Just another reason to like Roy:
FAMOUS FAN:
Among the 8,267 at UNC's (women's soccer) semifinal game was men's basketball coach Roy Williams, who attended the first half with assistant coach Joe Holladay before heading back to Chapel Hill for basketball practice.
ESPN2 cameras caught up with Williams after the Heels scored their first goal. He complimented Kendall Fletcher's back flip after her first-half goal, saying she could play for him with her vertical-leaping ability. Williams broke off in the middle of a sentence to holler "Go!" when UNC got close again.
"Roy and I go back to when we were students together at UNC," women's soccer coach Anson Dorrance said. "I'm a huge Roy Williams fan. As all of you guys who attended the University of North Carolina know, I think part of your degree is a degree in basketball. I think we're all basketball fans.
"I get more nervous watching our basketball team play than watching our soccer team. I love the fact that he would take some time out of an obviously busy schedule to come out here on a miserable day to support us. That meant a heck of a lot to me."
Saturday, December 06, 2003
Thursday, December 04, 2003
An excellent observation about the proponents of "Turkeygate" by the always worth reading Dean Esmay:
"...when you no longer have any ideas of relevance, demonizing your opponents and seeking scandals everywhere are your only remaining tools.
Bush, who has always been a moderate centrist on most issues, and who's only slightly right-of-center on the rest, regularly gives his opponents 85-90% of what they want. They then shriek like whipped puppies over the 10-15% they don't get, and look desperately for scandals everywhere.
John Stuart Mill once observed that the opponents of liberalism were people who didn't have any real ideas, but merely irritable mental gestures that sought to resemble ideas. I believe he is quite correct on that, which is why I keep saying that most of the Left stopped being liberal--on most issues anyway--quite some time ago.
Oh, by the way: BushLied!!!!111!1!(TM)"
-Dean Esmay
"...when you no longer have any ideas of relevance, demonizing your opponents and seeking scandals everywhere are your only remaining tools.
Bush, who has always been a moderate centrist on most issues, and who's only slightly right-of-center on the rest, regularly gives his opponents 85-90% of what they want. They then shriek like whipped puppies over the 10-15% they don't get, and look desperately for scandals everywhere.
John Stuart Mill once observed that the opponents of liberalism were people who didn't have any real ideas, but merely irritable mental gestures that sought to resemble ideas. I believe he is quite correct on that, which is why I keep saying that most of the Left stopped being liberal--on most issues anyway--quite some time ago.
Oh, by the way: BushLied!!!!111!1!(TM)"
-Dean Esmay
Wednesday, December 03, 2003
A fine review of a new book on Tolkien.
War and Middle-earth
By A.N. Wilson, Evening Standard
In October 1916, one of the thousands of young men caught up in the Battle of the Somme was Second Lieutenant Ronald Tolkien of the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers. He subsequently developed trench fever, brought on by the lice. But he survived; he was one of the lucky ones. Of the 600 in his battalion, 60 were dead, 74 missing and 450 wounded.
Tolkien, the author of one of the most popular stories of struggle and endurance ever written in the history of the English language - come to that, in the history of the human race - was part of that tragic generation whom we remember with awe and gratitude at this time of year.
"By 1918," he wrote half a century later in a preface to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, "all but one of my close friends were dead."
John Garth, in this new study of Tolkien, shows two very considerable areas of expertise. He has mastered the complicated history of the First World War, its battles and campaigns. His narrative, of how young Tolkien and his schoolfriends fared during the war, is fleshed out with deep research in war diaries and letters and dispatches found in the Public Record Office and elsewhere.
He is also thoroughly versed in Tolkien's minor works, the so-called Lost Tales, and other literature, which the author left behind him when he died and which has been punctiliously edited by his son, Christopher Tolkien.
This is very much the best book about JRR Tolkien that has yet been written, because it concentrates on the one thing that interests us about a writer - namely the evolution of his imaginative life. It traces the story of the Birmingham schoolboy who, as a South African of German racial origins, always felt a bit of an outsider, and whose sense of solitude was increased by losing both his parents by the time he was 12. He blamed his mother's early death - its immediate cause was diabetes - on the hardship she endured when she was converted to Roman Catholicism, and ostracised by the family.
This deeply introverted boy received the most wonderful education at Edward VI School, Birmingham, the alma mater of, among others, all the best English New Testament Greek scholars of the 19th century and, more recently, David Willetts and Enoch Powell. The thought of a JRR Tolkien of today being forced into the comprehensive system makes one shudder. (You did right, Diane Abbott!) By the time he was 18, not only was he a competent classicist, but he had fluent German, and had invented many languages and mythologies. Once he began to read the Finnish Kalevala, the Norse Edda and Anglo-Saxon poetry, his imagination was fired to invent and reinvent the mythologies which became the background, eventually, to The Lord of the Rings.
Christopher Tolkien has done a heroic thing in laying out all the material that traces this evolution, but few but the greatest enthusiasts will ever be able to make sense of it all. John Garth does this - he chooses the salient passages, including stuff which is not yet in print - and watches Tolkien's mind grow.
He is far from uncritical. For example, he regrets the ironing out, as The Silmarillion evolved, of the grotesque and the cruel elements in earlier versions of the mythology. And he thinks much more highly of the cruder, earlier creation-mythology than of the finished Valaquenta (which I think Tolkien's finest work). Without saying so so rudely, he concedes that much of what Tolkien wrote was tosh, but he painstakingly makes a case for the greatness and, above all, the originality of the man and his creations.
There was no writer remotely like Tolkien. Perhaps without the experience of comradeship, battle and tragic loss that was forced upon him by the Great War, Tolkien's imaginative world would only have been a weird philological fantasy. Its capacity at times to rise to near-Homeric greatness surely grew out of his experiences as a young soldier on the western front. No writer before John Garth has been patient enough to explore not merely the obvious truth of this, but the more complicated matter of how the truth applies itself in each of the relevant texts, major and minor.
Even if you are not a Lord of the Rings fan, I commend this book to you. It is all so interesting in itself, and I have rarely read a book which so intelligently graphed the relation between a writer's inner life and his outward circumstances.
War and Middle-earth
By A.N. Wilson, Evening Standard
In October 1916, one of the thousands of young men caught up in the Battle of the Somme was Second Lieutenant Ronald Tolkien of the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers. He subsequently developed trench fever, brought on by the lice. But he survived; he was one of the lucky ones. Of the 600 in his battalion, 60 were dead, 74 missing and 450 wounded.
Tolkien, the author of one of the most popular stories of struggle and endurance ever written in the history of the English language - come to that, in the history of the human race - was part of that tragic generation whom we remember with awe and gratitude at this time of year.
"By 1918," he wrote half a century later in a preface to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, "all but one of my close friends were dead."
John Garth, in this new study of Tolkien, shows two very considerable areas of expertise. He has mastered the complicated history of the First World War, its battles and campaigns. His narrative, of how young Tolkien and his schoolfriends fared during the war, is fleshed out with deep research in war diaries and letters and dispatches found in the Public Record Office and elsewhere.
He is also thoroughly versed in Tolkien's minor works, the so-called Lost Tales, and other literature, which the author left behind him when he died and which has been punctiliously edited by his son, Christopher Tolkien.
This is very much the best book about JRR Tolkien that has yet been written, because it concentrates on the one thing that interests us about a writer - namely the evolution of his imaginative life. It traces the story of the Birmingham schoolboy who, as a South African of German racial origins, always felt a bit of an outsider, and whose sense of solitude was increased by losing both his parents by the time he was 12. He blamed his mother's early death - its immediate cause was diabetes - on the hardship she endured when she was converted to Roman Catholicism, and ostracised by the family.
This deeply introverted boy received the most wonderful education at Edward VI School, Birmingham, the alma mater of, among others, all the best English New Testament Greek scholars of the 19th century and, more recently, David Willetts and Enoch Powell. The thought of a JRR Tolkien of today being forced into the comprehensive system makes one shudder. (You did right, Diane Abbott!) By the time he was 18, not only was he a competent classicist, but he had fluent German, and had invented many languages and mythologies. Once he began to read the Finnish Kalevala, the Norse Edda and Anglo-Saxon poetry, his imagination was fired to invent and reinvent the mythologies which became the background, eventually, to The Lord of the Rings.
Christopher Tolkien has done a heroic thing in laying out all the material that traces this evolution, but few but the greatest enthusiasts will ever be able to make sense of it all. John Garth does this - he chooses the salient passages, including stuff which is not yet in print - and watches Tolkien's mind grow.
He is far from uncritical. For example, he regrets the ironing out, as The Silmarillion evolved, of the grotesque and the cruel elements in earlier versions of the mythology. And he thinks much more highly of the cruder, earlier creation-mythology than of the finished Valaquenta (which I think Tolkien's finest work). Without saying so so rudely, he concedes that much of what Tolkien wrote was tosh, but he painstakingly makes a case for the greatness and, above all, the originality of the man and his creations.
There was no writer remotely like Tolkien. Perhaps without the experience of comradeship, battle and tragic loss that was forced upon him by the Great War, Tolkien's imaginative world would only have been a weird philological fantasy. Its capacity at times to rise to near-Homeric greatness surely grew out of his experiences as a young soldier on the western front. No writer before John Garth has been patient enough to explore not merely the obvious truth of this, but the more complicated matter of how the truth applies itself in each of the relevant texts, major and minor.
Even if you are not a Lord of the Rings fan, I commend this book to you. It is all so interesting in itself, and I have rarely read a book which so intelligently graphed the relation between a writer's inner life and his outward circumstances.
A great, great post from the blog "Wormtalk and Slugspeak."
"Nostalgia" in Lord of the Rings
"I just wanted to add something about the "nostalgia" in LotR.
There is indeed something "backward looking" about LotR, but it's not anti-technology (what are the Elven Rings, after all, but good technology that allows for Lorien and Rivendell?) or wholly pro-monarchy. It is rather a completely and characteristically human longing for the good things in the past (I mean here the personal past), projected by Tolkien into a deep, bittersweet sadness about inevitable loss. You might say it's what someone would feel in 1918 looking back at the summers of 1913 or 1914 (but that's another posting).
I have an amazing two-year-old daughter, and I love watching her grow up, but every once in a while you get an incredible pang of sadness at what will never happen again: she'll never fall asleep on my chest like she did when she was a tiny baby; she'll never wear certain things again, or like certain toys. The past is gone forever. Tolkien's genius was to capture that emotion and give it a shape and form, so that Frodo at the Grey Havens is immediately understandable to readers in a deeply personal way.
People, like Brin, who want to claim that this feeling is politically retrograde or base or wrong are simply missing out on a great deal of human emotion. We don't have to live in the past, and in the character of Denethor Tolkien shows how destructive such living could be. But it is not merely acceptable but actually good to remember, long for, and even grieve for those things that were great and beautiful but which are now, as a price paid for our free will and open future, gone forever."
"Nostalgia" in Lord of the Rings
"I just wanted to add something about the "nostalgia" in LotR.
There is indeed something "backward looking" about LotR, but it's not anti-technology (what are the Elven Rings, after all, but good technology that allows for Lorien and Rivendell?) or wholly pro-monarchy. It is rather a completely and characteristically human longing for the good things in the past (I mean here the personal past), projected by Tolkien into a deep, bittersweet sadness about inevitable loss. You might say it's what someone would feel in 1918 looking back at the summers of 1913 or 1914 (but that's another posting).
I have an amazing two-year-old daughter, and I love watching her grow up, but every once in a while you get an incredible pang of sadness at what will never happen again: she'll never fall asleep on my chest like she did when she was a tiny baby; she'll never wear certain things again, or like certain toys. The past is gone forever. Tolkien's genius was to capture that emotion and give it a shape and form, so that Frodo at the Grey Havens is immediately understandable to readers in a deeply personal way.
People, like Brin, who want to claim that this feeling is politically retrograde or base or wrong are simply missing out on a great deal of human emotion. We don't have to live in the past, and in the character of Denethor Tolkien shows how destructive such living could be. But it is not merely acceptable but actually good to remember, long for, and even grieve for those things that were great and beautiful but which are now, as a price paid for our free will and open future, gone forever."
Tuesday, December 02, 2003
Excellent post from Adam Yoshida's blog.
Hebrews 9:22
Something is rotten in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The problem is not, as some have asserted, that the United States is abusing human rights: the problem is that it is spending too much time paying attention to them and offering too much deference to so-called allies who cry about the rights of their terrorist ‘citizens.’
Abdurahman Khadr, the son of top al-Qaeda financer Ahmed Saeed Khadr, was released from Guantanamo Bay several months ago. He has now made his way back into Canada. He claims to have been ‘innocent’ of any crime- a statement which the United States Government apparently agrees with, since it released him. Oh: except for the three months he spent training in an al-Qaeda camp. Yes, that.
Why in the world is the United States letting anyone who trained in an al-Qaeda camp go? Even if you buy the assertion that these people ought to be treated as Prisoners of War, you don’t let enemy POW’s go before the end of a war! Anyone who has any connection with al-Qaeda who falls into US custody should be held in a cage for the duration of the war. If the War on Terrorism goes on for three decades, that’s fine by me. By all rights those who join al-Qaeda, upon capture, should be forcibly interrogated and then executed on the spot. Bandits do not have the protections of soldiers. Those who would join the terrorists deserve nothing more than a shallow and anonymous grave. There they can begin their journey to Hell: unknown, unloved, and unmourned.
Now we have word that Abdurahman’s brother, Omar, is going to be released as well. Omar not only joined al-Qaeda: but he killed an American solider. There can be no worthy punishment for him short of the rope, the bullet, or the bayonet. My best guess is that he’s being released because he was ‘only’ fifteen when he committed his crime, because trying him would cause problems with all sorts of human rights groups and the Canadian government (he, laughably, being a Canadian Citizen), and because, given the chaotic conditions of battle, proving he was the one who threw the fatal grenade would be difficult.
But none of that, so far as I’m concerned, matters. He killed an American solider: there can be no remission of such sins but by blood. The blood of our slain heroes calls out for the blood of their murderers. Let a thousand terrorists meet their deaths for each one of our own they take. The lives of those who join al-Qaeda, support it, or sympathize with it are, so far as I am concerned, forfeit. By joining or supporting al-Qaeda or a similar group one shows oneself to be less than a human being. There is only one fate that these terrorists deserve: violent and bloody death.
Some will say, “But these (alleged) people are soldiers, we didn’t execute Germans or Japanese who killed our own.” This is quite true. The difference is clear and simple: other armies are entitled to a certain respect and deference as a result of their status. However, al-Qaeda is not an army: it is a mob of bandit murders. Its members are owed none of the respect traditionally accorded to soldiers and none of the protections due either.
Once a person has committed a crime like that of Omar Khadr, they no longer have a right to life. They ought not to be entitled to food, water, or oxygen. The idea that this human refuse might soon be walking the same streets as I makes me shake with rage. I pray that a benevolent God will strike down this heathen sinner. After all, if I were to kill him, I’d probably actually go to jail for a long time, as it would doubtlessly be tried as a ‘hate crime.’ Some country Canada is.
This is a war. In wars, lives our lost. But, by God, let those lives be theirs and not ours. Almost all things may be purged away with blood, it is true. The sins of those who join, support, or sympathize with the terrorists can even be expunged by such means, if the quantity is sufficient. About 5.6 litres per terrorist ought to suffice.
posted by Adam at 1:02 PM
Hebrews 9:22
Something is rotten in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The problem is not, as some have asserted, that the United States is abusing human rights: the problem is that it is spending too much time paying attention to them and offering too much deference to so-called allies who cry about the rights of their terrorist ‘citizens.’
Abdurahman Khadr, the son of top al-Qaeda financer Ahmed Saeed Khadr, was released from Guantanamo Bay several months ago. He has now made his way back into Canada. He claims to have been ‘innocent’ of any crime- a statement which the United States Government apparently agrees with, since it released him. Oh: except for the three months he spent training in an al-Qaeda camp. Yes, that.
Why in the world is the United States letting anyone who trained in an al-Qaeda camp go? Even if you buy the assertion that these people ought to be treated as Prisoners of War, you don’t let enemy POW’s go before the end of a war! Anyone who has any connection with al-Qaeda who falls into US custody should be held in a cage for the duration of the war. If the War on Terrorism goes on for three decades, that’s fine by me. By all rights those who join al-Qaeda, upon capture, should be forcibly interrogated and then executed on the spot. Bandits do not have the protections of soldiers. Those who would join the terrorists deserve nothing more than a shallow and anonymous grave. There they can begin their journey to Hell: unknown, unloved, and unmourned.
Now we have word that Abdurahman’s brother, Omar, is going to be released as well. Omar not only joined al-Qaeda: but he killed an American solider. There can be no worthy punishment for him short of the rope, the bullet, or the bayonet. My best guess is that he’s being released because he was ‘only’ fifteen when he committed his crime, because trying him would cause problems with all sorts of human rights groups and the Canadian government (he, laughably, being a Canadian Citizen), and because, given the chaotic conditions of battle, proving he was the one who threw the fatal grenade would be difficult.
But none of that, so far as I’m concerned, matters. He killed an American solider: there can be no remission of such sins but by blood. The blood of our slain heroes calls out for the blood of their murderers. Let a thousand terrorists meet their deaths for each one of our own they take. The lives of those who join al-Qaeda, support it, or sympathize with it are, so far as I am concerned, forfeit. By joining or supporting al-Qaeda or a similar group one shows oneself to be less than a human being. There is only one fate that these terrorists deserve: violent and bloody death.
Some will say, “But these (alleged) people are soldiers, we didn’t execute Germans or Japanese who killed our own.” This is quite true. The difference is clear and simple: other armies are entitled to a certain respect and deference as a result of their status. However, al-Qaeda is not an army: it is a mob of bandit murders. Its members are owed none of the respect traditionally accorded to soldiers and none of the protections due either.
Once a person has committed a crime like that of Omar Khadr, they no longer have a right to life. They ought not to be entitled to food, water, or oxygen. The idea that this human refuse might soon be walking the same streets as I makes me shake with rage. I pray that a benevolent God will strike down this heathen sinner. After all, if I were to kill him, I’d probably actually go to jail for a long time, as it would doubtlessly be tried as a ‘hate crime.’ Some country Canada is.
This is a war. In wars, lives our lost. But, by God, let those lives be theirs and not ours. Almost all things may be purged away with blood, it is true. The sins of those who join, support, or sympathize with the terrorists can even be expunged by such means, if the quantity is sufficient. About 5.6 litres per terrorist ought to suffice.
posted by Adam at 1:02 PM
Good post here on the unholy alliance of the European Left with radical Islam from a new (to me) blog discovery, Belmont Club.
Tuesday, December 02, 2003
Decline and Fall
Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan for providing a portal into the almost alien, yet horribly recognizable world of the European Left. The Weekly Standard's account of recent political realignments within France is a tale of armies marching and countermarching, feverishly vying, each under its own strange banner, for the levers of French state power. But as always with the Left, it is really the future of the world they want to decide. And the venue in which it is being decided is the European Social Forum. This massive conclave, with "55 plenary sessions and 250 seminars" was attended by 50,000 hard-eyed, unsmiling militants meeting for days at a stretch under joint chairmanship of "the 'peasant' leftist José Bové" and that representative of the Global South, Tariq Ramadan.
Yet the admission of Ramadan into the Social Forum, at first a mere gesture of Leftist solidarity towards Islam, showed instead how far the equilibrium between them had shifted. Ramadan, far from acting the part of the token Ayatollah, swiftly proved he had the power to rearrange the agenda of the Leftist forum itself. The grandson of Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and linked by Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon to Ahmed Brahim, the Algerian financier of al Qaeda, Ramadan's brother, Hani, advocated "the lapidation (stoning to death) of adulterous women in Nigeria". Acting entirely within character Tariq Ramadan proceeded to immediately cast out the Jewish devils from the Leftist temple. He began by circulating an editorial accusing Jewish French intellectuals of being Zionist stooges, including one, Pierre-André Taguieff, who turned out not to be a Jew at all.
The expostulations of the traditional Left protesting this monumental breach of "solidarity" towards Jewish comrades was silenced by support for Ramadan from the hard Left. These began to stage massive demonstrations, culminating in a riot, demanding the expulsion of the more moderate Socialists from the "pluralist space of meetings and debates", to which the moderate presence was an affront. Faced with a choice between humiliation and alienating "those Trotskyite and Communist parties that won 10 percent of the vote in the first round of the last presidential elections, and which the Socialists will be counting on for their margin of victory in elections for the foreseeable future" they naturally chose humiliation.
But none of this ... was enough to satisfy the radicals at the Forum. On the second day of the gathering, at La Villette in Paris, protesters threw tear-gas bombs in the course of a "demonstration against the presence of the Socialist party at the European Social Forum." During the November 15 closing march, hostile protesters surrounded the Socialist delegation. They accused the party of collaborating with capitalism, threw bottles, and (according to the later account of one Socialist marcher) yelled, "Lynch them!"
The Belmont Club has long argued that "the hollowing out of the Left -- the death of its Bolshevik core -- is one of the great unwritten stories of the late twentieth century" (from Islam and the End of the Left).
The decline of the cadre of professional revolutionaries at its center was simultaneously matched by the inrush from the periphery of the network of sympathizers, fellow travelers and "useful fools" which it once adopted as protective coloration. It was a classic case of the inmates taking over an asylum from which the keepers had fled.
Belmont Club argued that the Left, now consisting of soft elements without a real core of professional revolutionaries to anchor it, would gradually lose its membership, beginning with its most radical wing, to Islam.
Islam ... will gain membership largely at the expense of Left ... That market share will be dominated by the party with the better product and the most competitive advantages ... Leftist attempts to compensate by allying themselves with Islam will only accelerate their downfall as the madrassas cannibalize the faltering socialist base. The weaker the Left becomes, the more dependent it is on alliances with Islam. The closer its alliances with Islam, the weaker the Left becomes. By and by, the Left will have nothing left to offer their allies. The Taliban did not even make a pretense of sparing the Revolutionary Association of Afghan Women from persecution.
That describes almost word for word, the fate of the Socialist moderates at the European Social Forum. And it will describe, even more accurately, the destiny of the European Left, which once proudly styled itself the "Vanguard of History", and which now finds itself staring up at a patch of ceiling from the bottom of an Islamic dustbin. Those who would inquire into the state of the Leftist church would do well to ask one of its saints, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as "Carlos the Jackal."
He has just published a book in French to announce his conversion to Islam and present his strategy for "the destruction of the United States through an orchestrated and persistent campaign of terror." Entitled "Revolutionary Islam" (Editions du Rocher, 2003) and published under the name Ilich Ram?rez S?nchez-CARLOS, the book urges "all revolutionaries, including those of the left, even atheists," to accept the leadership of Islamists such as Osama bin Laden and so help turn Afghanistan and Iraq into the "graveyards of American imperialism."
The Communist enemy against which we fought; for which Rosenberg betrayed his country; for which Giap's legions marched, fallen to this.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
posted by wretchard
Tuesday, December 02, 2003
Decline and Fall
Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan for providing a portal into the almost alien, yet horribly recognizable world of the European Left. The Weekly Standard's account of recent political realignments within France is a tale of armies marching and countermarching, feverishly vying, each under its own strange banner, for the levers of French state power. But as always with the Left, it is really the future of the world they want to decide. And the venue in which it is being decided is the European Social Forum. This massive conclave, with "55 plenary sessions and 250 seminars" was attended by 50,000 hard-eyed, unsmiling militants meeting for days at a stretch under joint chairmanship of "the 'peasant' leftist José Bové" and that representative of the Global South, Tariq Ramadan.
Yet the admission of Ramadan into the Social Forum, at first a mere gesture of Leftist solidarity towards Islam, showed instead how far the equilibrium between them had shifted. Ramadan, far from acting the part of the token Ayatollah, swiftly proved he had the power to rearrange the agenda of the Leftist forum itself. The grandson of Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and linked by Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon to Ahmed Brahim, the Algerian financier of al Qaeda, Ramadan's brother, Hani, advocated "the lapidation (stoning to death) of adulterous women in Nigeria". Acting entirely within character Tariq Ramadan proceeded to immediately cast out the Jewish devils from the Leftist temple. He began by circulating an editorial accusing Jewish French intellectuals of being Zionist stooges, including one, Pierre-André Taguieff, who turned out not to be a Jew at all.
The expostulations of the traditional Left protesting this monumental breach of "solidarity" towards Jewish comrades was silenced by support for Ramadan from the hard Left. These began to stage massive demonstrations, culminating in a riot, demanding the expulsion of the more moderate Socialists from the "pluralist space of meetings and debates", to which the moderate presence was an affront. Faced with a choice between humiliation and alienating "those Trotskyite and Communist parties that won 10 percent of the vote in the first round of the last presidential elections, and which the Socialists will be counting on for their margin of victory in elections for the foreseeable future" they naturally chose humiliation.
But none of this ... was enough to satisfy the radicals at the Forum. On the second day of the gathering, at La Villette in Paris, protesters threw tear-gas bombs in the course of a "demonstration against the presence of the Socialist party at the European Social Forum." During the November 15 closing march, hostile protesters surrounded the Socialist delegation. They accused the party of collaborating with capitalism, threw bottles, and (according to the later account of one Socialist marcher) yelled, "Lynch them!"
The Belmont Club has long argued that "the hollowing out of the Left -- the death of its Bolshevik core -- is one of the great unwritten stories of the late twentieth century" (from Islam and the End of the Left).
The decline of the cadre of professional revolutionaries at its center was simultaneously matched by the inrush from the periphery of the network of sympathizers, fellow travelers and "useful fools" which it once adopted as protective coloration. It was a classic case of the inmates taking over an asylum from which the keepers had fled.
Belmont Club argued that the Left, now consisting of soft elements without a real core of professional revolutionaries to anchor it, would gradually lose its membership, beginning with its most radical wing, to Islam.
Islam ... will gain membership largely at the expense of Left ... That market share will be dominated by the party with the better product and the most competitive advantages ... Leftist attempts to compensate by allying themselves with Islam will only accelerate their downfall as the madrassas cannibalize the faltering socialist base. The weaker the Left becomes, the more dependent it is on alliances with Islam. The closer its alliances with Islam, the weaker the Left becomes. By and by, the Left will have nothing left to offer their allies. The Taliban did not even make a pretense of sparing the Revolutionary Association of Afghan Women from persecution.
That describes almost word for word, the fate of the Socialist moderates at the European Social Forum. And it will describe, even more accurately, the destiny of the European Left, which once proudly styled itself the "Vanguard of History", and which now finds itself staring up at a patch of ceiling from the bottom of an Islamic dustbin. Those who would inquire into the state of the Leftist church would do well to ask one of its saints, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as "Carlos the Jackal."
He has just published a book in French to announce his conversion to Islam and present his strategy for "the destruction of the United States through an orchestrated and persistent campaign of terror." Entitled "Revolutionary Islam" (Editions du Rocher, 2003) and published under the name Ilich Ram?rez S?nchez-CARLOS, the book urges "all revolutionaries, including those of the left, even atheists," to accept the leadership of Islamists such as Osama bin Laden and so help turn Afghanistan and Iraq into the "graveyards of American imperialism."
The Communist enemy against which we fought; for which Rosenberg betrayed his country; for which Giap's legions marched, fallen to this.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
posted by wretchard
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