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.
Trump was back to threatening war crimes against Iran this week. As he fumes about the fact that the war of aggression he started is not working out well for him, he has vowed to begin blowing up Iranian civilian infrastructure—unless they agree to let Trump walk away from this war of his own making and restore the status quo in the Strait of Hormuz that prevailed before he started bombing.
Nor is this the only recent sign that we are heading back into full-scale war. In response to the deaths of four U.S. service members, Trump declared on social media that "Every time Iran kills an American Soldier, they will pay for that killing many times over."
Three more Americans died this week because of Trump's utterly needless and unjustifiable war of aggression in Iran.
As Thomas Hardy wrote of another pointless colonial war—this one at the turn of the century:
South of the Line, inland from far Durban,
A mouldering soldier lies—your countryman [...]
