Anna of all the Russias

One of my better-placed sources let it be known through the back-channel that our nation is being eaten away by jihadis in government, Michigan Democrats, fascist Moslems and their dhimmi cheerleaders.

The first thing that came to mind is a line from Anna Akhmatova, one of my favorite poets. I found my last reference to her by doing a google search, as below.

My question is often to ask at what point is government illegitimate. We cannot rightly go around overthrowing governments just because we don't like the folks elected. It's not my business who people elect to represent them. They can vote for Hitler for all it matters to me. But what happens when the people vote for a number of little Hitlers, and the Hitlers take power? What if they take power and use it to destroy the lives and property of the citizens, those who did or didn't vote for the Hitlers? If the people speak and vote for Hitlers, what do we do? Should we leave the nation to the Hitlers to do with as they please? It's the will of the people, and who am I to say this or that about their free choices? If people in Michigan wish to vote for a Muslim fascist, what is that to me? If they wish to vote for another in iraq, what's my concern in it? Who am I to tell the majority they can't vote for crazed fascists?

People in Russia loved Stalin. To this day he is much loved by many there. If it's not my business to interfere in whoever Russians vote for there today, then what business is it of mine to care about the vote in Michigan yesterday? If the majority of Americans decide in their infinite wisdom to vote for a majority of Left dhimmi fascists who promote Islam and who destroy the Constitiution, then it's the will of the American people, and not about me at all.

I'm big on obeying the law-- for the most part. Unless it interferes with my life in some concrete and obnoxious fashion. But let's forget about that and look only at my positon as a law-abiding guy who values law in itself. Our law is based on tradition and reason. If we decide to base our laws on whim and revelation and Islamic jurisprudence, then such is the will of the people, and it must be for the minority to accept dhimmitude and death. Well, since that's not realistic, at what point do we rebel? Our Constitution is open to ammendment, and rightly so; it is amended often and ignored even by activist judges. At what point do we say the Constitution is so vitiated that it is not our las anymore, and we are not bound by revisionist interpretations to the point we are rightly impelled to rebellion and the overthrow of the state? We've got a big mess in a number of states now, some folks so evil and corrupt that they should be imprisoned in Cuba wiothout any swift trial. Oh well.

In the comment below I respond to someone who complains about my imperialist sympathies and my calls for filibustering in the greater world because I don't give a damn about the sensitivities of savages. My postion is fairly clear: that those who do not obey the Rational and codified common law of basic Human decency, then they are illegitimate laws and illegitimate nations. Sudan? Iraq? Mexico? Overthrow their evil governments and rule their lands and people by force of arms and men, intermarry and colonise and make the whole of the world one big America of the mind. But what do we do about Michigan?
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War on terror? Hey, even for the right-wing religious bigot that am I have a sense of humor. Here's one I truly like, and because it's not so right-wing, please excuse the source:

"A revolution without firing squads is meaningless." V.I. Lenin.

Don't think highly of William Walker? Well, since I don't travel with a library on my back trust me that Eduord Bernstein remarks somewhere that continued settlement is contingent upon the natives behaving like civilized people. Yes, that Bernstein would be Engels' writing partner after Marx died.

But today my favorite thought on Iraq and our dealings with the jihadis comes from a comment from Anna Akhmatova, who wrote that once Stalin got upset over something, (and who really cares what,) and she noted that "The vegetarian years were over, and the meat-eating years began."

Stalin for Secretary of State.

Red, Black, White, Green. I can't see the difference.

Can you see the difference?

I'm hungry. I also appreciate Robert's intellectual approach to this problem. What do we get if we become like them? As a right-wing religious bigot, let me mention that Tatian compares the Romans to the Christians by writing that the Romans produce men who kill each other for fun, what he describes as the "cannibal banquet of the soul." When I look at shredded people I see that they look too much like pork. It increases my appetite for Spencer's reasonableness.

Let's try to get smart and rid ourselves first of our governments in our local elections. Educate some voters. Let's get some Spencers into office so we can win this war on jihadist terror properly. Then we can make omelets.

Posted by: sonofwalker at April 29, 2005 04:16 PM
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Stalin spent many vegetarian years as dictator before the meat-eating years began. We might end up with such a leader in our lands if we do nothing now to promote decent men instead of those we have now. These are the vegetarian years for us. If we do nothing to prevent the rise of the cannibals, then we will suffer, as will the whole of Humanity, not just murder but the shame of having been able to prevent it if only we'd bothered.

Wondering what happened to Anna Akhmatova? She survived Stalin's meat-eating years. Will you want to? I know too much about Stalin. If we need our own Stalin as Secretary of State, then count me out. We still have a democracy, and we can still use it to make rational sense of our societies. We still have right law and Human decency. If we do nothing until it's too late, then our choices will be bitter indeed. I don't want to overthrow our government. I want to make our government better than it has ever been before. I want to vote for you. I don't want to see you lose to Stalin. I don't want to witness the meat-eating years that will come if you do nothing. Act before it's too late.

All Quiet on the Western Fringe

Dalton Trumbo wrote his famous pacifist novel Johnny Got His Gun in 1939, and to my knowledge Trumbo never actually saw anything like combat first hand, though he wrote about it often and with passion. Trumbo, a communist sympathizer and party member for some years, also wrote a supposedly stirring piece of sentimental rubbish about the Republican loss in the Spanish Civil War, whinging and mincing about how he would have been a hero had he been there, and how he will be a hero if ever the chance arises for him to prove it in the future. Anti-war propaganist, novelist, hack buffoon. If I can find the quotation in my notes I'll include it here and make my poor fans suffer the reading of it. But not today. Today all is quiet on the Western fringe.

In the morning it will be what we formerly called Armistice Day. Stice is interesting, it being part of interstice and solstice and so on, coming from Latin, stitium, a stopping or a space between things. We can look at the armistice signed on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month to end WWI as a gap between wars, not the day that ushered in the end to the war to end all war. The armistice was a stopping for a while. War is with us and will continue to be with us for the foreseeable future. The question is how we deal with that unpleasant reality, whether we deal with it as a reality or whether we deal with it as an indulgence in private sentimentality and sanctimony and self-righteousness and moralistic posturing while appeasing the truly evil for the sake of our posings and posturings, such as Trumbo did so often. We have given up the very use of the term Armistice to describe the day, and in America we call it Veterans Day.

Wouldn't it be nice if war had truly ended on November 11, 1918? No more Wilfred Owens to write such poems as "Dulce et decorum est." Unlike Trumbo, Owen was in the trenches he writes about. Below, in the last stanza of the poem, he describes a poison gas attack and the narrator tells a war mongering fool to stop lying about the glory of dying for ones nation. Owen was shot to death a week before the war ended, died in combat.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory
The old Lie: dulce decorum est
Pro patria mori.

No, we won't be found encouraging men and women to die for glory and nation. We could be found telling our own to risk death for the sake of life, to rid the world of tyrrants who would use poison gas to murder civilians at random. We could ourselves be found in the ranks of those who would give our all for the sake of life even if that means death for us. The good that makes life worth living means there are those same things that make it worth the dying to give to our own if we must go before them.

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine;
Et lux perpetua luceat eis.

Benjamin Britten made his Requiem's libretto from poems by Owen. It opens as above.

Lord grant them eternal rest;
And let the perpetual light shine upon them.

The whole should be available here:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/-Britten/reqtext.html.

Yes, it's a fine sentiment to be against war, but finer still is to fight those who are commited to evil, finer to die if one must in the war against those who would murder if they are not stopped. Yes, it's even glorious to die in dubious battles, to die if one must in the hope that one is better to fight for what is likely better than to allow the murder of others.

This Remembrance Day I will remember Shakespeare's lines as I recall those who make our lives of freedom possible, The Dead at rest:

The edge of war, like an ill-sheathed blade,
Shall no more cut its master.

I remember.

Renewing the National Covenant

Whatever distant relationship I have to Andrew Jackson of Tennessee is one I am proud to hold. Jackson once held a ball at his home, prior to which someone, as a joke of some kind, sent an invitation to the town's only mother/daughter prostitute team, thinking the ladies would be insulted and the sender could tell the joke later. When the ladies showed up at the appointed hour with invitations in hand, Jackson invited them in as guests, and he waltzed with them as couretously as any gentleman would waltz with any lady invited to his party. When the ladies left they still had no idea that someone had tried to embarass them.

When some South Carolinians threatened to cede from the Union, Jackson was asked if he had any message for them. "Yes, I have. Please give my compliments to my friends in your state, and say to them that if a single drop of blood shall be shed there in opposition to the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man I can lay my hands on engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first tree I can reach."

Gentlemen, we request your presence at the Vancouver Public Library this Thursday evening in the atrium from 7-9:00 pm where you will find us outside Blenz Coffee bar. We wear Israeli flags on our hats and we don blue scarves in solidarity with our fellows struggling against barbarism and dhimmitude in France. If you provide the gentlemanly manners I will provide the old hickory. Please join us to discuss the nature of our politic in this united Canadian nation.