SelwynDuke.com

Is Obama Turning Us into the Next Evil Empire?

By Selwyn Duke

When Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an "evil empire" in 1983, he was articulating in the boldest terms what had always been an American understanding. The Kremlin had long been fomenting communist revolution the world over, and we had long pursued our policy of "containment."

Thus did we fight wars in Korea and Vietnam, facilitate coups d'état against people such as Salvador Allende and support anti-communist rebels such as the mujahedeen in Afghanistan. Of course, plans didn't always come together. There was the Bay of Pigs debacle, and the covert Iran-Contra operation getting front-page exposure. The "police action" in Korea ended in a stalemate and Vietnam just became stale, losing the public and political support necessary for victory.

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TNA Cover Story — Obama: Beyond the Idea of an Icon

By Selwyn Duke

There has long been a certain objection to the divine command that we should worship God. It is simply: Why does God need you to worship Him? It is, really, an eminently fair question, and it has an eminently logical answer: God doesn’t need you to worship Him. You need to worship Him. Worshipping God has, among other things, the very great by-product of reminding us who God is and, by extension, who He is not: us.

This may seem obvious, but history has shown that this simple fact more often than not eludes man. For instance, Egyptian pharaohs were considered very important gods in their culture; in 44 B.C., Julius Caesar erected a statue of himself with the inscription, “The unvanquished god”; and in the mid 2200s B.C., King Narim-Sin of the Akkadian Empire was known as “the god of Agade.”

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Guest Piece: The Wages of Appeasemennt

By Bruce Walker

The world has known for many years that the wages of appeasement are the loss of moral high ground to monstrous villains.  During the Cold War, although America usually kept its military power adequate to deter Soviet aggression, the American Left (and European Left) blithely pretended that a regime which conspired with Adolph Hitler to start the Second World War, which instructed the Nazis about how to create massive camps in which millions of souls could perish – as millions had before the Nazis even came to power in Germany – and which preached as doctrine that any lie, any crime, any vice which advanced the cause of communism was morally on the same plane as America and the West.

Guest Commentary: And That’s The Way it Wasn’t – Walter Cronkite

By Bruce Walker

By all accounts, Walter Cronkite was a kindly, almost avuncular figure.  Many members of the journalist community have written eulogies of his decency and humility.  He had a long, happy marriage.  These things should count to us conservatives, who yearn for human life to be more about how it is lived than in the personal politics of each individual. We ought to respect, for example, the genuine marital love that Barack has for Michelle or, for that matter, the love that Jimmy Carter has for Roselyn.  If we fail to honor those good aspects of our political opponents, then we run the grave risk of becoming that hideous creation of the Left, homo politicus.

Savage Appearance: Critics Rebuke Pope Benedict XVI — 05/22/2009

Critics Rebuke Pope Benedict XVI — 05/22/2009

Guest Piece: The Biggest Problem of the Mainstream Media

By Bruce Walker

The media – newspapers, magazines, book publishing, radio, television, and film – have never at any point in the history of our nation been impartial.  Newspapers were once the whole heart and substance of our media.  They provided news, opinion, entertainment, advice, humor, advertisements and information.  Newspapers were often unabashed partisans.

The Tears of the Goddess of Liberty

By Bruce Walker

Twenty years ago the light of liberty flickered briefly in China.  In May 1989, Chinese students built a “Goddess of Liberty,” alternatively called a “Goddess of Democracy,” in Tiananmen Square.  Throughout much of China, the subjects of the nation, on the fortieth anniversary of the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War, expressed their support for liberty as well.  The whole world watched.  Then, on May 30, 1989, twenty years ago, the tanks of the People’s Liberation Army (the ultimate oxymoron) violently crushed the mass gathering and crushed all public dissent.  All this happened while the whole world watched.  There could be no pretense any longer that this was the People’s Republic.  It was, instead, the Oligarchs’ Republic.

Critics Rebuke Pope Benedict XVI

By Selwyn Duke

Pope Benedict XVI gave a speech at Israel’s Yad Veshem Holocaust Memorial this past Monday, during which he paid tribute to the Jewish victims of Nazi genocide. His words were not well-received by all, however, as some Israeli critics expected an apology from Benedict and felt that he was “restrained” in his remarks. Most notably, speaker of the Knesset, Reuven Rivlin, said, “[I was] hoping to hear an apology and a request for forgiveness from those who caused our tragedy, and among them, the Germans and the church. But to my sadness, I did not hear any such thing." Reuters tells us that the speaker also “referred to Benedict as ‘a German who joined the Hitler Youth and ... Hitler's army.’”

The Israeli speaker's remarks are ironic since he is falling victim (assuming he’s sincere) to a technique that none other than Adolf Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, spoke of when he infamously said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” In fact, Rivlin is in the grip of at least a couple of big lies, ones that, lamentably, are widely embraced.

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Guest Piece: Finance Capitalists and Scapegoats

By Bruce Walker

The doctored outrage at AIG executives raises one of the ugliest specters in modern political history:  mindless fury directed at “Finance Capitalism.”  The profits of men who create goods and services is easy to defend.  Bill Gates gave us Windows.  T. Boone Pickens and Ross Perot drilled for oil.  Sam Walton retailed consumer goods at very low prices.  People grasp the value to society which these men produce.

Why Stop With Global Warming?

By Bruce Walker

The heavy artillery of the Left has been wheeled into a line of barrage:  global warming is real; global warming is man-made; and if government does not stop, terrible things will happen.   This means  that we cannot save ourselves unless we are willing to make draconian sacrifices, to surrender our liberties to government, and  to accept blindly the latest version of politically-correct science.