Some want to tear down Confederate Soldier Memorials because they see them as a glorification of Slavery. Others want to keep them in place because they see them as monuments that honor their fallen ancesters. Both may have a point. This brief essay tries to assess how these two conflicting views hold up in a global comparison.
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this is another issue on which there is no similarity between Trump and Hitler. Trump has an elaborate sense of humor and often even makes fun of himself. One of my distant relatives in Germany was a Nazi prosecutor. He sought the death penalty for a shipyard worker who had written a funny poem about Hitler. The man was shot. Like almost all despots, Hitler had no sense of humor, leave alone self-irony.
Equating Trump to Hitler not only shows a pitiful lack of understanding who Trump is and what he tries to accomplish. It also shows a dangerous lack of understanding who Hitler really was and what he did and the severity of his crimes, his war mongering, his insane ideas of racial superiority and inferiority, and his imperial aspirations. Maybe equating Trump to Julius Caesar works better. Here is Mark Anthony about Trump (loosely based on Shakespeare):
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In her debate with Donald Trump and in her subsequent interview, Mrs. Harris responded to almost any question with the stereotype: “I was raised in a middle-class family…” Instead of answering the questions, she talked about herself in teleprompter-served cookie cutter bits.
In many public statements, she tried to paint herself as an underdog with the claim that she is a “person of color” who had to “sit in the back of the bus” as a school kid. She also called herself “black” and “African American”. She touts “Joy, joy, joy” and recommends herself as the solver of all our current problems, when she had spent the past 3.5 years as Vice-president creating and/or exacerbating these problems and continues doing so.
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Bublichki are a traditional Jewish/Russian street food. They can look and taste like bagels or like doughnuts. In 1922, by the Ukrainian Jew Yakov (Davidovich) Jadov from Odessa composed a song titled “Bublichki”, “Бублички” in Russian, and its text was in the Russian language.
The socio-economic context of this song is the NEP (New Economic Policy), an economic policy implemented in the Soviet Union in 1921 by Vladimir Lenin in an attempt to stabilize the country’s economy after the Boshevik Revolution. The NEP was intended as a temporary measure that allowed for a limited amount of free-market capitalism, while the state continued to control the large industries, the banks, and foreign trade. The NEP created a thriving class of small entrepreneurs, but it also led to further impoverishment of large parts of the population, mainly in the big cities. The song reflects the desperation of a street bagel vendor who is trying to sell his last bagels before nightfall.
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When Stalin wanted to get rid of his political rivals or just of people he feared or disliked, he often sent agents of the secret state police, the Наро́дный комиссариа́т вну́тренних дел (NKVD), a euphemism, meaning People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs. Mostly, the person he disapproved of would just be arrested, whisked away, and executed in a dark cell of the Lubyanka prison or disappeared in a Siberian GULAG.
But eventually, Stalin wanted something more spectacular. A procedure that would crush and destroy his adversary and mark him in the eyes of the Soviet population and the global public (the world press) as a common criminal, whose destruction is well deserved by his unlawful actions. This was typically accomplished by a political show trial.
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Hamas is an Islamist militant movement and one of the Palestinian territories’ two major political parties. It governs more than two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, but the group is best known for its armed terrorist actions against Israel.
Hamas has fired rockets and mortars into Israel since the group took over the Gaza Strip in the mid-2000s. Iranian security officials have said that Iran provided some of these weapons, but that Hamas gained the ability to build its own missiles after training with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and proxies.
In recent years, Israel estimated that Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups in Gaza had about thirty thousand rockets and mortars in their arsenal. Hamas militants have flown balloons carrying incendiary devices toward Israel, which have sometimes caused fires. The group has also carried out incursions into Israeli territory, killing and kidnapping soldiers and civilians.
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Carlson’s interview avoided the key confrontational issues. The opening question should have been: “Mr. Putin, why did you order the invasion of a sovereign neighboring country, a UN member state?” Judging from Putin’s other responses he would probably have replied: “Ukraine is not a sovereign country. It has always been part of Russia. Both politically and culturally.” That reply would not have been supported by the historical facts. But what else could Putin have said?
When Carlson asked Putin if he would invade Poland, Putin said he would not do that because it “is not in Russia’s interest”. In other words: Putin deems any action he takes as justified as long as the action reflects the best interest of Russia – or what he thinks that is. This shows clearly that Putin is a “Realpolitiker”: He acts within the limits of what his power allows him to do. Considerations such as the right of a nation to exist as an independent nation state or limitations of international law are irrelevant to him.
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Two days before the New Hampshire Republican Primary, my old friend, Richard Feldman, former Executive Director of the American Shooting Sports Council, and current President of the Independent Firearms Owners’ Association, wrote me an email stating that he kept silent too long and that he now needs to endorse Nikki Haley. He wrote:
“Firearms owners across the country demand that an American President stand firm in support of our cherished Bill of Rights, including the 2nd Amendment that protects our right to keep and bear arms. Donald Trump will not be such a President. While on occasion he has sought the votes of firearms owners, he has elsewhere made it painfully clear that he will “terminate all rules, regulations and articles, even those found in the Constitution” to have his way on any issue. Trump has stated he intends to be an absolute dictator on day one of his administration. Just one day, one is one too many! His unprincipled “Art of the Deal” mentality and his oft demonstrated lust for unrestrained personal power means that no Trump commitment to any position can be trusted. … In simple terms, we have no confidence in Trumps’ pledge to uphold and protect the gun rights of law-abiding citizens”.
I answered:
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The Declaration of Independence states the reasons why the Colonials wanted to become their own independent nation state and lists their grievances against the British rulers. They argue that they have repeatedly complained about the unjust and oppressive treatment they had to suffer under colonial rule and that their frequent complaints and requests for change amounted to nothing.
The authors of the DOI listed 26 grievances for which they did not receive redress despite their repeated petitions. Today, we face government not by a king but by non-elected deep-state officials who are in cahoots with excessively rich capitalists and international organizations like Mr. Schwab’s unelected World Economic Forum and the unelected United Nations and who are united in the belief in Man Made Global Warming, in the need to reduce world population, and in a vision of a future world as collectivist and controlled by some form of global governance. These groups, their convictions and underlying values, are attempting to destroy the nation state.
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On October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists invaded Israel. They randomly killed over 2000 civilians and took several hundred hostages. They murdered partying teens, they murdered people in the streets, they murdered people in their homes, their beds, their cars. They raped women in public and murdered several dozen babies by gouging out their eyes and cutting off their heads. Vlad the Impaler appears like a true moderate compared to the atrocities committed by these bloodthirsty Islamic fanatics.
When Israel awakened from its shock and started to retaliate proclaiming that, this time, it would completely eradicate Hamas so as to make sure that something like this would never happen again, all hell broke loose. Demonstrations everywhere.
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