nu-spengler is ed anger of the blog ra

Putin understands how to exercise power. Unlike Iraq, the restive Muslim province of Chechnya now nestles comfortably in Putin's palm, albeit with about half the people it had a decade ago. Russian troops killed between 35,000 and 100,000 civilians in the first Chechen war of 1994-96, and half a million were driven from their homes, totaling about half the population. But that is not what pacified Chechnya. Putin bribed and bullied Chechnyan clans to do Russia's dirty work for it, showing himself a master at the game of divide-and-conquer. Working from a position of weakness, Russia's president is the closest the modern world comes to the insidious strategic genius of a Cardinal Richelieu.

That is the sort of strategic thinking America needs. So my endorsement for the next president of the United States goes to Vladimir Putin.

a thread for me and goole

haha yesss

As Magdi Allam recounted , on his road to conversion the challenge that Pope Benedict XVI offered to Islam in his September 2006 address at Regensburg was "undoubtedly the most extraordinary and important encounter in my decision to convert". Osama bin Laden recently accused Benedict of plotting a new crusade against Islam, and instead finds something far more threatening: faith the size of a mustard seed that can move mountains. Before Benedict's election, I summarized his position as "I have a mustard seed and I'm not afraid to use it." Now the mustard seed has earned pride of place in global affairs.

Magdi Allam tells us that he has found the true God and forsaken an Islam that he regards as inherently violent. Magdi Allam has a powerful voice as deputy editor of Italy's newspaper of record, Corriere della Sera, and a bestselling author. For years he was the exemplar of "moderate Islam" in Europe, and now he has decided that Islam cannot be "moderate".

Since September 2001, the would-be wizards of Western strategy have tried to conjure an "Islamic reformation", or a "moderate Islam", or "Islamic democracy". None of this matters now, for as Magdi Allam tells us, the matter on the agenda is not to persuade Muslims to act like liberal Westerners, but instead to convince them to cease to be Muslims.

From this great suffering arise two genres of American popular culture, the Gone With the Wind ilk of Civil War epic, and the "Get Rich or Die Tryin'" brand of gangsta tale. Both try to take the edge off the revulsion and placate the dishonored dead by turning them into folk-heroes. That is understandable, but also unfortunate, for America still has a great deal of killing left to do around the world, and might as well get used to it.

Germany's President Horst Koehler has denounced the world financial market as a "monster" using "highly complex financial instruments" to make "massive leveraged investments with minimal capital". Koehler, formerly head of the International Monetary Fund, seems perplexed about the causes of the present crisis, but I can explain them in a way any German can understand. Derivatives are like sausages. You take the low-quality parts of the pig that you don't want to look at while you are eating them, and grind them up into a package that seems more appetizing.

Like the feckless Kung Fu Panda, America's youth think slacking is an entitlement and that in two easy lessons they will be masters of the universe. Sorry, dudes, things changed last Friday. Instead of a four-year party at university, you will work during the day, go to night school, and save for a dozen years to buy your first house. You will not complain about boring jobs and oppressive bosses, you will feel grateful to have the work - as will your parents, who will have to postpone retirement for 10 years.

Remember that it costs much, much more if an outside contractor arranges your civil war. It's always cheaper to do it yourself. During the Thirty Years' War of 1618-1648, the German princes let the French Cardinal Richelieu take charge. The bill came to more than half the population of Central Europe. (But of German peasants). Then you can pay with a Czech!

Both parties to the Spanish civil war of 1936-1939 invited in their own contractors. Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin fought it out to the last drop of Spanish blood. In all do-it-yourself projects, it helps if your neighbor has done similar work and can give you some pointers. I am not promising you an overnight repair job, of course, but the point is that the sooner you tackle the problem, the sooner you will be done. If you neglect the problem, though, there's no way of telling how long the job will last.

If you let your lawn go to seed or let your dog bark all night, your neighbors will become impatient and compel you to take action. The same applies to civil wars. If you don't do it yourself, the neighbors may do it for you, and end up damaging your property.

It's no use to say, "They can't get all of us!" They don't need to get all of you. Consider that the American criminal justice system has incarcerated or otherwise controlled one out of every three black Americans between the ages of 20 and 30. That is nothing less than the ruin of a generation, but it correlates to a big decline in the rate of commission of violent crimes.

If America is willing to exterminate large numbers of its own discontented population, don't expect any compunction when it comes to you. In a war of attrition, the side with more resources and more killing capacity always wins. If you make yourself sufficiently obnoxious, the Americans will take the leash of the Israelis and let them sort you out, however long it takes.

pay with a czech! I love his bad puns

"the day the slacker died" is an all-time fave

America might be the first country in recorded history whose culture celebrates not only indolence but also the sheer absence of ability. Byronic loafing is the birthright of genius, but slacking has become the entitlement of every young American. American popular culture puts a special premium on doing nothing, which is what the protagonists of such popular television series as Friends, Sex in the City, The Office and Seinfeld did. Aristocrats throughout history loafed because they could afford to. Until very recently, so could Americans. That has come to a sudden and ignoble end, on which more later.

Contrary to the impression of some readers, I am an admirer of the United States, and something of an aficionado of American history. America's Civil War remains one of my favorite wars, in part because it is one of the few wars literally fought to the death. It ended only when the rebel Southern states no longer could put enough men into the line to fight. Among modern wars in the Western world, only Europe's Thirty Years War stands comparison. Fully one-quarter of all military-age men in the slave states died in the Civil War, which President Lincoln (here the English historian Paul Johnson is correct) pursued as a religious crusade.

As he made clear in his Second Inaugural address, now chiseled into the wall of his memorial, he saw the devastation as divine judgment. Somewhere Lincoln remarked that in every Southern town there existed a class of men fit only to hunt, dance, gamble and duel, and that there existed no solution for such a problem except to kill them all. I suspect Lincoln knew all along how horrible the resolution of the conflict would be. Had Americans had an inkling of what lay in store for them, someone doubtless would have assassinated Lincoln before rather than after the war. They would have permitted the South to secede, and slavery would have spread like cancer from the Mason-Dixon Line to Tierra del Fuego. It was America's (and humanity's) great good luck that Northerners deluded themselves that they could put down the rebellion in a matter of weeks. Once into the war, they found the courage to pursue it to the bitter end.

America now has entered another war from which, if they could envision the hardships and sacrifices ahead, Americans would shrink back in horror. It is better, I suppose, for them not to know. The truth will not make you free, contrary to St John (and the lobby at CIA headquarters). Oftentimes it will scare you silly. If the letterbag at Asia Times Online reflects the opinions of well-informed Americans, we have nothing to worry about.

love it whenever he invokes the civil war as a justification for genocide

ha i just notice what board this is on

inmates run asylum now, all hope lost

The resentful country folk who formed the first audience for the now-dominant style in American music turn up in literature as noble, suffering peasants fighting for a traditional way of life, as in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Nothing could be further from the truth. American farmers were migratory entrepreneurs who did well during World War I, when agricultural exports surged, and very badly during the 1920s, when exports fell, and even worse during the 1930s. Country people were resentful because they were becoming poorer. That was unfortunate, but feeling sorry for one's self is no excuse to inflict the likes of Hank Williams on the world. The object of high art is to lift the listener out of the misery of his personal circumstance by showing him a better world in which his petty troubles are beside the point. What is the point of music that assists the listener in wallowing in his troubles? Some country-music fanciers no doubt will find this callous, and I want to disclose that I do not care one way or another whether their wife left them, their dog died, or their truck broke down.

lol!

With all due respect, it is a disadvantage under present circumstances for the US president to be a Texan, and the secretary of state to be African-American. On three occasions, the United States has destroyed a significant part of an identifiable population. The first occasion was the reduction of its aboriginal population, often carried out in a brutal and dishonorable way. The second was the slaughter during the Civil War of nearly two-fifths of the military-age population of rebel provinces, the worst casualty toll in modern history. The third occasion was the incarceration of 10% of black American males, within the world's largest prison population of more than 2 million. The US solved the problem of criminal acts by a disgruntled minority by decimating the minority, putting one out of three young black American males in prison.

Killing off the southern rebels was an act of heroism; incarcerating young American blacks was an involuntary reflex of the law courts. But American southerners still mourn their dead, and turn away from the evil purposes of their ancestors. American blacks still weep for a lost generation. Both suffered unspeakably from the consequences of cultural (or perhaps moral) failure, and compensate with exaggerated hopes for redemption. Former president Jimmy Carter, who tried to love the Iranians who took hostage American diplomats, is the most extreme example. The trouble is that most peoples are not redeemed - not, in any event, before they are reduced by war. President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are learning this the hard way.

have to run now

slacker martial law now in effect for US

Silly as he sounds, Prof Madden is quite right. In fact, I have been defending the Spanish Inquisition for years, most recently in a comment on March 16, 2004 (Spain's elections show why radical Islam can win). People do nasty things not because they are negligent or bloody-minded, but rather because they cannot avoid doing them. That is why we call such things tragic. Spain's inquisitors were not the horror-movie sadists of popular myth, but sad little functionaries seeking to prevent the sort of religious war that plagued Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries. Not the boorish Germans but rather the agile Latins first opened the Pandora's Box of religious reform. If we accept that Spain's Inquisition was tragic rather than arbitrary, we must - I believe - also reach the conclusion that Christianity can flourish only on the American model. Neither Catholic empire nor the Protestant nation-state could do anything except destroy itself. But this is to get ahead of the story; we have only just tugged at the loose thread.

Before it burned heretics, the Spanish Inquisition burned books. Only one leaf remains of Bonifacio Ferrer's 1478 Spanish translation of the Bible, for the Inquisition hunted down every copy printed. Bible reading, they knew led to Protestantism, and Protestantism led to religious war.

Then the Inquisition hunted down Jews, for Jews knew Hebrew, and might teach it to Protestants who then might translate the Bible (which happened in Luther's Germany). As the Catholic Encyclopedia puts it, the Inquisition sought to prevent the "Judaizing of all of Spain", that is, the spread of Protestantism, and thus persuaded the Catholic monarchs to expel the Jews in 1492.

Was the Spanish Inquisition wrong? On the contrary. Religious war devastated France during the 16th century, and during the 17th century reduced the population of Germany by more than half. England's Civil War shed less blood, but left its business unfinished. Cavalier and Roundhead diehards emigrated respectively to Virginia and Massachusetts, sowing the seeds of America's devastating Civil War 200 years later (see David Hackett Fischer’s 1989 book Albion’s Seed).

Not until 1936 did the lid blow off, and Spain fought a long-delayed religious war between Catholicism and Atheism, in which the firing squad claimed more than a fifth of the estimated half-million violent deaths. The Spanish Civil War reduced a formerly martial nation to the feckless, infertile hedonists of today whose only claim to fame is the world's lowest birthrate. It was not always so.

The international community could help most by finding better homes for a few hundred thousand Gazans. The best-case scenario would be a parallel to Hurricane Katrina, which forced the mass evacuation of the city of New Orleans during 2005. Displaced to Atlanta, Georgia, Houston, Texas, and other cities with a strong black middle class, the poor African-American refugees soon were earning more and living better than they had in corrupt, backward New Orleans.

I reviewed the good fortune of the New Orleans refugees here (See Katrina and China's whirlwind growth Asia Times Online, April 25, 2006) and observed that the best way to help poor people is to move them out of poor regions into rich ones. The late Sam Kinison's stand-up comedy routine about world hunger applies doubly to Gaza. "You want to help world hunger? Stop sending them food. Don't send them another bite, send them U-Hauls ... we've been coming here giving you food for about 35 years now and we were driving through the desert, and we realized there wouldn't BE world hunger if you people would live where the FOOD IS!"

Otherwise, the default recommendation is what I offered five years ago, (See see More killing, please! Asia Times Online, June 12, 2003). As I observed at the time,

A recurring theme in the history of war is that most of the killing typically occurs long after rational calculation would call for the surrender of the losing side. Think of the Japanese after Okinawa, the Germans after the Battle of the Bulge, or the final phase of the Peloponnesian War, the Thirty Years War, or the Hundred Years War. Across epochs and cultures, blood has flown in proportion inverse to the hope of victory. Perhaps what the Middle East requires in order to achieve a peace settlement is not less killing, but more.

That is horrifying, but nonetheless true, and the international community simply may have to raise its threshold of horror.

In fact, avers D'Antonio, the citizens of Senator John Kerry's home state lead purer lives than Red Staters:

The state with the lowest divorce rate in the nation is Massachusetts. At latest count it had a divorce rate of 2.4 per 1,000 population, while the rate for Texas was 4.1 ... Born-again Christians have among the highest divorce rates. The Associated Press, using data supplied by the US Census Bureau, found that the highest divorce rates are to be found in the Bible Belt.

That is true in part because the population of the Bible Belt is younger and more likely to marry; if no one but lesbians lived in Massachusetts, the divorce rate would be zero. Nonetheless it is true that Massachusetts liberals display less hypocrisy than Bible Belt Christians, who preach better than they practice. Liberals admit no constraints to pleasure-seeking. They are not hypocritical, but merely disgusting.

look i know nobody maybe not even ed III at this point cares, but today's column is flat out incredible. summary of basically all creepy spenglerian obsessions in one.

short version is this: obama, because he is an african sociopath, may be a good president after all, because he understands the necessity of genocide.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KA13Ak01.html

special machete fund found buried in obama stimulus package

well i'll be

spengler REVEALED

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/KD18Aa01.html

As I wrote pseudonymously for Asia Times Online, new friends announced themselves - journalists, academics, clergy, and people of faith from many walks of life, not least the indefatigable group of good friends that manages the Spengler Forum. The editors of First Things asked me for an essay on Franz Rosenzweig and Islam, which I published in 2007, and later a piece entitled "Zionism for Christians", which appeared in 2008 under the pseudonym "David Shushon". That was a milestone for me.

I had subscribed to the journal not long after its inception in 1990, the year I finished my PhD coursework in music. To write for First Things was an unanticipated honor. I came to know the magazine's editor Joseph Bottum, as well as such regular contributors as George Weigel, Russell Hittinger and R R Reno.

On January 8, 2009, the magazine's founder Richard John Neuhaus died. A few weeks later Jody Bottum asked me to join the staff of First Things as an editor and writer. It seems only heartbeats ago that I was in dark seas, looking up at this beacon; now it is my turn to help keep the lighthouse.

As for Asia Times Online - this scrappy, virtual expat bar - I was there at the founding, and will contribute to it as long it continues to upload, if somewhat less frequently than before.

"Spengler" is channeled by David P Goldman, associate editor of First Things (www.firstthings.com).

(Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd.

bump

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/KJ20Ak03.html

out of the park

a blowhard basically - a nasty bloodthirsty blowhard

he almost has me going with the crazy archconservative geopolitics stuff, and then, boom

It now seems well established that his autobiography Dreams of My Father was ghost-written by the former Weatherman Bill Ayers, now a professor of education in Chicago. Long rumored, this allegation is confirmed by celebrity journalist Christopher Anderson in his new book, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage. Jack Cashill at the American Thinker has been on this trail for a year, comparing Ayers' attributed writing to Dreams, and in my view made a strong case even before Anderson's book appeared.

warp speed

re: mr jack cashill, here's a take on his "strong case"

http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2009/06/in-which-i-discover-bill-ayers-in-my-head.html

nu-spengler must be so disappointed that obama has not yet unveiled his african genocide style plan to deal with iran

I love the way he relays insanely bellicose theories in a tone of sensible consideration, he should ghostwrite for colbert

what's in it for atimes though? where exactly do the interest of Thai anti-democrats and jewish racists converge?

rather like Eugene O'Neill's Brutus Jones

rather

The hostage-taking at Pakistan's military headquarters in Rawalpindi on October 10 and the bombing of police headquarters in Peshawar, the capital of North-West Frontier Province, comprise part of the pattern that includes Sunday's bombings in the Iranian border town of Pisheen: the unifying element is a demonstration of Sunni power against an external enemy, namely Iran, as well as internal enemies.

Pakistan isn't run by Sunnis; even the president belongs to the Shia minority

blog-ra is the thundercats mortal enemy

damn! i've read this thread many times and never noticed the spelling mistake before

Europe had the capacity to bring forth a new people and instead it gave rise to a murderous horde. The tragedy in the wars of religion was the death of Catholic universalism, and the tragedy of a mediocre people that could find nothing which which to replace it - until the American Revolution.

As the Napoleonic Wars wore on, Schiller's hopes turned away from the great European states and their leaders. The Swiss burghers rising against foreign oppressors in his last play, William Tell, recognizably are American revolutionaries. The character of Tell drives the drama less than that of the ordinary people who find the means to become extraordinary. The mediocrity of the Europeans is redeemed in American circumstances, and the peoples emerge as heroic protagonist rather than as tragic hero.

probably not too funny to anyone other than a committed anti-stan like me, but, damn

never read a word of schiller but i'm confident spengler is totally wrong about him.

omg there is a spengler blog!! no more waiting around for atimes to update!!

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/spengler/

his latest post is amazing. who it at fault for the current "attack" on the vatican? why, obama! obamaobamaobamaobama!