Michael Oren, the Israeli Ambassador to the u.s., just got a spear shoved through him by Stephen Colbert and he hasn’t even noticed it yet. Tonight Colbert got Oren to appear on a comedy show, to come onstage as the punchline of comedy routine, and to yuk it up with a comedian – all while defending the Israeli government’s recent acts of piracy and murder in international waters. Was this deliberate sabotage by Colbert? My money’s on yes.
Tag Archives | Terror
Rothbard on Dukakis
In addition to what you can find at Liberty magazine’s official site, there’s a trove of back issues of Liberty on Mises.org. (CHT Jesse Walker, who has a good labortarian piece on pp. 53-57 here.)
It’s been pointed out that “G. Duncan Williams,” the pseudonymous author of a sort-of-pro-Dukakis piece about the Bush-Dukakis presidential race on pp. 12-14 of the November 1988 Liberty, was actually Murray N. Rothbard, not yet in full paleo mode. (In addition to Rothbard’s distinctive style, having the same number of letters per name could be a clue.)
Ah, memories. I also wrote a sort-of-pro-Dukakis piece that year; it was my declaration of independence from the Republican Party. (Rothbard’s farewell to the GOP had obviously come much earlier.)
A Blast From the Past
Literally, unfortunately. World War II has been over for 65 years but Allied bombs are still killing people.
The Logick of Kings
The Israeli government explains that it had to kill innocent people because they defended themselves when attacked.
Fun With Mommy
Last night I watched, on and off, most of a 1928 John Ford silent movie called Four Sons. It wasn’t a great movie (it’s gaggingly sentimental, for one thing), but it was surprisingly anti-war and anti-government for a Memorial Day movie.
It’s about an elderly Bavarian woman whose four sons all go off to fight in World War I, three on the German side and one, who has emigrated to America, on the American side. The three who fight for Germany are all killed one after another (the third dying in the arms of the fourth), but despite this the mother is bullied and treated as a pariah by the local military authorities (played with entertaining villainy) because the fourth son is a “traitor.”
After the war her only surviving son invites her to come live with him in America, but the u.s. immigration authorities refuse to let her in because the bereaved and traumatised woman can’t pass the literacy test.
The ending doesn’t make much sense – panicked and bewildered, she wanders away from Ellis Island and onto the streets of Manhattan (how she “wanders” across New York Harbor is never explained, unless she is even more saintly than she appears), and when a policeman learns her story he implausibly delivers her to her son rather than back to Ellis Island; cue happy-ish ending.
The German military brass are portrayed as treating civilians with contempt and taking petty revenge on them for tiny slights; the American authorities seem nicer, but try to keep the woman from her surviving son anyway, explaining that they’re just following orders. The war is portrayed as utterly pointless. So, all in all, not a bad Memorial Day movie.
War and Remembrance
There are two ways to think about Memorial Day.
We could think about it as a day to celebrate the state and its wars. Most Americans do seem to regard it as a pro-war holiday; the other day I actually heard someone on tv saying, in reference to the three-day holiday, “Thank a veteran for the fact that you have the freedom to take a day off.” (Right, because if Vietnam had conquered the u.s. like it was all set to, they wouldn’t have given us any public holidays.)
But a day to commemorate those who fell in war is, properly speaking, an anti-war holiday, to honour the victims who have been drafted or otherwise conned into becoming cannon fodder for the squabbles among the ruling classes of the earth.
The true Memorial Day slogan should be: “Never Again.”