Read Buchanan’s pro-Russian article here.

The neocons got their war with Iraq. They are pushing for war on Iran. And they are now baiting the Russian Bear.

Is this what McCain has on offer? Endless war?

Buchanan, it seems, forgets who the aggressor is, and prefers to see everything from within his cozy, isolationist bubble.

Read Christopher Hitchen’s scathing review of Buchanan’s WWII revisionst book here.

Pat Buchanan, twice a candidate for the Republican nomination and in 2000 the standard-bearer for the Reform Party who ignited a memorable “chad” row in Florida, has now condensed all the antiwar arguments into one. His case, made in his recently released “Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War,” is as follows:

• That Germany was faced with encirclement and injustice in both 1914 and 1939.
• Britain in both years ought to have stayed out of quarrels on the European mainland.
• That Winston Churchill was the principal British warmonger on both occasions.
• The United States was needlessly dragged into war on both occasions.
• That the principal beneficiaries of this were Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong.
• That the Holocaust of European Jewry was as much the consequence of an avoidable war as it was of Nazi racism.

Isolationism is one thing, but excusing the actions of Hitler and the Final Solution–pinning them on the Allies as a German reaction to Allied hostility?

Originally posted over at birdbrain.

In 1936, a country under a totalitarian government hosted the summer Olympics. The regime successfully projected an image during these Olympics that convinced a great number of people that the regime was benign and good. This regime, of course, was the Nazis, who later went on to kill twelve million civilians and start a world war in which even more people died.

In 2008, another country under a totalitarian regime is hosting the summer Olympics. This country, Communist China, has a horrible record on human rights. They censor their internet and imprison dissidents. Yet they won the bid to host these games back in 2001 because they promised to make the 2008 Olympics “green”. In the years leading up to the 2008 Olympics, China employed the services of internationally known architects and urban planners to completely redesign their city. They are putting up a face of Communism for the world to see, a face intended to deceive us. They would have us believe that Communism works, yet nothing could be further from the truth.

We all know the saying: “Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.” Letting countries like Communist China or Nazi Germany host the Olympics just is not a good idea. By doing this, we (as in the free world) enable them with an excellent propaganda opportunity that can only serve to undermine us.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Or, put more pithily, people never learn.

Image credit

This review was originally published at my blog, birdbrain.

Humberto Fontova has written a must read book: Exposing the Real Che Guevara: And the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him. Fontova himself was born in Cuba. Luckily, his family was able to leave Cuba and escape Communism, though his father was detained on the day they were scheduled to leave. Fontova, his mother, and siblings had to leave his father behind to get out. Fontova’s father later was able to get to Miami and reunite with his family. Though everything worked out for the Fontova family, things didn’t work out for thousands of other families, due to a man named Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

Che Guevara is revered as a hero nowadays. All of us have seen those people sporting the Che shirts and other ridiculous Che paraphernalia. (Jonah Goldberg reports in his book Liberal Fascism having seen a Che onesie for a baby–luckily he, unlike most people, knows the truth about Che and likens it to a “Himmler sippy cup”–see pg 194.) But this man, Che Guevara, is not some rebel who fought for equality and rights for the poor. He is not someone that anyone in their right mind should idolize. Che Guevara was a murderer, simple as that. He had countless thousands of Cubans executed. And yet, in a cruel twist of fate, somehow this criminal is remembered in such a good light.

Che was a Communist in the purest sense of the word. He wanted everyone else to live poorly, while he, a top member in the Communist Party, lived in a mansion that he stole from its rightful owner. He tolerated no dissent: anyone who criticized him or those in power was more often than not arrested, tortured, and executed by a firing squad, all without a proper trial. And age or gender did not matter: Che had no qualms about executing women and children as well as men.

Che was not only violent, he was stupid. He had little military experience, despite the lies propagated by the left that he was an excellent guerrilla warrior. He knew nothing about fighting–before a battle, he actually managed to shoot himself in the head with his own pistol. Unfortunately, the wound was not fatal or damaging. He later proved his military ineptness in Congo and as a commander of a guerrilla force in Bolivia. He himself admitted to close associates that he was not knowledgeable militarily. He was also a coward: he surrendered in Bolivia with his pistol fully loaded, begging his captors not to kill him.

Che finally faced justice on October 9, 1967. He had been captured in Bolivia a few days earlier and the soldiers received orders to execute him. In an excellent turn of events, Che was shot without having a trial, just as he had ordered so many thousands of innocent people to their deaths. I cannot think of a more excellent example of poetic justice: this murderer who executed so many people without a fair trial meeting his end in a similar manner.

It is time we stopped revering a criminal. I would argue that Che’s crimes ought to be characterized as crimes against humanity and their perpetrator treated as such: a murderous criminal. You wouldn’t buy something glorifying Hitler, Himmler, or Heydrich, would you? No one decent would speak about these men in a complimentary way, either. Che is as bad as any of those three men–it’s time for us to force the left to face the facts about Che Guevara.

~by Israel Kasnett

While the Arab-Israeli conflict today is a diplomatic and military one, it is also composed of a third element - the media. Not being confined, the media debate has spread throughout the internet, online newspapers, online journals and of course, blogs.

Although contributors to online blogs and threads often offer nothing more than rubbish and repartee, there exists a lively and healthy debate on the Arab-Israeli conflict. One of the main points of contention on most blogs and discussions I have seen center around one issue. Pro-Palestinian writers claim that in 1948, Israel appropriated Palestinian lands and villages to create their own cities and agricultural communities. Pro-Israel writers offer good counterpoints but these are often insufficient to properly negate the argument and win the debate.

Debaters from both sides of the argument often use sources gleaned from political, left or right-wing sources and this damages the quality of the argument since the proofs brought are often nothing more than the biased views of extreme groups. When making an argument, it is important to find credible information from sources that cannot be attributed to a specific political slant.

The first part of the argument that Zionists stole Palestinian land can refer to the British Mandate period before the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. Arab absentee landowners owned most of the land eventually used by the UN to create the State of Israel and their willingness to sell the land to Jews demonstrates evident disinterest in maintaining ownership over it.

Furthermore, Arab governments displaced their own populations in far greater numbers than the Jews displaced Palestinian Arabs up until the 1930’s. Jews were careful not to buy land in areas that would cause Arab displacement and instead bought uncultivated land in remote areas. Israeli leaders at the time discouraged Jews from displacing Arabs and placed heavy importance on a continued Arab presence in the land.

In January of 1937, Ben Gurion testified before the Palestine Royal Commission in which he said, “We will work it out together, and we will see to it that not a single Arab cultivator is displaced, but he should not only remain, but his conditions should be improved, and, by intensification, new room should be created for new Jewish settlers.”

However, even with this proposed cooperation, Arabs often sold their land to Jews when they decided to move elsewhere or when they needed the money to invest in promising Jewish-owned business projects.

The Peel Commission of 1937 found Arab claims that Jews stole their land as baseless. Land shortages were due more in part to massive Arab immigration to Palestine from other Arab countries than to Jewish land purchases. Chapter IX of the Peel Commission states,

“The shortage of land is due less to purchase by Jews than to the increase in the Arab population. The Arab claims that the Jews have obtained too large a proportion of good land cannot be maintained. Much of the land now carrying orange groves was sand dunes or swamps and uncultivated when it was bought.”

Whereas the British resigned much of Palestine to be “uninhabitable,” the Jews took this “barren wasteland,” drained the swamps and “made the desert bloom.” Many of the Jewish-owned citrus groves at the time were situated on sand dunes viewed by the British as “uncultivable.”

It is without doubt that the Jews, in their quest to purchase and acquire more land, did not take any land from Arabs unlawfully. Furthermore, Arab absentee landlords living elsewhere and real estate brokers sold their land to Jews at an inflated cost.

As of today, not a single person representing the pro-Palestinian view has been able to contradict this reality using any official documentation, land data or historical records.

Furthermore, the Peel Commission admitted that Arabs on the whole, benefited from a growing Jewish presence in the land as they brought economic prosperity and stability to Palestine and its inhabitants.

“The Arab population shows a remarkable increase since 1920, and it has had some share in the increased prosperity of Palestine. Many Arab landowners have benefited from the sale of land and the profitable investment of the purchase money. The fellaheen are better off on the whole than they were in 1920. This Arab progress has been partly due to the import of Jewish capital into Palestine and other factors associated with the growth of the National Home. In particular, the Arabs have benefited from social services which could not have been provided on the existing scale without the revenue obtained from the Jews.”

Up until 1948, the Palestinian Arab population grew approximately 120 percent. This population growth occurred in tandem with Palestinian Jewish population growth and for reasons often overlooked. Jewish immigration and subsequent economic growth in Palestine led to increased Arab immigration from other countries by those seeking economic opportunity. Many Arabs at the time wandered around the Middle East seeking sustenance and a means to support their families.

Arab claims that they were displaced from their homes after living there generation after generation for thousands of years were baseless and fabricated. Most Arabs living in Palestine prior to 1948 had come from Arab lands in search of subsistence and had not been in Palestine for more than a few years.

In addition, the Jews cleared unused land, drained swamps in the Jezreel Valley and surrounding areas and in doing so, helped rid the country of its widespread malaria problem. They established medical clinics, improved water supplies and developed better solutions to deal with sanitation. All this, directly led to better health, higher standard of living, longer life expectancy and a lower infant mortality rate.

It is clear that Arab complaints against Jews were, for the most part, politically motivated, and did not reflect the reality in Palestine at the time. In comparison to their lives in Arab countries or the situation in Palestine before massive Jewish immigration, Arabs saw a consistently increased improvement in their standard of living, overall health and improved economic stability - all while cultivating their own land.

This post was originally published at my blog, birdbrain. I originally posted it on July 17 to commemorate Russia’s last imperial family. I am now posting it here as well.

It was on this night (well, okay, it was early, early morning, as in about 2.00 AM), ninety years ago, that Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and his family–wife, four daughters, one son, and their three servants–were murdered by the Bolsheviks.

I’m no great supporter of monarchies, but I’ve always been bothered by what happened to the Romanovs. They really weren’t bad people–Nicholas was just not suited to rule. He never really wanted to be tsar, by the way; he only became tsar because he felt it was his duty. He stupidly did not want the give any power to an elected assembly, though he was later forced to allow a parliament (called the Duma). Had he given power to an elected assembly, as most of the civilised world was doing, perhaps Russia could have made a peaceful transition into a democratic country.

That was not to be. The tsar was arrested and imprisoned. After Tsar Nicholas was removed from power, Alexander Kerensky was put in charge of a more democratic government that unfortunately did not succeed. The Bolsheviks instead gained power and the Romanovs were executed early in the morning on July 17 on Lenin’s orders (Lenin was a very bad person, though history does not always seem to portray him that way), thereby ushering in a long period of Communist rule for Russia.

The following photograph (via Wikipedia) shows the family during happier times in 1913. From left to right: Grand Duchesses Olga and Maria, Nicholas, Tsarina Alexandra (his wife), Grand Duchess Anastasia, Tsarevich Alexei, and Grand Duchess Tatiana. The children were tragically young when they died: Olga was twenty-two; Tatiana twenty-one; Maria nineteen; Anastatia seventeen; and Alexei thirteen.

Their bodies were unceremoniously dumped in pits. In 1998, the family was reburied in the St. Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg. They have been canonized as saints by the Russian Orthodox Church.

Just a side note: for many years, people thought that it was possible that one or two of the girls could have survived the terrible night of July 17–in fact, many women came forward claiming to be Anastasia. In recent years, extensive excavation has confirmed that none of the family survived.

On our most recent sortie through Sir Winston’s old papers and notes, we came across an item of interest, particularly in light of the philosophical divide that is the subtext of the current United States presidential contest.

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