Our old friend Josh Trevino (aka Tacitus, or the Marble Douchebag) is dismayed that his clever thought experiments about concentration camps are not being received in a clinical, coolly rational fashion. I have nothing but sympathy. It's so hard nowadays to bring up concentration camps without everyone getting all emotional.
Tac is saying that Bush's plan to send in 20K or so more troops won't work. What would work would be to do what the British did to the Boers: separate the women and children from the men, and give the men the choice of "surrender or die." You'd need a "quarter of a million" soldiers to do this effectively. But Bush isn't proposing that we send in the 250K troops or so who are ready to do the dirty deeds necessary to win this fucker, and that's a total bummer. But there is still some joy in Mudville, because at least Bush wants to win, even though he won't. And that desire, which he clearly won't achieve, places him on a higher "moral plane" than the Left, who is otherwise named "Kos." Tac presumably knows Kos finds "defeat" to be a "palatable" option because he thinks Bush's plan to send in 20K or so more troops won't work, but he doesn't mention concentration camps. See, unlike that stinky Kos, at least Tac is "implacably opposed to the genocide-minded" folks we're fighting in Iraq. Kos is, presumably, merely placably opposed to the genocide-minded in Iraq, whom we are, it seems, not actually going to defeat. Still, Tac is implacable, and good for him.
Tac ends with a classic bit of posturing, sniffing prissily at the Left because they misread his article as calling for "indiscriminate murder" when he was merely calling for "concentration camps" where men would be given an option of "surrender or die." Or at least he is calling for other unspecified "cruel things," because "to eschew them is folly." Anyway, Tac knows in his heart that the Left isn't really against genocide, because if they were, they would have a different attitude towards military adventures that could never possibly work.
What a dizzy bastard. Anyway, all this is lifted to the level of high hilarity by the delightfully absurd Paul J. Cella, who as it turns out is not Maximos, but whose hatred for the English language burns as fierce. Cella's article is titled "In defense of a brave man," meaning Tacitus the Implacable, who had the gigantic balls one needs to write something and post it to the Internet. Cella spews words like "perforce" and "conmtemners," and ends up on the plinth declaiming against the Left like he's got a pair:
They have vitiated their idol, Reason, so that when we talk to them, even we, the Conservatives and skeptics of Reason, cannot use it.
These are the wages of the madness that has conquered so many in the West. If we survive it, we will owe a debt of gratitude to men like Josh, who did not fear to use reason on the problems that confront us.
Christ, that's embarrassing. A grown man wrote that. A grown man! Fucking hell.
Read through that comment thread though if you're interested in plumbing the moral depths of the kind of people who are outraged at the suggestion that they're in favor of Nazi-style concentration camps when they are in fact only calling for Boer-war style concentration camps.
Why does all this matter? Mostly because clowns are funny, even if they're also kinda scary. But there is a kernel of something more interesting here, in one of Tac's trademark "poof! it is I! Aha!" ninja-smokebomb goofball comments thread appearances, this time at Scott Lemieux's, whom he disses in his inimitible Fauntleroy fashion:
I would call you a liar, but that presupposes awareness of falsehood. I can, however, call you ignorant: suffice it to say that "exterminate all the brutes" is hardly an apt description of British strategy in the Boer War (or French strategy in Algeria, for that matter). I know this isn't your field -- but it's a pity you don't.
Actually, "exterminate all the brutes" IS a perfectly apt description of this kind of a strategy, as it is of all colonial strategies. Since Tac is such a fan of "context," let's put the phrase back in its proper place:
by and by I learned that, most appropriately, the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had intrusted him with the making of a report, for its future guidance. And he had written it, too. I've seen it. I've read it. It was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence, but too high-strung, I think. Seventeen pages of close writing he had found time for! But this must have been before his -- let us say -- nerves, went wrong, and caused him to preside at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites, which -- as far as I reluctantly gathered from what I heard at various times -- were offered up to him -- do you understand? -- to Mr. Kurtz himself. But it was a beautiful piece of writing. The opening paragraph, however, in the light of later information, strikes me now as ominous. He began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, 'must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings -- we approach them with the might of a deity,' and so on, and so on. 'By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,' etc., etc. From that point he soared and took me with him. The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember, you know. It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbounded power of eloquence -- of words -- of burning noble words. There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the exposition of a method. It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: 'Exterminate all the brutes!'
Joseph Conrad long ago said all that needed saying about our Tac.