"A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker."

~ H. L. Mencken

Although understandable, it was nevertheless dispiriting to have read so much about 11 September in American newspapers. Television, too, outdid itself with non-stop coverage. Imagine if Uncle Sam had been hit with a Dresden, or a Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What then? Still, at least firemen and cops got the credit that was long overdue. Now even trendy lefties and Hollywood types recognize their sacrifice, however reluctantly.

~ Taki, in The Spectator

I had a dreadful nightmare a few nights ago. It really shook me up. I dreamt I was the officer accompanying General Lee to the Appomattox Court House for the surrender. I had an hour to kill and spent it chatting with two Confederate civilians in a local tavern. I understood that soon I’d have to open that holster, take out my Navy Colt, and lay it down. Then I’d be the property of the Yankee government, for an unarmed man exists at the pleasure of those with arms.

As I spoke with the chaps in the tavern and prepared to mount up and depart, we all realized that these were the last free moments we would ever experience. When I woke up I was terribly depressed, as you might well imagine.

For me, this brought to mind the surrender of Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, to the revolutionary socialists, which I personally witnessed.

Log on to a Rhodesian web site, and look around for news and comments about those who remain in that pathetic husk of a country. They bravely whistle as they pass the graveyard. As their firearms and property are confiscated, one piece at a time, they always put a happy face on it. Observing all this is a distinctly creepy experience. The local newspaper in Harare continues to print society columns in a grotesque parody of their previous existence.

Do you still wonder why so many gun "nuts" and "fanatics" – that is, men and women composedly determined to oversee their own lives, to protect their loved ones and what is rightfully theirs – grimly declare, They will take my gun away from me when they can pry it from my cold dead fingers?

~ Michael Peirce

For I have reason to conclude that he who would get me into his power without my consent would use me as he pleased when he had got me there, and destroy me too when he had a fancy to it.

~ John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, chapter 3

Since the most dangerous mind-altering substance known to man is ink, when can we expect the government to declare war on it?

~ Sheldon Richman

If you want to get a glimpse of the "glory" that British soldiers experienced while fighting for the Empire in faraway lands (here, the Sudan), go see the new movie The Four Feathers. The film displays the murderous hatred that the natives, for some crazy reason, felt for the British troops that came out of nowhere to occupy and take over their homeland and lord it over them. There’s also a nice love story, but warning: the movie teems with gory scenes, especially during the battles between the British soldiers and the Sudanese…terrorists.

~ Jacob G. Hornberger

Professors of "business ethics" are fond of crusading against investing in politically incorrect products like tobacco and liquor. They urge "socially responsible" universities and other institutions to divest themselves of any stock ownership in such companies in order to eliminate the moral taint of these products.

But selling tobacco stock that will be purchased by someone else merely shifts the moral taint, it doesn’t eliminate it. This is ethical? This point was brought home by a recent (Sept. 22, 2002) Knight Ridder/Baltimore Sun article:

The Vice Fund went on sale to the public this month, billing itself as a "socially irresponsible fund" that will put investors’ assets into tobacco, gambling, liquor and defense [sic]. The Vice Fund’s founder, a Texas research and investment outfit with $240 million in assets under management, says the industries it has singled out for the Vice Fund are easy for the public to understand and largely recession-proof. "I would suspect that the large fund houses would not do this because it would be viewed as politically incorrect," Dan Ahrens, 36, Vice Fund portfolio co-manager said.

Mutuals.com Inc. sells the Vice Fund and, not surprisingly, the article goes on to quote a professor of legal studies and business ethics at Temple University who is "appalled" by it. Others might call it a case of entrepreneurial alertness.

~ Thomas J. DiLorenzo

In the decades following the Civil War, Republican politicians kept on "waving the bloody shirt" at election time. They smeared their Democratic opponents as "rebels" and "traitors," and endlessly rehashed the horrors of the slave system and of the dreadful war that was supposedly all about slavery.

This tactic proved highly effective. It allowed the Republicans to continue in power, subsidizing the western railroad barons, massively exploiting the American public through ever higher tariffs, massacring the Plains Indians, and in other ways exemplifying the traditions of the Grand Old Party.

Nowadays, the bloodiest shirt of them all is Hitler and the Nazis. The most vulnerable target to wave it in front of is, naturally, the Germans.

The neocons could not contain their venom when Chancellor Schröder campaigned (and won) the general election by pledging not to join George Bush’s handlers in their war on Iraq. A writer for National Review Online (my friend Paul Gottfried pointed it out to me) quoted a would-be contemporary Mencken as saying that the German language was fit only for spitting in your interlocutor’s face. This dumb insult might have been more telling had it come from people able to read a few lines of German prose or, say, a poem by Goethe, a well-known author who didn’t spit in people’s faces that much.

The Wall Street Journal took a somewhat higher line:

The German Way. As we noted last week, there is one point of commonality between the militaristic Germany of the 1930s and the pacifistic Germany of the 2000s: Both are siding against the free world with a fascist dictator, albeit in this case not their own. As if to underscore our point, the Times of London reported before the election that "German neo-Nazis, including the former head of the far-Right Republican Party, Franz Schönhuber, are coming out in support of the Chancellor for having adopted "the German way" in defying the United States."

This is the bloody shirt waving back and forth insanely. The logic is rather mad, nicht wahr? Pacifistic fascist-lovers? One might also reasonably object: hasn’t Pope John Paul II also come out against this unprovoked attack on Iraq and its people?

Of course, there are neocons who would reply that the present pope is simply reenacting the "fascism" of his predecessor, Pius XII, "Hitler’s Pope." But the Journal hasn’t sunk to the level of The New Republic, has it? Not yet. But how soon?

~ Ralph Raico

October 3, 2002

The Passing Scene is edited by Ralph Raico.

The Passing Scene Archives: 9/28/02

Copyright © 2002 LewRockwell.com