Let me know if you want in or out.
Links: FR Index of his articles: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=victordavishanson
His website: http://victorhanson.com/ NRO archive: http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson-archive.asp
The term always worked for me.
Great article!
If they are so confident of a fulfulling future, why are they so quick to kill themselves?
Incidentally, I've been reading 'The Looming Tower', and a more unappealing group of total losers would be difficult to find. It turns out that bin Laden did essentially nothing in Afgahnistan against the Soviets, and nonetheless returned bragging that he could defend all of Saudi Arabia from the Iraqis, instead of inviting the Amerians in.
The Saudi intelligence head laughed him out of the room; thus his desire for revenge, against both the Saudi government and the Americans he felt were defiling the kingdom.
Tolik, could you add me to the VDH ping list, please?
Many thanks.
D
Sorry VDH, it's not "fascism", it's just Islam at its core. "Isamic fascism" or "islamofascism" is just Rove-speak. Rather like when Pharma coined the term "erectile-dysfunction"--not used in any medical text--to sell various "love potions". My problme with VDH is his obsession with TR/Wilsonian style "big stick" diplomacy; America's "special place in the world" etc. This will bankrupt and destroy America; empires ALWAYS fall and every nation seduced by the siren of empire has collapsed sooner or later. The smart thing for America to do is revert to a pre-1898 foreign policy and bascially:
1. Tend to it's own knitting regarding foreign affairs; 19th century America did not care if the Ottoman Turks mistreated Greeks or Rumanians, if the Tsar of all the Russias mistreated the Finns or Tartars etcc.
2. Economic autarky should be pursued, although this would entail something Americans have never attempted--an industrial/economic policy. The USA is self-sufficent (or could become self-sufficent) in most items. Execptions being certain trace elements for aerospace and certain gems like diamonds, both easily obtained from nations in Africa in exchange for food. Notice I didn't mention energy in this small list of exceptions. The USA is the Saudi Arabia of coal; the Nazi's quite successfully maintained their vast war machine on petroleum synthesized from coal, no doubt the US could do the same. If, theoretically, every source (ANWR, all offshore areas) were drilled for oil, the US could survive with nary a drop of imported energy. Those crazy kids in Seattle had a point; globalism really is evil, and the outside (i.e OLD world) has been nothing but a source of grief for the New World.
There have only been two books I've read where I've closed them halfway through, walked over to the garbage and tossed them in: Mein Kampf and The "Holy" Quran.
Word for word - and factually - they have nothing in common. But emotionally and intellectually, they were written in the same mindset: despicable, pea-brained hatred.
Personally, I think Hilter and Mohammed were way, way, waaaay too angry about their one-inch penises.
PRoP PING! Although it does seem to be "reaching to the choir".
Perhaps the TRUTH will be accepted if you say it enough.
Not to argue his overall point, but VDH has just revised history re the Japanese. First, Yamamoto was opposed to going to war with America, because he had travelled the country and seen our industrial capacity and gotten to know some of the people, unlike his buds who came here to go to skool at Harvard and Stanford.
Second, and more trivially, "Banzai" was just a shout. The correct Japanese term VDH was looking for is "Bushido".
He's right about islamofascists, of course, but he must have mailed this one in, or had it ghostwritten.
Most people have no ideology, but simply accommodate themselves to the prevailing sense of an agenda’s success or failure. Just as there weren’t more than a dozen vocal critics of Hitler after the Wehrmacht finished off France in six weeks in June of 1940, so too there wasn’t a Nazi to be found in June 1945 when Berlin lay in rubble.
It doesn’t matter whether Middle Easterners actually accept the tenets of bin Laden’s worldview — not if they think he is on the ascendancy, can bring them a sense of restored pride, and humiliate the Jews and the West on the cheap. Bin Laden is no more eccentric or impotent than Hitler was in the late 1920s.Yet if he can claim that his martyrs forced the United States out of Afghanistan and Iraq, toppled a petrol sheikdom or two, and acquired its wealth and influence — or if he got his hands on nuclear weapons and lorded it over appeasing Westerners — then he too, like the Fuhrer in the 1930s, will become untouchable. The same is true of Iran’s president Ahmadinejad.
This sums it all up very nicely for me.
Ping!
Confront Ahmadinejad about his cognitive dissidence -- if Ahmadinejad believes the Holocaust happened then it shoots down his theory that "the Joos" are powerful beyond words and run the world.
A race of people can't be at one and the same time, more powerful than all others, and victims burned to death in ovens.
In Ahmadinejad's mind, he has to believe the story of the powerful "Joo" - the "Joo" who keeps all Arab and Persian cultures broken, poor, and humiliated. If Ahmadinejad were to look closely at reality, he would see that dictatorships all over the world are poor - and their citizens unhappy. When that's mixed with politically powerless women, 7th century ideas, a total lack of freedom, the results are the same: backward, ignorant, helpless, poor, angry countries. It's not the US, it's not the "joos" it's their choices. It's Muslim choices that are their own downfall.
The recipe for failure? An oppressive religion, thuggy men, powerless women and limited to nonexistent freedom. They create the failure. Their choices make Muslim countries into the totalitarian failures they are -- Ahmadinjad and Islamic fascism are lies -- lying to themselves -- lying to us. We must not buy into it.
“Islamic fascism” is the exact choice of words to describe Muslim Terrorists.
What's even funnier is that Hanson ramblingly invokes Hitler, which would only make sense if we were talking about Islamonazis.
Hanson's become a bad joke. Does he understand religion at all? I think he's at least half-blinded by secularism, so he has to cram violent Islam into secular-political categories, rather than theological-political.
He should go back to tending his vineyards.
Along with this we should not be swayed by the fact that 99% of Muslims appear to be Allah fearing good Muslims.
The 99% are enabling the 1% by providing cover and anonymity to the terrorist who hide among them.
By refusing to become "involved" they are in effect helping the terrorists.
Well, a list isn't an argument. What did Zen Buddhism have to do with Japanese militarism? Is there such a thing as "Shinto Buddhism"? Or are Shinto and Buddhism separate religions? How is Gamal Abdel Nasser comparable to "Nordic folk romance" or Wagnerian opera?
VD is a classics professor, not an expert on military strategy or the Middle East. And his record in writing on those subjects isn't the best. I suspect he's even more out of his depth on Japanese history and culture. It's sad that people get taken in by him.
Don't miss the latest song -- http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1709006/posts