Monday, April 25, 2011

The Cowardly Generation

On May 13, 1943, Axis forces in North Africa surrendered. The Allies suddenly found themselves saddled with nearly three hundred thousand prisoners of war, including the bulk of General Erwin Rommel’s famed Afrika Korps. Unable to feed or house their share, the British asked their American comrades to relieve them of the burden. And so, by the tens of thousands, German soldiers were loaded aboard Liberty Ships, which had carried American troops across the Atlantic. Eventually, some five hundred P.O.W. camps, scattered across forty-five of the forty-eight United States, housed some four hundred thousand men. In every one of those camps, the Geneva conventions were adhered to so scrupulously that, after the war, not a few of the inmates decided to stick around and become Americans themselves. That was extraordinary rendition, Greatest Generation style.

The “war on terror” is a very different kind of war, and the prisoners thereof are very different, too. It’s not just that a higher proportion of them appear to have been truly dedicated to the ideology in whose name they were fighting, or that they were unaffiliated with a government. It’s also that their numbers are small—a hamlet compared to the city-size P.O.W. population of 1945. In the nine years since the creation of the purpose-built prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a grand total of seven hundred and seventy-nine men (and boys—the youngest was fifteen years old when he was captured) have been sent there. It currently holds a hundred and seventy-two. Yet this relative handful of shackled, isolated prisoners has somehow been permitted to engender a miasma of popular fear and political cowardice that contrasts shamefully with the matter-of-fact courage of an earlier and simpler time.

—Hendrik Hertzberg, "Prisoners," The New Yorker, 18 April 2011

Friday, April 15, 2011

My First lesli_hannah Post

If you read lesli_hannah's blog, you know that she loves a good quotation and often posts them. I saw this one today on the profile of a Facebook friend and I had to post it here. And besides, I'm just too freaking busy to write the half dozen or so posts I've thought of the in the past few weeks. 
You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, "Look at that, you son of a bitch."  
Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut, People magazine, 8 April 1974 

Friday, April 1, 2011

For Your Further Enlightenment XVII

A Dude from Barcelona that likes to draw stuff

A Facebook friend made me aware of Alex Noriega's blog, Stuff No One Told Me. Noriega is "a dude from Barcelona that likes to draw stuff." I'm following him now, and so should you. Here's a sampler of his work.









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It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. ---W.K. Clifford

Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear. ---Thomas Jefferson