Comments on: A new press hero: Saddam, defendant

By: mexican flag

mexican flag — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 07:00:00 +0000

I have a flag that was flown during WWII. It started my collection and my new business. I am always looking for more info on flags and found your post.
Thanks,
mexican flag

By: Ymarsakar

Ymarsakar — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 07:00:00 +0000

Oh Ya, I'm pretty sure a lot of 18th century Americans would have heart attacks if they saw what their "precious free press" was doing with their paid for (by saddam) and bought for (by soldiers) freedom.

Rolling in their graves.

By: Ymarsakar

Ymarsakar — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 07:00:00 +0000

Why can’t the New York Times just F*** Off, hrm?

By: Richard Aubrey

Richard Aubrey — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 07:00:00 +0000

Jim. I wasn't referring to your post, except that Marcos occurred to me as a handy example, avoiding the need to tax my own brain.
The authoritarians we worked with in Latin America were all like Marcos, none like Castro, or now Chavez. Our guys wanted to stay home and milk the country for their retirement bennies.
And now, as you point out, they're gone.
Now we have that boring, bourgeois, messy democracy where Jose Lunchbucket isn't required to listen to his intellectual superiors. Makes the latter as nuts there as it does here.

By: Jim

Jim — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 07:00:00 +0000

“Marcos vs. Castro. Compare both on qualities of internal oppression and foreign adventurism.”

They are hardly in the same sport, much less the same league,I don’t know whether because of differing circumstances – I cannot see anyone getting away with Castro’s crap in the Philippines – or because of differences between them as individuals. I only compared them because Marcos is a standard tu quoque, and also because he was one pet ruler we let fall on his own. I certainly did not mean the comaparison as some kind of exact analogy.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 07:00:00 +0000

A totalitarian is an authoritarian whose grip on power has started to slip.

By: Richard Aubrey

Richard Aubrey — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 07:00:00 +0000

Jean Kirkpatrick got Reagan's attention when she wrote a paper differentiating authoritarian and totalitarian governments.
There were two major differences. The totalitarians killed far more people and the authoritarians stayed home.
They are not, she said, and a look around will show, the same, but on different sides.
Marcos vs. Castro. Compare both on qualities of internal oppression and foreign adventurism.

By: Jim

Jim — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 07:00:00 +0000

All lot of streams feed this culture of revolutionary roimance.

1. Permanent adolescent rebellion. This is a real danger especially for Americans, who think it is cool to be young, rather than powerless and pathetic. How much do you sense in the grey ponytail crowd that this accusatory, defiant attitude toward the establishment that feeds them, on way or another, is really just a way to be young and righteaous, a throwback to times when it was righteous to be young?

2. Fossilized blue-collar pieties: Back before Watergate turned journalism into a prophetic calling, and gave rise to j-schools, newspapers were staffed by working stiff types. These people had a normal anti-management orientation. The blue-collars are gone, but the attitudes remains the same way the Army still wears blue Union Army unofrms for special occasions.

3. And a lot of the grey ponytail crowd has similar class origins, even if they have tenured sinecures to pay the rent now, and these attitudes are simultaneously their homage to working-class solidarity and also a rebellion against the respectability of their own lace-curtain working class parents.

4. These people really do admire these tyrants. Erasmus is on to something, but he has it a little wrong. People under the boot don't care whether their tyrant styles himself left-wing or right-wing. Any collectivist ideology is going to lead to an authoritarian government, and it can easily become totalitarian as the great Liberator gets old and entrenched. people under the boot could not care less why foreigners are supporting that tyrant, realpolitik or romance. There is a real differen, and that is that romance makes for real allies, where realpolitik means the a**hole will get dumped in a heartbeat when he starts to stumble. Marcos is an example. Compare that to the apologies and the substantive support for Castro.

By: Richard Aubrey

Richard Aubrey — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 07:00:00 +0000

There is a scene in the movie "Cabaret" which I thought particularly enlightening.
After taking us through the sweaty and disturbing decadence of Weimar Germany, two of the characters are in a restaurant in the mountains. The restaurant has an outdoor area for eating and large windows for those inside. The blue-green mountains stretch into the distance and I swear the theater turned up the air conditioning. The entire thing was a relief after the Liza Minnelli and Joel Gray scenes.
Then a young man with a terrific tenor in vaguely military lederhosen (?) begins a song about the Rhine gives its gold to the sea and the stag in the forest runs free. Great. German mountains, semi-pagan but pleasant imagery in the song.
Then a couple of similarly-attired blue-jowled plug-ugly baritones join in, taking it to a menacing march beat.
And the restaurant patrons stand and give the Hitler salute.

Tyranny seems "clean", by golly.

By: David

David — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 07:00:00 +0000

Regarding the appeal that totalitarians have for so many intellectual’s: here’s what Aldous Huxley had to say:

“In the field of politics the equivalent of a theorem is a perfectly disciplined army; of a sonnet or picture, a police state under a dictatorship. The Marxist calls himself scientific and to this claim the Fascist adds another: he is the poet–the scientific poet–of a new mythology. Both are justified in their pretensions; for each applies to human situations the procedures which have proved effective in the laboratory and the ivory tower. They simplify, they abstract, they eliminate all that, for their purposes, is irrelevant and ignore whatever they choose to regard an inessential; they impose a style, they compel the facts to verify a favorite hypothesis, they consign to the waste paper basket all that, to their mind, falls short of perfection…the dream of Order begets tyranny, the dream of Beauty, monsters and violence.”