In case you haven’t seen it, here’s German video of Hizbollah Superhero Green Helmet acting as a director of Qana propaganda video. (h/t Ron Ackert / Tom Pechinski)
I’ve written plenty on post-modernist sensibilities and wills to power in modern political thought—how such things proceed from (or, if you prefer, are reinforced by, depending on your philosophical starting point) certain linguistic assumptions that then translate into self-justifying strategems and an overarching rationale for cynically exploiting the “pragmatism” supposedly created in the vaccuum of metaphysics’ implosion—so I’ll spare you more of the same from me and instead point you to Bryan Preston at Hot Air, who notes:
Post-modern conflict is a war of images over substance, where armies or militias can lose every single battle but still win the war if they have marshalled images and sound more successfully than their opponent. Battles still matter, but the airwaves have become another dimension of the battlespace. It’s more than the sultry voice of Tokyo Rose telling American sailors that they were steaming toward their doom. It tells the homefront that the war is unwinnable, that it may be a product of conspiracies by their own leadership, and that it’s resulting in the mass killing of innocent civilians. Post-modern wars play on our Western sense of fairness and the value we place on human life, and obscures the reality of our enemy and its wholesale targeting of civilians in an effort to break our will.
Islamist religion is clearly pre-enlightenment. But their tactics for bringing about a return to the dark ages are quite pointedly post-Enlightenment, fueled by the continental “lessons” of the linguistic turn, which described the man-made nature of our epistemology—and which was then (mistakenly, in my opinion) construed to justify cultural relativism, a philosophical move that gave rise to the will to power as a dangerous governing force in modern day social and political organization.
One way to fight back is to engage such philosophy on its own terms—something I discussed previously here, for those of you interested in such things.
Matthew Sheffield at Newsbusters has more. See also, LGF.
And unfortunately, a late development in our civilization is the rise of great numbers of citizens with pretty much no will to break, no cognitive ability to confront, and appetite for little but servility to an always beneficent Big Brother.
I wonder how they’ll dig living under the Caliphatemongers. I wouldn’t know, because speech will be repressed, and I’ll likely be dead.
Cordially…
I love the way you neofascist boys believe that the abject all-encompassing failure of this administration is merely perception. Himmler tacked with the same strategy once the bolsheviks started closing in. I.e., The Germans must not lose their will to win. We must support our glorious furher. Victory is ours, dumbkoffs!
Same deal, right? How ‘bout mulling on this tack–the neofascists in this country have blown their wad. It’s over. We can’t mount a new offensive on the so-called war on terror because our glorious ranch-hand has run our military into the ground and for what? So he can piss on the constitution? Why not go write another smirky haiku? Helps keep up the pretense.
Kim
No.
Idiot.
Clearly the green helmet guy should get an Emmy, Oscar, Pulitzer and the Nobel Peace prize.
How come the MSM has so many willing and/or complicit dupes? I’d be at least a bit embarrassed to be exposed as a total suck a## for a group of muderering thugs but I suppose when the “news” is more important than virtue things get a little hazy.
Doesn’t anyone resent the orchestration?
Or is that so common that it is just accepted practice?
tw: perhaps if we call it a *play* he could win a Tony
My sincere thanks, “jill,” for amply demonstrating my points about the lumpen idiotariat that the jihadis are counting on.
May the numbers of your comrades dwindle, before we’re killed.
Cordially…
TW: you’re the type I was referring to.
Oh good, Blackfacer shows up to blackout those who corrupt the purity of her cause.
TW Even from this distance I can smell fried brain emitting from the enlightened Ivory Tower.
Is it “jill” or “Kim” or “newsflashmail@juno.com”?
I suspect it’s none of the above, actually.
I read that he actually tocked.
Caliphatemongers?
Wow. Cute.
I especially like the new riff that Hamas and Hezzbollah have invented wartime spin.
It is clearly a media control conspiracy being perpetrated by all those Arab-Americans we see giving each other Oscars every year.
The war damage is all photoshop, so presumably there will be no bill to fix it. If I log on when and if a bill comes, where will you be, er, hiding?
You can sum up Skips comment to:
Who cares if the news media is lying to us, there really IS a war going on.
Really? What idiot said that? Besides yourself, that is.
Which means, what, exactly?
Why the hell can’t the loons just say what they mean?
Because even they don’t know what they mean anymore.
Oh, I think “Skip” had a something in mind with the line about Hollywood. I just think he knows he’d be slammed if he said it.
Man, I liked the old trolls better.
The new ones just reek.
Wow, Skip. Apologizing for direct manipulation of children’s corpses for the purposes of propaganda. Claiming terrorist manipulation of the media is somehow harmless ‘spin.’ Pretending that identifying fake photos and staged corpses is the equivalent to claiming that there is no war damage occurring.
TW: Know: Skip must know that perfect groveling will make the terrorists will kill him last.
Cut Jill some slack guys. She’s really depressed that her freedom fighters were preventing from making a “big boom” in the sky due to the violation of their civil rights by Bush/BlairHitler. Maybe a few tourists in Bali or Egypt will get splattered later on this week and she will cheer back up.
Cheer up Jill! Neocons are still having rockets dropped on their heads in northern Israel. There is still something for you to cheer about in the world!
I think Skip wanted to say the pictures were fake but accurate.
Look, if we can’t tell the difference between some of our liberals and jihadists, is there any difference?
t/w; I am in range of Dearborn. Went there yesterday, as a matter of fact. A Catholic school converted to Muslim academy (I was buying a few old desks.)
First, Jill/Kim, some of us are neofascist GIRLS. Or is that womyn?
We can’t mount a new offensive on the so-called war on terror because our glorious ranch-hand has run our military into the ground and for what?
We’re run into the ground? My military sources might disagree with you.
So he can piss on the constitution? Why not go write another smirky haiku? Helps keep up the pretense.
Wrong again. The haiku stuff is simply for pleasure. You may be unfamiliar with the concept.
Speaking of Germany, though not in a lunatic way (cough, cough), I’ve been getting a bunch of hits this morning from searches for “green helmet man”—all from Germany. Wonder what’s up there.
I think some enterprising lefty needs to find “green helmet man” and bring him to the U.S. He’d be bigger than Cindy Sheehan and his stage management is so much more professional.
Post-modernism would be hilarious if it weren’t so commonly the frightening cause of Orwellian doublespeak. “I refuse definition, so you can’t define me as wrong!”
Bull.
Neofascists?
Does that mean I finally get to wear the jodhpurs and jack-boots?
BECAUSE OF THE BOOT-JACKS!
You must be serving in a different Army than I am “Kim”. I suppose the Navy and Air Force are also worn out, right?
Atilla, the TV feature came from ZAPP – a German Network, if you have anything on your site re: the Green Helmet (is that like the “Green Hornet”?), I’d say you have Germans looking for further info.
Say what you want. Nazis dressed sharp.
Or maybe they were dressed to kill. Whichever is less PC.
Thank you, Axis Sally.
Comrade, you couldn’t be more right. You neo-fascists have blown your wad. I hope I’m not around when you realize it.
tw: everyone. Everyone knew her as Nancy.
Helmut Greene directed Syriana, didn’t he? I’m a big Helmut Greene fan.
Dr. Freud… paging Dr. Freud…
<hums “Flight of the Bumblebee>
I used to think that show was so cool. Bruce Lee as Kato!
I think some enterprising lefty needs to find “green helmet man†and bring him to the U.S. He’d be bigger than Cindy Sheehan and his stage management is so much more professional.
Just think of the possibilities if we could get “Green Helmet” and Baghdad Bob together!
Skip, you ignorant slut.
No one is saying that Islamofascists invented propaganda. We’re saying that they are distributing propaganda through credulous Western media outlets that claim to be objective and are accepted as so by many people. That’s a big freaking problem in a war that may come down to a battle of wills (or of willingness to actually fight).
Apparently you have no problem with dishonest reporting that weakens peoples’ resolve for fighting terror.
Now, I have to bring out the big guns: I OFFICIALLY QUESTION YOUR PATRIOTISM, SKIP!
This is a little OT, but Thomas Sowell has written a very good piece on the inaccurate use of citations. Sowell is one of the best minds of this era.
<a href=”http://www.gopusa.com/commentary/tsowell/2006/ts_0810p.shtml” target=”_blank”>
Major John: “Atilla, the TV feature came from ZAPP – a German Network, if you have anything on your site re: the Green Helmet (is that like the “Green Hornetâ€Â?), I’d say you have Germans looking for further info.”
Attila (slapping his forehead): …oh
If your helmet is green, I would suggest a course of antibiotics…
<a href=”http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/08/the_contrived_news_story.html” target=”_blank”>
A little (but only a very little) OT—there’s a great commentary on how our “own” press contrives “news” to fit their agenda.
TW: Is it possible they’re making stuff up?????
Lemme try that again.
Attila, Don’t worry about it – hordes of curious, link-suchtig Germans would disorient me too.
I think this is where Skip and Jill run up the hill to fetch a pail of
WHY DON’T YOU CALL FOR A DRAFT YOU NAZI CHICKENHAWKS!
No, wait, that wasn’t watter…
Jill, all we need is ten more minutes. Rumor has it Jeff only needs five. But not ALL of us have the stamina of an 18 year old.
And don’t you wingnuts know that the natives are too noble and pure and fundamentally ignorant to practice propaganda?
Multiculturalism: the way to be racist and still feel good about yourself…
P. J. O’Rourke: “I get asked, doesn’t it bother you when people call you a Nazi? No, and for a very simple reason. No one has ever had a fantasy about being tied to a bed and ravished by someone dressed as a liberal.”
TW: act. I’m not even going there.
That is the funniest thing I’ve heard since I saw Clerks II.
Is it just me? Or does the “Green Helmet Guy” look an awful like “baghdad Bob”?
They’re distantly related on their mother’s side.
Jackboots hell! I do all my best ravishing wearing caulked boots.
TW: Footwear to help keep a grip on what’s real.
Many people have suggested that the photoshop “proves” two things:
1) That the MSM, and Reuters itself, is willfully skewing the news in Hezzbollah’s favor.
2) That any falsified evidence of bombing damage means there is no bombing. It follows that, if there weren’t as many dead children as claimed, everything is made up, including the the 30-1 fatality figure and the devastated infrastructure.
With regard to the Oscars, I merely pointed out that such a brutally effective “Hezzywood” pro-Arab media dominance would tend to be rendered visible somewhere. Yet what we see at the Academy Awards is rather the opposite, as Ms. Redgrave found out to her sorrow.
My curiosity caught up with my laziness today, and I went looking for a definition of a term that was new to me, fourth generation warfare. A few taps of the keyboard and a visit to google led me to this article http://www.d-n-i.net/fcs/4th_gen_war_gazette.htm . What that has to do with this discussion is the paragraph that really caught my attention:
So. He who controls the tube may win the battle. All the more important that these phonies and collaborateurs be unmasked.
C’mon, skip–you’re almost there–you can sound it out…it sounds similar to O.J. Simpson’s nickname.
But I do remember that time Spielberg parked a rocket laucher in between two Beverly Hills villas in the hope that, say, the Iraqi or Egyptian air forces would miss it and kill Dom Deluise instead. Imagine the outrage that would have caused.
skip, you are just another Jew-hating lefty. It’s that simple.
Now go get me a juice box, bitch.
And lest I let this gem go scot free:
Because in war, fairness would dictate a 1:1 ratio. And if you can sort out why that last sentence makes no sense, you may be on the road to recovery, skip.
Paraphrasing Tom Clancy: If you kick a tiger in the ass, you better have plans for dealing with the teeth.
Poster Jill, must have swallowed a pill. She is hallucinating that there is no terrorist global Jihad. She may be singing a different tune had she been booked on a flight from Heathrow to JFK. This is the new democrat party. No war is worth fighting and everything is negotiable. Jill, if those of like mind are in charge of our national security, you should go out and buy your burqa now.
skip (are you one of those New England muffy/buffy trust fund kiddies?) do you have a link to someone who made those suggestions, or are you just logic and reality impaired naturally?
For instance, if the MSM and Reuters aren’t skewing the news towards the Hezzies, then any photoshop ‘mistakes’ should divide evenly between those helping the Hezzies and those helping the Israelis. I’ll look forward to you showing us the ones that were photoshopped in favor of the Israelis and put out by the MSM or Reuters.
And your second ‘point’ is too asinine to be believed, let alone rebutted.
What a maroon.
TW: services. Skip happily ‘services’ islamofascists in the manner of Ned Lamont.
My vocabulary is deficient; I’m missing a word. What’s the equivalent of “solipsism” on a cultural level?
Skip, jill, and many others aren’t multiculturalists and certainly aren’t anything resembling “tolerant”. What they are is word-I-can’t-think-of-ists. They don’t believe in the existence of any culture but their own, and any and all actions by anybody anywhere, Andamanese to Zulus inclusive, are to be interpreted as being the result of the motives and drives of somebody who lives in a leafy suburb in the northeastern US or British Midlands and makes a high five figures doing some kind of paperwork or “intellectual” task. Middle manager in an insurance company or professor at a junior college; that sort of thing. Everybody’s like that, exactly, and the only “villains” are people who pretend otherwise, obviously for nefarious ends.
I swear one of the reasons the Mad Mullahs are mad all the time is the frustration. They lay out their course—motivations, intent, goals, methods, the whole nine yards, in words of few syllables and sentences of simple structure. No sooner have they sat down and twitched their robes back into place than some Westerner jumps up to call the liars. None of that makes any sense, so of course it’s all a bunch of shit, what they’re really sore about is Imperialism and Oppression by the Capitalists, as anybody would be. Repeating what the Islamists actually say, as opposed to the “translation” offered by the Left, is “hate”—see LGF, Debka, et al. Everything has to be shoehorned into the Procrustean politics of the Left. If I were a mullah it would piss me off. Hell, it irritates me vastly as it is.
Regards,
Ric
tw: I think we should simply take them at their word.
C’mon, skippy. Say it. You know you want to. McKinney had no problem saying it.
Though her father had some trouble spelling it.
It’s time to start thinking about what civilization should do when the world of Islamofascism uses a nuclear weapon against the West.
The first phase of this War Against IslamoFascism is nearing an end. I have no doubt that history – if anyone is left to write it – will see this future mushroom cloud as the demarcation point, much as Pearl Harbor was a significant turn in WWII.
To his great discredit, President Bush, through lack of leadership, was not capable of making 9/11 that demarcation, as FDR did with December 7th or Winston Churchill with Poland. The U.S. passed a “Declaration of Force” resolution, not a true Act of War. As a result, the first chapter of the West’s last stand against barbarism was lost in its infancy.
No country in the history of mankind has ever won a war with its civilian populace at peace, and its military at war. RE: Vietnam. Korea. Etc.
So, when the mushroom cloud appears, it will be incumbent upon the West to determine its reaction. Shall there be appeasement? Excuses? Cautions not to “overreact?”
Or will the West lurch away from its current suicidal course and recognize that Islam is a religion-philosophy far more dangerous than Nazism or Communism ever was, and resort to the extremest of measures to wipe it from the face of the earth?
Considering this question now, and laying the groundwork within the culture for the correct answer now, may help prevent the West from ultimately succumbing to Islamic barbarism.
Do the rolling eyes indicate a disupte of the statement?
From what I’ve read, the resolution authorizing the President to invade Afghanistan, etc., was patterned after the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, and we know how well that one went…
Imagine what would have happened if Bush had called a joint session of congress directly after 9/11 and had given a speech akin to FDR’s “Day of Infamy” speech, only geared towards Islamofascism. He could have gotten a true declaration of war; and then he could have put the country on a real war footing.
With our civilian population geared for war, our industrial might could have been mobilized to mass produce cruise missiles, tanks, ships, technologies. Our press, our mass media, everything could have been channeled into a WWII-style mode that would have brooked nothing less than victory.
Germany and Japan were only defeated when their civilian populations reached complete and utter capitulation. The Islamic world will never reach that stage unless it is met with unstoppable force.
In short, with a true act of war, we would have been able to pursue the only morally justifiable form of warfare:
That form in which utter victory is pursued as quickly and with as much brutal efficiency as possible.
Unfortunately our liberal compatriots will not be on board until something horrible happens to our country. Hopefully, too many lives will not be lost in the next attack. I think President Bush’s insistence on trying so hard to keep life as close to normal as it can be after 9/11,is partly to blame for this mass hallucination that enemies are not on our very doorstep. With our little bubble burst overreaction will be inevitable. That is something the good Muslims should think about, and turn out the fanatical fascists that are in their midst.
One of the primary problems with this war, is the lack of a recognizable enemy. We can’t go in and bomb every Moslem back to the stone age. Not every Islamic is a terrorist. No, this war has to be fought on every plane. Like the Cold War, this war will be fought in back alleys and mostly unknown places. The world will never hear or know of most of the battles that do occur. The war will be fought on the battlefield. In Iraq and Afghanistan, we have Islamic extremists from all over the world showing up to contribute. This just makes it easier for our military forces to get them there and not here. Most importantly, this war will be fought in the international media. Propaganda is a crucial aspect to this war, as has been frequently noted above.
Unfortunately, many people have not yet realized that this is a war, that the extremist factions of Islam do not care for peace or our actions of the past/present/future. They have stated repeatedly that their end goal is the extermination of Israel, the destruction of the United States and the world converted to Islam.
There were non-extremist Nazis and Imperial Japanese, too. The point of war is not to quibble over how to weed out the good people from the bad. The point of war is to brutally destroy the threat as quickly as possible. This is the only form of “humane” or “moral” war that should ever be waged.
Anything else results in stalemate and useless casualties.
You are correct that at this very moment – without a true declaration of war by our country – there is no motivation to reduce Islam to the dustbin of history, as we did with Nazism. You are correct that at this moment, we can’t go in and bomb every Moslem back to the stone age.
But when stating that not every Islamist is a terrorist, you are stating an irrelevancy. It doesn’t matter whether they are terrorists or not, no more than whether a German soldier was a member of the Nazi party or not… both were deadly.
A casual glance at nearly any poll will show that a frighteningly large majority of the Islamic world wishes to have a world Caliphate return, and fervently desires to see the west destroyed.
Once they have actually detonated a nuclear weapon – and it’s only a matter of time until they do – we must be prepared as a society, a culture, and a nation to declare war… war against all Islamic Theocracies and their supporters. From Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan, their evil must be cleansed from the earth.
And we can not shrink from this duty. To do otherwise would mean suicide.
The moment of Islamic nuclear attack will indeed mean that we shall be forced to destroy every mosque and Islamic shrime, and turn every Koran into a rare novelty that only students of history are interested in – like Mein Kampf or The Communist Manifesto.
The other choice? Witness, and be part of, the utter destruction of our freedoms by the most evil and horrible religion, forever.