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With legal same-sex marriage sweeping both Europe and North America, one can safely say the West has never been less homophobic.
Michael Totten
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Iranians, when left alone, are far more liberal-minded and modern than Saudis. The Iranian and Saudi governments, though, are remarkably similar in their fanatical absurdity. The Saudi government has always been more severe, but just at the moment when the Iranian regime is tightening the screws again, Saudi Arabia's own morality police are being stripped of some of their powers.
Michael Totten
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We all have to deal with the world as it is, but sacrificing Taiwan to the wolves is outrageous. Taiwan had a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council until Richard Nixon, neverminding tens of millions of corpses, gave it to Mao Zedong. Nixon told Taiwan that the US was engaging instead with the mainland Chinese.
Michael Totten
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In Europe the lunatic fringe is going mainstream. Maddening as this is, I really do worry for them. I'm beginning to think something terrible might happen over there.
Michael Totten
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Russia has long been a paranoid land power. It's huge, mostly flat, and wide open to invasion. Just to name a few examples, it was invaded by the Mongols in the 13th century, Napoleon in the 19th, Nazi Germany in the 20th, and has been recently squeezed by NATO expansion in the former Soviet bloc. These events seared themselves into the Russian psyche. They breathe better with buffer states.
Michael Totten
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Americans are good at solving problems. We've put men on the moon, cured countless diseases, and invented nearly all modern technology from televisions and telephones to microchips and the Internet. We created a durable democracy that has lasted more than 200 years, ended slavery, destroyed Hitler's Nazi regime, and bested the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Surely, then, we can solve terrorism, or at least drastically reduce it, but let's get one thing clear. There is no such thing as The Answer. There is no silver bullet, no magic wand, no perfectly calibrated piece of legislation that Congress can pass to make terrorists leave us alone.
Michael Totten
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I don't think it's right to compare German gullibility to American gullibility by pointing out, for example, that lots of Americans falsely believe Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11 attacks. There is a qualitative difference between believing Saddam was behind an attack on America and believing that the American government was behind an attack on America. It is at least plausible that Saddam had something to do with it, even though he didn't. The idea that the U.S. government committed that deed is insane.
Michael Totten
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People in Scotland don't enjoy having decisions made for them in England any more than the English like having decisions made for them in Belgium. Nationalism in Britain cut both ways.
Michael Totten
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A mob set fire to the Saudi embassy in Tehran, stormed the compound and trashed its offices while Iranian security personnel stood aside. This is hardly anything new. The Iranian government has been violently contemptuous of worldwide norms of diplomacy ever since it seized power in 1979. The Iranian hostage crisis, where Islamist revolutionaries held 52 foreign servicemen and women hostage at the American Embassy for 444 days, was just the beginning. Four years later, Iran's terrorist proxies in Lebanon used to a suicide truck bomb to destroy the American embassy in Beirut. Ten years later they blew up the Israeli embassy in Argentina, also with a suicide truck bomb.
Michael Totten
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By obsessing over politics above all else, identitarian artists of the twenty-first century resemble the Socialist Realists from the Soviet Union in the early- to mid-twentieth century. One could charitably call Socialist Realism an artistic style, one that glorified peasants, factory workers, and Communist values, but it was nurtured by a totalitarian police state and was the only style allowed by the government lest hapless artists wished to live out the remaining days of their lives in a Siberian slave labor camp.
Michael Totten
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Lebanon may not be the most crucial country according to narrowly defined American interests, but like Tunisia, it's one of the few Arab countries that has had a real shot at building something resembling a democratic system during the last couple of years. Lebanon is divided against itself, though, as it always has been, and Syria and Iran are aggressively and even violently backing the anti-Western and anti-democratic side. With no one supporting Lebanon's pro-Western and pro-democratic side, there was ever only one possible outcome.
Michael Totten
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Sexual assault in public is so pervasive in Egypt that the authorities ban men from some cars on the subway so women can get to work in the morning without being mauled.
Michael Totten
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America is tired of being America, so Russia is being Russia again. While an exhausted and burned out United States wishes international migraines like the Syrian civil war would just go away, Russia is energized by the prospect of filling the vacuum and thus once again playing a major role on the world stage.
Michael Totten
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Shockingly, only 32 percent of Millennials think it's absolutely essential that civil rights protect people's liberty. What on earth is going on? Partly it's a matter of historical experience. Those born in the 1930s were alive during Hitler's conquest of Europe. Those born a bit later have no memory of World War II, but they do remember Stalinist Russia, a more distant threat, but one that was still frankly terrifying. Those born later still have no memory of the darkest days of the Soviet Union, but they do remember the Cold War and the Berlin Wall.
Michael Totten
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I stared at the city below out the window as I sipped my red wine. Havana looked like a glittering metropolis in the dark. Night washed away the rot and the grime and revealed nothing but city lights. It occurred to me that Havana will look mostly the same—at night, anyway—after it is liberated from the tyrannical imbeciles who govern it now. I tried to pretend that I was looking out on a Cuba that was already free and that the tables around me were occupied—by local people, not foreigners—but the fantasy faded fast. I was all alone at the top of Cuba's Elysium and yearning for home—where capitalism's inequalities are not so jagged and stark.
Michael Totten
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What will become of Northern Ireland? It can't be neatly partitioned any more than Baghdad can be neatly partitioned.
Michael Totten
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Would it be great if we could get along with Russia or reset relations? Of course. But it's not going to happen because there's not a damn thing you can to do change Russia's national interests or its centuries-long hostility toward its neighbors.
Michael Totten
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To paraphrase Leon Trotsky, you may not be interested in war but war is interested in you.
Michael Totten
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Trump has changed his position on Syria twice and even reversed himself once, but he still can't find the right answer... He said he thinks the Middle East would be better off if Saddam Hussein and Moammar Qaddafi were still in charge of Iraq and Libya, and that Syria will be better off if Bashar al-Assad remains in power for the same reason... He sounds like a random guy in a bar who's thinking out loud after reading a couple of newspaper articles that are fuzzy on the details. We all run into people like that once a while, people who don't really know anything about the Middle East but think they've got it all figured out anyway. He realizes it's hard, though, and figures, hey, let the Russians deal with it instead.
Michael Totten
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If Turkey wasn't already in NATO, it would not be invited to join. Indeed, a lot of Americans want to kick Turkey out of NATO. Don't. It might be emotionally satisfying, but we're going to have to deal with the Turks whether we and they like it or not, and we'll get far better results if we do it within a cooperative framework than if we don't.
Michael Totten
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Cuba is a police state and Che was its co-founder. Cubans 'love' him the same way Romanians 'loved' Nicolae Ceausescu and East Germans 'loved' Berlin Wall architect Erich Honecker. You know what happens to Cubans who display open hatred of Che? They get arrested. When he was still alive, they were executed or herded into slave-labor camps. So yeah, everyone 'loves' him. It's required by law. Woe to those who disobey State Security.
Michael Totten
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Did somebody have a nice little chat about the 2 billion dollars in aid money we give Egypt every year?
Michael Totten
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There were no violent Nazi-like demonstrations in the United States against Arabs or Muslims, not even on or after September 11, 2001, when ten times as many people were murdered in the most spectacular terrorist attack in world history.
Michael Totten
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Trump's national security advisor is much more eager to fight a huge war than George W. Bush or Barack Obama. If you voted for Trump because you want less war instead of more, you're probably out of luck.
Michael Totten
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The truth about Che now has its boots on. He helped free Cubans from the repressive Batista regime, only to enslave them in a totalitarian police state worst than the last. He was Fidel Castro's chief executioner, a mass-murderer who in theory could have commanded any number of Latin American death squads, from Peru's Shining Path on the political left to Guatemala's White Hand on the right.
Michael Totten
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Quote of the day
Be a sinner and sin strongly, but more strongly have faith and rejoice in Christ.
Martin Luther
Michael Totten
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Bio:
Michael J. Totten is an American journalist and author who has reported from the Middle East, the Balkans, Cuba, Vietnam, and the Caucasus. His work appears in various publications, Web sites, and on his blog.
Known for:
Resurrection: A Zombie Novel
In the Wake of the Surge
Taken
Road to Fatima Gate
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