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Bookworm Room Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts. (November 11, 2006)

By on May 19th, 2021

https://www.bookwormroom.com/2016/11/06/bureaucrats-job-security-dangerous/

THANKS TO ANDREA WIDBURG OF AMERICAN THINKER…..RSK

EXCERPTS:

Here’s some new information for you to consider when it comes to bureaucrats run amok:  Did you know that it was British bureaucrats, determined to keep their jobs at all costs, who sparked Arab nationalism in Palestine, creating the dangerous Middle East that consumes the world today?

This story comes from Pierre van Paassen’s The Forgotten Ally, published in 1943. The book’s primary purpose is to describe the role Jewish Palestinians played in defeating Rommel – a task Britain could never have accomplished but for these Jewish troops. Before he gets to World War II, though, van Paassen tells how the British Mandate in Palestine came into being and how the Arabs, who had once welcomed the thought of Jews making that wasteland a more inhabitable place, came to be the fanatic Islamic nationalists the world now faces. Because van Paassen was a foreign correspondent in the 20s and 30s, the book has the virtue of being the recollections of a contemporaneous witness, who traveled widely in the Middle East, met many of the power players, and was privy to original documents. (He even interviewed both Hitler and the Mufti of Jerusalem!)

Because of the myriad details van Paassen provides about the creation of the modern Middle East in the years during and immediately after WWI, it’s quite easy for someone like me to get lost in the weeds. (My first draft of this post hit 5,000 words before I was even a quarter of the way through.) I’ll just touch upon a few highlights here.

Between the Roman conquest in 70 AD and Israel’s re-birth in 1948, the territory known as Palestine (or Syria-Palestine) was never a nation. It was not even an independent substate in the vast Ottoman Empire that eventually controlled it. Instead, it was simply the southern most end of Ottoman controlled Syria. During all those centuries, nobody cared about Palestine because it was a desolate, swampy, disease-filled wasteland. Here’s van Paassen’s description of Syria-Palestine in the years before, during, and immediately after WWI:

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Bay of Pigs 60th Anniversary Part III – Humiliating Che Guevara and John Kerry A brave Cuban freedom fighter confronts Kerry’s lies. Humberto Fontova

By on May 10th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/bay-pigs-60th-anniversary-part-iiihumiliating-che-humberto-fontova/

”This is the history of a failure.” — The oddly frank opening lines of Che Guevara’s Congo Dairies.

“Those Cuban-CIA men [Bay of Pigs vets] were as tough, dedicated and impetuous a group of soldiers as I’ve ever had the honor of commanding.” — Legendary anti-communist mercenary “Mad Mike” Hoare, commander of the “Wild Geese,” in his book Congo Mercenary.

“I stood above Che Guevara, my boots near his head, just as Che had once stood over my dear friend and fellow 2506 Brigade member, Nestor Pino. ‘We’re going to kill you all,’ Che said to Pino. Now, the situation was reversed. Che Guevara lay at my feet. He looked like a piece of trash. I said, ‘Che Guevara, I want to talk to you.'” — Former President of the Bay of Pigs Veterans Association Felix Rodriguez (pictured above), recalling Che Guevara’s capture in Bolivia, where he played a key role.

“Senator [John Kerry] your committee’s slander against me was in every g*dd*mmed newspaper after your committee’s last closed hearing! Saying I solicited drug money for the Contras. THAT, senator Kerry, is a D*MNED LIE!…and it difficult for me to answer questions from a man (you, the chairman of the committee) I do not RESPECT!” — Felix Rodriguez testifying for Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations hearings chaired by Senator John Kerry in 1986. These evolved into the Iran-Contra hearings.

After being ransomed back by the guilt-stricken JFK after his Bay of Pigs betrayal, many of these Cuban freedom-fighters were itching to get back into the fight (but with ammo and air cover this time). The CIA obliged and sent a group of them with ex-marine Rip Robertson to the Congo in ‘64 where Castro (with tongue tucked deeply in his cheek) had sent Che Guevara to foment a “war of liberation,” training and commanding the alternately Chinese-and Soviet-backed “Simbas” of Laurent Kabila, who were murdering, raping and munching (many were cannibals) their way through the defenseless Europeans still left in the recently abandoned Belgian colony.

Together, Mad Mike, Rip and the Cubans made short work of Che and Kabila’s Simbas. Guevara himself barely escaped by hightailing it with his tail tucked firmly between his legs across Lake Tanganyika into Tanzania, with the Cuba-CIA men in hot pursuit.

Too bad Hollywood never picked up on this exploit for one of their many glorifications of Che — worse still that Monty Python’s Flying Circus didn’t pick it up. I’ll even start the script for them: “In 1965, while planning a military campaign in the Congo against crack mercenaries commanded by a professional soldier who helped defeat Rommel in North Africa, Che confidently allied himself with ‘soldiers’ who used chicken feathers for helmets and stood in the open waving at attacking aircraft because a muganga (witch doctor) had assured them that the magic water he sprinkled over them would make .50 caliber bullets bounce harmlessly off their bodies. Six months later, Che fled Africa, narrowly escaping with his life and with his tail tucked tightly between his legs.”

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The Bay of Pigs 60th Anniversary, Part II A story of betrayal — and heroism. Humberto Fontova

By on April 27th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/bay-pigs-60th-anniversary-part-ii-humberto-fontova/

Outnumbered over ten-to-one by Soviet-led forces and betrayed by their sponsor, these mostly civilian volunteers fought ’til the last bullet. In three days of relentless, close-quarter fighting they made monkeys of the Soviet commanders at the scene and their Cuban lackeys and cannon fodder, inflicting losses of 20-to-one.

Castro and Che Guevara were jittery there for awhile, urging caution in the counterattack. From the lethal fury of the attack and the horrendous casualties their troops and militia were taking, the two Soviet satraps assumed they faced at least 20,000 invading “mercenaries,” as they called them.

Yet it was a band of mostly civilian volunteers they outnumbered laughably. But to hear Castro’s echo chamber (the Beltway media and leftist academics), Fidel was the plucky David and the invaders the bumbling Goliath!

(We discussed the battle in greater detail last week here.)

In fact, if JFK wanted some genuine Profiles in Courage he might have looked at the men he betrayed on that heroic beachhead. Some of the most jaw-dropping heroics, however, came after the shooting ended, after they’d spent their last bullets and knew no more were coming from their ally, the most powerful nation on earth, the same one that enforced a “no-fly zone” half a country wide on another continent (Iraq) with half the U.S Air Force for a decade—but refused to provide one three miles across, 90 miles away, for half a day with two planes.

At any rate, the battle was over in three days, but the heroism was not.

Now came almost two years in Castro’s dungeons for the captured Brigada, complete with the physical and psychological torture that always comes with communist incarceration. During almost two years in Castro’s dungeons, the freedom-fighters lived under a daily death sentence.

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New National World War I Memorial Is A Moving Tribute To Bravery, Sacrifice, And The Indomitable American Spirit By Paulina Enck

By on April 19th, 2021

https://thefederalist.com/2021/04/17/new-national-world-war-i-memorial-is-a-moving-tribute-to-bravery-sacrifice-and-the-indomitable-american-spirit/

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

John McCrae’s immortal words of remembrance of all who fell in the Great War carried through a beautiful ceremony honoring the oft-forgotten war and America’s pivotal role. On Friday morning, politicians, historians, activists, military leaders, artists, and descendants virtually gathered to raise the American flag over the newly-erected World War I memorial in Washington DC.

As the last of the major 20th century US war veterans to receive a national memorial, those who served in WWI now have a powerful tribute to their sacrifice, bravery, and heroism. Hopefully, the monument will help return the Great War to public consciousness.

The monument is a peaceful place of reflection, erected in downtown Washington, D.C. within Pershing Park, which is named for John Pershing, General of the Armies who commanded America to victory in the Great War. The stone walls contain quotes from writings and poetry of WWI soldiers, and small fountains hide the city sounds.

The centerpiece of the memorial is a long statue featuring several war scenes leading into the other. The figures are near life-sized and each tableau has a sense of action, as well as fluidity between them, creating a palpable sense of immediacy to the images.

Joe Weishaar, the architect who designed the memorial, detailed his desire to center the monument on the stories of those who served. To supplement the beauty and remembrance of the physical structure, there is a multimedia aspect in the form of an app, which augments the experience by providing deeper learning to the attendees. The app can also be used outside the monument itself, allowing users to turn any area into a place of remembrance.

Actor and philanthropist Gary Sinise, best known for his Oscar-nominated turn as Lieutenant Dan in “Forrest Gump,” hosted the flag-raising from the office of his veteran service foundation. He opened the ceremony describing the American Soldiers, or doughboys as they were colloquially referred, in turning the tide of the war for the allied powers, overlaid with footage of the brave soldiers.

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The Courage of Your Convictions: Paul Revere, Lexington, and Concord By Rick Moran

By on April 19th, 2021

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/04/18/the-courage-of-your-convictions-paul-revere-lexington-and-concord-n1440789

“Too many today reflexively reject anything that doesn’t fit in with the tribal narrative. But all sides could look at what happened in Lexington and Concord and draw inspiration and perhaps — just perhaps — begin to understand just a little bit about what America truly means.”

Two hundred and forty-six years ago this evening, a prominent Boston silversmith set out on a ride that would be immortalized by America’s finest poet. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was looking for a subject to write about that illustrated American virtues and concluded that Paul Revere’s ride on April 18, 1775, to alert Sam Adams and John Hancock that the British regulars were coming to arrest them in Lexington was a perfect allegory.

Longfellow wrote the poem “Paul Revere’s Ride” in 1860 when no one was alive who remembered the actual events. And that was a good thing.  Longfellow took enormous liberties with the subject matter. But he wasn’t trying to achieve historical accuracy. Instead, Longfellow wanted to say something profound about the American character and the entire revolutionary generation: that they were willing to suffer and die for something greater than themselves.

Revere was a fairly wealthy man by standards of the time and could have done quite well for himself if he had stuck with the British during the Revolution. But he was a figure that would become quite common in America’s future. Revere was a man on the make and knew that if allowed the freedom to prosper, he could do better.

Revere became one of the first American industrialists and died a very wealthy man.

But most colonists were like the small group of militiamen who took positions on the green at Lexington the next day. They were simple folk — farmers, tradesmen, nary a wealthy man among them. They weren’t really sure why they were there except they knew they were standing up for what they understood their rights as free-born Englishmen to be. They were bitterly and tragically mistaken.

Imagine you were there. What side would you have been on?

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Remembering The Patriot With The Most Thorough Understanding Of Liberty Gary M. Galles

By on April 19th, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/04/19/remembering-the-patriot-with-the-most-thorough-understanding-of-liberty/

Today is patriot’s day, marking the Revolutionary War’s opening shots at Lexington and Concord. An excellent way to commemorate it is by remembering Samuel Adams, who Murray Rothbard called “the premier leader of the revolutionary movement,” as far more than a name on a beer bottle.

Adams helped organize the Committees of Correspondence, authored “The Rights of Colonists,” founded The Sons of Liberty, and was the principal organizer of the Boston Tea Party. The British government wanted him for treason a year before the Declaration of Independence. He inspired the battle cry “no taxation without representation,” signed the Declaration of Independence and was a representative to both Continental Congresses. Even Paul Revere’s famous ride was to warn Adams. 

Samuel Adams’ most important contribution to America’s cause, however, was that, in his cousin John Adams’ words, he had “the most thorough understanding of liberty,” which was the central spark in America’s creation. The threats liberty faces today, including a host of government actions that treat the trampling of liberty as non-issues, make recalling his ideas particularly important. 

Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: first, a right to life; secondly, to liberty; thirdly to property; together with the right to support and defend them.

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Bay of Pigs has lessons for our time By Lawrence J. Haas

By on April 12th, 2021

It was 60 years ago this week that an uncertain new president launched an ill-conceived military venture of astonishing naivety. The scheme was straightforward and audacious: 1,400 U.S.-trained Cuban exiles would land at the Bay of Pigs and ignite a populist uprising that would topple a Soviet-backed communist revolutionary by the name of Fidel Castro.

It was an unmitigated disaster.

With an army of 25,000, Castro quickly quashed hopes of an uprising as his forces killed more than a hundred exiles and imprisoned most of the others, and President John F. Kennedy suffered an embarrassing global setback just three months into his presidency.

Worse, the disaster came just weeks after JFK had launched his Alliance for Progress, which was supposed to set a new tone in U.S.-Latin American relations. Rather than continue to back right-wing regimes that supported U.S. interests in the region, the United States would provide billions in aid in exchange for political and economic reforms that would improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

The Alliance was designed to burnish America’s image in Latin America, but the Bay of Pigs buried those hopes by resurrecting the specter of U.S. imperialism in a region that had seen more than enough of it.

The fiasco had a silver lining, however, for it forced JFK to take stock, re-evaluate his approach to global challenges, see the world clearly, and act accordingly – in essence, to learn from his mistake.

It’s an approach that remains both important and timely, however different are the challenges that President Joe Biden now faces.

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The Fatuousness of Guilt as an Instrument of Policy Roger Kimball

By on April 11th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/10/the-fatuousness-of-guilt-as-an-instrument-of-policy/

When the world no longer speaks meaningfully to us, we shout into the void and pretend the echoes come from on high.

In Europe’s Last Summer, his brilliant book about the origins of World War I, the historian David Fromkin dilates on the seductive beauties of the summer of 1914. It was, he notes, the most gorgeous in living memory. That serene balminess seemed an objective correlative of the rock-solid political and social stability that Europe had enjoyed for decades. Percipient observers might have discerned troubling clouds on the horizon. But there were plenty of soothing voices to point out that the world’s increasing economic interdependence rendered any serious conflict impossible. There had been no war among the Great Powers for nearly half a century, ergo the status quo would persist for decades, maybe forever. There would always be honey then for tea. 

When war did finally break out, it was greeted in many quarters as a lark, a holiday, a deliverance from the tedious routines of everyday life. Yes, there were some cautionary voices. In August 1914, for example, Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, mournfully predicted, “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our time.” But at that moment, Grey’s was a minority perspective. “We’ll just pop over to France next week and be home by Christmas.” That was the popular refrain. 

In Germany, the mood was triumphalist. Thomas Mann, for example, cheered “the collapse of the hated world of peace, stinking of the corruption of bourgeois-mercantile ‘Civilization’ with its enmity to heroism and genius.” 

Then in September came the first battle of the Marne. Its unprecedented slaughter exacted half a million casualties in a week. It is accounted a great victory for the Allies. But although it halted the German advance, it also paved the way for four years of that butchery by attrition that is trench warfare in the age of total war. 

Cultural Consequences?

The Great War had enormous economic and political consequences, of course. It also had enormous consequences in the realm of cultural endeavor, in the visual arts and literature. It is often said that the primary existential or spiritual effect of the war was disillusionment. Barbara Tuchman, for example, notes in one of her classic studies of the Great War that the war had many results but that the dominant one was “disillusion.” She quotes D. H. Lawrence, who observed, “All the great words were cancelled out for that generation.” Honor, nobility, valor, patriotism, sacrifice, beauty: who could still take such abstractions seriously after the wholesale slaughter of the war?  

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Africa’s “Bigger Slave Problem” More pressing than Democrats’ quest for reparations. Lloyd Billingsley

By on March 31st, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/africas-bigger-slave-problem-lloyd-billingsley/

Last year Joe Biden said African Americans who don’t support him “ain’t black,” but this year the Delaware Democrat is open to reparations for slavery, America’s “original sin,” according to the composite character president David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama. A neglected historical account provides enlightenment on slavery’s true origins and its most enduring practitioners.

In 1856, British Army officer John Hanning Speke set out to find the source of the Nile. Speke’s massive Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile documents the African societies he found, and the widespread practice of slavery.  “To catch slaves is the first thought of every chief in the interior,” Speke wrote, “Hence fights and slavery impoverish the land.”

Many Africans were “caught in wars, as may be seen every day in Africa, made slaves of, and sold to the Arabs for a few yards of common cloth, brass wire, or beads. They would then be taken to Zanzibar, resold like horses to the highest bidder, and then kept in bondage by their new masters.”

As slaves, the Africans were “circumcised to make Mussulmans of them, that their hands might be ‘clean’ to slaughter their master’s cattle and extend his creed. For the Arabs believe the day must come when the tenets of Mohammed will be accepted by all men.” True to form, “the slave is willed to his successor.”

On Arab slave ships, “old women, stark naked, were dying in the most disgusting ‘ferret box’ atmosphere.” By contrast, “Slavery had received a severe blow by the sharp measures Colonel Rigby had taken in giving tickets of emancipation to all those slaves our Indian subjects the Banyans had been secretly keeping.”

Speke found an ally in chief  Mbumi who “knew that the English were the ruling power in that land, and that they were opposed to slavery.”  In some parts of Africa, Speke found, “cows, sheep, slaves have to be given to the father for the value of his daughter.” The Wahuma people kept slaves and “do not allow their daughters to taint their blood by marrying outside of the clan.”

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Taxation with Representation A fair and reasonable alternative to D.C. statehood John Steele Gordon

By on March 28th, 2021

https://www.city-journal.org/an-alternative-to-dc-statehood

Though Democrats haven’t made any formal moves on the idea yet, statehood for the District of Columbia is very much on their wish list. Ostensibly, it would cure a constitutional anomaly that gives the residents of the District no voice in Congress other than a nonvoting delegate in the House. In a country born under the slogan, “No taxation without representation,” it’s more than a bit embarrassing that citizens of that country’s capital city are taxed without representation.

Yet everyone realizes that the real reason behind the move is to create two new Senate seats that would be held by Democrats for the foreseeable future. How certain are we of this? Consider that in 1984, voters reelected Ronald Reagan in one of the greatest landslides in American political history. He carried 49 states and only missed the 50th by a mere 3,761 votes, yet in the District of Columbia he captured just under 14 percent of the vote.

The Framers of the Constitution didn’t want the capital to be located in a state, fearing that the state would have too much influence as a result. So they authorized the creation of a “District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and by the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States.” In Article I, Section 8, the Constitution gives Congress the power “To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District.”

Maryland ceded 63 square miles and Virginia 37 to create the ten-miles-square district. In 1846, Congress agreed to retrocede the Virginia portion back to that state, which is why the Pentagon is in Arlington, Virginia, not the District of Columbia.

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