Egoism
Individualism
Sovereignty
Splendor

(These ideas are explicated in this sloppy manifesto)

Saturday, June 05, 2004
 
Ronald Reagan, dead at 93



What is the power of principle? By the force of an indomitable will, he single-handedly dismantled the Soviet Union. He gave us much better than we deserved, and he deserved far more honor than ever we gave him. Requiescat in pace.


Friday, June 04, 2004
 
Waking up with fleas...

Billy Beck cited this Opinion Journal piece:
Before Pearl Harbor but long after the character of Hitlerism was clear--after the Nuremberg laws, the Kristallnacht pogrom, the establishment of Dachau and the Gestapo--American intellectuals tended to be dead against the U.S. joining Britain's war on Hitler.

Today's students learn (sometimes) about right-wing isolationists like Charles Lindbergh and the America Firsters. They are less likely to read documents like this, which appeared in Partisan Review (the U.S. intelligentsia's No. 1 favorite mag) in fall 1939, signed by John Dewey, William Carlos Williams, Meyer Schapiro and many more of the era's leading lights. "The last war showed only too clearly that we can have no faith in imperialist crusades to bring freedom to any people. Our entry into the war, under the slogan of 'Stop Hitler!' would actually result in the immediate introduction of totalitarianism over here. .Ê.Ê. The American masses can best help [the German people] by fighting at home to keep their own liberties." The intelligentsia acted on its convictions. "By one means or another," Diana Trilling later wrote of this period, "most of the intellectuals of our acquaintance evaded the draft."

Why rake up these Profiles in Disgrace? Because in the Iraq War era they have a painfully familiar ring.
Communists are ever thus. The difference is that in 1939 they didn't have allegedly libertarian lap dogs to yap out their propaganda.





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