David Warren - Clear-thinking Canadian - BUMP [please freepmail me if you want or don't want to be pinged to David Warren articles]
Posted on 06/07/2004 5:50:27 AM PDT by Tolik
You can't smoke at the Legion any more. The veterans have been told to butt out almost everywhere, and municipalities won't give Legion Halls exemptions from the proliferating anti-smoking by-laws, because that would invite legal challenges from private bar-owners wanting exemptions, too.
Think of this for a moment -- think of our half million surviving vets, many of whom (as my late grandpa) were going there for decades to drink and smoke with their cronies. (Old friends are the best.) Almost all of them smoke, or would smoke -- it's a social thing. Everybody smoked in the Second World War, everybody smoked in France -- read any diary, look at the snapshots, from that age before the triumph of tight-assed political correction. And especially in bars, which have been smoking zones since they were invented.
This is all about freedom: why our vets went to war. In case you've never heard, Adolf Hitler was a non-smoker. He was the pioneer of anti-smoking regulations (as Bismarck before him was the pioneer of the welfare state; we 're all German now). Hitler tried to ban smoking throughout the German civil service. To be fair to the man, he gave up when he realized that he didn't have the power.
To the non-smoker, the right to smoke is a minor thing, surely not worth defending. Why should anyone persist in smoking, if I decide I don't like it? After all, what's another person's freedom? Democracy rules, and now that a majority are non-smokers, they can vote to make the minority behave. (It's an excellent example of democracy and freedom in direct conflict.)
My non-smoking readers -- not all of them, just the "health fascists", the ones with the ants in their pants -- may well argue I am being petty by bringing this up. Smoking is "minor", death on the battlefield is "major", why should I reduce the 60th anniversary of D-Day to some irrelevant rant about smoker's rights? But for the guys who landed in Normandy, smoking was not a minor thing. It was a poignant symbol of freedom.
We blew the Nazis off the cliffs, and then we had a smoke. We ducked into the trench under a Moaning Minnie, and then we puffed. We liberated Paris, and after we'd done that, we lit a Gitane. The baguette and the glass of Bordeaux were optional.
A dear friend in the Yukon has compiled the memoirs of a certain Sgt. Red Anderson, Calgary Highlanders, transcribed from oral source. It is a most wonderfully entertaining document -- hysterically funny, yet clanging everywhere with the ring of truth. It cries out to be read, by generations who know nothing of war -- which alas is the very reason no Canadian publisher today would have the guts to print it. For it is utterly free of neurotic moral posturing.
Take, for example, this succinct explanation for a place marker, somewhere inland from the Norman beachfront:
"I remember one German soldier that was shot in the middle of the road. All the tanks, trucks, and Bren gun carriers (even me) would run over him. After a while (five days) he was nothing but a spread-eagled grease spot. ... It was at a road junction, so everybody called it 'Flat Man's Corner'."
It's the stuff they talk about in Legion Halls, where the old guys go, or used to go, to smoke and drink. To talk about stuff that people who weren't there wouldn't understand, wouldn't want to understand -- the "boomers" and their progeny, the people raised in luxury and peace, who haven't heard that evil exists, who no longer know what it takes to contain it; the people of the mall culture.
Red Anderson again, after a good shelling: "When it was over, I went to check on the boys. I was no braver than anyone else, but being a sergeant, you were supposed to act brave, so the men would think you were okay. Checked each man and everybody was scared and shook up. I asked Mac how he was doing. He said: 'Red, I am so yellow I could give a blood transfusion to a lemon.' That broke the tension and we all had a good laugh."
Sixty years later, the world is changed. Peace has brought the tyranny of the jackass, aptly symbolized by his anti-smoking by-laws. We have forgotten everything. For instance, that freedom is laughter. That it's a glass of whisky, an off-colour joke. That freedom was freedom when freedom was a smoke.
David Warren - Clear-thinking Canadian - BUMP [please freepmail me if you want or don't want to be pinged to David Warren articles]
Uhhhh, okay.... to sum up:
America fought, and hundreds of thousands died, for the right to smoke. Hitler was against smoking. Ergo, if you oppose the right to smoke in bars, you spit in the face of what our soldiers fought for... oh yeah, and you're like Hitler.
Uhhh, yeah.... okay.... whatever.....
The American Legion may need to again close the bars and halls to the public. There are nitwits running around who believe that businesses are public property, and therefore, open to control by the public.
Hitler and his fascist mob stated that private property was permissible as long as the government controlled the private property.
I see no difference between America's fascists and Germany's fascists who want to impose their politically correct will on private property concerning issues such as banning smoking.
Sixty years later, the world is changed. Peace has brought the tyranny of the jackass, aptly symbolized by his anti-smoking by-laws. We have forgotten everything. For instance, that freedom is laughter. That it's a glass of whisky, an off-colour joke. That freedom was freedom when freedom was a smoke.
"First they came for the criminals, but I wasn't a criminal so I didn't say anything. Then they came for the homosexuals, but I wasn't a homosexual, so I didn't say anything, then they came for the Jews, but I wasn't a Jew so I didn't say anything, then they came for me and there wasn't anyone left to say anything."
Yes, that's right. It's a petty thing to you, obviously, but the larger principle behind it is, FREEDOM.
Private Property, Freedom,
and the Rule of Law
by Richard Pipes
(excerpt)
Now let us turn to the twentieth century and show how unfavorable it was to both property and freedom. Communist Russia is, of course, an obvious example. Within two or three years of seizing power, Lenin abolished, in favor of the state, all private property except small landholdings. Ten years later Stalin completed the process by "collectivizing" agriculture (i.e., nationalizing all land and turning farmers into state chattel). On the eve of World War II, some 98 percent of all the productive wealth of the Soviet Union belonged to the government or, more precisely, the Communist Party. The effect this had on the political and civil rights of Soviet citizens requires no elaboration: they were totally wiped out.
The same applies, though to a lesser degree, to fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, which are often erroneously depicted as "capitalist" societies. True, both Mussolini and Hitler tolerated private property in the means of production but only as long as it served the state. In the early 1920s Hitler explained to a journalist his views on the subject:
I want everyone to keep the property he has acquired for himself according to the principle: the common good takes precedence over self-interest. But the state must retain control and each property owner should consider himself an agent of the state. . . . The Third Reich will always retain the right to control the owners of property.
And indeed, this right the Nazi state asserted when it came to power by controlling dividends, interest rates, and wages. In regard to agriculture, it reserved to itself the authority to expropriate any farm that did not produce foodstuffs to its satisfaction. So what we had here was property in a very limited sense, more like a trusteeship than ownership in the true meaning of the word.
http://www.hooverdigest.org/012/pipes.html
Back in October of 2000, I went with my dad to a reunion of his artillery battallion. ALL of the survivors, at least the ones who made it to the reunion, were non-smokers. All the smokers had died.
I'm all for freedom for stupid people to smoke. Honestly. If you want to kill yourself, I have no desire to stand in your way. Feel free also to not wear a seatbelt - or a helmet if you're a motorbike rider. Hell, feel free to play with dynamite. Freedom is a beautiful thing.
Just don't feed me hack journalistic pieces about people dying in battle to preserve the right to smoke. It's silly, trivializing and (IMHO) insulting to our veterans - especially at this time of year.
And your point is?
I didn't "feed you" a damn thing. You clicked on the post all by yourself.
"...about people dying in battle to preserve the right to smoke."
Who's being trivial now? The author didn't say that. His point, as I took it, was that the nanny-staters will do with as they may with the law, "for your own good," individual freedom be damned.
"To talk about stuff that people who weren't there wouldn't understand, wouldn't want to understand -- the "boomers" and their progeny, the people raised in luxury and peace, who haven't heard that evil exists, who no longer know what it takes to contain it; the people of the mall culture."
My understanding is this: we sanitized our society to the schizophrenic point when for many people neurotic moral posturing about smoke and other nonsense is more important than clear understanding that sometimes you have to face evil, and it takes quite a bit more than just talking to contain it.
Full disclosure: I don't smoke and never smoked.
My point is, this is an overblown issue. Somebody was suffering from writer's block and chose to just get some people cranked up over nothing instead of writing about something significant.
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