Fashion victim

An Italian woman who converted to Islam has been fined €80 (~US$100) for appearing in public with a nikab (a face-covering veil), under a Fascist-era law forbidding the public wearing of masks. She is, of course, damn stylish.

Tying Illuminati to Doom

Patrick pointed at a new (to me) blog recently, The Structure of Lies in a Land Without Silence, specifically the post about the Spitting-on-Vets Myth, the false urban legend about anti-war protesters spitting on returning Vietnam veterans.

I was more interested by this post about how the lies of the “Swift Boat Veterans” recapitulates a myth from the French Revolution equating liberalism with treason. I’d known, in the fuzzy abstract, that many soldiers in Vietnam had strong doubts about the war (to put it lightly). I hadn’t known how that there were nearly as many fraggings as Pentagon records admit to:

Officers who insisted on taking resistant units into the field were often attacked by the troops under their command—what was called "fragging," after a common method—the use of a fragmentation grenade. The Pentagon reported 96 fraggings in 1969 and 209 in 1970—but these were almost certainly low-ball figures.

And I hadn’t known about this:

Over time, massive resistance developed to going to Vietnam, along with massive resistance to fighting, once there. Zinn notes, "As early as June 1965, Richard Steinke, a West Point graduate in Vietnam, refused to board an aircraft taking him to a remote Vietnamese village…. In early 1967, Captain Howard Levy, an army doctor at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, refused to teach Green Berets, a Special Forces elite in the military."

Resistance increased in step with major protests, such as on Moratorium Day, October 15, 1969. Some troops wore black armbands—the symbol of the anti-war movement’s resistance activities that day. Zinn writes,"A news photographer reported that in a platoon on patrol near Da Nang, about half of the men were wearing black armbands. One soldier stationed at Cu Chi wrote to a friend on October 26, 1970, that separate companies had been set up for men refusing to go into the field to fight. ‘It's no big thing here anymore to refuse to go.’ The French newspaper Le Monde reported that in four months, 109 soldiers of the first air cavalry division were charged with refusal to fight. ‘A common sight,’ the correspondent for Le Monde wrote, ‘is the black soldier, with his left fist clenched in defiance of a war he has never considered his own.’"

Speaking of which, I assume most of you saw this bit of recent news from Iraq:

The Army is investigating members of a Reserve unit in Iraq who refused to deliver a fuel shipment to a town north of Baghdad under conditions they considered unsafe, the Pentagon and relatives of the soldiers said Friday. Several soldiers called it a "suicide mission," relatives said.

Up to 19 members of the 343rd Quartermaster Company were detained at gunpoint for nearly two days after disobeying orders to drive trucks that they said had not been serviced and were not being escorted by armed vehicles to Taji, about 15 miles north of Baghdad, relatives said after speaking to some of the soldiers.

The right-wingers are already laying the groundwork for blaming this sort of thing on liberals. No matter who wins on November 2nd, it’s gonna be a bumpy decade.

Suskindest cut

Man, every anti-Bush blogger and LJer in the world is gonna be linking to this Ron Suskind piece in tomorrow’s NY Times Magazine:

Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me recently that "if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3."

My first thought was that Suskind is a pro-Bush plant, trying to lure Democrats into voting for Bush, ’cause that civil war thing, hey, fun to watch. Especially from a distance. Maybe we can get them to do it in some other country? Anyway, a bit further down, an anecdote:

In the Oval Office in December 2002, the president met with a few ranking senators and members of the House, both Republicans and Democrats. In those days, there were high hopes that the United States-sponsored ''road map'' for the Israelis and Palestinians would be a pathway to peace, and the discussion that wintry day was, in part, about countries providing peacekeeping forces in the region. The problem, everyone agreed, was that a number of European countries, like France and Germany, had armies that were not trusted by either the Israelis or Palestinians. One congressman -- the Hungarian-born Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California and the only Holocaust survivor in Congress -- mentioned that the Scandinavian countries were viewed more positively. Lantos went on to describe for the president how the Swedish Army might be an ideal candidate to anchor a small peacekeeping force on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Sweden has a well-trained force of about 25,000. The president looked at him appraisingly, several people in the room recall.

''I don't know why you're talking about Sweden,'' Bush said. ''They're the neutral one. They don't have an army.''

Lantos paused, a little shocked, and offered a gentlemanly reply: ''Mr. President, you may have thought that I said Switzerland. They're the ones that are historically neutral, without an army.'' Then Lantos mentioned, in a gracious aside, that the Swiss do have a tough national guard to protect the country in the event of invasion.

Bush held to his view. ''No, no, it's Sweden that has no army.''

The room went silent, until someone changed the subject.