From an article on Wendy Yoshimura, American terrorist and bomb-maker for the Symbionese Liberation Army:
"The reclusive artist was never a violent person, Yoshimura's supporters say, despite her association with the SLA and her subsequent conviction on earlier, unrelated explosives and weapons charges."
On September 21, 1897 The New York Sun, printed the following:
We take pleasure in answering thus prominently the communication below, expressing at the same time our great gratification that its faithful author is numbered among the friends of The Sun:
Dear Editor:
I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, "If you see it in The Sun, it's so." Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?
Virginia O'Hanlon
Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the scepticism of a sceptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or children's, are little. In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The external light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.
Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies. You might get your papa to have men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if you did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.
You tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest men, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived could tear apart. Only faith, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.
No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.
Earthquakes, wars, rumors of wars, perturbations in the middle air, and now this --- Stephen Lewis is chosen as Maclean's Canadian of the Year.
Yes, the country that gave the world a gay married couple their chance to beTime magazine's Canadian Newsmakers of the Year now marks for distiction the only man who can give Svend Robinson a run for his money in the insufferability sweepstakes.
The decision by the Calgary Stampeders to hire Matt Dunigan as both their coach and general manager will be recognized by this time next year as a disaster. Dunigan will be fired before his contract expires.
On a happier note, watching the CFL on television this year will be more pleasurable as we will not have to listen to Matt Dunigan's inane commentary.
Has somebody told the Nation of Islam's newest convert what Mullah Omar would do to men who, er, snuggle, with adolescent boys?
The jubilation of much of the world at the capture of Saddam Hussein has left me feeling rather Scrooge-like. While his capture is of course preferable to his having remained at large, I can't help but consider his likely fate -- decades of chess with Milosevic in a Euro-jail, while enjoying health care and cuisine better than that available to most Canadians -- wildly inappropriate. More importantly, though, people who think that Hussein's capture marks the end of the problem are missing the wider picture.
The "one lunatic" theory of genocidal states is convenient but lacking. In post-War Europe, when fending off Communism became the highest priority almost immediately after 1945, this myth was necessary; had the Allies concerned themselves too much with meting out justice to Germany, they might well have lost crucial opportunities to contain the Soviets. It therefore suited many people, not least the Germans themselves, to create the legend of Hitler as national brainwasher, waving his shiny coin and turning otherwise sane and kindly people into the perpetrators of atrocities. This is of course nonsense. All societies create lunatics and evil men; most societies don't elect these men to positions of great power. Hitler was only a problem because of the millions of Germans who elected him, the hundreds of thousands who shared his lunacy, and the vast numbers of his subjects who were wilfully ignorant of the evil he perpetrated.
Likewise, Saddam Hussein is only the symbol of the evil that was carried out by the torturers, rapists and terrorists he kept on salary. His work could not have been done without the complicity of Islamists everywhere. Nor could his last decade of misrule have taken place had Bush I and Powell chosen to advance to Baghdad rather than leave the work undone. On September 11th Americans paid very dearly for this error. Ordinary Iraqis also paid a heavy price for their complicity in allowing his regime to come to power. Will those who shared in his crimes ever be brought to justice of any sort, or will they end up on the payroll of the new government, as did so many old Nazis?
Symbols are important. The capture and imprisonment (and perhaps, if we are lucky, execution) of Saddam Hussein is a good first step. It is quite possible, though, that just as the war against Communism required that justice be delayed in Germany, the wider conflict against Islamists will necessitate some sort of amnesty, declared or otherwise, in Iraq. While this may be necessary, it would still be a shame.
After reading Mark Steyn, capturing Saddam Hussein alive rather than lobbing in that grenade looks better and better. After all, Yasser, Kim and all the Saudi princes would probably prefer death to having pictures of their delousing on international newspapers.
In one of the slyest digs at the misfortunes of Saddam Hussein, the Jerusalem Post has run an article about the sadness felt by Palestinians and their leadership over the falll of the Iraqi dictator. The caption to a picture of Yasser Arafat and Saddam holding hands reads: "We'll always have Paris." Amazing how four liittle words can sum up the unholy alliance of the French, the PLO and the Baathists while contrasting it with Humphrey Bogart and World War II"s resistance to fascism.
The capture of Saddam Hussein is an important breakthrough for the US army, since it is a bit embarassing for one man to be able to hide from the best and most expensive military and intelligence apparatus in the world. It is no doubt heartening to the Iraqi people who may well have feared his eventual return to power, although the predictions that his capture will end the resistance strike me as somewhat premature, given the close connections between anti-American terrorists inIraq and their brethren in Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.
In terms of politics, though, I don't see how this makes a difference at all within the USA. Those who supported the war were not deterred by the failure to find Hussein before this weekend. Those who opposed the war are even now finding ways to explain how no matter how good the outcome for Iraq it was still unjustified to go to war. And since we will all have to listen to the EUnuchs explain why the death penalty is wrong in any case, it would have been greatly preferable to find him dead.
As Russia becomes the latest country to deal with the atrocities inflicted on Israelis for years, the international press becomes ever more circumspect about who is blowing up whom. This article, for instance, manages to make no reference at all to the religion of the bombers in question. Note to editors: pretending that Islam is not part of the problem will not, in fact, make it go away.
Excessive viewing of the news and any "topical" drama can cause extreme annoyance in those who don't support every tenet of our modern theocracy. In recent days there have been news stories, Law and Order episodes and a David E. Kelley rerun all of which imply that if the Vatican were to abolish celibacy, the horrific abuse of preteen boys that has marked the last few decades would not occur again. Proponents of this theory are under the impression that men who would otherwise choose monogamous, consensual sex with adult women will, if denied that option by their own choosing, resort to raping scores of young boys. In what alternate universe does this make any sense? They can't have it both ways: if homosexuality is inborn, then allowing priests to marry adult women will do nothing to curb their tendencies in other directions. If, on the other hand, they believe that homosexuality or pederasty can be induced by a given situation, they must take seriously the possibility that it can be corrected by other situations. The homosexual lobby has, of course, spent much energy insisting that this is impossible, and that any attempt to cure, treat or reorient homosexuals is bigotry masquerading as compassion. It would be interesting to see ultraliberal Catholics reconcile these two positions.