The Dougout

My post from last Thursday, June 8th, "Anecdotes, Facts and Wetbacks" has generated more comments than any other Dougout post. It has been a very interesting discussion and Otto has made some excellent contributions to it. He has also just posted on his own experience from reading abstracts for an coming up in August "Feminist gibberish in academic conference abstract:"

While there were quite a few abstracts for the German diaspora conference I would have rejected that got accepted, one stands out as particularly bad. The title of the paper is "The Domestication of Radical Ideas and Colonial Spaces: The Case of Elisabeth Foerster-Nietzsche - Session: Gender Perspectives." Immediately it is apparent that the paper does not deal with the topic of the conference and is written in language that is alien to everybody outside of the ivory tower...

Finally there is the convoluted writing. I am still not sure what the abstract is about exactly. Only that it manages to use all the proper politically correct code words. I reproduce some of the more difficult to read sentences below.

"At issue in my exploration of colonialist activities is not to demonstrate female complicity with the colonial enterprise-as has been done by various explorations of colonialism-,but rather to turn Forster-Nietzsche into a case study for the female appropriation of it."

"While Forster-Nietzsche's duplicitous activities as the wife of the anti-Semite Forster reflect her political opportunism and the partial internalization of bourgeois moral codes pertaining to women, they also indicate her ambiguous stance toward and partial rebellion against the intellectual and social dependency implied by her role of female supporter of the enterprises of men."

"In domesticating her anti-Semitic husband's radical conservative and racist ideas in Paraguay, Forster-Nietzsche sets in motion a process of dispossession as she attempts to counteract her own subordination under the enterprises of men."

Can anybody translate any of the three sentences above into English?

Good lord!

This is off topic but very important, Oriana Fallaci is on trial in Italy for "defaming Islam." Fallaci is living in New York and most likely won't appear for her heresy trial. The feminists and academics who obsess about pronouns will remain silent on this.

It just keeps getting weirder. Big Tent links to this story on how the "Fighting Sioux," of the Unversity of North Dakota may have to sue the NCAA for harassing them about their name:

Perhaps the most amazing thing is that through all of this – except for stirring things up – you have accomplished nothing. Your stand against Indian nicknames and logos – a stand that seemed to start out against all references to races and national origin – fizzled before it started when you left out Irish, Celtics, Vandals, and a host of other names. Then, for highly convoluted, hypocritical, and in some instances mysterious reasons, you exempted the Aztecs and other American Indian nicknames at the outset and, following that, you exempted the use of Chippewa, the Utes, the Choctaws, the Catawbas, and the Seminoles, leaving the NCAA position on even American Indian nicknames about as solid as room-temperature Jell-O. All of this was, and remains, highly arbitrary and capricious.

It may be that we have indeed forfeited our rights to fairness and evenhandedness by becoming “volunteer” members of the NCAA, but we may need to find out for sure in the courts since there really is no other membership option for UND.

No PC speech/expression codes here.

Guest Editorial by Edward Cline:

All right. Two Saudis and one Yemeni committed suicide at the Guantanamo Bay prison. And? As one correspondent of mine remarked: “Since Muslims are committing suicide on a daily basis all over the world -- and killing as many others as is possible with themselves -- what is so hard to believe about three suicides in a jail?” Remember that every one of the 460 detainees at Gitmo was either taken in combat against U.S. forces in Afghanistan or Iraq or elsewhere, or taken as a suspect with terrorist or Taliban connections, and scheduled to be tried by a tribunal.

It is hard to believe if reality does not conform to one’s wishes.

Remember that these are not “rockin’” fans of the Dixie Chicks or gentle Bono groupies or twittering sycophants of Muslim-patronizing Prince Charles of Britain, spirited away from Pennsylvania Avenue or the Strand and unlawfully incarcerated without charge. These are men who would just as soon as cut the throats of American civilians with box-cutters, hijack another planeload of them and smash it into the U.S. Capitol in an act of suicidal jihad. Or at least stockpile bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer to grow more piles of Western bodies and rubble.

No, if you listen to the news media, you are not to remember that. You are to buy the story that these three succumbed to the “stench of despair,” as Mark Denbeaux, a law professor at Seton Hall University described the “plight” of prisoners at Gitmo. Denbeaux and his son represent two Tunisian prisoners there. It did not occur to the writer of the Associated Press report that quoted Denbeaux to wonder: Who is paying Denbeaux’s retainer? CAIR? Or some other Islamic front organization funded by Saudi Arabia? Attorneys cost money. So does the judicial system, even for pro bono lawyers. But don’t expect any investigative Pulitzer Prize-winning stories to result from that tidbit.

You are not to remember either the extent to which the American military has gone to accommodate Islamic customs at Gitmo in terms of prayer times and prayer rugs, food, free copies of the Koran, not to mention all the medical services, cleaner clothing than most of them ever wore, and other perks that no American prisoners of war ever enjoyed in any war of the 20th century. The U.S. has gone more than the whole nine yards to fend off accusations by “human rights” organizations that it is mistreating prisoners, even to the extent of calling them “detainees” and not “prisoners of war.”

No, you are to empathize with their suffering, not your own or that of Americans whom these “detainees” have killed or would have killed if not captured. You are to forget that every one of them acted in the name of a totalitarian ideology that regards due process, individual rights, and freedom as the corrupt practices of men to be either killed or enslaved.

A measure of the news media’s virulent hatred of the U.S. is how quickly and eagerly it will jump on any rumor of American misbehavior. Its malevolent glee at a chance to knock the Marines -- the proudest and least politically correct American military service -- over Haditha must sit in the craw of anyone who has ever been in combat against Islamic “insurgents” or lost a friend or relative to these “freedom fighters.” You want to put your fist through the TV screen and wipe the sanctimony from the faces of Charles Gibson, Matt Lauer, Diane Sawyer and their patronizingly skeptical brothers and sisters elsewhere in the media.

The crime this time is that especially the American news media is willing to grant credence to our enemies first -- an enemy that knows how to work the West’s multicultural and relativist premises to his full advantage -- before examining facts or even recognizing that there are such things as facts. Observe, for example, how the media dwells on the Israeli mortar shell dropped on a Gaza beach, killing some “innocent” Palestinian civilians. You watch the footage and if you have half a brain, you must ask yourself: Why does this look so staged? What was a cameraman doing there with a camcorder and audio? Why does the little girl behave like she is following directions?

You can almost hear the Hamas’s verbal cues. “Now, run along the beach looking for your father. Don’t look at the camera! Okay. Now you see him. I’ll put the camera on him, and then you see him and flop into the sand and roll back and forth hysterically, screaming anguish and bloody murder. Try not to look up at the camera, or it’ll look phony. Hey, great work, little one! Now we have an excuse to fire more rockets into Israel. To hell with their apologies. We want to kill Jews. Say, little one, how would you like to wear a pretty new vest?”

But, back to the Gitmo suicides. The Associated Press reports General John Craddock, commander of the U.S. Southern Command, saying that the “suicides were part of Islamic militants’ holy war against the United States and its allies.” “They’re determined, intelligent, committed elements,” said Craddock, “and they continue to do everything they can…to become martyrs in the jihad.” “Militants”? Not prisoners of war?

Fine. Let more of them commit suicide and martyr themselves. Give them the bed sheets and maybe some nylon rope. It will mean fewer hostile mouths for U.S. taxpayers to feed. It’s a thought, but all 130 Saudis at Gitmo could be freed by herding them onto Air Force transports for “released” over Riyadh, together with about a thousand 500-pound bombs targeted on various palaces of the sheiks, the mourning tents, and mosques.

The Associated Press reports of June 12th on the suicides read like an Islamic agony column. (A correspondent of mine queried whether or not the Associated Press and Reuters might be sub-cells of Al-Quada, which is not so wild a hypothesis, since rich Saudis are stealthily buying interests in Western news organizations.) Ample space was given to the likes of Denbeaux and his ilk in the European Union and Saudi Arabia, all of whom commiserate over the “detainees” and who call for the closing of Gitmo and release of the “detainees.” Very little space was devoted to the American position. Most Saudis don’t believe the deaths were the result of suicides, or if they believe they were suicides, they were brought on by “torture.”

“A crime was committed here,” said Kateb al Shimri,” to the Associated Press, “and the U.S. authorities are responsible.” The Associated Press went on to say that Shimri echoed “the general sentiment heard in the Saudi capital.” Shimri is a Saudi lawyer representing relatives of Saudis held at Gitmo. He plans to sue the U.S. government for compensation on behalf of the relatives of the suicides. “Many Saudis denounced the suicide claims as a fabrication, and some accused the U.S. authorities of complicity in the inmates’ deaths.”

“They were killed; they were murdered,” one mother of a Saudi prisoner of war wailed. “This was no suicide.” This from a Muslim woman who would have celebrated her son’s death had he wandered into an Israeli pizza parlor and blew himself and twenty people up. That action, presumably, would not qualify as killing and murder. Does anyone out there see the deadly double standard that is eroding the separation of Western and Muslim cultures, the moral chasm that divides the life-giving values of the West and the death-worshipping cult of the East?

Finally, I quote another Saudi whose veracity is demonstrably impeachable, Mufleh al-Qahtani, deputy director of the Saudi kingdom’s Saudi Human Rights Group.
“There are no independent monitors at the detention camp,” he said to the Associated Press, “so it is easy to pin the crime on the prisoners, given that it’s possible they were tortured.” Also, the A.P. article reported that “The kingdom’s semiofficial human rights organization called for an independent investigation into the deaths of the two Saudis.”

I submit that a Saudi “human rights” organization is as much an oxymoron as a Mafia-run squad that offers crime victims trauma and bereavement counseling. It would be the stuff of satire were it not actually happening.

I submit also that it is beyond bizarre. Doubtless Shimri and al-Qahtani speak with the approval of the Saudi government. Saudi Arabia last week complained that the State Department included it in a list of twelve countries that deal in “human trafficking” (also known as slavery), and that this was “unfair” in lieu of American guilt. Prince Turki al-Faisal, Saudi ambassador to the U.S., speaking to a group of Nashville businessmen, said that “We read in American media and the press about the mistreatment of illegals who come to the U.S. seeking work and end up in brothels and gangs and unacceptable servitude, whether in factories or at farms, and yet that is not mentioned in the State Department report.”

More sanctimony that invites a punch in the face. It cannot even be called “hypocrisy.” You see how slyly and effectively the double standard of fatal altruist/ pragmatist/ multicultural Western premises can be used against us. You can see it; President Bush and Condeleezza Rice cannot. Or will not. Al-Faisal and his ilk know how to work a crowd of dupes and apologists and exploit our own double standard of good and bad premises. “You are altruists, but not perfect. Do not presume to throw stones at us. What you call crimes and abuses, you are guilty of committing.” And the dupes and apologists and aging hippies in three-piece suits nod in sad concession.

Saudi Arabia is a medieval dinosaur that also respects honor killings, castrations of boys, the subjugation of women, tribal vendettas, supports kindergartens for killers called “madrasas,” funds the jihad against the West through various “charities,” foundations, and oil revenues, and regularly practices extortion against especially the U.S. Saudi and other Islamic mouthpieces in the U.S. call for Sharia law to replace the Constitution. (Since that is an assertion of a “religious belief,” it cannot be defined as advocating treason, even though Islam makes no distinction between “church” and state.)

It would be an interesting to listen to a debate on the subject of which Muslim country is our deadlier enemy: Saudi Arabia or Iran. If I were a judge of such a debate, I would be obliged to call a tie and give both sides an equal number of marks.

Nicholas at Rule of Reason has posted the third Objectivist Carnival. Nicholas links to seventeen different sites. One that interests me is from the Charlotte Capitalist on a story about a new college starting in their neck of the woods:

Plans for a future institution of higher learning here are beginning to surface in more detail, and a state educational official says she and a team of examiners tentatively are planning a July 26 site meeting with the organizers.

Founders College has submitted an application projecting a fall 2007 start and an enrollment of 500, said Michelle Howard-Vital, associate vice president of academic affairs for UNC General Administration.

The College of Rational Education, in papers filed with the secretary of state's office, said its purpose includes applying the philosophy of the late Ayn Rand.

A Russian-born American intellectual and novelist, Rand was known for emphasizing the protection of individual rights to life, liberty and property as well as limited government.

Let's hear it for school choice.

My favorite is from Quent Cordair Fine Art, where artist Bryan Larsen demonstrates how he turned this sketch:

Into this, almost, completed work: New Year's Eve

Canada has a new political party. Actually, it's the province of Saskatchewan that has a new player in the mix: The Marijuana Party:

Voters could have another party to choose from in the next general provincial election now that the Saskatchewan Marijuana Party has become a registered provincial party.

Federal Marijuana Party leader Blair Longley said the federal and provincial wings of the party agree that marijuana, also known as cannabis, should be decriminalized.

"If cannabis was not criminal, then it would no longer be under federal jurisdiction. It would be under provincial jurisdiction," he said.

"The Saskatchewan Marijuana Party would want the Saskatchewan government to legalize the cultivation and possession of cannabis for all of its possible uses … food, fuel, fibre, medicine, recreation," he said.

The article also notes how things are in a nation where political parties have to be "registered" with the government. After official approval a political party is allowed to raise and spend money. But, they are also able to receive government funds. This is what "reformers" mean by "fair and open" elections. All the choices the state sees fit to allow.

In related news, James Hudnall has posted a link to pre-prohibition product advertisments that makes for interesting reading.


This old Coca-Cola ad mentions that "cocaine removed." But, they are still advertising their product for medicinal uses.

In 1914 the Harrison Narcotics Act was passed. This loathsome and destructive measure was a gift to the American people by the villians of American history, the so-called Progressives. The results were predictable and immediate. On May 15, 1915 the New York Medical Journal noted:

As was expected ... the immediate effects of the Harrison antinarcotic law were seen in the flocking of drug habitues to hospitals and sanatoriums. Sporadic crimes of violence were reported too, due usual1y to desperate efforts by addicts to obtain drugs, but occasionally to a delirious state induced by sudden withdrawal....

The really serious results of this legislation, however, will only appear gradually and will not always be recognized as such. These will be the failures of promising careers, the disrupting of happy families, the commission of crimes which will never be traced to their real cause, and the influx into hospitals to the mentally disordered of many who would otherwise live socially competent lives.

Three years after the Harrison Act's passage a Congressional investigating committee came to these conculsions:

Opium and other narcotic drugs (including cocaine, which Congress had erroneously labeled as a narcotic in 1914) were being used by about a million people. (This was almost certainly an overestimate; see Chapter 9.)

The "underground" traffic in narcotic drugs was about equal to the legitimate medical traffic.

The "dope peddlers" appeared to have established a national organization, smuggling the drugs in through seaports or across the Canadian or Mexican borders-especially the Canadian border.

The wrongful use of narcotic drugs had increased since passage of the Harrison Act. Twenty cities, including New York and San Francisco, had reported such increases. (The increase no doubt resulted from the migration of addicts into cities where black markets flourished.)

The committee's recommendation, tougher law enforcement. This was in 1918. The "drug war" another social engineering success story.

Otto has recently posted about how his friend’s dog was blinded by a wetback. Otto lives in Arizona were his friend, Sandy, has a ranch. Sandy is one of those Americans who have the misfortune of living on an illegal alien thoroughfare. His property has become a conduit for large numbers of illegals and he, like many others, is paying the price of being abandoned by his nation’s law enforcement agencies:

Recently, illegal aliens blinded my friend Sandy's dog. The dog, Gobbler was in his kennel on Sandy's property when it happened. The criminals sprayed pepper spray into the eyes of a helpless animal just for "kicks." The dog is now blind. This story really upsets me. Blinding a man's dog should be a hanging offense.

Otto provides a link to the Arizona Daily Star story. It gives more details on how Sandy, up till now, had maintained a state of truce with the invaders:

Sandy Schlesinger thought he had an unspoken accord with the illegal entrants who passed through his property on a nearly daily basis.

He filled their water jugs and gave them tortillas before sending them on their way and calling the Border Patrol.

The article’s headline is: “Border Crossers Appear Guilty of Blinding Dog with Pepper.” “Border crossers,” is, I guess, the new, official PC term of evasion. They used to be called wetbacks, but that was judged to harsh and even “racist.” After all Americans wouldn’t want to hurt the feelings of those who flaunt our laws and national sovereignty. So, the new term became “illegal alien.” While it was an increase to two words and four syllables to say the same thing as one word, it was still accurate.

Accuracy was still a problem for the arbiters of language. Accordingly, the new, new term became “undocumented workers.” Now we are up to seven syllables to say nothing. “Undocumented,” as if the main problem with these invaders is a paper work hang-up. While shorter, “border crossers” is even more absurd. Millions cross our southern border legally every year. The purpose of the new PC term is to evade the distinction between the law abiding and the law breaker.

On Otto’s comments I made mention of this issue:

I noticed in the article you link to yet another PC euphemism designed to conceal the truth: "border crossers." Not least among the left's many intellectual crimes is their abuse of language.

Chris O’Byrne, of The Peaceful Birder, quickly took me to task:

Interesting, Grant, that you so blithely separate the left and right by their purported abuse of language. Instead of blasting you for such an over-simplification, let me simply ask you this: do you have any statistical evidence supporting your statement? Is not this abuse more an individual trait, instead of a political trait?

Hmmm…where to begin with the above? I, not so blithely, separate the left and right based on their different ideas. What I find interesting is those who dismiss uncongenial facts as “anecdotes.” I will also note that statistics, while valuable, is not the foundation of induction. Once one has enough data points, there is justification to come to general conclusion. In this case the left’s politically correct abuse of language. I single out the left because with their dominance of the mainstream media, academia and the prestige press, they have the power to alter language to conform with their agenda.

No, I haven’t conducted a statistical survey to support my viewpoint, nor do I have to. This demand by Chris is just an attempt to prevent discussion on an important issue. There are many examples of the phenomenon.

George Orwell wrote about the adulteration of language for political purposes sixty years ago with his essay “Politics and the English Language:”

It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because out thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble.

In this essay Orwell was not specifically writing about mendacious words driving out truthful ones. Of course, he saved that issue for his essay on “Newspeak.”

Moving forward to our own time, one of the most egregious examples of a euphemism being used to muddy the intellectual waters is the term “Native American.” To even say the word “Indian” on an American college campus is to identify oneself as a doublepluscrimethinker. I seriously doubt if a scholar could get a peer review essay published in an academic journal or a book published by an academic press without using the new terminology. Never mind that the American Indian Movement refuses to change its name and its leader, Russell Means, “abhors” the new term, or that their reasons are incontrovertible. The PC language police will enforce their edicts wherever they can get away with it.

There are even books, and many chapters of books, on the proper use of academic left Newspeak. Edward Cline wrote a brilliant analysis on this ten years ago, “The Ghouls of Grammatical Egalitarianism:”

A small, innocuous-looking book appeared in bookstores recently, published under the auspices of the Association of American University Presses (AAUP), an organization which claims to be devoted to the dissemination of knowledge and scholarly research. Its title is Guidelines for Bias-Free Writing, by Marilyn Schwartz and the Task Force on Bias-Free Language (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). It is little more than 100 pages long, weighs less than a pound, yet its contents are more potent than the Oklahoma City bomb. Its ingredients are politically correct jargon, multiculturalism, and the phenomenon of what may be called "grammatical egalitarianism.

The PC Newspeak is not limited to the United States. Australian historian Keith Windschuttle recently wrote on this topic of “Language Wars.” Windschuttle focuses on how, and why, “gender” replaced the perfectly serviceable word “sex” in political correct argot:

Gender is a term that reeks of the sexual politics of the Seventies. It made its first appearance when gay activists began to demand that homosexuality be not merely tolerated but given equal standing with heterosexuality in all things. It was reinforced by feminists who wanted to eliminate the differences between men and women.

These activists had to face the fact that sexual differences are grounded in biology. They are determined at conception by the distribution of X and Y chromosomes and cannot be altered, no matter what identity a person assumes, how many hormones someone ingests, or whatever surgery is performed. Moreover, the biology of sexual difference has no place for homosexual activities. Indeed, it implies they are unnatural.

Clearly, that won’t do. Sex may remind some that humans are sexual mammals and that not everything under the sun is up to individual caprice.

I’ll close with a quote from Less Than Words Can Say by Richard Mitchell, the Underground Grammarian. I doubt if he is a favorite of the language cops:

Words never fail. We hear them, we read them; they enter into the mind and become part of us for as long as we shall live. Who speaks reason to his fellow men bestows it upon them. Who mouths inanity disorders thought for all who listen. There must be some minimum allowable dose of inanity beyond which the mind cannot remain reasonable. Irrationality, like buried chemical waste, sooner or later must seep into all the tissues of thought.

Update, 6/9: I almost forgot Daniel Pipes list of twenty euphemism for the terrorist killers of Beslan, "Beslan Atrocity: They're Terrorists - Not Activists." Pipes list is from the international media, the refusal to call things by their proper names is a worldwide problem.

The Bush administration has just come out in opposition to the Akaka Bill. This development can also be viewed as a long overdue political whack upside Governor Linda Lingle's (RINO) head. Hawaii Reporter has posted a letter from William E. Moschella, Assistant Attorney General, to the lamest of ducks, Bill Frist:

Dear Mr. Leader:

The Administration strongly opposes passage of S. 147. As noted recently by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, this bill risks "further subdivid[ing] the American people into discrete subgroups accorded varying degrees of privilege." As the President has said, "we must ... honor the great American tradition of the melting pot, which has made us one nation out of many peoples." This bill would reverse that great American tradition and divide people by their race. Closely related to that policy concern, this bill raises the serious threshold constitutional issues that arise anytime legislation seeks to separate American citizens into race-related classifications rather than "according to [their] own merit[s] and essential qualities." Indeed, in the particular context of native Hawaiians, the Supreme Court and lower Federal courts have invalidated state legislation containing similar race-based qualifications for participation in government entities and programs.

While this legislation seeks to address this issue by affording federal tribal recognition to native Hawaiians, the Supreme Court has noted that whether native Hawaiians are eligible for tribal status is a "matter of dispute" and "of considerable moment and difficulty." Given the substantial historical, structural and cultural differences between native Hawaiians as a group and recognized federal Indian tribes, tribal recognition is inappropriate for native Hawaiians and would still raise difficult constitutional issues.

I hope this means that if, in its infinite stupidity, Congress passes this turd of a bill, the President will veto it. I also hope Lingle will enjoy being Hawaii's Christine Todd Whitman.

Update, 6/9: Akaka Bill dead for this session. Much whining from the usual suspects, Lingle (who claims to be a Republican) vows to save raced based programs from Constitutional scrutiny.

A B-26 Marauder, of course.

More cool stuff here.

Just before D-Day all allied aircraft were painted with "invasion stripes" like the B-26 above. I couldn't find anything on the internet about who had the idea to do this or gave the order. The purpose was to help allied soldiers identify friendly aircraft:

Air Force history records show how all Allied aircraft were painted with"invasion stripes" of alternating black and white bands completely aroundfuselages and wings. Pedone said the stripes on his C-47 and other aircraftwould easily identify them as friendly to ships and troops below.

The hope was the stripes would prevent trigger-happy AAA gunners from shooting down the good guys. Although, the flyboys made their share of blunders:

The relationship between the IX TAC [Tactical Air Command] and the First Army was exceptional. The IX TAC used a microwave radar, the MEW 10, for flight following and kept accountability of their high-altitude flights. Because of this, the last-minute decision to paint invasion stripes on allied aircraft, and the opportunity to see both friendly and enemy aircraft fratricide was dramatically reduced in the European Theater of Operations. Unfortunately, the Army Air Force continued to attack friendlies, despite the standardization of recognition symbols, such as yellow smoke. The situation got so bad that, shortly after D-Day, the commander of the 30th Division ordered his AW battalion commander to fire at "all" airplanes, especially friendlies.

Some squadrons went for the natural look, but still had the stripes.




I remember reading somewhere that some British pilots told the American P-51 drivers that the metal finish was a bad idea because the Germans would be able to spot them from hundreds of miles away. The Americans answered "good." They were flying the baddest buggy around and they wanted the Luftwaffe to come up for a scrap.

The Akaka Bill follies are heating up again. Today there are two excellent pieces on the Akaka Abomination. Duncan Currie, of the Weekly Standard, points out both the historical lies that the pro-Akaka bunch are using and the nasty ramifications of the Bill:

START WITH THE REVISIONIST HISTORY. The Akaka bill largely stems from the 1993 Apology Resolution, in which Congress expressed its "deep regret" for the January 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, an event that led to U.S. annexation of Hawaii five years later. The Apology accused U.S. minister to Hawaii John L. Stevens of conspiring with American military forces and "non-Hawaiian" insurgents to topple the monarchy. It further hinted that the interests of American sugar planters were central to the conspiracy....

This raises serious constitutional questions. Everyone agrees that Congress can recognize existing Indian tribes. But can it create a new "tribe" at the behest of a particular ethnic lobby? Probably not; and if so, only in the rarest of circumstances. Surely there are Hispanic separatists in the American Southwest who would love to get their own sovereign "nation" as reparations for the Mexican War. [*] The Akaka bill would encourage them to press their case.

John Fund, who has been covering this story for the Wall Street Journal, notes that the Akaka Bill is not very popular in Hawaii:

In Hawaii, debate over the ramifications of the Akaka bill has been stifled, as almost all of its elected officials have signed on to it for fear of being branded insensitive or racist. But none of them want to test the measure by consulting the state's voters directly on the Akaka bill. A Grassroots Institute poll last week showed some two-thirds of Hawaiians oppose the bill, including a near-majority of Native Hawaiians.

It what would appear to be an unrelated issue, the chairman of the Hawaii Republican Party, Sam Aiona, had a letter to the editor in today's Honolulu Advertiser:

The two major-party conventions this past weekend demonstrated the importance of having citizens involved in politics and taking time to know the issues and the candidates. I can assure you the Hawai'i Republican Party will do its share to offer candidates who will give the voters a clear choice on election day, and we will continue to work hard to ensure a strong two-party system in Hawai'i.

Except when it comes to the Akaka Bill, that is. In that case neither party wants any input from either the public at large or their own rank-in-file. A little over a year ago at the Hawaii County Republican Convention, I was told by the Lt. Governor, Duke Aiona (Sam's cousin), that there is no room for discussion on this topic within the Republican Party. As far as the Lingle Machine is concerned it's been "decided."

Both the Democratic and Republican have decided this issue for the people of Hawaii in some smoke filled back room. This is hardly the "clear choice" as promised by Aiona. In fact, like the Democrats, the Republicans intend for this issue to be settled in Washington D.C. Their strategy is to use highly paid lobbyists with assistance by junkets to D.C. by Lingle and the OHA nomenklatura all paid for by the long suffering Hawaii taxpayer.

The Aiona's and Lingle are all for citizen being "involved" in the political arena. Unless, of course, said participation results in the rejection of their pet projects. Like the Democrats, the current Republican leadership wants the public's involvement limited to sign waving and convention "unity." "Unity" meaning toeing the Party Line on Akaka. To the current leadership of the Republican Party, the damage which the Akaka Bill will cause to both the state and national social fabric is far less important than their political ambitions.

The Party of Lincoln is now, in Hawaii, the Party of Apartheid.

* The lies and half-truths about the Mexican-American War never end.

This is just sad, according to this report some British have banned their own flag so as not to "offend" you know who:

Following warnings by extremist Islamic group al-Muhajiroun, in which the group said that the red cross in the England flag symbolizes the 'blood thirsty crusaders' and the occupation of Muslims, some of the largest companies in England have ordered their workers not to wave the flags.

But the Islamic protest forced some corporations, such as cable companies NTL, Heathrow airport in London, and even the Drivers and Vehicles Licensing Agency to ban the flag in every form due to fears from reactions of Muslims.

Wow. Of course, all Mohammadans have to do is mention the Crusades and the self-loathers, who now run Europe, will go into a frenzy of multi-cultural surrender at the nearest Mosque. This is not an isolated event, go here and here to read other stories of those English who now feel ashamed of their flag and are too cowardly to defend it.

This England is clearly dead:

I.

When Britain first,
at heaven’s command,
Arose from out the azure main,
This was the charter of the land,
And guardian angels sang this strain --

"Rule, Britannia! Britannia rule the waves;
- Britons never, never, never shall be slaves."

II.

The nations not so blest as thee,
Must in their turn to tyrants fall,
Whilst thou shall flourish great and free,
The dread and envy of them all.

- "Rule, Britannia! etc..."

III.

Still more majestic shalt thou rise,
More dreadful from each foreign stroke.
As the loud blast that tears the skies,
Serves but to root thy native oak.

- "Rule, Britannia! etc..."

IV.

Thee haughty tyrants ne’er shall tame,
All their attempts to bend thee down,
Will but arouse thy generous flame,
And work their woe and thy renown.

- "Rule, Britannia! etc..."

V.

To thee belongs the rural reign,
Thy cities shall with commerce shine,
And thine shall be the subject main,
And every shore it circles thine.

- "Rule, Britannia! etc..."

VI.

The muses, still with freedom found,
Shall to thy happy coast repair,
Blest isle with matchless beauty crowned,
And manly hearts to guard the fair.

- "Rule, Britannia! etc..."

Hat tip: My allies in the cause at Infidel Bloggers Alliance.

On this day in 1942 the Imperial Japanese Navy lost four of its six fleet aircraft carriers along with their entire air groups. The Battle of Midway is considered one of the most decisive battles in world history. The sinking of the Akagi, Kaga, Soryu and Hiryu made the counter-offensive at Guadalcanal possible. The Marine landings on Guadalcanal caused the Japanese to shift their priorities to that island away from the New Guinea theater. That decision, in turn, enabled MacArthur to launch his offensive in Papua.

At Midway the US Navy lost the carrier Yorktown. The other two American carriers Enterprise and Hornet were not even scratched. The Hornet was sunk during the Guadalcanal campaign at the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands on October, 26 1942. The Enterprise, which didn't seem to miss any battle in the Pacific, survived the war.



Sadly, The Big E did not survive the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. If you can believe it, she was scrapped in July 1958.

Update, 6/5: Doug White at Poinography has informed me that the Yorktown has been found. Doug informed me that he was part of the University of Hawaii team that found the vessel in 16500 feet of water.

The issue of teaching "intelligent design" in schools has received a great deal of attention. In this debate all right thinking "liberals" side with keeping "intelligent design" out of the public classroom as it has no place in science education. In this the "liberals" are on the correct side of the issue.

However, when a major university surrenders its patent rights and stops scientific research due to pressure from religious believers who are not Christians the same "liberal" opinions hails it as victory for "indigenous" people:

The University of Hawai'i announced yesterday that it will give three patents for genetically enhanced, crossbred taro plants to Native Hawaiians.

"The University of Hawai'i has a strong desire to maintain appropriate respect and sensitivity to the indigenous Hawaiian host culture," said Gary K. Ostrander, UH- Manoa vice chancellor for research.

According to Hawaiian legend, the cosmic first couple gave birth to a stillborn, Haloa, from whose gnarled body sprang the broad-leafed plant whose bulb-like underground corms are cooked and pounded into one of Hawai'i's best-known foods, poi.

The Hawaiian people, it is believed, came from a second brother, making the plant part of their common ancestry.

Notice that a small group of protesters have been promoted to "The Hawaiian people." Notice also Ostrander's statement, "indigenous Hawaiian host culture." Here is an explicit statement that the university and the values that it represents are merely "guests" in Hawaii. Are the majority of ethnic Hawaiians who are Christians (hardly an indigenous Hawaiian belief system) also guests in Hawaii, or just their non-indigenous beliefs?

Science, reason, individualism, and freedom are now "guest" values in Hawaii, which can be expelled at anytime by the most strident and intolerant practitioners of "indigenous" culture, as they define it. The university has become complicit with those who want to turn the clock back to pre-1819 Hawaii.

Guest Editorial by Edward Cline:

“The world must be made safe for democracy,” said President Woodrow Wilson to Congress on April 2nd, 1917, some months after he proposed “peace without victory.” Four days later Congress approved a declaration of war against Germany. Wilson could have asked for a declaration much earlier. German submarines were sinking neutral American shipping in a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare, five merchant ships being sunk in February and March that year alone.

Wilson had been waiting for a more “overt” act of belligerence against the U.S other than the loss of American lives at sea at German hands. But the most recent sinkings, together with the Zimmermann note to the German minister in Mexico, forced him to face reality. The Zimmermann note pledged Germany to support Mexico in an invasion of the U.S. southwest to deter certain American entry into the European conflict until after Germany had beaten Britain and France to exhaustion. If the U.S. declared war, German foreign minister Alfred Zimmermann instructed his minister in Mexico to assure Mexico that “we shall make war together and together make peace. We shall give generous financial support and it is understood that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in New Mexico, Texas and Arizona.”

A declaration of war was not what Wilson had in mind as an altruist “tonic of a moral adventure,” as editor and fellow Progressive Herbert Croly had prescribed for America years before. Rather, it was the role of mediator and “peace maker” in the conflicts and international disputes of the early 20th century.

Shuttle ahead ninety years to Georgetown University, where British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in remarks about the “new” global politics, proclaimed, “Idealism becomes the realpolitik.” An essential part of that “idealism” is the introduction of “democracy” in regions of the world that have seen no legitimate governments in over a century, chiefly because their inhabitants did not know what to do with democracy, except to vote themselves new tyrants or tolerate old ones. Democracy, however, means mob rule, no matter how legitimate it sounds. It recognizes no individual rights that a majority cannot abridge or abrogate.

Even Wilson’s contemporary, Vladimir Lenin, understood that. “Democracy is not identical with majority rule.” Off by one adverb in that statement, he elucidates the point in contradiction of himself. “Democracy is a State which recognizes the subjection of the minority to the majority, that is, an organization for the systematic use of force by one class against the other, by one part of the population against another.” (Chapter 4, State and Revolution, 1919) Which is why democracy was as much his enemy as “capitalistic” republicanism, to be ruthlessly crushed. After all, in terms of a nation’s population, a totalitarian party’s members are always in the minority.

The point here is that President Bush’s and Mr. Blair’s “idealism” does not fundamentally differ from Wilson’s. Its moral core consists of blind duty and the sacrifice of wealth and of lives to accomplish the spread of democracy. Integral to the concept is that the U.S. should eschew its selfish isolationism and adopt a proactive, Kantian “moral” role to correct wrongs wherever it might see them. Our political leaders are ruled by the little Prussian’s categorical imperative to “do the right thing” regardless of cost, self-interest, or even of consequence.

“Democracy,” rather than being an object of populist appeal or simply because it is easier for politicians to pronounce than “constitutional republic” (which is what the U.S. is becoming less and less), thus complements such “idealist realpolitik.” That is the true character of Mr. Blair’s “realpolitik.” It is the “idealism” of humility, retreat, and ultimate self-destruction.

In the conflict with Iran and its neo-Hitlerian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bush contends that the issue of Iran’s nuclear weapons development can be resolved with “robust diplomacy.” That was Wilson’s premise behind his proposal for an international peace conference to end the fighting between the European powers, and the basis of Neville Chamberlain’s negotiations with Nazi Germany.

Wilson also said, in April 1915, that “No nation is fit to sit in judgment upon any other nation.” Both Bush and Blair have refined that idea, alleging that no religion is fit to sit in judgment of any other creed. Their altruist, Christian premises forbid them to condemn Islam, and allow them to claim that Islam is not the motivating force behind terrorism. It has been “hijacked,” or “perverted.”

Anyone who has read the Koran knows this is an absurd notion, as absurd a notion that Hitler “hijacked” Nazism or that Stalin “perverted” communism. But, then, Bush and Blair believe in democracy, as well.

Some commentators may suspect that the May 31st news that the U.S. is willing to negotiate directly with Iran is a ruse to assure world opinion that it is not trying to bully Iran into giving up its nuclear enrichment program, and that it does not intend to employ force against Iran.

Given recent developments, we can believe that it is not a ruse. President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are willing to take both of Ahmadinejad’s hands and personally lead him to the higher plateau of international amity, global peace, and pure “democracy,” with Prime Minister Blair, Europe, Russia, China and others flinging confetti and flowers at them. Ahmadinejad can snarl and missile-rattle all he wishes; Bush and Rice are willing to forget dignity and take the abuse in the name of a higher cause.

Ahmadinejad is a beast, they agree. But he is there, a metaphysical given, and must be dealt with without igniting more conflict or exacerbating existing animosity. Ma Rice acknowledges that Iran is a supporter of terrorism “in Lebanon and Palestinian territories,” she remarked at a news conference, according to an Associated Press report on May 31st. But, “Iran can and should be a responsible state.” No mention by her or Bush of its support of terrorism in Iraq, where Iran’s “insurgent” proxies and planners are picking off Americans and Iraqis by the busload. Apparently, that is not “overt’ enough an act of war.

Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were also metaphysical givens. Our policy more than half a century ago was to erase those givens, and that was the end of that. There were no negotiating “tables” to lure dictators to in the name of peace, just the burnt out shell of the Reichstag and the wind-blown ashes of Hiroshima.

As John Lewis remarked in correspondence elsewhere in response to the AP report, “Note that Rice’s admission that Iran has a right to nuclear energy is the same error the British made prior to WW II, when they accepted that Germany had the same ‘right to self-determination’ as other nations.”

Iran’s “self-determination,” in light of its record and especially in view of Ahmadinejad’s bellicose rantings, includes the “destiny” of ruling the Mideast by force or subversion, the annihilation of Israel, and setting the terms of peace with the rest of the world in a quest for a Pax Persia via nuclear payload.

In the staring contest between Ahmadinejad, Bush and Rice, the pragmatists blinked. So they must always blink when facing bellicosity. Their concept of ensuring national security is to offer the aggressor bribes, such as the U.S and Britain did in Vienna on June 1st, and to rule out military force.

The “realpolitik” of U.S. policy to date has been one of uncompromising pragmatism. Pragmatism as an “ideal” and as a policy must by its nature sacrifice the good to evil; otherwise it would not be pragmatism. Evil derives its strength from compromised and ultimately vanquished principles. Pragmatism discounts principles as a guide to moral conduct; they are forgotten in a rush to keep a nemesis at bay.

The principle left behind here is the right of the U.S. to its self-defense against a threatening rogue state. Reason and reality have no role in a policy of pragmatism. Yet, despite pragmatism’s sorry and costly role in history, especially in the 20th century, current leaders are convinced that pragmatism is the only “moral” path to follow. They are determined to make it “work.” But it works only to the benefit of the enemies of civilization.

The New York Times, under the chortling headline on June 1st, “Bush’s Realization on Iran: No Good Choice Left Except Talk,” reported that the president asked Rice “several months ago that he needed ‘a third option,’ a way to get beyond either a nuclear Iran or an American military action.” The term “beyond” is eloquently appropriate; it suggests an excursion into fantasyland in search of a Star Trekian “Prime Directive.” Bush has explicitly rejected an “either/or” in favor of an evasive, non-confrontational middle course.

One must wonder about the psychology of men who are so afraid of absolutes that they are willing to acknowledge a threat but never the rational course of action to take to remove one. According to the AP report, when Rice was asked about the possibility of the U.S. reestablishing diplomatic relations with Iran, Rice “ruled out a ‘grand bargain.’ However, she said a negotiated solution to the nuclear dispute could ‘begin to change the relationship.’”

“Nobody is confused about the nature of this regime,” said Rice at a news conference held to announce the alleged shift in policy. “We are not negotiating the terms of terrorism.”

Were she and Bush genuinely confused about the nature of Iran’s regime, it might be forgivable. But she names what she and Bush both know, and that makes the action an unforgivable betrayal. In effect, their willingness to “come to the table” to talk is, in effect, a willingness to negotiate the terms of terrorism.

Is it any wonder that Ahmadinejad is so contemptuously confident that Islam will triumph? Even psychopaths like him can sense cowardice and smell blood. Ahmadinejad has mastered Hitler’s playbook of the 1930’s.

The overture to the U.S.’s creeping, inevitable capitulation on Iran was reported in the Los Angeles Times of May 26th under the appropriate headline, “The Tyranny Doctrine.”

“Last week, Secretary of State…Rice announced resumption of full U.S. diplomatic relations with Libya, citing Tripoli’s renunciation of terrorism and intelligence cooperation.” The article asserts that this move “marks an effective end to the Bush doctrine.”

Rather, it highlights a continuation of the Bush doctrine of non-judgmental pragmatism, which has been to take the path of least resistance and greatest expediency, to avoid confronting major threats and to expend lives and treasure on incidentals, such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Not to mention, in this instance, a forgiving of Libyan dictator Qadhaffi for the murder of hundreds of Westerners by his own army of jihadists. There is “realpolitik” for you.

The Los Angeles Times article goes on to list Bush’s record of non-achievements in his pursuit of global “democracy”:

“The Bush administration has watched Egypt abrogate elections, ignored the collapse of the so-called Cedar Revolution in Lebanon and abandoned Chinese dissidents; now Washington is mulling a peace treaty with Stalinist North Korea.”

The mare’s nest of pragmatism and its consequences grows nastier, thicker and more perilous. When will Bush have his own “reality check” and grasp the true nature of our enemies? When we experience another September 11th?

Bush, at his second inauguration, stated: “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.” The first half of this statement is not strictly true; liberty in America can succeed without it succeeding elsewhere in the world. But what if the rest of the world rejects the peace that freedom can bring, and chooses the “peace” of submission, tyranny or conquest?

The world, indeed, is being made safe, but not for freedom.

Last January the American Historical Association had its annual conference. Scott Jaschik provided a review of how military historians faired with the academics who consider them court historians:

When historians gathered this weekend in Philadelphia for the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, military historians organized a session to talk about their unusual situation right now. Panelists included historians who work in academe and those who work in the military — all of whom said they face credibility issues. Those in academe must contend with those in the military who think they are scandal-mongers or irrelevant, and with academic colleagues who question whether they are sufficiently critical of the military. And scholars in the military — even those with solid publication records — face questions from academics about whether they are legitimate.

Members of all of those audiences turn to military history hoping that it will “offer a redemption story,” and most of the time it doesn’t, Stoler said. “I tell people, if you want a redemption story, go to church, go to synagogue.”... [Heh]

John Lewis, professor of history at Ashland University, provides "a report from the front" on the recent conference of The Society for Military History:

From the outset the conference set an utterly different tone than one hears at America's largest historical enclave, the American Historical Association. The difference starts with the membership: the AHA is almost totally academic, while the SMH has a large number of historians working directly with military units, either in uniform or as civilians. The opening speaker at the SMH said two things that I have never heard at the AHA: he praised our "passion for facts," and he urged us to write history always "with practical value for today." The purpose of history, I heard repeatedly at the conference, was to place modern events into an historical context, and to offer people—civilians, officers and soldiers—a means to better understand the present, and to plan for the future.

People not involved in academia may not understand how refreshing this was to me. At the AHA, outright hostility will usually greet such claims. I have sat on history panels where the first thing said is "there are no facts—only interpretations [cute, that's Nietzsche]; and there are no lessons—only the contemplation of complexity." I have been in job interviews where the committee members' eyes glaze over when you even mention political, intellectual or military history. To them, everything is the subjective creation of gender history, "queer" studies, how the average man lived, or the "history" of oppressed peoples. It's all generally disgusting, irrelevant to understanding human events, and downright boring.

The Greeks and Romans knew that the purpose of learning history was to live a better life today. In the world of today's academics, this is all but forgotten. To hear it stated as a matter of fact at a professional conference was like a breath of fresh air. I do hope they accept my paper proposal next year....

Guest Editorial by Edward Cline

Today, one often hears the question asked -- sometimes despairingly, sometimes jeeringly -- that if classical music is so wonderful, uplifting, and timeless, why is it no longer being composed? The stock answers are numerous, but unconvincing.

One is that classical music is peculiar to a period of European history dating approximately from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century, and thus is not the “voice” of our age. But that classical music remains valued by so many people in this age belies this assertion.

Another argument claims that classical composition has “evolved” beyond harmony, tonality, and melody to a “new plateau” of atonality. A variant of this argument charges that the public “ear,” so habituated to the traditional forms of musicality, suffers from a sort of evolutional, tonal lag because it has not kept pace with the ever-evolving musical avant-gard, purportedly representative of an advanced species of humanity. Thus, the ear must be trained or “conditioned” to plumb the reputed depths of jumbles of random sounds, or, in some cases, no sounds at all.

This is the complaint of the modern artist who sneers that the public cannot appreciate his abstract rendering of, say, Perseus and Andromeda, as a canvas of blots, drippings, and sprinkled-on metal shavings. The public, with the notable exception of an aesthetically superior minority, is philistine, perhaps even artistically “reactionary”; it is confined to a reificatory, bourgeois aesthetic prison, and insists that art be -- Gads! Can you credit it? -- intelligible and that music be compatible with its inchoate psychology.

Modern “formal” music, like modern art, is devoted to addressing a “higher” consciousness, using a “logic” that transcends syllogisms, proportion, time, space dimension, sense perception, and other Euro- and/or logo-centric “constructs.” In short, reality. It requires that listeners revise their expectations, discard the “prejudice” of the various centrisms, and passively receive logically ineffable droplets of pure essence, or pure being -- or deliberately unintegrated sense data.

Among the many demerits of the politically correct Webster’s II New Riverside University Dictionary (1994), is its definition of music: “The art of arranging tones in an orderly sequence so as to produce a unified and continuous composition.” This definition is a step backward from “The science or art of incorporating intelligible combinations of tones into a composition having structure and continuity,” which is the definition found in Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary (1969). The Riverside definition replaces the key term intelligible with orderly, which can mean virtually anything, and the term structure with unified, which can also mean virtually anything. One can imagine that the next edition of the Riverside will shed the self-conscious air of its ambiguous qualifiers and offer an au courant, fashionably “deconstructed” definition: “The art of arranging tones in a sequence to produce a composition” -- which, of course, could be applied equally to Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 5” or to the gruntings and squeals of a pig sty.

A musical composition is an identifiable sum of its parts. A composition that has no structure, that seems to fly apart, or worse, seems to be notes and rhythms randomly flung into the air to fall where they may on a blank music sheet, has no sum, no identity, and no theme but chaos and madness. A composition of jumbled sounds “represents” merely the modernist fixation with pseudo-aesthetics and artistic fraud.

In her explanation of the purpose and demands of music, novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand wrote:

“It is in terms of his fundamental emotions -- i.e., the emotions produced by his own metaphysical value judgments -- that man responds to music….The theme of a composition entitled ‘Spring Song’ is not spring, but the emotions which spring evoked in the composer….Liszt’s ‘St. Francis Walking on the Water’ was inspired by a specific legend but what it conveys is a passionately dedicated struggle and triumph -- by whom and in the name of what, is for each individual to supply.” 1

It was fashionable among early twentieth century composers to write melodic music punctuated by stretches of dissonance. Ralph Vaughan Williams, Aaron Copeland, Charles Ives, and Virgil Thompson all interspersed orchestrated “folk” melodies with dissonance. Even Edward Elgar, in his later work, resorted to the practice. They all helped to make madness and the irrational respectable. Copeland’s “Symphony No. 3,” for example, uses his well-known “Fanfare for the Common Man” as a melody around which he weaves screeches, drum rolls that herald nothing, and other chaotic noise. And none but the musicians who must play it can remember the full score of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio.”

“Don’t set out to raze all shrines -- you’ll frighten men,” says Ellsworth Toohey, the critic and arch-villain in Rand’s novel, The Fountainhead. “Enshrine mediocrity -- and the shrines are razed.”2 Toohey offers that advice in the course of explicating, for one of his willingly duped victims, his method of inculcating and promulgating collectivism in men’s souls. He could have added: Elevate incompetence, and competence is irrelevant; sanctify the irrational, and the rational is emasculated; praise noise, and music is silenced. The principle behind Thomas Gresham’s law, that bad money will drive out the good, is equally applicable to art and music, especially in a culture that is in a state of philosophical disintegration, and in which the destroyers are blithely sustained by the destroyed. Indeed, the idea that our culture, in its present state of anarchy, could generate classical music, seems almost oxymoronic.

“Doctors have this theory that if you play classical music for infants, they’ll understand complex relationships, like math. They don’t know what effect rock-and-roll would have. Well, we figure the world could do with one fewer accountant.”

This message was spoken by a post-adolescent male voice in a smarmy drawl in an ad for a popular radio station, accompanied by a series of jerky, time-lapse close-ups of a smiling infant rolling its head back and forth on a pillow in seeming enjoyment of the dissonant “rock” being played in the background. The commercial’s message is clear: It is not necessary for anyone to understand “complex relationships like math,” or to develop much skill in any field of mental labor. It is okay to raise a child to be a cognitive troglodyte, unable to raise his consciousness beyond the immediately perceptible, impatient with music that demands conceptual integration or that addresses a soul he may never recognize he possesses, or could have possessed, indifferent or hostile to anything that “makes sense.”

Whether or not there is any scientific truth to the theory that a particular genre of music can aid in (or arrest) a child’s mental faculties, the ad implicitly endorses the stunting of children’s minds. Accountant doubtless is used as a generic pejorative for all professionals who deal in facts, which includes the universe of Western science and technology that allows the intellectually slothful to exist in relative opulence and without having to exert much mental effort. The ad is distinctly anti-mind.

Anyone who regularly attends classical music concerts must be familiar with the practice of conductors or music directors of inserting “new” (or even old) atonal compositions between “traditional” ones in a program. An orchestra might begin with, say, Mozart’s “Impresario Overture,” end with Prokofiev’s “Classical Symphony,” and sandwich in between them something like Peter Warlock’s “Capriole Suite.” The practice ensures that concertgoers hear something of the “new plateau” genre whether they want to or not. And they will hear it, chiefly because most concertgoers believe it would be rude to rise en masse, leave the hall, and return when the noise has subsided. Modern “formal” music is played to audiences held hostage by their own civility.

If an orchestra were to advertise an all-Warlock, or an all-John Cage, or an all-Schoenberg concert, attendance would be embarrassingly thin. Why conductors or music directors continue the practice of subjecting their audiences to aural torture is a matter of conjecture. Perhaps they feel duty-bound to be “fair” to the newer composers; perhaps they feel obligated to play the compositions of government- or foundation-subsidized artists.

The last possibility has some interesting implications. How many orchestras remain wholly supported by private donations and receipts, free of the pressures exerted in by the byzantine mazes of public arts funding bureaucracies? Very few. That they must resort to this brand of extortion underscores the bankruptcy of what they foist upon their audiences.

Surely conductors know the difference between Camille Saint-Saëns’ “Phaeton” and Fritz Kreisler’s “String Quartet.” They must suspect that people attend live performances for many reasons, but that voluntary submission to what amounts to an enervating, auditory Rorschach test is not one of them. Whatever rationalizations have been offered by defenders of the practice, it is as purposeful as art galleries exhibiting kitsch or non-art together with genuine art. The unstated purpose of these exercises is to “enshrine mediocrity,” to subvert and destroy values, to undercut man’s capacity to formulate or sustain values, and to introduce doubt in their minds about the values they do hold.

One regularly exposed to this practice, if he does not maintain the conviction that what is being committed is a fraud, will begin to think: “Perhaps there is something here, something important about these lead pipes welded together to make a stick man. It’s right there next to Canova’s “Cupid and Psyche.” Perhaps I’ve missed the boat, and shouldn’t be so smug (or certain) about these things.”

This individual will not stop seeing the stick man as a bunch of pipes welded together, nor will he begin doubting the artistic value of the Canova, but he may begin to doubt the evidence of his senses, the certainty of his mind. Some part of his implicit certitude concerning right and wrong, good and bad, beautiful and ugly, reality and fantasy, will turn to mush, the certitude progressively softened by the miasma of a subjectivist, value-negating artistic nihilism.

This is an instance of retrogression, of the flaunting of primitivism as merely a “cultural difference.” Among this country’s black youth the results of this value negation have been especially sad. The enormity of the evil perpetrated on them by their parents and teachers defies description. “Cultural separatism” shares the same corrupting end as atonal “formal” composition: to be both A and non-A; that is, to live in a country whose high standard of living is made possible by Western values, but to hold conscious values that are hostile to or inimical to the West and civilized living.

Walter Grimes, reporting on a highly publicized debate between August Wilson, the Pulitzer-winning black playwright and Robert Brustein, drama critic for The New Republic, wrote: “Mr. Wilson tried to explain that his insistence on a black theater was not limiting.”3

“Why is white experience assumed to be universal, he asked, and black experience somehow particular? Why are black artists expected to become universal by transcending race and moving beyond black themes?”

Grimes added:

“Black Americans, Mr. Wilson said, want to enter the American mainstream, but not at the price of shedding their African identity. Black artists have a duty to preserve and promote the thoughts and values of their ancestors, including their African ancestors. ‘If we choose not to assimilate…this does not mean we oppose the values of the dominant culture, but rather we wish to champion our own causes, our own celebrations, our own values.’”

Mr. Grimes did not broach such questions as: What is a “black theme”? What is it that Mr. Wilson wishes to perpetuate? Is it only black “angst”? It is merely “white” experiences that the playwright wants segregated from the mainstream, or is it Western values in general? Are the concepts of individual rights and independent minds too universal or too peculiarly “white” to apply to blacks? How can one support individual freedoms, yet uphold a tribal (i.e., collectivist) consciousness at the same time?

“Separatism” may be achieved, but an “ethno-culture,” burdened with such phenomena as “Ebonics” in language, will not send probes to Mars, invent open-heart surgery, or grow corn. The great black musicians who contributed to American culture, e.g., Scott Joplin, Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, and Louis Armstrong, have apparently been disowned in favor of the malevolent “dissing” and droning of “rap.” Armstrong and company are now no more revered among Afro-centrists than are Thomas Sowell, J.C. Watts, Walter Williams, or Ward Connerly among thinkers, economists or educators, black or white.

Composers of film scores inherited the mantle of classical music composers. There is little distinction between what moved the latter and what can inspire the best creators of film scores: a story, a legend, an image, a tableau, a play, a need to express some inner conviction or truth. Once, much film music approached the symphonic or classical level. Many scores by composers such as William Walton, Arthur Bliss, John Barry, and Miklos Rozsa are as evocative and memorable as any opus from the nineteenth century, and can stand alone apart from their original inspiration. Walton’s score for Henry V, Maurice Jarre’s for Lawrence of Arabia, and James Horner’s for Glory come to mind as instances of what is possible.

The best film scores were those written for grand-scale, larger-than-life epics. But such epics are no longer being produced. Great music cannot be written to dramatize triteness, or about psychotics, functional illiterates, criminals, perverts, predatory aliens, whales or dinosaurs. And great music cannot be indefinitely appropriated to accompany and elevate the depiction of the superficial, the witless, the stupid, or the banal, such as in Woody Allen’s Manhattan.

The preferred and broadening cesspool of subject matter of most filmmakers today cannot serve as the genesis of magnificent, or event pleasant music. Popular films have become little more than vehicles for “special effects”; their stories are superfluous appendages, flimsy excuses to exhibit the technological repertoire of their computer graphics artists and incendiary experts. “Serious” films today, such as Love! Valour! Compassion! and Female Perversions (dealing, respectively, with homosexual relationships and feminist existentialism), are not rich material for great music, either. Film scores are written now to be heard and promptly forgotten.

A word about bass in contemporary popular music. Were this a separate article, its title could well be “Technology in the Hands of Barbarians.” The stress on “mega” bass (of 120 decibels or more, crowding the 180 decibel range of a NASA rocket launch) is especially revealing, for it confesses an attempt to compensate for vapidity of content in what passes for contemporary popular music. Bass, once considered a single musical element, has come to dominate “pop” music because this type of music requires the least amount of thought or imagination by either its composers or listeners. Its continual “thumping” -- in popular music and even in television commercials -- is used to arrest one’s attention, deaden thought, and metaphorically beat listeners to a stupefied pulp. On dance floors and in bars, it imposes a nihilistic gestalt on everyone and everything it touches. It is not joy or happiness or even sorrow that this kind of bass seeks to evoke, but a temporary state of annihilation.

Bass is also employed now as a weapon against civilized existence by those who install expensive “mega bass” amplifiers, “woofers,” and speakers in their vehicles. It is easy to name the motive of the owners of these throbbing machines: pure, unadulterated malice. The blasts that emanate from these vehicles are distracting not merely because of their volume; their peculiar, offensive, intrusive nature penetrates one’s consciousness as a disruptive, often painful force. It is not joy that the perpetrators of the “mega bass” phenomenon wish to share with random passersby or residents, but hatred and the chance to torture without physically touching anyone. What such creatures are saying is: We’re a revolting nuisance, but we’re here, we’re pumping up the volume, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

“Rap,” of course, cannot even be considered as music. Taking together its belligerent tone, its monotonous, metronomic beat, obscene and homicidal “lyrics,” and confrontational delivery, it is simply a species of malevolence.

Students attending the best music schools are no longer taught how to compose “classical” music. These schools, such as the Peabody in Baltimore, the Curtis in Philadelphia, and the Julliard in New York, are turning out talented soloist musicians, but their philosophy of composition is governed -- if modern “formal” music is any kind of gauge -- by the likes of Arnold Schoenberg, or worse. Consider the spirit of the nineteenth century, and one will understand the reasons why so much great music was written in that era. Consider the spirit of our time, and one will grasp the significance of music as a litmus test of general cultural well-being or decay.

A culture takes its cues from the top -- from the universities, from the intelligentsia, from the trendsetters of ideas. And if the message from the top is that anything goes, then all that is good will go. The rubbish, bile, and nihilism that pass for music today cannot be legislated out of existence. Conservatives such was William Bennett, the former Secretary of Education, have proposed silencing the barbarians and frauds and nuisances, but even if they could be repressed or muffled, the appearance of a new Verdi, Brahms or Chopin will not be the consequence.

What is true of politics is true of aesthetics. Just as a free nation will collapse into statism when the most rational elements of the political philosophy on which it was founded and sustained are subverted or negated by elements of their antipodes, the best in aesthetics will vanish when the irrational, the atonal, and the unintelligible are given equal time and equal approbation.

The sad truth is that we should not expect greatness in music to emerge from a decaying, rudderless culture.


1 Ayn Rand, “Art and Cognition,” in The Romantic Manifesto (New York: New American Library).
2 Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1943), p. 691.
3 William Grimes, “Face-to-Face Encounter on Race in the Theater,” New York Times, January 29, 1997, Sec. C, p. 9.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.

* Revised. Originally published in The Social Critic, Summer 1997

1) "The US will apologize to the world for our "interference" in their affairs, past & present. You know, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Tojo, Noriega, Milosevic, Hussein, and the rest of those "good ole boys", we will never "interfere" again.

2) We will withdraw our troops from all over the world, starting with Germany, South Korea, the Middle East, and the Philippines. They don't want us there. We would station troops at our borders. No one allowed sneaking through holes in the fence.

3) All illegal aliens have 90 days to get their affairs together and leave. We'll give them a free trip home. After 90 days the remainder will be gathered up and deported immediately, regardless of whom or where they are. They're illegal!!! France will welcome them.

4) All future visitors will be thoroughly checked and limited to 90 days unless given a special permit!!!! No one from a terrorist nation will be allowed in. If you don't like it there, change it yourself and don't hide here. Asylum would never be available to anyone. We don't need any more cab drivers or 7-11 cashiers.

5) No foreign "students" over age 21. The older ones are the bombers. If they don't attend classes, they get a "D" and it's back home baby.

6) The US will make a strong effort to become self-sufficient energy wise. This will include developing nonpolluting sources of energy but will require a temporary drilling of oil in the Alaskan wilderness. The caribou will have to cope for a while.

7) Offer Saudi Arabia and other oil producing countries $10 a barrel for their oil. If they don't like it, we'll go someplace else. They can go somewhere else to sell their production. (About a week of the wells filling up the storage sites would be enough.)

8) If there is a famine or other natural catastrophe in the world, we will not "interfere." They can pray to Allah or whomever, for seeds, rain, cement or whatever they need. Besides most of know that what we give them is stolen or given to the army. The people who need it most get very little, if anything.

9) Ship the UN Headquarters to an isolated island someplace. We don't need the spies and fair weather friends here. Besides, the building would make a good homeless shelter or lockup for illegal aliens.

10) All Americans must go to charm and beauty school. That way, no one can call us "Ugly Americans" any longer.

11) The Language we speak is ENGLISH...learn it...or LEAVE...

Good for Them.

National Memorial Cemetary of the Pacific. Punchbowl, Hawaii.

Diana Hsieh, at NoodleFood, has posted a letter written by the philosophy chair at CU, Bob Pasnau. The letter was published as an op/ed by the Boulder Daily Camera, registration required. The most interesting, and hopeful, part of the letter is Pasnau's statement that Churchill's frauds are the exception and not the rule at CU:

Since the investigative report released earlier this month on the Churchill affair, little has been heard from CU faculty. This is understandable, since the whole affair is such a quagmire, but still the silence is unfortunate, since no one is so well placed to judge the matter. I hope these remarks will provide some helpful context.

A careful reading of the investigative report (available on CU's web site [here]) shows the committee to have discharged its duty with tremendous care for the many nuances of the case, scholarly and political. Ironically, however, the very care taken in the report, which runs to over 100 pages, may have kept the full seriousness of the charges from being fully appreciated. In short, the committee found two cases where Churchill extensively plagiarized the work of others. They found other cases where he first wrote articles under a false name, and then in a later work cited those earlier articles as providing independent confirmation for his own claims. They found a great many places where apparently detailed footnotes turned out on close inspection to offer no support whatsoever for the claims being made, and found that Churchill continued to stick with these false sources in later work even after being confronted in print with their inadequacy. Assessing the cumulative impact of these tactics, the committee describes "a pattern and consistent research stratagem to cloak extreme, unsupportable, propaganda-like claims of fact that support Professor Churchill's legal and political claims with the aura of authentic scholarly research by referencing apparently (but not actually) supportive independent third-party sources."

The fact that this disparate group of highly distinguished scholars could reach its verdict with complete unanimity -- save for the final, delicate question of what sanction to impose -- should give one a great deal of confidence in their verdict. No such confidence can be taken from Churchill's own statement (available on the Camera's web site [here]). A careful reading of the original report, next to his response, shows him to have misstated and ignored the committee's findings at every stage. Indeed, one might almost laugh at the way his slipshod responses reenact the very sorts of intellectual failings that the report originally highlighted.

One might laugh, that is, if the whole affair were not so depressing. Perhaps its most unfortunate aspect, beyond the immediate and very serious damage to CU, is the impression it seems to have left in some quarters that this is just the tip of the iceberg. Here my own experience is relevant. In the course of my duties evaluating the work of my colleagues, I have never encountered a single instance of fraud or misconduct, or even the bare allegation of such. Additionally, in all of the graduate seminars I have conducted, and dissertations I have read, I have never seen anything even remotely resembling this sort of conduct. Furthermore, over many years of evaluating thousands of job applicants, reviewing their qualifications with the greatest care, I have never seen or heard of even the shadow of this sort of behavior. Finally, in all my years of scholarly research, over the countless articles and books that I have read, I have never encountered anything of this kind.

Happily, it does not fall upon me to decide what sort of penalty is appropriate in this case. But were such misconduct discovered among my own faculty, or in my own field at large, I would be the first to seek that person's dismissal.

Professor Robert Pasnau
Chair, Department of Philosophy, CU/Boulder

Diana is a graduate student in philosophy at CU.
Hat tip: Thrutch

Here's a ahistoricality event of interest, according to the State Department reminding the Turks of their nation's past crimes, which the Turkish government denies ever happened, is grounds for dismissal. While America is supposed to bear the guilt for every unhappy event in world history, the Other (everyone who is not white) will always receive a pass:

Over 60 Members of Congress, led by Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), sent a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice asking for clarification on reports of U.S. Ambassador to Armenian John Evans’ recall over his forthright remarks about the Armenian Genocide, reported the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA).

The Administration has recalled Amb. Evans over his February 2005 statements at Armenian American community functions, during which he properly characterized the Armenian Genocide as ‘genocide.’ Following his statements, Amb. Evans was apparently forced to issue a statement clarifying that his references to the Armenian Genocide were his personal views and did not represent a change in US policy. He subsequently issued a correction to this statement, replacing a reference to the genocide with the word “tragedy.” The American Foreign Service Association, which had planned to honor Amb. Evans with the “Christian A. Herter Award,” recognizing creative thinking and intellectual courage within the Foreign Service, reportedly rescinded the award following pressure from the State Department a few days before Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan traveled to Washington, DC to meet with President Bush.

On the diplomatic level, this cowardly act sends a strong message of weakness, which is the only kind Bush can send of late. Clinton should make another trip, and this time take Bush along.

Hat tip: Dhimmi Watch.

Update, 5/28: Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald has posted on our leaders' ongoing refusal to identify the enemy, which includes this statement:

And now that the same madness is reflected in the State Department. Had Ambassador John Evans, the U.S. Ambassador to Armenia who was fired for referring to the Armenian genocide, not been forced to apologize for speaking the truth, had he not been forced to resign, had Turkish protests been met with steely indifference, it would have been good for American relations with Turkey. The Turks must in any number of ways be made to realize that a series of events has demonstrated that Turkey is not the ally that the United States thought it was....

It was important to signal to both Armenia and Turkey that the genocide would be called what it is. It was important for Ambassador Evans to be celebrated. It was even more important to begin to tell the Turkish government and people that they have to face up to this history, and in so doing, should put the blame right where it belongs: not on some fault inherent in Turks, but on Islam, which made Muslim Turks willing to massacre Christian Armenians whom they deemed in violation of their dhimma. In that way, secularist Turks can claim that in taming or distancing themselves from Islam, they have tried to tame the ideological source for those mass murders in 1894-96 and then the later genocide (in its intent and scope, by many of those involved) of 1915-1920.

Read the whole thing.

According to this report, Jose Padilla was far more involved with the leadership of al-Qaeda than the treason enablers will ever admit:

Federal investigators say they have evidence that former Chicago street gang member Jose Padilla was a higher ranking member of Al Qaeda than first thought.

Jose Padilla was not just a Chicago street gang stooge as some in law enforcement portrayed him at the time of his arrest. Federal authorities say evidence now shows that Padilla had had risen in Al Qaeda's ranks to have personal relationships with the top planners of the September 11th attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C.

Padilla has told authorities that his direct Al Qaeda supervisor was Ammar al-Baluchi who obtained flight simulators that the 9/11 hijackers used in training. According to Padilla, Baluchi was the right-hand man of Khalid Sheihk Mohammed---considered the architect of the 9/11 attacks.

But authorities say Padilla's connection to the upper crust of Al Qaeda is best found in his activities with three of the organization's top terrorists. The night before leaving for Chicago they threw him a bon voyage dinner -- hosted by the men considered to be the 9/11 masterminds.

If this is true, Padilla should be tried for treason during time of war and then hanged. He won't be, of course. When John Walker Lindh was not tried for treason and executed, I knew George W. Bush was planning to "fight" a nampy-pampy, politically correct war.

For the liberal bed-wetters, the U.S. Constitution Article 3 Section 3:

Section 3 - Treason

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

The Congress shall have power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.

Note, that contrary to popular belief, for someone to be charged with treason Congress does not first have to declare war. The two pieces of walking garbage mentioned above certainly met the Constitution's definition of treason.

There is also historical precedent for traitors being tried and executed on the battlefield, the scene of their crimes:

The San Patricios [Irish-Catholics who deserted and fought for Santa Ana] fought ferociously to the end, suspecting that capture meant a rope. They were right; U.S. courts-martial sentenced 71 of the 73 captured deserters to hang for the crime of desertion during time of war. General Scott commuted 20 of the sentences, but the rest were executed—including 30 men who were hanged from a bluff overlooking the final battle of the war—the breathtaking army and marine assault upon the towering, stone fortress of Chapultepec.

There is also some Security Watchtower

Last Thursday, the 25th, my local paper the Hilo Tribune-Herald printed on its front page as a "news" story Greenpeace lies regarding genetically modified papayas. Apparently, some hippies wearing painter suits and cutting down a few papaya trees is big news on the state of Hawaii. As this story states:

KAPOHO -- The battle against genetically engineered foods arrived here Thursday when local farmers joined members of Greenpeace International to remove disease-resistant papaya from an organic farm.

"This is sort of the heartland for GE papaya. This is ground zero," Michelle Sheather, coordinator of Greenpeace's GE Campaign, said as 10 volunteers wearing protective hazardous-materials suits cleared a few trees from a roughly 400-square-foot area.

Terri Mulroy said about a week ago she discovered suspected SunUp papaya growing on the 9.1-acre organic farm she bought 18 months ago after moving here from Florida.

Unfortunately for the mendacious Tribune-Herald, the editor and publisher of the bi-monthly Hawaii Free Press, Andrew Walden, is also a farmer and agriculture student at the University of Hawaii-Hilo. Walden has written a rebuttal to the Tribune-Herald's "new" story. Although, the Hawaii Free Press isn't available online, Walden's story is posted at the Hawaii Reporter:

In a May 25 publicity stunt dutifully picked up on the front page of the Hawaii Tribune-Herald, West Hawaii Today and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Greenpeace operatives backed by photographers donned white full-body “haz-mat suits” (actually painters’ suits available at many hardware stores) and posed for the cameras.

They wrapped a small section of a 9.1 acre garden bought 18 months ago in Puna by anti-GM activist Terri Mulroy in red “biohazard tape” (available from mail-order sources) and then viciously hacked to death at least two perfectly good papaya trees, calling them “contaminated”.

Greenpeace operatives’ ability to spot the so-called “contaminated” papaya trees may be due to the fact that Papaya Ring Spot Virus has destroyed almost all non-GM papaya trees. Any healthy, green papaya tree on the Big Island is likely to be modified.

Reading the mainstream media's "news" report on this and then Walden's response demonstrates how the media will lie and shill for the leftist political agenda that almost all journalism school graduates share.

It's official "multiculturalism" trumps the seperation of church and state according to the most "liberal" court in the land:

In our brave new schools, Johnny can't say the pledge, but he can recite the Quran. Yup, the same court that found the phrase "under God" unconstitutional now endorses Islamic catechism in public school.

In a recent federal decision that got surprisingly little press, even from conservative talk radio, California's 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled it's OK to put public-school kids through Muslim role-playing exercises, including:

Reciting aloud Muslim prayers that begin with "In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful . . . ."

Memorizing the Muslim profession of faith: "Allah is the only true God and Muhammad is his messenger."

Chanting "Praise be to Allah" in response to teacher prompts.

Professing as "true" the Muslim belief that "The Holy Quran is God's word."

Giving up candy and TV to demonstrate Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting.

Designing prayer rugs, taking an Arabic name and essentially "becoming a Muslim" for two full weeks.

Parents of seventh-graders, who after 9-11 were taught the pro-Islamic lessons as part of California's world history curriculum, sued under the First Amendment ban on religious establishment. They argued, reasonably, that the government was promoting Islam. But a federal judge appointed by President Clinton told them in so many words to get over it, that the state was merely teaching kids about another "culture."

So the parents appealed. Unfortunately, the most left-wing court in the land got their case. The 9th Circuit, which previously ruled in favor of an atheist who filed suit against the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, upheld the lower court ruling.

The ed consultant's name is Susan L. Douglass. No, she's not a Christian scholar. She's a devout Muslim activist on the Saudi government payroll, according to an investigation by Paul Sperry, author of "Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington." He found that for years Douglass taught social studies at the Islamic Saudi Academy just outside Washington, D.C. Her husband still teaches there.

Hat tip: My good friends at the Infidel Bloggers Alliance

The Victoria Cross (the VC) is the highest decoration for personal bravery in battle that a citizen (or is that subject) of the British Commonwealth can receive. While visiting England the Prime Minister of New Zealand asked Buckingham Palace to issue the VC to a Kiwi veteran of World War II posthumously:

Mr Goff said Sergeant Manahi's bravery was shown "time and time again" when he led Maori soldiers up a mountainside in an attack on German positions in North Africa on 1943.

Sgt Manahi's effort was recognised by "the entire chain of command" including four generals who signed his citation for the VC and yet it was not granted.

He died in a car accident in 1986.

"The original citation and supporting sworn statements are compelling evidence of Lance-Sergeant Manahi's conspicuous bravery," Mr Goff said.

"We are exploring with the Queen's advisors whether his case can be reconsidered, mindful of the fact that the consistent position of the monarch since the late 1940s has been not to revisit such decisions."

Guest Editorial by Edward Cline

On May 21st, the New York Times Book Review published the results of its survey, “What is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?” Accompanying the dismal list of “winners” was an essay by A.O. Scott, “In Search of the Best.” With the typical absence of passion, criteria, and commitment that characterizes modern criticism and especially that of the New York Times, Scott, a film critic for the Times, neither applauds the survey results nor condemns them.

Scott describes the “Great American Novel” as a “crossbreed of romance and reportage, high philosophy and low gossip, wishful thinking and hard-nosed skepticism.” His nattering, gossipy article snickers at the subject of “best”, striving to assure its readers that the author could never be accused of valuing anything, not even the rubbish heap that passes for modern literature. It is just there, beyond judgment or comparison.

“…Late 20th century American Lit comprises a bustling menagerie, like Noah’s ark or the island of Dr. Moreau, where modernists and postmodernists consort with fabulists and realists, ghost stories commingle with domestic dramas, and historical pageantry mutates into metafiction. It is, gratifyingly if also bewilderingly, a messy and multitudinous affair.”

How can one judge? Should one judge? Scott asks but evades answering those questions, and abstains from judging the “best” works, twenty-two of them, just as he abstains from faulting or praising the over one hundred judges -- “prominent writers, critics, editors, and other literary sages” -- for their choices. Little is communicated in his essay but a contempt that percolates through an amused scorn for the whole subject. Comparing the “Great American Novel” with the yeti, Loch Ness monster and sasquatch, he notes, “The Times Book Review, ever wary of hoaxes but always eager to test the boundary between empirical science and folk superstition, has commissioned a survey of recent sightings.”

Focusing on the “winner” of the survey, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Scott merely reports on the judges’ consensus:

“When the book first began to be assigned in college classrooms, during an earlier and in retrospect much tamer phase of the culture wars, its inclusion on syllabuses was taken, by partisans and opponents alike, as a radical gesture. (The conservative canard one heard in those days was that left-wing professors were casting aside Shakespeare in favor of Morrison.) But the political rhetoric of the time obscured the essential conservatism of the novel, which aimed not to displace or overthrow its beloved precursors, but to complete and to some extent correct them.”

“Enshrine mediocrity,” Ellsworth Toohey told Peter Keating in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, “and the shrines are razed.” Reading Scott’s comments on the winning and neglected authors and their works, one is immediately certain that the idea of literary shrines is alien to him. He is a product of his age and education, a subjectivist/relativist who does not presume to venture beyond the perceptual and the visceral, or to question others’ appraisals. If his object is more demolition work, he is unaware that his literary and critical predecessors have already razed the shrines and that he is wandering through ruins overgrown by weeds, infested with vermin, and tenanted by vagrants. The great or notable literature of the past, to him, is a mirage. Who is he to hold himself or other writers up to a higher standard? Or to any standards? To Scott, the dishwater gray culture he sees before him is the norm.

“The American masterpieces of the mid-19th century…were compounded of precisely these elements [what he calls earlier realism, allegory, folk tale, Gothic and romance], and nowadays it seems almost impossible to write about that period without crossing into the realm of the supernatural, or at least the self-consciously mythic.”

Given the novels chosen by the Times judges as the “best” in the last twenty-five years, one might understand why Scott would consider the masterpieces of the 19th century an unattainable mirage. But Scott is not an innocent party; he helps to perpetuate the grayness. Not one of the survey novels deserves extended critical attention here; they all echo the common charge, as critics never tire of pointing out, that America is “mythic,” founded on violence, illusions, hypocrisy, racism, shallowness, and angst. It is a country based on fraud, and populated by trolls and gnomes.

Scott himself apparently does not aspire to anything greater than the stature of a troll. He writes effusively and with nagging drollery about modern literature in Harvard-taught patois, but devotes not one word to what “might and ought to be.” The concept is impossible to him. It is not a treasure trove of values that he seeks or regrets the loss of, but the chamber pots of modern American writers. What they have produced, is there. To Scott, nothing else is conceivable.

Against what literary or esthetic criteria does he measure modern literature? None. Such criteria do not exist, according to Scott. It is a “myth.” He might have redeemed himself had he attempted this kind of appraisal: “As modern France is no longer the France of Victor Hugo and Edmond Rostand, America is no longer the America of Hawthorne and Whitman.” But that kind of observation requires a perspicuity and intellectual honesty based on the knowledge that one is confined in a suffocatingly dreary, boring, bankrupt culture.

Scott, previously a book reviewer for Newsday, is also a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. He is representative of the modern profession of criticism, virtually indistinguishable in his philosophy and style from his colleagues who write for other major publications. He cannot take literature seriously enough to approach it with any passion or conviction. How could he or anyone stoke up a passion for the drearily undifferentiated trash the subjects of his essay? One holds a conviction about a truth. How could he have a conviction about anything when he claims there are no absolutes and no measures of value?

The measure he does employ is not esthetic or literary, but sociological. Scott calls it “cultural importance.” How does a particular work of fiction “reflect” its time, how well does it succeed in revealing the foibles, absurdities, dishonesty or hubris of society at this or that particular period of history? If one must portray individuals, they must be “types,” or symbols, or transparently neurotic or confused or helplessly miserable or oppressed, and readily identifiable by the random reader as a satirical mirror image of himself as victim or victimizer, or as a helpless, inconsequential cipher in a deterministic milieu.

Heroes? Achievements in the face of terrific odds? The larger-than-life? Happiness? Don’t make Scott laugh. And he will laugh, in chorus with the rest of the literary establishment.

“Every man to his taste,” goes the proverb, and it is claimed that “taste” cannot be accounted for. But, “taste,” or a hierarchy of specific literary and esthetic values, can be accounted for. One can reject the corrosives of naturalism, subjectivism, and nihilism, for which critics like Scott constantly shill in book reviews and essays, and instead measure or formulate literary and artistic values by an “ought.” It was done in the past; it can be done again.

Those who value literature, especially benevolent, heroic, Romantic, life-affirming literature -- literature, Ayn Rand once wrote, that serves as live-saving emotional or spiritual fuel to fight one’s own battles and that can propel one to accomplish one’s own goals -- in turn cannot take the likes of Scott or anything that passes for literature today seriously. Scott and his ilk cannot, on their premises, fight for or advocate anything of literary or artistic value. All they can do is gloat, and chant in their reviews and essays, “Such is life.”

All we can do is yawn, and work to stage a revolution in literature.

The Grassroot Institute of Hawaii has released the findings of their latest poll on the Akaka Bill. The results are not surprising:

69.89% of Hawaii’s residents want to vote on the Akaka Bill before it is considered at the national level.

68.3% of residents in the first Congressional District (Rep Neil Abercrombie) want that vote.

70.87% of Rep Ed Case’s 2nd Congressional District want such a vote.

66.95% of the entire state continue to oppose the Akaka bill.

80.16% of Hawaii’s residents do not support laws that provide preferences for people groups based on their race.

77.83% would vote for statehood if the vote was held today. (In 1959, 94% voted for statehood.)

39.10%. Of residents would be more likely to vote for Ed Case for the US Senate if he opposed the Akaka bill.

Despite these numbers, both major parties support the Akaka Bill while opposing a vote on it this November. I'm most curious about Linda Lingle's real reasons for supporting a measure that is so unpopular with the rank-and-file of her own party. Perhaps it's the result of the standard contempt many Republican office holders have "Who else are they going to vote for?"

The vessel which Captain Cook first sailed to New Zealand has been found off the coast of New England where it had been used to oppress the American people:

The ship that Captain Cook commanded on his first voyage across the Pacific Ocean may be resting on the seabed off the coast of New England, US.

The Endeavour was the first British vessel to reach New Zealand in 1769 and Australia in 1770.

She is thought to have ended her days in a fleet of 13 ships sunk by British forces defending Newport in 1778.

According to the article the British sunk the Endeavour, along with twelve other vessels, as block ships in order to close Newport harbor to Allied warships. (This was back when the French were actually good for something)

It was September 1918 and the Allies stood poised for the final assault upon the Kaiser's weakened army. On September 15 1918 American Lee Duncan of the Air Corps found and adopted a German Shephard pup. He named the pup Rin Tin Tin. It is not uncommon for servicemen of all nations to adopt pets as mascots. During WWI, for example, German ace Manfred Von Richthofen took his dog Moritz on sight-seeing flights.

Moritz would lose part of an ear to a propeller while chasing airplanes.

After the war Duncan returned to California with Rinty. At a dog show in 1922, Rin Tin Tin was discovered. He would make twenty-six pictures for Warner Brothers and become a leading star of the silent screen. Rin Tin Tin's movies have been credited with saving Warners Brothers from bankruptcy.

While Rin Tin Tin is the most famous, soldiers have always kept mascots. During the Western Indian wars officers and men would bring along their dogs both for company and hunting.

It was Alexander Woollcott's classic tale Verdun Belle which dramatized what a little "lady" could do for the morale of men in impossible, desperate situations.

With this history in mind Central Command's General Order 1-A is far too draconian and is actually detrimental to morale:

General Order 1A is designed to prevent this type of situation from occurring among service members. It prohibits service members from adopting, as pets or mascots, caring for or feeding any type of domestic or wild animals... Stray Animals are to be Shot or Poisoned.

The United States Humane Society has offered its help to insure that mascots are properly vaccinated and do not carry disease. A letter from the president of the HSUS was unanswered by Secretary Rumsfeld. The position of the HSUS is incontrovertible:

During the Civil War, it was Sallie, Jack, Grace, Old Harvey, York, and Major. During World War I, it was Blanco, Joffre, Queenie, Smoke, Stubby, and Verdun Belle. Today, in the distant war zones of Iraq, it’s Bashur, Lava, and Ratchet. They are the dogs of war, pets and mascots of American soldiers who have rescued and cared for animals trapped in the chaos and tumult of human conflict.

Already, however, the biographies of Bashur, Lava, and Ratchet read differently than those of their storied predecessors. That’s because the pets and mascots of Baghdad and Fallujah are fugitives—escapees from a military order that requires the killing of animals harbored by American soldiers in combat zones. The goodhearted service members are no less culpable in the eyes of military brass; those who breach the policy on pets face the threat of serious punishment, including reduction in rank and court-martial.

An army may march on its stomach, but it survives on its morale. Whatever its motivations for the confiscation and killing of animals, our government should do more to reconcile the imperatives of public health and safety with the humane instincts of its military personnel. The keeping of animals by soldiers is an American tradition, one that should be honored and celebrated. In this sense, GO-1A is a grim “about-face.”

The military, of course, uses working dogs for various purposes. Now the brass needs to rethink its policy and acknowledge the usefulness of mascots to unit morale.

U.S. Marine Corps Sgt. Thomas R. Gehring gives his military working dog Horst a drink of water during a search in the Al Anbar province of Iraq May 6, 2006. Gehring is a K-9 handler with Apache Company, 4th Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment. Photo by U.S. Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Ben J. Flores

Office of Hawaiian Affairs chair Haunani Apoliona has given Hawaii's RINO governor Linda Lingle her marching orders:

Office of Hawaiian Affairs Chairwoman Haunani Apoliona asked the governor in a letter yesterday to make the trip to Washington, D.C.

Lingle said in a news release yesterday that she would meet with Senate Republicans on June 5 and 6.

Apoliona also said it is unclear if there are enough votes to approve the cloture petition and bring the Akaka Bill to the Senate floor. Sixty votes are needed to approve the petition.

Apoliona told Lingle that "there are a certain number of senators who may need to be reassured by you relating to what the bill does and does not do prior to committing their vote."

In a phone conversation yesterday, Lingle told Sen. Daniel Akaka she would be making the trip.

Lingle is up for re-election this November. Akaka Bill supporters are opposed to having the voters of Hawaii decide this matter, along with the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. As far as Hawaii is concerned, the Party of Lincoln has become the party of Apartheid.

Thanks to Christine at Infidel Blogger Alliance for the reminder that today is Armed Forces Day:

On August 31, 1949, Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson announced the creation of an Armed Forces Day to replace separate Army, Navy and Air Force Days. The single-day celebration stemmed from the unification of the Armed Forces under one department -- the Department of Defense. Each of the military leagues and orders was asked to drop sponsorship of its specific service day in order to celebrate the newly announced Armed Forces Day. The Army, Navy and Air Force leagues adopted the newly formed day. The Marine Corps League declined to drop support for Marine Corps Day but supports Armed Forces Day, too.

So it's a good time to remember "A Tradition of Heroes."

I don't usually repost stuff from LittleGreenFootballs on the assumption that everyone's who is interested has already seen it. However, the Hatefest at UCI is so egregious I feel the need to post on it even though I don't have anything new to contribute.

Charles posts an eyewitness account of this event by a UCI student:

For two hours, Malik Ali spouted paranoid nonsense about a Jewish Zionist plot to destroy Sudan, etc., etc., matching a plot by George Bush to hold off economic collapse by spreading civil wars in the muslim world.

Hatred and a confident, arrogant desire to kill and subjugate the kufar gleamed from every eye. Every few minutes, as the guest made an impressive statement, e.g. “ a cheerleader would shout ”TAKBEEEEEER“ — to which the crowd would reply, screaming from the gut, in unison, ”ALLAHU AKHBAR!“

At that moment, I became convinced that a shooting war is coming, here in America. The MSU is an enemy army, allowed into our house by current immigration law, and by admissions policies that favor foreigners over Americans.

Of course, this event would have been a wonderful opportunity to round-up all the nutters and deport them. However, just as President Bush has no interest in defending the borders, he is also not interested in the festering Fifth-Column housed by an institution only slightly less hostile to American than the Jihadis: academia.

Hyperbole on my part? Check out this video and ask yourself why our government (and academia) believes that America doesn't have enough domestic hate mongers such as David Duke and therefore, we must import more.

Nicholas at Rule of Reason has a post about the Seattle Public School's definition of racism. It is the sort of thing one can expect from self-loathers with graduate degrees in "education." This document yet again demonstrates why "education" schools and colleges at American universities are rightfully viewed as the intellectual slums of those institutions. The definition for "racism" is an interesting bit of projection by those who are only concerned about the relative power levels of collectives:

The systematic subordination of members of targeted racial groups who have relatively little social power in the United States (Blacks, Latino/as, Native Americans, and Asians), by the members of the agent racial group who have relatively more social power (Whites). The subordination is supported by the actions of individuals, cultural norms and values, and the institutional structures and practices of society.

And just in case the militant collectivism of the above statement isn't clear enough, there is this definition of something called "cultural racism," no kidding:

Those aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and Whiteness, and devalue, stereotype, and label people of color as "other," different, less than, or render them invisible. Examples of these norms include defining white skin tones as nude or flesh colored, having a future time orientation, emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology, defining one form of English as standard, and identifying only Whites as great writers or composers.

As it has been pointed out many times, such cretins as those responsible for the above statement are unable to discern the difference between culture and race. The truth or validity of individualism is not their concern, just as ideas as such are not their business.

In reality, racism is just one form of collectivism. The only alternative to endless tribal warfare is the recognition of the morality of individualism with its political corollary of individual rights.

One could ask the Seattle School Board (rhetorically, since they are impervious to reason): Why is racism morally wrong? If the individual is just the non-entity cipher of the group, then why privilege one form of collectivism over others? All are equally bad.

Morality implies the freedom to choose one's values and associations. Collectivism denies the individual has the power to make these choices. If people insist they do, they'll be accused of suffering from "false consciousness." As Ayn Rand noted in her essay "Racism" in The Virtue of Selfishness:

Historically, racism has always risen or fallen with the rise or fall of collectivism. Collectivism holds that the individual has no rights, that his life and work belong to the group (to "society," to the tribe, the state, the nation) and that the group may sacrifice him at its own whim to its own interests. The only way to implement a doctrine of that kind is by means of brute force -- and statism has always been the poltical corollary of collectivism.

When men began to be indoctrinated once more with the notion that the individual possesses no rights, that supremacy, moral authority and unlimited power belong to the group, and that a man has no significance outside his group -- the inevitable consequence was that men began to gravitate toward some group or another, in self-protection, in bewilderment and in subconscious terror. The simplest collective to join, the easiest one to identify -- particularly for people of limited intelligence -- the least demanding form of "belonging" and of "togetherness" is: race.

It is thus that the theoreticians of collectivism, the "humanitarian" advocates of a "benevolent" absolute state, have led to the rebirth and the new, virulent growth of racism in the 20th century.

This is the poison being taught to school children in Seattle, with no-doubt the approval of their "liberal" parents. Rand wrote her essay on racism in 1963. In many ways things have improved since then while, intellecually many have returned to the Dark Ages.

Update, 5/20: Amritas has more on this.

Guest Editorial by Edward Cline:

It is not so curious that in the wake of the Danish cartoon conflict, during which the American press and news media revealed their tepid commitment to freedom of speech and the inviolacy of the First Amendment, incidents of assaults on that freedom would not only multiply, but assume odd but no less ominous forms.

In 1996, in “The Ghouls of Grammatical Egalitarianism,” a review for The Social Critic of the American Association of University Press’s Guidelines for Bias-Free Writing, I noted:

“Thought orthodoxy is not synonymous with thought control. There is no Federal Board of Language Usage to which publishers must submit their books and journals to be tested for discriminatory or disparaging language before they can be put on the market for sale to the public. However, while no official agency of control exists, there is a kind of interlocking directorate of semi-public institutions and organizations which accomplishes the same purpose by presenting a united front against freedom of expression and imposing orthodoxy on our culture’s intellectual and literary pacesetters. ‘Say what you please, we’re not censors!….But say it our way, or do not bother to say it.’

“Short of overt government repression, I cannot imagine a more insidious form of thought control than this, which is to thrust independent minds of whatever professional suasion or degree of ability into a purgatory that is not quite freedom and not quite slavery.”

And, in discussing the ramifications of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 in my entry on “Censorship” in the 2002 edition of The Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science (Vol. 70), I observed:

“All the provisions regarding ‘obscenity’ are ostensibly for the sake of protecting children. An early precedent for this particular ruse was the Rubbish and Smut bill (or the Schund und Schmutz law) of May 1927, enacted by the Weimar government in Germany, in which children under the age of 18 were similarly ‘protected’ by controls from plays, literature, art, and especially nightclub performances that might corrupt their moral fiber. The act took the form of a ban of all under 18 years of age from proximity to these ‘evils.’ It also gave the police the unlimited power to enter private residences to enforce the law, and even prohibited young adults from attending art classes that employed nude models. The Rubbish and Smut law was an overture to wholesale Nazi censorship six years later.”

Germany was prepared for Nazi rule in more ways than one -- chiefly by its philosophy -- and the Rubbish and Smut law was passed and enforced in the name of “decency.” In the U.S., such laws are enacted on federal and state levels for the same reason, and also in the name of “fairness,” “balance,” and “sensitivity.” Not to mention that Trojan horse of all regulations, bans, and controls: children.

“Speech codes” have established stultifying purgatories of expression not only on college campuses, but in other venues, as well, such as business and even tourism. In how many numberless places of business would one now risk a sexual harassment lawsuit by paying a colleague a compliment on his or her appearance, and probable dismissal by one’s employer, who would likely be named a co-defendant for not having enforced federal and state “guidelines”?

And what better way to ensure that college students become “responsible” citizens than by creating lists of “protected” and “unprotected” speech, and even linking academic success to the degree to which students adhere to them? Establish in their minds the habit of observing arbitrary parameters of speech and thought, and they won't give the authorities much trouble. They will be too busy “giving back to society” to discover how much liberty that society has surrendered and taken from them.

And, just the other day, browsing through some Colonial Williamsburg teachers’ brochures that offer literature on how to introduce students to the American Revolution, I encountered the term “tradespeople” in lieu of “tradesmen.” What the first term conveys is that the men who made the Revolution possible were androgynous “persons” who wore strange clothing and practiced odd customs. But the employment of sanitized terminology is not the worst offense committed by Colonial Williamsburg. Its acceptance of federal grants disqualifies the foundation from teaching anything about why the Revolution occurred, for with the grants come the requirements of political correctness, which can only influence how it represents history.

To return to thought control. The “control” that enforces “orthodoxy” in speech by individuals is simply fear of retribution, reprisal, or financial and personal ruin. To work, thought or speech control relies exclusively on self-censorship. The instances of operable thought control are as ubiquitous and innocuous in our culture as countless drops of water falling on one’s forehead in a Chinese torture.

Now, there’s a “disparaging” analogy! Could it be construed as an ethnic slur, or a cultural slur? A sleazy lawyer could make a case for both and take me to the cleaners. Wait! Now I’m offending lawyers! And cleaners! Well, how about saying that thought control is much like the embrace of an iron maiden? No, that wouldn’t sit well with maidens reading this, either. Not that any girl or woman today wouldn’t feel offended by being called a “maiden.” How about risking being hauled before a Spanish Inquisition for speech heresy? Or for playing Russian Roulette with one’s mouth? Nope. I might offend Hispanics, Catholics, or the Moscow Mafia. And perhaps Italians.

A friend remarked to me, referring to the disgraceful behavior of our government and press during the Danish cartoon “outrage,” that “Mohammed was only the beginning.” Rather, Mohammed is only the capstone of an edifice otherwise known as an Orwellian Ministry of Truth, under construction in our culture for the last half century.

I trust I have made my point. The Mohammedan enforcer of politically correct speech is ready with his scimitar, watching your every movement and listening to your every word, eager to behead unrepentant infidels of the First Amendment. “Slay them wherever you find them.” Or take them to court.

And if we are tempted to speak out of turn -- that is, to endorse or criticize a candidate for political office and consequently violate the time strictures of the Campaign Finance Law and an arbitrary ruling of the Federal Election Commission -- we must not think that law is an abridgement of the First Amendment, but rather as a gag for the “public good.”

In Boulder, Colorado, for example, citizens concerned about the “decency” of their neighbors, coworkers, or strangers may have the chance to snitch anonymously to the authorities if they believe a “hate crime” has been committed.

The Denver Post reports that “the Boulder City Council will take up the matter of allocating public funding for a ‘hate hotline,’ which would giver residents an opportunity to report incidents in which Boulderites use tactless language.”

As though that were not bad enough, try to unravel the illogic of a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union. The Post reports him as saying, “Our concern -- and there are many -- is that there is no confidentiality, no legal confidentiality,” explains Judd Golden, chairman of the Boulder ACLU. “So it’s potentially chilling if people think they are providing this information in confidence and then that information were provided to the government or the government sought access to it. That would chill free speech.”

Here is that gibberish unraveled. Golden is not concerned about the power of the government to punish someone for speaking his mind and asserting his freedom of speech. That it has such power, or is seeking it, is the given he sanctions. He is concerned about the jeopardy in which informants might find themselves if the government knew their identities. It is not the principle of the First Amendment that he is worried can be chilled, splintered, and melted away, but the contextless “freedom of speech” and “privacy” of petit Nazis and would-be gauleiters.

The Boulder Council, flailing about in its own shrunken epistemology, believes it has a duty to protect tattletales from any consequences of their “public spirited” actions. Its resolution would not only condemn “the usual individual or collective acts of racism and bigotry,” writes the Post, but those who attack, disparage, or denigrate “personal beliefs and values.”

Sound familiar? This is Mohammed in the guise of any random soccer mom, public school teacher, community activist, or other endorser of the idea of “hate crimes.”

The criminal code and justice system were once legitimately concerned with determining and punishing criminal actions in order to protect or uphold individual rights. The concept of “hate crimes,” however, extends and sanctions the power of government and our courts to punish thought, as well, that is, for why a crime might have been committed.

It is but a short step from linking an actual crime with “hate” to making it a crime to “hate.” One need not act on that “hate” to be pilloried by a law or society, except to express one’s opinion or position, no matter how rational or irrational it might be. The Boulder Council seems to want to take that step. One can only imagine in how many other American cities that willingness exists in the minds of “stewards of the public good and safety.”

On a fundamental cultural level, it is no coincidence that the introduction and gradual acceptance of the concept of “hate crimes” paralleled the stealthy and de facto imposition of politically correct speech. Politically correct speech, in turn, has established the grounds for punishable “tactless language.”

In May of 1765, Patrick Henry urged the Virginia General Assembly to adopt the “tactless language” of his Resolves over the “politically correct” style of his time to protest the Stamp Act. When other colonial Americans read that language, deemed by the fearful as “disrespectful,” “insensitive,” “disparaging” and “offensive” to the majesty and prerogatives of the British Crown, it moved them to unite for the first time to oppose and resist Parliamentary power. That was the true beginning of the American Revolution.

The growing silence you hear now is a cowed nation exercising its freedomless speech.

*******************************************************************************

Other articles by Edward Cline on censorship:

“Here Comes a Chopper to Chop Off Your Head: Freedom of Expression vs. Censorship in America” Essay: The Journal of Information Ethics (St. Cloud State University, MN/ McFarland & Co., Publishers, Jefferson, NC), Fall 1995

“Patrick Henry: Not Merely an Orator” Essay: The Colonial Williamsburg Journal, Winter 1995

“The Ghouls of Grammatical Egalitarianism” a review of Guidelines for Bias-Free Writing, ed. Marilyn Schwartz and the Task Force on Bias-Free Language, The Social Critic, November/ December 1996

“Censorship” Entry: The Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, ed. Allen Kent, Marcel Dekker, New York, Vols. 62 (1998) and 70 (2002)

One of the History News Network's contributors is a professor of German and Comparative Literature Dagmar Barnouw. Barnouw's thesis is that the German people were as much a victim of the Nazis (more so) as the Jews, Russians, etc. One literary technique used by Barnouw is to encapsulate the phrase The Holocaust within sneer quotes. An example can be found in this article posted at HNN on October 10, 2005.

Some of her more ludicrous claims I answered here at the time. Barnouw also maintains that the Germans and Japanese were stripped of their memories. Somehow this didn't prevent Germans who were prominent in the war from writing their memoirs. Let's see who I can come up with off the top of my head (you can play along too in the comments).

There's Hitler's chosen successor Karl Donitz with Memoirs: Ten Years and Twenty Days. There's the commander of the Luftwaffe's fighter forces Adolf Galland with The First and the Last. There is Hitler's favorite warrior Hans Rudel with his Stuka Pilot. There's Hitler's, debatably, most talented general Heinz Guderian with Panzer Leader. And what collection would be complete without the Fuhrer's architect, Albert Speer's Inside the Third Reich? Of course most of the above are military figures, but that should be alright since according to Barnouw they were victims too.

H-Net has a review of Barnouw's book The War in the Empty Air: Victims, Perpetrators, and Postwar Germans by Frank Biess. Biess does note that Barnouw has a personal ax to grind on this matter:

The text is also interspersed with her own recollections of the fire bombing of Dresden in February 1945, which she survived as young girl together with her mother, to whom the book is dedicated.

Biess provides this interesting window into the soul of the Nazi apologist:

The last chapter consists of a detailed discussion of the case of the left-liberal professor of German literature, Hans Schwerte, who, at the age of 84, revealed his true identity as the former SS-officer Hans Ernst Schneider. For Barnouw, this case again exemplifies the mechanisms of a "powerfully ritualized German collective guilt" (p. 259). Schneider/Schwerte was quickly condemned, even though he left behind, in her view, a past that was "dangerously confused and misguided but not personally criminal" (p. 229).

What a lovely evasion "not personally criminal." Actually the case of Schneider helps to refute Barnouw's thesis. Schneider was an academic who put his scholarship to work for the SS. Now here is a rich mine for further research. Besides the thugs of the Friekorps, Hitler's earliest and strongest support came from German academics.

Schneider was a member in and officer of the Ahnenerbe or Ancestral Heritage a branch of the SS. It's purpose during the war was to find "Nordic" recruits for the SS from the occupied countries. Schnieder performed this work in The Netherlands, home of Anne Frank.

Here is a description of Schnieder's most damning activity:

The public outcry in Germany and beyond is to do with the fact that, in 1943, Schneider was ordered by his Berlin superiors to requisition medical equipment in the Netherlands that was later used by Nazi physician Siegfried Rascher in human experiments carried out in the concentration camp at Dachau. Hundreds of prisoners were used as guinea pigs, and many of them died as a result.

As to Schnieder's personal guilt, he was member of a criminal organization. The purpose of this organization (the SS) was to commit crimes on a historic scale. His membership alone is sufficient to make him an accomplice in the group's crimes. "I didn't know" is not a defense.

Schnieder apparently spent the war playing Sgt. Schultz and claimed "I know nothing." According to Barnouw, most Germans were Sgt. Schultz's and knew nothing, except for that tiny minority of bad guys who managed to take over their country, and whom they blindly followed to the bitter end.

Branouw's crap is tiresome. Fortunately, there are real historians in Germany who don't have an agenda to white-wash their nation's past:

A well-respected German historian has a radical new theory to explain a nagging question: Why did average Germans so heartily support the Nazis and Third Reich? Hitler, says Goetz Aly, was a "feel good dictator," a leader who not only made Germans feel important, but also made sure they were well cared-for by the state.

As such, most Germans saw Nazism as a "warm-hearted" protector, says Aly, author of the new book "Hitler's People's State: Robbery, Racial War and National Socialism" and currently a guest lecturer at the University of Frankfurt. They were only too happy to overlook the Third Reich's unsavory, murderous side.

Mahalos to Big Tent

It's official, the University of Hawaii's favorite American hating moonbat is a liar and a fraud. The University of Colorado has just released the results (PDF format) of its investigation of the allegations of Churchill's academic fraud and plagiarism. The report is 125 pages long. However, Inside Higher Education has a write up on the findings:

While the panel was unanimous in its findings about Churchill’s conduct, it was divided about whether he should lose his tenured position as professor....

Among the violations that the committee found Churchill had committed were falsification, fabrication, plagiarism, failure to comply with established standard regarding author names on publications, and a “serious deviation from accepted practices in reporting results from research.” The committee also found that Churchill “was disrespectful of Indian oral traditions” in his writings about an 1837 smallpox epidemic.

PirateBallerina, your one stop shop for all things W.C., provides this quote from the summary of the report:

While we are unanimous in finding that Professor Churchill’s research misconduct is serious and that we should express the degree of that seriousness through a recommendation about sanctions, our discussions have not led to unanimity about what particular sanctions are warranted. What follows, then, is the only portion of our report that presents multiple views.

Three members of the Committee believe that Professor Churchill’s research misconduct is so serious that it satisfies the criteria for revocation of tenure and dismissal specified in section 5.C.1 of the Laws of the Regents, and hence that revocation of tenure and dismissal, after completion of all appropriate procedures, is not an improper sanction.

The Committee observes also that the allegations we were asked to investigate were initiated in the wake of the public outcry concerning some highly controversial essays by Professor Churchill dealing with, among other things, the 9/11 tragedy. While not endorsing either the tone or the contents of those essays, the Committee reaffirms, as the University has already acknowledged, that Professor Churchill’s right to publish his views was protected by both the First and Fourteenth Amendment guarantees of free speech. Although those essays played no part in our deliberations, the Committee expresses its concern regarding the timing and perhaps the motives for the University's decision to forward charges made in that context. We point out finally that when Professor Churchill was hired as an Associate Professor with tenure in 1991 and promoted to (full) Professor in 1997, the University knew that he did not have a Ph.D. or law degree, as commonly expected for faculty at this institution, and was aware that he was a controversial public intellectual.

The Committee's own report demonstrates that the juxtaposition of "Ward Churchill" with "intellectual" is farce. It will be interesting to see if this "controversial public" fraud gets the same treatment as students committing similiar academic violations.

Airminded is the host of the bi-monthly history carnival. He has done a wonderful job with the thirty-first edition. For example, he has a post by Yisrael Ne'eman on the deadly history of anti-Semitism:

Hitler was a hero to "ethnic" Germans in Europe but gained allies among the political elite in Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, the Ukraine, Croatia and the Baltic countries. Popular support, especially for murdering (or at least doing away with) Jews was solid in Eastern Europe. Totalitarian Islam rules in Iran, Sudan, for the most part in Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority and threatens regimes in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Algeria, Iraq and the rest of the Arab/Moslem world. Jew hatred is a priority even if the Jewish presence does not exist (except for a few thousand in Morocco and in Iran itself).

Moving from villains to heroes, in a review of Fiction As Fact: The Horse Soldiers & Popular Memory by Neil Longley York, Bret Schulte describes Grierson's Raid:

Author Neil York first examines the raid as it exists on historical record. Colonel Benjamin Grierson took his under strength cavalry brigade, consisting of the 6th and 7th Illinois, the 2nd Iowa, and a six gun battery of two pounders of the 1st Illinois Artillery, on a raid through the heart of Confederate-held Mississippi in April 1863. Grierson's raid was a spectacular success. Over a time frame of just over two weeks, he took his men from La Grange, Tennessee to Union-held Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Through a lot of skill and even dumb luck, he was able to tie up a large number of Confederate pursuers just as Grant was starting the final offensive of his Vicksburg Campaign by crossing east over the Mississippi and driving inland. The Union cavalry lost very few men and destroyed numerous stores along the way as an added bonus.

Col. Grierson after the Civil War went on to recruit, train and command (for 24 years) the U.S. Tenth Cavalry, also known as the Buffalo Soldiers.

And then there is this piece which states:

Mexico was angered by the United States acquisition of Texas in 1845. They protested that Texas was a rebel province of Mexico and the United States had no right under international law to illegally annex Mexican territory. Further, the official boundary between Texas and Mexico was disputed.

By moving Zachary Taylor and an army into the disputed territory, Polk openly provoked a war with Mexico. War may have occurred anyway. However, it is possible that a diplomatic solution could have worked.

I'm not sure who was going to do the negotiating since the Mexican government had refused to meet with the American envoy James Slidell. If Texas was a "rebel province" in the first place, then there could not have been anything to discuss regarding "disputed" borders in the second place.

Actually, Texas was a sovereign nation and it wasn't any of Mexico's business if Texas wanted to be annexed to the United States. Mexico was more than willing to go to war to regain their lost province. They lost. They should really, really stop sniveling about it.

After the Mexican defeat at San Jacinto, Santa Ana was giving the choice of (deservedly) hanging for war crimes or signing a treaty acknowleging Texas independence. He signed.

Capitalism Magazine has posted an article by Edwin A. Locke and Alex Epstein on "The Terrorists' Motivation: Islam:"

The near silence about the true role of Islam in motivating Islamic terrorists has two main causes: multiculturalism and religion. Multiculturalism asserts that all cultures are equal and therefore none may criticize another; intellectuals and politicians are therefore reluctant to declare the obvious superiority of Western culture to Islamic culture. And the strong commitment to religion of many Americans, especially conservatives, makes them reluctant to indict a religion as the cause of a massive evil. But if we are to identify the fundamental cause of the terrorists' actions, we must understand at least two fundamental premises of the religion they kill for.

Meanwhile, History News Network has posted an article by Fawaz A. Gerges titled: "What Does History Bring to the Study of Jihadism?" The answer is of course, a great deal. Unfortunately, Gerges essay includes little history and much "Moslem on the street interviews." He seems to think that Moslem attacks on the West are a response to political events as opposed to the ideology of Islam. He also states that there are different types of Jihad and some are not so bad:

Jihadists still have a long way to go before they gain the trust of their fellow Muslims, let alone the international community, but some have taken an important first step. The terrorism perpetrated by certain cells and factions will continue over the next decade, but their movement no longer has a large base of support or a safe haven in which to plot new operations. Jihadists of all stripes know they are at a crossroads. At home and abroad they are blamed for unleashing the wrath of the United States against the ummah. Only a miracle will resuscitate jihadism. The question, of course, is whether the continued occupation of Iraq will be that ­miracle.

The last phase of Jihad is the result of the Iraq campaign, seriously. If Gerges provided the proper historical context of Moslem aggression over the last 1400 years, it would be obvious that Jihad wanes and waxes. We are now enduring yet another expansionist phase of Islam. Gerges wants to "prove" that no such thing is occurring and terrorism is just the result of a few Al Qaeda fanatics responding to alleged Western provocations. He ignores current events in Eurabia and the funding of radical Wahabi sect world-wide by the Saudi Entity along with a great deal more. He even includes Israel, along with the U.S., as the "far enemy" that Jihadis had been ignoring prior to Al Qaeda. In presenting his thesis, he simply ignores the ongoing, sixty-year long, Jihad against Israel.

This is the kind of analysis American college students receive in lieu of an education.

The Ahistoricality Guy has this report of the Library on Congress threatening blind people who inquired about the Library's National Library Service for the Blind's Web-Braille service being no longer available:

Let me catch you up. A few days ago my spouse got a phone call from a friend who'd discovered that the Library of Congress's National Library Service for the Blind's Web-Braille service -- where the electronic braille files of professionally produced braille books can be downloaded for access by certified blind NLS users with the proper electronic equipment -- had been shut down with a simple "out of service" message. Since then there's been a flurry of speculation and consternation in the blind community: this is a fantastic service, one of those unabashed "technology makes the world better" moments which is a mainstay of braille readers in this
country.

Very little information has been forthcoming from the head of the National Library Service, one Frank Kurt Cylke, in spite of calls, e-mails and letters from some very prominent leaders and educators in the field. Even American Council of the Blind president Chris Gray got evasions and even threats ("Finally, you threatened the blind community by saying that should the community protest your decision, that would only lead to delays in thereinstatement of Web-Braille.") when he tried to figure out what the issue was.

For those of us familiar with Leonard Peikoff's run-in with the Library of Congress this sort of thing isn't surprising. Peikoff had given the Library the manuscripts for Ayn Rand's four novels in the early 1990s. Peikoff retained the first and last page from The Fountainhead for sentimental reasons. The Library then accused Peikoff of stealing his own property and threatened endless litigation:

In my opinion, given the above, future literary figures or executors should think carefully before bequeathing or donating material to the Library of Congress. Its seeming willingness to litigate against an unwary donor is frightening. At the very least, given today's law, it behooves any donor to devise an airtight legal contract first, in an effort—possibly even so doomed to failure—to protect himself or his Estate from further demands made, perhaps years or even decades later, by a grasping or hostile official.

The problems at the Library of Congress, the abuse of power, has nothing to do with politics or who's in power. They are institutional. A thorough Library cleaning is in order.

Haiti has just inaugurated its new president Rene Preval. The mainstream media is trumpeting this as a victory for "democracy:"

President Rene Preval took office and appealed for peace in his troubled Caribbean nation on Sunday as Haiti inaugurated its first democratically elected leader since Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted more than two years ago.

The biggest problem with Preval is that he is a long time follower of former president Aristide:

Préval has been called the "twin" or protégé of former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was ousted from power in 2004 and is now in exile in South Africa. Many in Haiti and across the Caribbean believe the US had sought to remove Mr. Aristide, who was democratically elected.

Well, that is as far as "democratically elected" means anything in Haiti. This is typical of the shallow, "liberal" mainstream media. All that's required to rebuild a country is an election and good intentions. Ideas are optional (This is also true with President Bush). If Preval subscribes to Aristide's kindergarten Marxism, elected fairly or not, Haiti is in for yet more trouble.

I recently watched a lengthy interview on C-SPAN with the new lady president of Liberia, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. She sounded like Milton Friedman in the discussion and seems to have a firm grasp of economic realities. I seriously doubt if the same can be said for Preval. So, Haiti needs much luck to survive yet another round of top-down, centrally planned "reform."

Update, 5/15: Amritas notes that maybe Perval isn't such a bad guy and there is some hope for Haiti:

As president Préval instituted a number of economic reforms, most notably the privatization of various government companies. Some have suggested that these privatizations were a result of Préval bowing to the pressure exerted on him by external entities including the IMF. The unemployment rate (though still quite high) had fallen to its lowest level since the fall of Duvalier by the end of Préval's term.