The phenomenon of the mass media praising the recently deceased Pope as an exemplar or demigod is almost as inappropriate as the equivalent frenzy that followed the death of Princess Diana. Yes, the Pope was an opponent of communism – though not in fact an especially significant one. Yes, he deserves credit for taking a stand against antisemitism within his Church – though he did not hesitate to elevate several notorious antisemites to sainthood, and utterly failed to bear witness when President Assad, in his presence, resurrected ancient antisemitic blood libels and hailed the Pope as a fellow enemy of The Jews. Perhaps his most praiseworthy attribute (which is notably under-recognised, even in the current festival of appreciation for him), was his firm defence of the proposition that morality is not arbitrary or relative but objective – though even this great and rare virtue is offset by the embarrassing fact that his actual grasp of right and wrong over many issues of current controversy was ludicrously shaky compared with, say, the average person in an American street.

For as Christopher Hitchens points out, Pope John-Paul II opposed contraception that would have saved millions from AIDS, the Iraq war that liberated millions from tyranny, and stem cell research that would advance medical science and save lives, and was likewise a dogmatic and implacable opponent of much that would improve the human condition as well as his own Church. Many people with more deference than sense will continue to claim that he was a moral giant for some time to come, and that is a large part of the Catholic Church's problem. Millions of people follow its advice uncritically because they regard it as a supernaturally certified moral authority. This has given the Catholic Church enormous power but little capacity to improve, and almost none of the checks and balances that could offset the tendency of that power to corrupt.

None of us has ever voted Labour before. Until very recently, we would have considered our doing so at the forthcoming election to be as unlikely as that we might endorse spoon-bending, or claim to have been abducted by extraterrestrials. Moreover, we remain desperately opposed to core Labour themes such as greater European integration, higher taxes, the destruction of valuable traditions (most recently, the abolition of the double-jeopardy rule), and ever-increasing bureaucratic intervention in every aspect of British life.

Yet despite all that, we want to do everything we can to return Tony Blair to office at the forthcoming election. In most constituencies, this will entail voting Labour, so that is what we urge our British readers to do.

The reason is, of course, the war. Faced with that challenge, Tony Blair spectacularly found his moral compass. Michael Howard shamefully lost his – and the Conservative Party stands willingly behind him. And of course the Liberal Democrats' stance was, and remains, utterly despicable.

There might be an argument for protest-voting for a fringe party, such as perhaps the UK Independence Party. But such a protest would be meaningless under the present circumstances, where there are overridingly important foreign-policy and defence issues. One small comfort is that we shall get a separate chance to vote against Blair on the issues of the Euro and the European Constitution.

So, more precisely, our advice is: vote for Blair's foreign and defence policies. If your local Labour candidate is a Blair loyalist, the choice is easy: vote for him or her. (You can easily discover such information on the web.) If the Labour candidate is a Saddam supporter and the Conservative candidate approves of Blair's handling of the war, the choice is more complicated: you might then want to vote Conservative, because you would not want to have voted for an MP who, when Blair retires, will support an idiotarian socialist for Prime Minister. Also, where applicable, it is important to vote tactically to keep the Liberal Democrats from making any gains: more than anything else, large gains by them will be interpreted as a vote for the legitimacy of Saddam's regime and the world's remaining fear regimes.

[For the first four instalments of this series, see here.]

The Soviet dictator Josef Stalin was notorious for his all-encompassing paranoia. And yet, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn pointed out in his novel The First Circle, even Stalin was not entirely lacking in the capacity to trust:

Distrust of people was the dominating characteristic of Joseph Djugashvili [Stalin]; it was his only philosophy of life. He had not trusted his own mother; neither had he trusted God, before whom as a young man he had bowed down in His temple. He had not trusted his fellow Party members, especially those with the gift of eloquence. He had not trusted his comrades in exile. He did not trust the peasants to sow their grain or harvest their wheat unless he forced them to do it and watched over them. He did not trust the workers to work unless he laid down their production targets. He did not trust the intellectuals to help the cause rather than to harm it. He did not trust the soldiers and the generals to fight without penal battalions and field security squads. He had never trusted his relatives, his wives or his mistresses. He had not even trusted his children. And how right he had been!

In all his long, suspicion-ridden life he had only trusted one man. That man had shown the whole world that he knew his own mind, knew whom it was expedient to like and whom to hate; and he had always known when to turn round and offer the hand of friendship to those who had been his enemies.

This man, whom Stalin had trusted, was Adolf Hitler.

And so, when Hitler suddenly invaded the Soviet Union, betraying Stalin's trust and their non-aggression treaty (including all the nasty little secret clauses under which they had plotted jointly to enslave Eastern Europe), Stalin

blindly and fanatically refused to believe Hitler was going to attack and even after the Nazi assault began still refused to believe that Hitler had ordered the offensive. [Harrison E. Salisbury, emphases in original.]

Stalin also refused to believe his own spies, such as the astonishing Richard Sorge, who had sent specific and timely warnings of Hitler's plans, complete with smoking-gun evidence in the form of photographs of diplomatic telegrams.

Stalin nevertheless preferred to believe Hitler.

Stalin's island of gullibility in his ocean of paranoia is not exceptional – in fact, it is the rule. For instance, conspiracy theorists today prefer to believe that the likes of Saddam and Osama and Arafat tell the truth while Blair and Bush and Sharon lie. For, despite Solzhenitsyn's understandable mockery, what Stalin trusted uncritically was not Hitler, it was his own explanation (or rather, his own conspiracy-theoretic non-explanation) of what makes the world tick. Hitler was a natural beneficiary though, because he shared the same explanation. And it was Stalin's blind faith in this false world view, his inability to modify it in response to new information, that betrayed him. That is why it is not really very surprising that a person for whose “only philosophy of life” was distrust, came to lay himself wide open to the biggest betrayal of all time.

Paranoids, cynics and conspiracy theorists think of themselves as the most sceptical, the least gullible of the human race, and hence also as the most secure against disappointment. “If you're a pessimist,” the saying goes, “at least you'll never be disappointed”. But that could hardly be more false. Just look at the world of disappointment that Hitler let himself in for when he deduced, from the depths of his cynicism, that Britain was all talk and would never fight. Just look how heartbroken all the cynics and pessimists on today's political scene are whenever things go well in Iraq or Afghanistan.

In reality, such people are not the least gullible in the world but the most. For their approach to understanding the complex and frightening world of human affairs is not characterised by the countless possible explanations that they have vowed to reject, but by the single conspiracy-theoretic mode of explanation that they have vowed to believe regardless of all evidence or experience or argument to the contrary. This is not scepticism in the rational sense of the word, it is faith. They have chosen to put blind faith in their conspiracy theories. But the world punishes blind faith. Tyrants in general tend to be paranoid, yet nevertheless, they nearly always end up disappointed as well. Stalin was relatively lucky in his disappointment: most of them die of it.

Part 6

Readers may be appalled to learn that child poverty in rich countries has actually risen during the last decade.

We, on the other hand, are indifferent to – nay, quietly satisfied with – this development.

That is because poverty has changed. In the 19th and early 20th centuries a substantial proportion of the population lived in conditions that were uncomfortable, painful, degrading and terrifying. Child mortality was high for various reasons such as bad sanitation, malnutrition, and so on. Leftists wanted to do something about this using government power. Their argument prevailed. Sewer systems were built by the government, and did indeed improve sanitation.

Subsequently, people became less poor and child mortality declined. This was only partly due to the presence of sewers. Nutrition, working and living conditions, clothing, literacy and so on were all improved primarily by improving technology for which market forces were almost entirely responsible.

Nevertheless, Leftists were flushed with success.

They managed to make a case for more and more state intervention in the economy over the following century or more, deriving their argument from the sewers. Unfortunately, the state never really had another success on the scale they had achieved with the sewage system, while on the other hand they caused many collective disasters. For example, the welfare state herded poor people into tower blocks containing hundreds of flats that were so badly designed that they rapidly became uninhabitable. Criminals could easily cover the single entrance or lurk in the elevators and so used a tower block's design against its inhabitants. As economists like Hayek pointed out, the state was chronically prone to wasting vast resources on such mistakes because it is relatively unaccountable compared to institutions on the market.

Leftists were not daunted by the total crashing failure of their world view, and the fact that their entire raison d'etre had disappeared along with the poverty that they had bemoaned. They simply redefined the word poverty. They set up a tradition of redefining it in such a way that it would last for ever.

Hence the definition of child poverty given in the UNICEF report:

Hence the definition of child poverty used in this report and widely accepted by policy-makers in many OECD countries: a child is to be considered poor if the income available to that child, assuming a fair distribution of resources within the family and making allowances for family size and composition, is less than half the median income available to a child growing up in that society.

This new definition of poverty has no moral significance. It has nothing to do with relieving suffering, only with justifying continued Leftism. It is arbitrary and ridiculous. It is economic nonsense: according to it, if Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and a dozen other billionaires and their entire companies, were to move to Belgium, child poverty in Belgium would by definition shoot up drastically, even though every last person in the country would be better off as a result. That is, in effect, what has happened to cause the scare headline with which we began.

Underlying these flaws in the prevailing definition of poverty is the inescapable fact that there is no way to make people systematically better off simply by shuffing money around by force. The creativity of individuals tempered by the criticism of the market can produce ideas and inventions that will make the world a better place. UNICEF's beloved socialist bureaucracy, spiteful levelling and pointless bean counting cannot do this and should, at most, confine itself to the sewers from whence it came.

EU officials are starting a tax funded £5.5 million campaign to “inform” people about the proposed EU Constitution. EU officials promise that it will not be used to promote a yes vote.

There are two possibilities:

• These EU officials are lying; or
• They genuinely think that a vast, unaccountable bureaucracy is capable of dispassionately informing people about a proposal that would greatly increase, and permanently entrench, its power.

Neither possibility bodes well, should these turkeys succeed the referenda happen to yield the affirmative outcome that these paragons of impartiality may or may not want.

“Two hands, one mouth” is an old Libertarian slogan (by the way, can anyone tell us its origin?) that rebuts the myth that immigrants are an economic burden on the societies that they join. It makes the point that human beings in general are a positive resource, creating more wealth than they consume.

Of course politics can change that. An invading army can destroy the territories that it conquers. Some nations are beginning to think that hostile civilians can too. And governments, by instituting welfare-state or other socialist policies, can prevent immigrants from creating wealth and from lifting themselves out of the condition of being alienated parasites.

There was no need for West Germany to spend 1.5 trillion dollars on subsidising and ‘reconstructing’ East Germany after Reunification, thereby severely damaging its own economy and storing up political trouble for the future. On the contrary, the East Germans, after decades of communist repression, were an untapped resource both for themselves and for the world, whose liberation should have enriched both parts of the country and everyone else as well.

Now we see, via Solomonia, that the South Koreans are making the same tragic mistake in regard to their own northern compatriots:

The South has been laboring to keep the North afloat for fear of the extreme costs of integrating the North should it collapse.

Meanwhile, the regime they are keeping afloat holds millions in starvation and tyranny, and threatens the world with weapons of mass destruction.

The North Korea crisis is complex and dangerous enough already, without being worsened by tacky economic myths. The South Koreans – and the world – should not be thinking “but how would we support 22 million indigent spongers?” They should be thinking “22 million additional South Koreans! OK, most of them don't know much yet, but they can learn, and most would eagerly work hard for a month in return for a mere colour television. What a boon to the world!”

Norway's government has taken action to force a change in IKEA's furniture-assembly instructions. The offending instructions consist of diagrams that show only male figures or figures whose sex is unclear, and this has excited many who are obssessed with political correctness. IKEA's defence:

Verdens Gang quoted an IKEA spokeswoman as saying: "We have to take account of cultural factors. In Muslim countries it's problematic to use women in instruction manuals."...

In the game of political correctness, this is an ace, and would normally win the trick. But on this occasion the Norwegian government has a trump:

"This isn't good enough," Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik was quoted on Thursday as telling the daily Verdens Gang. "It's important to promote attitudes for sexual equality, not least in Muslim nations."

We think that it is ridiculous – and yes, under these circumstances perhaps also immoral – to remove images of females from furniture instructions for fear of offending religious prudes. It is a form of immorality that should, in civilised countries in peacetime, be legal. But we are, in principle, open to a related argument that the Norwegian government should be making, namely that there's a war on and certain civil liberties – perhaps even the cherished freedom to publish sexist furniture manuals in order to curry favour with bigots – may need to be curtailed until it is won.

We do find this argument moderately persuasive in the case of the freedom to wear headscarves to state schools in France. But frankly, we are fairly sure that IKEA furniture instructions are going to be a very small part of any strategy to change Islamist attitudes toward women. Hence, the Norwegian government is wasting its time and effort by making all this fuss about furniture instructions when they could be doing something more effective, like perhaps prosecuting Islamist terrorists who live in their midst.

We recently wrote about two cases of secular-religious insanity in education, in which the meanings of ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ had been interchanged in the debate on school curricula.

Now we report a similar reversal concerning discrimination and non-discrimination against minorities. This has nothing to do with the paradoxes of ‘positive discrimination’ which, whatever you may think of its merits, at least says what it is. The following two cases involve a moral reversal, and a betrayal of ostensible values, as profound as those at the conclusion of George Orwell's Animal Farm.

The first is a new EU report on anti-Muslim discrimination, which uses as one of its measures of discrimination whether people ‘associate the word “Islam” with … “oppression of women”’. In other words, anyone who opposes the discrimination against women in Islamic cultures counts as biased, and only those who condone this discrimination so deeply that they do not even associate the two concepts in their minds, are certified as free from bias!

The second is a new plan proposed by the Commission for Racial Equality forcibly to separate black boys from their classmates and give them a different education. Given the history of the fight for racial equality in education, and given who is proposing this wicked and racist plan, the irony is almost palpable.

Yet more evidence that the world is insane.

Fans of his will want to look here.

How did we know? Macintosh users may want to look here.

"This is a struggle of good and evil. And we're the good." (Via LGF.)

No, that was not President Bush contrasting the West with the world's terrorists and tyrants. It was Howard Dean, the new Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, contrasting the left with the right in America.

Yet you can be sure that no one will call Dean Manichaean, or equate him with the rulers of Iran in torrents of frantic sidetracking such as this. The sophistry that equates right with wrong and then sides eagerly with wrong is ever available and ever attractive, it seems, to those who prefer the glamour of dissent to the effort of engagement with real problems.

The BBC asked young people from various countries to say how they would do things differently to “tackle the environmental problems we are creating today” and change the world. All eight answers that the BBC saw fit to publish had a common theme: government control. Institute even more propaganda campaigns in schools and elsewhere; take up ever more of the population's time and effort in religious rituals such as ‘recycling’ their garbage or avoiding their cars; rein in production; ban trade; and generally smash capitalism:

The problem with free trade is that there is nothing in it for the environment – the bottom line is entirely monetary…

I think this a job for the government – it shouldn't let free market run wild.

One of the young people, who despite being only 14 is under the impression that she can feel the change in temperature due to global warming, said:

More people have to try to save the environment – but not a lot of people know about it.

This, despite the fact that virtually everyone her age (and most older people too) would already reply to the question exactly as she does. One of the most impressive achievements of the existing environmental ‘education’ campaign is to have caused this universal, ritual denial of its own tremendous success, and even its own existence.

The young people's objection to the free market is extremely common, but it is nonsense. Money is a means for people to express their preferences, which they arrive at for a combination of reasons of their own choosing. They are free not to buy a product if they think it is sub-standard or manufactured in an unsafe or harmful or immoral way. So it doesn't make much sense to say that the bottom line is money. Money is just a tool for expressing and criticising values.

Aparna Bhasin advocated:

Population control is also something we should look into - it will make everything else much easier to tackle.

In real life, population control policies, like those practiced by China, are code for brutal repression that includes infanticide and forced abortions. So in real life, governmental population control is a terrible evil. It is not a solution to environmental problems. By contrast, in free countries, there is no government population control and no population problem either.

None of the quoted respondents managed to identify the single biggest environmental problem in the world today – socialism. The free market allows people to make choices among different policies according to their best judgement about the issue in question. In a socialist society state functionaries control part of the economy and impose their own favoured policies while someone else is forced to bear the whole cost, no matter what effect those policies have. Thus socialism stifles the criticism that would help to create the knowledge necessary to improve the environment. As a result governments consistently abuse the environment though corruption and ignorance. So to protect the environment we must argue against government interference in the economy.

Congressman Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) says that the fake CBS memos were planted by Karl Rove to discredit Dan Rather and divert attention from President Bush's “draft dodging” – says LGF. And they have the transcript and the audio.

Congressman Hinchey says that it is very important for such charges to be made.

If you haven't read our series on conspiracy theories, please do so!

A couple of years ago we commented on a purportedly scientific (but actually scientistic¹) study that claimed to have found “conclusive evidence of pain perception in fish”.

Now, a similarly scientistic study has come to the opposite conclusion about worms, lobsters, crabs, insects and spiders: they feel no pain.

Nothing inconsistent between the two conclusions. Fish aren't on that list.

But interestingly, the authors of the second study explicitly rejected as worthless the entire body of evidence cited by the authors of the first study. In summary:

The scientists [in the first study] found sites in the heads of rainbow trout that responded to damaging stimuli.

They also found the fish showed marked reactions when exposed to harmful substances

But Prof. Farstad, of the second study, said:

"It seems to be only reflex curling when [worms are] put on the hook ... They might sense something, but it is not painful and does not compromise their well-being."

[…]

Farstad said most invertebrates, including lobsters and crabs boiled alive, do not feel pain because, unlike mammals, they do not have a big brain to read the signals.

They do have a small brain, however, which reacts centrally to stimuli – for instance, all the legs cooperate to move the crab away when it encounters harmful substances, or towards a crab of the opposite sex.

Of course neither group displayed any scientific evidence for using the criteria that they were using. How could they? That is not a scientific issue. Evidently both sets of researchers in effect brought their conclusions with them to the study: the first happened to be false, the second true. But if they were going to do that, why didn't they just look in front of them at their computer screens, and notice that their computer meets all of the first study's criteria for feeling pain, and all the second study's criteria for not feeling it. And then, shouldn't these researchers have responded with some trace of intelligence – never mind feeling – to that stimulus?

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¹ Scientism: The purported use of scientific methods to resolve non-scientific (i.e. philosophical) issues.

At a local school in Dover, Pennsylvania, the school board decided to teach students creationism. Their excuse for this abrogation of even the minimum of scholarly standards is a mixture of falsehood, nonsense and double talk:

“Because Darwin's Theory is a theory, it continues to be tested as new evidence is discovered. The Theory is not a fact. Gaps in the Theory exist for which there is no evidence. A theory is defined as a well-tested explanation that unifies a broad range of observations. Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin's view.”

Creationism (aka “Intelligent Design”) is a worthless pseudoexplanation, the sole function of which is to resist the implications of the theory of evolution. An explanation of the origins of life must explain how complex organisms arose from non-biological precursors. So any purported explanation that does not include a description of such a process is inherently worthless. Furthermore, an explanation of life as we see it today must explain how adaptations (purposeful properties) come into being. So any explanation that invokes a pre-existing purpose whose origin is itself inexplicable, is also inherently worthless. And since God could have made the world any way he liked, Creationism is also untestable and anti-scientific. Its purportedly authoritative advocates are intellectually dishonest.

By contrast, evolution is a scientific theory that has survived rigorous critical scrutiny. Evolution explains how life arose from simple non-biological precursors, and how it acquired its adaptations. Science teachers in Dover have quite correctly refused to read out any apology for creationism because by doing so they would promote rank superstition.

However, the religious world is not alone in having worthless superstitions. Secular mental health charities like Rethink promote a view of the world based on the idea of mental illness. According to Rethink's worldview people take actions based on chemicals buzzing around in their brain. In reality, people act on their theories and values and not on orders from mindless chemicals or fictional mental illnesses. Unfortunately, nonsense about mental illness is what passes for serious discussion of moral issues among large and influential sections of the secular world. This, too, is an abrogation of intellectual and moral standards. For the sake of science and freedom and reason, we must abandon these secular superstitions as well.

Regular readers will know that we are not enamoured of the mainstream media. However, Belmont Club have gone rather too far in their excoriation of the media when they compare them to the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell's book 1984.

In 1984, Orwell describes a totalitarian society in which the state controls newspapers, books, television and all other media through the cynically named Ministry of Truth. One of the Ministry's functions is to maintain the official fiction that the Party is always right – not only by lying about the present but by changing all historical evidence. In that society the role of the media is to parrot what the dictators want them to say about both the present and the past, without paying attention to the truth.

The media in the West currently peddle a set of myths about the way the world works. Myths in which they believe. These beliefs cause them to impose certain interpretations on events and to ignore stories that tend to suggest that perhaps the world works in a different way. When they feel strongly enough, they feel obliged bend the truth – to report something other than what literally happened, in the noble cause of conveying a deeper truth to the public who would otherwise be led astray.

But, they do not have the power physically to coerce people who do not share their beliefs.

In some cases most of the media professionals happen to share the same set of prejudices as state officials and publicise these prejudices at the expense of the truth. Sometimes they even allow state officials to rewrite scripts to fit in with the government's agenda – in this case their witch hunt against drug users. However, the media can be independent of the government when they choose to be, as with their campaign of opposition to the liberation of Iraq. Nor do most of the media spin their stories in favour of George Bush's visceral and ignorant dislike of stem cell research. So the media are not simply an extension of the state, even when they behave badly.

The media do not, and cannot, censor opposing views. The likes of Thomas Szasz and free market economists can't get much time on major networks, but this has not stopped such people from propagating their ideas. Even though the media tend to stick fairly closely to a common left-of-centre, elitist ideology, they are not completely homogeneous. Fox News is more right wing than CNN and the blogosphere is becoming more important. Although they leave a lot to be desired, the media in a free society are not like the omnipresent state controlled television in 1984 in any important respect.

----------------------------------------------------

P.S. It doesn't help that Belmont Club link to a Holocaust-denying web site in that post, and approvingly quote from its tendentious interpretation of both Orwell and World War 2. What are they thinking of?

HonestReporting describes a particularly clear, and particularly nasty, example of what it calls the “media two-step” in reporting on Israel.

Our summary of the two-step in general:

Step 0: Report only violence. Never report anything like this.

Step 1 (a): If Jews Israelis have committed any act of violence, imply (or report as fact) that it was motivated by pure malevolence on their part.

Step 1 (b): If Jews Israelis haven't committed any act of violence, report as fact an allegation that they have, and proceed as in step 1(a).

Step 2: If violence is committed against Jews Israelis, report as fact that its motive was retaliation for previous violence by Jews Israelis.

Imagine that we discover that a nuclear weapon has been hidden somewhere in one of the world's great cities. We don't know which city, or where it is hidden. We know that it is due to be set off by a timer, but we do not know when. It might be today, or it might be ten years from now. But we do know that the timer is already running.

What should be done?

The value of a great city is unimaginably large. In terms of human life. In terms of culture. And in raw economic terms. Hence the resources that it would be worth devoting to the task of preventing such a loss would be correspondingly tremendous.

This is not a hypothetical situation. It is the situation that we are actually in. With the minor difference that the weapon of mass destruction has not been planted yet. But it will be. And with the major difference that it is not just one city but all of them, because it not just a matter of nuclear weapons but biological doomsday weapons as well.

That is why one of the smartest people in the world, Britain's Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees, thinks that civilisation has only a fifty percent chance of surviving the twenty-first century. See his book Our Final Century.

He is dead wrong. Civilisation is going to survive. But only because the United States and its few real allies are going to achieve something that is, at present, almost inconceivable. That's why Professor Rees didn't conceive of it when he was writing his book. And they are going to achieve this in the teeth of the most frenzied opposition from everyone else in the world, including many American Conservatives, who are dead wrong too on this issue, as on many others.

For it turns out that to prevent this ultimate catastrophe, the least expensive option – again, in terms of loss of human lives and culture, and economic cost – depends, among other things, on ending certain types of tyranny everywhere in the world, and on doing so soon.

“Let the remaining tyrants of the world learn the lesson from this day”, say Mohammed and Omar at Iraq the Model. “No more confusion about what the people want, they have said their word and they said it loud and the world has got to respect and support the people's will”. (Read the whole thing!). Yes indeed, every one of those tyrants is feeling justifiable fear today, while every decent person shares Mohammed and Omar's sense that today is a historic turning point for Iraq and for the world.

Reuters says:

Voters, some ululating with joy, others hiding their faces in fear, cast ballots in higher-than-expected numbers in Iraq's first multi-party election in half a century.

Samir Hassan, 32, who lost his leg in a car bomb blast last year, said as he waited to vote in Baghdad: "I would have crawled here if I had to. I don't want terrorists to kill other Iraqis like they tried to kill me."

John Kerry doesn't agree with them, though. He doesn't think it's that big a deal:

Sen. John Kerry says the vote is significant, but shouldn't be “overhyped”

Meanwhile, for some reason the bad guys tried their murderous best to prevent this ‘overhyped’ event from happening:

Despite draconian security measures imposed by Iraq's U.S.-backed interim government, militants launched a string of attacks to try to torpedo the polls.

They struck mainly in Baghdad, rocking the capital with nine suicide blasts in rapid succession. The Iraqi wing of al Qaeda, led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, claimed responsibility.

It had declared war on the election, vowing to kill any "infidel" who voted.

John Kerry's opinion?

“It is hard to say that something is legitimate when whole portions of the country can't vote and doesn't vote.”

In other words, John Kerry finds it hard to accept the legitimacy of any election that is not approved by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

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Update: Andrew Sullivan is euphoric. Good. Now, Andrew: why exactly is John Kerry not euphoric?

This article is posted as part of the January 27, 2005, BlogBurst, to commemorate the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, sixty years ago, on January 27, 1945.

January 20th was the anniversary of the 1942 Wannsee Conference, in the course of which the Nazi hierarchy formalised Hitler's plan to annihilate the Jewish people. Understanding the horrors of Auschwitz requires that one be aware of the premeditated mass murder that was presented at Wannsee.

Highlighting these events now is important. Even as the press reports that 45% of Britons have never heard of Auschwitz, a group of 500 Russian intellectuals, including 19 members of Parliament, marked the anniversary with an open letter linking Judaism to ritual murder, and calling on the authorities to close down Jewish organisations across Russia. The Muslim Council of Britain, representing 350 Muslim organisations, is boycotting the official commemoration because it makes no reference to the “holocaust of the Palestinian intifada”. A British Muslim MP has opposed the boycott, saying “if people are boycotting this then I think it’s a mistake. People who were exterminated in the Holocaust were not just Jews”.

The World's tiny contribution is to write about a key difference between the Nazis and the West: their view of the best way to change the world.

As a result of an antisemitic conspiracy theory, the Nazis saw The Jews as their enemy. Their response to this perceived problem was to kill all Jews. In addition to antisemitism, this policy also implemented two other fundamental principles of Nazism: that there are no individuals, only groups; and that differences between groups can be resolved only by violence. Thus they embarked, collectively, upon the mass murder known as the Holocaust. Nevertheless, each of the murderers committed murder individually, and each of the victims suffered it individually.

When the Allies liberated the few surviving Jews of Europe in 1945, including some in Auschwitz itself, Allied governments, who were themselves largely antisemitic, weren't pleased to have about 250,000 surplus Jews on their hands. However, the Western Allies took for granted that human life is intrinsically valuable and the idea of killing those Jews did not occur to them. They recognised that there is no problem so bad that people can't fix it by spreading good ideas. Germany is a democratic country today because the Western Allies spread some of their good ideas to the Germans. And we support Israel as part of our struggle against bad ideas including the antisemitism that has survived to this day even in the open societies of the West.

In President Bush's historic Second Inaugural Address, he gave an inspiring re-statement of the Bush Doctrine. Some passages contain references to God. As atheists, we nevertheless wholeheartedly support those passages, such as this crucial one [emphasis ours]:

America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the maker of heaven and earth. Across the generations, we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our nation. It is the honorable achievement of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation's security, and the calling of our time.

That is because the appeal to the supernatural there is purely formal: the substance of the argument is relentlessly rational. As a public service, we offer the following translation of the sentence in question:

From the day of our founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because whenever any arguments to the contrary have been subjected to rational criticism, they have invariably turned out to rely on supernatural justifications, from King Charles’ divine right of kings, to Hegel’s divinity of the State, to Rousseau’s ‘infallibility of the general will’. Of all the regulatory principles ever proposed for human affairs, only our doctrine of the rights and value of each individual passes that cold test of reason. Furthermore, only political programmes that give effect to that doctrine have ever created institutions and policies that allow themselves to be subjected to a test of reason at all. And only they have ever created a community of nations among whom war is unknown.

We modestly hope that our version is more precise. On the other hand, it is longer and, we have to admit, less punchy. There is room for both.

God bless America.