of the Revolution — the Jews. Disregarding the Jewish threat, which is undoubtedly recognized even by today’s leaders (as various statement from prominent personalities reveal), these men are forced to accept Jewish favors to their private advantage and to repay these favors. And the repayment does not merely involve satisfying every possible Jewish demand, but above all preventing the struggle of the betrayed people against its defrauders, by sabotaging the antisemitic movement.
You see, his is a rational antisemitism — which will lead to a rebirth of the nation’s moral and spiritual forces. Hmm…
What is really going on in the Arab Spring? Martin van Creveld answers:
The situation seems to vary from one country to another. In Tunisia, the so-called Yasmin revolution has led to the installation of a relatively moderate Islamic government. Whether or not that means democracy, will, however, only be put to the test if and when the time comes for another election which the opposition may win. In Libya, the outcome has been virtual disintegration of the central state which is unable to cope with the various regional militias. Yemen following the revolution has become even more anarchic and more of a stamping ground. In Egypt, the most important effect of the revolution so far has been the loss of control over the Sinai, which likewise is becoming, [or] has already become, a haven for terrorists and criminals. As I said earlier, the fate of Syria hangs in the balance.
It would seem that, in each country, four outcomes are possible. They are, first, the substitution of one military dictator for another; second, the rise of an Islamic dictatorship; third, anarchy; and fourth, democracy. Generally speaking, the last possibility is the least likely one. The reason for this is the persistence of tribalism, which makes democracy very difficult to achieve.
To use a historical analogy, ere Cleisthenes was able to establish the world’s first true democracy in ancient Athens he had to demolish the tribes into which the population was divided. In Rome, by contrast, the survival of the tribes led to the creation of an aristocratic republic. Only late in the second century B.C. did attempts at greater democratization get under way: the outcome, as we know, was military dictatorship.
William S. Lind explains why conservatives hate war:
Few countries go to war expecting to lose, but wars are seldom won by both sides. The effects of military defeat on social order can be revolutionary.
Russia’s involvement in World War I gave us Bolshevism. Germany’s defeat made Hitler possible. As the First World War shows, if a conflict is costly enough, the victors’ social order can suffer nearly as badly as that of the vanquished. Not only did the British Empire die in the mud of Flanders, but postwar Britain was a very different place from Edwardian Britain.
The plain fact is, conservatives loathe unpredictability. They also know that vast state expenditures and debts can destabilize a society, and no activity of the state is more expensive than war. America’s adventure in Iraq, driven in no small part by the quest for oil—which will now mostly go to China—has already cost a trillion dollars, with another trillion or two to come caring for crippled veterans. Even the peacetime cost of a large military can break a country, as it broke the Soviet Union. American conservatives used to be budget hawks, not warhawks.
If we look beyond dollars, francs, pounds, and marks, the toll of war grows endless. After World War I, there were no young men on the streets of Paris. As one British observer noted, the German casualty lists from the early battles in that war read like the Almanach de Gotha, the book that catalogued the German nobility. Most frighteningly to conservatives, wars like World War I can destroy a whole culture’s faith in itself. It may well be that European civilization’s last chance for survival was a German victory on the Marne in 1914.
One gain that comes out of war is as disturbing to conservatives as any of the losses: an aggrandizement of state power. The argument of “wartime necessity” runs roughshod over all checks and balances, civil liberties, and traditional constraints on government. In the 20th century, American progressives knew they could only create the powerful, centralizing federal government they sought by going to war. It was they, the left, who engineered America’s entry into World War I. Nearly a century later, 9/11 gave centralizers in the neocon Bush administration the cover they needed for the “Patriot Act,” legislation that would have left most of America’s original patriots rethinking the merits of King George. Just as nothing adds more to a state’s debt than war, so nothing more increases its power. Conservatives rue both.