Last night, I was playing for my son the six marvelous Adam Curtis BBC documentaries on "the modern sense of self" (right up your hallway, keats) I'd downloaded a few weeks ago, and suddenly, I remembered that Part 2 {"The Phantom Victory) and Part 3 ("Shadows of the Cave") from THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES: THE RISE OF THE POLITICS OF FEAR, the jewel of the Collection, use Bernard Herrmann's coda for CITIZEN KANE under the 9/11 attack sections.

You may download the Adam Curtis collection on the torrent services.

And here is my review of THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES

http://www.epinions.com/content_193667698308


Possibly, with the exception of THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, this docurmentary is the most significant film not yet given a full theatrical release. Curtis cites difficulties in getting "music releases" as the bottom line which has prevented the release of at least a DVD. Could the use of Herrmann's music or the non-verbal reference to, and use of, Orson Welles' material from CITIZEN KANE be a partial explanation?

The idea just occurred to me.

Glenn

Hi there, Glenn!

Thanks for the post on THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES. For anyone who actually knows anything about Sayyed Qutb and Leo Strauss, (ie. me), Adam Curtis's documentary sounds like a magnum of chloroform (for example, The Project for a New American Century is a think tank, not a letter or memo; the missive you cite was probably the 90-page report issued by the Project entitled "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources For a New Century". The report can be read here: http://www.webcitation.org/5e3est5lT. I defy anyone to find anything in it that resembles MEIN KAMPF, or is in any way puritanical, in the accepted sense of the term.)

But who cares about politics, this is Wellesnet! And your link to your epinions review of this clever if lengthy remake of the Picasso episode of F FOR FAKE led me to peruse your other epinion reviews (as a restauranteur, I love your restaurant reviews. Really.), and in particular your review of the DVD of Citizen Kane. It may be one of the finest things I have ever read on that remarkable, extraordinary, endlessly interesting work; and if this were a well-ordered world, your magnificent essay would preface any future editions of THE CITIZEN KANE BOOK, in place of Pauline Kael's pathetic desecration.

I was particularly struck by these two passages:

"What else can we say about CITIZEN KANE, sixty years after its creation? It starts with . . . rosebud -- and ends . . . with all the things we get for Christmas, the stuff with which we furnish our homes, the gadgets we spend our money on, the photos of "happier times" we keep in the garage, the games and jigsaw puzzles that take up our lives, the junk around us when we die: everything that is given to others, sold second-hand, or buried, thrown away, cremated . . . gone."

" But underneath, CITIZEN KANE is nothing less than a symbolic biography of the primal Cain, and of the great majority of Americans, rich or poor, weak or powerful. We, like Charles Foster Kane, follow the practices of Western Civilization by taking part in tribal rituals, exorcising kindness, losing hope, gathering useless goods about us, often betraying our brothers, spouses, children for material possessions; and we buy a house, perhaps, but die feeling we should have accomplished more -- all those dreams of our childhood."

Welles spent his life trying to avoid Kane's fate, but in the end he died like his fictional creation, trapped in a Xanadu of his own making, not a strictly material one, to be sure, but one just as real, and vast, and stultifying; the Xanadu that was Welles' self-created legend. To be sure, it was a legend that Welles both fought against and abetted; and the jury is till out as to whether the legend has hurt or helped the man and the artist. The question is, was it worth the effort? To expend all that energy in opposition, and yet still end up in the same place? In short, could Welles have lived differently, and still been Welles? Could Kane have lived differently and still been Kane? Would he have wanted to?

Kane: You know, Mr. Bernstein, if I hadn't been very rich, I might have been a really great man.
Thatcher: Don't you think you are?
Kane: I think I did pretty well under the circumstances.
Thatcher: What would you like to have been?
Kane: Everything you hate.

Welles certainly played out that exchange. Perhaps, in the end, it was a fate worth accepting. After all, not many of us end up dying in Xanadu, whether real or metaphorical. And Welles' legacy has hardly gone up in smoke, belching out of a decaying furnace into a cold, dark, indifferent sky. Rosebud is still with us...

Glenn,
Were you at Radio City on May 1, 1941 ?

Dear mido505: Thank you for finding my review of CITIZEN KANE useful. As so many others have discovered -- and illustrated for us -- if one gives himself/herself over to the film, many layers of personal insight may be found. I'm glad that you thought those passages you quote had meaning.

I would say that Welles was able to flower far beyond the structures which came to contain him. In that aspect, his tragedy was different from the one he may have envisaged and feared for himself while fleshing out Charles Foster Kane, the figure many of us experience in watching the film. That tragic Charlie Kane, we can see from our glimpse of him as a young boy before losing his mother, began as a romantic dreamer, an idealist, and then, circumstances forced him to exchange his dreams for money and power. Kane scarcely was able to realize even a small portion of his real potential as a human being.

You unerringly quote the philosophical climax of the film and Charles Foster Kane's life.

Orson Welles, on the contrary, throughout his struggles with himself and outside challenges, achieved a great deal more. His imagined sanctuary was not the cold, cobbled together tomb of Xanadu but a soaring Chartres of artistic and intellectual accomplishment.

As for THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES: THE RISE OF THE POLITICS OF FEAR, given your knowledge, I trust that you are not evaluating this three-part documentary on a basis of my inadequate review. I hope that you are not forming your conclusions without actually having watched the entire work, a failing which I sometimes take Toddy Baesen to task for. The BBC production from late 2004 is an F FOR FAKE-type of essay film which would have pleased Orson Welles immensely, I'm sure.

[BTW, I am indebted to you for forcing me to examine my review again, leading to my discovery that for at least a third time, a URL for the documentary has gone dead. I've found a new one, even if one has to view it in 16 parts: http://curezone.com/forums/fm.asp?i=1468187 -- There is also a synopsis and a sampling of critiques, but I would like you to take the time -- three hours, I know -- to actually see the film, perhaps, an hour at a sitting as was originally intended for TV audiences. The documentary has never been shown on American Televison, and only in a feature version shown during the Cannes Festival in 2005, at a few theaters within the United States.]

Believe me, Curtis's documentary, rather than being "a dose of chloroform," is a highly entertaining, thoughtful, and chilling examination of how we came to be where we are today. [And that's true, whether or not you agree with its thrust.] It is full of inside jokes, references to movies and TV, and marvelous editing (even in its broadcast version) which would gladden the heart of keats or Welles, and it has an internal logic which is hard to argue with. Remarkably, few events or errors have risen during the intervening five years since it was first broadcast to challenge Adam Curtis's main thesis: The great majority of us in Western industrialized societies now live without real belief that any political ideology of the past -- the Great Chain of Being, imperialism(?), democracy, liberalism, conservatism, socialism, communism -- can offer us a better future than our fathers had. We are left with fanatical religious cults that continue to preach illogical, unrealistic modes of living here on earth, or hold out rewards in an afterlife that the discoveries science and the irrational slaughters over religion during the last hundred years make increasingly absurd. Fascism or what we now call Corporatism is what remains for the elite. For the rest of us, politicians now pledge only uncertain protection from what Curtis calls the "phantom menace," which began as "godless communism" in the Cold War and, as he shows, morphed into "the war on terrorism," a sort of "shadow on the wall of the cave," represented by the contradiction in terms, "Islamo-fascism" of the last decade, or whatever it will be called in the future.

You bring up my discussion of The Project for a New American Century. Actually, the group which manned "the project" and formulated the document you cite, while they may inform a portion of THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES, are dealt with mainly as individuals, such as Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Dick Cheney, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Paul Weyrich, Michael Ladeen, Irving and William Kristol, etc. They appear mainly as members of President Ronald Reagan's "Team B," which took as their mission (though I don't think anyone in the documentary quite says it) to discredit detent and disarmament efforts with the Soviets by any means necessary. And a number of them condemn themselves out of their own mouths, as when the eminent Soviet Scholar, Dr. Richard Pipes, Reagan's trusted advisor, a member of "The Committee on the Clear and Present Danger," characterizes his former boss as naive, a nice old fellow who had to be brought around, and speaks of the lack of evidence for Soviet military superiority as evidence that their superiority did exist, and was all the more deadly because no one could detect it. "That's important, yes." Dr. Pipes says. " If something is not there, that's significant. ... By its absence. If you believe that [the Soviets] share your view of strategic weapons, and they don't talk about it, then there's something missing. Something is wrong. And the CIA wasn't aware of that."

[BTW, most of the critics of THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES proudly confess that they would never waste their time sitting down to watch it! Just as, if you only glanced at your copy of The Project for a New American Century, one might surmise that only a group of minor factotums wrote and subscribed to it, rather than that nearly everyone who came to occupy the top echelons of the Bush Administration signed off on it.]

When I first compared The Project for a New American Century to Mein Kampf, admittedly, I was a bit out on a limb, but subsequent events and reports certainly offer support for my wild-eyed remark. It has emerged that the document you provide for us began as a position paper in 1991, a seed, a rosebud if you will, which grew like a Glenn Beck tree, supported by a kind of "loyal opposition" idea that caused it to be revised and expanded every year or so as the decade of the 1990's passed. And so, after 9/11, The Project, what had begun as probably a fanciful series of documents regarding America achieving geopolitical dominance in the World by throwing a protective condon around Russia and China, became a matrix for the Bush Administration to target "60 nations for preemptive strikes." That sounds like a modern Mein Kampf (from a different perspective) to me. Here is a Timeline which later appeared in a Frontline presentation:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline ... /cron.html

Within the document, A Project for a New American Century, which you cite, mido505, there is the framework for the above strategy of achieving unrivaled World military domination, right? I call your attention to the sentence at the top of Page 51, on which the viability of implementing that plan pivots:

"Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor."

I don't believe that Adam Curtis ever quotes that sentence, but it underlies his whole argument that, if not before -- certainly after 9/11 -- the United States (with the complicit support of Great Britain) was influenced by Team B types to engage in a long term ["generational," I think Vice President Cheney called it] task of taking advantage of events to achieve American geopolitical hegemony over the World.

. . . which leads to the shambles of today's political, economic and environmental situation.

I urge you to watch THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES: THE RISE OF THE POLITICS OF FEAR, Adam Curtis's homage to the spirit of Orson Welles' F FOR FAKE. I urge others to do the same. Then, tell me what you think.

Glenn

No, Alfie, on May 1, 1941, I was looking forward to a large orange Popsicle in a small Northeastern Ohio town.

Glenn

O.K., Glenn, I'll give it a shot, although any attempt to show ideological, methodological, or moral equivalence between Qutb and Strauss, and between the Islamists and the neocons is going to leave me panting for less. For instance, Strauss's thought was formed, not in 1940's America, but in 1920's Germany, where the failures of the left/liberal Weimar Republic led directly to the horrors of Naziism. Strauss was looking to protect and preserve what was best in the Western tradition, which he defined as the uneasy but profound union of two ultimately irreconcilable modes of thought - the ancient faith-based religious culture founded by Abraham, and the rationalist culture of classical Greece, i.e. Athens and Jeruselem. The difficult balance between the two led directly to the particular and unique dynamism of Western culture. Strauss may have thought that America had tipped too far towards a soulless post-enlightenment rationalism, but he would have been horrified by a Qutb, who represented the worst of the many children of Abraham. Remember, Glenn; whatever his political leanings, Welles was a member and upholder of the same Western tradition that Strauss championed. Whatever their political differences, Welles and Strauss could stand side by side looking at Chartres, and essentially see the same thing. A Sayeed Qutb would blow the cathedral up, and bury Welles in the rubble. Not much use for a Citizen Kane in that world view...

Thanks, mido505: I appreciate the civility and kindness of your reply. And I do not want to sidetrack a discussion which began with simply the observation of music from CITIZEN KANE being used by Documentarian Adam Curtis.

But, assuming that you have now watched entirely THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES: THE RISE OF THE POLITICS OF FEAR, and granting that an F FOR FAKE-type film documentary is going to have some degree of oversimplification, I am puzzled by three aspects of your reaction:

1) Curtis is simply saying that two highly influential but little known figures in their respective cultures came to believe that the societies of which they were a part had taken catastrophically wrong turns. Leo Strauss (having experienced the consequences, as you say, of a failed liberal democracy in Weimar Germany) was critical of the American society which he fled to, and those who interpreted his teachings, on a basis of the direction that Post-War America was taking, decided that Liberalism was leading to moral decay in Western Civilization. Sayeed Qutb, having suffered culture shock when he observed the waste, the "licentiousness," of American Life Styles in Greely, Colorado, and after a visit to a Christian church social, etc, saw the influence of Western commercialism in a different and sinister light when he returned to his native Egypt. That entwined irony on which Curtis's documentary takes off shows that the followers of each man became radicalized by reactions of their governments to essentially the same critique, trapped in a kind of mirror image of each other.

In existential terms of results, what is it about Strauss's adoption of Machiavelli's "Noble Lie" which makes his criticism of Western Society superior to Qutb's disgust with what he saw as Western corruption of his Islamic Culture? The conclusions each man reached led to profoundly tragic events, events I would hazard, neither man would have approved of in the beginning.

2) You ignore how each of these men was treated by their respective governments. Strauss was looked upon as a guru by a generation of privleged conservative thinkers, and his Good Guy-Bad Guy, it's Okay to Lie in Order to Preserve the State, machiavellian ideas were implemented at the highest levels of several American Administrations -- leading to serious damage to our Constitutional protections, Foreign Policy disasters, the final over-reaching of Capitalism in the World, and the needless deaths of at least hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Qubt, for expressing his philosophical objections, was imprisoned twice, tortured by CIA-trained interrogators, suffered a heart attack, was radicalized, and executed. His followers, most notably Ayman al-Zawahiri, mounted a revolutionary movement in his memory which, when they were driven out of their own countries, ended up with their being under the protection of the Taliban in Afghanistan. They eventually, after scattered terroristic acts, generated a lucky strike financed by Osama bin Laden on the power centers of America, in 9/11, That gave the Straussians, Committee for the Clear and Present Danger, Team B operatives, the excuse they needed, for all intents and purposes, to extend The Cold War into the 21st Century in the guise of "a war on 'Islamofascistic' terror."

Why is the slaughter of thousands of innocent Americans (and tens of thousands of others around the World) due to the religious "purity" of one group of fanatical followers more horrendous than the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocents caused by the "noble lies" of another group of fanatics? The thinking of both Strauss and Qutb, inadvertently perhaps, led to terrible and barbaric ends, of the kind which both Joseph Conrad and Orson Welles foresaw in the last Century.

3) You neglect the fact that Orson Welles, though a kind of spiritual Christian, I suppose, was also "A Citizen of the World." His travels in North Africa and the Far East left him with a great respect for Islamic, Buddhist, and Asian cultures. He is a man who, after all, has a square dedicated to his memory in Mogador, Morocco. I think the difference between Welles and either Strauss or Qutb is that the latter pair would have rationalized the destruction of both Chartres and Islamic treasures if the end justified their means. Welles could never have done that.

In terms of results, what makes Leo Strauss superior to Sayeed Qutb?

Finally, mido505, though I appreciate your taking time to respond to my posting, I am left with the question: What specifically did you find to object to in THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES? Would you join Beatrice Welles in possibly condemning Curtis's use of Bernard Herrmann's "Xanadu Theme" to point up the destruction of The Twin Towers, or would your criticism extend to others areas of the documentary?

Give me some specifics.

Glenn

Sorry, Glenn, if I had mislead you into believing that I had watched the doc; I intend to do so, on your recommendation, but it will take time, in hour increments, as I work 60+ hours a week and am about to take a much needed vacation. I'll get you a full critique when finished.

As for Strauss, I think you have a highly misleading view of him, and to his relationship with the neocons, who owe more to Irving Kristol than they do to Strauss. Suffice it to say, without boring Harvey Chartrand and other readers of this thread, is that Strauss was highly critical of Machiavelli, as having initiated a revolution in the history of political thought that led to the impass we face today. It is Machiavelli (a staunch Republican, by the way, in the older sense of the term) who replaced the older classical focus on virtue and the ideal to a more "realistic" emphasis on will and passion, a path later followed by Locke, Adam Smith, and the utilitarians. By the way, the "Noble Lie" that you keep harping on comes from Plato, not from Machiavelli.

I'm not saying Strauss was right; I merely point out that there is a lot more to him than the ludicrous caricatures promulgated on the left. To say that Strauss would have rationalized the destruction of any historical treasures if the end justified the means is a bit too much, Glenn. I hope there is more to the documentary than that type of thinking.

I'm sorry, but I just can't take all this hysteria and salivating about George W. Bush and Satan and conspiracies and neocons and the evil Leo Strauss. As if George W. Bush was the first politician to take us to war, and as if mean old conservatives have some kind of monopoly on bloodlust. Here's a little history lesson to jog the memory:

Progressive icon Woodrow Wilson brought us into WWI.
Liberal icon (and Welles's hero) FDR brought us into WWII.
Liberal New Dealer Harry Truman nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Prince of Camelot, the matyred JFK, initiated the Vietnam war.
New Dealer and inventor of the Great Society, LBJ, inflates that conflict into an untenable morass.

Interregnum, when despised anti-communist criminal Richard Nixon ends Vietnam war, and crafts the policy of detente with China and the Soviet Union that you, Glenn, blame the neocons for scrapping.

Return to status quo when liberal Congress, led by John Kerry and Joe Biden, halts all aid to South Vietnamese government, leading to triumph of North Vietnamese communists, and, as spillover, the destruction of Cambodia.

After the boring Carter years New Democrat Bill Clinton returns to form by carpet bombing the Balkans, leading to the destruction of many historical landmarks in the name of the end justifying the means. But hey, all the world loves a lover, right?

Now, the most left-leaning man ever elected to the presidency of These States proves the most despised President ever correct in his claim that when his successor sees what crosses his desk every day, he will do no different. Despite campaign promises to the contrary, Obama leaves Guantanamo open; continues extraordinary rendition; leaves the Patriot Act in place; refuses to prosecute phone companies for helping the government listen in to terrorists; despite noises made by his dumb Attorney General, refuses to prosecute Bush officials implicated in torture; does not withdraw troops from Iraq; and will soon, after a dog and pony show of hemming and hawing, give General McCrystal exactly what he needs in Afganistan.

No terrorist threat, my (Aunt) fanny.

I hope the powers that be let this thread go on for a while; the topic is off-topic so we can't be accused of highjacking it. And I'm just getting warmed up.

Qutb was not radicalized because he was tortured by those ubiquitious "CIA-trained" interrogators. Nassar was in the Soviet camp, so Qutb would have been tortured by KGB-trained interrogators. Nasser had Qutb arrested and tortured because a) as a Muslim secularist he had no use for the Islamists and b) because the Muslim Brotherhood tried to have him assassinated. Qutb was a radical long before Nassar got on his case.

Moments in logic #3459: if the neoconservatives challenged the policy of detente in order to defeat the Soviet Union and end the cold war, why would they want to extend the cold war into the 21st century? Given the choice of extending the cold war into the 21st century by a) maintaining the status quo with the Soviets or b) defeating the enemy and then creating a new one by some incredible feat of conspiratorial rigamarole, I think I'd choose the former.

Noble Lies #96856: Anyone remember Joe "What I Didn't Find in Africa" Wilson? Joe gained his fifteen minutes of fame when he claimed that he and his wife were targeted by the Bush administration for revealing that the administration's claim that Saddam had tried to procurr yellowcake uranium from Niger to fuel his revived nuclear program, part of their justification for the invasion, was a big, fat (Noble) lie. Well, several hundred tons of the yellowcake that Wilson failed to find in Africa was found in Iraq, by the invading Americans, and carted off to Canada in a daring special operation. Story linked here (at MSNBC!): http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25546334/

As the sainted Barack Obama, Nobel Peace Prize in hand, is rapidly learning, power is difficult. You have to make real decisions in a real world based on events outside of your control. For instance, I was adamantly opposed to the invasion of Iraq until I read an interview with evil neocon Paul Wolfowitz that put things into perspective for me. He stated, in a more complex fashion the following:

Strip away all the hysteria and rhetoric about the decision to invade Iraq and it boils down to three possible choices the administration could have made. There are only these three, and no others.

1) Status quo. Maintain current sanctions and containment regime, to keep Saddam bottled up. This is the "Clinton" option. Problem is, support for sanctions is weakening in Europe, particularly in France and in Germany, where business and governement want to do deals with Saddam. The corrupt UN sponsored Oil for Food program only serves to strengthen Saddam's hold on the country, pouring billions into his already overflowing coffers. Meanwhile the already brutalized civilian population suffers horrifically because of the sanctions, with perhaps hundreds of thousands of children dying because of a lack of much needed medication. At the time the Left in U.S. and Europe was heavily critical of the sanctions for these humanitarian reasons.

2) Cry uncle. Lift sanctions and normalize relations. Leave Saddam alone! This is the paleocon "Pat Buchanan" option. Sounds great, except that history shows that when this guy is left to his own devices, he starts wars and massacres significant numbers of his own population.

3) Invade and get rid of the guy.

That's it. Three choices. There are no others. Each choice will lead to the deaths of a significant number of people. Imagine yourself as President, Glenn. You're the decider. Pick one. Decide.

Dear mido505: You have now quite straightened me out. It would be unfair of me to continue our discussion, your being at the disadvantage of not really being able to judge THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES because you have not seen it.

When you have had a rest and some time to take in the stimulating, entertaining, maddening (you'll no doubt find), Wellsian-styled documentary, we may want to continue a critique of it.

I'll only say two things about what you have most recently written here. First, your view of modern history is . . . breathtaking! [For instance, how John Kerry, who was studying law at Boston College, and Joe Biden, who was a newly elected junior Senator from Delaware, managed to engineer the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975 is a feat only followers of Leo Strauss could explain!] Second, I'll also postpone any description of Professor Strauss as Curtis depicts him until after you have completed your viewing. Stressing again that THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES is a Wellsian film essay, full of cheekily amusing oversimplifications (despite their emotional and essential veracity), and granting that the man was to his critics one weird cat, "a man who stares at goats" kind of thinker, I anticipate that Curtis will have you frothing at the mind.

At least, we agree that President Obama is displaying all the symptoms of "a noble lie" philosophy attributed to the handlers and followers of George W. Bush.

Looking forward to your pleasurable vacation at the TV.

Glenn

O.K., Glenn, you got me there. Sometimes I get a bit worked up and botch the facts. As you correctly note, John Kerry attempted to ensure our defeat in Southeast Asia by testifying in front of the Congress, and not as a member of it. I stand by my comments on Biden, cosponsor of the Case-Church amendment. Anyway, sitting down now to my first dose of that frothy, family entertainment, THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES. Talk to you soon...

Ah-h-h, mido505: You PROMISED!

The topic is "off topic" -- has been, no matter how we enjoy it, ever since you allowed that you have haven't seen the movie. This is "Beasenism" at its worst! And I shall not be part of it, sir, no matter how much we are enjoying it.

Two weeks from now, by the Mills of He Who Never Wishes His Name Uttered Again, we shall meet here, and decide if Adam Curtis fairly used deconstructed references to CITIZEN KANE in creating THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES: THE RISE OF THE POLITICS OF FEAR.

Until then, may you dream of the Aquerello Chef's Menu in San Francisco, or a year's free subscription to Big Hollywood, your choice, and know that although I stood shoulder to shoulder beside you on the Grassy Knoll, I am not a supporter of "The Iranian Candidate."

Meanwhile, I enjoy your company, trooper.

And remember, the answer to most of your questions is to be found in the works of Karl and Albrecht Haushofer.

Watch the Movie! So we can continue this.

Glenn

DOTZ IT!!

I don't want to see any more of your lovable botched facts for at least the next three hours.

Good watching, kiddo.

Glenn

Glenn,
This might be the time to ask you to regale us with one of your stories about You and Orson Welles.

Mido, Since you mentioned Pat Buchanan, I thought I'd toss in this excerpt from the one book of his that I've read. I'm not a huge fan of his Archie Bunker persona, but he did come up with this rather chilling analogy about the U.S.'s hastily-prepared overreaction in the Middle East that I think Orson Welles would have appreciated:

"Terrorists are like picadors and matadors. They prick the bull until it bleeds and is blinded by rage, then they snap the red cape of bloody terror in its face. The bull charges again and again until, exhausted, it can charge no more. Then the matador, though smaller and weaker, drives the sword into the soft spot between the shoulder blades of the bull. For the bull has failed to understand that the snapping cape was but a provocation to goad it into attacking and exhausting itself for the kill."
-Patrick J. Buchanan, Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency


"People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both"
Benjamin Franklin