LandV

Came upon some interesting history recently, reading about the Allied invasions of Africa in 1942.

Specifically, some stuff from official transcripts of FDR’s talks with officials in the area, revealing a side of Roosevelt you don’t often hear about these days. Namely, his lukewarm devotion to liberty and his anti-Semitism:

According to the official transcript of the Casablanca conversation, Gen. Nogues (a non-Vichy French official put in place by the Allies after the TORCH invasions of Africa) informed FDR that the Jews in North Africa were clamoring for the right to vote.

Roosevelt replied “that the answer to that was very simple, namely, that there just weren’t going to be any elections, so the Jews need not worry about the privilege of voting.”

Ambassador Murphy then pointed out that aside from the specific right to vote, North African Jews “were very much disappointed that the ‘war for liberation’ had not immediately resulted in their being given their complete freedom.”

FDR’s reply minced no words: “The number of Jews engaged in the practice of the professions (law, medicine, etc) should be definitely limited to the percentage that the Jewish population in North Africa bears to the whole of the North African population…The President stated that his plan would further eliminate the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore toward the Jews in Germany, namely, that while they represented a small part of the population, over fifty percent of the lawyers, doctors, school teachers, college professors, etc., in Germany, were Jews.”

It has not yet occurred to anyone that affirmative action quotas could also be maximums, caps or ceilings. FDR was way ahead of his times.

A few weeks ago, I saw an excellent movie, Emperor, a Joint US-NZ production, which covered the period right after the surrender of Japan in 1945 during which Gen MacArthur, the military governor of Japan after the surrender, decided what to do with the Emperor. The perspective of the movie was from Brigadier General Bonner Fellers, the officer who MacArthur put in charge of investigating the Emperor’s complicity in WWII war crimes. The film was limited to the art theater circuit, mores the shame because is was brilliantly done.

Last evening, I saw another film covering exactly the same period of time, The Sun, a Russian production done in 2005, which was taken from the perspective of the Emperor himself. It was brilliant.

Both movies are well worth the time and trouble.

Here’s a quick one:

I’m betting Obama goes to war in Syria just before the midterm elections. Any takers?

Of course, it will be a half-assed version of war, but somewhat more upfront than Libya.  Since the emphasis will be on video, it is likely to be mostly air action. Air strikes always look good on CNN, and our guys probably could use some practice.

The big question: Where will he get the money? I mean, didn’t that sequester he wanted (scratch that, I mean the one Republicans forced on him) bankrupt the military? Nah, this will require emergency funds. He’ll pay for it later. Just get that video!! Wolf Blitzer live from the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan! Scratch that, from the U.S.S. Harry Truman! Of course, the carriers will be anchored since we can’t afford to sail them around anymore, never mind that they are nuclear powered.

OK, I’ll stop before I fall any further behind.

http://politi.co/181bJlY

I think the thrill is supposed to be a perceived break in MSM ranks:  hearing MSM dissed by one of its own.

But what I note is Brokaw’s concern:

This is one of the issues that we have to address. What kind of image do we present to the rest of the country?

It’s all about image:  that is, how to deceive people.

Yeesh.

Boston: it’s obvious enough, isn’t it? Salon’s hope that it would be a white male was dashed, at least as they define white male (actually, it was two white males). Mark Steyn notes we went from “I pray it’s a white male” to “Boston bombers are Muslims: So?”

This article ( link ) attempts to find root causes other than Islam without actually denying the undeniable, but instead shifting the focus.

I think he has a partial point. Our elder bomber was Muslim and had economic trouble. According to the insightful book Terrorists in Love — well, not the book, but my conclusion from the stories in the book — you mostly need 2 things to make an Islamic terrorist. One is some sort of serious trouble in life (not, as the left suggests, poverty, but some personal tragedy or wakeup call); the other is that the way out of the trouble, moral or otherwise, is jihad.

But his analysis, IMJ, is weakened here:

Yet Dzhokhar had recently failed several classes at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, where he was a student, and he may have begun to feel the same kind of financial pressure that had become familiar to his older brother by then. (My problem: “may have” is not evidence.)

and fails here:

Lost dreams are obviously no excuse for terrorism, but falling living standards and higher barriers to success are a new and troubling phenomenon afflicting American society in many pernicious ways.

Falling living standards have happened many times before, and Americans (and immigrants) didn’t turn to terror. High economic barriers aren’t new; what’s new is that they’re no longer expected, endemic, widespread. Poverty didn’t cause Uncle Patrick to turn to terror when Irish were the big immigrant group, nor Uncle Luigi when it was Italians, and today, our biggest and poorest immigrant group, Mexicans, are never or almost never terrorists. I think our author’s wish to shift the focus from Islam, that is, to be multiculturalist rather than learn about cultures, is so strong he can’t see the obvious: when almost no out-of-work people turn to terror but two do, “out of work” is not the major factor. If we want to know the major factor, we can ask the terrorists. They don’t exactly keep it a secret.