America's New Enemy

Those people who think President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will implement a peaceful new foreign policy in place of Bush's idiotic "Axis of Evil" are sadly mistaken. Hillary has already added a new "member" to the Axis of Evil, Burma or Myanmar. 

This is one of the poorest countries in the world, a nation that can't even control all of its own territory without Chinese help. Yet Hillary has decided that Myanmar is now a threat to the United States because North Korea might be helping this country which has no modern infrastructure or industry develop nuclear weapons. Since Myanmar is about a thousand miles from North Korea and the two nations don't border each other it's hard to see how North Korea could transfer nuclear material to Myanmar without the US Navy intercepting it. Yet Hillary now thinks the evil alliance of North Korea and Myanmar is now a threat to the stability of Southeast Asia and the world. 

Naturally, this will lead to massive new military deployments to protect Myanmar's neighbors from a country that can't control its own territory. It will also lead to diplomatic efforts to isolate Myanmar and calls for "regime change." 

This nonsense of course sounds very familiar doesn't it. A few years ago, another President warned us about another member of the Axis of Evil: Iraq. He demanded that action be taken against Iraq's evil dictator so he couldn't develop nuclear weapons to threaten America and the world with. Three thousand Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis are now dead because of that and no weapons of mass destruction have been found. 

It feels like Deja Vu all over again doesn't it? The faces in Washington change, the so called enemies change but the idiotic policies don't change. 

Book Review Liberal Fascism

Book Review: Liberal Fascism

Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left by Jonah Goldberg, New York, Doubleday, 2007.
On the surface this book looks like another tiresome piece of political propaganda on the order of American Fascism, Christopher Hedges’ loathsome and hate filled tract that assures Blue state residents that everyone who reads a Bible is potential Brownshirt. In contrast Goldberg’s book a rather fun tour through history that makes some good conclusions.
Unlike Hedges, Goldberg is a good historian who actually knows something about history. His basic conclusion is right on, between 1910 and 1950 the American Progressive movement behaved a great deal like the Italian fascists and their wicked stepchildren the German Nazis. Like Hitler and Mussolini American progressives like Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and FDR wanted an all powerful state and promoted an all embracing nationalism that trampled the rights of average citizens. Like Wilson, FDR & TR Mussolini believed that war and conquest were good things that would benefit the nation. Goldberg is correct when he notes the similarity between Woodrow Wilson’s World War One administration in America and the dictatorships of Mussolini and Hitler.
Goldberg is also correct when he points out that large numbers of America’s best and brightest openly admired Hitler and Mussolini and wanted to emulate their regimes before World War II. Of course he forgets to note that until World War II, Hitler and Mussolini’s behavior wasn’t all that bad and certainly no where near as horrific as that of Lenin or Stalin. Nor does Goldberg admit that most Americans abandoned whatever sympathy they had for Hitler after the revelation of the true nature of his regime and its crimes particularly the Holocaust. Or for that matter the contempt most Americans had for Mussolini and his pygmy empire. Especially after Mussolini’s military when faced with overwhelming British and American military power in 1943, quickly changed sides and joined the Allies. Leaving Il Duce to the tender mercies of his ally Hitler.
Goldberg goes off course when he starts chronicling after 1950 and making the case that modern American liberals are fascist. When he tries to call the radicals of the 1960s fascist he falls flat on his face. Of the various leftist morons who surfaced in the 1960s only the Black Panthers could be called fascist. The Weathermen, the anti war movement, Students for a Democratic Society and so on were many bad things but they certainly weren’t fascist. Anarchist perhaps, Communist maybe but fascist no. Indeed like far too many modern conservative historians Goldberg pays far too much attention to the bored students who played revolution in the late 1960s. That is they played revolutionary until daddy stopped mailing the allowance checks then the revolutionaries quietly bought ties and rejoined society.
Nor does Goldberg make a convincing case that the tired joke called the modern American left is fascist. He gives the left too much credit, true fascism would require energy, imagination and some modicum of courage. The present American left hasn’t shown any of these traits. Indeed the American left is so afraid of itself and its own ideology that it is practically harmless.
Indeed as Goldberg points out if there are American fascists or heirs of the totalitarian progressives of the 1930s and 40s it is the neoconservatives. Like the old time Progressives the neoconservatives believe in war for war’s sake, imperialism, militarism and nationalism. Like John F. Kennedy (the real guy not the liberal myth), Lyndon Johnson and Theodore Roosevelt before them, the Neocons want an American empire and believe that American arms will bring democracy to the world. Like the progressives the neocons are willing to lie for the sake of their war effort and violate the rights of their fellow citizens. Like the progressives the neocons have enlisted God in their crusade, George Bush dusted off the tired old social gospel and began sermonizing from it. Fortunately the Neocons have not been able to trample civil liberties or engage in the kind of fascist gangsterism that FDR and Woodrow Wilson were allowed to get away with.
In conclusion Goldberg’s book is a good read, but hardly original (generations of libertarians have pointed out FDR’s fascist tendencies) or convincing. Goldberg is right to conclude that there was a progressive fascism in American but he fails to notice that it died shortly after World War II if not before. What happened in the 1960s and has happened since is certainly bad but it isn’t fascism. What’s needed is for a far more insightful libertarian writer to take a look at 20th century history and write a definitive and original book. Goldberg’s book isn’t it that but hopefully it could inspire such a work.
One final thought here, the fact that this book was brought out by a major New York publishing house and given wide attention shows that there is a strong discontent with the establishment view of American history and a strong appetite for libertarian thought out there. Hopefully Goldberg’s work will inspire Americans to learn the real history of their country and see how the leaders of past misled us and trampled our liberty in the process. If that is the case then maybe this book will be remembered as the opening shot in the war to reclaim American history for liberty.

Robert McNamara Is Dead but His Sick Legacy Lives On

I see that tired old fool Robert McNamara is dead, McNamara for the 90% of the population that rightly and justly doesn’t know or care who about his memory was Lyndon Johnson’s secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War.
McNamara revealed himself to be a hypocrite, a fool and perhaps even a fraud by his behavior during the war. During the Vietnam War McNamara blindly and enthusiastically supported the war effort. The war effort involved sending several hundred thousand American troops to Vietnam getting 60,000 of them killed for no apparent reason and wasting untold billions of the American taxpayers’ hard earned dollars on a battle that McNamara himself admitted was senseless. To make matters worse McNamara’s war effort involved massive bombings that killed or injured tens of thousands of innocent Vietnamese people, the people we were supposedly fighting the war to protect.
The worst part of the war was that we fought the Vietnam War to stop the spread of Communism. Yet it ended with Communist occupation of South Vietnam the murder of tens of thousands of innocent Vietnamese and hundreds of thousands of Cambodians by Communist thugs not to mention the exile of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese citizens who simply wanted to live their lives for something other than the glory of the Communist Party.
The saddest aspect of the story was that the US could have ended the Vietnam War in a few days by simply occupying North Vietnam. After the tremendous victory over Communist forces by US forces in the Tet Offensive in 1968 the US military could have quickly overrun North Vietnam forced Ho Chi Minh and his followers into exile and ended the war. Media coverage of the North Vietnamese Communist Party’s torture chambers, concentration camps and atrocities would have given the US a huge propaganda victory over Communism in the Cold War. A US victory in Vietnam would have also shown up the Soviet Union and the mighty Red Army for the paper tigers they really were, all the Kremlin could have done in the face of a US invasion of North Vietnam was to print a few editorials in Pravda condemning American Imperialism.
Or had McNamara if he had imagination and courage could have urged his boss LBJ to adopt the simple and effective strategy that Ronald Reagan used to win the Cold War without a single American coming home in a body bag. All the American soldiers and weaponry wasted in Vietnam could have been shipped to Europe to face the Red Army in Germany. The Kremlin would have had to respond in kind with massive military deployments of its own. Such an arms build up would have quickly bankrupted the Soviet Union and caused its collapse a decade or two earlier. I might also add that under such a strategy, the Americans killed or wounded in Vietnam would have enjoyed a pleasant interlude of drinking German beer and chasing Frauliens rather than hell in the jungle. As for Vietnam well, history demonstrated the minute the gravy train from Moscow was cut off the Vietnamese Communist Party couldn’t adopt capitalism or become or friend fast enough. This would have occurred with or without the Vietnam War or the 60,000 American deaths there.
McNamara of course admitted none of his mistakes. After leaving office, he began parroting the Liberal Establishment Party Line that the Vietnamese Communists were patriots fighting for their country and not thugs out to establish a vicious dictatorship. For this behavior McNamara was hailed as a great man by liberals who had denounced him as a baby killer a decade before.
McNamara at the end of the day was like almost all liberal elitists a hollow man with no real imagination or character a shallow fool who let The New York Times editorial page do his thinking for him. Like most of his ilk McNamara was betrayed and mistreated by the liberals yet he kept coming back to them at the end of the day because he had nothing. No imagination, no values, no loyalty just a desire for fame and power that ultimately destroyed him.
Of course the real danger from McNamara is that there are thousands of would be McNamaras in Washington right now ready to implement any imbecilic strategy or plan in exchange for a big office and a few minutes of media coverage every week. The solution to the problem of Robert McNamara then is not to condemn the memory of a pathetic dead man but to put an end to the monstrous system that put Robert McNamara in power, allowed him to destroy countless lives for no reason, rewarded him for his incompetence and honored him for his stupidity. Until that happens we’ll see an unending stream of McNamaras in Washington and a growing number of Americans coming home in body bags.