Islamic Fascism 101 - On all they’ve done to earn the name.

National Review ^ | 25 Sept 2006 | VDH

[RKV]

You still need more history lessons. E.g. Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine were American government policies, like the Wilsonians use. How about TR's mediation of the Russo-Japanese War, or our invitation of the French navy to fight the British during our revolution, for other examples of an outward looking foreign policy. It appears that you have abandoned your call for autarchy, too.

[RKV]

Albania used to do autarchy too.

[katyusha]

--You mean like NK?--

"NK" has no:
Natural resources (gets all its goodies from China, which may be tiring of its charity)

An industrial base worthy of the name (i.e. early 50s Stalinist-style smokestack rubbish, producing nothing worthwhile)

Entrepeneurial class, "protestant ethic" (un-PC term I know), business schools etc.

Comparing North Korea to the USA is like comparing a tinker toy to a Boeing 747 (maybe this analogy isn't the best, but you get the point)

[RKV]

You aren't the only one who feels that way.

[From One - Many]

Good ....there is strength in numbers.....
and for the coming battles, America and Americans will need all the strength we can muster.

[Valin]

Yeah and that worked real well.
/sarcasm

[Psycho_Bunny]

To read al Qaeda’s texts is to reenter the world of Mein Kampf

There have only been two books I've read where I've closed them halfway through, walked over to the garbage and tossed them in:  Mein Kampf and The "Holy" Quran.

Word for word - and factually - they have nothing in common.  But emotionally and intellectually, they were written in the same mindset:  despicable, pea-brained hatred.

Personally, I think Hilter and Mohammed were way, way, waaaay too angry about their one-inch penises.

 

[katyusha]

Oh where do I begin:

--E.g. Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine were American government policies, like the Wilsonians use--

The United States has had "government policies" since 1776! What is your point? The Monroe Doctrine dealt with the NEW World (i.e. our "backyard") and how to protect it. Manifest destiny was Americas expansion to the pacific--Mexico's holdings north of the Rio Grande stood in the way.

-- How about TR's mediation of the Russo-Japanese War, --

That was 1905 (i.e. TWENTIETH CENTURY)!! Go back to your history books--and I blame TR along with Woodrow Wilson in putting the US on the death road to empire and getting mired in the problems of the Old World.

--or our invitation of the French navy to fight the British during our revolution--

France crashed the party to get back at Britain for kicking its butt during the Seven Years (French and Indian) War (taking Canada etc.) Typical of France, it interviened when the Continental Army had pretty much won (Britain lost the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic and was barely holding on to Georgia and the Carolinas when France interveined).

I have not abandoned autarky at all--one thing at a time, fella. See another post above for further arguments in favor of autarky.

[Former Dodger]

Good one, RKV.

PRoP PING! Although it does seem to be "reaching to the choir".

Perhaps the TRUTH will be accepted if you say it enough.

[Eastbound]

"The Saudi intelligence head laughed him out of the room; thus his desire for revenge, against both the Saudi government and the Americans he felt were defiling the kingdom."

'Hell hath no fury like a conquering hero that didn't get hailed.'

[Valin]

I do understand your point, I just disagree with your take on economics. the world is becoming a smaller more interconnected place every day, and those countiers that don't get on board are doomed to a Hobbesian existance.

(For what it's worth)
Before the start of WWII, what we call North Korea today was the industrial section of Korea, the southern part was the agricultural section.

[OKSooner]

"like the “Banzai” spirit of the Japanese, should always trump the cowardly and debased material superiority of decadent Western democracies. So al Qaeda boasts that in Somalia and Afghanistan the unshakeable creed of Islam overcame the richer and better equipped Americans and Russians. To read bin Laden’s communiqués is to be reminded of old Admiral Yamamato assuring his creepy peers that his years in the United States in the 1920s taught him that Roaring Twenties America, despite its fancy cars and skyscrapers, simply could not match the courage of the chosen Japanese."

Not to argue his overall point, but VDH has just revised history re the Japanese. First, Yamamoto was opposed to going to war with America, because he had travelled the country and seen our industrial capacity and gotten to know some of the people, unlike his buds who came here to go to skool at Harvard and Stanford.

Second, and more trivially, "Banzai" was just a shout. The correct Japanese term VDH was looking for is "Bushido".

He's right about islamofascists, of course, but he must have mailed this one in, or had it ghostwritten.

[katyusha]

--Before the start of WWII, what we call North Korea today was the industrial section of Korea, the southern part was the agricultural section.--

True, but the "industrial section" was originally Japanese, and was bombed to bits by the United States in 2 wars (WWII and especially Korean War); it never really recovered.

[RKV]

1) Got a contemporary example of a successful autarchy? If not, give up on it. 2) You conceed my point then, that prior to 1900, US foreign policy included "Wilsonian" elements of active engagement in the world at large, maybe less than now, but we certainly weren't closed in trade or in policy.

[AlbionGirl]

Fourth, just as it was idle in the middle of World War II to speculate how many Germans, Japanese, or Italians really accepted the silly hatred of Hitler, Mussolini, or Tojo, so too it is a vain enterprise to worry over how many Muslims follow or support al Qaeda, or, in contrast, how many in the Middle East actively resist Islamists.

Most people have no ideology, but simply accommodate themselves to the prevailing sense of an agenda’s success or failure. Just as there weren’t more than a dozen vocal critics of Hitler after the Wehrmacht finished off France in six weeks in June of 1940, so too there wasn’t a Nazi to be found in June 1945 when Berlin lay in rubble.

It doesn’t matter whether Middle Easterners actually accept the tenets of bin Laden’s worldview — not if they think he is on the ascendancy, can bring them a sense of restored pride, and humiliate the Jews and the West on the cheap. Bin Laden is no more eccentric or impotent than Hitler was in the late 1920s.Yet if he can claim that his martyrs forced the United States out of Afghanistan and Iraq, toppled a petrol sheikdom or two, and acquired its wealth and influence — or if he got his hands on nuclear weapons and lorded it over appeasing Westerners — then he too, like the Fuhrer in the 1930s, will become untouchable. The same is true of Iran’s president Ahmadinejad.

This sums it all up very nicely for me.

[katyusha]

--1) Got a contemporary example of a successful autarchy? If not, give up on it. 2) You conceed my point then, that prior to 1900, US foreign policy included "Wilsonian" elements of active engagement in the world at large, maybe less than now, but we certainly weren't closed in trade or in policy.--

1. There is no other nation with the combination of industrial base, natural resources, educational infrastructure, entrepenurial spirt and plain-technological know-how of the United States. If any nation could do it, it is the USA.

2. I concede nothing. The Treaty of Portsmouth that ended the Russo-Japanese war was 1905. 1905 is AFTER 1900!
Other than the lone Barbary Pirates episode, there is no other example of the US mucking about in the Old World pre-1900. Conquest of CA, CO, AZ, NM, TX etc. in 1845-1846 was strictly a New World affair. And France got in on the action in 1782 or thereabouts to get revenge on it's old enemy Great Britain at a time when the Continental Army already had Great Britain on the ropes. Keep trying, though.

[theBuckwheat]

>>
islam doesn't worship the God I know, islam worships the devil.
<<

My point is that the unintended consequence of Islam's newly found ability to intrude in the daily affairs of the secular west is to bring a very basic spiritual issue to the attention of people who reject the very concept.

Where Islam forces a person to consider its "invitation" or else submit (as a subservient citizen), or die, they force a person who rejects that God exists to consider if how they answer has eternal consequences or not.

If God does not exist, then it doesn't matter if the secular person, like the kidnapped Fox reporters, converts to Islam in order to make the death threat go away. If there is no God, it is an inconsequential choice, like choosing to buy Juicy Fruit chewing gum instead of Spearmint, or no gum at all. But if God exists, then it matters more than any other decision this person will make in his life.

The choice may be clear to you and to me, but it is not at all clear to the millions in the west who have not already resolved faced this question.

Before this is all over, everyone alive will have to make some very important choices.

[Valin]

There's no reason why it could not have recovered...except for their policy of "Self reliance" and (it goes without saying) Communism.

[RKV]

So then you have a hunch, a theory, about this autarchy thing, that the US could make it work if we tried real hard. I don't think so. One antidote for that kind of thinking to read Adam Smith - The Wealth of Nations.