Free Republic

Incredibly, it wasn’t until I was 19 that I learned that there had been a Holocaust. My hyper-assimilated, New England Jewish family and friends looked only to the present and future. We focused on the polio vaccine that promised to banish the iron lungs that had been our childhood terror. We trusted in the United Nations, whose gleaming buildings my father took me to see when they were brand-new, and from which I came away with hopeful admiration—mixed, however, with a vague sense, which I couldn’t have put into words then, that perhaps an enterprise housed in architecture so grandiosely...

Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was an English poet, short-story writer, and novelist chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, and also for his tales and poems of British soldiers in India.  He wrote classic poems and stories which include (among many others) "The Jungle book", a children's book of short stories which contains the famous story "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi", the poems "Gunga Din" and "Mandalay". He also wrote the novels "The Man Who Would Be King" and "Captains Courageous", as well as his two most famous poems, "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" and "IF__".  He was born in India, and...

So, Barack Obama, in pursuit of a world in which nuclear weapons are “obsolete,” just announced [1] that he is “revamping American nuclear strategy to substantially narrow the conditions” under which the United States would use such weapons. To set an “example” to other nations, the president also announced that the United States was renouncing the development of any new nuclear weapons. What sort of “example” do you suppose this sets? To begin to comprehend what the president has in mind, contemplate these two declarations, just reported in The New York Times: For the first time, the United States is...