On a brighter note, today is September 4, and I would like to wish you all a very happy Fall of the Roman Empire Day. 1,528 years ago today, Romulus Augustulus, the last Emperor of the West, was deposed by the barbarian king Odoacer. Odoacer, unlike the petty tyrants who had spent the past century grabbing at the purple, declined to proclaim himself Emperor, and at last the long Roman nightmare in Western Europe slid into its well-deserved oblivion.

Your gift for this joyous occasion is a game to play with the neo-conservatives creepy spendthrift fascists. Next time some neo-conservative creepy spendthrift fascist starts waxing poetic about the glories of a future Pax Americana, ask him what the Jews, or the Dacians, or the Christians, thought of the Pax Romana.

Here’s to many happy returns–and the hope that we might add the fall of certain other empires to our holiday calendar soon!

Further reading

• GT 2004/03/15: Happy Tyrannicide Day (observed)!

(Scharzenegger quote pointed out by Ghost in the Machine 2004-09-01.)

Arnold Schwarzenegger, speech to the Republican National Convention, 2004-08-31:

My fellow immigrants, my fellow Americans, how do you know if you are a Republican? Well, I tell you how. If you believe that government should be accountable to the people, not the people to the government, then you are a Republican.

Zell Miller, speech to the Republican National Convention supporting George W. Bush, 2004-09-01 (emphasis added):

In the summer of 1940, I was an 8-year-old boy living in a remote little Appalachian valley. Our country was not yet at war, but even we children knew that there were some crazy man across the ocean who would kill us if they could.

President Roosevelt, in a speech that summer, told America, All private plans, all private lives, have been in a sense repealed by an overriding public danger.

In 1940, Wendell Wilkie was the Republican nominee. And there is no better example of someone repealing their “private plans” than this good man.

He gave Roosevelt the critical support he needed for a peacetime draft, an unpopular idea at the time.

And he made it clear that he would rather lose the election than make national security a partisan campaign issue.

(This passage got loud applause and vocal cheers from the Republican audience.)

Hiding the Truth? President Bush’s Need-to-Know Democracy by Stephen Pizzo:

It’s been said that the first casualty of war is always truth. But with the Bush administration’s war on terrorism, it’s hard to know, because even before 9/11 the administration had begun hermetically sealing formerly public sources of government information.

It began when Vice President Dick Cheney refused to provide details of his energy task force meetings with energy companies, particularly top Enron officials. Then, came President George Bush’s November 2001 executive order allowing the administration or former presidents to order executive branch documents withheld from the public. At the time, the administration said the new restriction on presidential papers was to protect the privacy of former presidents and those they dealt with while in office.

But, the order also shields from public view documents from President Bush’s father’s term in office that could be awkward now. The suspicion was that the executive order was designed to protect several current White House officials who served in the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations from embarrassment –specifically, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Vice President Dick Cheney, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, and former Budget Director Mitch Daniels, Jr.

Each official had brushes with controversial policies in earlier administrations — not the least of which was the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration. The elder Bush, then-Vice President, maintained he was out of the loop. Documents in the Reagan archives might contradict that version of history.

Both Cheney’s refusal to hand over his energy task force documents, and the presidential order shielding past administrations’ archived documents caused uproars among open-government advocates, historians and members of Congress.

. . .

Effectively, keeping secrets means never having to say you’re sorry. It also means never having to admit you made a terrible mistake, or even lied.

White House press flack Ari Fleischer:

They’re reminders to all Americans that they need to, to watch what they say, watch what they do, and this is not a time for remarks like that. It never is!

John Ashcroft, Attorney General of the United States of America, 2001:

To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberties, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists — for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve.

I suppose that I’ll read some of the commentary on the speech tomorrow. But, as happens so often with this administration, it’s just the same damned stuff, and there’s little to do other than repeat what you’ve already said. Thus, here is my summary and commentary for the night:

Are you surprised by anything that’s been said by anyone at this convention? If so, why the hell are you surprised? Why even bother talking about it at length? When the Bush League give speeches, they just lie. There’s very little left to be surprised at; save your indignation for throwing the bastards out.

In his comments on my post yesterday, Mark Noonan asks what my answer to his challenge is–to wit:

We’ve given the left a pass long enough — its [sic] time for those who are of leftwing opinion to make their final call: which side of the river are you on? If you’re on America’s side, then you want total and overwhelming US victory — and just to really spell it out; this means that our enemies are dead or begging for mercy. I challenge you — choose, and let you be known for what you are by what you choose — patriot, or traitor.

The easy answer would be to say that I don’t take the challenge seriously (which I don’t) and that I regard the question Do you want complete American victory in Iraq, or are you of another opinion? as fundamentally confused (which I do). However, perhaps it will be best to lead off by repeating what I said the last time Mr. Noonan asked me for my opinion on the matter:

Finally, even if you were to convince me that Kennedy is entirely in the wrong, I could not possibly see it as an instance of the general principle that you set out: “If you’re on America’s side, then you want total and overwhelming US victory — and just to really spell it out; this means that our enemies are dead or begging for mercy.” It could not be an instance of that principle because the principle is jingoistic claptrap that is obviously and wretchedly false–not to mention dangerous to basic points of republican virtue.

The highest form of love is the love of the virtue in the beloved, and those who are truly “on America’s side”–in any sense of the word that would make it an attitude worth having–are those who want America to live up to its better self. Whether that involves victory in war or not depends entirely on whether the war in question is just or unjust; even if you are right (as I think you are not) that support for this war is righteous, the idea of extending unconditional support for victory in any war that the United States government has committed itself to strikes me as nothing more than belligerent foolishness.

To that I should only add that, as I have argued in The War on Iraq One Year On and What You Mean “We”?, the assault on Iraq and the on-going occupation were not and are not, in fact, anything approaching just or righteous, and that it is becoming more obvious with every day just how ridiculous the demand to take a side is–where the only sides on offer are the Imperial Legions of the United States and the newly sovereign Iraqi junta, on the one side, and terrorist jihadis aligned with thugs such as Muqtada al-Sadr, on the other. If those are the two sides of the river, I would rather drown.

I am not on the United States government’s side. Nor am I on the jihadis’ side. (As a secessionist republic of one, I have an official policy of non-alignment in this conflict.) I don’t think that loyalty to any side in any conflict is, or can be, a virtue unless it is conditioned by loyalty for the truth and for justice, and what I’ve repeatedly argued in this space is that there is precious little of those in the Bush Administration’s case for war or practice of the war and occupation. (And the same, of course, goes for Mr. al-Sadr and his militia.) If I am on anyone’s side, it is innocent Iraqis who continue to be caught in the crossfire and to have their freedoms squelched, their rights trodden upon, their dignity insulted, and their lives and livelihoods destroyed, by two gangs caught in a bloody, apparently endless turf war.

The best thing that the U.S. government could achieve at this point would be to make it right to what degree they can. And that would mean:complete and immediate withdrawal, an official apology, and war reparations to Iraqi civilians maimed or dispossessed by the war and occupation–or to their heirs if they were among the tens of thousands killed. (The funds for reparations should, ideally, be expropriated from the personal fortunes of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, Tom Daschle, John Kerry, Tom DeLay, Tony Blair, Jack Straw, José Maria Aznar, Saddam Hussein, Uday and Qusay Hussein, Tariq Aziz, Ahmad Chalabi, et cetera.)

That’s not “complete victory,” in any sense, but there is an important sense in which–since “victory” is, by definition, something worth having, and since it is not worthwhile to achieve dominance in an unjust war–there is no victory possible for the American military in Iraq. There is only conquest. And mere conquest is not something worth having, nor is it something worth wishing for your friends to have.

Isn’t it great to know that the intellectual bodyguard of the party currently in power in Washington stands for limited government and individual liberty? So much so that when Ted Kennedy–one of their most hated opponents, but also a man a man whose presence on an aeroplane poses no threat to anyone else–is prevented from boarding a plane because of a secret, unaccountable, government no-fly list forced on private airline companies by the fiat of the Executive Branch of government, and which has been repeatedly used in acts of political harassment, one can certainly count on them to make a bold, principled denunciation of this shameless invasion on civil liberties by a overbearing government. For example, here’s National Review Online on the incident:

TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE [Steve Hayward]

Ted Kennedy on the no-fly list? Supply your own punchline.

Posted at 08:12 PM

Ho, ho, ho. Nor is this the first time that American conservatism has extended this sort of charity towards Mr. Kennedy:

So, I ask the question – is Senator Kennedy a traitor who says things which give aid and comfort to the enemy, or is he just plain and simple stupid? There are no other options on this – pick one, or the other.

…

Let us be clear about this — there are legitimate criticisms to be made about the liberation of Iraq; about whether or not we should have gone in, and about the manner in which we went in, and about how we have performed since we went in; there are, however, no legitimate criticisms to be raised about the reason we went in, nor can there be any legitimate point for an American to make other than that we should be doing more to win this fight. To criticise the reasons we went in and/or to do anything which indicates an unwillingness to see this thing through to final victory is the statement of a fool, or a traitor. No two ways about it.

We’ve given the left a pass long enough — its [sic] time for those who are of leftwing opinion to make their final call: which side of the river are you on? If you’re on America’s side, then you want total and overwhelming US victory — and just to really spell it out; this means that our enemies are dead or begging for mercy. I challenge you — choose, and let you be known for what you are by what you choose — patriot, or traitor.

— Blockheads for Bush 2004/04/09: Is this treason, or stupidity?

I have to disagree, though, with Jeffrey Tucker’s suggestion that this sort of good-hearted charity and principled defense of liberty is a new trend in modern-day conservatism. It is actually a long-standing tradition of the Right, from the Old Right’s defense of peace and prosperity for all:

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to abolish the Negro race, proper methods should be used. Among these are guns, bows and arrows, slingshots and knives…. All whites are created equal with certain rights, among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of dead niggers.

— Senator James Eastland, addressing a rally of the White Citizens Council in 1956

… to the vigorous defense of liberty and principled opposition to all forms of invasive power by the leading lights of the New Right, such as the folks behind the National Review:

the thus far invincible aggressiveness of the Soviet Union imminently threatens U.S. security, … we have to accept Big Government for the duration–for neither an offensive nor defensive war can be waged given our present government skills, except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores…

And if they deem Soviet power a menace to our freedom (as I happen to), they will have to support large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards, and the attendant of centralization of power in Washington — Even with Truman at the reins of it all.

–William F. Buckley, The Commonweal, 25 January 1952

Thank God Above for the Right: they’ve been staunch defenders of an orderly freedom for lo these many years. And by orderly freedom, of course, I mean the freedom to take orders from an all-powerful righteous government. Or else.

Further reading

• GT 2004/04/10: Aid and Comfort
• Murray N. Rothbard: Buckley Revealed
• Jeffrey Tuckery: The Violence of Conservatism