If you’re in the United States Armed Forces, the time to seek Conscientious Objector status to the “Iran War” is now. Don’t delay. Don’t overthink. Don’t give in to excuses. Don’t engage in wishful thinking. Don’t succumb to pressure. Get out now. If ever you’ve sought to show valor on the battlefield, here is your chance. You’re on the battlefield. It’s called life. You have only one weapon at your disposal. It’s called integrity. Use either one to preserve the other, and flee this war as fast as you fucking can. Continue reading
Get ROTC Off Campus Now
Another letter to The Daily Princetonian, likely to go unprinted. Do I sound like a broken record? Yes. Do I care? No.
The photo below is of members of Princeton Army ROTC this morning, ambling from some ROTC training back to Forbes College. It’s all obviously a game to them: ROTC may as well be some alternative sort of NCAA sport. Somebody needs to tell these students that the sport for which they’re training is civilizational annihilation. Are they willing to play that game, or do they think they should demur? No one at Princeton seems to have the courage or honesty to raise this question directly with them, much less with their officers. I have to confess that I myself was waiting for a bus when I took this picture, and didn’t have the nerve to forget the commute, bail out on my work day, walk over to them, and initiate a conversation. We all have an excuse for inaction, but eventually the excuses have to give way to action–mine, yours, everyone’s. Continue reading
I’m Rooting for Iran
As the United States continues to lose the war to Iran, expect American journalists to employ increasingly bizarre but instructive circumlocutions to misdescribe obvious but unpalatable realities. This piece in The Wall Street Journal is a classic in the genre. “Iran uses asymmetric warfare to inflict pain from a weakened position.” Translation: “Iran is using asymmetric warfare to win the war.” Continue reading
A Challenge for Professor Kurtzer
Yet another unprinted letter of mine below, this one (like the last) submitted to The Daily Princetonian. The letter, dated March 29, contains a direct challenge to Professor Daniel Kurtzer, currently Professor of the Practice in International Relations and Professor of Middle East Studies at Princeton, and previously U.S. Ambassador to both Israel and Egypt. Continue reading
Meir Kahane at Princeton
Here’s another unprinted letter of mine, this one sent a few weeks ago to The Daily Princetonian (Princeton University’s student newspaper, popularly known as “The Prince”), a paper that prides itself on its fact-checking protocols, but has a lot of trouble admitting error when it gets things wrong. Well, sorry, but it’s gotten this issue badly wrong. Continue reading
Little Municipality Can’t Be Wrong
Other people’s thoughts, they ain’t your hand-me-downs
Would it be so bad to simply turn around?
–The Spin Doctors, “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong”
Here’s the latest installment in my ongoing struggle to restore facticity to political discourse in Princeton. My last go-round with Princeton’s Town Topics concerned its misdescription, graciously conceded by the editor, of the municipality’s acquisition of Westminster Choir College. This one concerns the paper’s insistence on repeating the municipality’s PR to the effect that “the Princeton Police Department does not participate in federal immigration enforcement.” Yes, it does. Repeating this “does not participate” mantra doesn’t make it true, but that doesn’t stop either the municipality or its amen-corner at Town Topics from repeating it ad nauseam. Continue reading
No Words
We’re propagandized incessantly about anti-Semitism and “Islamism”—terms without stable definitions—but there turns out not to be any terminology in the English language to describe the forcible displacement of a whole population on sectarian grounds by a Jewish State, even if that State has spent its entire history and pre-history doing just that, and invokes an elaborate ideology to rationalize it. The predictable result is that we have words for things we can’t define, but lack words for things that keep recurring. The first thing leads to snap judgments, the second, to blindness about the obvious. Continue reading
No Kings: A Modest Proposal
A challenge for anyone throwing around the “No Kings” slogan: if you’re really opposed to monarchy, now is the time to support the overthrow of the Gulf Cooperation Council, which consists of six repressive monarchies: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman. All six countries are ruled by kings long propped up by the United States. All six now face existential crisis. No kings? Opportunity beckons. Start there.
Dire Strait
Consider one of the antinomies, or self-contradictions, of international relations.
For decades now, the conventional wisdom in international relations has held that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz was a low probability event, and that if it happened, it could very likely be dealt with by the U.S. Navy. For documentation and a literature review, see Caitlin Talmadge’s paper, “Closing Time: Assessing the Iranian Threat to the Strait of Hormuz,” International Security, vol. 33:1 (Summer 2008), pp. 82-117. Continue reading
No Kings and the Anti-War Movement
We’re about a month into the Iran War at this point. The war is, as predicted, a disaster getting worse by the day. As I’ve argued here before, we desperately need a large-scale anti-war movement, but the movement is, alas, in a low-energy state right now. Not that it’s entirely dead: there are direct actions taking place, some very brave ones, along with some ordinary demonstrations. And there’s no shortage of astute commentary out there as well.
But the movement has a problem in need of solution, and while No Kings seems at first to provide the solution, that appearance quickly evaporates on contact with it. The anti-war movement has a clear goal, ending the war, but lacks the means or numbers to accomplish it. No Kings has the numbers, but seems uninterested in ending the war (or any war), and uninterested even in broaching the topic. So it’s worth discussing the relationship, or anti-relationship, between these things. Continue reading
Policy of Truth 