Michael Totten - People Quotes

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It's possible that Russia might take even Kiev if Putin thinks the response to seizing Crimea is sufficiently supine. I doubt it, personally, but I don't know that he won't. No one can know that. He wouldn't get much out of it, aside from a violent migraine, that he isn't already getting by invading Crimea. Ukraine can't fend off a full-blown Russian invasion, but it can make an invasion bloody and expensive. And what would Russians back home think? Ukrainians aren't their enemies. There is little hatred between these two closely-related peoples.

Michael Totten
Why should anyone outside the art world care about this? Why not ignore these people and leave them to fester in their own irrelevance? The problem isn't just with the degradation of art, though that's bad enough. The real trouble is with identitarianism itself and the society-wide tribalism that's breaking out across the entire Western world, from San Diego to Budapest. Identity politics isn't new, nor is the politicization of art, but the shots fired in the battle of group identities by the avant-garde Left is being answered by the identitarians of the so-called alt-Right.

Michael Totten
The French gun ban accomplished a grand total of jack squat last year when ISIS hit Paris. And Mohammad Atta's crew killed thousands of people on 9/11 armed with nothing but box cutters.

Michael Totten
Ukraine could end up permanently divvied up in the future, with the Russian regions annexed by Moscow, either formally or de-facto, while the rest of the country, which naturally tilts more to the West, admitted to the European Union and NATO. That's a best-case scenario rather than a likely scenario. Ukraine in its current borders, though, surely won't be admitted to the European Union or NATO, at least not before the Russian Federation liberalizes dramatically, because too many people in its political class are volunteer tools of Moscow.

Michael Totten
Want a trip into bizarroland? Take a look at the Twitter feed for Iran's 'Supreme Guide' Ayatollah Khamenei. No, his Twitter feed hasn't been hacked by Al Sharpton. Nor is this a spoof site. It's the real online megaphone for the Iranian dictator. This pasty old man doesn't give a flying fork about black people, especially those who live in the United States. When he and his underlings chant 'Death to America', they don't mean death to white America. They're talking about the whole country, from our black president at the top to undocumented immigrants on the bottom and everyone in between.

Michael Totten
Government officials are almost always the worst sources and interview subjects. That's true everywhere in the world. They live in rarefied bubbles. They lie. They leave things out, sometimes because they want to and sometimes because they have to. They're often incompetent and even more often shockingly ignorant. Everyone has opinions, and lots of people have agendas, but nobody has an agenda the way government officials have agendas.

Michael Totten
Even a draconian absolute gun ban wouldn't work. Under what theory would a war on guns work any better than the war on drugs? Does anyone seriously believe that the government could ever take so many weapons away from so many people that terrorists would have to resort to running around with butter knives? Come on.

Michael Totten
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
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
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
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
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
Almost everybody hates the Washington swamp, including lots of people who live there. Of all American institutions, Congress has the lowest approval rating, less than 10 percent, and the military has the highest at 73 percent. In the Middle East and Latin America, numbers like these would portend a military coup. But we don't live in the Middle East or Latin America. We live here. So instead of a military coup, we got Donald Trump.

Michael Totten
Iraq has never been a coherent nation-state; arguably, it wouldn't exist if the British Empire hadn't installed the Kingdom of Iraq in 1932. Its three biggest communities—Sunni Arabs, Shi'a Arabs and Kurds¬—have proven themselves incapable of living together in peace. The country will probably never be both democratic and stable within its current borders. Splitting Iraq into its three constituent parts would be better for the people who live there. It would be better for us, too, insofar as this separation would prevent the kind of unstable anarchy that breeds both Sunni and Shia militias, including ISIS.

Michael Totten
And at least the U.S. got something out of the deal. At least our people are still among the living when they come home... Iran committed three criminal acts against American citizens and paid no price. We put kidnappers in prison for a very long time in this country, but the Iranian government was rewarded. What's to stop that government from doing it again? Nothing. Why should the Iranian government stop? Kidnapping and ransoming hostages works. And the regime is already gearing up to do it again.

Michael Totten