How Mr. Obama manages to do that while also balancing American interests is a question that officials acknowledge will plague this historic president for months to come. Mr. Obama has told people that it would be so much easier to be the president of China. As one official put it, “No one is scrutinizing Hu Jintao’s words in Tahrir Square.”

I could say quite a bit about this, but I’d rather leave it on its own.

It’s a worthwhile mental exercise to work out the moral calculus of the conflict between Nazi Germany and Communist Russia. Both had totalitarian regimes that committed attrocities on a scale that are impossible to fully comprehend. Both were aggressive and militant in exporting their totalitarianism, and both were willing to enforce their will on other nations through brute strength and horrid oppression. When one considers the comparable evils of the two regimes, it’s hard to fault Patton for believing that once we had defeated the one, we should have just kept rolling eastward. How many lives would it have been worth to spare hundreds of millions (or, if you presume Mao could not have triumphed in China without Soviet aid, billions) from decades of dark tyranny?

But the West came to an understandable belief that the Communists weren’t as much a threat as the Nazis. So we allied with evil to defeat what we believed was a greater evil. Indirectly, and certainly against his will, Stalin’s assistance helped the West end the war in a dominant position, which in turn resulted in the amazing explosion of democracy and freedom that has characterized the last 65 years.

War is not only hell, it is complicated. A good war memorial should not only serve to highlight our victory, but what did to achieve that victory. The great liberation of western Europe could begin in Normandy only because the vast bulk of the Nazi army was tied up in the east, where the two greatest evils of the last century fought over who would get to oppress eastern Europe. Not thinking of that reduces understanding of how serious Americans regarded the war – serious enough to ally with Communists – and it retards retroflection about how we handle the evils of our day.

But shame on Showtime for agreeing to air Stone’s dribble.

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This is, of course, yet another fine example of life imitating art, albeit after a gap of about ten years:

BTW, I hadn’t seen that commercial since it aired.  God, I love the internet.

What’s somewhat harder to understand is anti-Semitism in the modern world. Specifically, Marxist anti-Semitism. Marx himself didn’t like the Jews. If you see the world split in two, between the workers and the capitalists, a people who insist on cultural continuity no matter where they live and no matter their class, and who would rather live in peace with their second-class status than start a revolution – well, it’s not too difficult to see how the Jews would become something of an ideological enemy to 19th and early 20th Century Marxists.

But, in the 21st Century, when the Marxist ex-president of Honduras – HONDURAS! – starts ranting that Israeli mercenaries are trying to kill him . . . surely it has all become farce. Except that the Leftist government of the United States, the most Jew-friendly country not named Israel, wants that ex-president reinstated. That is not a farce, and it is something I cannot bring myself to understand.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.

- George Orwell

 

Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy.

- John Derbyshire

 

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.

- Thomas Friedman

To this, let’s add Abraham Lincoln: “Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.”  Thomas Friedman, get thee to a laogai.

In his recent visit to Buchenwald, the Nazi death camp, President Obama insisted that we must “bear witness” to the evil of the Holocaust. Such platitudes are the stuff of every president and potentate who visits such places. And that’s fine. It is, after all, what we are supposed to say. But we are also supposed to mean it. After all, it is easy to say we must bear witness to things that have already happened and to promise to “never forget” the sins of others and our own good deeds.

But what of things figuratively happening under our noses and literally transpiring a click away on our computer screens? You can see the slave camps in North Korea — not quite live via satellite, but close enough — where the machinery of suffering chugs along 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Ask yourself: What if Buchenwald were a mouse click away?

It’s a good question, but the column raises the uncomfortable question: what should we do about that psychotic state?

A white person like myself – but I’m not blue-eyed, so I’m blameless in the present crisis! – might be called racist for saying that “I do not know any black or indigenous bankers.”*** A white person like myself would almost certainly be called racist for pointing out, “It’s those same white people who, uniquely in human history, created a widespread political and economic philosophy of freedom, which has produced the unprecedented prosperity of the last two hundred years.” But since I’m not a racist like Brazil’s Socialist president, I wouldn’t say such a thing. Perhaps it’s often best, in the name of racial harmony, to not point out certain facts that might be obvious to non-biased observers.

The best bit, though, is Gordon Brown, who responds to this racist shtick with, “I’m not going to attribute blame to any individuals.” Well neither, evidently, is Mr. Silva, who attributed it to a race (or, at least, the blue-eyed subset of a race) phenotype. Pretty nifty that when two socialists stand next to other and one says something blatantly racist, the other doesn’t have to criticize. No enemies on the left, eh Gordo?

*Aren’t white, blue-eyed people indigenous?

**Really, he thinks “black and indigenous” people, whatever that means, are paying for this crisis? That’s ignorant leftist demagoguery. But I’m redundant.

***I might also be called ignorant, and told, “Go to New York and actually meet some bankers.”