Judt on recent political grotesqueness

The only people qualified to speak on this matter, it would seem, are those who got it wrong initially.
[...]
This is not a choice that most American liberal commentators are even willing to acknowledge, much less make. And so they say nothing.

—Tony Judt in the London Review of Books, on the recent political climate.

On a tangent from that article:

They may see themselves as having migrated to the opposite shore; but they display precisely the same mixture of dogmatic faith and cultural provincialism, not to mention the exuberant enthusiasm for violent political transformation at other people’s expense, that marked their fellow-travelling predecessors across the Cold War ideological divide.

That's about lefties-turned-"hawks", and again seems to echo the meme that's been sloshing around (Francis Fukuyama, was it?) that the "neocons" are actually crypto-Trotskyists.

Hell yes

I could pull quotes from this all week. (This is nominally about that US congressman who was exploiting sixteen-year old interns.)

This terror is a complex of the sexualization of children and teenagers, and the violence directed against children and teenagers in the society.

In their view there is a vast homosexual conspiracy to infect youth with gay secular humanism. In short, the evangelical world sees a counter world – a Satanism of secularlism, that like themselves, infects people with exposure. [...] In the Manichean war, the forces of light and the forces of darkness engage in a race to reach, and save or corrupt, the unconverted.

For most of its history, until the late 1970s, the more evangelical one was, the more likely one was to be not involved in politics AT ALL--to see it as an inherently sinful realm.

—The Revolution Eats its Own, by Stirling Newberry. At last, recent history, and Team America: World Police, is beginning to come together to something coherent.

Ugly, but coherent.

Eternal war, part CXXXVII

Interesting. Americans are apparently beginning to internalize the notion that

Now since when has the objective of war been to never kill or torture civilians? Not in World War II, where we bombed Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The intent then was to crush the will of the other side, and to make so horrible for them to keep fighting us that they would surrender.

It is refreshing when they just out and admit that they're in favor of employing terrorist tactics. Or maybe this is just due to "terrorist" having been used as a synonym for "enemy" for so long that it completely passes them by.

Implied, of course, is the notion that since our side did it, it must be okay. Forgotten is the simple fact that most wars before 1933 did not involve civilians very much. Forgotten is the fact that WWII's civilian slaughters were so horrible that a Geneva convention was drawn up to prevent it from happening again.

Note also the circumspect language — goals of war are not usually defined negatively, nor are they usually consistent throughout the course of it: war has its own logic, and tends to sweep people along once it starts to churn. As we can see.