Maverick Philosopher

Repost from Election Day, 2016: Catholics Must Support Trump

This is an unredacted repost from 8 November 2016.  My opinion of Trump is higher now than it was then.  But the piece is basically on the right track and I stand by it. I threw the dice for Trump and the sequel showed that I was right to do so.  I was vindicated in my prediction that he would appoint conservative justices to SCOTUS.  That was and is a big deal. 

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It is astonishing that there are Catholics who vote Democrat, when the Dems are the abortion party, and lately and increasingly a threat to religious liberty to boot.  How then could any practicing Catholic vote for Hillary or support Hillary by voting for neither Hillary nor Trump?

So here's my final appeal on Election Day.  It consists of a repost from August, substantially redacted, and an addendum in which I reproduce a recent bit of text  from George Weigel.

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Could a Catholic Support Trump?

Via Burgess-Jackson, I came to this piece by Robert P. George and George Weigel, An Appeal to Our Fellow Catholics (7 March 2016).  Appended to it is a list of distinguished signatories.   Excerpt:

Donald Trump is manifestly unfit to be president of the United States. His campaign has already driven our politics down to new levels of vulgarity. His appeals to racial and ethnic fears and prejudice are offensive to any genuinely Catholic sensibility. He promised to order U.S. military personnel to torture terrorist suspects and to kill terrorists’ families — actions condemned by the Church and policies that would bring shame upon our country. And there is nothing in his campaign or his previous record that gives us grounds for confidence that he genuinely shares our commitments to the right to life, to religious freedom and the rights of conscience, to rebuilding the marriage culture, or to subsidiarity and the principle of limited constitutional government.          

I will respond to these points seriatim.    

A. It is true that Trump is unfit to be president, but so is Hillary.  But that is the choice we face now that Trump has secured the Republican nomination.  In the politics of the real world, as opposed to the politics of utopia, it will be either Trump or Hillary: not both and not neither.  Are they equally unfit for the presidency? Arguably yes at the level of character.  But at the level of policy no clear-thinking conservative or Catholic could possibly do anything to aid Hillary, whether by voting for her or by not voting for Trump.  Consider just abortion and religious liberty and ask yourself which candidate is more likely to forward an agenda favorable to Catholics.

B.  Yes, Trump has taken vulgarity in politics to new depths.  Unlike milquetoast conservatives, however, he knows how to fight back against political enemies. He doesn't apologize and he doesn't wilt in the face of leftist lies and abuse.   He realizes that in post-consensus politics there is little or no place for civility.  There is no advantage in being civil to the viciously uncivil.  He realizes that the Alinskyite tactics the uncivil Left has been using for decades have to be turned against them.  To paraphrase Barack Obama, he understands that one needs to bring a gun to a gun fight.

C. The third sentence above, the one about appeals to racial fears,  is something one would expect from a race-baiting leftist, not from a conservative.  Besides, it borders on slander, something I should think a Catholic would want to avoid.  

You slander Trump and his supporters when you ignore his and their entirely legitimate concern for the rule of law and for national sovereignty and suggest that what motivates him and them is bigotry and fear.  Trump and Trump alone among the candidates has had the courage to face the Islamist threat to our country and to call for the vetting of Muslim immigrants. That is just common sense.   The milquetoast conservatives are so fearful of being branded xenophobes, 'Islamophobes,' and racists and so desirous of being liked and accepted in respectable Establishment circles, that they will not speak out against the threat. 

If they had, and if they had been courageous conservatives on other issues, there would be no need for Trump, he would have gained no traction, and his manifest negatives would have sunk him.  Trump's traction is a direct result of conservative inaction.  The milquetoasts and bow-tie boys need to look in the mirror and own up to their complicity in having created Trump the politician.  But of course they will not do that; they will waste their energy attacking Trump, the only hope we have, in violation of Ronald Reagan's Eleventh Commandment.  What a sorry bunch of self-serving pussy-wussies!  They yap and scribble, but when it comes time to act and show civil courage, they wilt.  They need to peer into a mirror; they will then know what a quisling looks like.

D. I concede that Trump's remarks about torture ought to worry a Catholic. But you should also realize that Trump's strategy is to shoot his mouth off like a rude, New York working stiff in order to energize his base, to intimidate his enemies, and to draw free media attention to himself.  Then in prepared speeches he 'walks back' his unguarded comments and adds the necessary qualifications. It is a brilliant strategy, and it has worked.

Trump understands that politics is a practical struggle.  It takes place in the street, in a broad sense of the  term, not in the seminar room.  We intellectuals cringe at Trump's absurd exaggerations, but Trump knows that Joe Sixpack and the blue-collared guys who do the real work of the world have contempt for 'pointy-headed intellekshuls' and he knows that the way to reach them is by speaking their language.

E. It is true that Trump's previous record supplies a reason to doubt whether Trump really shares Catholic commitments.  But is it not possible that he has 'evolved'?  You say the 'evolution' is merely opportunistic? That may well be.  But how much does it matter what his motives are if he helps with the conservative agenda?  It is obvious that his own ego and its enhancement is the cynosure of all his striving.  He is out for himself, first, and a patriot, second.  But Hillary is also out for herself, first, and she is manifestly not a patriot but a destructive hate-America leftist who will work to advance Obama's "fundamental transformation of America."  (No one who loves his country seeks a fundamental transformation of it.)

We KNOW what Hillary and her ilk and entourage will do.  We KNOW she will be  inimical "to the right to life, to religious freedom and the rights of conscience, to rebuilding the marriage culture, or to subsidiarity and the principle of limited constitutional government." Now I grant you that Trump is unreliable, mercurial, flaky, and other bad things to boot.  But it is a very good bet that some of what he and his entourage will do will advance the conservative agenda.  Trump is espousing the Right ideas, and it is they that count.  Can't stand him as a person?  Vote for him as a vehicle of the Right ideas!

So I say: if you are a conservative or a Catholic and you do not vote for Trump, you are a damned fool!  Look in the mirror and see the quisling who is worried about his status in 'respectable society.'

Companion post: Social Justice or Subsidiarity?

Here is what George Weigel has to say in NRO today:

The most obvious con is the Trumpian one. Over the past year, the Republican party was captured by a narcissistic buccaneer who repudiated most of what conservatism and the Republican party have stood for over the past half-century, cast venomous aspersions on Republican leaders and those manifestly more qualified than he is for president, insulted our fellow citizens, demeaned women and minorities, played footsy with the Russian dictator Putin, threw NATO under the bus, displayed a dismal ignorance of both the Constitution and the grave matters at stake in current public-policy debates — and in general behaved like a vulgar, sinister bore. In doing all this, Trump the con artist confirmed in the eyes of a partisan mainstream media every one of its false conceptions of what modern conservatism stands for and is prepared to do when entrusted with the tasks of governance.

This outburst does not merit reply beyond what I have said above and elsewhere; Weigel the man needs to seek help for a bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

But one last shot:  as for the Constitution, we KNOW that Hillary will shred it; Trump, however, has promised to appoint conservative justices to the Supreme Court, and he has provided a list.  How can anyone's head be so far up his nether hole as not to understand this?

The nation is at a tipping point.  Do your bit to save it.

Via Burgess-Jackson, I came to this piece by Robert P. George and George Weigel, An Appeal to Our Fellow Catholics (7 March 2016).  Appended to it is a list of distinguished signatories.   Excerpt:

Donald Trump is manifestly unfit to be president of the United States. His campaign has already driven our politics down to new levels of vulgarity. His appeals to racial and ethnic fears and prejudice are offensive to any genuinely Catholic sensibility. He promised to order U.S. military personnel to torture terrorist suspects and to kill terrorists’ families — actions condemned by the Church and policies that would bring shame upon our country. And there is nothing in his campaign or his previous record that gives us grounds for confidence that he genuinely shares our commitments to the right to life, to religious freedom and the rights of conscience, to rebuilding the marriage culture, or to subsidiarity and the principle of limited constitutional government.          

I will respond to these points seriatim.    

A. It is true that Trump is unfit to be president, but so is Hillary.  But that is the choice we face now that Trump has secured the Republican nomination.  In the politics of the real world, as opposed to the politics of utopia, it will be either Trump or Hillary: not both and not neither.  Are they equally unfit for the presidency? Arguably yes at the level of character.  But at the level of policy no clear-thinking conservative or Catholic could possibly do anything to aid Hillary, whether by voting for her or by not voting for Trump.  Consider just abortion and religious liberty and ask yourself which candidate is more likely to forward an agenda favorable to Catholics.

B.  Yes, Trump has taken vulgarity in politics to new depths.  Unlike milquetoast conservatives, however, he knows how to fight back against political enemies. He doesn't apologize and he doesn't wilt in the face of leftist lies and abuse.   He realizes that in post-consensus politics there is little or no place for civility.  There is no advantage in being civil to the viciously uncivil.  He realizes that the Alinskyite tactics the uncivil Left has been using for decades have to be turned against them.  To paraphrase Barack Obama, he understands that one needs to bring a gun to a gun fight.

C. The third sentence above, the one about appeals to racial fears,  is something one would expect from a race-baiting leftist, not from a conservative.  Besides, it borders on slander, something I should think a Catholic would want to avoid.  

You slander Trump and his supporters when you ignore his and their entirely legitimate concern for the rule of law and for national sovereignty and suggest that what motivates him and them is bigotry and fear.  Trump and Trump alone among the candidates has had the courage to face the Islamist threat to our country and to call for the vetting of Muslim immigrants. That is just common sense.   The milquetoast conservatives are so fearful of being branded xenophobes, 'Islamophobes,' and racists and so desirous of being liked and accepted in respectable Establishment circles, that they will not speak out against the threat. 

If they had, and if they had been courageous conservatives on other issues, there would be no need for Trump, he would have gained no traction, and his manifest negatives would have sunk him.  Trump's traction is a direct result of conservative inaction.  The milquetoasts and bow-tie boys need to look in the mirror and own up to their complicity in having created Trump the politician.  But of course they will not do that; they will waste their energy attacking Trump, the only hope we have, in violation of Ronald Reagan's Eleventh Commandment.  What a sorry bunch of self-serving pussy-wussies!  They yap and scribble, but when it comes time to act and show civil courage, they wilt.  They need to peer into a mirror; they will then know what a quisling looks like.

D. I concede that Trump's remarks about torture ought to worry a Catholic. But you should also realize that Trump's strategy is to shoot his mouth off like a rude, New York working stiff in order to energize his base, to intimidate his enemies, and to draw free media attention to himself.  Then in prepared speeches he 'walks back' his unguarded comments and adds the necessary qualifications. It is a brilliant strategy, and it has worked.

Trump understands that politics is a practical struggle.  It takes place in the street, in a broad sense of the  term, not in the seminar room.  We intellectuals cringe at Trump's absurd exaggerations, but Trump knows that Joe Sixpack and the blue-collared guys who do the real work of the world have contempt for 'pointy-headed intellekshuls' and he knows that the way to reach them is by speaking their language.

E. It is true that Trump's previous record supplies a reason to doubt whether Trump really shares Catholic commitments.  But is it not possible that he has 'evolved'?  You say the 'evolution' is merely opportunistic? That may well be.  But how much does it matter what his motives are if he helps with the conservative agenda?  It is obvious that his own ego and its enhancement is the cynosure of all his striving.  He is out for himself, first, and a patriot, second.  But Hillary is also out for herself, first, and she is manifestly not a patriot but a destructive hate-America leftist who will work to advance Obama's "fundamental transformation of America."  (No one who loves his country seeks a fundamental transformation of it.)

We KNOW what Hillary and her ilk and entourage will do.  We KNOW she will be  inimical "to the right to life, to religious freedom and the rights of conscience, to rebuilding the marriage culture, or to subsidiarity and the principle of limited constitutional government." Now I grant you that Trump is unreliable, mercurial, flaky, and other bad things to boot.  But it is a very good bet that some of what he and his entourage will do will advance the conservative agenda.  Trump is espousing the Right ideas, and it is they that count.  Can't stand him as a person?  Vote for him as a vehicle of the Right ideas!

So I say: if you are a conservative or a Catholic and you do not vote for Trump, you are a damned fool!  Look in the mirror and see the quisling who is worried about his status in 'respectable society.'

Companion post: Social Justice or Subsidiarity?

Here is what George Weigel has to say in NRO today:

The most obvious con is the Trumpian one. Over the past year, the Republican party was captured by a narcissistic buccaneer who repudiated most of what conservatism and the Republican party have stood for over the past half-century, cast venomous aspersions on Republican leaders and those manifestly more qualified than he is for president, insulted our fellow citizens, demeaned women and minorities, played footsy with the Russian dictator Putin, threw NATO under the bus, displayed a dismal ignorance of both the Constitution and the grave matters at stake in current public-policy debates — and in general behaved like a vulgar, sinister bore. In doing all this, Trump the con artist confirmed in the eyes of a partisan mainstream media every one of its false conceptions of what modern conservatism stands for and is prepared to do when entrusted with the tasks of governance.

This outburst does not merit reply beyond what I have said above and elsewhere; Weigel the man needs to seek help for a bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

But one last shot:  as for the Constitution, we KNOW that Hillary will shred it; Trump, however, has promised to appoint conservative justices to the Supreme Court, and he has provided a list.  How can anyone's head be so far up his nether hole as not to understand this?

The nation is at a tipping point.  Do your bit to save it.

Trotsky's (Misplaced) Faith in Man

On 20 August 1940, 84 years ago today, the long arm of Joseph Stalin finally reached Leon Trotsky in exile in Mexico City where an agent of Stalin drove an ice axe into Trotsky's skull. He died the next day. Yet another proof of how the Left eats its own.

The last days of Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky, prime mover of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, are the subject of Bertrand M. Patenaude's Trotsky: The Downfall of a Revolutionary (HarperCollins, 2009).  It held my interest from the first page to the last, skillfully telling the story of Trotsky's Mexican exile, those who guarded him, and their failure ultimately to protect him from an agent of the GPU/NKVD sent by Stalin to murder him.  Contrary to some accounts, it was not an ice pick that Ramon Mercader drove into Trotsky's skull, but an ice axe, a mountaineering implement far more deadly than an ice pick when used as a weapon.   Here is how Trotsky ends his last testament, written in 1940, the year of his death:

Read the rest over at my Substack site.

Among those who guarded Trotsky in exile was a fascinating character in his own right, Jean van Heijenoort. I have two Substack entries about him: Thomas Merton and Jean van Hejenoort: A Tale of Two Idealists and Like a Moth to the Flame: A Sermon of Sorts on Romantic Folly.  The latter begins:

Jean van Heijenoort was drawn to Anne-Marie Zamora like a moth to the flame. He firmly believed she wanted to kill him and yet he travelled thousands of miles to Mexico City to visit her where kill him she did by pumping three rounds from her Colt .38 Special into his head while he slept.  She then turned the gun on herself. There is no little irony in the fact that van Heijenoort met his end in the same city as Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky. For van Heijenoort was Trotsky's secretary, body guard, and translator from 1932 to 1939.

In these days when Comrade Kamala threatens to preside over a once-great nation, I offer a salutary reflection on the horrors of communism with the help of Lev Kopelev. It begins:

While completing an invited essay for a collection of essays by dissident philosophers, I pulled down from the shelf many a volume on Marx and Marxism, including Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxford UP, 1987). In the front matter of that very good book I found the following quotation from the hitherto unknown to me Lev Kopelev (emphases added):

Finally, a question for Tony Flood, one-time card-carrying member of the CPUSA, who knows more about communism than I ever will.  Trotsky says somewhere something along the lines of: You may attempt to distance yourself from politics, but politics won't distance itself from you.  What exactly did he say? And where did he say it?

I fear that old Trotsky is right, which is why we of the Coalition of the Sane and the Reasonable must fight, Fight, FIGHT!

The Reichstag Fire and the January 6th 'Insurrection'

How close is the analogy? And what could the analogy be taken to show?

Is there an historian in the house?

Lenin: 100 Years Later

Here:

Academic Marxists of various stripes still appeal to Lenin’s 1917 pamphlet The State and Revolution in an effort to find a more “libertarian” Lenin. But this is at once a chimera and a bad joke. Like Marx himself, but even more intensely and ferociously, Lenin combines a Jacobin defense of terror and tyranny with a confidence that once the bourgeois “machinery” of domination is “suppressed,” the state will quickly “wither away.” In 1918, Max Weber had already exposed the absurd logic, and the ignorance of human nature, underlying such a claim. On some level, as Solzhenitsyn points out to great effect in The Gulag Archipelago, Lenin was a fabulist. He had persuaded himself, in words quoted by Solzhenitsyn, that “’the suppression of the minority of exploiters by the majority of the hired slaves of yesterday is a matter so comparatively easy, simple and natural, that is going to cost much less in blood […] will be much cheaper for humanity’ than the preceding suppression of the minority.” The result of this delusory expectation was that millions, even tens of millions, would perish under Lenin and Stalin.  Declaring war to the death on established customs, private property, religion, sundry “class enemies” and “enemies of the people,” and on political liberty and human nature itself, was never going to be simple or easy affair.

Lenin made of the Solovetsky monastery the SU's first and cruellest gulag. How different is the US from the SU?  Different, yes, but how different? Headed in the same direction under the able leadership of that devout Catholic, Joe Dementia? Harrison Butker seems to have triggered our lefty pals, bigly.  Interesting times. And that reminds me: to the range on Monday.

Related: Tony Flood wonders why Earth Day falls on Lenin's birthday.

Why Isn't There a Palestinian State?

A history lesson in under five minutes.

A more nuanced narrative from eight years ago.

Is there an historian in the house?

On this Date in 1970

Kent State Shootings. Comparison with current campus  unrest. Neil Young's Ohio.

'Nuclear' Thoughts on Dylan's Birthday

We've gotten used to living under the Sword of Damocles:

One of its more famous [invocations] came in 1961 during the Cold War, when President John F. Kennedy gave a speech before the United Nations in which he said that “Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness.”

We seem not too worried these days. If anything, the threat of nuclear war is greater now than it was in '61 and this, in no small measure, because we now have a doofus for POTUS. I shudder to think what would have become of us had Joey B. been president in October of 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. People were worried back then, but now we have worse threats to worry about such as white supremacy and climate change.  In those days  people were so worried that they built fallout shelters. There was much discussion of their efficacy and of the mentality of their builders. Rod Serling provided memorable commentary in the Twilight Zone episode, The Shelter, that aired on 29 September, 1961.  

Thomas Merton, in his journal entry of 16 August 1961, his former contemptus mundi on the wane and his new-found amor mundi on the rise, writes  

The absurdity of American civil defense propaganda -- for a shelter in the cellar --  "come out in two weeks and resume the American way of life."

. . . I see no reason why I should go out of my way to survive a thermonuclear attack on the U. S. A. It seems to me nobler and simpler to share, with all consent and love, in what is bound to be the lot of the majority . . . . (Vol. 4, 152)

In the entry of 31 May 1962 (Ascension Day), Merton reports that a friend

Sent a clipping about the Fallout shelter the Trappists at O. L. [Our Lady] of the Genesee have built for themselves. It is sickening to to think that my writing against nuclear war is regarded as scandalous, and this folly of building a shelter  for monks is accepted without question as quite fitting. We no longer know what a monk is. (Italics in original. Vol. 4, 222)

Now today is Bob Dylan's birthday. Born in 1941, he turns 82.  As you know, Merton, though born in 1915, was by the mid-'60s a big Dylan fan.  And so in honor of both of these acolytes of the '60s Zeitgeist, I introduce to you young guys  Dylan's Let Me Die in My Footsteps which evokes that far-off and fabulous time with as much authority as do Rod Serling and Tom Merton. A Joan Baez rendition. The Steep Canyon Rangers do an impressive job with it.

Dylan hails from Hibbing, Minnesota hard by the Canadian border near the Mesabi Iron Range. The young Dylan, old beyond his years, tells a tale from a woman's point of view in North Country Blues.

I have often wondered why there are so many Minnesotans where I live. Minnesota, gone 'woke,' is bleeding population. High taxes is one reason. Another is crime:

The second, and even more important reason I'm leaving Minnesota is that crime has destroyed much of what I used to enjoy in the Twin Cities. Up until a few years ago, I thought to avoid being a victim of violent crime all I needed to do was avoid being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But today in the metro area, every place could be the wrong place at any time of every day.

A few weeks ago, a resident of bucolic St. Anthony Park was shot dead outside his home at 7:30 a.m. on a Saturday. Car thefts are up 95% this year in Minneapolis, and carjackings, a crime seldom heard of before 2020, occur every week throughout the metro. At the recent Art-A-Whirl studio tour in northeast Minneapolis, a 70-year-old woman was sent to the hospital when she was randomly punched in the face as she crossed the street to go to a restaurant on a Friday evening.

Because of high crime, the downtown Minneapolis restaurants I used to enjoy are closing early or permanently. The Basilica Block Party is gone, and you couldn't pay me to attend the new Taste of Minnesota July 4th block party on Nicollet Mall after last year's July 4th mass shooting and private fireworks anarchy. Even the State Fair at night has become a risky proposition.

As Rep. Ilhan Omar asked recently, "What happens if I am killed?" But unlike her, I don't have armed security — instead, I have to rely on the police for protection. Yet Minneapolis remains more than 100 officers short of the minimum required by its charter, and the too-few applicants who do apply should be automatically rejected for bad judgment in wanting the job.

Again, contrast this with Southwest Florida, where the police ranks are full, the restaurants are open, and violent crime is still a rarity. It's a pretty easy decision to live in an area where I don't have to plan my exit from a concert as if I were leaving a Philadelphia Eagles home game wearing a Vikings jersey.

The last reason I'm leaving Minnesota is because of a lack of hope. I'm a realist, and realism tells me there's nothing more I can do to help prevent Minnesota's decline. Not only its declining public safety, but also its declining public schools, its hopelessly irrational light-rail transit system and its eroding future.

I know our current leaders won't solve these problems because they won't even acknowledge they exist. Minneapolis recently unveiled a new multimillion-dollar ad campaign to draw visitors into the city to "see what all the fuss is about" because "negative perceptions" have "overshadowed" the positive. Unfortunately for that campaign's credibility, the "fuss" on the day it was announced was about six people under the age of 18 shot in Brooklyn Center.

Do you like crime? Then vote Democrat early and often.

Hegel on History: Another Case of Misattribution

Misattributed to Hegel: "We learn from history that we do not learn from history." Close, but that's not what he says. 

I haven't checked the following quotations, but they look good to the eye of one who has read his fair share of the Swabian genius. HT: Seth Nimbosa

Was die Erfahrung aber und die Geschichte lehren, ist dieses, daß Völker und Regierungen niemals etwas aus der Geschichte gelernt und nach Lehren, die aus derselben zu ziehen gewesen wären, gehandelt haben. (Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte)

What experience and history teach is this — that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it. (Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, tr. H. B. Nisbet (1975))

I'll leave it to the reader to ponder the internal coherence, or rather incoherence, of the Hegelian observation.

Related:

Misattributed to Socrates

A Misattribution [of mine] Corrected

If you can show me that I have made a mistake, I will admit my error.  How many people do that? Am I now 'signaling my virtue' or setting a good example? You decide. 

Of course, it is easy to admit minor errors.  It is the big ones that we are loathe to admit.

It is 410 A. D.

Alaric is sacking Rome. An obscure Roman philosopher  is penning an agenda for the salvation of the republic. His writings are lost to history. In any case, too little, too late. Will we share his fate?

Three years after the Visigoth invasion, a Christian Platonist and mystic in North Africa puts pen to paper. As Rome goes under, and night falls, the Owl of Minerva rises in the pages of The City of God.

If St. Augustine could see us now he might remark that while the pagan gods failed Rome, we failed the true God when we began worshipping idols.

Joseph-Nöel Sylvestre’s 1890 Painting Depicting the Sack of Rome by the Visigoths in AD 410.

 

His Story

History is largely His Story, but part of that story is how place was made, by men mainly, but not solely, for Her Story. 

Beware the Ides of March, Vladimir

"They are come, but not yet gone."

Thus spoke the soothsayer to Julius Caesar when the dictator perpetuus said to the soothsayer that the Ides of March had come and he was still alive.

Dictator perpetuus has an overly confident ring to it much like eintausendjähriges Reich. 

Some history here.

The Death of Caesar (1798) by Vincenzo Camuccini

'The Wrong Side of History'

This is a re-thought and  much improved version of a post that first appeared on this weblog on 15 May 2012. 

................................

I once heard a prominent conservative tell an ideological opponent that he was 'on the wrong side of history.' This question I want to raise is whether this is a phrase that a self-aware and self-consistent conservative should use. For if there is a 'wrong side,' then there must be a 'right side.' 'Right side of history,' however, suggests that history is moving in a certain direction, toward various outcomes, and that this direction and these outcomes are somehow justified or rendered good by the actual tendency of events. But how could the mere fact of a certain drift justify or render good or attach any positive normative predicate to that drift and its likely outcomes? For example, we are moving in the United States, and not just here, towards more and more intrusive government, more and more socialism, less and less individual liberty. This has certainly been the trend from FDR on regardless of which party has been in power. Would a self-aware conservative want to say that the fact of this drift justifies it or renders it good?  Presumably not.

'Everyone today believes that such-and-such.' It doesn't follow that such-and-such is true. 'Everyone now does such-and-such.' It doesn't follow that such-and-such is morally permissible.  'The direction of events is towards such-and-such.' It doesn't follow that such-and-such is a good or valuable outcome. (If a mountaineer is sliding into the abyss and fails to self-arrest, would you say that he is headed in a salutary direction?) In each of these cases there is arguably if not obviously a logical mistake. One cannot validly infer truth from belief, ought from is, values from facts, desirability* from the fact of being desired, or progress from change.  Progress is change for the better. But that a change is for the better is not validly inferable from the change qua change.

One who opposes the drift toward a socialist surveillance state, one in which 'equity' (equality of outcome) is enforced by state power, a drift that is accelerating, and indeed jerking under President Biden, could be said to be on the wrong side of history only on the assumption that history's direction is the right direction. Now an Hegelian might believe that.  Marxists and 'progressives' might believe it. Alexandre Kojève reads Hegel as claiming  that the master-slave dialectic in the Swabian's Phenomenology of Spirit (ch. 4, sec. A) is the motor of history, which, I note, clearly anticipates the opening paragraph of the Communist Manifesto:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

Logically prior to the question of what the motor of history is, is the question of whether it has one. If history has a motor, it lies deeper than the succession of events and any empirical regularities the events display; it lies deeper as the driver of these events and the ground of their patterns and regularities.  The Hegelians and the Marxists, despite their important differences, have their answer: there is a motor but the motor is immanent, not transcendent, and the end state will be attained in the here and now, in this material world by human collective effort, and not hereafter by transcendent divine agency.  Crudely put, the 'pie' is not in 'the sky' but in the future. This is what is meant by the immanentization of the eschaton.  

For Kojève and his fellow travellers, 'right side of history' has a legitimate use: you are on the right side if you are hip to, and in line with, history's internal 'logic,' dialectical to be sure, a logic driven by a spiritual Logos in Hegel, which is a secularization and immanentization of the triune God of Christianity, but in Marx arguably the same except stood on its head and materialized.  You are on the 'right side' which is also the left side if you march in step with the beat of  the internal 'drummer' toward the immanent eschaton whereat all alienation and class distinctions will be at an end, a state in which the State will have withered away (V. I. Lenin), all coercion will cease, a state  in which all will be free and equal, mutual recognition and respect will be universal and humanity will realize itself fully als Gattungswesen, as species-being, and embrace this life, this world, and its finitude, making it so beautiful and so satisfying that there will be no hankering for the nonexistent hinter worlds of the metaphysicians and the religionists. The friends of finitude will achieve such a rich state of self-realization that their finite lives, albeit extended somewhat by technological means,  will suffice and there will be no longer any craving for nirvanic narcotics or religious opiates.

So while the mere fact of a certain empirically discernible drift of events does not justify or render good the drift and its probable outcomes, a drift driven by a hidden motor might. This brings us to the theocon, the theistic conservative. 

Many if not most conservatives are theists and theists typically believe in divine providence. God provides and he fore-sees (pro-videre). God created the world and he created it with a plan in mind. The teleology is built in and not up for decision by such frail reeds as ourselves. He created it for a purpose and in particular he created us for a purpose. For theists God is the hidden motor, the Prime Mover, and First Cause, both efficiently and finally. God is Alpha, Omega, and everything in between. He caused the world to exist ex nihilo and he gave it its purpose which in our case is to  share in his life and to achieve our ultimate felicity and highest good thereby.  A theistic conservative, then, has a legitimate use for 'right side of history.' You are the right side when you submit to the divine plan and live you life in accordance with it.  You are on the wrong side when you don't, in rebellion and glorifying your own miserable ego.

To conclude, I see two ways of attaching a legitimate sense to the expressions 'right side of history' and 'wrong side of history.'  One is theistic, the other atheistic, as above.

I now refer you to Malcolm Pollack's effort in a similar direction. We pretty much agree, except that he doesn't credit the atheist option which is a secularization and immanentization of the theistic.  I am a theist myself, for the record. 

Is the secularization a betrayal, a fulfillment, or a disaster which is the inevitable consequence of the false Judeo-Christian starting point?

Before logging off, I would like to recommend to Malcolm and the rest of you Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, which includes the Strauss-Kojeve correspondence and a very clear and informative introduction.

_______________

*Note the ambiguity of 'desirable' as between 'worthy of being desired' and 'able to be desired.' I intend the former.

The Erasure of History at the University of Leicester

Another incident in the suicide of the West. And in England of all places. The battle appears to be lost in the mother country and in the rest of the Anglosphere with the exception of the United States of America. Here is where the West will make its last stand, or else begin to turn the tide. 

Is the meaning of 'last stand' such that the defenders, fighting against overwhelming odds, always lose? That is what 'last' implies. Custer's last stand was the end of Custer. He stood no more. Or does the meaning of the phrase allow for the defenders to sometimes prevail? Onkel Ludwig taught us that meaning is use. I take it to be an empirically verifiable lexical point that the phrase is used in both ways.  Sometimes linguistic prescriptivists such as your humble correspondent have to acquiesce in the ways of a wayward world. Kicking against the pricks is somethimges pointless. I am tempted to dilate upon 'kicking against the pricks,' but I will resist temptation. 

Jillian Becker: A Terrorism Archive Lost:

If one of the primary purposes of a university is to protect and hand on intellectual heritage, commitment to archive preservation is fundamental to that purpose. Perhaps the reason why the University of Leicester did not protect the IST archive was because it is now committed to erasing the past. An indication of this is in reports that the administration wants to “decolonize” the teaching of English literature by eliminating medieval studies (so Chaucer, inter alia, is to be removed from the curriculum), and “focus on ethnicity, sexuality and diversity,”

Ceasing to teach something does not necessarily entail the destruction of materials used for teaching it. Is it likely that a university entrusted with documents of national and international importance would deliberately discard them because they are no longer useful to its teaching? Would it choose to waste the fruits of long, hard, even dangerous effort exerted against a malign force threatening the Western world? Sadly, I suspect it would if it came to believe that the Western world was systemically at fault and needed to be transformed. But if therefore it would no longer protect documents of public importance, should it still be funded with public money?

The loss of an archive, whether by negligence or decision, is a calamity. To lose it by negligence is barbarously callous. To discard it deliberately is an act of intellectual vandalism, the equivalent of book-burning. If, in either case, a university is responsible, the disgrace must leave a permanent stain on its reputation.

Jillian Becker self portrait (early 1970s)

Other photographs of Jillian Becker

History

History may have lessons to teach us, but we don't agree on what they are; so we learn nothing usefully applicable to the present.

Study history to know yourself and what you are capable of

In this important video, Jordan Peterson explains how history describes you.

Part of what he is doing is railing against the pernicious leftist displacement of evil onto external conditions, social and economic, and its removal from its original and true locus, the foul and diseased heart of the human animal. For your own good, please pay close attention to the whole talk.

Most assuredly, you would have been a Nazi had you been a German in Germany 1933-1945.

And you will be a 'woke' totalitarian commie if we don't get this country back on track. You will go along to get long. You will fall in line out of fear and the instinct of self-preservation. You will snitch on your neighbors. You will practice self-censorship. You will acquiesce in the pronoun nonsense oblivious as you are to the power of language to guide and mis-guide thought.  You will submit to absurd health mandates. You will sell your birthright for a mess of pottage. And you will have no trouble rationalizing and justifying your compliance. "I have a family to support." And in other more creative ways.  The capacity for rationalization in humans is near-infinite.

READINGS FOR DARK TIMES

When the light of liberty was extinguished in Germany 1933-1945, many escaped to America.  But when the light of liberty is extinguished here, there will be no place left to go.  The rest of the Anglosphere appears lost, liberty-wise. Consider what is happening in Australia of all places.

What was it like to live in the Third Reich?  What can we learn that may be of use in the present darkness? I come back again and again to the following four.

Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night, tr. A Dru, Pantheon, 1950.

Paul Roubiczek, Across the Abyss: Diary Entries for the Year 1939-1940, tr. George Bird, Cambridge UP, 1982.

Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler: A Memoir, tr. O. Pretzel, Picador, 2000.

Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, The University of Chicago Press, 1955, 2017

All of these are easy reading, especially the second two.

Related: Theodor Haecker entries.

History Lesson

The Pitesti Gulag in Romania

Readings for Dark Times

When the light of liberty was extinguished in Germany 1933-1945, many escaped to America.  But when the light of liberty is extinguished here, there will be no place left to go.  

What was it like to live in the Third Reich?  What can we learn that may be of use in the present darkness? I come back again and again to the following four.

Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night, tr. A Dru, Pantheon, 1950.

Paul Roubiczek, Across the Abyss: Diary Entries for the Year 1939-1940, tr. George Bird, Cambridge UP, 1982.

Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler: A Memoir, tr. O. Pretzel, Picador, 2000.

Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, The University of Chicago Press, 1955, 2017

Related: Theodor Haecker entries

Rebel with a Cause

"The eighty-year-old mystery of the murder of Sheldon Robert Harte, Leon Trotsky’s most controversial bodyguard."

Jean van Heijenoort was another of the Old Man's bodyguards.  I met van Heijenoort in the mid-70s when he came to Boston College on the invitation of my quondam girlfriend, Charaine H., a student at Brandeis University where van Heijenoort taught.  I had arranged for Robert Sokolowski to come and read a paper on Husserl. Comrade Van attended the talk. By then, however, the political enthusiasms of his youth were a thing of the distant past.  He had given up politics for logic and love. My entry tells the tale of his murder by a crazed lover in Mexico City where Lev Davidovich Bronstein  met his grisly end.

Moral?  Stick to logic if you want to play it safe. But there is more of life (and death) in politics and love.

A comment from Joseph:

I regularly read your blog, but I never comment because I do not know how. Anyway, I wanted to send a note about the Monsignor -- what an incredible man. He is one of my personal models for how an academic should be. He is not only brilliant but also patient with students not so gifted (99.99% of them) -- and he has quite a knack for teaching to several levels simultaneously. He is also funny (and not just for a priest). I'm glad that you have had the chance to meet him.

'The Wrong Side of History'

(An edited re-post from 15 May 2012.)

I once heard a prominent conservative tell an ideological opponent that he was 'on the wrong side of history.' But surely this is a phrase that no self-aware and self-consistent conservative should use. The phrase suggests that history is moving in a certain direction, toward various outcomes, and that this direction and those outcomes are somehow justified by the actual tendency of events. But how can the mere fact of a certain drift justify that drift? For example, we are moving in the United States, and not just here, towards more and more intrusive government, more and more socialism, less and less individual liberty. This has certainly been the trend from FDR on regardless of which party has been in power. Would a self-aware conservative want to say that the fact of this drift justifies it?  I think not.

'Everyone today believes that such-and-such.' It doesn't follow that such-and-such is true. 'Everyone now does such-and-such.' It doesn't follow that such-and-such ought to be done. 'The direction of events is towards such-and-such.' It doesn't follow that such-and-such is a good or valuable outcome. In each of these cases there is a logical mistake. One cannot validly infer truth from belief, ought from is, or values from facts.

One who opposes the drift toward socialism, a drift that is accelerating under President Obama, is on the wrong side of history. But that is no objection unless one assumes that history's direction is the right direction. Now an Hegelian might believe that, one for whom all the real is rational and all the rational real. Marxists and 'progressives' might believe it. But no conservative who understands conservatism can believe it.*

The other night a conservative talk show host told a guest that she was on the wrong side of history in her support for same-sex marriage.    My guess is that in a generation the same-sex marriage issue will be moot,  the liberals having won.  The liberals will have been on the right side of history.  The right side of history, but wrong nonetheless. 

As I have said more than once, if you are a conservative don't talk like a liberal. Don't validate, by adopting, their question-begging phrases.

_______________

*Memo to self: this entire problematic needs more careful thought. What about the theist who believes that God has a providential plan and that what happens happens in accordance with the divine will?  And doesn't Christian eschatology in good measure drive the Hegelian and Marxist schemes?

"History is written by the victors."

The cynicism of the saying presupposes the reality of the past.

Plague in an Ancient City

"Plague in an Ancient City" by Michiel Sweerts (1618-1664 AD) is believed to depict the Plague of Athens (430-427 BC). Oil on canvas. Painted c. 1652-1654 AD. 118.7 cm (46.7 in) x 170.8 cm (67.2 in). (Courtesy of Los Angeles County Museum of Art)

Now read the outstanding essay by Victor Davis Hanson, The Scab and the Wound Beneath

The Fall of the Wall

Thirty years ago, today.

Here we come face to face with the fundamental reason for the collapse of European Communism. For all of the sophisticated “structural” and “materialist” analyses of the Communist world, it comes down to the simple fact that the European Communist rulers—most of them anyway—lost the will to shoot their own people in large numbers. (Not so the Chinese.) This might seem an inevitable consequence of the loss of belief in the Marxist ideology of class struggle, but the will to power of rulers has never been dependent on ideology, and it might have turned out differently.

Political Hatred: A Look Back at Nixon

Has any president of the United States been the object of deeper hatred than Donald Trump? Abraham Lincoln perhaps. But in recent decades only Richard Nixon comes close.  Both Nixon and Trump elicit mindless rage, and for similar reasons.  The elites hate both because they have no class.  That's the short answer. For nuance we turn to Paul Johnson's 1988 In Praise of Richard Nixon, which contains a wealth of insights that can be put to use in the present to understand the Trump phenomenon. Here are some excerpts (emphases added, and brief comments in blue):

What makes Nixon’s insistence that the world is run by realpolitik and national interest even more objectionable to liberals is that he is as much an idealist as they are; but in his way, not theirs. Streetwise in the global metropolis, Nixon is nonetheless in many respects an old-fashioned evangelical American patriot. He rose by hard work from humble origins to the world’s highest office. He is deeply grateful to the fair and free society which made such an ascent possible, and he is anxious to pay his debt to it. He also believes, as all Americans up to recent decades were taught to believe, that providence has been good to America as a whole, and that America as a society and a great power has incurred reciprocal obligations. He states openly: “Almost nowhere else on earth are people as secure and as prosperous as in the United States. Both our great power and our great blessings challenge us to adopt policies in both foreign and domestic affairs whose ultimate goal is to make the world safer and better.”

Liberals find this tone of voice, coming on top of the realpolitik, insufferable. They feel it is sanctimonious, hypocritical, sly, self-seeking. They believe it springs from a devious nature incapable of truth. [They called him Tricky Dick] The idea that it might be totally and passionately sincere is inconceivable to them. From the start, then, liberal antipathy to Nixon was and is based on a profound misunderstanding of his moral character.

Dislike is deepened by social contempt. It is often assumed by foreigners, and believed by Americans themselves, that class plays no part in American politics. This may be generally true, but there are certainly exceptions, and the anti-Nixon syndrome is one of them. Nixon was a hard-working man who raised himself not from romantic poverty but from the dullest of lower-middle-class backgrounds. He did so early and quickly and without acquiring any of the social graces or eccentricities or gimmicks or rhetorical flourishes or parlor tricks which make a climber interesting. Nor did he ever learn to hide his obvious ambition or cloak it in the progressive sentiments of the day.

Like everyone else in politics, Nixon wanted fame and power, but he did not know how to make his yearnings culturally respectable. There was nothing about him—his school, his tastes, his choice of language, his friends, his interests, his heroes, his reading—that was remotely fashionable. He could at times be gauche, say the wrong thing, make the awkward, grating gesture. To East Coast liberals from assured, easy backgrounds and Ivy League schools, he appeared to be everything they most detested: brash, self-seeking, uncultured, greedy for money and power, devoid of noblesse oblige, hard and materialistic. They could not bear the thought of being ruled by him and his like. Immediately after the 1960 presidential election, a victorious John F. Kennedy contemptuously summed up this feeling: Nixon, he said, “went out like he came in—no class.”

To a European, this comment, coming from the son of a man who was little better than a financial gangster, is full of ironies. The Kennedys, to an outside observer, far from embodying the principle of American legitimacy, appear rather to illustrate the rapacity with which a predatory immigrant clan exploits the opportunities America offers: the unscrupulous father amassing wealth so that his indulged and conscienceless offspring may buy their way into office and power. Visiting Washington as British Prime Minister shortly after Kennedy was elected, Harold Macmillan commented: “It’s rather like watching the Borgia brothers take over a respectable North Italian town.” As time goes by, and the sins of the Kennedys multiply with the generations, the comparison seems ever more apt.

But whatever their moral shortcomings—and these were seen less clearly in the 1960’s than now—the younger Kennedys possessed enviable social advantages. They not only had a lot of money but had never been put to the coarsening trouble of earning it. They made the appropriate cultural noises. They had the right academic and media connections, and could buy more if necessary. They had their own court historians and tame editors. They spoke the liberal vernacular with zeal if not from inner conviction. Most important of all, they exercised, like any other self-assured aristocracy, however ersatz, a powerful appeal over the intelligentsia, which will always prefer a graceful prince to a self-made man. To the intellectuals, and to East Coast liberals generally, the 1960 election was between “us” and “them,” a Manichean struggle between enlightenment and materialism.

In fact it was one of the most corrupt elections of modern times, with the Democratic machine forced to play all its grubby cards to get Kennedy elected at all. He won by a whisker in circumstances which will always make the validity of his election dubious. It says a lot for Nixon’s old-fashioned notions of patriotism and decorum—“no class” notwithstanding—that he refused to challenge the result. And so it was that Camelot came into being, the glittering antithesis of Nixonian suburbia: in the foreground, cerebral rhetoric, haute couture, patronage of the arts; in the background, sexual athletics with Mafia molls, shielded by a compliant press.

[. . .]

_____________

So in 1968 Nixon became President after all, and great was the gnashing of teeth in the liberal middle and upper classes. His was the first postwar administration from which the East Coast establishment was largely excluded, its places taken by men, often Californians, anti-intellectuals, and provincials, who aroused in the liberal soul a peculiar detestation. That Nixon set about fulfilling his campaign promise of scaling down, then ending, the Vietnam war was neither here nor there: once again, it was the tone that was objectionable.

Nixon made no secret of the fact that he disliked the metropolitan media. Worse, he developed an alarming skill at speaking over the head of the media directly to the American people, taking it upon himself to voice the hopes and fears of what he termed “the silent majority.” [Just like Trump, but without Twitter.] While never exactly popular—incapable, perhaps, of being popular with any wide section of the community—he became an extremely effective populist.

If the Nixon victory of 1968 was hard for the liberals to bear, his landslide of 1972 was insupportable, particularly since Nixon had openly accepted the Democratic candidacy of Senator George McGovern as an opportunity for the contest he had sought: Middle America against progressive pandaemonium. “Here is a situation,” Nixon exultantly told his staff, “where the Eastern establishment media finally has a candidate who almost totally shares their views.” He added that the “real ideological bent of the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, and the three TV networks” was “on the side of amnesty, pot, abortion, confiscations of wealth (unless it is theirs), massive increases in welfare, unilateral disarmament, reduction of our defenses, and surrender in Vietnam.” At last, then, “the country will find out whether what the media has been standing for during these last five years really represents the majority thinking.”

Nixon’s overwhelming victory, carrying the Electoral College 521 to 17 and picking up over 60 percent of the popular vote, ought to have settled the matter. But it did not. Although the events which led up to Watergate and Nixon’s abdication are extremely complicated, one salient fact must be borne in mind. The Eastern liberal establishment never really admitted the legitimacy of the Nixon administration. From the start, the media interests which spoke for the establishment treated the Nixon presidency as in some metaphysical sense an outlaw regime whose true, unconstitutional character would eventually be exposed. The powerful barons of the Eastern press and TV felt themselves morally and constitutionally entitled to snatch back the power he had secured from the voters by (as they saw it) chicanery. All they needed was a pretext.  [Sound familiar?]

Nixon played into their hands. His deep sense of insecurity, reinforced by what was now almost a paranoid hatred and fear of the press, led him to confuse a perfectly justified desire to prevent the media from publishing state secrets—as they had done in the case of the Pentagon Papers and other documents—with the routine skulduggery of party-political espionage. The result was the Watergate mess.

_____________

In essence, Watergate was a mess and nothing more. The Nixon administration’s record of misuse of power and raison d’état was no worse than that of Truman and Eisenhower, and considerably better than Franklin D. Roosevelt’s. There was none of the personal corruption which had marked the rule of Lyndon Johnson, let alone the gross immoralities and security risks of John F. Kennedy’s White House. Nixon’s sins were venial and sprang mostly from misplaced loyalty. The notion that he plotted an assault on the Constitution and the rule of law is a malicious invention.

Indeed, the way in which the opportunities offered by Watergate were exploited by the Eastern media, aided by a hostile Congress—a key element in the story—and by a section of the legal establishment to whom Nixon was anathema, is a frightening example of how the will of a popular majority can be frustrated and overturned by the skillful manipulation of press and TV. This was the first media Putsch in history, as ruthless and anti-democratic as any military coup by bemedaled generals with their sashes and sabers. It is obvious that Nixon, a responsible and experienced statesman preoccupied with the international problems of the early 1970’s, not least the appalling Middle East crisis of autumn 1973 and its disastrous economic aftermath, consistently underestimated the unscrupulousness of his media enemies and their willingness to sacrifice the national interest in the pursuit of their institutional vendetta.

So great was the inequity of Nixon’s downfall that future historians may well conclude he would have been justified in allowing events to take their course and in subjecting the nation to the prolonged paralysis of a public impeachment, which at least would have given him the opportunity to defend himself by due process of law. But once again his patriotism took precedence over his self-interest, and he cut short the national agony by a voluntary abdication. In defeat he was dignified and not at all disposed to recriminate. The episode wrecked his official career, but going through the fire strengthened and refined his moral character. By a curious paradox Richard Nixon was one of the very few people who emerged from the Watergate affair with credit. But he remained, and remains, as mysterious as ever.

_____________

Fallen statesmen rarely rise again. But it pays them to live long. Nixon, like Herbert Hoover before him, has survived nearly all his enemies. And he has made much better use of his retirement than Hoover did. Few men have been more successful at putting the past behind them and looking firmly into the future.

His new book is only one example of the assiduity and genuine excitement with which Nixon scans the distant horizons of geopolitics. There are few retired Washington giants—Henry Kissinger is an exception—who keep themselves so well briefed on the state of the world, or who have more worthwhile observations to make about it. In its modest way, 1999: Victory Without War is an excellent geopolitical primer, which, if academics were not so prejudiced, could well serve as an introductory textbook in courses in political science.

By the term “victory” in the title, Nixon does not mean an ideological or economic conquest but rather a process of persuasion whereby the freedoms generally recognized as desirable and productive can be more widely, and eventually universally, spread. He looks first at the present posture of the two superpowers. Then, in three carefully argued chapters, he shows how the United States can peacefully prevent the Soviets from making risky forward moves, how it can match and refute Soviet propaganda in the uncommitted world, and, not least, how it can effectively negotiate with Moscow to reduce tension and arms budgets.

Nixon next turns to the three economic-growth areas—Western Europe, which he calls “the fragmented giant”; Japan, the “reluctant giant”; and China, the “awakened giant”—which will in his judgment expand the present two superpowers into five, and shows how each of them can play a constructive role in the negotiation-from-strength process he envisages. He then provides a survey of Third World theaters of conflict where competition between economic and political systems is most intense.

_____________

Nixon’s final chapter concerns the United States itself, and is a plea that Americans will reinforce their material success by a return to the pristine idealism of the men who created what he calls “the animating principles of our country.” In his view, the new thinking which Gorbachev is urging his Soviet comrades to adopt should be matched by a fundamental reappraisal of America’s conduct and role. Nixon wants Americans to be remembered “not just as a good people who took care of themselves without doing harm to others” but as a “great people” who went “beyond the call of duty” in helping to enlarge the freedoms enjoyed all over the world.

This is the kind of traditional nationalist idealism which Nixon’s critics find insincere and repellent. To me, as an outsider who feels none of this emotional hostility to the ex-President, it seems patently sincere, almost painfully so. Moreover, I think it strikes echoes among a very large number of ordinary Americans. One of Nixon’s greatest strengths is his nose for what the voters feel at any given time. There can be few men whose judgment of the American political scene is so shrewd and penetrating, as well as surprisingly objective. [Nixon had a Trumpian nose, to put it anachronistically.]

Most ex-Presidents are anxious to offer their advice to those who succeed them, and find themselves consulted often out of mere courtesy. Nixon’s advice, by contrast, is eagerly solicited and often taken. He probably exercises more political influence than any other Western statesman not actually in office. Considering the depths of degradation from which he has climbed, this is a remarkable achievement.

In thus rehabilitating himself, Nixon has displayed courage, endurance, persistence, patience, skill, and—there is no other word for it—magnanimity. This greatness of heart is something his enemies never dreamed he possessed, and helps to explain their misunderstanding of his nature. “No class”: today, the cruel snobbery of the phrase reflects solely on the man who uttered it, and whose own reputation declines with every fresh unveiling of the record. To the contrary: the last fifteen years have shown that Richard Nixon has a lot of class. But it remains to be seen whether history will give him the justice his contemporaries denied him.

9/11: Eighteen Years After

And the nation's borders are still not secure.

The morning of 9/11 was a beautiful, dry Arizona morning. Back from a hard run, I flipped on the TV while doing some cool-down exercises only to see one of the planes crash into one of the towers. I knew right away what was going on.

I said to my wife, "Well, two good things will come of this: Gary Condit will be out of the news forever, and finally something will be done about our porous southern border."

I was right about the first, but not about the second.

Do you remember Gary Condit, the California congressman? Succumbing as so many do to the fire down below, Condit initiated an extramarital affair with the federal intern, Chandra Levy. When Levy was found murdered, Condit's link to Levy proved his undoing. The cable shows were awash with the Condit-Levy affair that summer of 2001. 9/11 put an end to the soap opera.

But it didn't do much for the security of the southern border.

We have one last chance,and its name is Donald Trump.

Victor Davis Hanson on Quiet America's Resilience

Conservatives such as Victor Davis Hanson have a sense of history and are respectful of its lessons. Leftists are a species of retromingent who piss on the past and seek its erasure. That is why they tear down historical monuments. Leftists confuse the world with their utopian fantasy of what they would like it to be. They are deracinated u-topians, Nowhere Men or rather Nowhere Children. The conservative stands on the terra firma of a reality antecedent to his hopes and dreams, adjusting the latter by what experience has taught him is in the realm of the possible. The fundamental metaphysical error of contemporary leftists is their denial of objective reality. But this objective reality has a way of biting in the ass the fools who piss on the past. (Am I warming to my theme?)

 

The Continued Resilience of Quiet America | RealClearPolitics

 

The Erasure of History

The Left's assault on collective memory via the redacting and outright erasure of the historical record is quite convenient for them: it ensures that the memory of its iniquities will be kept hidden.

This Just In

Caesar completes conquest of Gaul.

Against Iconoclasm and the Erasure of History

Muslims are well-known for their iconoclasm, hostility to the arts, and destruction of cultural artifacts. Leftists are like unto Muslims in this regard too.

The trouble with iconoclasm is that all parties can play the game. 

Mass-murdering communist regimes are responsible for some 94 million deaths in the 20th century. Why not then destroy all the statues and monuments that honor the likes of Karl Marx, V. I. Lenin, Fidel Castro and all others who either laid the foundations for or carried out mass murder?  

 

You understand, of course, that I am not advocating this.  For one thing, the erasure of history would make it rather more difficult to learn from it. For another thing, there would be no end to it.  Why not destroy the Colosseum in Rome? You know what went on there.

Or how about St. Robert Bellarmine, S. J. ?  Should paintings and statues of him be destroyed?  He had a hand in the burning at the stake of the philosopher Giordano Bruno! According to Wikipedia:

Bellarmine was made rector of the Roman College in 1592, examiner of bishops in 1598, and cardinal in 1599. Immediately after his appointment as Cardinal, Pope Clement made him a Cardinal Inquisitor, in which capacity he served as one of the judges at the trial of Giordano Bruno, and concurred in the decision which condemned Bruno to be burned at the stake as a heretic.^[5]

Better known is the fact that Bellarmine is the man who hauled the great Galileo Galilei before the Inquisition. 

Calling all philosophers and scientists! To your sledge hammers and blow torches!

And then there are the paintings, statues, etc. of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., plagiarist and adulterer. Yes, King plagiarized (portions of) his Boston University dissertation. 

Anyone with sense should be able to understand that high merit worthy of honor can exist alongside deep character flaws.

There is no need to multiply examples. You should be getting the point along about now.

I now assign Victor Davis Hanson, The Ideology of Statue Smashing. Yes, kiddies, this will be on the final.

The Last Days and Words of Leon Trotsky

On this date in 1940 in Mexico City Ramon Mercader drove an ice axe (not an ice pick as some accounts have it) into the skull of Leon Trotsky.  He died the next day.  Here we read:

Mercader later testified at his trial:

I laid my raincoat on the table  in such a way as to be able to remove the ice axe which was in the pocket. I  decided not to miss the wonderful opportunity that presented itself. The moment  Trotsky began reading the article, he gave me my chance; I took out the ice axe  from the raincoat, gripped it in my hand and, with my eyes closed, dealt him a  terrible blow on the head.

According to Joseph Cannon, the secretary of the Socialist Workers Party  (USA), Trotsky's last words were "I will not survive this attack. Stalin  has finally accomplished the task he attempted unsuccessfully before."

Trotsky, who didn't shrink from murder and brutality in pursuit of his utopian fata morgana, met his end brutally. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

Related: Trotsky's Faith

Trotsky's erstwhile secretary, the logician Jean van Heijenoort, himself came to a brutal end in Mexico City a victim, not of politics, but of . . . well read it:

Like a Moth to the Flame.

Chappaquiddick

Forty-nine years ago, yesterday. Rod Dreher comments on the event and the movie.

Why Did America Fight the Korean War?

Victor Davis Hanson explains in less than five minutes. 

South Korea is a model global citizen and a strong ally of the U.S.—and stands in sharp contrast to the communist regime in the North that has starved and murdered millions of its own people and caused untold mischief in the world community. Had it not been for U.S. intervention and support to the South, the current monstrous regime in Pyongyang would now rule all of Korea, ensuring its nuclear-armed dictatorship even greater power and resources.

The American effort to save South Korea also sent a message to both communist China and the Soviet Union that the free world, under U.S. leadership, would no longer tolerate communist military take-overs of free nations. The resulting deterrence policy helped to keep the communist world from attempting similar surprise attacks on Japan, Taiwan, and Western Europe.

Finally, the Korean War awakened the United States to the dangers of disarmament and isolationism and led to the bipartisan foreign policy of containment of global communism that in 1989 finally led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and with it victory in the Cold War.

The Korean War was an incomplete American victory in its failure to liberate North Korea and unite the peninsula, but a victory nonetheless. And not just from a military perspective, but from a moral one as well. The reason 35,000 Americans died in Korea was to keep at least half the Korean people free. Korea did not have a single material resource that would have benefited America.

The Korean War merits more than a blank stare. It deserves to be remembered and studied – with pride.

The Tet Offensive Fifty Years Later

It was around the time of Tet that I received a letter from Uncle Sam ordering me to downtown Los Angeles for my pre-induction physical. I went, and flunked. Due to a birth defect I hear only out of my right ear. I was classified 1-Y, and that was later changed to 4-F.

In any case, I had been awarded a California State Scholarship to attend college that fall. So I was doubly safe from the draft.

But enough about me. 

50 Years Later: What Tet Didn't Destroy, Deferments Did

 I would add:

There is something to be said in favor of an all-voluntary military, but on the debit side there is this: only those with 'skin in the game' -- either their own or that of their loved ones -- properly appreciate the costs of foreign military interventions.  I say that as a conservative, not a libertarian.

There is also this to consider:  In the bad old days of the draft people of different stations -- to use a good old word that will not be allowed to fall into desuetude, leastways not on my watch -- were forced to associate with one another -- with some good effects.  It is 'broadening' to mingle  and have to get along with different sorts of people.  And when the veteran of foreign wars returns and takes up a profession in, say, academe, he brings with him precious hard-won experience of all sorts of people in different  lands in trying circumstances.  He is then more likely to exhibit the sense of a Winston Churchill as opposed to the nonsense of a Ward Churchill.

The Rugged Routes of the Superstition Mountains

These are trails that try men's soles.

......................

Most of my erudite and esteemed readers will catch the allusion, but in case you don't.

The Battle of Stalingrad 75 Years Later

Know your history.

Despite the horrors of Soviet Communism, the Allied winners of World War II owed a great deal to the Russian people. Russia's male and female soldiers were most responsible for destroying Hitler's vast ground forces, having killed more than two-thirds of the German soldiers lost in the war.

The Soviet Union lost about 27 million soldiers and civilians -- about 60 times more than America lost in the war.

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The Truth About Che Guevara, Mass-Murderer and Hero of the Left

50 years ago today: execution of Che Guevara by Bolivian government.

Michael Totten:

Che Guevara has the most effective public relations department on earth. The Argentine guerrilla and modern Cuba’s co-founding father has been fashioned into a hipster icon, a counter-cultural hero, an anti-establishment rebel, and a champion of the poor. As James Callaghan once put it, “A lie can be halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on.”

The truth about Che now has its boots on. He helped free Cubans from the repressive Batista regime, only to enslave them in a totalitarian police state worst than the last. He was Fidel Castro’s chief executioner, a mass-murderer who in theory could have commanded any number of Latin American death squads, from Peru’s Shining Path on the political left to Guatemala’s White Hand on the right.

You know-nothing liberals need to read the whole thing.

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Was the British Empire Good or Bad for the World?

Can you spare five minutes?

Was the British Empire a good or bad thing for the world? To put it another way, is freedom a good or bad thing for the world? Historian and author H.W. Crocker III explains why we may want to rethink the British Empire's bad rap.

Kent State Shootings

On this date, in 1970. History lesson. Neil Young, Ohio.

Is the Left Playing with Fire Again?

Pitchfork Pat gives us a history lesson.

How Many Saw It Coming?

The collapse of the Evil Empire in December of 1991.

The attack of radical Islam on the USA in September of 2001.

The election of Donald Trump in November of 2016 and his destruction of the Bush and Clinton dynasties.

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Fidel Castro was a Mass Murderer

Imagine having seven pints of your blood forcibly extracted prior to being executed for your political dissent.  You are not allowed to face the firing squad with dignity, but murdered while dazed and confused from blood loss.  And yet the Left sings the dictator's praises. Here:

Castro’s body count varies depending on who you ask. The Cuba Archive Project has one of the most reliable data sets. The group’s records cover a period from May 1952 to the present. In order to be counted, the stories of each victim must be verified by two independent sources. To date, the Archive attributes some 10,723 deaths to the regime. Including nearly 1,000 deaths linked to “disappearances,” more than 2,000 extrajudicial killings, and over 3,100 people killed by firing squad. Some 100 minor children have been murdered by the regime via beating, the withholding of medical attention, and other methods. In addition to these killings, some 78,000 people are estimated to have died while trying to flee the country.

To those unconvinced by mass murder that Castro was a lamentable dictator, consider his government’s practice of forced blood donation. This can range from taking a person’s blood forcibly without their consent to coercing individuals to offer their blood.

The Cuba Archive has credible information on at least 11 cases of forced blood extraction prior to execution. According to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of States (OAS) 1967 report regarding the practice at Havana’s La Cabaña prison, an average of seven pints of blood were forcibly taken from prisoners on their way to be executed, causing “cerebral anemia and a state of unconscious paralysis.” (For perspective, the average adult has around 10 pints of blood in their body.) Victims would then be taken to the firing squad on a stretcher.

The Cuban government would then sell the blood to the North Vietnamese for around $50 a pint.

Today, Cubans are required to “donate” blood before even minor medical procedures. Year-round media campaigns encourage citizens to donate in an effort to “save lives.” In reality, the Cuban government has kept up with its history of exporting blood products. According to Cuba’s Oficina Nacionel de Estadísticas (National Office of Statistics), the country exported some $622.5 million—an average of $31 million per year—of blood products between 1995 and 2014. (It’s worth noting that these numbers may very well be understated. Other products made from blood derivatives may not be classified as blood products when exported.) 

He Was a Friend of Mine

John F. Kennedy was assassinated 53 years ago today. Here is The Byrds' tribute to the slain leader. They took a traditional song and redid the lyrics. Here Willie Nelson does a great job with the traditional song.  You Dylan aficionados will want to give a listen to young Bob's rendition of the old song.

I was in the eighth grade when Kennedy was gunned down. We were assembled in an auditorium for some reason when the principal came in and announced that the president had been shot. The date was November 22, 1963. I remember it like it was yesterday. I was seated behind my quondam inamorata, Christine W. My love for her was from afar, like that of Don Quixote for the fair Dulcinea, but at the moment I was in close physical proximity to her, studying the back of her blouse through which I could make out the strap of her training bra . . . .

 

Since those far-off and fabulous days of 'Camelot,' we have learned a lot about Kennedy's dark side. But every man has his 'wobble,' and who among us would want to be exposed to the full light of day?  He was a boyhood hero of mine, "the intrepid skipper of the PT 109," as I described him in a school essay.  My assessment of him has been dialed downward over the years, but there were traces of greatness about him.  He was a resolute commie fighter and a lifetime member of the NRA and Second Amendment defender.   In those days, a decent, patriotic American could be a Democrat.  

And if it weren't for his inspiration we wouldn't have beaten the Evil Empire in the space race.

By the way, if you want to read a thorough (1,612 pages with notes on a separate CD!) takedown of all the JFK conspiracy speculation, I recommend Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy.

It was a tale of two nonentities, Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby. Both were little men who wanted to be big men. Oswald, acting alone, shot Kennedy. Ruby, acting alone, shot Oswald. That is the long and the short of it. For details, I refer you to Bugliosi.

And let's not forget that it was a commie who murdered Kennedy.  

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The Rosenbergs: Still Guilty After All These Years

On this date in 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were put to death as atomic spies for the Soviet Union.  They were most certainly guilty as we now know. But no amount of proof of their guilt will stop the Left from lying about them as victims of  American 'fascism.' In those days we weren't the decadent weaklings we have become, unsure of ourselves, and unwilling to defend our nation against deadly threats.

Why, for example, is Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, still alive?  He committed his crimes to the cry of Allahu akbar in 2009, was sentenced to death in 2013, but is still alive.  Why hasn't he been executed?  Why the endless appeals?  

We need a judicial fast track to execution for convicted terrorists.  

We have lost our way.  We now longer believe in ourselves. We have elected and re-elected a hate-America leftist fool who actually had the temerity to refer to Hasan's terror as "work place violence."  And it is a good bet that he will be elected for a third term in the guise of Hillary Milhous Clinton.

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St. Jerome on the Collapse of the Roman Empire

The following, which might be relevant to current events, is  borrowed from here.  

St. Jerome was born around the year 340. He came to Rome and was baptized there around 360. He devoted the rest of his life to scholarly pursuits and the translation of the Bible into Latin. He died in 420. He wrote the following observations describing the devastation of the Empire around 406:

"Nations innumerable and most savage have invaded all Gaul. The Whole region between the Alps and the Pyrenees, the ocean and the Rhine, has been devastated by the Quadi, the Vandals, the Sarmati, the Alani, the Gepidae, the hostile Heruli, the Saxons, the Burgundians, the Alemanni, and the Pahnonians.

Oh wretched Empire! Mayence [Mainz, Germany], formerly so noble a city, has been taken and ruined, and in the church many thousands of men have been massacred. Worms [Germany] has been destroyed after a long siege. Rheims, that powerful city, Amiens, Arras, Speyer [Germany], Strasburg, - all have seen their citizens led away captive into Germany. Aquitaine and the provinces of Lyons and Narbonne, all save a few towns, have been depopulated; and these the sword threatens without, while hunger ravages within.

I cannot speak without tears of Toulouse, which the merits of the holy Bishop Exuperius have prevailed so far to save from destruction. Spain, even, is in daily terror lest it perish, remembering the invasion of the Cimbri; and whatsoever the other provinces have suffered once, they continue to suffer in their fear.

I will keep silence concerning the rest, lest I seem to despair of the mercy of God. For a long time, from the Black Sea to the Julian Alps, those things which are ours have not been ours; and for thirty years, since the Danube boundary was broken, war has been waged in the very midst of the Roman Empire. Our tears are dried by old age. Except a few old men, all were born in captivity and siege, and do not desire the liberty they never knew.

Who could believe this? How could the whole tale be worthily told? How Rome has fought within her own bosom not for glory, but for preservation - nay, how she has not even fought, but with gold and all her precious things has ransomed her life...

Who could believe that Rome, built upon the conquest of the whole world, would fall to the ground? That the mother herself would become the tomb of her peoples? That all the regions of the East, of Africa and Egypt, once ruled by the queenly city, would be filled with troops of slaves and handmaidens? That to-day holy Bethlehem should shelter men and women of noble birth, who once abounded in wealth and are now beggars?"

References:
This eyewitness account appears in Robinson, James Harvey, Readings in European History (1906); Duruy, Victor, History of Rome and of the Roman People, vol VIII (1883).

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Thomas F. Madden:

For starters, the Crusades to the East were in every way defensive wars. They were a direct response to Muslim aggression—an attempt to turn back or defend against Muslim conquests of Christian lands.

Christians in the eleventh century were not paranoid fanatics. Muslims really were gunning for them. While Muslims can be peaceful, Islam was born in war and grew the same way. From the time of Mohammed, the means of Muslim expansion was always the sword. Muslim thought divides the world into two spheres, the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War. Christianity—and for that matter any other non-Muslim religion—has no abode. Christians and Jews can be tolerated within a Muslim state under Muslim rule. But, in traditional Islam, Christian and Jewish states must be destroyed and their lands conquered. When Mohammed was waging war against Mecca in the seventh century, Christianity was the dominant religion of power and wealth. As the faith of the Roman Empire, it spanned the entire Mediterranean, including the Middle East, where it was born. The Christian world, therefore, was a prime target for the earliest caliphs, and it would remain so for Muslim leaders for the next thousand years.

With enormous energy, the warriors of Islam struck out against the Christians shortly after Mohammed’s death. They were extremely successful. Palestine, Syria, and Egypt—once the most heavily Christian areas in the world—quickly succumbed. By the eighth century, Muslim armies had conquered all of Christian North Africa and Spain. In the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks conquered Asia Minor (modern Turkey), which had been Christian since the time of St. Paul. The old Roman Empire, known to modern historians as the Byzantine Empire, was reduced to little more than Greece. In desperation, the emperor in Constantinople sent word to the Christians of western Europe asking them to aid their brothers and sisters in the East.

That is what gave birth to the Crusades. They were not the brainchild of an ambitious pope or rapacious knights but a response to more than four centuries of conquests in which Muslims had already captured two-thirds of the old Christian world. At some point, Christianity as a faith and a culture had to defend itself or be subsumed by Islam. The Crusades were that defense.

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The Crusades: Misconceptions Debunked

A review by Thomas F. Madden of Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam.  Some excerpts (bolding added):

It is generally thought that Christians attacked Muslims without provocation to seize their lands and forcibly convert them. The Crusaders were Europe’s lacklands and ne’er-do-wells, who marched against the infidels out of blind zealotry and a desire for booty and land. As such, the Crusades betrayed Christianity itself. They transformed “turn the other cheek” into “kill them all; God will know his own.”

Every word of this is wrong. Historians of the Crusades have long known that it is wrong, but they find it extraordinarily difficult to be heard across a chasm of entrenched preconceptions. For on the other side is, as Riley-Smith puts it “nearly everyone else, from leading churchmen and scholars in other fields to the general public.” There is the great Sir Steven Runciman, whose three-volume History of the Crusades is still a brisk seller for Cambridge University Press a half century after its release. It was Runciman who called the Crusades “a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is a sin against the Holy Ghost.” The pity of it is that Runciman and the other popular writers simply write better stories than the professional historians.

[. . .]

St. Paul said of secular authorities, “He does not bear the sword in vain; he is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer.” Several centuries later, St. Augustine articulated a Christian approach to just war, one in which legitimate authorities could use violence to halt or avert a greater evil. It must be a defensive war, in reaction to an act of aggression. For Christians, therefore, violence was ethically neutral, since it could be employed either for evil or against it.  As Riley-Smith notes, the concept that violence is intrinsically evil belongs solely to the modern world. It is not Christian.

All the Crusades met the criteria of just wars. They came about in reaction attacks against Christians or their Church. The First Crusade was called in 1095 in response to the recent Turkish conquest of Christian Asia Minor, as well as the much earlier Arab conquest of the Christian-held Holy Land. The second was called in response to the Muslim conquest of Edessa in 1144. The third was called in response to the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem and most other Christian lands in the Levant in 1187.

[. . .]

And yet, so ingrained is this notion that the Crusades began the modern European assault on Islam that many moderate Muslims still believe it. Riley-Smith recounts : “I recently refused to take part in a television series, produced by an intelligent and well-educated Egyptian woman, for whom a continuing Western crusade was an article of faith. Having less to do with historical reality than with reactions to imperialism, the nationalist and Islamist interpretations of crusade history help many people, moderates as well as extremists, to place the exploitation they believe they have suffered in a historical context and to satisfy their feelings of both superiority and humiliation.”

In the Middle East, as in the West, we are left with the gaping chasm between myth and reality. Crusade historians sometimes try to yell across it but usually just talk to each other, while the leading churchmen, the scholars in other fields, and the general public hold to a caricature of the Crusades created by a pox of modern ideologies. If that chasm is ever to be bridged, it will be with well-written and powerful books such as this.

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Bernard Lewis, "Jihad versus Crusade"

We Americans are forward-looking people, 'progressives' if you will.  ("History is bunk," said Henry Ford.) Muslims, by contrast, live in the past where they nurture centuries-old grievances.  This is part of the explanation of the inanition of their culture and the misery of their lands, which fact is part of the explanation of why they won't stay where they are but insist on infiltrating the West.  Exercised as they remain over the Crusades, lo these many centuries later, it behooves us to inform ourselves of the historical facts.  This is especially important in light of President Obama's recent foolish, unserious, and mendacious comments.

Herewith, then, a piece from someone who knows what he is talking about.  I copied it from this location.

Jihad vs. Crusade

Bernard Lewis/Wall Street Journal, Sept. 28, 2001

U.S. President George W. Bush's use of the term "crusade" in calling for a powerful joint effort against terrorism was unfortunate, but excusable. In Western usage, this word has long since lost its original meaning of "a war for the cross," and many are probably unaware that this is the derivation of the name. At present, "crusade" almost always means simply a vigorous campaign for a good cause. This cause may be political or military, though this is rare; more commonly, it is social, moral or environmental. In modern Western usage it is rarely if ever religious.

Yet "crusade" still touches a raw nerve in the Middle East, where the Crusades are seen and presented as early medieval precursors of European imperialism -- aggressive, expansionist and predatory. I have no wish to defend or excuse the often-atrocious behavior of the crusaders, both in their countries of origin and in the countries they invaded, but the imperialist parallel is highly misleading. The Crusades could more accurately be described as a limited, belated and, in the last analysis, ineffectual response to the jihad -- a failed attempt to recover by a Christian holy war what had been lost to a Muslim holy war.

At the time of the Crusades, when the Holy Land and some adjoining regions in Syria were conquered and for a while ruled by invaders from Europe, there seems to have been little awareness among Muslims of the nature of the movement that had brought the Europeans to the region. The crusaders established principalities in the Levant, which soon fitted into the pattern of Levantine regional politics. Even the crusader capture of Jerusalem aroused little attention at the time, and appeals for help to various Muslim capitals brought no response.

The real countercrusade began when the crusaders -- very foolishly -- began to harry and attack the Muslim holy lands, namely the Hijaz in Arabia, containing the holy cities of Mecca and Medina where Muhammad was born, carried out his mission, and died. In the vast Arabic historiography of the Crusades period, there is frequent reference to these invaders, who are always called "Franks" or "infidels." The words "Crusade" and "crusader" simply do not occur.

They begin to occur with increasing frequency in the 19th century, among modernized Arabic writers, as they became aware of Western historiography in Western languages. By now they are in common use. It is surely significant that Osama bin Laden, in his declaration of jihad against the United States, refers to the Americans as "crusaders" and lists their presence in Arabia as their first and primary offense. Their second offense is their use of Arabia as a base for their attack on Iraq. The issue of Jerusalem and support for "the petty state of the Jews" come third.

The literal meaning of the Arabic word "jihad" is striving, and its common use derives from the Quranic phrase "striving in the path of God." Some Muslims, particularly in modern times, have interpreted the duty of jihad in a spiritual and moral sense. The more common interpretation, and that of the overwhelming majority of the classical jurists and commentators, presents jihad as armed struggle for Islam against infidels and apostates. Unlike "crusade," it has retained its religious and military connotation into modern times.

Being a religious obligation, jihad is elaborately regulated in sharia law, which discusses in minute detail such matters as the opening, conduct, interruption and cessation of hostilities, the treatment of prisoners and noncombatants, the use of weapons, etc. In an offensive war, jihad is a collective obligation of the entire community, and may therefore be discharged by volunteers and professionals. In a defensive war, it is an individual obligation of every able-bodied Muslim.

In his declaration of 1998, Osama bin Laden specifically invokes this rule: "For more than seven years the United States is occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of its territories, Arabia, plundering its riches, overwhelming its rulers, humiliating its people, threatening its neighbors, and using its bases in the peninsula as a spearhead to fight against the neighboring Islamic peoples." In view of this, "to kill Americans and their allies, both civil and military, is an individual duty of every Muslim who can, in any country where this is possible, until the Aqsa mosque and the Haram mosque are freed from their grip, and until their armies, shattered and broken-winged, depart from all the lands of Islam, incapable of threatening any Muslim."

Muhammad himself led the first jihad, in the wars of the Muslims against the pagans in Arabia. The jihad continued under his successors, with a series of wars that brought the Middle East, including the Holy Land, under Arab Muslim rule and then continued eastward into Asia, westward into Africa, and three times into Europe -- the Moors in Spain, the Tatars in Russia, the Turks in the Balkans. The Crusade was part of the European counterattack. The Christian reconquest succeeded in Spain, Russia and eventually the Balkans; it failed to recover the Holy Land of Christendom.

In Islamic usage the term martyrdom is normally interpreted to mean death in a jihad, and the reward is eternal bliss, described in some detail in early religious texts. Suicide is another matter.

Classical Islam in all its different forms and versions has never permitted suicide. This is seen as a mortal sin, and brings eternal punishment in the form of the unending repetition of the act by which the suicide killed himself. The classical jurists, in discussing the laws of war, distinguish clearly between a soldier who faces certain death at the hands of the enemy, and one who kills himself by his own hand. The first goes to heaven, the other to hell. In recent years, some jurists and scholars have blurred this distinction, and promised the joys of paradise to the suicide bomber. Others retain the more traditional view that suicide in any form is totally forbidden.

Similarly, the laws of jihad categorically preclude wanton and indiscriminate slaughter. The warriors in the holy war are urged not to harm noncombatants, women and children, "unless they attack you first." Even such questions as missile and chemical warfare are addressed, the first in relation to mangonels and catapults, the other to the use of poison-tipped arrows and poisoning enemy water supplies. Here the jurists differ -- some permit, some restrict, some forbid these forms of warfare. A point on which they insist is the need for a clear declaration of war before beginning hostilities, and for proper warning before resuming hostilities after a truce.

What the classical jurists of Islam never remotely considered is the kind of unprovoked, unannounced mass slaughter of uninvolved civil populations that we saw in New York two weeks ago. For this there is no precedent and no authority in Islam. Indeed it is difficult to find precedents even in the rich annals of human wickedness.

---

Mr. Lewis is professor emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University.

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Joachim Fest, Not I

One of the books I am reading is Joachim Fest's Not I: Memories of a German Childhood (orig. publ. in German in 2006 by Rowohlt, tr. Martin Chalmers, New York, Other Press, 2013).

The title alludes to Mark 14:29: "But Peter said unto him, Although all shall be offended, yet will not I."

WSJ review by T. J. Reed here.  I reproduce a sizeable chunk of it in case it ends up behind a pay wall:

The [Fest] family lives under a shadow. Their dissent is no secret. Father had been a member of the Reichsbanner, the organization in which his Catholic Centre Party had joined with liberals and Social Democrats to defend the republic against Communists and Nazis. It's not every school headmaster who gets involved in street fights and comes home bloody, as Johannes Fest did. But after 1933 he was a headmaster no longer, suspended indefinitely by the new political masters. The family's status and income were lost, their lives transformed. Grandfather had to come out of retirement to earn a bit for them. Father never worked again. The Nazis did try to cajole him back into teaching, since any observable dissent was bad publicity. They even offered accelerated promotion if he would outwardly conform. He remained firm.

Family tension became palpable. Mother, bearing the brunt of straitened family circumstances, asks Father if he might not compromise. Weren't lies always the resort of the "little people"? He replies: "We aren't little people." It is one of the maxims that guided the conduct of Fest's father and a few friends. (The title of his son's memoir comes from a Gospel passage that he would often quote, Peter promising Jesus: "Even if all others fall away—not I.") There were some Germans who made sure that they were carrying something in both hands when they went out into the street, the only plausible ground for not giving the required "Heil Hitler" salute to anyone they met. But Fest's father goes out resolutely empty-handed.

"Keep your head down," Johannes [father of Joachim] told his family, "but don't let it make you smaller." Young Joachim didn't always listen. A classmate reports him for carving a Hitler caricature on his desk. (He has been scribbling them on surfaces all over town.) As a consequence, he is removed from the school; his brothers too. The episode is just one instance of an independence akin to his father's.

The friends of the Fests—they now became former friends—and many neighbors and acquaintances fell by the wayside, even without being keen Nazis. Only one of the 12 families in the apartment block was in the party. The rest merely went along as things changed, drifting deeper into acquiescence, making excuses even as stable social and political structures fell apart in the name of a new "people's community." The Nazis, after all, were formally the legitimate government, however brutal their conduct of affairs—from the realm of international diplomacy to the arbitrary laws that replaced justice down to the small changes in everyday life, the swindles and favoritism of party members.

By recording these small changes, Joachim Fest creates a picture of how the one-party state operated on an intimate level, and exerted its unbreakable grip. It recalls the bleak account of incremental misery in Victor Klemperer's diaries of the period. A woman sees a Jewish-looking man in the street not wearing a star, pursues and denounces him. There are first rumors and then reliable evidence of atrocities.

Anti-Semitism had considerably more popular resonance than many other Nazi policies, such as the campaign for "Lebensraum" in the east. How many Germans would have wanted to up sticks and resettle somewhere on the vast Russian plains? As for Jewish Germans themselves, even after Kristallnacht there were those who waited for the Nazi "phase" to pass. Their trust in a culture that had produced Kant, Goethe, Schiller, Lessing and Beethoven, a culture into which they felt they had assimilated, meant that they delayed escape too long.

But was it German culture that produced Kant, Goethe, et al.?  Or was it the Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian culture that had its sources in Athens and Jerusalem? That is one question.  A second question is whether talk of production is anywhere near adequate, whether any culture could produce such geniuses as opposed merely to providing  a fertile soil in which they developed themselves.

A third question is whether we are not now drifting toward a totalitarian unculture in which the slightest deviations from politically correct modes of thought and speech bring down drastic punishments on those who think they can speak their minds in private and in public without fear of reprisal from illiberal 'liberals.'

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Not Me: A German Childhood by Joachim Fest - review

Dissertation Advice on the Occasion of Kant's Birthday

Putin's Sudetenland?

Not Me: Memoirs of a German Childhood, By Joachim Fest, trans. Martin Chalmers

Brotherly hatred

Homo Homini Lupus: The Red Army Rape of German Women, Spring 1945

The best antidote to the leftist-progressivist fantasy that man is basically good is the study of history, including the history of leftist-progressivist atrocities.  Here is an excerpt from Antony Beevor's book on the fall of Berlin.  "They raped every German female from eight to 80."

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