We tend to romanticize old wars and old battles: Agincourt, Yorktown, Gettysburg. Another good example is the Battle of Britain (July-September 1940), rhetorically immortalized by Winston Churchill. “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few,” he remarked in a speech to the House of Commons on 21 August 1940. He was referring to the pilots of RAF Fighter Command who, in their Spitfires and Hurricanes, were contesting control of the air over southeast England with Hitler’s mighty Luftwaffe. His words were greeted with prolonged applause that has echoed down to this day. In the high summer of 1940 the fate of Britain—indeed of the world—seemed to hinge on this air battle. Churchill’s "few"—a few hundred RAF fighter pilots, most of them in their twenties—thus entered history’s Valhalla.

If this is your impression of the Battle of Britain, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to read Derek Robinson’s Piece of Cake (1983; now available for the Kindle).

Robinson’s novel chronicles the adventures of Hornet Squadron from the outbreak of war in September 1939 to the climax of the Battle of Britain. It’s not a very romantic story, and it’s not Hollywood-heroic. The pilots of Hornet Squadron find themselves pitted against the Luftwaffe with inadequate aircraft. (Their first Hurricane fighters have two-bladed wooden propellers and fabric-covered wings while lacking cockpit armor and self-sealing fuel tanks.) Moreover, the RAF’s rigid peacetime tactics prove disastrous against the well-trained Germans. After taking a pasting in France, the squadron returns to Britain for the great battle. By the time the book ends, only a few of the characters the reader has gotten to know along the way are still alive.

While taking nothing away from the brave young men who fought and died in the skies over England in the summer of 1940, Piece of Cake tells it like it is. War is hell, everybody's scared, the good die young and sometimes survival is merely a matter of luck. This one’s a must read.

Posted by tmg110 at 11:12 AM EST

Updated: Thursday, 11 April 2013 9:54 PM EDT

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How thoughtful:

MADALLA, Nigeria (AP) - At a Nigerian Catholic church where a terror attack killed 35 people on Christmas, women tried to clean the sanctuary ahead of Mass on Monday while one man wept uncontrollably amid the debris.

 

>snip<

 

At least 52 people were wounded in the attack, said Slaku Luguard, a coordinator with Nigeria's National Emergency Management Agency. Victims filled the cement floors of a nearby government hospital, some crying in pools of their own blood.

 

On Christmas, attacks by the radical Muslim sect left 39 dead across Africa's most populous nation. A bomb also exploded amid gunfire in the central Nigeria city of Jos and a suicide car bomber attacked the military in the nation's northeast.

 

After the bombings, a Boko Haram spokesman using the nom de guerre Abul-Qaqa claimed responsibility for the attacks in an interview with The Daily Trust, the newspaper of record across Nigeria's Muslim north. The sect has used the newspaper in the past to communicate with public.

 

"There will never be peace until our demands are met," the newspaper quoted the spokesman as saying. "We want all our brothers who have been incarcerated to be released; we want full implementation of the Sharia system and we want democracy and the constitution to be suspended."

Well, incidents like this certainly don’t present Islam in a very favorable light. But not to worry! No doubt our dedicated apologists for the Religion of Peace on campus and elsewhere will find some way to pin the blame on the victims. I can hear them now: "The nerve of those damned Catholics, who had the gross insensitivity to build their lousy churches in Muslim Nigeria…"

Posted by tmg110 at 1:58 PM EST

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Then you just might be giving your vote to a 9/11 truther who has speculated that President Bush and the CIA had a hand in the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. He also believes that America ought not to have fought Nazi Germany. “Saving the Jews,” he thinks, was none of our business. He also thinks it possible that FDR somehow engineered the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that plunged the nation into war.

This interesting summary of Paul’s lunatic views on foreign policy comes from a former aide, Eric Dondero. The candidate’s spokesman describes this individual as “a disgruntled former staffer.” So perhaps what he alleges should be taken with a grain of salt. Paul has said, though, thinks that the 9/11 attack was really America’s fault; the Islamofascists were simply reacting our oppressive foreign policy. Starting from there, it’s a short hike to the zany conspiracy theories of the 9/11 truther mob.

Would you really be comfortable with someone like Ron Paul in the White House? Think about it.

Posted by tmg110 at 1:44 PM EST

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I just updated WAR FLAGS, my website devoted to military and naval flags of the world, past and present. Check it out!

Posted by tmg110 at 1:16 PM EST

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When jolly old Saint Nick comes down your chimney this year, better have a breathalyzer handy: Drunken Santas Terrorized Lower Manhattan.

Thousands of drunken Santas terrorized Lower Manhattan when they flooded into the neighborhood for SantaCon earlier this month, openly flouting public drinking and urination laws, locals say.

Angry residents attended Community Board 1's Monday night meeting to complain about the latest incarnation of the annual pub crawl, whose participants have been allowed to grow more rowdy every year, they say.

"There was public urination, people vomiting all over the place, open containers and no police," said John Fratta, chairman of the Seaport/Civic Center Committee which plans to send an angry missive to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and the 1st Precinct complaining about the lack of enforcement during SantaCon.

Are they absolutely sure this wasn't an Occupy Wall Street protest…?

Posted by tmg110 at 8:41 AM EST

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There are times when a book or movie—not necessarily great in itself—captures the mood of the moment, reflecting and magnifying society's attitudes, tastes, prejudices, fears or anxieties. Such a movie is Death Wish, a workmanlike Charles Bronson vehicle, directed by Michael Winner, that caused a nationwide sensation and became a smash hit when it was released in 1974.

Death Wish, based on the novel of the same name by Brian Garfield, tells the story of Paul Kersey, a successful New York architect whose life is torn apart when his wife and daughter fall victim to a home invasion. The wife (Hope Lange) is kicked to death by the trio of thugs (one played by a young Jeff Goldblum) who’ve forced their way into the Kersey apartment. The daughter is raped and beaten. She survives only to lapse into a state of catatonia. The grieving husband soon discovers that there’s little that the police can do to identify and arrest those responsible.

In the mid-Seventies, violent crime was a major social and political issue. The streets and public parks of big cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles were infested by vicious street criminals; assault, armed robbery, rape and murder were depressingly common occurances. The mugger was the iconic figure of the age and such outrages as the vicious attack on Paul Kersey’s family were only too common.

Thus Death Wish zeroed in on a widely experienced state of anxiety, fear—and anger. The pain and suffering inflicted by violent crime were bad enough, but worse perhaps was the pervasive sense of helplessness produced by life in a lawless society. It was obvious to the average citizen that the police could not protect him. If he fell victim to a mugging or assault, the cops would probably not catch those responsible. And if they were caught, it was very unlikely that the courts would give them much more than a slap on the wrist. Things were not quite that black and white, of course, but that’s the way people perceived the situation in 1974.

All this explains why audiences cheered and applauded when Paul Kersey, instead of resigning himself to life as a victim, took up the gun and started shooting street criminals.

Death Wish isn’t exactly a revenge movie, for Kersey doesn’t go looking for the thugs who destroyed his family. Rather, he becomes a vigilante. His mission: to fight violent crime. His method: simplicity itself. Kersey merely slips a pistol into his pocket and takes a stroll in a dangerous neighborhood or park. Inevitably, he’s accosted by violent street criminals, whereupon he produces his pistol and opens fire. Needless to say, after gunning down three or four muggers, the Vigilante becomes a folk hero to the long-suffering citizens of New York. (Cue loud and prolonged audience applause.)

Why this enthusiastic and somewhat disconcerting audience reaction? It derived, I think, from the fact that Kersey, as played by Bronson, is presented not as an action hero but as Everyman. He’s not a violent guy by nature; indeed, he served in the Korean War in the Medical Corps as a contentious objector. He could be your next-door neighbor, your dentist, your brother, your uncle, your father. But the traumatic shock of the assault on his family turns him into the Vigilante. It’s intimated in the film that Kersey is a bit deranged. Well, who wouldn’t be, after what he’d gone through?

In Death Wish, the movie and the moment met with a bang. A number of similar films have been made since then (including four highly inferior Death Wish sequels) but none of them resonated with mainstream America as this one did. (Incidentally, the critics of the time hated Death Wish for all the usual left-liberal reasons. A lot they knew!) It’s not a great film, but it’s a good one and it has held up well—thanks in part to Bronson’s excellent performance, which was possibly the best of his career. If you’ve never seen Death Wish, it’s currently available on Netflix. (I watched it last night.) If you have seen it, now is the time for a second look. Death Wish is one on the most politically incorrect movies ever made—and I mean that as the most heartfelt of compliments.

Posted by tmg110 at 11:46 AM EST

Updated: Friday, 3 February 2012 11:27 AM EST

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Progressives would rather not be reminded of how their ideological forbearers fawned over dear old Comrade Stalin and the totalitarian death machine that he constructed. (See Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror for some really disgusting examples of how British and American leftists tongue-polished Stalin’s boots.) But such deliberate amnesia has its risks, as this story in the Weekly Standard makes painfully clear:

Wendy Sherman, undersecretary of state for political affairs at the State Department, had some rather nice things to say about the reclusive Kim Jong Il, the dictatorial leader of North Korea who died a few days ago. She had met the rogue dictator, Josh Rogin reports, when Sherman “served as State Department counselor and North Korea policy coordinator under former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, [and had] traveled to Pyongyang with Albright in 2000.”

 

An NPR obituary quotes the high ranking State Department official as saying that “He was smart and a quick problem-solver,” and that “[Kim Jong Il] is also witty and humorous. Our overall impression was very different from the way he was known to the outside world.”

As Lord Acton so very aptly observed: “In the wake of every tyrant comes an apologist with a sponge.” Wendy, you are a total idiot. And incidentally, I was not at all surprised to learn that you hold a master’s degree in social work from the University of Maryland.

Posted by tmg110 at 5:39 PM EST

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Goodness gracious me! I’ve just learned that a whopping 48% of the population of the United Stares are either “poor” or “near poor.” No wonder the Occupy Wall Street mob is up in arms. This is outrageous!

Now you may think that so many people are poor or near poor because of those wicked One Precenters, who are taking advantage of bad economic conditions to fleece the vanishing middle class. That’s certainly what the Obama Administration would like you to believe. But guess what? That’s not the reason why nearly half the nation’s population is in or near poverty. What happened was that Barry and his merry tricksters changed the definition of “near poor” in such a way as to inflate the total. As Robert Rector explains in this blog post for NRO:

Traditionally, a U.S. household was considered “low income” or “near poor” if it had income below 200 percent of the official poverty income thresholds. The Obama administration has raised those income thresholds and thereby transformed the way the government measures poverty and near poverty.

 

Under President Obama’s new definitions, a family of four in Oakland is “near poor” if their annual pre-tax income is less than $89,700 plus medical insurance. In metropolitan Washington, D.C., the near-poverty line became $80,500. In New York, it’s now $78,500; in Boston, $68,900; and Chicago, $68,600.

 

One result: The income level for “near poverty” is now very close to the median household income in most communities. (Median income means half the households have more income and half have less.)

Imagine, a family of four with an income close to $90,000 is “near poor” in Obama’s America! This statistical fan dance is obviously intended to provide justification for higher taxes on “the rich” and more revenue to squander on “social programs.” And it makes perfect sense. What could be better for progressives than to transform half the population of the nation into pitiful, sniveling wards of the state?

Posted by tmg110 at 4:42 PM EST

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Though the novel, Starship Troopers, is not without its flaws, the best that one can say of the movie, Starship Troopers, directed by Paul Verhoeven, is that it’s a clumsy attempt at political satire. And the evaluations plunge downhill from there.

Perhaps fancying himself as a modern Jonathan Swift, Verhoeven decided to play to the left-wing critique of Starship Troopers by making the Terran Federation into a quasi-fascist state. To that end, he costumes his actors in Nazi-like uniforms and borrows much imagery from such Nazi epics as Olympiad and Triumph of the Will. Official propaganda appears to be patterned after World War II-era American newsreel footage, posters, etc. The Terran Federation is thus presented as an authoritarian, highly militarized regime—in short, a society almost the polar opposite of the one imagined by Robert Heinlein.

Now I have no objection in principle to a film that takes a fresh look at the premise of a book—but a cheap shot is not a fresh look. Verhoeven’s enthusiastic embrace of the Heinlein-is-a-fascist critique is not only unfair but ludicrous—as crude and dumb as an Occupy Wall Street chant-and-response. He may have believed that he was sending a message, and he did so. The message reads: “I am an idiot.”

And it gets worse. Not only did Verhoeven tart up his movie with a bunch of phony-baloney political messaging, he threw out the best part of Starship Troopers entirely. Gone are the powered combat suits, gone are the advanced weapons and tactics. His future soldiers are armed with conventional assault rifles and their tactics consist mainly of charging back and forth in a disorderly mob while spraying bullets in all directions. Moreover, the highly professional officers and NCOs of Heinlein’s Mobile Infantry are nowhere in evidence. Instead we get the equivalent of gang leaders, e.g. Michael Ironside as the oafish and brutal Lieutenant Rasczak, channeling his inner Freikorps chief. Considering that the movie is set in a future where interstellar spaceflight has become routine, this is plainly ridiculous.

Even the enemy—the thoroughly alien Arachnid race—gets slighted. In the novel, they’re presented as an intelligent species with a human-level command of technology. Not in the movie! The warrior-caste Bugs don’t wield weapons—they just tear the opposition apart with their big, nasty pincers. How the Arachnids even get around the Galaxy is something of a puzzle, since they seem not to possess starships. Again, it’s all quite ridiculous.

It may seem gratuitous at this point to bum-rap the cast, but Starship Trooper’s male and female leads might as well have been deliberately selected to set one’s teeth on edge. Casper Van Dien as Rico sports the Hitler Youth-type looks that Verhoeven was going for, but his acting is wooden. Dina Meyer as tragic love interest Dizzy Flores is comely but totally unconvincing as a rough, tough soldier. Neil Patrick Harris looks like Himmler’s nephew playing dress-up in his Gestapo-like costume and as for Denise Richards, well, by the end of the movie you’ll be rooting for the Bugs to rip that trademark smirk off her face.

Thus Starship Troopers is, on its stand-alone merits, a misbegotten and stupid movie—in which regard, of course, it has plenty of company. What makes Verhoeven’s cruddy little flick so specially deserving of condemnation is the way in which it squanders the raw material that could have been used to produce a really good movie. Shame!

Posted by tmg110 at 9:17 AM EST

Updated: Friday, 16 December 2011 12:39 PM EST

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