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December 30, 2003ADVICE FOR ANGRY LIBERALSDescribing a form of political argumentation, these words, written in 1824 by Sydney Smith, are still applicable to our contemporary Bush hating liberals. "Fallacies of Pretended Danger. - Imputations of Bad Design; of Bad Character; of Bad Motives; of Inconsistency; of Suspicious Connections. - The object of this class of fallacies is to draw aside attention from the measure to the man, and this in such a manner that, for some real or supposed defect in the author of the measure, a corresponding defect shall be imputed to the measure itself. Thus, "the author of the measure entertains a bad design; therefore the measure is bad. His character is bad, therefore the measure is bad; his motive is bad, I will vote against the measure. On former occasions this same person who proposed the measure was its enemy, therefore the measure is bad. He is on footing of intimacy with this or that dangerous man, or has been seen in his company, or is suspected of entertaining some of his opinions, therefore the measure is bad. He bears a name that at a former period was borne by a set of men now no more, by whom bad principles were entertained, therefore the measure is bad!" 
September 28, 2003LISTEN TO THEM NOW AND SEE WHAT THEY SAID THEN"One way or the other, we are determined to deny Iraq the capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them. That is our bottom line." "If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program." "Iraq is a long way from [here], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face." "He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983." "[W]e urge you, after consulting with Congress, and consistent with the U.S. Constitution and laws, to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs." Letter to President Clinton, signed by: "Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process." "Hussein has ... chosen to spend his money on building weapons of mass destruction and palaces for his cronies." "There is no doubt that ... Saddam Hussein has reinvigorated his weapons programs. Reports indicate that biological, chemical and nuclear programs continue apace and may be back to pre-Gulf War status. In addition, Saddam continues to redefine delivery systems and is doubtless using the cover of a licit missile program to develop longer-range missiles that will threaten the United States and our allies." "We begin with the common belief that Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a threat to the peace and stability of the region. He has ignored the mandate of the United Nations and is building weapons of mass destruction and th! e means of delivering them." "We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country." "Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power." "We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction." "The last UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical and biological warfare capabilities. Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons..." "I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force-- if necessary-- to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security." "There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years ... We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction." "He has systematically violated, over the course of the past 11 years, every significant UN resolution that has demanded that he disarm and destroy his chemical and biological weapons, and any nuclear capacity. This he has refused to do" "In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al Qaeda members ... It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons." "We are in possession of what I think to be compelling evidence that Saddam Hussein has, and has had for a number of years, a developing capacity for the production and storage of weapons of mass destruction."
(Thanks to Ruth King)
September 11, 2003WAR AND HUMAN NATURE: 9/11 REMEMBERED9-11-03: Horsefeathers turned on the TV last night and almost drowned in bathos. The media is in full “sensitive and caring” mode. The anniversary of the terrorist attacks gives our highly coiffed pundits an opportunity for heartstring tugging displays of self absorption. There is no feeling they will not share with us---except, of course, anger. The Judy Woodruffs, Diane Sawyers and Katie Courics with anxious, choked voices share their grief and empathic concern, dabbing at tears, biting their lips-and then turning to the next story, preferably about the heartlessness of the President. The male pundits, like Tom Brokaw, crack their voices and display their ‘sensitive’ side. In our soft and squishy therapeutic age, anger is the one unacceptable emotion, something to “get beyond”, to “resolve”, replace with “acceptance”. If we hold fast to our anger we are “sick” and in need of the benign ministrations of the caring professions. And then, amazingly, and in the midst of the navel gazing, Horsefeathers heard Rudolph Giuliani on Don Imus’s radio show. When asked by Imus what he felt, Giuliani instantly replied, “anger”, then went on to elaborate on why he felt the same cold fury today that he felt 2 years ago. He didn’t parade his sensitivity, merely mentioned that he had lost many good friends, losses which fueled and directed his anger at the Islamo-Nazis with whom we are at war. No wonder he was a leader in the Churchill tradition; he had, as Churchill did, unashamed access to a cold and determined anger. It was elevating. The famous theorist of war, Karl Von Clausewitz, observed that "There is only one decisive victory: the last". In order to fight on to that decisive victory we must resist the cant of the caring, professional empathizers whose shallow view of human nature threatens to undo us. Instead, Horsefeathers counsels rereading Patton, Churchill, John Stuart Mill and Shakespeare. We are at war. Our brief vacation from history during the 1990’s following the fall of Communism is over. We must destroy those who would destroy us. Here are a few excerpts from some Horsefeathers favorites to help keep our balance and strengthen our will. "...We ask no favours of the enemy. We seek from them no compunction. On the contrary, if tonight our people were asked to cast their vote whether a convention should be entered into to stop the bombing of cities, the overwhelming majority would cry, "No, we will mete out to them the measure, and more than the measure, that they have meted out to us." The people with one voice would say: "You have committed every crime under the sun. Where you have been the least resisted there you have been the most brutal. It was you who began the indiscriminate bombing. We will have no truce or parley with you, or the grisly gang who work your wicked will. You do your worst - and we will do our best." Perhaps it may be our turn soon; perhaps it may be our turn now..." "...The real hero is the man who fights even though he's scared. Some get over their fright in a minute, under fire; others take an hour; for some it takes days; but a real man will never let the fear of death overpower his honor, his sense of duty, to his country and to his manhood... "War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature, and has no chance of being free unless made or kept so by the exertions of better men than himself." And finally, from the writer who knew a bit more about human nature than Larry King and Barbara Walters: “In peace there's nothing so becomes a man As modest stillness and humility; But when the blast of war blows in our ears, Then imitate the action of the tiger: Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood. “
August 27, 2003"GENTLEMEN MAY CRY PEACE, PEACE, BUT THERE IS NO PEACE"---PATRICK HENRYDave Kopel of NRO reminds us that today is the 75th anniversary of the Kellog-Briand pact which outlawed war. "The Pact, produced by American Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg and French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand was eventually ratified by sixty-two nations, almost every sovereign in the world at the time. It passed the U.S. Senate with only a single negative vote. The Pact had, arguably, one success, in defusing a 1929 Soviet-Chinese dispute over a railroad in Manchuria. The other effect of the Pact was to encourage countries engaged in international aggression not to issue a formal declaration of war. Thus, there was no declaration of war for Japan's 1931 invasion of Manchuria, Italy's 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, and Germany's 1938 threatened invasion of Austria (which eventually took place peacefully, thanks to the cowardice of the Austrian government and the democracies). Kellogg was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize (Briand had already won one), putting him and Briand in the ranks of Prize winners such as Yasser Arafat, Jimmy Carter, Kofi Annan, Rigoberta Menchu, Le Duc Tho (North Vietnamese foreign minister), and others whose public careers ended up helping to cause war and violence. The Pact helped produce World War II, by making it appear that it was immoral or illegal to take decisive military action against Hitler when he was still weak, in the mid-1930s. All 15 of the original signatory nations ended up fighting in World War II. Notably, the Pact was produced under the administration of Calvin Coolidge, which shows that even conservatives can delude themselves with Wilsonian illusions about the power of international agreements. Technically, the Pact is still in force, a permanent reminder of folly of all who believe that pieces of paper, rather than powerful armies, will deter the aggression of dictatorships." Kellog's 1930 Nobel prize address is a perfect expression of the liberal utopian sentiments that echo to this day in the remarks of Kofi Annan and those who place their faith in fantasies of universal peace under the sway of international courts and the UN. As the world was plummeting towards a disastrous war, Kellog was happily predicting that reasoned discourse, good will, and education would bring peace: "...during the last ten years the European countries have, with patience and statesmanlike vision, been settling these difficult problems, which in other times might have brought on international conflict. Many of these disputes have been submitted to the Court of International Justice, and the judgment of that tribunal has always been accepted as final. That there are yet many differences which must be adjusted, there is no doubt, but I have the utmost confidence in the people that these problems will be worked out by peaceful means, for all must realize that war will only bring on additional burdens and greater injustice, and is there anyone who believes that any of these questions growing out of the war is worth plunging Europe, and perhaps the world, into another war? What we need is to keep cool and above all keep our confidence in the people that in time these questions which are agitating the public mind will be adjusted. There will always be disputes between nations which, at times, will inflame the public and threaten conflicts, but the main thing is to educate the people of the world to be ever mindful that there are better means of settling such disputes than by war. It is by such means as the prize offered by your Committee that the attention of the world will be focused and that men and women will be inspired to greater efforts in the interest of peace. The churches, the peace societies, the schools and colleges should add their educational influence to this great movement."
April 27, 2003HORSEFEATHERS DOCTRINE APPLIED TO MEGALOMANIACAL TYRANTS: THE CASE OF NORTH KOREA Now that our vacation from history during the Clinton years has ended, it is worth noting the limits of the ex-President's Oxford bull session, therapeutic approach to the business of nations. Like, an old vinyl record stuck in a groove, Mr. Clinton continues, post 9-11, in his logorrheic insistence that we should empathically talk, talk, talk with foes and friends at the UN, recognize why we have caused ourselves to be disliked by so many, and demonstrate our willingness to acknowledge our guilt and express our heartfelt mea culpas. What if, however, built deeply into human nature is the capacity for irrational envy and hatred, and what if this is not subject to reasoned, empathic modification? What if all the talk merely feeds the belief that action will never be taken? We now know that the years and years of UN talk helped Saddam consolidate and expand his megalomaniacal criminal enterprise masquerading as a government. The UN is itself a huge fraud in which thugocracies assault democracies while demanding an equality they withold from their own peoples. Talk, followed by treaties, followed by Jimmy Carter, followed by more treaties has helped North Korea become a nuclear power.
March 05, 2003STALIN LIVESSaddam Hussein's hero and role model died 50 years ago. While the Soviet Union crumbled, along with Communism, Stalinism survives. Its current exemplars: Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il, Yasser Arafat and Fidel Castro. Their world wide constituency: the "useful idiots" of the peace movement. In this superb article Johan Hari notes that "According to his biographer Con Coughlin, Saddam Hussein became obsessed with Stalin's political theories during his time in exile in Egypt in the early 1960s. After the 1968 revolution, Saddam embarked on the "Stalinization of Iraq" by ruthlessly building a one-party state based on hierarchy, secrecy and discipline. He borrowed Stalin's vicious tactic of staging show-trials, and began to discover "Zionist spy-rings" across the country. Coughlin explains that "the only significant difference between Saddam's purges and Stalin's terror is that in Iraq there were no gulags; with a few exceptions, Saddam's intended victims stood no chance of survival"..." Hari's focus is on British Stalinists but his observations hold true for America. The war between civilization and barbarism will be waged against Stalin's and Hitler's natural heirs around the globe.
February 11, 2003"CREATURES OUT OF THE DARK AGES HAVE COME MARCHING INTO THE PRESENT..."The latest murderous rantings by Osama bin Laden, broadcast courtesy of advanced Western technology, made me wonder about what new apologetics for Islamo-fascist killers we can expect from our chattering literary class. As the war on Islamo-fascism intensifies, growing numbers of playwrights and novelists loudly tell us the primary danger we face is not Islamo-Fascism, and not murderous tyrants like Saddam, nor the alliance between the two; rather it is George W. Bush and Western imperialism, and Israel, that constitute the main dangers. Why do verbally gifted and creative individuals lend themselves to this sort of idiocy? Why do they lend their prestige to preservation of a tyrant's regime in the name of a fantasy of "peace"? The answer is that they are people who overvalue fantasies, and who often are able to transmute those fantasies into money. Dr. Johnson once remarked that "No-one but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money." Granted, sometimes it is not actually tangible coin of the realm, but rather the coin of respect and prestige. Yet such individuals are particularly susceptible to belief in utopian fantasies wherein they can create a perfect world. Novelists, playwrights and poets possess an ability to create imaginary worlds out of their fantasies. They can put these into words that gain an audience, thereby validating their worth. We all yearn for a better world, or to return to an imaginary Eden, and novelistic or theatrical creations can seem more perfect than our own. The more artfully constructed, the better able they are to seduce readers into the willing suspension of disbelief necessary to enter those worlds. Even those poems, novels and plays that seem especially"realistic" possess an artificial structure sadly absent from everyday life. Authors are often subject to bouts of grandiosity, as if they believed they were Gods, truly possessing the power to create worlds and populate those worlds with creatures, like themselves who do their bidding. As readers, we happily pretend such invented worlds are real. Sometimes, with the greatest artists like Shakespeare, such imaginary beings, for example, Hamlet, seem as "real" as actual people we know. Yet we know they aren't. Given their grandiosity and yearning for imaginary worlds it should not be surprising to hear the likes of Pinter, Mailer, Sontag, Vidal, Le Guin--and many others calling for "peace". Of course the "peace" they desire is based on a fantasy that requires, like a novel, the willing suspension of disbelief--disbelief in the desire of our enemies to destroy us. In reality, therefore, the peace they seek may help bring the peace of the grave for 'infidels'. Since these creative types, as well as the rest of us, tend to overvalue fictional creations, they also incline to belief in their unique wisdom and originality, as if no-one had ever heard such notions before. Yet those of us of a certain age experience a sensation of deja vu. Now it's Pinter; then it was G.B. Shaw. Now it's Mailer; then it was Hemingway. The common denominator: a utopian fantasy of an egalitarian world where no-one is aggrieved, where envy, hatred and grievance wither away. This "rational" utopia is a mirror image of the totalitarian Muslim utopia envisioned by Osama. Thus there is an unconscious alliance formed between the two. Both yearn for an unattainable perfection that can only require the annihilation of those who stand in the way. While historical circumstances change, human nature remains constant and utopian yearnings are eternal. The failure of such twentieth century utopian enterprises as Communism and Fascism cannot eliminate this yearning. The bloodbaths they brought are minimized and explained away by their numerous intellectual apologists like Eric Hobsbawm. Scapegoats are found so that the utopian ideal can be preserved. And so that ideal lives on, unsullied and invulnerable to mere facts. Our debate today between liberals and conservatives is really a new version of the longstanding debate between utopians and anti-utopians. The latter are naturally regarded as less morally worthy than those who embrace a self flattering fantasy of universal love. H. G. Wells was the archetypal novelist as public intellectual in the early years of the twentieth century. Prolific and proselytizing, were Wells alive today he'd be a sure fire hit as a media pundit. Wells decided that his immensely entertaining creations of science fiction utopias were not enough; he would attempt to bring socialist egalitarian utopia to the real world. What was needed, he argued, was a world government, one that should be managed by superior intellects, according to principles of science. His book A Modern Utopia described this ideal society, run and organised by humanistic and well-educated people, people who, naturally resembled H.G. Wells. Isn't it odd that George Orwell, the archetypal dystopian novelist lives on more vividly than Wells, gaining in stature with the passage of time? His novels, Animal Farm and 1984, depicted the horrifying outcome of the effort to create egalitarian utopias. They showed how "peace" could really mean war and "freedom" could mean enslavement. They continue to live in ways that Wells's fiction does not. Orwell's critical writings are not as well known as his novels, but in 1941 he wrote an essay called Wells, Hitler and the World State. It was a respectful but harsh assessment of Wells's utopianism and holds up today as an indictment of our contemporary liberal utopians. The rise of Hitler, Orwell points out, was greeted by Wells, not as a danger to be confronted with force, but rather as a challenge to create a world government that would satisfy the grievances of the world's afflicted. Through the 1930's, and even after the war began, Wells continued to minimize the danger posed by Hitler, insisting that the West was exagerrating the threat posed by "that screaming little defective in Berlin.." He could not acknowledge the power and appeal of murderous evil. Echoes of Wells's call for world government can be heard today in contemporary left- liberalism's insistence that the UN be strengthened in the face of the threat posed by Saddam. Having jettisoned religion, the left cannot recognize it is in thrall to a new religion--the religion of universalist faith in supra-government institutions like the UN.
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