Archive for January, 2008

Liberal Fascism

Saturday, January 26th, 2008

I have finished Jonah Goldberg’s book, Liberal Fascism. I posted a review on Amazon but have a few other thoughts about the book. It is a very interesting book and he has done a good job with the history. Chou En Lai was once famously quoted about the French Revolution. When asked his opinion of its consequences, he answered that “it is too soon to tell.” Even Iraq War critics use the anecdote in discussing historical analogies. Goldberg raises the issue of the French Revolution to assert that Robespierre is the philosophical father of the Progressive Movement of modern times.

In fact, Rousseau has been called the precursor of the modern pseudo-democrats such as Stalin and Hitler and the “people’s democracies.” His call for the “sovereign” to force men to be free if necessary in the interests of the “General Will” harks back to the Lycurgus of Sparta instead of to the pluralism of Athens; the legacy of Rousseau is Robespierre and the radical Jacobins of the Terror who followed and worshipped him passionately. In the 20th century, his influence is further felt by tyrants who would arouse the egalitarian passions of the masses not so much in the interests of social justice as social control. Let us take Rousseau for the literary genius he was and appreciate his contribution to history; let us look at his political philosophy with great skepticism.

Robespierre himself has spoken about this issue:

“Terror is nought but prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is less a particular principle than a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to the most pressing needs of the fatherland.”
Maximillien Marie Isidore de Robespierre
Address, National Convention, 1794

The authoritarian temptation of the political left is the subject of Goldberg’s thesis. Fabian Socialists like George Bernard Shaw, American Progressives like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt all figure in a continuous line in Goldberg’s book. I think he makes excellent points. This essay on Robespierre makes several points that echo those of Goldberg.

Robespierre and his compatriots, especially Louis-Antoine Saint-Just and George Couthon, envisioned a French Republic based on virtue, wherein economic class distinctions would cease, wherein it would be criminal to own an excess of wealth, wherein the highest and noblest goal of any citizen would be service to the state.

Here is the origin of Socialism. Robespierre acknowledged a great debt to Rousseau:

From Rousseau, Robespierre adopted the Social Contract theory of government, which was later to be accepted by the Jacobins. Man is by nature good, but becomes corrupt through unjust institutions and laws; he is born free, but becomes a slave to injustice.  Government is literally a contract entered into by people; each individual brings into the larger group a share of its power and authority. Moreover, the contract can be changed at any time the “general will” desires.

The conservative concept of freedom, property and the right “to be let alone” is not part of the “Social Contract” according to the Rousseau concept. A straight line is drawn from The Terror to “An Inconvenient Truth.”

I’ll have more to post on this later.

Maybe the British worm is turning

Friday, January 25th, 2008

I have had concerns that Britain is taking the disastrous road to civil disorder that occurred in this country in the 1960s. Theodore Dalrymle has voiced similar concerns. Now there is a tiny sign that someone is fighting back. It is a single story but a least it is in the press. I liked this quote:

“I have never used a weapon in my life and it was a great feeling.

Maybe there is hope after all. A recent article in The Telegraph about civil disorder and filthy toilets in British airports was followed by a letter from an expatriot Briton who now lived in Indiana. He wrote that he was surrounded by neighbors who owned and even carried guns. He had never felt so safe in Britain.

UPDATE: This is not good news.

Britain’s home secretary, Jacqui Smith, unveiled the new brand name in a speech a few days ago. “There is nothing Islamic about the wish to terrorize, nothing Islamic about plotting murder, pain and grief,” she told her audience. “Indeed, if anything, these actions are anti-Islamic.”

Has this woman ever read the Quran ?

Why are we Republicans ?

Thursday, January 24th, 2008

UPDATE: Peggy Noonan has a very serious column today on the Republican schisms. Her point is that Bush broke the consensus of te party on a number of issues, including spending and immigration. I think she is right.

The 2006 loss of the majority in Congress might have chastened the Republicans to mend their high spending ways. It doesn’t seem to have done so if this Robert Novak column is accurate. The focus is on earmarks, a practice in which members of Congress assign spending items to favored parties, often campaign contributers.

This practice is not new as this column points out. After the 2006 election showed the price of such corruption, there was talk of reform. The history of earmarks shows a steady climb the past decade. When the Democrats took Congress, they promised reform but that appears to have been an empty promise. If Republicans are ever going to regain the majority, this would seem to be a significant issue. After all, conservatives tend to oppose government spending. If Novak’s prediction is correct, it seems we will have a long wait. There have been suggestions that Bush simply cancel them as they are not part of the legislation. Since the Republican caucus seems unlikely to appoint Jeff Flake, an enemy of earmarks to the Appropriations Committee, that may be our last chance at reform.

The Big Army is still resisting the future.

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008

I have previously posted on the military’s need to enter the 21st century and the Age of 4th generation warfare. A negative milestone was reached when John Nagl retired, still a LT colonel in spite of being the expert in COIN warfare. Now, we come upon a comment from a student at the Army’s Command and General Staff College who writes that the lessons of Iraq and the theory of COIN war learned at so high a cost in Iraq, are not being taught. The Big Army, a term used by Robert Kaplan in his book “Imperial Grunts,” seems to be immune to the lessons of Iraq. Maybe it’s not as bad as that, if you read all the comments. Still, it is a worry.

The cost of good intentions

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008

I ran across an example of how expensive global warming political correctness can be. These five CEOs thought that there would be no downside to their adoption of the global warming theme. They would be “good citizens” and probably get invited to a Hollywood or Manhattan cocktail party where they could schmooze with left wing intellectuals. Instead, their companies, and their customers, took a hit. It would be funny except for the costs to employees and customers who would never be invited to those cocktail parties anyway.

More on Washingtonstan

Monday, January 21st, 2008

UPDATE: More on Coughlan’s Master’s Thesis and what he thinks about Islam. I fear he is correct.

Several weeks ago, I posted on the firing of Major Coughlan, a Pentagon expert on Islamic law. He was accused of being a Christian ! A commenter here suggested that he did not know Arabic and therefore had no expertise. Now, there is more to the story, although unsurprisingly it has not made the MSM. There is an interesting debate going on in the Pentagon.

Former Army intelligence officer Jerome Gordon, who has discussed Coughlin’s thesis with former colleagues who have attended his briefings, told Newsmax that Hesham Islam is not Coughlin’s only enemy.

“If there is a cabal that is opposing him, it’s in the military intelligence community,” Gordon said. “Clearly, they have been cowed by the significant entrée provided by the U.S. government to leaders of Muslim Brotherhood fronts here in America.”

In a 153-slide PowerPoint presentation he uses to brief U.S. military officers headed for the Middle East, Coughlin criticizes analysts such as Harlan Ullman, a Washington Times columnist who boasts of his ties to Condoleezza Rice.

“And unlike the Nazis, these extremists lack a central, unifying ideology, come from many diverse movements and so far have not been inclined to develop a political theory for seizing political power,” Ullman wrote in a November 2007 column.

Coughlin called that statement a “non-sequitor,” and said that U.S. military officers had a “duty” to base their assessment on an objective analysis of the facts, not on assumptions or desires.

Another Ullman statement: “The world indeed has changed. But not as we think. American power and perceived omnipotence have been greatly neutralized or displaced…This means aligning our ego with reality. Mr. Bush once called for a more humble foreign policy. The times never demanded one more.”

So these are the people who want us to be blind to militant Islam’s literature.

The Democrats and the surge

Sunday, January 20th, 2008

Don’t think for a moment that the Democrats are giving up on defeat. They are only laying low. They are convinced that defeat is just around the corner. Their thesis?

The United States has acquired a ramshackle, ungovernable and unresponsive dependency that is incapable of securing its own borders or managing its own affairs. More than three years after then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice handed President Bush a note announcing that “Iraq is sovereign,” that sovereignty remains a fiction.

They will not accept a sovereign Iraq because that would vindicate the Bush foreign policy. The goalposts will be moved until they can declare defeat and go home.

Even a prescient warning by a grand old man of liberal politics may not be enough to keep them from the third rail of security policy. Democrats cannot be trusted with national security. Every once in a while, they feel the need to remind us.

The Fred campaign fell short

Sunday, January 20th, 2008

I declared for Fred here a week ago but  the win he needed in South Carolina didn’t happen. Giuliani is the next one to have a chance to show that he can win a big primary. I don’t think Romney can do it and McCain may be the nominee. We’ll see what happens. I still think Fred was the last real conservative in the race but Rudy is close. McCain is not a conservative.

Calls for help with Mexican immigrants-From Mexico

Saturday, January 19th, 2008

Mexican legislators are traveling to Phoenix this week to complain about illegal aliens; returning to Mexico. “How can they pass a law like this?” asked Mexican Rep. Leticia Amparano Gamez, who represents Nogales. The horror of it!

the legislators said Sonora – Arizona’s southern neighbor, made up of mostly small towns – cannot handle the demand for housing, jobs and schools it will face as illegal Mexican workers here return to their hometowns without jobs or money.

Where does it say that this is our problem ?

How big is the problem ?

“There is not one person living in Sonora who does not have a friend or relative working in Arizona,” she said in Spanish.

Rep. Francisco Garcia Gámez, a legislator from Cananea and that city’s former mayor, said the lack of mining jobs there has driven many Mexicans to Arizona to find work. He said they depend on jobs in Arizona to feed their families on both sides of the border.

That is what is going on. The Mexicans are coming here to work but their families are in Mexico. I actually don’t mind this if there is a way to let them work legally and avoid the burden on the community of extra services. We used to have such a program. It was called the Bracero Program. Why did it come to an end ? Because the American labor unions wanted to support Cesar Chavez and his Farm Workers Union.

The end of the Bracero program in 1964 was quickly followed by the formation of the United Farm Workers, and the subsequent transformation of American migrant labor under the activist leadership of Cesar Chavez, a prominent critic of the bracero program.

The rest is history. This is where the illegal immigration program began. Mexico has become more dependent on this program than the agricultural businesses that employ the workers. Expect more screaming from Mexico as attempts to close the borders increase.

The NY Times and the military

Friday, January 18th, 2008

“Pinch” Sulzberger, chairman of the NY Times company, famously apologized to a graduating class that his generation hadn’t been able to change America to their image of a correct society. It isn’t for lack of trying. Sulzberger will keep trying until the NY Times stock price is zero. The Times’ most recent attempt at mind changing is an article that purports to show that the American military is full of murderers. The article has been the object of furious rebuttal. The reactions at Huffington Post, which printed the story in its entirety, were predictable:

I’m sure it has been mentioned before on this thread … but I would like to take a moment and comment that these murders are only the tip of the huge problem surrounding PTSD in our returning warriors.Of the many lies and obfuscations foisted on we the people about the Iraq war by the Shrub administration, “We support the troops” is probably the most reprehensible.

Yup, they certainly don’t support the troops at the NY Times. Or the Huffington Post.

This all happened before, in the 1960s, for which “Pinch” is so nostaligic. C.G. Burkett, a veteran of the Vietnam War wrote Stolen Valor in response to all the “crazy vet” stories that the news media were spreading after that war. He points out how many are fraudulent. I teach medical students and it is common for them to be interviewing a male patient in the County Hospital and to be told he is a Vietnam vet. Most of them would have been less than ten years old at the time all US troops were gone from that country. Yet the myth of the homeless veteran persists and is embellished by the NY Times stories and many of the followup stories from the left.

Ten years ago, Thomas Ricks, a military writer for the Washington Post, another left wing newspaper, pointed out in his book Making the Corps, that since the end of the draft, most civilians in this country have no experience in the military. The gulf between the military culture and civilian culture is the widest since the 1930s when “Soldiers and dogs get off the grass” signs were a (possibly apocryphal) indication of the attitude of civilians toward the soldier. This is not unique to America or to this time. Rudyard Kipling, the bard of the British Army, had something to say about it. Today, the British public treats their soldiers even worse than the left wing does ours. Ricks, in his book, pointed out that the widening gulf between civilian and military in this country could even become a hazard. With the country seemingly ready to elect an anti-war president next fall, we are all in danger from this nonsense. The lefties don’t think the jihadists will ever disturb their gated community, latte sipping lives. I wonder.

Kipling knew what he was talking about.

MORE: Why I like Iowahawk. Should we be worried about psychological pathology in newsrooms?