Feedback | 2 August 2003

Comment on Sword of honour by Paul Robinson (26/07/2003)

National honour is a valid reason to go to war, but in the current case, there is also the principle of self-defence. When someone announces he’s going to do you serious or fatal harm, it is not required to give him one free blow before initiating defensive measures. In my state, (Colorado), if someone announces he’s going to kill you, and you believe the threat credible, and you have no other immediate recourse, you may use deadly force pre-emptively. In the current world case, we actually gave the enemy several free swings at us before deciding to hit back.

In the South, when a person becomes a threat to the general stability, and someone takes an opportunity to remedy the problem, “He needed killing.” is a valid defence, although you WILL be required to elaborate on this to the courts satisfaction, should the affair come to trial.
Bill Llewellin

First, Texas isn’t, nor was it ever, a part of the Old South, and George Bush is, in any event, an East Coast transplant. Furthermore, the people who generated the current US foreign policy, ancillary to “the war on terrorism,” are all from the East Coast and predominately Jewish.

Selective inattention can render one blind, or at least ignorant.
Russ Thayer

Mr. Robinson, a former British military intelligence officer, is apparently bothered by the possibility that American policy is in some way a function of Southern notions of honour. In his assertions, though, Mr. Robinson is mistaken as to American history, Greek literature, what precisely honour is and how it functioned both historically and presently. I will reply to him in the fashion the ancients preferred, “point by point.”

It is true that the Old South saw blacks as essentially outside of the realm of honour, which was part and parcel of the desire in the Old South to see blacks as alien generally.