The ultimate challenge
Taki
Gstaad Bismarck famously said that the Balkans were not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier. Nor is Iraq. We had Saddam cold back in 1991 but stopped the war a day too early. With good reason. The ghastly Saudis, the treacherous Turks and the shitty Iranians were not keen on a separate Kurdistan, ergo Saddam was given a pass by Bush senior. Now we're back to square one — this time, however, with Sharon calling the tune. Talk about massive overload. Uncle Sam seems to be everywhere, from Colombia to the Philippines, the Middle East, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, North Korea, you name it, Sammy's involved.
I'm off to America for the launch of the American Conservative, the national fortnightly out of Washington DC edited by Pat Buchanan and myself. with Scott McConnell doing the heavy lifting. Why a new conservative fortnightly? Why not, is my answer.
Basically it's armchair warriors such as William Kristol, John Podhoretz and Mark Steyn, to name just a few, who gave Pat, Scott and me the idea to start a mag. There are many such heroes in America right now, all ready to fight, as long, of course, as others are doing the fighting. Mind you, they're not the first. It's always been like this. The American Conservative will have a few things to say about these gentlemenwar heroes, but not until the end of September, when the second greatest magazine in the English-speaking world will debut.
In the meantime, while I sun myself in Gstaad, but still on the subject of war, one Laurence Rees, a bald BBC hack, stands out as a perfect example of what I was talking about previously. While reviewing a new book on the kamikazes, the bald BBC hack (the tabloid his review appeared in ran a picture of him, that's why I know he's bald and he wears glasses to boot) denounces the myth of the kamikazes and proclaims that the historical reality this book omits is that in Japan's sick, ultra-conformist wartime society, it took far greater courage to speak out and resist becoming a kamikaze pilot than it took to volunteer'. What a crock, typical BBC peacenik bullshit, and then some. In the Sunday Telegraph, Saul David, reviewing the same book, shows the difference between bullshit lefty artists like the bald one with glasses and real historians. According to David the difference between Western and Japanese philosophy is that the former tells a person how to live, whereas the latter tells them how to die. Hear, hear!
It might sound contradictory, but what armchair war-heroes like Kristol and Podhoretz. and bald BBC hacks with glasses have in common is a disdain for manly death. The armchair ones see death as unimportant, a necessary evil. like DDT-ing mosquitoes. The BBC hack views death as macho posturing, a sham. Both, of course, are full of shit. Death, and the way a man faces it, is the ultimate challenge. The Greeks, the Romans, the German knights and the Japanese Samurai revelled in it. A soldier's death is the greatest honour, and, yes, I do know that dulce et decorum est pro patria mori is now considered passé by Guardian types who pee sitting down. Japanese soldiers believed that if they fell in the field of honour they would become kami, or gods. When 150,000 Brits surrendered to 55,000 Japanese without firing a shot, Anglos became a laughing stock to the Japanese. Soldiers who surrendered were seen as cowards. And rightly so. The BBC hack describes the kamikaze poems written before the final mission as pathetic. He would, wouldn't he? Bespectacled bald hacks do not understand warrior sentimentality. They cry at science-fiction movies when the robot's batteries run dry, but not when young men go willingly to their death. BBC hack bad. Kamikaze pilot good.
I have always loved the Japs, starting with Yukio Mishima. The grotesque FDR forced the imperial army to attack Pearl Harbor by denying the land of the rising sun oil. It is as simple as that. The rest is bullshit. Japan was willing to compromise but FDR kept raising the stakes. And who the hell was FDR to tell Hirohito to get out of Manchuria? We fire-bombed Tokyo, incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and have now perpetrated the ultimate crime against the little yellow people; we have turned them from warriors into consumers. Still, they say nothing. Samurai and martial-spirited Japanese good. American bullies, BBC hacks and Guardian types bad.
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