The American Spectator

Reader Mail

(Page 3 of 4)

You can blame the 'net for much of this. It's how I read The Spectator. Which I loyally subscribed to for years prior to the convenience of internet publishing (and several address changes). I was myself, an extremely well paid scanner operator, doing multiple color-separations for the daily news publications here in town. Desk-top publishing knocked me out in '97. I was not bitter, I just left the industry.
-- P. Aaron Jones
Michigan

WITH US OR AGAINST US
Re: Hal G.P. Colebatch's The Trial of Tony Blair:

I am sufficiently xenophobic to appreciate Mr. Blair for his principled stance with America in the war against terror. I care neither a feather nor a fig either for or about his domestic policies. The nation he ruled is a sovereign country and they are permitted to do as they wish with their social and economic life.

I care whether a nation aligns itself with us. I care that a nation doesn't betray us. I, for instance, would show the retarded chimpanzee running Venezuela how to build a nation if he'd stop his anti- American rhetoric. Fidel's people wouldn't be starving now in perfect socialismo if he hadn't made us the bad guy. We'd be feeding Cuba just like we feed Africa.

But you see, the left, here (Listen to Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and their minions from Hollywood) and overseas HATE America. Why? The answer is very simple and wonderfully profound. The United States has, for it's entire existence, permitted it's citizens to run about like chickens with their heads cut off, doing what they will, when they will, in the manner they will, and that alone created the most marvelous social and economic engine the world has known.

Ungainly? Certainly. Lacking the social niceties of European civilization? Perhaps. But successful? Beyond any argument. So why do they hate us? Very simple. Our success undermines the very foundation of socialism. That is that elites must rule or the unwashed will starve and descend into chaos. So we must be seen to be a failure when in fact The United States is a Darwinian success: those who try succeed. Socialists cannot abide the individual who does it on his own. We are a nation of them.
-- Jay W. Molyneaux
North Carolina

NAZIS WERE BAD, DOESN'T MEAN OTHERS WERE GOOD
Re: James Bowman's Valkyrie:

Isn'y it funny how happy Hollywood is to make World War II movies? I know that it was pretty big, but, damn, it happened over 60 years ago and lasted "only" six years. Hardly enough time now to start an Environment Impact Assessment of the World Trade Center memorial. It's almost as if Hollywood desperately needs to make good-war movies and the Nazies (soft "a") are simply the only universal Bad Guy they can get behind. We fought the Cold War for 45 years and it keeps getting the short end. How about movies about the RB-47 crews that were shot down over Kamchatka or Kola? How about the U-2 missions that didn't end up eating the dirt outside Sverdlovsk? Is there NOTHING to make a movie about? A movie about Solzhenitsyn? Sakharov? Anyone? Could it be that Hollywood can't make these movies because…the U.S. was on the Wrong Side? Pathetic.
-- Craig Z.
Nairobi, Kenya

Mr. Bowman touches on a reality among the conspirators in Hitler's assassination not readily appreciated by rebel-minded Americans (the ex-Englishmen sort). One such conspirator (although probably having nothing to do with Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg) was the Lutheran Pastor Dietrich Bonheoffer. American Lutherans often use Bonheoffer as an inspiring example for civil disobedience and activism; but this mischaracterizes the man. Bonheoffer, like most German Christians, took St. Paul's admonition that civil authorities were established by God for the good of a sinful world and as Christians they must be obedient to the kings and princes of this world. Many if not most believed that God chose particular individuals to be in particular positions of power for specific times. Thus to war against a civil leader could be easily construed as a sin against God. Indeed, Bonheoffer was troubled that, even though he identified Hitler as the Antichrist, he might be sinning against God's own obscure purposes or disobeying God's command to submit to civil authority in the very least. Whether the plot was successful or not, Bonheoffer believed he would have to answer to God for the profound evil he commented in the name of the good.

From the 20/20 hindsight of history, we often wonder that so many with real power either did nothing or were so ineffective in an effort to remove Hitler. The Allied forces didn't trust the German opposition and did nothing more than offer lip service. But there is another item to keep in mind: even if von Stauffenberg had actually succeeded, there is little reason to believe that the average German would have understood him.
-- Mike Dooley

MORMONS DON'T HAVE IT SO EASY
Re: Doug Bandow's The Real Meaning of Religious Persecution:

Mr. Bandow seems to implicitly agree that Mormons (who vigorously supported Prop 8) are indeed Christians in including them in his discussion of religious non-persecution against Christians. That's a first! Why didn't he include them sooner in his Christian fold? He doesn't, however, deal at all with the historic persecution of Mormons in America, which was the most violent of any religious group ever in this country, including an "Extermination Order" issued by Governor Lilburn Boggs of Missouri that any Mormon could be shot on site. He doesn't mention the Hahn's Mill massacre of Mormon women and children, cold blooded murder. The media and entertainment industry wasted no opportunity to vilify Mormons during Mitt Romney's presidential bid, including Jon Voight's movie "September Dawn" which he billed as a movie of the first act of religious terrorism in America (the Mountain Meadows massacre outside of Cedar City Utah in 1858 when an Federal Army was advancing on Utah). What other religious group has had a US Army sent against it in the US of A? He ignores the cold-blooded murder of the founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, for which justice was never even considered.

Does he not remember Waco, in which unproven charges of child abuse led the Clinton Justice Department under Janet Reno to mount an assault on the Branch Davidians, a fringe religious sect? I had the uncanny experience of reading Mario Vargas-Llosas' novel, "The War at the End of the World" about a similar incident in Northeast Brazil at the end of the 19th Century in which a Brazilian army annihilated a small religious enclave at Canudos in a fashion eerily suggestive of the Waco incident a Century later in America (are we catching up with Brazil a century late?). No religious persecution in this country? The events in West Texas over the past year belie such nonsense.

Beyond persecution, it is hard to deny the massive religious bigotry exposed during the past presidential election. The foremost evidences of such bigotry occurred with Mitt Romney. He proved, along with Obama's victory, that while America has moved beyond racial bigotry, it has certainly come nowhere near moving beyond religious bigotry. The other most overt manifestation of religious bigotry in the Presidential election was the treatment of Sarah Palin by the media. Evangelicals, though of influence in Republican primaries, continue to be denigrated ad libitum by the intellectualoids, as evidenced by the vitriol directed at Rick Warren's token invitation to offer a prayer at the inaugural. To the contrary, Evangelicals now form the backbone of American values. The denigration of Palin's beliefs and actions reflected not just misogyny, but a deep religious bigotry among the intellectualoids, the left, and the press. Nancy Pelosi gains kudos from the usual suspects for stating her view that killing unborn children is an economic stimulus, while Sarah Palin is pilloried for choosing life regardless of the circumstances. The perversion of liberals, hostile to human life and decency, ascendant politically, signals a nation in decline. What America wants is what the residents of Sodom and Gomorrah wanted with Lot's daughter.

The fact that Mormons have been driven out of their livelihoods in California subsequent to their support for Prop 8 is not persecution? It is, both religious and political, in America! Those of a religious persuasion are being driven underground and out of the town square of democracy in America. That is not persecution? Christians seem to have a better deal in China these days than in the US.
-- Kent Lyon