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Tuesday, January 13, 2004
Want to know more about the guys ruining our country? A couple of them have written a book. David Frum and Richard Perle have just published An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror. From Mitchiko Kakatuni's review in today's New York Times:The title of this new book by David Frum and Richard Perle, "An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror," says it all. It captures the authors' absolutist, Manichaean language and worldview; their cocky know-it-all tone; their swaggering insinuation that they know "how to win the war on terror" and that readers, the Bush administration and the rest of the world had better listen to them. And how do these two nimrods solve the sort of knotty problems that have, uh, be-deviled humanity since the beginning of time? Here's a sample: But these points tend to be drowned out by their triumphalist boasts ("the United States has become the greatest of all great powers in world history"), their macho posturing and their willful, flame-throwing language. "There is no middle way for Americans," they write in the opening chapter. "It is victory or holocaust. This book is a manual for victory."
Discussing rulers like Fidel Castro and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, they declare that "when it is in our power and our interest, we should toss dictators aside with no more compunction than a police sharpshooter feels when he downs a hostage-taker." Of the United Nations, another one of their nemeses, they write, "The U.N. regularly broadcasts a spectacle as dishonest and morally deadening as a Stalinist show trial, a televised ritual of condemnation that inflames hatreds and sustains quarrels that might otherwise fade away." You know, this is sounding more and more like another "greatest of all great powers", the Athens Thucydides wrote of in The Peloponnesian War. From the Rex Warner translation, the Athenians trying to "convince" the neutral Melians to submit to Athenian authority:Instead we recommend that you should try to get what it is possible for you to get, taking into consideration what we both really do think; since you know as well as we do that, when these matters are discussed by practical people, the standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel and that in fact the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept. The Melians refusing, the Athenians killed every Melian man of military age and put their wives and children into slavery. So Athens won, right? Nope. In a few short years, it was arrogant and over-reaching Athens that was in ruins.
posted by jeev |
9:29 AM |
 
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