NO CHILD LEFT UNRECRUITED...UR AH...LEFT BEHIND

The mandatory recruitment provision in No Child Left Behind is odd indeed, when you consider the fact that No Child Left Behind is supposed to be an education bill, not a military bill. I suppose part of the problem rests with the recent behavior of renegade recruiters: showing up at schools once a week or more often; harassing and bullying potential enlistees; accepting enlistees with obvious psychological and/or drug problems; intruding into home situations etc....But I still have issues with the provision itself.

Ideally, it should have been passed separately or as a part of a military bill, preferably the former, rather than burying it in legislation which is designed to create over-testing and unfunded mandates for states while depriving local school boards of the right to local control. (Just what Ted Kennedy was thinking when he signed on to this monster of a bill is beyond me, but I lost a lot of respect for him after supported this imbecility.)

In a perfect universe there would be no financial penalty--no threat of lost federal funding by any school if that school refused to enforce this provision. And yet there is. Again, just why the government would resort to financial black mail in an effort top intrude into the private lives of parents and children is beyond me--maybe it's a strange form of family values from the far right--I don't know. But I do get a chuckle when I listen to anti-big government Republicans who support this fine example of big government intruding into the lives of parents and their abilities to parent. So much for getting government off our backs. Maybe it's an example of getting government off our backs and into our personal lives? Personally, I believe recruiters DO have a place in our schools, but that place should be on the same level as other career opportunities. No more nor less. There should be assigned times and places for recruitment efforts with strict penalties against both the recruiters and other business representatives who fail to obey the school's local standards. (The military being the financially secure institution that it is, I would suggest that individual fines be leveled against offending recruiters. The individual fines would range between $500 and $1000 per offense depending on the severity of the offense, but I would also zap the branch of the military that the recruiter represents at the rate of $100,000 to $500,000 per offense. Possibly more, again depending on the severity of the offense or offenses. Short of more openly revealing the fact that parents have a right to go to the school and demand that their children's personal information NOT be shared with the military (as No Child Left Behind stipulates), I would suggest a version of the DO NOT CALL LIST which is being used against tele-marketers in some states, be imposed at the federal level. Parents could put their children's name on the "DO NOT RECRUIT" list and after that there would be stiff fines the school, the recruiter, and the particular branch of the military in question when the terms of the DO NOT RECRUIT list are violated. I see this as a viable position since it places responsibilities on everyone involved. My only concern is that it might be used as a CALL list, but again, that would include strict penalties. Perhaps the best way to counter this is by enacting the provision as we do in DO NOT CALL provisions here in Wisconsin--just a name and a phone number with no personal information. And if you move you have a right and an obligation to contact the government to inform them of your new phone number (assuming you're one of the few who still have a land based phone.) Concerned parents would be responsible for placing their children's names on the DO NOT RECRUIT LIST; the military would have to obey, and after that it becomes a matter of each side playing by the rules and taking responsibility for its own actions. I realize my above suggestions come at a time when we are in the middle of an unpopular war; and I love to hear Republicans raise the idea of a draft when they defend the kind of underhanded tactics that are currently being employed by renegade recruiters. But there is another way to look at this. I support neither the draft nor heavy-handed recruitment efforts: merely honest, open recruiting techniques in proper places and proper times.

It all comes down to a matter of addictive behavior on the part of the military industrial complex and this administration in particular. If you give them a weapon the time will come when the craving will simply be too strong. They will want to use it. Deprive them of the weapon (in this case, potential targets in wars of choice) and they'll be a lot more selective in the kinds of wars they start in the future.

WHAT A FRIEND WE HAVE IN GEORGIE

,Editor's Note by Brandon

I'm sure this will trigger a heated discussion--not so much on the blog, but when my best friend/landlord learns that I found this and posted it without his persmission. As I told our team mates, I found this in the drawer in one of our endtables while I was looking for my wallet last night. It's a song parody written by Advocate1 in early to mid July while I was in Ireland with my fiancee, Kelli. When I asked him why he didn't post it or use it in some manner he told be that it wasn't up to his standards and that he didn't want to stir up too much trouble. Well, my man, this is a political blog. Making trouble is what we do best around here. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally, but there are times when we like to take time out for a little satire. With that in mind, I offer the following song parody. It is called "OH WHAT FAITH WE HAVE IN GEORGIE and....well, I've rattled on long enough.

Brandon

WHAT A FRIEND WE HAVE IN GEORGE BUSH
To be sung to the tune of "WHAT A FRIEND WE HAVE IN JESUS."
New Lyrics by Advocate1

Oh what faith we have in Georgie
When he says he'll never lie
Make Iraq a new republic
We won't even ask him why
Stop the mushroom cloud from blooming
Bring the mighty tyrant down
Keep the Neocons in power
Give King George his bloody crown

O what faith we have in Georgie
In his roving intellect
Start a war, extend our power
We will grab what we can get
Tie it to the burning towers
And the people will forget
Never mind the preparation
Let the critics whine and fret

Oh what faith we had in Georgie
Hear the G.O.P rejoice
Read the memo out of London
Now we have a war of choice
By the road the bombs are blasting
And the blood has freely flown
Hear the widows and the orphans
Something George will never own

Oh the faith we lost in Georgie
When he says we cannot lose
Now the soldiers are a fallin'
In a war we chose to choose
Disregard the talk of failure
As the bodies pile high
One excuse will breed another
George won't care how many die

JUST REMOVE THE SPAM

To my fellow team members and our valued readers.

I want this above board so that everyone, both our team members and our readers, will know what's going on around here. As some of you know, we have been receiving commercial spam in our commentary forum. This is annoying and frankly, we don't want to create the impression that we are encouraging certain businesses as opposed to others to run ads for free here.

I am therefore asking my fellow team mates to delete comments which read something like:

"Wonderful post, we like what yu are doing here, maybe youd like to take a look at the AcmeCoffincompany."

or

"A very nice comment, maybe you would be interested in visiting the UpYourShaftUsedCarCompany."

This does not apply to legitimate comments from genuine readers, no matter how outrageous they may appear. As we were all told when we signed up for the fine art of blogging, we aren't supposed to be using these blogs for personal gain, and to that end I feel that it is best that these spam ads, which make a mockery of that position, be deleted as quickly as possible.

Our purpose here is to promote and discuss political, philosophical and ecnomomic ideas, not to sell mortages, products or services.

I thank my fellow team members with their help in this regard and our readers for their patience with this situation.

Brandon

COUNTERING HISTORICAL REVISION ON THE RIGHT

COUNTERING HISTORICAL REVISION ON THE RIGHT:
SPEAKING TRUTH TO DELUSIONAL WORLD VIEWS ON WORLD WAR II AND NATIONAL SOCIALISM

by

Brandon
Advocate 1
Kyle


“But even if there were no moral weaknesses in Britain, how could the appalling physical facts be overcome? Our armies at home were known to be almost unarmed except for rifles. Months must pass before our factories could make good the munitions lost at Dunkirk. Can one wonder that the world at large was convinced that our hour of doom had struck?”

From MEMOIRS OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR
The Abridgement of the six volumes of THE SECOND WORLD WAR
By Winston Churchill


During the past few days the authors of this article have encountered a truly dangerous mutation of historical revision on the right which attempts to both, downplay the danger that fascism—National Socialism in particular—presented to the entire world, and which also attempts to place Adolf Hitler on the left side of the political spectrum instead of on the nationalistic right where he properly belongs.

The authors of this article have encountered this kind of revisionism before, but not to the degree or the extent to which we are finding it on certain right wing blogs, where delusions and internal impulses seem to replace common sense and historical facts. We might have missed this phenomenon if it hadn’t been for the fact that certain missives appeared in the commentary forum on a friend’s weblog, Under normal circumstances we’re accustomed to Holocaust denials and rabidly racist statements from the lunatic fringe, and God knows that as alert citizens we are familiar with the half-baked rants of the American Nazi party, Aryan Nation, and the “Christian” Identity Movement. Their kind of congenital imbecility is actually easy to identify and even easier to counter. Revisionists, however, cloak their fabrications in a cloak of pseudo intellectual chicanery. Their unique blend of truths, half truths, and outright prevarications may well sound plausible to the inexperienced ear, and that makes their deceitful rhetoric a great deal more treacherous.

The revisionism in question falls into three basic categories.

1. Hitler’s Third Reich represented no threat to the United States.

2. William L. Shirer’s classic, THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH, supports the above view.

3. Fascism—National Socialism in particular—belong on the left side of the political spectrum.

We shall begin by tackling the first two revisions together.


HITLER WAS INDEED A THREAT

To quote Shirer’s masterpiece:

“On the map the sum of Hitler’s conquests by September 1942 looked staggering. The Mediterranean had become practically an axis lake, with Germany and Italy holding most of the northern shore from Spain to Turkey and the southern shore from Tunisia to within sixty miles of the Nile. In fact, German troops now stood guard from the Norwegian Cape on the Arctic Ocean to Egypt, from the Atlantic to Brest, to the southern reaches of the Volga River on the border of Central Asia. German troops had reached the Volga just north of Stalingrad on August 23. Two days before the swastika had been hoisted on Mount Elbrus, the highest peak (18,481) in the Caucasus Mountains. The Maikop oil fields, producing annually two and a half million tons of oil, had been captured on August 8, though the Germans found them almost completely destroyed, and by the twenty-fifth, Kleist’s tanks had arrived at Mozdak, only fifty miles away from the main Soviet oil center around Grazny, and a bare hundred miles from the Caspian Sea…” (See page 914). Later, in a foot note, Shirer offers the following information from the before mentioned General Ewald von Kleist, as mentioned in THE GERMAN GENERALS TALK, by Liddell Hart. “’The Fourth Panzer Army could have taken Stalingrad without a fight at the end of July, but was diverted south to help me in crossing the Don. I did not need it and it merely congested the roads I was using. When it turned north again, a fortnight later, the Russians had gathered just sufficient forces at Stalingrad to check it.’ By that time Kleist needed the additional tank force. ‘We could have reached the goal [the Grozny oil] if my forces had not been drawn away to help the attack on Stalingrad,’ he added.”

Moreover, on page 913, Shirer notes that “German U Boats were sinking 700,000 tons of British American shipping a month in the Atlantic—more than could be replaced in the booming ship yards of the United States, Canada, and Scotland.” In adition, we would suggest that if the revisionists were to actually read THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH, especially Chapters 22, 23, and 24, they would ralize just how delusional their world view really is. In these chapters, and throughout a great deal of the book, you will discover a William L. Shirer who in no way underestimates the the danger that this regime presented to the civilized world. As Shirer points out again, and again, and again, the Nazi war effort was hindered by everything from Hitler’s growing ineptitude and megalomania (he directed the German war effort personally over the adice of his generals), to poor timing, to weather conditions, ad infinitum. In other words, if only a few factors had played out a little differently, World War II might not have ended as it did. (For a brief, but fascinating discussion on other, possible outcomes, we would highly recommend an intriguing little book which was published in 1995 by Greenhill Books: THE HITLER OPTIONS: ALTERNATE DECISIONS OF WORLD WAR II, edited by Kenneth Macksey. In it, you will find ten military scenarios, some of which result in Nazi victories.)

The upshot here is obvious. William L. Shirer in no way dismissed the danger that Nazi Germany represented to the world at large. Nor do mainstream educators and experts in the field—meaning that the delusional world view espoused by the revisionists is in fact a product of a small but highly vociferous fringe group which sees a need to downplay the barbarism and out right sociopathy of the Hitler regime. And, we would hasten to add, their world view presents a number of interesting “what ifs?”

Are they suggesting that America should not have fought in the European theater during World War II? If Hitler was not a threat to America, then their logic dictates we should not have fought in Europe. Taking their wild “idea” to its logical extreme, this would have probably resulted in a Communist-dominated Europe. Do the Communist fearing revisionists think the United States would have been safer if Stalin had overrun Nazi Germany plus all of Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and Great Britain? Would America be secure in a world where the Mid East and Northern Africa had been over run by Uncle Joe and the Red Army? Or do the revisionists think we should have stayed out of the European theater and allowed either Hitler of Stalin to reign supreme?

While you’re pondering that issue we shall move on to the third aspect of historical revision.

FASCISM AND NATIONAL SOCIALISM ARE NOT LEFT WING IDEAOLOGIES.

Of course, the misguided attempt to transform Hitler into a harmless ball of fluff wouldn’t be complete if it weren’t accompanied by an asinine attempt to make him over into a poster child for the socialists, or even the left in general.

Again, going back to THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH, we would highly recommend that our readers open this wonderful volume to chapters 1, 2, and 4. In Chapter 4 you will find a section called “The Intellectual Roots of the Third Reich.” Here Mister Shirer describes the “odd assortment of erudite, but unbalanced philosophers, historians, and teachers who captured the german mind during the century before Hitler.”

He begins with George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who in addition to inspiring Marx and Lenin, also inspired German, right-wing nationalists; who taught that the state was everything and that periods of happiness were, “’the empty pages of history because they are periods of agreement without conflict.” War, un other words, was a blessing, a great, racial purifier.

Hegel is followed by Heinrich Von Treitschke, another war-mongering fanatic. After which the list of intellectual misanthropes reads like a “Who’s Who” of the criminally insane right: Nietzsche; Richard Wagner, a bona fide French racist, County Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, and a pro-German Englishman, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who went so far as to suggest that Jesus was an Aryan. Later, In Chapter 8, Shirer also includes Martin Luther as one of the historical roots of German anti-Semitism and excessive obedience. (Note also that he might also have included the Popes and the highly anti-Semitic Catholic Church of the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries.)

In addition, a detailed investigation into the mind of Adolf Hitler reveals obsession that are obviously and viscerally anti-Semitic, anti-democratic, anti-liberal, anti-socialistic, and anti-communistic. One more than one occasion, Hitler said that that he wanted to be remembered as the destroyer of world wide Bolshevism. For those who have any doubts we would recommend that they fetch a copy of Hitler’s MEIN KAMPF—just to get an idea as to how violently anti-socialist this madman truly was. But if you don’t have a stomach for rambling, sociopathic drivel, then we highly recommend the following books.

DER FUEHRER, by Konrad Heiden, published in 1944 by Houghton Mifflin Company. (We’re using a first edition of the English translation by Ralph Mannheim, but you should be able to find a subsequent edition through your local library, and ADOLF HITLER, by John Toland, published in 1976 by Doubleday and still readily available. Both works will reveal the fact that the National Socialism is a decidedly ant-socialist, anti-communist ideology.

True, you might look at the 25 Points in the Original German Workers Party and claim that the (soon to be) Nazi Party was socialistic, but as Shirer demonstrates, it was mostly for show. Point 1 demanded the abolition of incomes unearned by work. Point 12 called for the nationalization of trusts. Point 12 called for the abolition of land rents and land speculation. But as Shirer says on page 41, “a good many paragraphs of the party program were obviously merely a demagogic appeal to the mood of the lower classes when they were in bad traits and were sympathetic to radical and even socialist slogans. And, as he said only two paragraphs earlier, “most of the 25 points were forgotten by the time the party came to power.” Of course a few managed to stick. Point 1 called for the union of all Germans in the Reich. Point 2 called for the abrogation of the Treaty of Versailles, while Point 18 established the death penalty for traitors.

There were also a number of deluded individuals, rivals like Gregor Strasser, who refused to bow before Hitler’s will, and who made the fatal mistake of actually believing the Socialist part of National Socialism, but such individuals were promptly dealt with. Read executed.

The revisionists also mentioned (albeit in passing) Laurence W. Britt’s "FASCISM ANYONE?" Not so much a book as a lengthy article on the online home of the Council for Human Secularism, this wonderful composition examines the 14 basic, defining characteristics of fascism. Just as interesting is the fact that Mister Britt was recently a guest on Wisconsin Public Radio where he appeared on the Kathleen Dunn Show. Following the host-guest discussion period, a very conservative caller chimed in to make the same point that the revisionists had tried to make—that fascism and National Socialism were products of the left. The response was telling. Mister Britt corrected the caller and stated unequivocally, that fascism and National Socialism belonged on the right, on the conservative side of the political spectrum; not—repeat, NOT—on the left.

In closing we would only add that World War II was a very dark, dangerous, and frightening time. Millions of people gave their lives for a just cause and a way which quite literally saved civilization as we know it. Others were either worked to death or sadistically slaughtered because of their racial or ethnic backgrounds or religious affiliations. The revisionists, by dismissing the seriousness of the Nazi threat, have belittled the millions either gave their lives for freedom or who were senselessly murdered during the war against fascism.

And for that they not only deserve our condemnation. They should just be ashamed of themselves.

Brandon Alexander Geraghty appears courtsey THE YOUNG LIBERALS, LEFT WING RISING, and THE COALITION FOR A REPUBLICAN-FRE AMERICA

J. M. Millar appears courtsey THE COLAITION FOR A REPUBLICAN-FREE AMERICA

Kyle Kilpatrick. appears courtsey LEFT WING RISING


Authors' notes. Those who are interested in World War II might want to consider some of the following resources which we used as sources for the above work.

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH: A HISTORY OF NAZI GERMANY
By William L. Shirer
Published by Simon and Schuster 1960

MEMOIRS OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR:The Abridgement of the Six Volumes of THE SECOND WORLD WAR
By Winston Churchill
Published 1959 my Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston
1987 by Lady Mary Soames


The Six volumes mentioned directly above:
I. THE GATHERING STORM
II. THEIR FINEST HOUR
III. THE GRAND ALLIANCE
IV. THE HINGE OF FATE
V. CLOSING THE RING
VI. TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY
By Winston Churchill
Published during the 1950s by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston



ADOLF HITLER
By John Toland
Published 1976 by Doubleday

THE HITLER OPTIONS: ALTERNATE DECISIONS OF WORLD WAR II
Edited by Kenneth Macksey
Published 1995 by Greenhill Books, London
Stock Pile Books, Pennsylvania

THE UNKNOWN WAR
By Harrison E. Salisbury
Published 1978 by Nelson Doubleday Inc