[Brian Allgar]

Originally Posted by Charlie Southerland

Unlike some here, I'm for free speech. So is Trump.

I can't improve on Mary Meriam's comment: "hahahahahahhahahahahahaha!!!!!!"

Someone on Facebook recently asked: "Who is now shutting down free speech?" Well, actually, it's Donald Trump, who wants to silence anyone who dares to criticize or disagree with him, and bans from his press conferences any reporters who won't lick his obscenely obese arse. And that, as we all know, is one of the first steps to a fascist dictatorship.

As for someone higher up the thread who called Charlie a pig, I must protest. This is an "ad porcem" attack.

[Roger Slater]

Free speech, when you are the president of the USA, does not include the right to make up lies about the former president and, with literally zero evidence to back up those lies, demand that Congress investigate (all the while bitterly opposing as "political" an investigation into your own campaign staff who have been caught red-handed, as it were, telling lie after lie about their contacts with Russian agents).

[John Whitworth]

Surely everybody thinks Blair is something you scrape off your shoe.. Except his mendacious crew, and I am sure you, Brian, are not among them.

Michael, you write good poetry but your political opinions are ridiculous.

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

Article on military strike in Yemen

[Andrew Frisardi]

Excellent article, Andrew. Iona Craig really knows her stuff. Still no evidence of the valuable intelligence the U.S. supposedly gathered in that attack, but there is plenty of evidence for the pointless destruction of lives. As for Trump, his failure to mention their deaths speaks volumes.

More and more, we'll find that the Trump administration is a better recruiter for jihadists than anything the ISIS propaganda machine could have come up with. It's as if certain key players want to throw gas on the fire, to create an excuse for all-out American-style blow-the-f*#k-out-'em warfare. Bannon's fundamentalist view of history is all the rationale that's needed to do that, conscience-free.

[Nigel Mace]

Andrew, that article on Bannon's favoured racist reading matter is by far the most chilling that I have read - and it clearly shows that this insane tide of prejudice, a word which hardly seems adquate in these circumstances, runs deep within the Trump administration. The exchange with Sessions is jaw-droppingly awful. How on earth has this vile book been allowed to circulate? I am beyond appalled and not a little scared. This is the language of lunacy, no whit different from that of the racist ideologues some 50 million died to stop by 1945.

[Andrew Frisardi]

Yes, Nigel, it's profoundly disturbing. To add to it, the similarities between Bannon's views and those of Anders Breivik (the Norwegian white supremicist mass murderer) are pretty hard to overlook. Breivik's dystopian novel of choice was The Turner Diaries, also beloved of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. Creepily enough, Breivik timed his slaughter to memorialize the halting of the Ottomans at Constantinople in the 15th century, an event mentioned in the French novel as well.

[Nigel Mace]

Some wonky history here - not surprisingly from these characters! Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453 - and in May not July. I think this is a scrambled version of Breivik's mad notion that 'the muslims' (sic) would be driven from Europe on the 630th anniversary of the fall of Constantinople. All too crazy to be worth comment - except, of course, that such a dangerous lunatic was able to do so much hideous harm.

[Andrew Frisardi]

My bad, Nigel. I'm not good at remembering historical dates. What I was recalling in a vague way was something I read in Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, by Mark Juergensmeyer, where the author writes about Breivik's manifesto that Breivik posted on Facebook just before he set out to slaughter all those people:

The manifesto, titled, “2083—A European Declaration of Independence,” ran over fifteen hundred pages, and was a bizarre mixture of diary entries, summaries of books and articles, and a paranoid analysis of European history and politics, focused primarily on what the author thought were the evil influences of feminism, cultural Marxism, and especially Muslim culture. The killing, apparently, was in part an attempt to gain public attention for this incoherent, vituperative essay. For much of that night I sat in my study, reading the manuscript and trying to make sense of it all. The item that first claimed my attention was the title, not just the part about a “European Declaration of Independence” (for what? from whom?) but also the date. What was significant about the year 2083? The title of Breivik’s manifesto, which was posted on the internet on that day, is 2083, the date that Breivik suggested would be the culmination of a seventy-year war that began with his action. Yet seventy years from 2011 would be 2081—why did he date the final purge of Muslims from Norway to be two years later, in 2083?

I found the answer on page 242 of Breivik’s manifesto, where he explains that on 1683 at the Battle of Vienna, the Ottoman Empire military was defeated in a protracted struggle, thereby insuring that most of Europe would not become part of the Muslim empire. The date in Breivik’s title is the four hundredth anniversary of that decisive battle, and it appeared that in Breivik’s mind he was re-creating the historic efforts to save Europe from what he imagined to be the evils of Islam. The threat of Islam is a dominant motif of the manifesto, and Breivik’s sense of urgency in stopping what he imagined to be a Muslim tide surging over Northern Europe is palpable. “The time for dialogue is over,” Breivik proclaimed. “The time for armed resistance has come.”

[Nigel Mace]

I hope this posting is not misconstrued by any Mod., but I felt that it was only fair, having challenged Charlie to 'fess up with an offering as a 'Trump poet' (he sent us to the Penn Review), that I did the reverse in relation to the dis-ease of this side of the pond. I did and it's up on the Metrical Thread as "Job's Lot" - all brick-bats accepted.