At times, I don’t know, I think we all need to look in the mirror. I include myself, of course. What is one to do with Derbyshire, who has said the (at least!) scurrilous thing above but who is by no means a boob of the kind who haunts this forum with mis-spelled accusations of “treason” and so forth. A similarly haunting case is that of James Lileks, a humorist from Minneapolis whose various websites I found uncomplicatedly side-splitting … until I found out that he, too was a winger.

Some of them “over there” /do/ have brains. In a way it makes it WORSE.

Me, I’d file Derbyshire’s asinine confession under my own growing pile of stuff demonstrating just how little we have evolved since our lizard brains started getting crusted over with cortex. We /like/ violence, or some of us do, at least as long as it’s happening to The Other Guy, and particularly if our perception of The Other Guy is that he’s someone who would LOOOVVVEE to have our heads on plates.

Chelsea is a Clinton. She bears the taint; and though not prosecutable in law, in custom and nature the taint cannot be ignored. All the great despotisms of the past – I’m not arguing for despotism as a principle, but they sure knew how to deal with potential trouble – recognized that the families of objectionable citizens were a continuing threat. In Stalin’s penal code it was a crime to be the wife or child of an ‘enemy of the people’. The Nazis used the same principle, which they called Sippenhaft, ‘clan liability’. In Imperial China, enemies of the state were punished ‘to the ninth degree’: that is, everyone in the offender’s own generation would be killed, and everyone related via four generations up, to the great-great-grandparents, and four generations down, to the great-great-grandchildren, would also be killed. (This sounds complicated, but in practice what usually happened was that a battalion of soldiers was sent to the offender’s home town, where they killed everyone they could find, on the principle neca eos omnes, deus suos agnoscet – ‘let God sort ‘em out’.)
– John Derbyshire, The National Review, February 15, 2001

For more quotes from right wingers who want liberals to die because of our beliefs, click here.

Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com

A World of Theocratic Idiot-centrists to be sure.

If they are doing it to themselves while we have been minding our own business… that is one thing. Doing it after we stired up the pot that is quit another.

In the first instance we can (as a good christian country) encourage the people to stop the insanity. If we feel that evil is being commited before our eyes (like the south with their slaves) then we might even get involved with force to stop the fighting.

In the second instance America wanted something and a civil war that resulted in the deaths of many many innocent was not going to stand in our way. We will just lie about our modivations so that we do not have to feel guilty and so that we can “save face” as we are called out at home by our fellow Americans.

Comment by renato — March 22, 2006 @ 4:07 pm

Exactly!

John Derbyshire is inhumanly callous.

However….

….I don’t see how his position is any different from those who would stand idly by while this kind of stuff happens in the Middle East, Africa, and SE Asia WITHOUT our intervention. I mean, he is saying a LOT more than “I love watching Arabs kill each other.” He articulates his foreign policy position, which is more of a Hamiltonian/Jeffersonian position, with a smattering of Jacksonianism mixed in. Part of that is the notion that “as long as our interests, our borders, and foreign service professionals are ok, I really don’t care if these people fight amongst themselves all day long.” Now, one might take issue with the notion that we cannot be secure if there is rampant stability, but that is a different issue than the one you all are taking with Derbyshire.

Essentially, this kind of murder was what Saddam was doing prior to our invasion, and none of my liberal friends were screaming about stopping that kind of genocide, or stopping the situation in Burma or any of the many African countries in which this happens every day. So, in that sense, “inhuman callousness” is a charge that can be spread around to everyone.

There are lots of problems with the administration’s lead-up to war and their management of the situation after the war. There are many things to point out that the numbskulls at NRO have said all along the way. Picking on this one is a bit of a stretch.