zenpundit.com

HISTORY AND THE MOVIES: JONATHAN DRESNER REVIEWS THE LAST SAMURAI

Dr. Dresner is a specialist in Japanese history and I enjoyed his review of Tom Cruise’s movie The Last Samurai so much that I decided to repost it from HNN. Dresner also contributes to the blog Cliopatra

DO YOU HAVE A YEN TO BE THE MOST SECRET OF THE SECRET WARRIORS ?

A look at the training requirements and the short history of the CIA’s Special Activities Staff via Specialoperations.com

ISLAMIST SITE ATTACKS DEMOCRACY

I thought visitors to Zenpundit might find this website illuminating. It’s a radical Qutbist-Islamist outfit called Khilafa.com that publishes in English, though judging from the syntax I would assume that the editors were educated in Western universities but that they picked up English as a second language later in life and are not Western converts to Islamism.

The site is ” moderate ” in the sense that they are careful not to advocate specific acts of violence – showing familiarity with American legal concepts about what would constitute a ” threat ” – but their end goals and contempt for democracy are clear in their explanation ” What is Khilafa ” ? A post I urge all of you to take the time to read because it provides the priceless opportunity to peer into the mind of an enemy of Western civilization through their own words. It would be particularly helpful for those academics critical of the views of people like Daniel Pipes for being ” anti-Muslim”, to give this segment a look.

DOES THE AMERICAN LEFT HAVE A HITLER FIXATION ?

Moveon.org, according to the Drudge Report, has posted another political add comparing George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler. This despite condemnations from Jewish groups like the Simon Wiesanthal Center and the American Jewish Congress for manipulating the context of the Holocaust for the purpose of eliciting giggles over the internet from sophmoric leftists.

Curious, I did a Google search for ” Hitler and Bush ” and came up with 441,000 hits including examples of brilliant historical reasoning found here, here and here. In foreign, openly socialist, media the Bush-Hitler campaign is virtually a cottage industry.

My question is, why ? Given that Adolf Hitler murdered over 11 million people, including at least two specific genocides ( Jews and Gypsies) plus support for a third ( Ustache slaughter of Serbians ) it would seem the comparison to be so grossly over the top and morally repellent as to be laughable. Yet, there is an air of desperation in these attacks, almost a frantic desire to find some kind of analogy, however strained and Orwellian, between the Third Reich and the Bush administration. It’s beyond bizarre, it borders on philo-Nazism.

If anyone has an explanation for this phenomena I’d love to hear it.

RECOMMENDED BLOG

Visit Far Outliers – a blog “Exploring migrants, exiles, expatriates, and out-of-the-way peoples, places, and times, mostly in the Asia-Pacific region. ” It’s good and gives you a nice popular culture as well as historical perspective.