Gosh, Old Nick, it's cold in here....
Gah. I find myself agreeing with Gordon.
It's understandable in its way, of course. I only agree with him because he's come round to my point of view: the really alarming part was when I had the urge to defend him having read all those whining, atavistic, betrayingtheleftcakes comments.
Here's what I think. He was probably wrong to call a nuclear deterrent "unacceptably expensive, economically wasteful and militarily unsound" back in 1984. It was, after all, the height of the Cold War, and frankly no expense was too great to ward off the malignant embrace of communism. It's hard, too, to understand what esoteric military thinking Gordon was applying to the issue to deduce that the deterrent offered by the assuredly catastrophically Phyrric nature of any victory claimed by the Russians was militarily unsound. We are still here, blogging away uselessly, after all.
What is certainly true, however, is that any arguments put forward along those lines today would undoubtedly be many, many times more foolish. The Soviets, for all their rather rum ideas about managing an economy and ensuring the freedom of their people, were nonetheless a comparatively civilised bunch and on the whole rather unlikely to embrace any kind of death cult just for the sake of it. Mark Steyn wrote,
It's understandable in its way, of course. I only agree with him because he's come round to my point of view: the really alarming part was when I had the urge to defend him having read all those whining, atavistic, betrayingtheleftcakes comments.
Here's what I think. He was probably wrong to call a nuclear deterrent "unacceptably expensive, economically wasteful and militarily unsound" back in 1984. It was, after all, the height of the Cold War, and frankly no expense was too great to ward off the malignant embrace of communism. It's hard, too, to understand what esoteric military thinking Gordon was applying to the issue to deduce that the deterrent offered by the assuredly catastrophically Phyrric nature of any victory claimed by the Russians was militarily unsound. We are still here, blogging away uselessly, after all.
What is certainly true, however, is that any arguments put forward along those lines today would undoubtedly be many, many times more foolish. The Soviets, for all their rather rum ideas about managing an economy and ensuring the freedom of their people, were nonetheless a comparatively civilised bunch and on the whole rather unlikely to embrace any kind of death cult just for the sake of it. Mark Steyn wrote,
The Left is remarkably nonchalant about these new terrors. When nuclear weapons were an elite club of five relatively sane world powers, the Left was convinced the planet was about to go ka-boom any minute, and the handful of us who survived would be walking in a nuclear winter wonderland. Now anyone with a few thousand bucks and an unlisted number in Islamabad in his Rolodex can get a nuke, and the Left couldn't care less.If Gordon, usually so absorbed in the cock-hardening amounts of "good" he believes he's doing, turns out not to be so stubbornly convinced of his own righteousness as to be incapable of accepting the increased threat of a nuclear attack since the Cold War, then there may be a little hope for him - and us - yet.
posted by Novus at 18:32
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home