THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

This particular leftist conference of European and Third World Wisdom is going to tell America how to handle the environment. A large part of the delegations are coming to South Africa from under the "yellow cloud" that is forming over India and southeast Asia.

This yellow cloud is something unprecedented, but it is perfectly predictable by anybody who does not represent World Environmental Wisdom.

As any reasonably intelligent person knows, a primitive industrial economy produces far, far, far more pollution than a more advanced one. If America had produced a tenth of this Asian "yellow cloud" of pure choking pollution, it would have made world headlines.

Long before Chernobyl, Communist countries always produced a lot more pollution and environmental destruction than the more advanced and productive western economies, but World Opinion never breathed a word about it.

But this particular yellow cloud is not coming from Red China. This one is coming from the leftists' pet, that Wise and Wonderful Third World in lower Asia.

Those Third World Idealist geniuses who are going to tell us how to run America's environmental policy are leaving their own lands at a good time. For a while they won't choke on the results of their own environmental policy.

This yellow cloud has already spread around Asia, and we are going to probably see signs of it over here before long.

On a CNN talk program about the bombing of Iraq, a liberal Democratic senator accidentally told a great truth. He was asked by the moderator what he regretted, and he said, "I regret that there are not more Senator McCain's in the Congress."

How true, how profoundly true! Every liberal Democrat regrets that. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, is one of the Democrats' greatest resources. He sponsored the McCain-Feingold Bill, which would limit all Republican campaign spending. At the same time, the McCain-Feingold proposal would leave the unions free to back liberals with their members' dues.

McCain wanted to take care of smoking by taxing hell out of cigarettes. That tax would fall on working people and give the money to Washington bureaucrats. This time, good old reliable McCain was attacking anybody who would dare say that our beloved president would time his attack on Iraq for political purposes. Like all respectable conservatives, McCain was more vicious than any liberal in attacking conservatives who dare to tell the simple truth.

Conservative respectables like McCain say that if the president timed his attack for political purposes, his cabinet members would resist him and tell on him.

Yeah, right! You notice the number of high-level political appointees who blow the whistle on liberals?

Respectable conservatives especially point out that it is a moderate Republican, Bill Cohen, who is Clinton's Secretary of Defense. Surely good old Bill Cohen would tell if Clinton were doing something political with our armed forces.

In the real world, Cohen would sell out FIRST. You are far more likely to find a conscience in a LIBERAL than in a moderate Republican. Selling out is what moderate Republicanism is all about.

Everything about Bill Clinton is political. Of course this attack took place when he needed it. And nobody around him is going to object.

I have been in high-level political counsels. If you tell the public what is going on, you never get back in the circles of power.

Before you get self-righteous about this, please remember the people ELECT rulers who withhold the truth from them this way.

Look at the women who told on President Clinton. Our beloved and heroic "people" tore them to pieces. Democracy is a system of government where people get what they deserve. But, surely, our noble heroes in uniform would tell if the president put their soldiers in harm's way for political purposes, right?

Wrong.

To a respectable conservative, anybody in a soldier suit automatically attains some kind of godhood. But back here in the real world, the guy in uniform is just another human being.

Nobody, but nobody, gets a general's star in this day and age unless he is an excellent bureaucrat. That means he puts politicians' interests first. It is no accident that the one American general who was known as a heroic whistle blower was not actually a general. "General" Billy Mitchell was a colonel. He was given a temporary eighteen-month promotion to general while he was assigned to command the Army Air Force in the 1920s.

Mitchell was expected to keep his mouth shut, like any other general. Instead, when he found out what was going on, he blew his top and went public.

No general since has ever done that. No general ever will do that again. And if it is silly to say the generals would tell on Clinton, it is madness to say his POLITICAL ADVISORS would. The story is that they would never, never allow Clinton to put our soldiers' lives in danger for political purposes.

Let us forget for a minute just how ruthless this Administration's politics are, and look at one other simple fact

Almost all of these appointees are LAWYERS!

Have you ever heard a lawyer discuss the repeat criminals he and his colleagues put back on the streets? He will look you in the eye and say that, sure, they will kill people when he helps them hit the streets again.

But, he will tell you, that's just the way things are.

He will not hesitate for a second to do everything he can to get those murderers, rapists, and psychopaths back on the streets ASAP.

These are thugs, gang. Like all thugs, they use the Constitution and all the cliches, but the bottom line is that they will not hesitate to get people killed, and they will get people killed for far less than a presidential appointment.

About 1900 the British Admiralty refused to develop submarines with an ironic comment:

"The British Navy is not in the business of developing ships that sink."

Cute.

And COSTLY.

France got smashed by Germany in 1870, 1914 and 1940, each time in the exact same way. Today it is hard to believe how dumb the French were in each case. In each case the Germans invented a new way to move so fast they reached Paris before the French Army could.

In each case France was fighting the last war.

One of history's cruelest jokes was what happened when the French built the Ultimate, Updated World War One Trench and called it the Maginot Line.

Dave explains the new technology of the fight brought on by the Internet. Tim sums it up brilliantly: "BUGS has no currency in the past."

For decades I worked with the old idea chain. I could trace the Latest Thing from New England campuses to the Boston Globe to the New York Times to the Atlanta Journal. Then Europeans would pick up the Latest Thing and then the colonies, the English language press in Australia and South Africa, would pick it up.

It ran like a Mussolini train schedule, perfectly predictable and right on time. This was useful to me, because I knew what "new" ideas people would come up with out where I was ahead of time. But I did not realize until now how exactly like a train it was. It depended on enormous initial investment in an established track made up of iron rails.

As Dave points out, the old idea train was the ONLY means of transporting ideas. If you had told people in 1908 that autos and trucks and suchlike playthings would reduce the importance of railroads, you would be laughed at.

But at NBC and CBS they are not laughing.

We can worry about their Maginot Line or we can concentrate on developing our Blitzkrieg.

The Koran says the infidel must be crushed. At the same time we are constantly told that Islam is a tolerant religion.

I hate to interrupt a perfectly good shouting match with information, but as usual there is a lot to what both sides are saying.

Moslems often refer to all non-Moslem faiths as "infidels." Sunni Moslems refer to Shiite Moslems as "heathens" and Shiite Moslems refer to Sunni Moslems as "infidels." Like most insults, these labels are not strictly accurate.

When the Koran uses the word "infidel," it is referring to faiths which are not derived from the Old Testament. Judaism, Christianity and Islam all recognize the Old Testament. Moslem countries allowed Jews and Christians to practice their own faith. In Moslem countries, Christians and Jews were discriminated against, but they were not killed.

Pagans, true infidels, were killed by Islam. So those who worshipped the old Greek gods or the old Arab tribal deities were slaughtered outright. Followers of all the old religions of Northern Europe were burned alive.

This is exactly the same approach medieval Christians used in relation to Jews. Jews were permitted to practice their religion in Catholic countries, in Eastern Orthodox countries, and in Protestant countries, but a "pagan" was burned alive.

A Jew who practiced his Old Religion was tolerated in every Christian land. But any of my ancestors who practiced his Old Religion was burned alive. Jews are the only ones we hear complaining about discrimination because they are the only ones who are still alive to do so.

No one complains about the burning of "heathens" by Christians because our old religions were wiped out by pure intolerance. The only people still around to complain are Jews, so the significance of the fact that they were allowed to live and practice their faith under Christians and Moslems is totally ignored.

So what we call the tolerance of Islam, slaughtering infidels but not Jews, was practiced by Christians.

When Jews were persecuted they went to Moslem lands or to other Christian lands. This sort of "Tolerance" is a very relative term.

According to the Old Testament, today's Israel was taken from its native inhabitants complete with blood, fire and genocide. Islam was spread with the sword just as Old Testament Judaism was. So the Crusaders, about whom Christians feel so guilty because they took the Holy Land by fire and sword, were simply the third of three faiths which took the same land the same way.

The forceful taking of Israel by the Jews in our age is a repetition of a very old process.

No faith based on the Old Testament is likely to be tolerant.

Pagans were almost always tolerant. Which may be why I must refer to them in the past tense.