Jinn of Current Events

NYT: Jalal Talabani, the Kurdish leader who is expected to take a senior post in Iraq's interim government, said today that the heads of Arab countries should be called to account for Saddam Hussein's crimes against the Iraqi people. ... He said that the discovery of mass graves in several locations around the country underscores the responsibility that Arab leaders must take for their support for Mr. Hussein and the Baath Party, which built and enforced his totalitarian rule. Is he calling for further regime change? 

The Times: Just when you thought the axis of weasels might have had the grace to leave Iraq alone, France and Russia have once again resumed their favourite pastime — making the lives of ordinary Iraqis as unpleasant as possible. Not content with propping up Saddam Hussein by doing as much business with him as possible; not content with supplying Saddam with 70 per cent of his weapons (according to the internationally recognised Stockholm International Peace Research Institute); not content with doing their best to keep Saddam in power by trying to prevent the coalition from taking action; not content with doing all of that, France and Russia have found a new means to help to ensure that Iraqis suffer. They have turned their attention to the UN sanctions against Iraq, and are fighting Anglo-American attempts to have them lifted. The sanctions, let us recall, were imposed to punish Saddam and force him to change his behaviour. Let's be charitable. Perhaps French and Russian diplomats haven't yet noticed that Saddam has gone and his regime is no more... 

Bettina Bien Greaves, Introduction to Ludwig von Mises' Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow: The ideal economic policy, both for today and tomorrow, is very simple. Government should protect and defend against domestic and foreign aggression the lives and property of the persons under its jurisdiction, settle disputes that arise, and leave the people otherwise free to pursue their various goals and ends in life. This is a radical idea in our interventionist age. 

Awad Nasir, an Iraqi poet, until recently exiled in London: The U.S. and its allies should ... ignore the supposedly disinterested advice of France, Russia and the Arab regimes to salvage the political and social legacy of the dictatorship. Last February, the U.S. and Britain stood firm and insisted that Iraq must be liberated, regardless of whatever anyone might say. Today, they must remain equally firm in asserting that Iraq must be democratized. ... In the meantime Jacques Chirac, Vladimir Putin, Kofi Annan and others have no authority to speak on behalf of my people. 

I am very consciously calling for the total defeat of Islamofascism, just as Nazism was defeated in Germany and Bushido/Militarism was defeated in Japan. Such a defeat will require a change of regime in Mecca, Tehran, Damascus, Islamabad, and Cairo, at a minimum. Kabul and Baghdad have been conquered, but it's far from over.

Islamofascism is a murderous ideology disguised as a religion, filled with hatred of freedom and women (among many other things and people the Islamofascists want to destroy or enslave), and primitive beyond redemption. That more than 1 billion people live under its yoke at the moment means merely that it will be a long, hard war. Red China also controls 1 billion people but will be defeated, ultimately. Soviet Russia subjugated hundreds of millions and collapsed after 70+ years of atrocities. This is World War IV. This is about Liberty, Enlightenment, and the future of mankind. 

What kind of people were the Carthaginians? One thing we know is that human sacrifice was a central element in Carthaginian religion; their own children were regularly sacrificed to Baal: From contemporaries of the Punic Wars down to Pliny in the first, and Plutarch in the second century AD, we are told of the slaughter and incineration of the innocents, either annually as a matter of course, or occasionally, in gratitude for favours received, or at moments of danger to the city. Music drowned the wailing of the women; children were bought for the purpose from poor parents; the victims fell into the fire from the hands of a bronze idol, as their mouths were twisted by the heat into a ghastly grin.

And as Winwood Reade wrote in The Martyrdom of Man (1872): The fall of the Carthaginian empire is not a matter for regret... Throughout Africa Carthage was never named without a curse. ... Carthage fed like a vulture upon the land. ... The Carthaginian customs were barbarous in the extreme. When a battle had been won they sacrificed their handsomest prisoners to the gods; when a battle had been lost the children of their noblest families were cast into the furnace...

Ceterum censeo, delenda est Mecca.