SOBRAN'S --
The Real News of the Month
November 2002
Volume 9, No. 11
Editor: Joe Sobran
Publisher: Fran Griffin (Griffin Communications)
Managing Editor: Ronald N. Neff
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CONTENTS
Features
-> The Return of the Patriot Right
-> Wartime Journal (plus Exclusives to this edition)
-> Are the Races Equal?
-> Hannibal and the Kids
Nuggets (plus Exclusives to this edition)
List of Columns Reprinted
FEATURES
The Return of the Patriot Right
(page 1)
THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE, under the editorship of
Patrick Buchanan and Taki Theodoracopulos, has just made
its debut, much to the satisfaction of those of us who
have longed for a magazine that is, well, American (as
opposed to Zionist) and conservative (as opposed to
neoconservative).
If you know anything about Buchanan, you already
know much of what the magazine will stand for. Its first
issue has few surprises: it confirms that it intends to
re-open the debates among conservatives that
neoconservatism has tried to close: over immigration,
free trade, and imperialist militarism.
Despite my warm affection and respect for my old
friends Pat and Taki, I expect to take issue with them
over some of these questions. But at the moment I can
only wish them success in persuading patriotic
conservatives that the United States has nothing to gain
from another war in the Middle East. That is the really
urgent task of the moment. And no other conservative
magazine is doing it. On the contrary.
The first issue offers anti-war essays by Buchanan,
Justin Raimondo, Stuart Reid, and Eric Margolis. They
warn not so much against the proposed war on Iraq as
against the dangers posed by its aftermath. Margolis sees
a repetition of the 1956 French-British-Israeli Suez
operation against Egypt, "a military success that turned
into a political fiasco" -- with the difference that this
one could well erupt into a regional maelstrom too. The
United States could easily find itself holding a fistful
of wild cards -- not only Iraq, but Iran, Israel, Turkey,
and the Kurds, to name a few. "There is simply no
political benefit for the United States in invading
Iraq."
Buchanan's one-page contribution, though fine as far
as it goes, is disappointingly brief, given that he's the
star of the show. He too predicts that the United States
will lose far more than it gains when it has to manage
the chaotic postwar world. True enough, but what about
the sheer cruelty and immorality of the war itself? This
"pre-emptive" war will be what is called "a war of
choice" rather than "a war of necessity." In a few weeks
countless people, mostly Iraqi boys, are going to die
violent deaths. They will be killed without
justification. This should appall us even if it produced
cost-free geopolitical profit for the United States. It's
fine to show that your opponent is wrong even on his own
premises, but the premises themselves should be openly
challenged.
Raimondo reminds us that the greatest anti-war
movement in American history was not the liberal protest
against the Vietnam War, but the America First Committee
during the early phase of World War II. Its chief voices
were conservative: John T. Flynn, Frank Chodorov,
Robert W. McCormick, and Garet Garrett. Then as now, it
was globalists, not patriots, who favored war.
But there was this difference: from 1939 to 1941 a
war was already under way, and nobody was proposing that
the United States *start* it. The war the Bush crowd and
the neoconservatives want would be a dangerous break with
American tradition; hardly a "conservative" course. It
took Pearl Harbor to scuttle the America First Committee
-- a surprise so convenient for the Roosevelt
administration that many still wonder whether Roosevelt
himself was really surprised.
Time will tell how truly THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE
will keep the faith other "conservative" organs have
abandoned, but it's off to an encouraging start.
Wartime Journal
(page 2)
A liberal Republican congresswoman's campaign ad
boasts that she "puts principle above politics."
Translation: she votes with the Democrats.
* * *
The Reverend Jerry Falwell, a very nice man with a
knack for putting his foot in it, has called the prophet
Mohammed "a terrorist." This, as you may imagine, hasn't
gone over too well in the Islamic world, where it has
been widely broadcast. Falwell quickly backed off, saying
he hadn't meant to offend law-abiding Muslims. Wonder
what he'd have said if he *had* meant to offend.
* * *
Let's face it: Christianity and Islam are eternal
enemies. Each makes uncompromising claims of exclusive
truth. "I bring not peace, but a sword." But this doesn't
mean that the imminent secularist-Zionist war on the
Islamic world serves any Christian interest or deserves
Christian support. This war won't be fought for Christian
ends, much less by Christian methods. Most Christians and
Muslims have learned to let sleeping dogs lie, which is
about the only kind of peace we can hope for in this
world.
* * *
What is "terrorism," anyway? Except in the West,
it's really just another word for war as men have always
waged it. Back when the West was Christendom, it tried to
codify rules of "civilized" warfare, to spare
noncombatants. A noble idea, but at odds with the nature
of war, and even the West itself has found it hard to
sustain (see World War II). In the rest of the world, it
has never caught on. Most people still observe the logic
of war: hurt your enemy any way you bloody well can, and
don't fight on his terms or by his rules. Can we really
get indignant when the Muslims, fighting the country that
created nuclear weapons (and still keeps a few thousand
in reserve), refuse to fight like Christian gentlemen? In
short, we talk as if "terrorism" were a deviation, when
in fact it's the norm. {{ If Iraq is, as President Bush
insists, an "imminent threat" to the United States, and
may strike us "at any time," why aren't we taking
precautions (gas masks, bomb shelters, civil defense
programs)? For the simple reason that nobody, including
Bush himself, really believes Iraq has any intention of
attacking us. }}
* * *
It's conventionally assumed that the Right is more
patriotic than the Left, but that's now open to question.
The Left opposes a war that could be disastrous for the
United States, while the so-called Right wants that war
chiefly because of its allegiance to Israel. Not that the
Left goes in for flag-waving; it does tend to "blame
America first." Still, America would be better off if it
took the advice of the Left rather than that of the
neoconservatives who have taken over the conservative
movement.
* * *
Erika Harold of Illinois, a/k/a Miss America, has
upset the officials of the annual pageant: she wants to
promote chastity and opposes abortion. Once upon a time
her views would have been presumed to be those of any
decent American girl, especially a Miss America. Today
they are deemed controversial and radical. Maybe in the
future it should be stipulated that the venerable contest
is open only to normal American sluts. Anyway, God bless
Miss Harold.
* * *
A letter to the editor of the NEW YORK TIMES,
published October 15: "A single sniper (perhaps with an
accomplice) has created enormous fear and frustration in
the Washington area for more than a week. The shooter has
baffled the combined police forces of the District of
Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia. If a lone terrorist can
wreak such havoc locally, we should have second thoughts
about the ease of defeating a large, amorphous terrorist
movement globally. How can destroying Iraq accomplish
this? (Signed) Joseph Sobran."
Exclusive to the electronic version:
As noted here previously, Patrick Buchanan warns us
that the real threat to the West is not terrorism but
demographics. Western women are ceasing to bear children,
and the void is being filled by immigrants, many of them
Muslim (especially in Europe). The anarchist philosopher
Hans-Hermann Hoppe, otherwise strongly opposed to
Buchanan, notes than since the introduction of the
welfare state, the Western birth rate has fallen by half.
Are the Races Equal?
(pages 3-5)
Though I don't pay much attention to sports anymore,
I recently tuned in on the U.S. Open women's championship
tennis match between the fabled Williams sisters, Venus
and Serena. I was duly amazed. These two tall, muscular
black girls, who serve at more than 100 miles per hour,
have completely taken over what was once a genteel white
people's game.
The same night, I also watched a video of the
"Thriller in Manila," the 1975 showdown between Muhammad
Ali and Joe Frazier. It was a punishing fight, stopped
when Frazier couldn't answer the bell for the 15th round.
Ali was supposed to be the boxer, Frazier the slugger,
and nobody had expected Ali to win on power and
endurance.
Between the two events, the legendary heavyweight
bout and the current tennis match, I was struck anew by
the astonishing athletic dominance of the Negro,
especially the American Negro. We hardly notice it now;
we have come to take it for granted in almost every major
sport. In just the past two years, for example, Barry
Bonds has proved he is probably the greatest baseball
player ever.
How do you explain the overall superiority of such a
small minority? Nature seems to win hands down over
nurture. Sportsmen themselves seem to agree that blacks
are physically designed for sports, with their long limbs
and quick reflexes, and according to a recent book,
scientific studies bear this out.
The whole subject of heredity makes liberals
nervous. It undermines their concept of equality, which
holds not that all men are created equal in a moral
sense, but that all men (and women) can be *made* equal
by proper social engineering. Liberalism even tries to
play down physical differences between the sexes. But all
such doctrinaire thinking is dying fast.
Specifically, liberals fear that if we admit that
blacks are physically superior by nature, it's a short
step to admitting that whites are likewise superior in
intellect. They don't want nature invoked on behalf of
the bogey of racism. Yet racial differences in
intellectual performance seem just as stubborn as
athletic ones. It's best not to be dogmatic about this as
long as most people are educated in state schools, but it
does seem to be the case. And Jews and Orientals
generally excel non-Jewish whites in measurable mental
skills. Efforts to narrow IQ gaps have had unimpressive
results.
Why should this be treated as scandalous, or even
regrettable? It merely means that different people excel
at different things. Aren't we supposed to delight in
diversity? Actually, people who demand "diversity" don't
usually like it when they see the real thing. Personally,
I prefer the less tendentious word "variety." And when
some people excel in certain skills, it follows that
others will lag in them.
Besides, black athletes are a source of racial
pride. Would blacks give up the glory of their
achievements if (supposing it were possible) they could
have a higher average intelligence in exchange? Don't
people really prefer distinction to equality? Isn't life
simply more fun this way?
Of course we are talking about possible hereditary
edges, not absolute differences. No matter what the role
of genetics, there are great white athletes and brilliant
Negro intellectuals. And such differences as there are
have no bearing on the rights in which people really are
equal. As Jefferson argued, the genius of Isaac Newton
gave him no claim to legal superiority over less
intelligent people. The difference between Newton and
others was nothing like the difference between man and
beast.
Liberal squeamishness about racial difference is
odd. Of course liberals believe in equality, but they
also believe in Darwin. If the races lived and developed
separately for eons, shouldn't we expect them to differ
in development? Wouldn't it, in fact, be strange if, over
vast expanses of time, they all developed at exactly the
same rate? Doesn't the idea of evolution itself challenge
the idea of equality? Racialism seems a far more logical
corollary of Darwin than egalitarianism. (Why don't
creationists make this point in the dispute over teaching
evolution in public schools?)
For whatever reason, some racial differences are
really stubborn. In their never-ending campaign to
abolish them, liberals now condemn as racist the very
color-blind, equal-opportunity policies they used to
espouse. Today they demand "affirmative action," whose
results aren't much better and create bitterness to boot.
Both sides know that its unadmitted premise is contempt
for Negro capacity to achieve. Affirmative action marks
the end of liberal optimism about race.
Why should anyone ever have expected blacks to
duplicate the patterns of whites, anyway? The white race
is as peculiar as other races. Are we troubled that the
French don't match the Swiss in skiing, yodeling, and
making chocolates? Maybe the Swiss just happen to enjoy
these things more than the French do. There is no reason
to treat their tastes as norms for others.
Everyone knows that, when it comes to small matters;
but we seem to forget it when it comes to education and
jobs, where a socialist mentality takes over. Then we
expect identical results of the most diverse people, and
equality becomes the great imperative of public policy.
But "equality" has a special meaning here. It doesn't
mean judging people by the same standards; it means using
the coercive power of the state to make people *uniform.*
And since this is sheer fantasy, its pursuit can only
mean increasing that coercive power indefinitely. "Civil
rights" in this sense, means less and less personal
liberty.
To say that the races aren't equal is only to say
that they aren't identical. Pretty obvious, except to the
state and its liberal avatars. They won't give up on the
principle of uniformity by force. And this requires a lot
of motive-hunting, in order to make sure that
"discrimination" is rooted out. Even when people are
trying not to "discriminate," the term has to be
redefined to prove that they aren't trying hard enough,
or that they are discriminating "unconsciously," or
otherwise evincing "patterns" of discrimination. And
since a real pattern can only be judged against a
putatively ideal pattern, this leads to racial quotas --
which everyone professes to oppose -- as the objective
test of subjective compliance.
Back on earth, races, like individuals, acquire
reputations over time. Liberals call these reputations
"prejudices" and "stereotypes," which to some extent they
are; but they are also, in large part, empirical
conclusions. They are like caricatures -- perhaps
exaggerated, even cruel, but also recognizable. They are
recognizable because patterns of group conduct are real.
Whatever liberal etiquette may say, we all know them.
Sometimes a government propaganda campaign can
create prejudice and hatred against a racial group or
social class, though it helps if there is antagonism to
begin with. But unfavorable popular views about
minorities also survive the most strenuous efforts of the
state to eliminate them, because they so often spring
from the direct personal experience of countless people.
Jews often complain of the prejudice they have met in
country after country-- England, Spain, France, Germany,
Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and now throughout the Arab
world.
But how could the same "prejudice" be shared by so
many cultures? We're entitled to suspect that Jewish
conduct has had at least something to do with causing
such persistent unpopularity. Israel Shahak frankly
examines the negative effect of Talmudic ethics on
Jewish-gentile relations in his incisive book JEWISH
RELIGION, JEWISH HISTORY.
Orthodox Jews, who live by the Talmud, are about as
far from liberal ideals as a race can get, and they are
pretty remote from Christianity and Islam as well. Yet
you have to admit that the Talmudic code has been a
powerful cohesive, enabling the Jews to avoid the
dissolution, cultural and racial, that is the lot of most
ethnic groups over time. Today's Italians bear only
traces of the ancient Romans, and much the same could
probably be said of today's Greeks, Turks, and Arabs.
The Talmud is therefore both divisive and cohesive,
like a language, which enables its speakers to understand
each other but appears as a "barrier" to those who don't
speak it. A century ago there was a movement to create an
invented "universal" language, Esperanto, with a
simplified vocabulary and grammar (no irregular verbs!).
It must have sounded like a good idea at the time, but it
never caught on: it was a laboratory language without
roots, history, memories, associations, fragrances -- all
the things that really make a language what it is.
Esperanto had no power to unify a real village, let alone
the entire human race. Nobody could even gossip in it.
We can't escape particularity. We all have to be
something finite. Nobody can be everyone, or even anyone
but himself, in all his tangled relations with the
particular people who have produced him. Race may not be
all of our destiny, but it's certainly close to it. It's
more than mere genetics, but it's that too. It's one of
the first things others perceive about us, and they are
as entitled to their impressions of us as we are of them.
And of course the first thing anyone notices about other
races is that they are funny-looking. They also turn out
to be funny in all sorts of ways.
Humor is a good test of racial experience. Ethnic
jokes are now as "off-color" as sexual jokes used to be,
but also as inextinguishably popular, and they have their
own rules. The chief rule is this: an ethnic joke must
ring true. A joke about a Jewish mugger or a crooked
Negro lawyer would fall flat, because these characters
are outside normal experience. Of course part of the joke
is that we know it exaggerates the very traits it makes
fun of: we laugh at our own perceptions as well as their
targets. The literal truth would be less amusing.
On the other hand, it doesn't follow that because
race is real and important, it's all-important. Too many
racialists ignore prior questions about humanity itself.
Do men have immortal souls? If so, it's hard to deny the
essential rights of men of all races. Or are racial
differences so significant that some races, for example,
should be excluded from the Catholic priesthood? This is
a very hard position for a Catholic to maintain,
believing, as he must, that Christ died for all men.
After the discovery of America, Catholic theologians
did debate whether the American Indian was fully human.
The dispute was soon settled in the affirmative, and
missionaries commenced trying to convert the Indians.
Meanwhile, the African slave trade boomed for centuries,
despite papal condemnations of the grim conditions to
which the Negro slaves were condemned. A huge number of
them inevitably died in the passage to the New World in
crowded, filthy ships, so that to participate in the
trade at all was to be a party to murder. One needn't
have believed in racial equality -- a novel notion in
those days, after all -- to be revolted by the sheer
cruelty of this form of commerce.
Yet such humanitarian philosophers as John Locke and
Voltaire enjoyed shares in the profits of the slave
trade; Voltaire proudly accepted the honor of having a
slave ship named for him. It can take men a depressingly
long time to face the implications of their professed
principles.
In recent years the drive for equality between the
sexes, modeled on the civil rights movement at its most
excessive, has begun to peter out. It was too absurdly
contrary to nature to be sustained. Women themselves
killed it. Men, especially the "powerful white males" of
feminist outrage, were only too ready to yield to its
demands. (Bill Clinton was always "good on women's
issues.")
Here, if ever, was a case of people preferring
distinction to equality. From early childhood, women
revel in being women. They adorn themselves from top to
toe, baffling men with their obsessive attention to hair,
makeup, dress, jewelry, shoes, and even cosmetic surgery.
Rare is the woman who would prefer to be a man; and men
would rather not even think about the things that consume
women, and of which women are such avid consumers.
A unisex world is no more possible than a world of
Esperanto-speakers; men might adapt to it, but women
would never permit it. At any rate, neither sex took the
feminists seriously; they were too obviously misfits,
whose idea of a better world had nothing to do with this
one. Despite its label, feminism was actually contempt
for the feminine, a desire to remake women on a masculine
model.
And of course the unisex world, like any other
fantasy, could only be approached (never realized) by
applying enormous amounts of coercion. A million things
would have to be forbidden, a million others enforced,
exhausting even the resources of a totalitarian state.
The final result would be a dull universal slavery. At
bottom, egalitarianism must always mean a regime of
limitless force.
More ambitious even than feminism, and therefore
more absurd, is the animal rights movement. Here we
should distinguish sharply between a thoughtful plea for
a more humane dominion over animals (Matthew Scully's
book on the subject -- see my column of October 1, which
is reprinted in this issue and which is available at
www.sobran.com/columns/021001.shtml -- is actually titled
DOMINION) and the doctrinaire extremes of Peter Singer,
author of ANIMAL LIBERATION. Singer actually defends the
killing of newborn infants, on grounds that they haven't
yet achieved sentience, whereas he opposes killing any
sentient animal.
It's obvious where this leads. If animals have the
same rights as people, then not only must man refrain
from violating those rights himself, he may have a duty
to police the entire animal world (including the ocean
depths) to prevent the beasts from preying on each other.
Such an enterprise, need we say, could cut sharply into
the Social Security fund.
Not only would the carnivores be hard to convince
(will the lion, having tasted the antelope, settle for
soybeans?); the equality of the sexes would be a hard
sell for almost any species, particularly those insects
that devour their mates.
It all goes to show that if you really want
equality, you must be prepared to exert a good deal of
force. The quest for equal rights has barely begun.
Hannibal and the Kids
(page 6)
Aristotle, in his POLITICS, argues that some
sentiments are just too base to be uttered in the
theater, even if they may suit the character who says
them. The theater, after all, serves a pedagogical
function, and citizens shouldn't become used to hearing
indecorous emotions expressed in public. Even popular
entertainment should be elevated.
The Greeks dealt with extremes of human behavior --
Orestes, Oedipus, and Medea certainly pushed the limits
-- but they kept the violence offstage. We've come a long
way since then.
I don't go to the movies much anymore, and when I do
it's usually to blockbusters I don't really expect to
enjoy; I just want to keep up with what everyone is
talking about. I wait for the more critically acclaimed
films to come out on video.
So it was that I recently ventured to see RED
DRAGON, the latest Hannibal Lecter film and the third
starring the great Sir Anthony Hopkins. In its first
weekend it was the biggest hit in the country. An earlier
version of the film, MANHUNTER, cast someone else as
Lecter and doesn't really count as part of the series.
The role belongs completely to Hopkins.
The first film in the series, SILENCE OF THE LAMBS
(1991), was gory enough, and well done; it was a huge hit
and won bushels of awards. For all its violence and
absurdity, it featured a riveting pair of characters:
Hopkins as Lecter and Jodie Foster as the FBI agent who
enlists his help, from his prison cell, in solving a
series of gruesome murders.
Lecter, the psychotic psychiatrist, doubled as
villain and Sherlock Holmes, presumably possessing
special insight into his fellow serial-killer. After a
most distinguished career playing Shakespeare and
whatnot, Hopkins became instantly world-famous in this
melodramatic gag. He was a monster with snob appeal: a
gourmet anthropophagite with a polished accent, a love of
the fine arts, and vast erudition, all implying, for the
groundlings, anyway, a profound mind. The black joke was
a play on two senses of "taste" -- the cannibal as
connoisseur. Nothing but the best for his palate! And it
was funny the first time.
The second Lecter film, HANNIBAL (1998), was a
sloppy effort that had the sole merit, to call it that,
of outdoing its predecessor in grossness: Lecter, having
broken out of prison and living in Florence, home of the
fine arts, stir-fried a bit of his living victim's brain
(the top of the skull having been delicately removed) and
fed it to him. I found this too silly to be shocking. The
film was straining for an effect that wasn't worth
achieving.
The story of RED DRAGON takes place before the
events of SILENCE; in an early scene we see Lecter, in
his posh home, serving a posh dinner to posh guests who
don't realize that the exquisite entree -- surprise! --
is a friend of theirs. He happens to be a musician in a
symphony orchestra, whose disappearance has baffled the
police; needless to say, they discuss his absence as they
eat what we know at once are his remains. (The film is
perhaps overly generous with clues for the audience.) The
play on "taste" is wearing thin. A brilliant young
detective (Edward Norton) whom Lecter has befriended
solves the crime in Lecter's own leather-bound library,
and Lecter goes to the slammer (with a few of his books).
We arrive at the status quo ante.
But this time the chief villain (Ralph Fiennes) is
an admirer of Lecter who, while commendably eschewing
cannibalism, makes up for it with singular cruelty. He
slaughters whole families, and we are treated to close-
ups of his victims, children and all, with their eyes
gouged out.
His motive? Ah, only the perverse genius of Dr.
Lecter can fathom such things, so the detective repairs
to his prison cell for counsel. But before you know it,
the prey has become predator, with the treacherous
Lecter's help. The maniacal killer learns where the
detective lives and is soon holding a shiny butcher knife
to the detective's little boy's eyeball. That's
entertainment!
Of course the killer has no motive, any more than
Lecter does, except to do inexplicably nasty things
which, we are to believe, can only be referred to
psychiatric "science." Fiennes goes through the film
acting tortured -- inner demons, you know -- but his
character doesn't even have the thin explanation of good
taste. It's just a device for revolting, and scaring, the
audience.
It revolts, but it doesn't scare. A thriller is only
as good as its villain, and this is a villain you can't
imagine meeting in real life. Nor does he appeal to the
imagination, even in the meretricious way Lecter does.
The only fright the viewer feels is uneasiness at the
prospect of seeing another child mutilated.
This sort of thing doesn't require a lot of
creativity. But judging by the box office, it's America's
idea of a good time. Carving up kids before your eyes may
open new vistas for Hollywood, which has here sunk to
depths beneath pornography.
NUGGETS
{{ Text dropped for reasons of space appears in double
curly brackets. }}
YOU AGAIN! Alan Dershowitz, America's Number One Pest,
has written a new book on how to fight terrorism. Among
his recommendations: the government should issue "torture
warrants," authorizing such measures as sticking needles
under the fingernails of suspected terrorists. Yes, this
is "Alan Dershowitz, famed civil liberties activist." (At
least that's what the press called him when his chief
passion was defending pornographers.) It sometimes takes
an effort to remind oneself that under our legal system,
no defendant may be presumed guilty just because
Dershowitz is representing him. (page 5)
THE GOOD OLD DAYS (CONT'D): In retrospect, the Ayatollah
Khomeini seems like a pretty reasonable fellow, doesn't
he? (page 8)
KUDOS: And may God also bless the Ludwig von Mises
Institute, which for 20 years now has been promoting
freedom without compromise. I make it my habit to start
the day by reading its excellent website,
lewrockwell.com. Congratulations to Lew Rockwell {{ for
carrying on the work of von Mises and the late, great
Murray Rothbard, both of whom would be justly proud of
their brilliant, dauntless disciple. }} (page 10)
THE RETURNS ARE IN: Saddam Hussein has been re-elected
president of Iraq, with 100 per cent of the popular vote.
Western pundits scoff, but if he was running against his
sons the figures are quite plausible. By all accounts,
they make the old man look like St. Francis of Assisi
(their hobbies include rape and torture), and admirers of
Saddam can only find them ... well, disappointing. {{ He
has evidently failed to inculcate his finer qualities.
Perhaps the Iraqi electorate, in their wisdom, have
decided that his WMDs must not fall into the wrong
hands. }} (page 12)
Exclusive to the electronic version:
MISNOMER: The NEW YORK POST dubbed our Beltway killer
"the Psycho-Sniper." The desire to insult this monster is
understandable, but why assume he's a mental case? It's a
glib diagnosis, and it inadvertently implies he could
offer an insanity defense. If he's crazy, after all,
maybe he's more to be pitied than censured. But pity for
this guy seems a bit premature. At this writing, he's
threatening to kill children.
CRAZY KIM: North Korea, the forgotten member of the Axis
of Evil, now tells us it already has nuclear weapons.
Pre-emptive war, anyone? By President Bush's logic,
destroying the present North Korean arsenal should be
even more urgent than preventing Iraq from getting nukes
some time in the future. You can hardly argue that Kim
Jong Il is a more sane and responsible leader than Saddam
Hussein. Neoconservatives used to distinguish, with
reason, between "authoritarian" rulers, who merely
quashed political opposition while leaving most social
institutions alone, and "totalitarian" rulers, who
exercised tyranny over every aspect of social life --
religion, the family, art, education, commerce, you name
it. Hussein clearly belongs to the former category, Kim
to the latter. But the distinction seems to have been
forgotten. Or purposely laid aside.
REPRINTED COLUMNS (pages 7-12)
* Before It Was a Sausage (October 1, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/021001.shtml
* Why Not War? (October 3, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/021003.shtml
* Drugs and the Law (October 10, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/021010.shtml
* Taking Care of Peewee (October 15, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/021015.shtml
* Anarchy without Fear (October 17, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/021017.shtml
* The Law of Force (October 22, 2002)
http://www.sobran.com/columns/021022.shtml
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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[ENDS]