Don’t Be a Tellarite

“Tellarites do not argue for any reason; they simply argue.”
–Ambassador Sarek

On the “censorship” front:

Here @ LoOG BlaiseP nukes a Tellarite; even the usually gentle Dr. Saunders goes to DefCon 2 on Tellarites; over at the vaunted Volokh Conspiracy blog, a Tellarite’s earth gets scorched bigtime, and permanently.

I was reading up on the fascinating—and fascinatingly neglected in our national discourse—history of the Korean War today. It was the Republicans who ran against it, with Ike Eisenhower campaigning in the should-be-more-famous speech “I Shall Go to Korea”, to survey the battlefield [and he did], and “To forego the diversions of politics and to concentrate on the job of ending the Korean war–until that job is honorably done.”

The American people were weary of what we might call “Mr. Truman’s War”–our combat deaths were over 30,000, almost ten times those of “Mr. Bush’s Wars” of our own century. And to the disappointment of some “hawks,” including his friend and consultant Gen. Mark Clark, Ike ended it without comprehensive victory, accepting the armistice that divides the Korean peninsula to this day.

But the strange thing is that the armistice was accepted not only by the US, but by the Commie aggressors, and so quickly—June 1953, scant months after Ike’s inauguration.

Why? What I didn’t know until today—the Korean War being one of those things that were shunted down our national memory hole—is that Ike, finding Korea an unacceptable abattoir for America’s soldiers—threatened the use of nuclear weapons.

I simply didn’t know that, I never heard that ever, that President Eisenhower—who is increasingly admired by right and left alike as a wise and temperate man, a good president and kind of a mellow fellow—stopped the slaughter that was Korea with the threat of even greater force, not less force.

Ike did indeed speak softly, and he carried a bigass stick.

Neither was the Korean Armistice entirely satisfactory: Millions died north of the DMZ after the armistice, of political murder and starvation under the totalitarian boot of the Nork regime, and they continue to die.

I don’t mean to trivialize the sacrifice and horror that our troops suffered in Korea by comparing it to what happens on blogs, the Toy Department of the real world. This post was originally intended just to talk about Tellarites—don’t be one. You’re annoying and you don’t argue a point. You just argue for the sake of arguing and you’re a pig face too.

BlaiseP and Dr. Saunders gave me a bigass LoOG laugh: it’s about time somebody did something about the Tellarites, even if it takes the threat of nuclear weapons. We are a League of Gentlemen, afterall, no matter how Ordinary. It says so, right at the top of our main page. And it’ll take a big stick to keep it that way.

But you will in future keep a civil tongue on my diaries or I’ll blow your posts out. Am I making myself clear here?
—BlaiseP

BlaiseP Ikes the Tellarites. Of such stuff, peace is made. Props, sir.