Interdum stultus opportuna loquitur...

Wednesday, February 16, 2005

NonRant: Some Genuine Insight...

Note - from June 24th 2009, this blog has migrated from Blogger to a self-hosted version. Click here to go straight there.

Now, I will confess this right up front: I'm a big fan of Wiliam Lind, Charley Reese and a lot of the folks who post at LewRockwell.com.

It's from one of their ilk that I first discovered "Our Enemy, The State" by A.J. Nock, which along with Dulce et Decorum Est and War is a Racket are the triptych that explains my world view. (Randolph Bourne's "War is the Health of the State" can be added as well).

Nock also wrote another mind-forming piece - namely, "Isaiah's Job", which I first read some years back. And of course Orwell's 1984 sits atop the lot like a Colossus.

William lind's latest (short) piece is nowhere near the "bedrock" formative stuff of those pieces; however he displays the same gift held by all genuinely smart students of geopolitics (note: here I specifically exclude anyone who uses the words "freedom", "liberty" or "democracy" in defense of US foreign policy since 1854).

That gift is the insight that enables a seemingly trivial incident - like the "shot heard round the world" at Concorde, or the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand - to take on global importance.

I think he is right about the Senkaku Islands. I don't think it will result in shooting war at this stage, but it will divert US intelligence and monitoring resources. It will also prevent any rapid redeployment of US forces from South Korea (where they are neitehr needed nor wanted) to elsewhere where they are not wanted by the locals, but are desperately needed by the US military command which is finding itself manpower-short.

And next time you hear politicians refer to each other as "honourable", try and resist the urge to spew all over yourself.