A recent Daily Kos headline reads: "Trump only 'pretty sure' Lindsey Graham is in heaven."
The reference was to Trump's eulogy yesterday for the departed senator. Apparently the full quote was: "I think I know where he is, and I think he’s up there. I think he’s watching us. I’m pretty sure of it."
For some reason, the name of Cecil Rhodes still connotes the utmost in prestige in our society. Elite students still scramble over themselves each year to secure a Rhodes Scholarship—despite the fact that it is named for a man who effectively stole a bunch of land in South Africa, dispossessed its inhabitants, reduced them to a system of virtual slavery, and governed for years as a capitalist dictator.
Surely here is proof of that old truism—remarked by Henry Fielding among others—that if a swindler only swindle on a large enough scale; a robber only rob enough territory; a murderer only kill enough people—he will cease to be condemned as a criminal and start to be sanctified as a statesman. For "power has never lacked eulogists" (Elias Canetti; Stewart trans.).
A recent piece in the Intercept traces Pete Hegseth's obsession with testosterone levels—and other manifestations of masculine insecurity—to a lifelong desire to model himself on Teddy Roosevelt.
The writer, Nick Turse, includes an anecdote from early in Hegseth's military career: "Stuffed in Hegseth’s Army-issue green duffle bag when he arrived at Gitmo was a sheet of plain white copy paper inside a black plastic frame with a quote from his hero, former President Teddy Roosevelt."
The Wall Street Journal published a pretty remarkable story yesterday based on unreleased footage from an upcoming Lindsey Graham documentary. Apparently, it shows just how closely involved Graham was in cheerleading and directly inspiring Trump's Iran war.
By the Journal's account, both men took an unsettlingly personal delight in the destruction and mayhem they had unleashed. In the war's opening days—when as we now know a U.S. Tomahawk missile annihilated an Iranian school and took the lives of more than a hundred children—Graham and Trump were crowing together over the TV images of their fiery handiwork.
I was writing in the previous post about what I called the "counter-tradition" of European and American writers who criticized imperialism. What strikes me though about reading the examples of this counter-tradition in Sven Lindqvist's book—and in the separate examples I assembled—is how often these writers felt the need to present their criticism in the indirect form of sarcasm.
The result is that I need to provide a whole paragraph of context, lest the contemporary reader get the false impression that Mark Twain actually meant it, say, when he wrote that "the world belongs to [...] the white man."
Everyone knows that European nations brutally colonized and subjugated much of the rest of humanity from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century and—through a combination of disease, war, enslavement, dispossession and deliberate genocide—pushed many human communities around the globe to the point of near-extinction.
Everyone knows this—so what's the point of thinking about it now? What's the point, specifically, of revisiting Sven Lindqvist's 1992 book, "Exterminate All the Brutes"—about the history of European colonial genocides?
Even back during college I was very committed to defending the liberal project. But I took a kind of grudging interest at the time in various "communitarian" and "traditionalist" critiques of liberalism and modernity. I thought they might be onto something; I thought liberalism could learn or gain something from them; and I went out of my way to vindicate them from charges of necessarily leading to authoritarian illiberalism.
I even devoted an entire 40-page B.A. thesis, about the history of fascist ideology, to attempting to draw an overfine distinction between religious conservatives and traditionalists, on the one hand, and genuine fascists on the other.
