Book Review: How Do You Kill 11 Million People?

“The punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is to live under the government of worse men.”

-Plato

I heard about this book while I was on vacation, and had to run out and pick it up.  It’s a small book, and can be read in one setting.  I hope you read this review and run out and grab your own copy.

“How Do You Kill 11 Million People?” by Andy Andrews looks at the importance of politicians telling the truth.  Some of the recent discussions on here have turned to questions of truth and politicians. I thought this also made it an interesting subject since we are going through a presidential election right now.   Mr. Andrews looks at why its’ important for us to keep our elected officials honest.  He does this with a case study:  How was Hitler able to kill 11 million people inside of Germany without its people rising up against him?

Hitler started with a small lie.  The Nazi’s would go to a community and start erecting fencing and barbed wire around it.  They would warn the community that the Russians were on their way and the fencing was for the protection of the community.  The community accepted it because, after all, the government was only trying to protect them.  At some point, officials from the government would show up to meet with the community.  According to Andrews, an official would say something similar to this:

Jews:  At last, it can be reported to you that the Russians are advancing on our eastern front.  I apologize for the hasty way we brought you into our protection.  Unfortunately, there was little time to explain.  You have nothing to worry about.  We want only the best for you.  You will leave here shortly and be sent to very fine places indeed.  You will work there, your wives will state at home, and your children will go to school.  You will have wonderful lives.  We will all be terribly crowded on the trains, but the journey is short.  Men?  Please keep your families together and board the railcars in an orderly manner.  Quickly now, my friends, we must hurry!

There are two reasons why we should all pay close attention to Mr. Andrews books.  First, he isn’t arguing from a Republican / Conservative or Democrat / Liberal point of view.  Instead, he is only trying to point out what can happen when we don’t hold our elected officials accountable.  Second, he isn’t arguing that anyone currently in government is going to start killing people in our communities.  However, unchecked, they might someday.

One way Mr. Andrews suggests keeping our elected officials honest:  verify what they say.  With the advent of the internet, youtube, and blogs like this one, it’s easy to verify what any candidate or activist says.  Voting records of most elected officials are public record.  Most people believe politicians are dishonest, but how many times have you actually fact checked anything a politician said to you?

This should apply to politicians we disagree with AND agree with.  While everyone wants Congress and the Senate kicked out of office, most people would like to keep their representative. Yet, how many of us believe our own representatives are honest with us?  How much dishonesty are we willing to accept from a candidate?

How Do You Kill 11 Million People?  is a very quick read, but is very powerful.  Mr. Andrews says in his book that:

I wrote this book for you to use as a tool.  I wrote it for you to give away.  I wrote it for you to discuss and preach about and read to your children.  I believe that now, more than ever, America needs to be challenged and inspired to participate.

I challenge you to check up on your own favorite candidate and on the President during this election cycle.

The Republican Base has had it!

I don’t like to repost articles or long quotes on this site.  However, occasionally I come across something that I think is worth sharing.  Rush Limbaugh opened his show after the South Carolina primary with a few incredibly insightful comments.  I found myself agreeing with everything he said.  I wanted to post it here to get everyone else’s take on it.  Rush started talking about this when trying to explain Newt Gingrich’s success in the South Carolina primary.   He starts by arguing that the questions about Newt’s former wife weren’t what catapulted him into the lead in South Carolina. From the Rush Limbaugh Show:

Why did those questions tee Newt up, and why did Newt know what to do with them?  Very simple. I’ve been doing this show for 23 years, and one of my themes from the beginning, from 1988, has been that the American conservative middle class are the ones playing by the rules.  They are the ones that obey the law to the best of their ability.  They raise their kids.  They try to shield their kids from cultural rot and depravity. They try to keep them off drugs. They try to get them into college. They follow as best they can all the rules and they’re laughed at and made fun of and they are impugned everywhere they look.  They go to the movies, they’re mocked and made fun of.  They turn on the radio, listen to music, they’re laughed at, mocked, and made fun of.  They turn on television, watch an average television show, they are laughed at, mocked and made fun of.  They open the newspaper, same thing.  They’ve had it. They’ve been dealing with this for over 20 years, and nobody’s fought back for ‘em. Not one person ever has fought back for ‘em.

The last time somebody actually spoke up in this large a forum, a presidential forum, would have to be Reagan; and Reagan did it not so much by what he said (although he had his moments). He did it by winning. He did it by skunking these people! Since then, the Republican leadership has not seemed focused so much on winning and they sit there and they take it. Whenever their own voters are insulted — when their own voters are laughed at and impugned and called racists, sexist, bigot homophobes — the Republicans don’t defend them nor themselves because they’re scared to death the independents are gonna be upset, or the media is gonna be upset.

So the base of the Republican Party, the voters, have been bottling up for 25 years, a resentment — an anger, if you will — that their own party won’t fight for them, won’t fight for itself, won’t fight for what’s right. So when Newt gets teed up with these questions from Juan Williams and John King and whoever else and simply says what they’ve been thinking for 25 years, they say, “Finally!” What they want right now is fight-back, what they want is push-back, what they want is kick-back, what they want is smack-down! What they want is for these people who have been laughing at them and mocking them and impugning them, put in their place.

They’re tired of the cultural rot taking place in the country. They’re tired of the incessant growth of government and spending. They’re tired of it, and they’re frustrated as they can be that members of their own party who get elected can’t seem to articulate their own passions. Politics is about passion, and the Republican Party doesn’t seem to have it! There’s always fear of somebody. Fear of the media, fear of Democrats. Well, Newt doesn’t act like he’s got any fear. So how many wives does he got? “I don’t care!” What did he do for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac? “I don’t care.” What are his national disapproval ratings?

“I don’t care! Finally somebody’s telling the bad guys who they are, what to do and that we’re not gonna take it anymore — or that we don’t want to take it anymore.” Now, you can sit there and you can say that that’s cockeyed, that elections aren’t won that way. Uhhhh, they aren’t? Who just won? Who’s already leading in the polls in Florida? George Will had a fascinating statistic over the weekend. Mitt Romney — Mr. Electability, according to the Republican establishment; Mr. The Only Guy That Can Give Us the Senate — is 9-and-16 in his election career. He’s won nine and lost 16. He’s nine out of 25. That, they tell us, is Mr. Electability — and they’re sitting around, the base is, and they’re saying, “We don’t care about this traditional stuff that you care about that’s kept you in second place all these years.”

Obama Cuts Our Military

The defense budget is being reshaped in the midst of a presidential contest in which Obama seeks to portray himself as a forward-looking commander in chief focusing on new security threats. Republicans want to cast him as weak on defense.

—FoxNews

Today the Obama administration says it wants to cut the U.S. Defense budget by $259 billion over the next five years.  However, this is suppose to look like a simple cost savings restructuring.  The administration is claiming that our military will still be stronger than it was on 9/11.  But will it?

The biggest cut that is being reported is the number of soldiers our military is going to be reduced by.  Defense Secretary Leon Panetta listed among the cuts:

The Army would shrink by 80,000 soldiers, from 570,000 today to 490,000 by 2017. That is slightly larger than the Army on 9/11. The Marine Corps would drop from today’s 202,000 to 182,000 — also above the level on 9/11.

The administration claims our military will still be, “…slightly larger than the Army on 9/11″.  This is true if you fudge the numbers a little.  In our pre-9/11 military, the army consisted of 32 Brigades.  Our army under these cuts would have 33 Brigades.  The Obama administration is hoping you don’t dig any deeper.  In our pre-9/11 military, each brigade had 3 heavy combat battalions.  Brigades in our current military have 2 heavy battalions and 1 light battalion.  Brigades under the current plan aren’t as strong as those organized pre-9/11.  So while we have more brigades, those brigades aren’t as strong as they use to be.  Some might call this slight of hand a lie.

That’s not the only deception in the plan.  Panetta also says, “Purchase of F-35 stealth fighter jets, to be fielded by the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps, would be slowed.”  That may not grab you on first glance.  However, back in 2009, President Obama canceled production of the F-22 fighter.  According to the New York Times:

The Pentagon would rather buy unmanned aircraft to gather intelligence in Afghanistan and accelerate the testing for the F-35, a new plane designed to attack ground targets. Pentagon officials say the F-22 is hard to maintain and costs $44,000 to operate for an hour, compared with $30,000 for older planes.

…and at the time,  an F-22 site run by Lockheed Martin,

 the Pentagon will end the F-22 fighter jet and White House helicopter programs run by Lockheed, but would increase production of the company’s Joint Strike Fighter.

Now, our military will be without the F-22, and will slow the production of F-35.  Slowing production will also drive up the cost of the F-35.  If President Obama is re-elected, should we expect him to kill the F-35 due to its increased cost in a year?

The Obama administration is going to continue to use the death of Osama bin Laden as evidence they are strong supporters of our military and they take foreign threats seriously.  While the president does deserve credit for allowing that mission to proceed, the proof is in today’s announcement of what our president really thinks of national defense.  He’s willing to make our military weaker than it was before Sept 11, 2001.

A Letter to South Carolina

Dear Voters of South Carolina,

You have a very important weekend ahead of you.  The eyes of the United States will be on you this weekend.  You will cast your votes to help select the GOP nominee who will hopefully defeat President Obama.  I think the best candidate to do that is Newt Gingrich.

Is Newt perfect? No, not even close.  No one is.  There have been a lot of articles written about Newt’s personal life going back to the Clinton years.  As Thomas Sowell has written, “If Newt Gingrich were being nominated for sainthood, many of us would vote very differently from the way we would vote if he were being nominated for a political office.”

Gingrich isn’t the perfect candidate.  He’s not the most conservative politician in the United States.  However, he is at least as conservative as the other candidates.  He also has an impressive list of accomplishments.  I think most political observers would say he is the smartest person in the room among the presidential candidates from both parties.  He deserves credit for engineering the Republican take over of the 1990′s.  He deserves credit for the “budget surplus’s” and the welfare reform of the Clinton years.  I think he is more knowledgeable on domestic and international issues.

A general election would stack up Newt’s record against the President’s record. If you boil President Obama’s record down two or three issues, they’re 1) Obamacare, 2) a terrible economy, and 3) an abysmal foreign policy.  On issue 2 and 3, I honestly believe the GOP candidates that are left will all be a great improvement over the current president.  That leaves Obamacare.

If Mitt Romney is the GOP nominee, then Obamacare is entirely off the table.  ”Romney-care” from Massachusetts  share’s many similarities with Obamacare.  The White House is going to say in a general election that they based Obamacare on Romneycare.  Mitt Romney has failed to distance himself from his Massachusetts health care plan, and has defended his plan over and over.  The American people deserve a debate on Obamacare, and the president deserves to be held accountable for his health care plan, one way or another.

Newt Gingrich isn’t a good candidate for sainthood.  He is a great candidate for President.  He should be your choice for the GOP primary.

War is All Hell

The U.S. Marine Corps is launching an internal investigation into the culture of the Corps in response to a video that purportedly shows troops urinating on the corpses of suspected Taliban fighters, a Marine official told ABC News today.

The probe will attempt to answer the question “What happened in the Marine Corps that this happened?” according to the official.

–Lee Ferran, ABC News

There has been a lot of criticism of the 4  U.S. Marine’s accused of urinating on Taliban corpses.  I would like to spend a little time trying to put this into perspective.  I don’t condone this behavior, but I don’t necessarily condemn it either.  This is a war, and this happened on the battlefield.  Theoretically, these Marines killed these same fighters.  I think that may have bothered the Taliban fighters more.

Let’s also remember that while these Marines are being condemned, I don’t remember any condemnation coming from Afghanistan or the Taliban when Al-Quedea members beheaded Daniel Pearl on video, then released the video for everyone in the world to see.  The Wikipedia entry describing the video of Pearl’s death says that at the end:

A few more images are shown near the image of Pearl’s head. The last 90 seconds of the video show the list of demands scrolling, superimposed on an image of Pearl’s severed head being held by the hair.

Which of these behaviors sounds more barbaric to you?

During World War II, Marines fighting the Japanese often took golden teeth as souvenirs.  Some Marines took Japanese skulls.  They would boil the flesh off, then mail the skull home to family and loved ones.  There is an image online from Life Magazine that shows a lady looking at a skull her boyfriend sent her from overseas.   This practice was so common that it was discussed in magazines and newspapers during the time.  President Roosevelt is reported to have had a Japanese skull on the White House desk that was presented to him by a soldier.

We can always look for more ways to make war humane.  At the end of the day, War is all Hell.  These Marines may have crossed a line we don’t like, but both former Marines, and the enemy these kids are fighting have done much, much worse.