2,307 words
This is the savagery of, that we only remember from the Nazi crimes in the Holocaust. — Benjamin Netanyahu
Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death. — Don DeLillo, White Noise (more…)
2,224 words
Norman Solomon
War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine
New York: The New Press, 2023
See also: The American Regime, here & here
Norman Solomon is one of those rare, honest, old-time liberals who genuinely questions the narratives of the mainstream media and the foreign policy establishment. He was a delegate for Bernie Sanders in 2016. (more…)
2,730 words
I know a kind person who has achieved a lot. We first met 40 years ago, although for many years we were not in touch. Then we remade contact, and now I don’t think we’re friends anymore. He found my political incorrectness hard to bear. (more…)
Col. Robert McCormick during the First World War.
Col. Robert McCormick during the First World War.
1,945 words
Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)
Military mid-level management
McCormick’s military career couldn’t be replicated today. In today’s United States military, either a college student is recruited to take classes in military leadership, or an enlisted man is selected to attend officer candidate school. Then, after 12 years of service, he may be promoted to Major. At no time during those 12 years can the soldier leave the service, and he must serve in a series of specific jobs. Any deviation from the norm means no promotion. (more…)
2,406 words
Jeffrey M. Bale & Tamir Bar-On
Fighting the Last War: Confusion, Partisanship, and Alarmism in the Literature on the Radical Right
Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2022
Professors Jeffrey M. Bale and Tamir Bar-On have taken a look at the response to the increasingly vocal political Right in the Western world. What they found is that the establishment has used the specter of fascism as a shadow to box against since 1945. Politics is the application of the friend/enemy distinction, so shadowboxing against a phantom enemy is a good way to go about domestic politics without stumbling into a civil war. (more…)
1,680 words
Whenever the self-proclaimed “progressives” lose a power play they suddenly experience a collective sphincter muscle collapse and react as if they’re teetering on the brink of an apocalypse, as was in stark evidence after Donald Trump derailed Hillary Clinton’s “The Corruption Express” headed for the White House Station. The Hollywood idiots, of course, were apoplectic. The outpouring and duration of mass hysteria in the aftermath of the 2016 election were unprecedented.
We’re still feeling the aftershock (more…)