Castorblog

Under the Impact of the Continuing Horror in the Middle East, Dexter's Natural Goodness Shows Signs of Coarsening

It is not to my credit but I think this story is funny. Just how stupid do you have to be to try and steal a suicide bomber's suicide bomb?

Dulce et decorum? Not quite

Unlike other parts of the globe, the West has had little time for a cult of death. It was General George Patton who said "no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country." We do not have a hierarchy of heroism with the dead -- martyrs or otherwise -- at the top; we honour heroic deeds whether those who perform them live, like Billy Bishop or Tommy Prince, or die, like Andy Mynarsky. But to be a hero, living or dead, one must have chosen to participate in the drama.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian who opposed Naziism, knew about the importance of choice. When World War II broke out Bonhoeffer was in New York where his friends congratulated him on his good fortune in escaping the conflict. He replied that he had to return to Germany, saying "I shall have no right to participate in the reconstruction of the Christian life in Germany after the war if I did not share in the trials of this time with my people ... Christians in Germany face the terrible alternative of willing the defeat of their nation in order that civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying civilization. I know which of these alternatives I must choose. But I cannot make that choice in security." He went back to his country, became involved in the Underground, smuggling Jews to safety and participating in a plot to assassinate Hitler. His reward was to die in a Nazi death chamber in the last month of the war.

Choice was important to Pat Tillman, a defensive back with the Arizona Cardinals of the NFL. Though he had a $3.6 million contract to play football, he quit professional sports in 2002 and joined the United States Army Rangers. He declined interviews about this remarkable act, considering his actions to be the normal sort of patriotism that citizenship required in time of war. On Thursday his patrol searching for al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan was ambushed and he died of his wounds.

The next time you hear the phrase "sport hero", don't imagine it applies to the tattooed, steroid-pumped poseurs on your television set.

March for some women's lives

The radical feminist lobby in the USA is famous for framing its politics in sweeping terms. Most recently, they are organizing a March For Women's Lives, to protest the just-over-the-horizon crackdown on women's rights that they swear will eliminate abortion, birth control, and probably put women back into corsets. But what group do they truly represent?

Half of the babies aborted in the US are female (possibly more, since communities that use abortion to choose a baby's sex skew in favour of male progeny.) So they don't speak on behalf of all those who have XX chromosomes. Perhaps they represent all those who have been born, who are biologically female? Well, they are generally opposed to traditional marriage as compared to "partnerships" and common-law relationships, which greatly increase the risk of girls growing up fatherless, with the attendant elevated risk of being molested, raped, and pregnant out of wedlock in their teens. So they're not working on behalf of female children, particularly. How about all adult women? Again, the feminist lobby opposes tax reforms that would make it easier for women who so desire to raise stay home with their children, a sizeable proportion of married women with children.

How about women too old to be bearing children? By favouring no fault divorce and a culture of promiscuity and serial monogamy, feminism helps drive many women into poverty in their later years, since the husbands who in other cultures would have supported them, and whose insurance would have subsidized their medical care, are now shacking up with younger women. And by favouring massive levels of immigration, leftist feminists flood the market with an oversupply of unskilled labourers, thereby lowering wages in traditional pink-collar ghettoes by which single women in the past had supported themselves.

How about women outside the USA? Surely American feminists must be delighted that the US military shut down the Taliban, who tortured women who dared wear nailpolish or learn to read. And they must be overjoyed that Saddam's salaried rape squads are no longer in operation. Strangely, this is not the case.

So, the women who will be Marching for Women's Lives take your rights very seriously indeed, provided you're an American woman over 18, not interested in a family of your own, well-educated and well-remunerated, and in a strong financial position for the next several decades. This isn't such a large constituency. It certainly is a noisy one.

A Politician Goes into a Jewelry Store...

Actually this joke has nothing to do with Svend Robinson. My mother sent me this piece of Mad Cow drollery. (And that makes both parents mentioned in the blog this week.)

Is it just me or does anyone else find it amazing that our government can track a cow, born in Alberta almost three years ago, right to the stall where she now sleeps in the state of Washington? They can also track her calves to their stalls but are unable to locate 1 million illegal aliens wandering around our country.

I think the solution is to give every illegal alien a cow.

Martin's Next Mistake

According to news reports today, the Liberals intend to run the next election campaign of the basis of their defence of Canadian values. The script that is now being tried out will claim that Liberals represent all that is decent about Canada while the Conservatives are "anti-Canadian." I sincerely hope this is true; I would love to see Martin and his minions trying to defend the following values which they made their own over the past decade:

• a contempt for our armed forces
• an inability to distinguish between the public purse and the Liberal Party slush-fund
• a cynical immigration policy that has thrown our borders open to terrorists
• an increasing contempt toward traditional values on matters of drugs, sex, religion and crime

This sort of campaign makes good sense only if the Liberals are preparing to be the junior partner in a minority government with the NDP. Roll on, election fever!

Spanish for "Coward" is pronounced "Za-pa-te-ro"

Eighty-nine years ago this week, on 22 April 1915, the German army used poison gas for the first time in warfare. Contrary to the Hague Convention to which they were a signatory, the Germans unleashed chlorine gas on the Allied lines at Ypres in Flanders. French and Algerian troops fled from the choking green cloud and the Canadian First Division entrenched nearby had to cover the gap in the Allied line. Had our ancestors not stood and fought through the gas the Allies might have suffered a significant defeat.

I bring this to our readers' attention not just because it is one of the most famous of a long series of battles in which Canadians died defending Old Europe but because it shows what happens when an ally turns and runs -- it exposes those who do stay to even more danger.

Thus, the decision of new socialist Prime Minister Zapatero to pull Spanish forces from Iraq harms not only Spain's security but it weakens the position of the Americans, British, Poles, Australians, Portuguese, etc., who remain behind to fight. This sort of betrayal of one's NATO and EU partners has usually been reserved for the French. Can there be room in Europe for two such poltroons?

They won't die in Iraq, but they're happy to die arguing over Iraq

Three UN policemen in Kosovo have apparently died after an argument about the war in Iraq led to gunfire. Since the UN has declined to stay in Iraq to improve infrastructure, judging it too dangerous, and failed utterly to prevent bloodshed in Africa, Rwanda, Israel, or anywhere else it's gotten involved, it's delightful to know that some things, to the UN foot soldier, are indeed worth dying for.

We fear change, part 87

A recent rash of scare-ads, funded by the moderate, centrist and balanced Canadian Labour Congress, has hit the radio waves. One in particular laments the possibility of letting the private sector enter health care, and says sternly that we mustn't Americanize medicare.

Look, there's no question that in the USA, there are some people (although far fewer than we are led to believe) who get sick or even die because they don't get the healthcare they need, as they can't afford it. In Canada, there are some people (far more than we are led to believe) who get sick or even die because they don't get the healthcare they need, as their goverment can't provide it and they're not allowed to pay for it themselves. It has yet to be explained why the first is a national shame and a catastrophe while the second is entirely acceptable. My theory is that socialists don't object to people suffering as long as everybody else is suffering just as much: in other words, equality of outcome. They're not offended by the thousands waiting months for necessary treatment in Canada; they're offended by the well-insured or well-off getting the same treatment immediately through the private sector.

America's health care system isn't perfect; neither is Britain's NHS, or Singapore's MSA system. By most measures, they're all better than ours, though, and copying some aspects of one or all of them isn't likely to make our system much worse. But the CLC's jejeune scare tactics will likely work; nothing makes a mild-mannered Canadian squeak in terror like the phrase "American style health care." It may be a crumbling, disgraceful Third World medical system, but at least it's ours.

You can't spell Schadenfreude without, well, most of the letters in Svend Robinson

This might not be a great day for Canadian conservatism, but at least it's a very very bad day for hyperliberal, Judeo-Christian-hating Canadian socialism. No doubt there are endless one-liners waiting to be honed about gay politicians, diamond rings (are they still forever?) property, and theft, but I'm too tired to think of them right now. The traditional toast may be "Confusion to our enemies" but for the time being, arrests for minor crimes will do just as well.

Here's to you, Mr Robinson

I thought I was too classy to make fun of the plight of departing-for-now MP Svend Robinson but it turns out I'm not quite that saintly. I will refrain from mocking the risible-on-any-other-occasion Svend in his moment of crisis but I just have to ask: what is it with the kleptomania of NDP MPs? My father, possessor of a long and keen political memory, reminded me of the sad case of Lorne Nystrom, the long-sitting Saskatchewan socialist drone who pocketed some lens cleaner without paying in 1990. He was acquitted of shoplifting charges and still sits in the House today. Both Nystrom and Robinson were elected federally long ago as very young men; neither has much experience of paid employment away from the public trough. Does this explain their difficulty in distinguishing between their property and someone else's? Or can it be that, denied the right to pilfer the national purse the way Liberal MPS can, Opposition members must turn to small-scale private scavenging?

Violence in the Passion

Having not yet seen the movie, I shall rise above the standard set at Princeton recently when several people who had not even seen the movie spoke out against it. This won't prevent me from addressing a criticism from the Right, as it were, on the current letters page on Mark Steyn's personal website (scroll down to "License to Kill").

The letter writer suggests that the level of violence in The Passion of the Christ will essentially innoculate the American public against conservative criticism of excessive violence and gore in secular movies. On the face of it this isn't a bad point, and in fact I'd be willing to bet a fair amount of money that one of the reviews of Kill Bill vol. 2, opening this weekend, will somehow reference Gibson's movie and use it to justify or excoriate Tarantino for making violent movies. But to suggest that the violence should have been toned down in The Passion is to completely miss the point.

Most of the 4-letter expletives had, until ten or fifteen years ago, considerable power to shock. Today, when they serve as adjective, noun and verb, frequently in the same sentence, in the vocabulary of the average 8 year old, they have lost almost all of that power. One reason why thoughtful historians and commentators object to calling any massacre or atrocity a "holocaust" is because the more commonly the word is used, the more it loses its power. If PETA can talk about a Holocaust of the Chickens, how bad can the real Holocaust have been? If cranky serving staff are called "soup Nazis", we lose track of why the actual Nazis were so evil.

By my admittedly puny understanding of Christian theology, what is significant about the death of Jesus is that it was undertaken voluntarily. That a man should choose, for the redemption of others, to suffer in such a gruesome and prolonged manner, is what makes the Crucifixion a pivotal event. Jesus wasn't killed painlessly by lethal injection, having first been sedated. The very purpose of the Stations of the Cross is to remind the faithful how deeply their saviour suffered. So it is peculiar indeed to see this movie criticized for portraying too faithfully the horrors of scourging and crucifixion.

The reason why many object to the glorification of violence in pop culture is that it cheapens it in the eyes of those who behold movies and television. Watching heroes of TV dramas, or even Mel Gibson in the Lethal Weapon movies, take prolonged, severe beatings and bounce back, relatively unscathed, complete with a witty rejoinder, distracts from the fragility of human life, and promotes the perception of assaults and murders as thrilling, or as great examples of special effects, rather than as horrible crimes. The problem isn't that The Passion will lead to greater violence on big and small screens; the problem is that violence in popular culture has blinded people to the true horror of human, or divine, suffering. In a better society, gross profanities would still shock people, nobody would talk about a holocaust of livestock, and the violence in The Passion would cause introspection and reverence for human life, rather than raising the bar still higher for cinematic torture scenes. If it does not, the fault rests not with Gibson but with Hollywood and those who consume its products, which means it rests with just about everybody. We shouldn't ask Mel Gibson to make a less violent rendition of The Passion; we should ask everybody else to tone down the fictional violence, that the real thing not lose its power to sadden and appal us.

Not as pithy, biting and insightful as Castorblog ...

... the Western Standard's new blog might be worth an occasional read. The reincarnated magazine isn't perfect, but it is the duty of all Liberal-hating Canadians to hope and pray that it succeeds, if only to break the monopoly of the Aspers (commonly known as the Graspers, I learned on my last trip to Ottawa) on media that is ever-so-microscopically-to-the-right of the Liberal Party.

Bush's lesson to Yasser

An increasing number of Jews and Christians are of the opinion that Bush endorsed Sharon's peace plan because it was the morally correct thing to do. Dubya has proven to be unlike most politicians in that he isn't controlled by opinion polls, least of all those conducted by rabid anti-Semite, or as he would put it anti-Zionist, Zogby. My money is on Bush having realized that neutrality between Israel and the Palestinians is on a par with neutrality between the US Marines and Al-Qaeda. Those of us who see this are glad that Bush now sees it too. Those of us who don't, if they haven't been persuaded by Oslo and its aftermath, likely never will.

The realpolitik explanation, though, and one more palatable to the less religiously inclined in his administration, is that terrorists and their bankers and pedagogues must not only pay for terrorism but must be seen to pay. For over 30 years, Arabs led by Arafat and his cronies have committed atrocity after atrocity against not only Israelis but also Jewish non-Israelis, American citizens, and Arab Christians. Now, two things very dear to him, the sanctity of the 1949 armistice line and the "right of return", have been taken off the table, God willing for a generation or more. I doubt that we can teach Islamists that it is wrong to shoot at school buses, to explode nightclubs, to ambush diplomatic convoys, to disguise bombers as pregnant women in need of medical attention, to torture to death American journalists in front of rolling cameras, or any other of the tactics in their ever more depraved bag of tricks. More feasibly, we can teach them that to do so will be very costly. Perhaps when Palestinians become tired of picking up the tab racked up by Yasser et al, they will install leaders worthy of the name, and worthy of concessions.

Felix, quem faciunt aliena pericula cautum

Here is the full text of Bin Laden's truce offer. Once one peers past the florid rhetoric with which the world's most famous troglodyte ornaments his speech, one can see some real cleverness. His maneuver aims to separate Europe from America and Israel by appealing to frightened Europeans over the heads of their governments -- a tactic that may well work in the light of recent Spanish spinelessness.

Moreover, the analysis offered by Bin Laden is exactly that of Noam Chomsky (Halliburton, big media, Zionists and armament manufacturers drive the war effort) and can be seen as appealing to the American left as well. What may surprise some is the contempt displayed toward the United Nations. (For another reason to despise the UN try this piece of arrant nonsense by a former UN official in Iraq.)

Help Me Here

I can see why Ariel Sharon was grinning from ear to ear, having at last achieved American support for land grabs on the West Bank. But, someone please tell me, what did the US gain from this enormous concession? It will only provide more ammunition for those who say that the Israeli tail is wagging the dog and make American foreign policy even more hostage to the Israeli irredentist wing. Can this really be a pitch for Jewish votes in November? It will be interesting to hear the nuanced reply which John Kerry is even now being forced to prepare.

At last, the break France was looking for

Osama Bin Laden offers a truce with Europe. Can a Nobel Prize be far behind?

So absurd that it speaks for itself.

Proof that Canadian politics and National Geographic magazine, if not popular culture as a whole, are beyond parody.

Pay no attention to the imam behind the curtain

The federal government announces it will start taking Jew-hating violence seriously. Good news? Perhaps, but only if Canada doesn't follow the example of the European Union, which recently sheleved a report on racial violence that found the vast majority of antisemitic incidents to be perpetrated by young Arabs. Wouldn't want to make them angry, after all.

Another word from our correspondent in Vichy

In analysis of current events in the Middle East, the French newspaper Le Monde opines thusly: "The Iraqis are scared. They ask themselves every day which American blunder is going to again aggravate the situation...The great error of the Americans is to not have understood that Iraqi society could straighten out the postwar a thousand times better than they."

Dexter yields to no man in his respect for the acuity of Parisian political analysis but he feels that an exchange from the 1942 movie Casablanca may put things in context. A Gestapo officer speaking to a French policeman dismisses the significance of American night-club owner Rick Blaine:

Major Strasser: You give him credit for too much cleverness. My
impression was that he's just another blundering American.
Captain Renault: We musn't underestimate American blundering. I was
with them when they blundered into Berlin in 1919.

One might say in reply to Le Monde that the great error of Frenchmen is not to have understood that their time in the spotlight expired in 1940. A world-weary sophistication amid a cloud of cigarette smoke is no substitute for principle and courage. Just as Jean-Paul Sartre sat out the Occupation scribbling about his existential angst, France in the last 60 years has abdicated responsibility for guarding the civilization that they once did so much to build. One only wishes that they would refrain from back-stabbing those who are still on duty.

And now with an update from the Munich Conference, here's Ms Neville Chamberlain

In what has to be the most foolish remark in a squalid and undistinguished career former Labour cabinet minister Mo Mowlam has called for negotiations with Osama Bin Laden. Britain and the USA, said Mowlam, must abandon their hard line against terrorism or risk perpetual war.

I am not opposed to negotiating with one's enemies, even those as repellent as Mr Bin Laden and his fellow cave dwellers. That is, after all, how conflicts get settled. But it astonishes me that Mowlam thinks there is anything one could give Bin Laden (or Adolf Hitler or Genghis Khan or a rabid wolverine) that would buy a lasting peace. The US could withdraw from Saudi Arabia, every Zionist between the Jordan and the Mediterranean could be dangling from a lamp-post and the Mad Mullah could be restored to power in Kabul and it would still not satisfy a fraction of radical Islam's agenda. The nice folks who crash airliners into office buildings want all existing Muslim governments overthrown and all Jews eradicated plus the return of Spain, Portugal, Greece, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Albania, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Slovenia, Hungary and the Crimea to the True Faith as a FIRST STEP toward extending the Muslim umma to include the entire planet.

It is one thing to talk with bombers who can be bought off with greater regional autonomy for their ethnic group and another to think one can dicker with killers on a universalist mission. It is particularly sad and frightening to think that the nation that once produced a Churchill will provide ready listeners for a Mowlam.

Window on a weltanschauung

In a ceremony marking the tenth anniversary of the Rwanda massacres, the president of that country uses the opportunity to rail against the rest of the world for allowing it to happen. There is some truth to this; it is becoming increasingly clear that the Clinton administration knew of the impending disaster but did not consider it worth their time. A prominent Canadian general has essentially gone mad from what he witnessed there, and also from his impotence to stop it in the face of US and UN indifference. But for the leader of the country that perpetrated this massacre, as compared to merely failing to stop it, to blame the outside world and primarily the West sheds much light on the failure of Africa to join the 21st century, or for that matter the 18th.

Colonialism brought the Third World many blessings. It is ironic that Third World activists, who usually live comfortable lives in Canada and the US, use such bitter invective when denouncing the very Western civilization that makes their dissent possible. Because of imperialism they survived to adulthood, instead of dying of a simple infection, or of diarrhea; because of imperialism they were educated in the language and rhetoric of the developed world and hence can participate in a dialogue about the evils of imperialism; what human rights are observed in the Third World have come about not due to an inherent African, Indian or Arab awareness of the rights of man but rather from their exposure to Western philosophy and morals. It is indisputable though that because of colonialism an entire chunk of the world cannot get beyond their self-image of dependence and clienthood upon Europe and America.

Thus the reaction of African leaders to their AIDS epidemic is not to encourage behaviour that would prevent the disease, nor to modernize their economies and infrastructure so money goes to hospitals and schools instead of to their cousins and to Mercedes dealerships, it is to insist that the drug companies leading the fight against AIDS-related problems provide their drugs free of charge to the Dark Continent. The African response to racism is not a renewed commitment to colour-blindness and a reverence for humanity in all its varieties, but the sponsorship of filthmongering such as the Durban conference, and the clamoring for blood money from, chiefly, the USA, which provides a better standard of living for blacks than anywhere else in the world, including their putative homeland. In the face of food shortages, southern Africa has not sought the expertise and help of farmers of European ancestry, who are the only people to farm successfully in the area, it has seized their land and driven them back to Europe.

To the extent that all mankind has obligations to one another, the West must share in the healing and development of Africa. But the failure of Africans to develop democratic government, to respect human rights, and to inculcate an ethic of civic responsibility is primarily just that, an African failure. Until Africa grasps this reality and stops reflexively blaming Whitey, nothing substantial will ever change there.

Froggie-bashing Chapter 12

Since keenly observing the high points of Gallic foreign policy is never out of season here at Castorblog, the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide gives us good reason to link to this BBC report which connects the French government and its military advisers to the murderous Hutu militia.

Just to refresh your memory the French are those people who put up such a spirited defence against Nazi Germany, who secretly promoted the destruction of Canadian federalism, who bombed the "Rainbow Warrior" and who were too highly principled to take part in the overthrow of Baathist tyranny. The sum of their contribution to twentieth century civilization lies in Babar, Asterix and Albert Camus (and even he was an Algerian). And, to be fair. some very attractive actresses. Nice pastries too. OK, and Philippe Noiret and Gerard Depardieu (but only with his clothes ON). And, perhaps best of all, the Protestant village of Le Chambon that saved 5,000 Jewish children in the midst of World War II. These are far outweighed by the Milice, Vichy, Dien Bien Phu, Gide, Breton, de Gaulle, the OAS, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, a corrupt foreign policy, the European Common Agricutural Policy, the additions to the Louvre, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstructionism, cultural studies and runny cheese. And let's never forget: John Kerry.

Well, that and the absence of burkas

David Frum, whose work I normally admire, overheats his rhetoric just a tad. By virtue of oil reserves and sympathy for Islamofascists, he considers us the Saudis of the North, saying that there is "one crucial difference though between the House of Saud and the Liberal Party of Canada: Canadians have the power to rid themselves of this discredited bunch at the ballot box." It's an interesting little blog entry, if one can see through the histrionics.

The Value of Appeasement

At the Munich Conference in 1938, Britain and France broke faith with an ally and betrayed Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany. "Peace in our time!", crowed Neville Chamberlain. The next year Germany attacked Poland and began World War II.

In Spain in 2004 the Socialist government, fearful of another Islamic terrorist attack, announced they were pulling their troops out of Iraq. Two weeks later the Islamicists repaid this cowardice with another bomb on a train line and blowing up an apartment block.

Having learned that the good-will of a terrorist is a flimsy thing, will the Spanish now accelerate their pulllout or will they have their backbones reinserted? My money is on the former.

We will fight them on the beaches but not, apparently, in the local parks

A statue destroyed by German bombers 60 years ago is at last restored and ready to be returned to the park where it used to stand. It will not, though, lest local practitioners of the Religion of Peace consider it another root cause of savagery. A nation that at one point was defined by its willingness to stand alone against great evil no longer has the courage necessary to admit that there is such a thing as evil, let alone look it in the eye. George W. Bush is far from flawless, but he is the closest thing to Churchill currently on offer, and this is less a reflection of Bush than of Europe.

Somewhere, right now perhaps, Hedi Fry is setting fire to a cross

Fake hate crimes, a growth industry?