The 'Denier': The Consequences Of Insane Ideas

AlGore recently emerged from his Man Cave in Nashville, ranting darkly about 'Deniers', people who don't agree with his view of Global Warming, and his very real set of 'solutions' to a perhaps not-so-real problem. If you are a 'Denier', you are ignorant, obstructionist, perhaps evil. The only other people about whom that fabricated word has ever been used are people who assert that the Holocaust never happened.  You know, 'Deniers'...

Now, about a new sort of 'Denier', that doesn't seem to trouble AlGore or anyone in the Obama Administration:

Clifton at Another Black Conservative (found to your right, and highly recommended) recently posted what seemed to be a strange news item: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is quoted as claiming that the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 did not occur, but were instead were propoganda fabrications.

So, OS thinks, naaahh, this can't possibly be an accurate account.

So he goes digging around, and yep, there it is.

Even CNN can't make this stuff up.

This assertion is just, well, insane. The product of a sick mind. OS, along with millions of others, saw these events take place. He had friends working in Manhattan that day, one of them at a nearby stock exchange. They assure him it happened. There were neighborhoods of Long Island, Queens, and New Jersey that suffered multiple deaths of loved ones. There were a lot of funerals. These events happened. The hole is still in the ground where the buildings stood. It's madness to even feel the need to write this paragraph, but these are the times in which we live.

Insane ideas, and insane people, attract followers. Lots of them, sometimes. Examples come to mind.
In the twentieth century, two prime candidates are Hitler and Stalin.

OS was beavering away last week, with the TV on low, looking for a ball game, when he tripped across a documentary on the Battle of Stalingrad. The details, in a way, don't matter. But the scope of the tragedy is worth remembering:

Various scholars have estimated the Axis suffered 850,000 casualties (killed, disabled, captured) among all branches of the German armed forces and its allies, many of them POWs who died in Soviet captivity between 1943 and 1955. 400,000 Germans, 120,000 Romanians, 120,000 Hungarians, and 120,000 Italians were killed, wounded or captured. Of the 91,000 German POWs taken at Stalingrad, 27,000 died within weeks and only 5,000 returned to Germany in 1955. The remainder of the POWs died in Soviet captivity.

Those were just the casualties for the Germans and their allies. In one manner or another, some 845,000 lives were sacrificed to Hitler's insane dream of empire. And that was just one battle in the whole bloody mess. Stalin, for his part, was willing to sacrifice innumerable soldiers and civilians, because by golly, it was the city named after him!

Insane ideas, and insane people, attract followers. Lots of them, sometimes.

Ahmadinejad is barking mad. And he sits on huge oil and gas reserves, unlike Hitler. Additionally, he is pushing full steam ahead on the development of nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them to a large part of the world. Hitler did not succeed at that, thanks to the RAF, and a sane Churchill, who recognized the danger and named it. But, he was on his way. He needed about another year or so.

So, what is the response of the United States government?  Well, the missile defense shield that would protect most of Europe has been removed.  Obama and Hilary keep yammering about 'sanctions' via the UN, in which China and the Russians have zero interest. A goodly portion of Iran is attempting to resist the madman, and the White House utters barely a word.  Mainly, the US government has decided that we should all just join hands, sing 'We Shall Overcome', smile a lot, borrow and spend kajillions more for health care and other follies, and essentially hope for the best. As for Israel...well, they're hung out to dry, and they know it.

This is how wars get started.

Meanwhile, back in Iran, the suppression of any and all who pose any possibility of dissent continues.
This account is just one of many, in this case a Christian minister imprisoned and tortured for performing baptisms.

OS writes this because he doesn't wish to see his children and grandchildren sacrificed at another Stalingrad at the behest of the 'Deniers' in the West, who deny that evil exists, and that evil people do indeed carry out their evil intentions.

Project 2996

A Green Shoots nomination for Project 2996, a cooperative project to remember those who were murdered on Sept. 11, 2001.

The shock can wear off after time, 2996 on September 11, untold thousands at places like Shiloh and Gettysburg, the some 2500 lost on D-Day, the horrendous casualties taken by the Marines on Iwo Jima and Okinawa, the fire-bombing of Dresden(in response to the fire-bombing of Coventry, in response to the air-raids on Munich, in a war seeking vengeance for 1914-1918...on it goes.)

OldSouth hopes the shock never wears off on this one. These people were guilty of nothing more than going about their lives, and many died because they chose to stay behind and assist those around them.

They were killed because...we won't know the whole story for some decades. That's how history works. But they were the victims of one of the sickest forms of religious zealotry in history, sourced in Islam.

Project 2996 will help keep that sense of shock alive, by putting a name and face to each innocent victim. We will continue to need it, since our politicians and cultural mavens wish to somehow tuck it away in the dark file cabinets of memory.

In memoriam

2,996 people, whose only crime was to be about their lives on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

Let us remember, and remember to teach our children (and theirs) about the examples of courage and character shown us that day.

And, to those who perpetrated the crime: Be assured, you haven't been forgotten by the citizens of this country.

Ask not for whom the drone buzzes.

It buzzes for you.