Chicago Boyz

(One of the better header lines in my recent spam harvest.)

And now for something completely different: Captain James T. Kirk, the Lileks Rendition

Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary on January 20th 1939:

“Wir müssen versuchen, die ganze Welt gegen die feigen Londoner Kriegstreiber mobil zu machen”.

Translation:

“We have to try to mobilize the whole world against the cowardly warmongers in London”.

It seems a bit strange that he would write something like this in private, but the term “English warmongers” was a staple of Nazi propaganda even before World war II, so it might have been out of force of habit. He also wasn’t being ironic, the Nazis would have preferred taking over Europe without a fight, of course.

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad hasn’t mellowed with age:

Jews rule the world, getting others to fight and die for them, but will not be able to defeat the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has told a major Islamic summit.

“The Europeans killed six million Jews out of 12 million. But today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them,” Mahathir said, adding, “1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews.”

…

He told the biggest gathering of Muslim leaders since the 2001 attacks on the United States that all Muslims were suffering “oppression and humiliation”, with their religion accused of promoting terrorism.

(Read the whole thing, it’s fascinating, in a horrifying kind of way).

This kind of insanity isn’t all that surprising coming from him. He is notorious for ranting about the evils of globalization and even his anti-Semitic screeching didn’t just come out of the blue. The man built his whole decades-long political career on the discrimination of ethnic Chinese, who serve as scapegoats for all problems in much of South East Asia (an obvious parallel to anti-Semitism). And Mahathir Mohamad wasn’t just an opportunist who went along, he was the driving force behind this policy.

Profiting from affirmative action at the expense of the more successful ethnic Chinese, few Malays complain (which would be illegal anyway). As long as Malays and Islam are securely on top in the country, the anti-Chinese riots of earlier decades won’t repeat themselves, but that is good news in a very qualified sense, for the Chinese effectively (if not formally) live in dhimmitude. Sharia law is gaining ground in the country and it looks like it might be extended to
the non-Muslim population, too.

Even so Malaysia is still pretty relaxed and tolerant for an Islamic country (at least for now), and Mahatir Mohamed is a moderate as Muslim leaders go. He’s set to retire now though, and his successor is likely to be worse. Add to this the problems of Indonesia and the Philippines to control their own Muslim extremists (not that they are always trying that hard) and the situation in the whole region looks increasingly likely to deteriorate. We might miss old Mahatir yet.

(When I posted I hadn’t noticed that Sylvain had put up an entry on the same speech a short while ago).

Update:

This is about one of Mahatir Mohamad’s possible successors:

Nik Abdul Aziz, the spiritual leader of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party, was quoted by the Malay-language Mingguan Malaysia newspaper as saying that even women who wear Muslim headscarves can arouse men if they wear makeup and perfume too. The end result could be rape or molestation, the newspaper cited Nik Aziz as saying. Anwar Bakri, a senior adviser to Nik Aziz, confirmed he made the comments, but said they were reported out of context.

…

The fundamentalist Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party is the country’s largest opposition group, controlling two of the 13 states, where it has restricted alcohol sales and segregated Muslim men and women at supermarket counters.

It has tried to introduce criminal laws including punishments such as amputation, but these have been blocked by Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad’s national government.

(Link via Reason)

Phil Carter cites to an Army Times story about how the Army is going to require everybody to be a competent warrior first, and do whatever other specialty they are assigned, second. This is something of a novelty in the Army, but much less so in the Marine Corps.

Carter is a real Army guy, and I’m an armchair warrior only. But I have been doing a lot of reading lately and a thought occurs to me which Carter did not address.

The Army, and all the services, have in recent years talked about manouever warfare, and reconnaisance pull rather than command push, and Sun Tzu and deception, surprise and indirection, and blitzkreig and aufstragtaktik, and moving away from attritional warfare. This is all good stuff. Tommy Franks ran Gulf War II on these principles, to excellent effect.

But. This approach creates its own unique burdens. If you make an effort to attack where the enemy is weak, like the German stosstruppen of 1918, and you bypass enemy strongpoints, and leave the follow-on wave to mop up, then you necessarily make all elements of the Army into front-line elements. If the tanks and heavy units are supposed to race past the enemy like water flowing around rocks to make deep penetrations, then the columns of trucks behind them are not going to be pulling up behind a trench line with a “front” toward the enemy, and unloading their supplies in a safe zone. Rather, these logistic elements will be operating in a fluid situation where (hopefully) discombobulated but still armed and alive elements of the enemy are still running around. Or, as someone put it, if you attack where the enemy is weak, then it must mean that your own weakest forces are going to come into contact with the enemy where he is still strong. The Germans in World War II faced this problem, with their armored spearheads leaving large partisan formations operating in their rear throughout the war. It occurs to me that the training and expectations of “rear echelon” troops will have to change. This raises two further issues. One, will we need to give up on the idea that women in the military are in “non-combat” roles. That seems inevitable. Two, will we need to equip our support services with more robust, combat-worth equipment, i.e. tracked and armored vehicles rather than soft-skinned trucks? This one I haven’t seen anybody write about. The Army leadership seems to be trying to take these challenges seriously. Good.

Dudes, I just noticed that Anna’s Bunny Blog is back up and running — since last month. Good stuff, and I missed the war stuff so much I almost missed the bunnies, too. And I’m just not a bunny kind of guy.

She’s got a good post about the Chinese putting a man into space: “Communists in space again? Oh great. ” But she concludes on a happy note, pointing out that Arsenal of Democracy — or AoD in her usual parlance — “the AoD owns space and can bring down whatever the enemy may send up.”

Yeah, I knew that. I wrote a post last night which I didn’t put up because it was way too ranting and angry and negative. See, I care about our readers’ feelings. I don’t always post every darn thing that I dredge out of my id.

In my first version of the post I said I wanted the Chicom astronaut to die. Kinda harsh. I don’t so much want him to die as I want the Chinese communists’ space program to fail. So, unlike Glenn Reynolds, I don’t wish them well. Bottom line, China is our long-term enemy. I think this space effort is them laying the foundation for a challenge to our control of space. (See the fascinating essay “Unrestricted Warfare” — part 1 here and part 2 here.) Nothing personal. If I were the Chinese, that’s what I’d be doing. They want to control their region, which means we have to leave. And we won’t leave if we are asked nicely, so they are going to push us. That’s how it is going to go. Stripping away our command of space is something they are working on doing. And they are very, very smart people. And they are very serious about beating us when they take us on, a process which is already underway.

This space launch isn’t the United Federation of Planets, a peaceful joint exploration of the natural wonders of unknown space. It is the instruments warming up in the orchestra pit before the curtain rises on Cold War II.

John B. Alexander‘s book Winning the War: Advanced Weapons, Strategies, and Concepts for the Post-9/11 World has got me all fired up about the need to control space. He predicts that there is going to be a collapse in the cost of getting into space and working there, and that market forces will drive this process in the near future. This will change the parameters, and be a threat to our current ascendency in the military use of space.

My wish list looks like this. I want the U.S. to invest massively in militarizing space. I want us to tear up any treaty that purports to block our doing so. I want us to deny the use of space to our enemies, including France and China. I want us to establish a permanent military presence, manned and unmanned, on the moon and at the LaGrange points. Space is the military high ground of the present and future. I want us to seize, hold and control it, and deny it completely and permanently to all enemies actual and potential.

I am glad that Anna is confident that we can do this if we need to. I’m worried that we will fail to invest, now, during the inter-war period. It will be a lot harder to take the high ground back by force at some later date. For now, I will take her word for it that the AoD can handle any challengers. I sure hope she’s right.