The Corner is having a discussion on moustaches and facial hair in politics. By far my favorite post to date is this one by John Derbyshire:
An old China hand emails: "JD---I'm sure you will recall that foreign correspondents in China's capital (do I dare say Peking?) used to call those portraits [i.e. of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin] 'The History of Shaving.'"I usually wear a full beard by winter, and a moustache in the summer. There is, however, some math involved.
The American Thinker has a piece on Chinese container ships, which could (in theory) be used for an out of the blue attack on Taiwan. As professor Wang Jisi says in the article, "The danger of war truly exists. We are not a paper tiger. We are a real tiger."
The Washington Post has a piece on some structural changes in the Chinese military. The Belmont Club had some good words on topic when I looked there earlier today, but Wretchard's site seems to be down at the moment.
The other China news is the anti-Japanese protests of the weekend. The Financial Times quotes Yan Xuetong, a notable Chinese scholar:
Beijing had been put in an "awkward position" by the anger of young Chinese against Japan, said Yan Xuetong, a professor at Tsinghua University, rejecting claims that the government tacitly supported the demonstrations.Japan's response has been to demand an apology, and speak dismissively of the protests. Shinzo Abe, the man most likely to be the next Japanese Prime Minister, had this to say:
"The Chinese government never looks for people to go to the streets according to their own will," said Professor Yan. "These demonstrations can sometimes be turned into something else."
Shinzo Abe, the acting secretary-general of the governing Liberal Democratic Party, said Sunday that anger at social problems in China, including widening income gaps, are behind the weekend marches.While there is doubtless real truth to that, Chinese subjects retain great anger toward the Japanese. Though it was not a frequent topic of conversation while I was in China, when the subject of Japan did come up, the Chinese -- especially my students, still in college and with their history lessons fresh in their minds -- expressed venom. I gather from conversations with my students that the Chinese history of the Second World War goes something like this: evil Japanese came to China, raped the Chinese women, killed their fathers and forced them mothers to smother their babies while hiding; burned the cities; ravaged the landscape; conducted horrible experiments on the people; and then were driven off by the heroic Mao Zedong, who in passing ran out the "bandits" led by Jiang. The existence of a wider war, or America's role in forcing Japan's surrender and the collapse of the Japanese empire, goes almost unmentioned.
"Japan is an outlet to vent that anger," Abe said in an appearance on the "Sunday Project" television program. "Since the Tiananmen incident, these kinds of demonstrations were severely restricted, but the authorities tolerated these kinds of anti-Japanese gatherings, and the people themselves used these anti-Japanese marches. Because of the anti-Japanese education there, it's easy to light the fire of these demonstrations and, because of the Internet, it's easy to assemble a lot of people."
Corporal Glenn Watkins, husband and father, volunteered to remain an extra year in Iraq in order to serve with his old unit. He was killed by a VBIED, the first combat casualty suffered by his battalion. Asked why he had chosen to stay, he said, "Sir -- someone’s got to teach these guys the ropes."
Another in his unit describes the memorial:
What bothered me most. Though, was all the pomp that went with it. It could have been much simpler, a formation, the field cross, and some words about the man. This was to parade ground, it was somebody's idea of how to have a memorial, like a movie set and we were all just actors in the scene.... To me it cheapened the man's life and all he sacrificed by extending an extra year so he could serve with his old friends in Alpha.How to say what wants to be said? Not two miles from my house is a mass grave. I have never walked by it without finding fresh flowers there, and little flags -- both American and Confederate -- left around it, posted into the ground on dowel rods.
Were you aware that 750,000 people have resigned from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)? If reports are to be believed, CCP resignations are running from 15-20,000 a day.
Now that even The New York Times admits that Iraq is going well, I think it's time to recognize that we are on the road to victory. There remain pitfalls, to be sure, but they are mostly -- as they have been all along -- political rather than military. There is much more risk in the Iraqi political process than in the enemy's attacks.
The enemy has resorted to bold, futile attacks that have little prospect of success -- the rough equivalent, in roulette, of putting all your remaining chips on 22 in the hope of winning enough back to make up for what you've lost. All there is to win, even should they be successful, is a propaganda victory. There are adequate reinforcements to retake any areas almost at once. The increase in Iraqi security forces has allowed for persistant control even in what were "no go" areas six months ago.
In addition, our own units -- always superior to the foe -- have improved and hardened. JHD reports on 2/2's movements via email. For OPSEC reasons, I won't share the details, but I will pass on this: according to his thumbnail estimate, 75% of the 2/2 Marines are now "Senior Marines." Such men will not be lightly overthrown on the field. Indeed, they will ravage anyone who dares to rise up against them.
That said, I invite readers to reconsider the analysis I wrote of the Iraq War back in mid-September. It is called Clausewitz and the Triangle. I think it's fair to say that it predicted all these trends accurately, and well in advance of their appearance.
I wrote at the time that a study of military science was of tremendous importance to all citizens. It allows, I held, for a correct evaluation of what are otherwise confusing and frightening issues. The nation's fortunes are never more at risk than in matters of war and law, two matters on which it is so easy to become dependent on expert opinion. Both are complicated areas, with huge and arcane libraries of information and thought, eternally growing under the hands of men whose lives are devoted to filling them.
Still, we are called by our duty to understand. It can be done, as I hope this exercise has proven. It can be done by citizens, with no better tools than an education in military science, newspapers, and friends in the service who will give them the straight story.
What is unexplained, as yet, is why it couldn't be done by the CIA. But that is a question for another day.
The Mudville Gazette fields a request for aid from readers of MilBlogs, and MilBloggers alike. As Greyhawk points out, the recent talk of progress doesn't change the fact that servicemen are still fighting in Iraq. Mid-April is a hard time to come up with extra cash (thanks for that, Uncle Sam), but you might keep them in mind if you have a few dollars more than you needed to pony up to the taxman.
I see via Kim that today is the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Third Army's liberation of Buchenwald Concentration Camp. You all know the story, naturally, though perhaps not all the details.
For example, I don't recall ever seeing that photo of Patton before...
Relating a story about her haircut, Baldilocks makes an insightful comment. It's a response to an older man who told her that women shaving their heads is forbidden by the Bible. Her response, read more generally, is a good warning for the believer of most any religion:
It's people like you--who don't know what they're talking about--that drive others away from God, the Bible and the church. And I'm willing to bet that God will not forget.That's a good point, is it not?
Eric will be glad to know that The Scotsman shares his amusement with the American fascination with their ancestry. They're running a whole special edition celebrating "stateside Tartan Week."
It seems the UK government is in on the act, too. They don't seem to think it's funny, though. They're proudly laying claim to Americans from Pinkerton to Grant, and from Carnegie to John Paul Jones.
A writer named Kaffie Sledge at the Columbus (Georgia) Ledger-Enquirer has a piece called "Vets Ripe for Road Rage." It quotes a reservist veteran of a "combat stress unit" who is a social worker in her civilian life.
"The road rage -- on some levels doesn't surprise me," she says. "Over there, the United States owns the roads. When we come in our Humvees, people pull over. It's like get out of our way or get run over . We go up on sidewalks. We squeeze between traffic. Police will halt traffic jams or whatever so that we can drive down the opposite side of the street. The concept is you never stop moving because it makes you a target.A fair point: being in a combat zone is not like being in an area ruled by established law. It takes a while to "gear back" to civilian life. This is why the USMC has told veterans not to drive for thirty days after their return from Iraq. Mr. Snook was on the passenger side of the vehicle.
"So, we drive fast, we drive wherever we want to whenever we want to, and there is really nobody there to challenge us. We will hit you, slam your vehicle or whatever.
"The Marine killed in Atlanta may have had road rage, or he may have had a personality disorder before he went to Iraq, and he came back and still had one."There is no basis for this sort of speculation. Psychologists feel free to throw these kinds of damaging, libelous statements around after little or -- as in this case -- no actual experience with the person in question. Mr. Snook can suffer no further harm from these statements, but had he still been a sergeant of Marines, his career could be ended by such idle speculation. Even in the grave, his memory is slandered by it.
Today, the grandparents -- that is, my family -- were up visiting from down Georgia way. We took the boy on his first train ride, down into Washington D.C.
I gather from talking to other parents of young boys that all boys go through a "train phase," which follows the "construction equipment phase," and preceeds the "sportscar phase" and the "jet fighter phase." I've heard this from several independent sources now. It doesn't seem to matter whether the kid ever encounters actual trains, or even sees them on television; if he's a boy, at some point, he's going to be fascinated with trains.
So we took the VRE from Manassas to the District. My wife and my mother were both delighted that, by happenstance, this week was the high bloom for the cherry blossoms in Washington. My father enjoyed his grandson (as did my mother). My son enjoyed the train immensely, but also had the chance to indulge in that other fascination of young boys.
I myself mostly got to shepherd the crew, but that is rewarding in itself. Plus, I got a chance to talk to my father, which is and has always been one of my favorite things to do. He is an untrained master of the art of storytelling, and can talk for hours without ever tiring his audience. Even if it's me, who's heard all the stories a hundred thousand times.
Today, he and I were talking about the tricks memory plays on the mind. Particularly, we were discussing how you tend to forget the miserable parts of any experience, but remember the good parts. Thus, even if an event was an endless stretch of pain punctuated by a few good moments, you'll end up with a positive memory of it if you get far enough away.
His own example was being in the Army. He loves to remember his time in the Army, when he was a Drill Sergeant. He was telling me how hard he has to think to remember the bad parts, which were legion: "All that crap," as he put it, "that drove me mad."
Grim's Hall is much the same way. We almost always focus on the good, indeed the glowing, parts of military life and culture. For example, this post on the Defense Department and its wings as a "parallel structure for the life of the mind."
Those parts are real, and it's all true.
On the other hand, there's this.
JHD writes to tell me that a Marine from my home was killed this week. He was too young for me to know him, though I know people who go to his church. His name was Jack Snook. He was killed, not in Baghdad, but in Atlanta.
A photograph of the alleged killer, Charles Anthony Key, is here. The details are as follows: Snook was riding in the passenger seat while his wife and he were driving around the best part of downtown Atlanta, the part where all the five-star hotels are that cater to the world's richest businessmen and conferences. It was a Sunday night, which is normally a pretty quiet time to be down there.
Somehow, an argument developed between Snook at another motorist. Snook got out of the car, and got shot in the face. No one seems to know exactly what was said. Having grown up in Forsyth County myself, I have my suspicions as to what might have been said, but they are only that. Still, Georgia license tags do list the county name on them, and Forsyth County is -- for historic reasons dating to 1912 -- particularly hated in Atlanta.
This is so much so that my father, a man who frequently saved lives or entered burning buildings as a volunteer firefighter, used to deface his license tag before driving into the city. If Snook were more combative -- as is suggested by the fact that he got out of his car to confront Key -- it's not hard to guess what kind of language would have been exchanged.
The law of the State of Georgia, until the US Supreme Court overturned a unanimous ruling of the Georgia Supreme Court, had a law that anticipated such language. Now they do not, and so we are left with prosecutions for murder instead of for "fighting words." The Federales were wrong to overturn the Georgia court in this case. The legislature and the state courts understood the culture of honor, and the dangerous history, that sometimes drives these young men to strike like bucks at one another. "Old men" like me, who grew up in the culture, understand it and support the legislature's attempts to empower people to stop this kind of thing before it gets out of control. The Supreme Court did not, and this is the price of its meddling.
We were better off when we empowered the police and the citizenry to arrest, and therefore separate, two such youths at the first sign of heated rhetoric. Now, people believe that because it is permitted by the law -- protected, indeed, by the Supreme Court! -- that it is acceptable. It is a tragedy. JHD thinks the killer will walk, and frankly so do I. The racial aspect to the case is one reason why; the jury in downtown Atlanta will be sympathetic in that sense. But also, even if I were a juror, I would find it hard to fault someone for shooting a large, powerful man who got out of his car, came up to your car, and started yelling fighting words at you. It was cowardly to shoot an unarmed man in these circumstances, when the shooter could have driven away instead, but it isn't murder. I could only vote to convict on a lesser offense, manslaughter perhaps.
The obituary for Snook says that he "played a vital role in the liberation of Baghdad." That suggests he was in I MEF, or Task Force Tripoli. I'll ask around the folks back home, and see if I can discover more. He leaves a seven year old daughter. A fund has been set up for her, if anyone is interested: call Region's Bank at 770/887-1031.
Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily for this link to "Unrealised Moscow." It is a slide show, with text, offering the majestic plans Stalin and his technocrats drew up for the capital of the Soviet empire.
Surprisingly, much of the architecture seems to be non-Modernist: notice the Gothic spires on the corners of the Palace of Soviets, below the giant New Soviet Man. The Palace of Technology is fronted with a Roman-revival arch. The People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry looks like a squared-off Colosseum.
It's notable that the USSR never managed to construct any of these things. Yet, somehow, it was perceived as a competitor by the America that never lets a year go by without some additional monument or museum on the National Mall.
Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein calls on the IRA to lay down arms. This will be an interesting one to watch, since Sinn Fein and the IRA are so closely tied. It could be a ruse. The IRA can refuse, making Sinn Fein seem more independent (and legitimately political) than it is.
On the other hand, the IRA would lose its principle defender. Any return to violence would have to be met with condemnation by Sinn Fein, unless Sinn Fein could justify it from British or Unionist actions.
Such justification would be hard under the standard Adams has set. It would require demonstrating that the particular act to which the IRA was responding was severe enough that "there was no alternative" to violence in order that "the struggle can... be moved forward." Simple reprisals for Unionist violence would not do it: it would have to be an attack on the political process.
The following letter appeared in the Best of the Web yesterday. It was composed by a resident of Germantown, MD, who had written an earlier letter that irritated people:
My intention was not to offend Christian conservatives--so if I have offended you as a Christian, who is also conservative, I would like to apologize. However, I am concerned that if we continue to blur the separation between church and state at home, it will become more and more difficult to win the hearts and minds of nondemocratic nations abroad.A generous apology should always be acknowledged, and so I do wish to remark that I appreciate the fellow's attempt to soothe the feelings of his fellow Americans. If all discourse was conducted so politely, we would have a far better political culture.
While I find the "culture of life" argument appealing, conservatives use it only where it is convenient. For example, conservatives have abused the Second Amendment to promote a "culture of death" with their unbridled support for all kinds of weapons, which are rarely purchased by law-abiding citizens but more frequently by criminals and visiting aliens (who probably export them to terrorists abroad).
I do not like to compare and equate religions for better or worse--religion has been the cause of the world's major problems throughout history--so it's best to keep one's faith personal. I can only hope you got my underlying message--the war on terror cannot be won if we start doing what they have been doing--defending political behavior and governance under the garb of a particular religion.
Even if the same gun were never used more than once in committing a crime, only one out of every 309 guns would be involved in a crime in a given year... If we realistically allow for repeated criminal uses of the same weapons, the fraction of all guns that are ever involved in crime would be less than 1 percent, with long guns under 0.5 percent and handguns under 2 percent.* As a trip to any gun show will demonstrate, the majority of firearms purchased or traded in America are antiques that are collected by enthusiasts, rarely but sometimes fired on the range. The majority of firearms have no interest to criminals or aliens at all.
There are more guns, gun owners, RTC [Right-To-Carry] states and carry permit holders than ever before. And the nation`s violent crime rate has decreased every year since 1991, to a 27-year low.* Nor is the protection of the right to keep and bear arms a "culture of death." From the same source:
Survey research during the early 1990s by award-winning criminologist Gary Kleck found as many as 2.5 million protective uses of guns each year in the U.S. "(T)he best available evidence indicates that guns were used about three to five times as often for defensive purposes as for criminal purposes," Kleck concluded. Analyzing National Crime Victimization Survey data, he found, "robbery and assault victims who used a gun to resist were less likely to be attacked or to suffer an injury than those who used any other methods of self-protection or those who did not resist at all."Thus, the right to bear arms is a part of a "culture of life," if you like. It prevents violence three to five times as often as not; only in 1% of cases is the criminal wounded, and only in a tenth of such cases is he killed. While there are some of us who would like to see the latter statistic rise a bit, the facts don't support the notion that there is a "culture of death" involved here. Just the opposite: this is how life is protected from human predators.
In most defensive gun uses, the gun is not fired. In only 1% of instances are criminals wounded, and in only 0.1% are criminals killed.
As per the last post, it's national Tartan Day today.
BlackFive has a post on haggis. I've had actual haggis (he seems interested in whether anyone has or not), at the regimental dining-in of the 78th Fraser Highlanders, to which I was invited one year. The ingredients were traditional, but the spices were not: the good lady wife of the Major, who prepared the thing, wanted everyone to enjoy it. As a result, she spiced it up nicely, and it was a truly delicious meal.
There was also a dram or twa, but the majority of the drinking followed the evening in the form of toasts. These were done with Port wine, not Scotch whisky, as there were far too many of them for a man to drink with whisky if he wanted to go home in any kind of shape.
Eric asked in comments, below, why Scots were so eager to leave Scotland if it was such a great place. Well, Scotland was a very poor place -- I don't know that it was at all a great place to be. It is the men, rather than the land, that I celebrate. Many of them left because they had taken arms against the King of England, and needed somewhere to go after the failure of the last great Jacobite uprising.
In my own home state of Georgia, the settlement of Darien on the Altamaha river was founded by warriors of the Clan McIntosh, MacDonald, MacKay, some smaller clans, and their families. They were allowed to relocate there from Scotland, under arms, even though they had used those arms against the King. However, relocated to the south of Georgia, they were a useful buffer force to keep the Spaniards in Florida out of the English colonies to the north.
As a consequence of their presence, and performance in battles such as Bloody Creek, the state of Georgia was secured against Spanish incursions. Darien itself survived until the Civil War, when it was utterly destroyed by Union army forces under the command of the famous Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. Most of you will know Shaw from the movie Glory, when he was played by Matthew Broderick. He was also the subject of a glowing biography written by Henry Cabot Lodge. You can read that here, if you're inclined. Lodge can be forgiven for forgetting to include mention of the burning of Darien, as well as other adventures, in his drive to focus on the purely heroic aspects of Shaw's career.
In memory of Darien, and the highlanders who secured the state of Georgia in her early days, the state filed for and received the Georgia district tartan in the registry kept by Lord Lyons. It closely follows the pattern of the McIntosh tartan, in memory of John Mohr McIntosh, who was the leader of the early settlers there.
It proves that I'm related to BlackFive. Distantly, but all the same -- he's a Clansman.
Yesterday must have been the unofficial day of support for MilBlogs for NRO. Greyhawk's alternative Pulitzers was linked in the Corner; my post on loving-while-killing-your-enemy was linked at TKS. Thanks are due, I suppose, to the big media folks at the majestic NRO HQ.
After the Pulitzers decided to award a prize to a collaborater with murderers, the Mudville Gazette has called for an alternative prize. Military photographers (presumably amateur) from Iraq are encouraged to submit links with photos posted.
Greyhawk has his own favorite up at the link above. I think mine, all things considered, is this one. It has it all: servicemen, a smiling child whose brighter future was bought at those men's peril, the thumbs up, and the Iraqi kid proudly wearing a USMC t-shirt.
That about sums it up for me: service, courage, friendship, liberation.
