Mahdi Army to Disarm in Iraq

New Sadrist literature calls for the Mahdi Army to use no arms at all. This has been confirmed by a Sadr spokesman and is not some rumor. Crash and Burn for the Mahdi Army.

Dozvedanya, Alexander

A most remarkable man has died, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, famed dissident, writer, and philosopher. Hero against communism and communist evil, and significantly responsible for the fall of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact. Continuing inspiration for millions the world over who still struggle against communism, and fight for freedom against oppression.

The Corner’s Kathryn Jean Lopez (years earlier, Jay Nordlinger) both paid tribute to Solzhenitsyn and a speech he gave at Harvard.

Here’s a remarkable passage, so prescient it’s almost beyond belief that he gave the speech in 1978:

In today's Western society, the inequality has been revealed of freedom for good deeds and freedom for evil deeds. A statesman who wants to achieve something important and highly constructive for his country has to move cautiously and even timidly; there are thousands of hasty and irresponsible critics around him, parliament and the press keep rebuffing him. As he moves ahead, he has to prove that every single step of his is well-founded and absolutely flawless. Actually an outstanding and particularly gifted person who has unusual and unexpected initiatives in mind hardly gets a chance to assert himself; from the very beginning, dozens of traps will be set out for him. Thus mediocrity triumphs with the excuse of restrictions imposed by democracy.

It is feasible and easy everywhere to undermine administrative power and, in fact, it has been drastically weakened in all Western countries. The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.

Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror. It is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically counter-balanced by the young people's right not to look or not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.

And what shall we say about the dark realm of criminality as such? Legal frames (especially in the United States) are broad enough to encourage not only individual freedom but also certain individual crimes. The culprit can go unpunished or obtain undeserved leniency with the support of thousands of public defenders. When a government starts an earnest fight against terrorism, public opinion immediately accuses it of violating the terrorists' civil rights. There are many such cases.

Such a tilt of freedom in the direction of evil has come about gradually but it was evidently born primarily out of a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which there is no evil inherent to human nature; the world belongs to mankind and all the defects of life are caused by wrong social systems which must be corrected. Strangely enough, though the best social conditions have been achieved in the West, there still is criminality and there even is considerably more of it than in the pauper and lawless Soviet society. (There is a huge number of prisoners in our camps which are termed criminals, but most of them never committed any crime; they merely tried to defend themselves against a lawless state resorting to means outside of a legal framework).

(Cross-posted at Dadmanly

Breakthrough in Military Public Affairs

Check out the military spokesdrone.

Raw Deal

Secret deal kept British Army out of battle for Basra

Re: Angels

Heh - one year ago - almost to the day:

Now, San Fran:

Supervisor Chris Daly wants Congress to stop the Blue Angels’ Fleet Week flyovers and introduced the resolution, citing a fatal accident at an aerial display in South Carolina last year. A hearing Monday let Veterans for Peace and other anti-war groups face off with tourism and commerce supporters. Opponents of the Blue Angels voiced their concern over the trauma the show inflicts on war refugees, the waste of fuel, and noise pollution.

“The Blue Angels are totally unnecessary,” said a resolution supporter. “I believe they are sent here to terrorize this town because we are an anti-war city.”

I'm surprised they failed to note that "Angels" implies endorsement of those religions that include such beings in their theology, and that "Blue" indicates color preference.

The measure failed - those key points could have put it over the top.