Ninety-seven years

The Unknown Soldier from WWI laid out in the Capitol rotunda in 1921.

This post, an annual tradition for Veterans Day at The Optimistic Conservative since 2009, is now an annual tradition at Liberty Unyielding.

Ninety-seven years ago, in the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the armistice was proclaimed that ended the terrible fighting in World War I.  A war that had erupted in large part because Europe’s political leaders, a century on from the Napoleonic conflicts, were accustomed to war remaining limited, produced some of the bloodiest battles ever fought. The six-month battle of the Somme in 1916 took the lives of an unimaginable 1.5 million French, German, and British soldiers – without either side achieving sustainable penetration of the line of confrontation, or any operational victory. WWI was the most tactically and politically frustrating of wars, admitting little maneuver, little jockeying for advantage, and no enduring significance to victory.

German schools rename ‘St. Martin’s Day’ fest – but look who opposes doing that

St. Martin’s Day – too Christian for the European left. (Image: Mitteldeutsche Zeitung)

You just know this latest in the thousand cuts of “multi-kulti” cultural suicide has to do with fear of offending Muslim immigrants.  And it does.

But I urge readers to look past the surface and keep in mind who’s doing the slice-and-dice job.

The story at hand involves a school in Oberkassel, Dusseldorf, which has redesignated the traditional St. Martin’s Day festival, held on 11 November, as an absurdly generic “Festival of Light.”  German media reported this late last week, and it was picked up quickly by English-language outlets.  (It’s worth making the point, as an aside, that we not only have to give up the richness of our own Western culture to supposedly avoid offending those from other cultures; we have to dumb everything down as well, turning ourselves into primitive animists and nature-worshipers.  Having a festival about “light” is so 10,000 years ago.)

The future of our time: Rewriting ‘Westphalianism’

Past master. (Image via Outside the Beltway)

Reading Henry Kissinger’s typically well-considered and intelligent article for the Wall Street Journal this weekend (“A Path out of the Middle East Collapse”), I had a growing sense that it isn’t so much a prescription for the future as a description of the past.

The sense began with the first paragraph, in which Kissinger defines the scope of what’s collapsing, and dates it only to 1973, when the U.S. moved to stabilize the Middle East during the Yom Kippur War.

But far more than recent U.S. policy on the Middle East is collapsing today.  What we’re seeing is more like the collapse of “Rome” itself:  the organization of Western power as a Europe-centric territorial phenomenon, setting unbreachable boundaries north, south, and west of a restless and perennially “unorganizable” Middle East.

Oregon killer singled out Christians to shoot them in the head

Chris Harper-Mercer at MySpace.

The killer at Umpqua Community College (UCC) in Oregon was identified on Thursday evening as Chris Harper-Mercer, 26, of Torrance, California, a Los Angeles suburb.  As Howard Portnoy reported earlier, Harper-Mercer died when police shot him to end his killing spree.

A lot of rumors are flying around the web among him right now.  There is zero substantiation, from what I can tell, of a report that he was a Muslim.  (Charles C. Johnson of Got News posted that report, but his website is hammered right now and the link doesn’t come up.  Here’s one of many citations of the Johnson report.)

However, eyewitnesses came forward in the hours after the massacre to report that Harper-Mercer asked each student in turn, in the classroom where he was shooting them, what religion they were.  He shot the Christians in the head.

Obama hubris meltdown: ‘I lead the strongest military the world has ever known’

The POTUS-in-Chief.

It’s certainly easier on the spirits these days to ignore Obama than to pay attention to his activities and pronouncements.

But it’s worth making sorrowful note of the fateful words he spoke in his speech to the UN General Assembly on Monday.  We cannot doubt that they are likely to become as famous a misreading of reality and the current moment as Neville Chamberlain’s “peace for our time” proclamation – curiously enough, uttered almost exactly 77 year ago, on 30 September 1938.

Here is what Obama said at the UN (emphasis added):