Gore Vidal on The Long War and Brainwashing

War is peace!

Where is Metro when you need him? Probably sulking because Blogger won’t let me leave any golden droppings in his comment section.

Stolen from the comments on Gawker:

  • Oh, look what’s lying right here on the coffee table, one of my favorite passages by Gore Vidal:

    “Although the Soviets still wanted to live by our original agreements at Yalta and even Potsdam, we had decided, unilaterally, to restore the German economy in order to enfold a rearmed Germany into Western Europe, thus isolating the Soviet, a nation which had not recovered from the Second World War and had no nuclear weapons. It was Acheson– again– who elegantly explained all the lies that he was obliged to tell Congress and the ten-minute-attention-spanned average American: “If we did make our points clearer than truth, we did not differ from most other educators and could hardly do otherwise…Qualification must give way to the simplicity of statement, nicety and nuance to bluntness, almost brutality, in carrying home a point.” Thus were two generations of Americans treated by their overlords until, in the end, at the word “Communism”, there is an orgasmic Pavlovian reflex just as the brain goes dead.”

    Gore Vidal, Dreaming War, New York, Thunder’s Mouth Press, p.117-118.

Bonus points for the following as well:

  • “When she was running for the Senate, Hillary’s psephologists discovered that the one group that really hated her was white, middle-aged men of property. She got the whole thing immediately — I heard she said, “I remind them of their first wife.”

The Long War: Laurie Lee and Alan Rickman

Here is everyone’s favorite velvet-throated thespian Alan Rickman, reading Laurie Lee’s poem The Long War for Peace Day, which was, apparently, September 21st. I wish they’d tell me these things ahead of time.

The Long War is a title which has been applied to any number of seemingly-endless conflicts, most recently used by the Bush administration to describe their “War on Terror” which has been the excuse for the continuing encroachments on civil liberties both within the US and around the world.

From The Long War by William S. Lind:

Long wars are usually strategic disasters for winners as well as losers, because they leave all parties exhausted. If they work to anyone’s advantage, it tends to be the weaker party’s, because its alternative is rapid defeat. The Rumsfeld Pentagon certainly does not see the United States as the weaker party in its “Global War on Terrorism.” So why has it adopted a long war strategy, or more accurately lack of strategy, unless one sees national exhaustion as a plus?

The answer is a common strategic blunder, but again one that is seldom seen up front; it normally arises as a war continues longer and proves more difficult than expected. The blunder is maximalist objectives. In a speech announcing the QDR, Secretary Rumsfeld said, speaking of our Fourth Generation opponents,

“Compelled by a militant ideology that celebrates murder and suicide, with no territory to defend, with little to lose, they will either succeed in changing our way of life or we will succeed in changing theirs.”

Guess which one won.

The Long War
by Laurie Lee

Less passionate the long war throws
its burning thorn about all men,
caught in one grief, we share one wound,
and cry one dialect of pain.

We have forgot who fired the house
Whose easy mischief spilled first blood
Under one raging roof we lie
The fault no longer understood
But as our twisted arms embrace the desert where our cities stood
Death’s family likeness in each face must show at last our brotherhood.

Not. Funny.

Well maybe kinda.

The Cowl of Cthulhu

The Great Octopus Potato Wars

And in the end times, when the stars align and the Earth is cleared off for the return of the Great Old Ones, with what shall the armies of Great Cthulhu be protected against the rage of Nodens and his fearsome allys, the Elder Gods?

With these:

The Cowl of Cthulhu

The soft underbelly of the Cowl of Cthulhu

And when we have won the battle and wish to slake our thirst for the blood of the vanquished, we shall serve it in this lovely teapot, also from the unofficial Benvenuto Cellini of the Great Old Ones, Miel-Margarita Paredes.

The Teapot of Cthulhu

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Run DMZ: rumble on the 38th parallel!

Somebody needs to turn the Israelis and Palestinians onto this before it’s too late. A new paradigm for conflict is demonstrated here by the forces of North and South Korea in an underreported, yet epic scuffle in the Demilitarized Zone.

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