Harry Kreisler: From the start, Jihadists came to believe that it would be ideal if American troops would be drawn back into the middle east. The idea was that if they attacked [on 9/11] and we came back at them in Afghanistan, the US would be destroyed in Afghanistan like the USSR had been.
They were wrong about that. But then… the invasion in Iraq.
Lawrence Wright: Iraq looks a lot like what bin Laden had in mind for us in Afghanistan.
If you read the memoirs of the inner-circle and ideologues of al-Qaeda, they confess that al-Qaeda was essentially dead after November, December 2001, when American and coalition forces swept aside the Taliban and pummeled al-Qaeda, accomplishing in a few weeks what the Red Army had failed to do in 10 years.
Eighty-percent of al-Qaeda membership was captured or killed, according to their own figures. And although we didn’t get the leaders, the survivors were scattered, unable to communicate with each other, destitute, and repudiated all over the world.
So this was a movement that was in a kind of zombie-like state.
It was Iraq that set the prairie on fire, that gave them another chance. Ironically, Iraq was never on bin Laden’s list of a likely candidate for Jihad because he knew it was a largely Shia nation, and al-Qaeda of course is an Sunni organization.
So it wasn’t high on his list. But we gave him an opportunity. And he took it.
Jon Snow: Look at the war on Iraq – do you not think that would stir an urge in the Arab world when they see women and children ravaged by what we Westerners are doing?
Martin Amis: I’ve said in print that by far the greatest danger of terrorism is not what it inflicts, but what it provokes; and the Iraq war has been a disaster. I was against it at the time, and I’m against it now. Blowing up a London nightclub on lady’s night [as an uncovered terrorist plot had planned] doesn’t seem to me to be a proportionate act in response to that.
The other night, I asked an audience to put up its hands if it felt morally superior to the Taliban. To the Taliban – who have two-day massacres, slash the throats of children, not only subtract women from society, but black up the windows of the houses they’re confined to. And only a third of the audience raised its hands.
Jon Snow: But do you feel morally superior to Islam?
Martin Amis: I feel morally superior toIslamism, yes. By some distance.
Jeremy Paxman: Islam itself?
Martin Amis: Well, I feel an intellectual distance from it.
Jon Snow: What do you say to the charge that you are your father’s son?
Martin Amis: Well, he’s now being lazily and cornily defamed by his critics when he’s not around to defend himself. You have an argument with your father all your life – and he’s been dead for twelve years, and I’m still having that argument.
I was on most things to the left of him. But critics are accusing him of impulses he never had – he was never homophobic; he had a difficult time in his relations with women, but was not misogynistic; was not, in any sense, anti-semitic, except in the odd impulse. And why do we not admit to these odd impulses?
Do we cleanse ourselves? Do we pretend that we’re homogenous and pure and clean? Do we want to live with that kind of illusion?
The anti-semites, the psychotic misogynists and homophobics are the Islamists.
“Once you got to Iraq and took it over, and took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place?
That’s a very volatile part of the world, and if you take down the central government of Iraq you can easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off. Part of it the Syrians would like to have to the west. Part of eastern Iraq, the Iranians would like to claim, fought over for eight years. In the north you’ve got the Kurds, and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey. It’s a quagmire.”
Does it matter? — losing your legs?
For people will always be kind,
And you need not show that you mind
When the others come in after hunting
To gobble their muffins and eggs.
Does it matter? — losing your sight?
There’s such splendid work for the blind;
And people will always be kind,
As you sit on the terrace remembering
And turning your face to the light.
Do they matter? — those dreams from the pit?
You can drink and forget and be glad,
And people won’t say that you’re mad;
For they’ll know you’ve fought for your country
And no one will worry a bit.
As we near Memorial Day, the subject is war. And on this Memorial Day, in the United States, the subject is how we treat veterans who have made it home.
In November of last year, I wrote a post in which I argued,
As of last week, the Department of Veterans Affairs has stopped releasing the number of non-fatal casualties of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars. The International Business Timessuspects this is an attempt to conceal a “grim milestone”: the one millionth American serviceman or woman who has returned home maimed or wounded…
Yet what we should see in the homecoming of these impossibly brave people is obscured by the context in which we see them return. So often, an apparently emblematic veteran is shown coming home at the halftime of an NFL game, his teary-eyed family rushing across the field for a hug as reverent claps and raucous chants of “USA!” reverberate through the stadium. In this contrived ceremony, many Americans believe they have seen the typical homecoming: a healthy soldier in uniform, his adorable and adoring wife, proud children, and the appreciative cheers of a grateful nation. Yet far more veterans will come home to trouble — physical, interpersonal and financial trouble — which is often the direct consequence of their deployments. But at the football game, you clap, you cry, and you absolve yourself of responsibility to that overjoyed family on the field.
I received several comments and a handful of emails in response, prompting me to offer a more direct clarification:
We send soldiers on a string of protracted deployments, from which they eventually return to a VA that is thoroughly backlogged and utterly inefficient. And underlying these operational disgraces is a strategic program that entrenches them (and us) in conflicts that are completely open-ended. There is no victory without objectives, and our objectives in Iraq and Afghanistan are, and have been for a long time, either muddled or unattainable…
It’s ignoble to charge men and women like [my brother-in-law] with quixotic missions — missions which we as a people neither seriously engage with nor sacrifice for, except in meaningless, vicarious gestures… What counts is, first, adopting sound policy so American power is used justifiably and effectively in the world; and second, making sure we have the proper care and support waiting for those brave men and women when they return home.
At this point, I’m on the verge of hysterics about the Veterans Affairs Health Care scandal. I think President Obama should be too. The opening words at his press conference yesterday should not have been “… people will be held accountable.” They should have been, “Not one more veteran dies because this sort of negligence. Not one more veteran loses care because of it. Not one more veteran will wait an extra minute, in any waiting room, in any state, at any time of day, because of it… otherwise, heads will roll.”
“In places like Dora, Gazaliya and Sadiya, the insurgents had taken to killing the garbagemen. It seemed strange at first that they would do that, kill a man who collected the trash. Then they started killing the bakers. In those places, naturally enough, the garbage piled up in the streets, heaps of it, mountains of it, and there wasn’t any bread. Then they started killing the teachers, and the teachers stopped going to the schools. And the children stopped going, of course. So: no bread and no schools and mountains of trash. Ingenious, I guess, if you wanted to stop the functioning of a neighborhood.
Not long after, I talked about these things with Yusra al-Hakeem, one of the Iraqi interpreters I worked with. Yusra was one of my best Iraqi friends. She was bright, funny and loud, one of those Iraqis who had taken immediately to the new freedoms. And yet in the past year life had changed dramatically for Yusra, and Yusra had changed herself. A Shiite and a liberal, Yusra had begun wearing a long black abaya, which she loathed but which was necessary, she believed, to protect her from the militias in her neighborhood. Yusra usually tore it from her head the second she walked inside the Times compound. ‘Stupid thing,’ she’d say, hurling it onto the couch.
And now Yusra had decided to leave the country. At first she joked in her usual way. ‘After 1,400 years, the Shiites have had their chance, and look at the mess they made. The Shiites, they cannot govern Iraq—bring back the Sunnis!’ And then a laugh. Yusra didn’t mean it—she loathed Saddam. But the danger was different now, debilitating in a way it had not been during the years of Saddam.
‘I am so tired,’ Yusra said. ‘In Saddam’s time, I knew that if I kept my mouth shut, if I did not say anything against him, I would be safe. But now it is different. There are so many reasons why someone would want to kill me now: because I am Shiite, because I have a Sunni son, because I work for the Americans, because I drive, because I am a woman with a job, because’—she picked up her abaya—‘I don’t wear my stupid hejab.’
She took my notebook and flipped it to a blank page. This was Yusra’s way of explaining her situation and, sensing the limitations of language, she would sometimes seize a reporter’s notebook and diagram her predicament. She drew a large circle in the middle.
‘This was Saddam,’ she said. ‘He is here. Big. During Saddam’s time, all you had to do was stay away from this giant thing. That was not pleasant, but not so hard.’
She flipped to another blank page. She drew a dozen circles, some of them touching, some overlapping. A small galaxy. She put her pen in the middle and made a dot.
‘The dot in the middle, that is me—that is every Iraqi,’ she said. ‘From everywhere you can be killed, from here, from here, from here, from here.’ She was stabbing her pen into the notepad.
‘We Iraqis,’ she said. ‘We are all sentenced to death and we do not know by whom.’
And so she would leave Iraq. For Jordan, for Syria—and then, if she was lucky, for America.”
Questioner: I have a bumper stick on my car that says, “War is not the answer”… But of course the question is, if war is not the answer, what is the answer?
Andrew Bacevich: I’m actually a conservative. Look… let me cut to the chase: as a Catholic, I believe in original sin. I think that we are, in our nature, fundamentally flawed. And that peace, probably, is beyond our capacity to achieve. Therefore, to my mind, a more modest goal is more realistic: to minimize the occurrence of war, except in those circumstances when the highest values are at risk and there is no alternative but to resort to violence in order to defend those ideals. And even then, always, always, always to be cognizant of the fact that war occurs in the realm of chance, and that the consequences that will stem from war will defy your imagination.
So, therefore, one needs to be extraordinarily cautious, careful, and wary. And… especially since the end of the Cold War, we as a people — and in particular our political leaders in Washington — have entirely lost sight of these historical realities. They’re far too casual about going to war; they’re oblivious to the adverse consequences. They work on the most optimistic assumptions — that it’s going to be easy, that it’s going to be cheap, that once you achieve some goal you set for yourself, all other problems will vanish.
And so, from a conservative’s perspective, I say, “No, there’s no reason to think along those terms.” And therefore, we should be cautious, and again minimize rather than expect to eliminate armed conflict.
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West Point graduate, Vietnam War veteran, and Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich, speaking during the Q&A portion of a recent panel on how the wounded come back from war. Below, watch a short clip of Bacevich testifying before Congress in 2009.
In 2010, Bacevich wrote a morally flawless piece in the Los Angeles Times that was published on Memorial Day, three years to the month of his son’s death while serving in Afghanistan. Bacevich summoned Americans to regard that day not as a holiday heralding the start of summer, but as a moment in which we solemnly memorialize fellow citizens who have come home draped in American flags. Let the article’s penultimate paragraph detonate in your mind:
How exactly did we get ourselves in such a fix, engaged in never-ending wars that we cannot win and cannot afford? Is the ineptitude of our generals the problem? Or is it the folly of our elected rulers? Or could it perhaps be our own lazy inattention? Rather than contemplating the reality of what American wars, past or present, have wrought, we choose to look away, preferring the beach, the ballgame and the prospect of another summer.
This issue of how our society processes its role in armed conflict, and armed conflict’s role in world affairs, is becoming something of a preoccupation of mine. Now that a half dozen of my friends have seen deployments and my brother-in-law has been awarded a Purple Heart for his service in Afghanistan, I have come to see their valor as fundamentally travestied by the quixotic missions for which they bravely sacrificed. More embarrassing, however, is the craven egotism of a society which has sacrificed nothing for the cause, leaving the immediate burden to a mercenary army and the bill to generations who were not alive when the war began.
As someone born the year the Cold War ended, I’ve now lived half my life as a citizen of “a country at war,” and I can remember skimming (when I was thirteen) Gore Vidal’s 2002 anti-imperial polemic Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. I loathed almost every page of Vidal’s cynical, careless screed, but I loved the title. It was so prescient, though the war’s peace would materialize most conspicuously in the minds of a civilian populace of which I am a part.
In the next week, I am going to publish a short reflection on Sebastian Junger’s tour de force WAR. In the meantime, I recommend watching Bacevich on how the wounded come home as well as reading his searing book Breach of Trust. If you are looking for more journalistic takes on our efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, check out Dexter Filkin’s The Forever War or Chris Hedges’s War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning.
“Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding…
Decency, security, and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means — to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal — would bring terrible retribution.”
For this case, which was decided over 85-years-ago, the Supreme Court deliberated whether the wiretapping of private telephone conversations — which was initiated by federal agents — could produce evidence that was legally admissible. The Supreme Court eventually ruled, in a 5-4 decision, that such wiretapping was not a violation of either the Fourth or Fifth Amendment, and thereby was not an encroachment on the defendant’s rights.
I agree with Justice Brandeis’s dissent here. And, happily, so did the Supreme Court — albeit not until four decades later, when they overturned Olmstead with their decision in Katz v. United States in 1967.
In thinking about this underlying but essential truth — that the government, like citizens, is not be allowed to break the law — I’m drawn to a juxtaposition that’s latent in the now popular story of Marcus Luttrell. When their lives were put on the line, when they were at their most vulnerable and had an easy but morally dubious way out, they refused to commit a war crime. Instead they abided by the rules of combat, knowing that such a choice would very likely lead to their demise.
Contrast this with the tough-talkers who were in Washington at that time. Bush, Cheney, and co., themselves so allergic to combat when their names were called, shredded not only domestic law (including habeas corpus, arguably the most important legal instrument we’ve got), but also international rules and norms, including the Geneva Conventions and the precedents set at the Nuremberg Tribunal.
President George W. Bush, speaking at his second inauguration: “America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling. Our goal, instead, is to help others find their own voice, attain their own freedom, and make their own way. The great objective of ending tyranny is the concentrated work of generations. The difficulty of the task is no excuse for avoiding it. America’s influence is not unlimited; but fortunately for the oppressed, America’s influence is considerable, and we will use it confidently in freedom’s cause…”
Interviewer: Gore Vidal, your response to these words?
Gore Vidal: Well, I hardly know where to end, much less begin. There’s not a word of truth in anything that he said. Our founding fathers did not set us on a course to liberate the world from tyranny. Jefferson just said, “all men are created equal, and should be free,” et cetera, but it was not the task of the United States to “go abroad to slay dragons,” as John Quincy Adams so wisely put it; because if the United States does go abroad to slay dragons in the name of freedom, liberty, and so on, she could become “dictatress of the world,” and in the process “She would lose her soul.” That is the lesson we should be learning now, instead of this declaration of war against the entire globe.
He doesn’t define what tyranny is. I’d say what we have now in the United States is working up a nice tyrannical persona for itself and for us. As we lose liberties he’s, I guess, handing them out to other countries which have not asked for them. That’s the reaction in Europe — and I know we mustn’t mention them because they’re immoral and they have all those different kinds of cheese — but, simultaneously, they’re much better educated than we are, and they’re richer. Get that out there: The Europeans per capita are richer than Americans, per capita. And by the time this administration is finished, there won’t be any money left of any kind…
And none of this we heard about in the last election. We were too busy with homosexual marriage and abortion: two really riveting subjects. War and peace, of course, are not worth talking about. And civilization, God forbid that we ever commit ourselves to that…
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A selection from Gore Vidal’s critiques of President Bush’s Second Inaugural Address, which were recorded this week in 2005.
I’ve uploaded a recording of the rest of Vidal’s brilliant, biting response below. It’s relevant and worth a watch even today.
As we now watch President Obama deliver this year’s State of the Union, almost 9 long years to the day since Bush uttered those words, it’s worth reflecting on how little has changed.
The War in Afghanistan, with it’s unprecedented 82% disapproval rate, is almost as unpopular as the Congress which kind of, sort of, almost authorized it. Still, we’re spending about $400 million there each day. Meanwhile, as I walk a block from my downtown apartment in America’s beautiful capital city, I see schools moldering and potholes flecking every street. (That 400,000,000, by the way, does not include the additional $130 million which we are daily funneling into Iraq, nor does it account for the $5.5 to $8.4 billion which we will spend annually to care for our veterans from both wars over the next three, four, five decades.)
Our Constitutional liberties remain largely ignored (much less restored) by a burgeoning surveillance state which, a decade later, is yet to make a single arrest that has prevented a terrorist attack. There are now over a million names on our terrorist watch list: a hay stack that, as it distends, obscures the few needles hiding inside it. Correspondingly, a million people now hold “top secret clearance” to access classified government information — a label fit for the gruesome world of Winston Smith and farcical enough for Peter Sellers or the President of Faber College. It took one in a million — Mr. Edward Snowden — to finally reveal what this unelected, unmonitored, and undomesticated appendage of the federal government was doing with our money and to us and our allies (in Brazil, in Germany, in South Korea), but he, like other whistle-blowers under this administration, was hardly honored for that act of conscience. While his stand has produced some valuable backlash against these security developments, the direction of their momentum remains unchanged; as the surveillance state becomes more opaque to us, we become more transparent to it.
Of course tonight’s pageantry is amounting to little more than a string of platitudes, but nevertheless, it is worth hoping that the coming days will reflect a glimmer of the promise that we are turning away from the imperial and the tyrannical, and turning towards Constitutionality at home and diplomacy abroad.
It’s often tricky to identify “the best” of a certain category. But with debates, ironically enough, the question is, at least to my mind, settled. There are a lot of nominees for second place: Buckley-Vidal, Chomsky-Foucault, and Miliband–Poulantzas (Here I’m talking about debates for which we have a substantive record, so Lincoln-Douglas, Huxley-Wilberforce, and Einstein-Bohr don’t count). But the greatest recorded debate of all time is Hitchens-Galloway. No Question.
It is simply the most caustic, articulate, and galvanizing verbal clash that has ever been captured on film. If you do yourself the favor of watching it, within a minute you will have found a side — and you will be enthralled. Once, after a long, desultory day of swimming last Spring, two politically-minded friends and I decided to put Hitchens-Galloway on in the background as we poured some drinks and planned out our evening. Within 5 minutes, we were glued to the screen; within 10, we had forgotten about the night’s plans and were rehearsing arguments about the Iraq War; within 20, we had taken sides in a 2-on-1 verbal fray that eventually ended — I’m amused and embarrassed to admit — with several not-so-light shoves being thrown.
I happened to be fighting solo in that scuffle. Because I did, do now, and have always categorically opposed the invasion of Iraq. In this debate, I take the side of Mr. Galloway. My two friends, loyal as ever to the Hitch, were flanking me from the right.
This does not alter the fact that I despise almost everything I’ve subsequently read about Mr. Galloway, and believe that Hitchens is dead right in many of his cutting ad hominems against the Respect MP. Nevertheless, the gravity and intensity with which Galloway gives voice to the concerns of the anti-war Left is unmatched really by anyone I have ever seen. Like an acid reacting to its catalyst, the venom that bubbles out of Galloway is clearly a response to what he identifies as the “malevolence and incompetence” of the “neo-con gang” which occupied 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue at the time. Fanning this brushfire of wild contempt were the looming effects of Hurricane Katrina, and the naturally conjoined questions which arose from it: Why are we hemorrhaging resources over there? Don’t we need that cash and manpower here?
Galloway makes this explicit several times in the exchange, but it runs like an underlying seam through several of his rejoinders. Some of these are, in addition to very clever, scathing and overflowing with (righteous?) animosity: “What you are witnessing is something unique in natural history: the first ever metamorphosis from a butterfly back into a slug”; “Never wrestle with a chimney sweep… there’s no way you can come out clean”; “People like Mr. Hitchens are ready to fight to the last drop of other people’s blood”; etc. But while these are below the belt, I don’t think they are — to borrow a line from Hitchens in the debate — beneath contempt. For one, Hitchens invites them (see the last two minutes of his opening remarks); and second, Hitchens can handle them. Galloway and Hitchens were two of the biggest alpha-males on the planet, and Galloway was not going to relent on his alpha-maleness. He couldn’t bring a knife to what was so clearly going to be a gun fight.
I can remember watching this debate when it aired on DemocracyNow the week of September 9th, 2005. I can also remember how much the Iraq question was beginning to fill the sky in the Fall of 2005 — that moment when some of us could foresee the now nearly unavoidable truth that our invasion was an enormous blunder and our occupation a Sisyphean waste. As a freshman at my conservative Southern Baptist high school, I was among the only students who felt this way about Iraq, and I can remember not only how strongly I was beginning to oppose the invasion, but also how much I despised the assumed self-righteousness of those who repeatedly excused the Bush administration’s rank deceptions and bravado.
It would be several years until I would read James Fenton’s “Prison Island”, a poem he wrote during his visit to Cambodia as the U.S. began bombing there in 1970. One particular stanza rings most acutely in my mind when I recall the bad early news out of Iraq and that 15-year-old kid who didn’t exactly know how to express why he didn’t like the war.
My dear friend, do you value the counsels of dead men?
I should say this. Fear defeat. Keep it before your minds
As much as victory. Defeat at the hands of friends,
Defeat in the plans of your confident generals.
Fear the kerchiefed captain who does not think he can die.
Ironically enough, I would for the first time stumble upon these words in the second-to-last page of Christopher Hitchens’s memoir, Hitch-22. The fact that Hitchens could write them without embarrassment or irony stands as verification of Michael Faraday’s immortal rejoinder. “There is nothing quite as frightening as a man who knows he is right.”
Watch “The Grapple in the Big Apple”, the greatest debate of all time (Playback begins as the debate heats up, so rewind to the start to watch all of Hitchens’s opening):
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Some of my comments on the so-called “Debate of the Decade”: George Galloway versus Christopher Hitchens on the Iraq War.
For the record: I don’t endorse all of Galloway’s remarks, nor do I oppose all of Hitchens’s. I admire this debate first for the rhetorical skill and knowledge it exacted from the interlocutors, and second because it brings to light many nuanced issues surrounding the Iraq invasion and occupation — issues which we should still grapple with today.
SPEAK, MEMORY—
Of the cunning hero, The wanderer, blown off course time and again After he plundered Troy’s sacred heights.
Speak
Of all the cities he saw, the minds he grasped,
The suffering deep in his heart at sea
As he struggled to survive and bring his men home
But could not save them, hard as he tried—
The fools—destroyed by their own recklessness
When they ate the cattle of Hyperion the Sun,
And that god snuffed out their day of return.
Of all these things
Speak, Immortal One,
And tell the tale once more in our time.
By now, all the others who had fought at Troy—
At least those who had survived the war and the sea—
Were safely back home. Only Odysseus
Still longed to return to his home and his wife.
These lines were composed in the 8th century BCE. Other than the Iliad, the work which these words set off is the oldest extant work of Western literature.
As a reminder to those who’ve forgotten their 10th grade English curriculum, the Iliad is the story of the final few weeks of the Trojan War. The Odyssey is the decade-long tale of its hero, Odysseus, as he returns home to his wife and son in Ithaca, where he is king. Odysseus is noted for his brilliance, perseverance, and cunning; he devised the Trojan horse, the winning ruse which, after ten years of warfare, led the Greeks to “plunder Troy’s sacred heights”.
The larger narrative of the Iliad and Odyssey is an immortal one, vibrating with harsh and immediate lessons for our own age. Philosophically, it relates the pitfalls of pride, the capriciousness of fate, the pulls of romantic love, and the truth of Oscar Wilde’s great dictum to be careful what you wish for — you may get it. On a practical level, however, it tells of war’s horrors and pities, its moments for heroism and glory, and the fact that, oftentimes, the settling of the dust marks only half the battle, because it’s the return home that often proves most perilous. It was true in the day of Patroclus, and true in the age of PTSD. As Chris Hedges noted, in his New York Timesreview of the Lombardo translation, “every recruit headed into war would be well advised to read the Iliad, just as every soldier returning home would be served by reading the Odyssey.”
Some brief notes about SPEAK MEMORY:
The opening words are essential. Homer’s poems would not have been codified on tablets or parchment; instead they were orated to an audience and set to some form of rhythmic music, such as the slow beat of a griot’s drum. For this reason, it’s important to try to hear his words spoken, either by yourself or by a performer such as Stanley Lombardo, who penned the above translation and reads them in the video below.
“Speak Memory” is also crucial because although we don’t know whether Homer was an actual person, folklore tells us that he was real and that he was also blind. So the “memory” part was something he would have only been able to express through his tongue. What’s more, like Shakespeare, he may never have existed; like Milton, he may never have actually seen the works over which we now pore.
Third, “Speak Memory” is notable because it is also the title of Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir. In a strong field, one of the most compelling titles I know of for an autobiography.
Watch Lombardo perform this portion of the Odyssey, as well as an extended discussion about the work, here:
“That’s why it’s so appalling to see so many liberals making excuses for bin Ladenism and Jihadism as if it was some kind of fucking liberation theology, which it is not. It’s the most reactionary ideology in the history of the human race. It means business. It means slavery; it means mass murder; it means bigotry. It means the abolition of culture.
And there are people who say we have to understand its deep-seeded nature, which we certainly do, but not by apologizing to or retreating from it…
Say it once, hope not to have to say it again: You do not deal yourself a hand in the conduct or formation of British foreign or defense policy by putting a bomb on a bus in Tavistock Square in London. You do not. Final. Do I have to say it twice? No.
Will I listen to anyone who says that we should? I certainly will not. I certainly will not, and nor should anyone else.
And the Prime Minister will not do so. And what people ought to realize is that there is indeed a connection between this and the wars abroad. The same people did this at King’s Cross and Edgware Road and Aldgate last week who last Friday blew up 34 school children in Baghdad. Yes of course there is a connection: we’re fighting the same people. And they will rule the day. Or we will outlive, and out kill, and out fight them.
They say they prefer death to life, maybe they do.
They want to be martyrs, we’re here to help.
But our love for London will outlive their hatred, and their love of death. Believe me.”
The picture is of Lee Rigby, son, husband, father of a two year old boy, and drummer in the British Royal Regiment — ritually and barbarically murdered on the streets of south London yesterday. His last text message to his mom will break your heart:
Goodnight mum, I hope you had a fantastic day today because you are the most fantastic and one in a million mum that anyone could ever wish for. Thank you for supporting me all these years, you’re not just my mum you’re my best friend. So goodnight and love you loads.
