On Big Government

_____________________________________________

 
 

Thursday

January 6, 2011

 
 

On Big

Government

 
 

The big government model is a wrong turn. As it takes over the responsibilities of the individual, it undermines personal morality by relieving the individual of accountability. It effectively eliminates competition, and thereby eliminates the chief motivator to excellence. All this costs a lot of money, too – it will all be paid for through the seizing and confiscation of privately, and legally, earned wealth.

If you think it’s all okay because it’s the right thing for government to do, that it’s the moral thing to do, the humane, altruistic, idealistic way to go, then you are a gullible dupe. In fact, of course, there is no moral obligation to be in favor of big government at all, or in favor of its various programs.

Big government is not what it claims to be – it says of itself that it’s helping the disadvantaged, the oppressed, but that’s just talk. It’s really a patronage system. It’s a system of favors sought and favors granted. As it grows bigger and more multi-faceted, it concomitantly increases its power to dole out largesse and it further ensconces itself and its members in a guaranteed life-style, sheltered from the empirical world.

For example, the issue of global warming – it clearly is false, exaggerated science, designed to lure more people into the tentacles of government, into being government clients, and is therefore designed to make them dependant on government. The same is true of Obama Care and gay marriage – a disingenuously emphasized issue is put before us, with a putative moral obligation to agree, but it’s all untrue.

In reality you are being taken for a ride: you give them your personal liberty and your personal integrity and the freedom of your mind in exchange for not much, just a subsidized life at the expense of the private sector.

This thinking seeps into our foreign policy, too. That is, a strong policy of international relations needs the will to seek outright victory at times over the neighborhood bully, and not just stand pat forging compromises with him (he is, after all, merely a child testing the limits of his parents).

But, with a government dedicated to favors and patronage and subsidies and clients, are we really capable of mustering the will to win from the Oval Office or from the State Department? Or will we rather just seek out more ways to grant favors and reach a paltry settlement with those who threaten us?

 

 

 

_____________________________________________

 
 

 
 

 
 

  

The French and American Revolutions

     
 

Saturday

October 23, 2010

     
 

The Diverse Meanings

of the

French and American

Revolutions

     
 

The difference between the two revolutions consists mainly in the French Revolution being concerned to create a nurturing government structure for the purpose of providing services for citizen-subjects, whereas the meaning of the American system was to create a wholly new manner of citizenship based on self-reliance. The American Revolution was fought on behalf of personal freedom and responsibility and therefore rejected the welfare-statism of Europe, which takes away the illustrious status of citizen and replaces it with the status of mere subject.

But we are losing the meaning of our revolution here in America – we have a superior system at first view, in that individual accomplishment can be pursued, but our country is now ever more rapidly turning into a patronage system just as in Europe. We are turning in and exchanging the meaning of our own revolution for that of the other one, the inferior one. So it’s not so much merit now that matters, or individual worth, but instead the lucky state of being connected to people who are in positions of power. Thus, the larger government grows, all the more does it become a system of corrupted patronage. That means a culture of recriminations.

We lost our way in foreign policy first, with Woodrow Wilson, who was a good man but a naïve, ego-driven one. He believed America should spread (read: smear) its democracy all over the world through the League of Nations. This is mistaken, we now see with the hindsight of historical vision, in that it’s about as possible as landing a man on the sun. That is, the vast majority of the globe is governed by a thuggish system, not by the rule of law and respect for the rights of property. There is not a peaceful transfer of power. “Who can do what to whom” is the dynamic that rules most of the world, as Lenin put his own view of how things should be done. We are in danger of taking on that same state of affairs in our country, which was originally meant as a refuge from that type of thing.

We should content ourselves in foreign policy with merely protecting our own, and be loath to get involved in the local politics of miserable places. If you think we’re helping oppressed people by intervening, then you don’t understand that their system is a game of King of the Hill. We’re just helping the underdog thug at the expense of the reigning thug. Nation-building is a wrong turn; it’s a horse that doesn’t run.

We lost our way then in domestic policy with Herbert Hoover and FDR. The latter, of course, implemented the gigantic welfare state that consumes an enormous part of our GDP. This welfare state has a voracious, rapacious appetite for dollars, in addition to creating a system of favors sought and favors granted. It breeds dependence and bad attitude (some of it justified, actually), and ruins everything that was formerly based on free competition and merit. It creates a ruling class, in sum. The mentality of “It takes a Village” is really one of government usurpation of personal and family issues. The talk about “unity” is the same thing – smoke and mirrors for depredations and for expropriations of personal and family life by the Brave New World of modern governance. If you think you’re working for idealistic motives and for justice, then you are unaware that, high above you, you are in reality merely working for a patronage system of entrenched interests.

Thus Barack Obama is the culmination of one hundred years of mistaken policy in America. He is armed to the teeth, to be sure, with fancy theories to prove he is doing right – but that’s exactly the point here: he’s armed with theories. The deleterious effects of theory on reality are blatantly discernable in the social malaise of our cities, and in the aggressive bad attitude that defends it. It looks as if the country the founders intended is gone forever, given over to the blindness of the French Revolution. Thus, Benjamin Franklin was once asked by a woman, “What have you given us?” Franklin answered, sensibly, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.” (We didn’t.)

   
 

   
 

__________________________________________

     

A Foreign Policy for the Rest of Us

   
 

________________

Monday

October 11, 2010

________________

   
 

A Foreign Policy

for

the Rest of Us

   
 

What follows is a basic rundown of what I believe is the proper conduct of international relations. I am indebted for the basis of this to Angelo Codevilla, a fellow of the Claremont Institute in southern California, and a frequent contributor to the Claremont Review of Books.

First realize that not all instances of peace are the same: There’s his peace and then there’s your peace. You can certainly get peace at any price – including that of your peace of mind – but that’s no way to live, with a gun to your head.

Don’t consider peace as something you are entitled to by right of birth – you have to fight for it and earn it. If you think of it as an entitlement, you will be loath to exert yourself for it, and will then surely lose it.

Don’t be too troubled at being disliked or even hated. Sometimes you have to do things that will alienate others, and they will not find you a particularly likable guy. No matter. Do it anyway. Your sense of yourself and of your freedom is more important than being universally well-liked. Besides, the latter is impossible.

Don’t try to change the world, that is, stay out of nation-building. The world doesn’t care about your paradigms, and will just use you. The majority of the globe is now and always has been governed by a system of “who can do what to whom,” as Lenin put his own view of politics. It isn’t governed by a respect for private property or for the rule of law, nor does it want to be. Stay away from democracy-promotion. Just punish the depredations, and then get out.

Don’t call for conferences and negotiations and summit meetings as a substitute for real resolution. The problem with the former is that they are used as a way to avoid real confrontation — but if you are to get real peace, you must eventually face hostilities unwaveringly.

Don’t show fear. That encourages your adversary to move in. Keep him back at a polite distance by exuding confidence and indomitability.

Don’t be self-destructive, don’t feel guilty about existing or about having a self-interest. Don’t capitulate to your adversary’s point of view all the time. It shows weakness to do so, and he’ll move in on you mercilessly.

Focus on the Somebodies, not on the Nobodies. We kill hundreds of thousands of nobodies to no purpose, when we could kill fifty times fewer people and get so much more out of it for our national security — if we would only concentrate on eliminating the regimes, the ruling class in renegade regimes, and forget to bother the non-entities.

Take advice from your staff with a grain of salt – they may have a personal agenda. For example, George W. Bush was too easily led by the Department of State to change the mission in Iraq to one of occupation, nation-building, and democracy-promotion. He also provided hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out private corporations on the say-so of the Treasury Department. He didn’t ask himself whether the advice was self-interested or not. He just acquiesced, he gave power to the same sort of people who had caused the problem in the first place.

Foreign policy primarily is the quiet art of informing your opponent what will happen to him if he doesn’t cease and desist. And if he fails to cease and desist, you must go through with imposing on him the consequences you warned of. International relations are not about being polite, not about calling for talks. They are rather about fighting for your peace in a world unequivocally given over to competition and strife. Speak softly and carry a big stick, indeed.

   
 

______________________________________________

 

 

 

George W. Bush: The Almost Great Man

 
 

Monday

August 2, 2010

 
 

Tony Downing’s Opinion Page

 
 

George W. Bush:

The Almost Great Man

 
 

George W. Bush was on the brink of forging a great foreign policy when, after having invaded Iraq with the intention of deposing the entire anti-American Sunni Baath regime in Baghdad, he was about to leave the country in the hands of the formerly oppressed Shia majority. But that didn’t happen. It should have, sports fans, but it didn’t, to our great regret.

Instead, America tragically embarked on a mission of nation-building, to no gain whatsoever for our national self-interest, and, with more than four thousand American lives lost, we are still at it after seven years plus. Why did this happen? Why did we change a correct course for a tragic one?

First, let me say that what America needs to do to solve its terror problem is precisely what Bush started to do: pull down the anti-American Arab regimes, starting with the Sunni variety in Baghdad, Damascus, and Riyadh, then hand power over to the newly-empowered, and get out after eight weeks in country. That’s it! Rocket Science: not! Bush started to do this, then stopped. He was on the brink of really doing something dynamic and forceful and useful. A real accomplishment. So what happened?

Saudi Arabia happened. They were soiling their robes with fear that a Sunni regime was about to really fall, and not just the henchman Saddam but the whole ruling class, and they panicked. They got in touch with the CIA and the Department of State in America, and convinced those that count that it would be a calamity of untold proportions if the Sunni fell in Iraq, that a general conflagration would ensue in the Arab world, etc, etc.

But who cares if there’s a general conflagration and the people rise up against their worthless masters? Who cares if the Sunni in Saudi Arabia fall? I’d love to see it. They are incapable of defending themselves against a kitten, they are corrupt beyond imagining, they can’t even get up out of a chair, so why do we prop them up? We get nothing out of it! Let them fall!

But Bush listened. He let State and CIA get to him. He was not his own man, and he fell short of greatness. So nothing has changed. It was all a waste. The soldiers’ sacrifice let down yet again. Win the war, lose the peace. Same old. Terror is just as strong as it ever was. It comes into your life primarily through the Sunni Arab regimes that sponsor it through their TV stations, through their laissez faire, through their domestic propaganda learned from their Nazi alliance in the 1930′s, and through billions and billions of petrodollars busily building anti-American mosques throughout the world. Had enough of the State Department? Had enough of Sunni regimes? Me, too.

 

 
 

 
 

 
 

  

You Call That Nation-Building? (Part 2)

 

 

————————————————

Sunday

May 16, 2010

 ————————————————

 

 

——————————————

You Call That Nation-Building?

(Part 2)

Or,

Thugs Don’t Read Voltaire

———————————————————————-

  
 

When you’re in a hole, the beginning of wisdom is:

Stop digging.

– Angelo Codevilla

 
 

We are missing the essentials in the War on Terror. We’re involved in ancillary stuff in Afghanistan, for sure, since the Taliban are newcomers to anti-Americanism and to global mayhem, and they have no vision beyond making money from their Arab tenants and dominating their own provincial realm and fiefdom. Whatever murderous idiocy they decide to engage in, they are mere pretenders to the throne, they are not the root and branch of terror.

 

But even now in Iraq, too, we’re missing the essentials: pulling down Saddam Hussein was the most useful military operation in a long, long time for the decent people of the world, but the US Department of State gave back the victory the military had won. That is to say, they allowed the deposed Sunni elite to make deals, and prevented the Shiites from taking power as the successor regime. That’s why we’re still there, nation-building and holding elections: it covers up that State made sure no real reversal of fortune would come to the former Sunni elite. So the Sunnis lose the elections? So what? They have survived the short-sighted American policy. Since when do elections mean anything in the Arab countries? Do you realize where you are, and what region it is that you’re building nations in?

 

Would Douglas Macarthur or George Patton or Montgomery or Churchill or Pershing nation-build like this in Iraq and Afghanistan? It doesn’t seem possible. They wouldn’t put their men in the position of sitting on their hands getting shot at. They knew the purpose of combat was victory, not stasis, not using soldiers as police or as peacekeepers. Victory means taking action – right now our soldiers are not allowed to take any action whatsoever. Either pull the Sunnis down, or pull the soldiers out.

 

The problem is that we’re not taking this war seriously as a war. The only possible purpose of deploying the military is the destruction of the enemy. The soldiers have a right to commanders who target only victory as the goal. This war should have a beginning, a middle, and an end – we’ve mistakenly settled into an eternal middle, all in the name of “fighting global terror,” as if it’s some quasi-inaccessible force of nature that cannot ever be defeated.

 

But it is only specific people that have to be defeated: Saddam and the rest of his ilk that survives in Iraq, Assad in Damascus, the Saudis, and the PLO for a start. Get them out of the game, along with their elite confederates, and the war is won. How could imposing a form called “democracy” on gangsters stop them from repairing their slightly damaged infrastructure of power?

 

We are shrinking away from the task of annihilating our adversary, and instead taking up an obfuscating task which is wholly irrelevant to the results we want. Our soldiers have the right to be seething at the childish, disingenuous idiocy of the conduct of this war. We must start to explicitly seek victory. That will begin when we admit that there is no such thing as al Qaida, since bin Laden is a goner, and since all the harping about al Qaida takes place only so as to remain in denial about the regimes. Get the regimes!

 
 

There will never be an Arab Tom Jefferson, and we are waiting for Godot if we think Arabs are going to humor our pretensions about elections and democracy any time soon. Therefore, stop building nations and just win! The dreamers in Washington who believe that the world will all come together in democracy, and thereby secure America’s safety, are kidding themselves. It’s a hardball world.

 

For the diplomats at State, it’s all about their egos, their legacies as statesmen and as leaders. But they let us down as they pursue personal agendas at the expense of the national agenda. Unbravo! This is what will elicit glowing praise in 100 years?!!!

 
 

 
 

In war, resolution. In defeat, defiance.

In victory, magnanimity. In peace, goodwill.

– Winston Churchill

 

——————————————————–

 

 

 

You call that Nation-building?

 

——————————————————————————————————————————————

 

 

 

Wednesday

 

May 12, 2010

 

You Call That Nation-Building?

 

The attempts of American foreign policy to bring democracy to the Middle East are misguided. They are not ignoble, but they are certainly incompetent. We Americans fail to understand the dysfunctional nature of the politics of the region, and we fail to see the impossibility of the European Age of Enlightenment taking root in the forbidding soil of Arabia.

 

 

That is to say, when America brings elections and universal suffrage and enfranchisement to a place like Iraq or Afghanistan, we first set ourselves the task of keeping the feuding parties separate, so they don’t tear each other apart. We must make them settle down to some extent in order to hold the elections at least halfway fairly. But this pacification only helps the original regime stay in power, since the enemies of that regime are then prevented by peacekeepers from attacking and removing the prior regime. The natural order of things is disrupted by the peacekeepers, who stand in the way of the new order taking its pound of flesh and emerging victorious.
 

 

Meanwhile, the subsequent results of the earnest elections have not, for the most part, proven themselves capable of restoring order or of sweeping away that original, brutalizing structure. Nation-building, ironically, helps the initial authoritarian institutions stay in power! That’s how clueless we are: We go to a country to bring change to it, and end up merely making any change impossible. It’s a case of having The Axioms: sometimes we believe so deeply and unconsciously in our axioms that we then believe, incredibly, that they yield more information about life than life itself.
 

 

We need to understand how things work in that part of the world. Moreover, our bipartisan arrogance that we know what’s going on is risible. A more sound strategy would have been for us to remove Angelo Codevilla’s (Advice to War Presidents, No Victory No Peace) top 2000 people, or allow the former oppressed to do so, and thereby really get a clean slate, thereby really change the regime and the attendant status quo. But up until now, we have not changed the status quo in Iraq or in Afghanistan, but we have, rather, emboldened it.
 

 

We cogitate that we need only remove the inner circle because we think their system is like ours, based on the peaceful transfer of power (“O, Stubb, how little thou knew of Ahab at that time!”). But their system is based on a violent strife of opposites that mutually cancel one another, and on traditional ties and loyalties that we can probably never comprehend (who would even want to?). 
 

 

We can at least comprehend, though, that the regime is more than the top 15 people at the roundtable in the inner circle. The regime is bigger than the government, as Codevilla points out. Eliminate the whole bunch and you will have done something. We need to unequivocally show the world that practicing anti-Americanism and terrorism gets you killed. We haven’t done that yet – we’ve only shown the world that our incompetent and clumsy nation-building only prolongs hostilities.
 

 

Finally, nation-building cannot work because thereby we are trying to transplant luxurious, native American foliage into a stingy soil hostile to egalitarian processes. It is logically impossible to bring democracy to the Middle East until such time as that vine becomes a growth native to that region, in its own way and in its own time. (Don’t hold your breath, by the way.) Middle Eastern governments are regimes run by thugs who can only be removed from power by more thuggery. It was ever thus and quite likely shall remain so for a long time.
 

 

Let’s then save American lives – let’s kill or arrest the top 2000 in those anti-American, terror-supporting regimes, hand power over to the former oppressed and allow them to become the successor regime, and then get the hell out after six weeks in country. (No more using the military as a sitting-duck police force.) That will solve your terror problem, and that way you won’t have to wait eight hours at the airport for a one-hour flight to Palookaville (plus, we won’t have to endure ridiculous front-page newspaper articles telling us that “things aren’t going so well in Afghanistan.” No kidding?!!! Didn’t see that coming!)
 

 

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
 

Afghan Taliban Gains — America needs to know that?

 
 

 
 

Thursday

 
 

April 29, 2010

 
 

 
 

 

 

—————————————————————————————————–

America needs to know

that the Taliban is gaining?

—————————————————————————————————–

 
 

 
 

 

In the Los Angeles Times today, the main article gravely informs us that the “sobering” new assessment from the Pentagon is that the Taliban and its insurgency are making inroads against the “Western-backed government” in Kabul of President Hamid Karzai.

 
 

 

So America should care about that? We really care about the irrelevance of Afghanistan to the War on Terror? Drawing upon the work of Angelo Codevilla (Advice to War Presidents), we now know that all the valor of our fighting men and women notwithstanding, Afghanistan has nothing to do with the War on Terror. Nothing. Afghanistan is fundamentally irrelevant to that war — the al Qaida training camps, yes, they are indeed relevant, but once the house-cleaning has been done and the rat’s nest purified, it’s time to get out and move on.

 

 

Putting a Western-style government in Kabul will not help make America safer — first, it’s a sham to think that Pashtun people would care about the European Age of Enlightenment principles of democracy, and second, the reality is we will get bogged-down in the idiocy of their local politics. The Taliban are not involved in terrorism – they are merely local thugs – it is actually the Arab regimes and their henchmen in Hamas, al Qaida, and in the mosques who are in truth the ones who propagate the fear and terror that led to the 9/11 attacks.

 

 
 

We are wasting American lives in Afghanistan, all to the purpose of a project that cannot work. What we should be doing in the War on Terror is undoing the Arab regimes that are most responsible for the propaganda behind the attacks: Saddam’s Iraq, Assad’s Syria, and the Palestinian Authority, a sham government if ever there was one. We must pull down the Baath party that we helped come to power in the 50s and 60s, and we must destroy those regimes utterly, while not permitting the U. S. Department of State to allow the upended elites in those countries to crawl back into the new power structure after the fall (one foreign service officer to another, eh?).

 
 

 

The idea that nation-building in Afghanistan is essential to the War on Terror has a very slight legitimacy to it that unfortunately blinds us to the overarching red-herring that nation-building there, and as a whole, is a crock: that is, the Democrats in D.C. want to appear as though they know what the real issues are in fighting terror, and that Bush was wrong about everything. But Bush got one thing right — he got rid of Saddam and his vile sons, and a good part of the Baath regime there. The CIA and DOS, however, undid a good part of that accomplishment by letting former Sunni elites back into the new scheme of things.

 
 

 

In sum, we need to be more accurate – if we are going to spend American lives abroad to make us all safer here stateside, then let’s do it in such a way as to yield real results. Let’s not engage in appearances for the sake of the next election cycle. Those Americans who stop the bullets to ensure freedom deserve a lot better than that.

 
 

 
 

 

 

 

 

The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, Ironically

 

Thursday

April 8, 2010

 

 

The Tragedy

of

American Diplomacy, Ironically

 

 
 

In the 1960s, William Appleman Williams published a misguided book called The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. In it, he excoriates America and asserts that we are simply on the wrong side of history. Henceforth, any pride in America, any defense of America or of her friends, is morally culpable in the extreme.

 

The real tragedy of the book, however, is that subsequently the American Left took it to heart as an iconic tome, and have used it as a prime authority ever since, as justification for their sad, dysfunctional anti-Americanism. In addition, that American Left has by now become the elite in America, housed comfortably with tenure in offices and bureaucracies in the media, in academe, in the judiciary, and now, finally, in the sciences.

 

That tragic book, in its own turn,
has remained the philosophical
underpinning of that elite’s worldview and wisdom on foreign affairs. Barack Obama is the current leading light thereof, with Jimmy Carter, Zibigniew Brzezinski, and Fareed Zakaria as some of the more revered background sources. But to put the real tragedy of American diplomacy in concrete terms, outside the pages of a silly, clueless book of axioms, we can discuss the New Start Agreement that was signed today by President Obama and by President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia.

 

This agreement will reduce nuclear arms
over the course of the next several years, leading Obama to declare, “This ceremony is a testament to the truth that old adversaries can forge new partnerships.” But nothing could be more disingenuous than that statement. Obama is actually sending Russia a message that America will not do anything to thwart Russia’s plans to bring back its former sphere of influence in the Old World. This agreement is an act of unequivocal, disgraceful capitulation to Vladimir Putin’s Soviet-style depredations in Georgia, in the Ukraine, in the Central Asian countries, and anywhere else he can manage.

 

Obama has already appeased Russia once before in scrapping plans for missile defense in Poland and in the Czech Republic (ironically, or maybe not, this is where today’s agreement was signed, rubbing salt in the wounds we inflicted on an admirable friend by making that friend the witness and host to the capitulation). To hail this agreement as something good is to purposely and shamelessly mislead the public. It is to live in a world of axioms tragically removed from reality, to the detriment of reality. The tragedy of American diplomacy is The Tragedy of American Diplomacy.

 

 

 

 

Book Review: Advice to War Presidents, By Angelo M. Codevilla

     
 

Sunday

February 21, 2010  

     
 

_________________________________________________________________________

Book Review:

 

Advice

to

War Presidents

 
 

by Angelo M. Codevilla

   316 pgs. with notes and index 

published 2009

(Angelo Codevilla, a Senior Fellow at

The Claremont Institute,

is a former naval officer

and is now a professor of

International Relations at Boston University)

________________________________________________________________________

     
 

 

     
 

This book is an informative, tightly argued, detailed, and passionate indictment of the misguided American foreign policy of the twentieth century. The book also takes to task precisely the elite and academic international affairs culture persisting in Washington which produced the mistaken policies.

     
 

In the overarching structure of this book, Codevilla parses our last one hundred years of international relations by dividing the relevant schools of thought that have finally emerged into three: Liberal Internationalists, who believe uncritically in the virtues of international organizations such as the UN, then Realists, who believe in seeking out “moderates” in other countries to forge detente-style truces, and, last but not least, Neoconservatives, who believe somewhat more in the use of force than the other two, and who seek to spread democracy far and wide in order to ensure the freedom of Americans all the better.

   
 

Now, Codevilla argues against all three of these twentieth century schools. He believes that the foreign policy of America’s first century of existence is the best rule of thumb for us in international affairs today, largely because that older style does not evince the “global meliorism,” the “global betterment,” so characteristic of our policies at present. Our diplomats in this era, consequently, in the haze of their mistakes, have become more concerned with pleasing foreigners than with pleasing Americans, and we have needlessly lost much blood and treasure for this — we have actually been more at war this way than if we had just pursued self-interest normally.

     
 

Within the present system, consequently, we are constantly at war. We should, on the contrary, Codevilla argues, give up global meliorism, stop worrying about making the globe ”safe for democracy,” and just get back to basics. There’s a reason that the League of Nations failed, and a similar reason why the UN is a witches’ brew of corruption: international organizations don’t have a chance of working. All nations have their own particular self-interest, and if you put all these scattered paradigms together, it’s just hopeless. Too many of these nations will simply use the international organization in question to pursue various self-interested, nefarious designs, making a mockery of the organization. Nothing can stop that eventuality.

     
 

But, back in the day, in the eighteenth century, that is, our American diplomats, who were wiser, more grounded men, only worried about making peace our way, in our immediate self-interest, and only used “engagement,” as it’s called today, as a last resort. To utilize endless negotiation as an official policy was not in their nature, and negotiations as ends in themselves were unheard of. But today they are the norm, exasperatingly. We accept peace at any price today, to our shame. For Codevilla, on the other hand, diplomacy fundamentally is the quiet art of simply informing your opponent what will happen to him if he does not cease and desist. And in foreign policy, by the way, if you don’t mean it, “you better shut up.”  No empty rhetoric has a place in competent diplomacy, no idle threats, no moral posturing: just mean what you say, and go through with it. Codevilla sums up by stating, in a wonderful phrase, that “competent diplomats don’t threaten, they warn.”

     
 

Ever since the Progressive Era of the early twentieth century, Codevilla continues, we have been influenced in our international relations by made-up concepts about foreign people’s desires, about America’s global role, and about, most of all, what the wider world is really like. All this has passed for wisdom. Liberal Internationalists think you can administer and bureaucratize the world into peace, Realists that you can find all the moderates until all the extremists are gone, and Neocons that the world is a titanic contest between totalitarian governments and the global populace of democracy lovers, such that everyone, everywhere, infallibly wants American-style democracy.

     
 

But none of this is true, for Codevilla. Our diplomats today have unfortunately set aside real diplomacy in favor of an imaginary diplomacy in which all the people of the world want the same thing, a world in which, essentially, there are no foreigners. Codevilla definitely sees all three schools as being guilty of these misconceptions. We have given up true “statecraft,” the pursuit of our immediate, national self-interest, and taken up the fantasy that we can “renovate the world.” Not good. We have experienced endless trouble because of this, and we should stop the needless, impossibly futile, destructive policies that are based on this fiction.

   
 

Codevilla has written an immensely convincing, compelling book. To say it repays the effort of reading it is a major understatement. And its goal is ambitious — to change America’s present way of conducting itself in international affairs. I, for one, hope the book succeeds in this.

     
 

Obama and the Nobel Prize

October 10, 2009
_______________________________________________________________________________________________ 

 ________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

 _________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

A LOT OF HOT AIR? The sidebar reads: “Bomb kills 49 in Pakistani market,” while the big color photo shot through the window of the Oval Office shows Obama on the phone smiling broadly. This is the front page of today’s L.A. Times here in La La Land. But what could better exemplify the cluelessness of the Scandinavian Nobel Committee and of Obama’s foreign policy than this above-the-fold juxtaposition?
 

Obama’s “post-American-world” foreign policy, along with his apology tour and the misguided Cairo speech about Islam, all evince in the mind the image of a man who has little contact with the world’s reality. The world is far more dangerous, violent, incorrigible, and totalitarian than he is willing to admit, and his A-mea-rica culpa philosophy will help those renegade forces. I feel apprehension about a global shift in power during his administration, much as we saw take place during the administration of Jimmy Carter.

 

The Nobel Committee (not a group of people known for detailed contact with reality, mind you) has done something cheap and irresponsible in awarding the Peace Prize to someone for what he merely intends to do, or for what the Committee would wish him to do, as if the prize were a bribe for future services rendered. (Jean-Paul Sartre won the Nobel for Literature in the sixties, but refused to accept lest he be compromised in his future work.)

 

Well…..it’s obvious that the Peace Prize is now completely motivated by a political agenda, and that the Committee has given a tawdry, discredited patina to their own once-magnificent prize. First they give it to Rigoberta Menchu, a clear fraud who made things up, and now they give it to a man simply because they want him to grow into it, to deserve it in the future. I think the Land of the Midnight Sun needs to start wearing a hat.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Will You Come Into The Court?

 

February 14, 2009  

 

“No man is a fit judge in his own case.” — Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

in re: Geert Wilders v. The Koran  

 

England recently denied entry to Geert Wilders, a Dutch parliament member. Wilders had twice been invited by a British lord to visit England and preside over a showing of Fitna, his short documentary movie illustrating his belief that Islam incites to violence. England’s refusal to allow Wilders to enter the country is capitulation: to intimidation, to lies, to totalitarianism.  

 

But refusing Wilders is also a mistaken policy in another sense — it evinces the belief that the intentions of total domination can be appeased. But that change of inclinations has never taken place; nay, on the contrary, we see time and again that appeasement accelerates the inclination to aggression. That is, the same old ancient mistake is being made once again: the mistake of believing there is no difference between the totalitarian world and the non-totalitarian world.  

 

But there is indeed a difference, and we will continue to ignore it at our peril. What works in the non-totalitarian world will not work in the totalitarian world. Appeasement in the non-totalitarian world can work at times, if there is a normal, healthy strand of self-interest that can be reached in the aggressor. But in dealing with a totalitarian movement, however, the aggressor has no normal self-interest that can be reached — they don’t live in the world we do, a totalitarian movement does not care about its immediate self-interest in terms of this world.  

 

Such a movement is only concerned about the perceived eternality of the ideology, its interpretation of history, that is, and about what can further that ideology. We are playing into their hands by not recognizing this — we assume, incorrectly, that they will respond to our cooperation with their own cooperation. They will not. To try to appeal to a normal self-interest in them is to assume they are non-totalitarian, and not steeped in ideology, an ideology that claims the world as its property. That appeal to a non-existent self-interest will fail because the totalitarian movement will seize upon the appeasement as yet another gain for the ideology.

 

We project onto them our own psychological state, that is, our desire for peace, and we project our own non-totalitarian version of personal interest. But appeasement cannot work — totalitarians don’t have any motives rooted in this world that can be reached! They want the world, in short, and will not settle for any compromise or meeting-of-the-minds — there will be no budging on their part since their goals are beyond any understandable state of consciousness. They have put an ideology above reality, to an unreachable degree.  

 

Finally, Wilders was right to fly into Heathrow, to make the British government go on record, publicly, as an uncomprehending foe of freedom.

 

Tony Downing

 

 

 

 

Why was the Soviet Union “The Socialist Motherland?”

 

December 30, 2008

 

A free-market economy is capable of creating wealth. A Marxist economy is not capable of creating wealth. First of all, there is the impossible-to-duplicate complexity of a spontaneous market economy that human (Marxist) planners could never imitate (according to Friedrich Hayek). An economy as large as that of America (or as the old Soviet Union’s would have been) is made up of millions of spending and saving decisions every hour by the entrepreneur and the consumer. This process continues until a hopelessly complicated economic phenomenon has accrued.

That inevitable failure, on the part of human planners, to duplicate the complexity inherent in economic spontaneity can only result in botched economic projects, since economic growth, and thereby the creation of wealth, will be stifled outright by the intellectual limitations of those human planners, and the short-sighted, hubristic policies that will ensue.

Second, there is the issue of Adam Smith’s famous concept of the “Invisible Hand.” Given that free markets are governed by competition rather than by planning, each individual capitalist knows himself to be in a position of uncertainty. He knows that success is not assured, it is earned. Therefore, he will know it to be in his self-interest to work hard, be curious about others, and take chances, so that the probability of his bringing a worthy product to the market is greater. This will increase his chances of success as it also creates a market full of desirable goods to buy.

As he helps himself through self-interest, he helps the market, too, by creating its wealth through his hard work. Since a Marxist economy kills the goose that lays the golden egg, competition, as well as the individual initiative that it gives rise to, and replaces that golden goose with the ineluctable incompetence of human planners, the sure result is an economy that cannot possibly create wealth. It’s ironic that so many people who criticize America do so from the position of strength that only America’s economic power could have provided them.

Now, with the Invisible Hand banished in a Marxist economy, the only element that could have ended up producing wealth is gone, namely, free-market competition. What you will have now is empty shelves in the stores. Those empty shelves can only be filled by the self-interested activity of the individual capitalist in a free competition. The Soviet Union had some of the most spectacular reserves of oil and natural gas in the world. It was among the richest countries in the world in this regard. This reduced the urgency to create capitalist wealth once the necessary infrastructure to extract, process, and transport those resources had been put in place (by capitalist know-how, no less). The Soviet Union thought it could rely on selling off its furniture in order to stay afloat — it didn’t need capitalism.

It believed it could pay its way forever through selling technological know-how and arms to its satellites and to developing nations duped by its rhetoric, and through the exploitation and sale of all those natural resources. Thus the old Soviet Union never got around to developing a free-market economy, to its detriment. The problem here is that the Soviet Union fell behind in innovation. Who ever wanted Soviet blue jeans? Or Soviet music? Or Soviet anything? There was no stimulus to create, be curious, or work hard. (Only in their dissident literature was there any creativity, and it was there with a vengeance, since it was the rebirth of the spirit against the state.) 

There is an old joke in former satellite communist countries: “The man who works hard in a communist country has everything he wants, and the man who doesn’t work hard has even more.” The rest of the world was not interested in trading with the Soviet Union except for bare necessities, for the stuff that was just simply in the ground. The fabulous conceit of Marxist economic theory is that it was using the superabundant natural resources of the Empire to fund itself while absurdly claiming the superiority of human economic planning over the spontaneous marketplace. No country poor in natural resources can afford the incompetence of Marxist economic policies.

Those policies cannot create wealth, they can only create empty shelves, and when there are no natural resources to sell off, the country will suffer grievously in the economic sphere. Many countries found this out the hard way. The tragedy is that a mistaken hatred of America — as if America created all the evil in the world rather than fell into the preexisting evil created by all of human history — compels some countries to try Marxism, only to find themselves impoverished. India tried Marxism in the 1970′s, found out how bad it was, and now is a staunch ally of America. India is one of the best allies America has, a member of the English-speaking countries and their common tradition of the rule of settled case law.

The Soviet Union was the Socialist Motherland by design, not coincidence. All those resources put Russia at risk for becoming the home of the most tragic and murderous experiment in human history: communism. With all that wealth under the ground, free of charge, the Soviet Union became the logical motherland of Marxism since all that free wealth could hide quite nicely the incapability of Marxist economics of creating any wealth. The more state-owned enterprises a country has, the more individual initiative will be in attrition, and the more the economy will be suffocated thereby.

The liberating truth is that capitalism is morally superior to Marxism, since the former opens up the possibility of freedom through the encouragement of private effort on one’s own behalf, and through the possibility of getting ahead through enrichment. There is a phony idea of altruism at the basis of Marxism that claims one can completely give up self-interest without annihilating the self (but only self-reliance can be the true definition of altruism).

 

Tony Downing

The Totalitarian Way and the Tragedy of Our Blindness

 

from the archive…..

November 8, 2008

In meeting with totalitarian leaders, we have helped them to advance their proposition that the world pursues a conspiracy against their movement. How so? Since the main tenet of a totalitarian state is this belief in a united conspiracy of the nontotalitarian states against the totalitarian regime, the negotiations are perceived by the totalitarian leader as reparations. Far from dissuading the leader from his complaint of victimhood, we only encourage that complaint. We make him feel that the conference is precisely for the purpose of redressing his grievances. We fail to understand his psychology.

Not merely that the leader of such a regime secretly sees our conferring with him as a sign of weakness on the part of the nontotalitarian conferees; the larger point here is that, in addition, the totalitarian leader sees his fictitious theory confirmed that his movement is the victim of united, global persecution. But, we ask, how could we have failed to get through to him, with our rational arguments about the commonwealth of nations?

We must understand that there is a part of the global reality which is wholly given over to implacable hostility to reality, given over to the creation of a fictitious world, a reality which is only flight from reality. This part of reality is, of course, the totalitarian movement. It was not failures of intelligence data, for example, that lowered our guard against the 9/11 attacks, but rather our incapacity to acknowledge this alternate apprehension of reality, this reality-as-denial-of-reality. We believed, incredibly, that they were like us. Thus the recriminations in the intelligence community and in the world of political spin are off-track.

But only a leader of a nontotalitarian country would be mollified by concessions or by negotiations. A leader from a totalitarian country, on the other hand, is the very opposite of mollified — he is spurred on in his conspiracy theories by the “reparations,” and by the apparent international recognition of his criminal regime as a member state. For the nontotalitarian world to fail to see this psychological type is tragedy. When we treat these monstrous leaders as if they were from the nontotalitarian world, we hurt ourselves. Rationality cannot reach them. They live in a world of their own making, having convinced themselves cynically of the most amazing lies possible. Their supreme lie is that they are a normal nation, and certainly they take pains to appear as such. Hence, to meet with them and to take them seriously is only to confirm as normal their fictitious, hellish world in their own eyes and in the eyes of the world at large. Their efforts towards total domination will now be redoubled.

The astonishing, inexpressible cruelty of such regimes is explained by the concept of utopia. As Hannah Arendt and David Rousset have pointed out, the elite in totalitarian states believe not only that everything is permitted (since we have lost the belief in a Last Judgement), but also that everything is possible. This experiment in the infinity of the possible is their utopia, conducted in the concentration camps. But we, on the other hand, do not so believe, and that disbelief of ours forms “a protective wall of incredulity” against the totalitarian state.

The totalitarian movement is not dead, it is in preparatory or in full-blown mode in several countries. Far from our considering the war in Iraq as arbitrary, as merely “Bush’s War,” we are then justified in feeling real gratitude to our soldiers, and in feeling immense pride in our America, which for the third time has sacrificed greatly to rid the world of the most horrific regimes imaginable.

Darfur: Part Two

  August 29, 2008

  At the basis of the Darfur sorrow, there is the split in Africa between black and Arab. This split in Sudan is a microcosm of the larger version of the same split in the African Union. The word “Africa” now means: black vs. Arab. But what we may not point out is that a sizable subculture among Arabs is supremicist in its attitudes, including among the Arabs of Africa. In sum, then, the genocide against the blacks in Sudan can only be explained by virulent racism, learned in the school of Hitler.

  That is, during WW II, Hitler of course took France– but the one who takes France in 1940 also takes French possessions in the Middle East. Thus Hitler was enabled to move the Nazi bureaucracy and attitude into that region. When the war ended, Israel soon after announced its brave existence to the world, only to be immediately attacked by Arab antisemitism, a good part of it imbibed from Hitler’s abandoned and overturned goblet. The Darfur genocide, like the attacks on Israel, has its precedent in the Nazi holocaust. We need to see the origin of the genocide clearly if we are to decide effectively how to stop it, and bring Omar al Bashir of Sudan to his knees. If we underestimate the provenance of the genocide, we will spin our wheels impotently. And that’s what’s been done so far. We should consider ourselves up against Hitler, or more precisely, up against the progeny of Hitler, if we are to take useful action against the horror of that regime.

  John Bolton writes in his U.N. memoir: “As is too often the case in ‘humanitarian’ affairs, actual performance is less central than demonstrating ‘compassion.’” What Bolton asserts here is that the moral stance of, say, the Save Darfur movement doesn’t do Darfuris any good– they need heavy military intervention. The web site of Save Darfur is full of references to the U.N. and to the African Union, and even to you, too, starting a Save Darfur group in your neighborhood. But what could be more inadequate? A lot of compassion is shown, but only to the purpose of self-validation, while nothing is actually done for Darfur, exactly. Bolton goes so far as to suggest Africa just flat outgrow U.N. peacekeeping operations. He claims that the black African ambassadors “urged him on” in his efforts to bring common sense to the problem. They certainly preferred him to the others on the Security Council.

  Africa possesses a powerful subculture of ethnic strife that can be called upon by Sudan to deny that genocide is genocide (at least among the Arab factions). Thus, a certain cover is provided for the odious machinations of Khartoum. There is also The Friends of The Sudan Society on the Security Council– that is, China, the Islamic countries, and the Arab countries. But, the Save Darfur movement, with its blind insistence on the U.N., is providing cover, too, of a different sort: by misdirection, it indirectly discourages real discussion of the solutions that could work. How could pretentious little neighborhood groups in American cities stop a genocidal monster in Africa?! We don’t want to see ourselves as people who advocate the destruction of life in any way. But the lack of historical sense of those who will not go beyond the pondering of weak solutions that cannot work, is culpable.

  Such as these believe themselves to be in possession of a solution that no one else can see or think of. They believe they are changing the world by being as they are morally, they believe themselves to be the moral highpoint of the human race and of history. They believe that if we undertook unequivocal military action to stop the genocide, that would be akin to the genocide itself. They feel they would lose a part of themselves if they came out in favor of American military force. And so, with moral conceit and blindness such as this, nothing happens to help the Darfuris, and real help for them is blocked.

  According to Bolton, the U.S., through the Pentagon, offered free military assistance to Kofi Annan for Darfur, but he turned it down, believing that the African Union could and should handle the problem. The willful naivete of the Secular Pope is beyond measure. But if you want something done about Darfur, get out of denial: the U.N. can’t handle it; the A.U. can’t handle it; Save Darfur can’t handle it; neighborhood groups can’t handle it. They just simply pursue the furtherance of a culture of concern.

   Any forceful, dynamic action is politically impossible, however, for the Bush Administration, given its low approval ratings. By discrediting Bush and the U.S., critics have constrained America politically as far as what it can do in Darfur. Bush has then just worked through the U.N. to get something done (like everybody else). But he would do more if not held down by the U.N. bureaucracy. Bombing missions such as NATO undertook in Serbia in the 1990′s would be a good start. Margaret Thatcher said drily at that time, in advocating force in the Balkans, “Serbia is not a world power.” Check– neither is The Sudan. I feel sure that anti-Americanism is standing in the way of Bush’s bombing al Bashir’s military installations. In the end, the misplaced idealism and passivity that thinks the solution doesn’t involve undiluted NATO or American force, is disingenuous.

T.D.

Thanks for visiting.

P.S. (New post now on PAGE TWO about Russia.)

As Silent As The Khartomb: Why Nothing Is Done About Darfur

  August 25, 2008 

  Bureaucratization. Self-Interest. Anti-Americanism.

  The failure to stop the genocide in Darfur should be seen in its overall context as just one among many failures of peacekeeping in Africa. The same reasoning that explains the failures elsewhere in Africa also explains the failure in Darfur. It’s the same story in Darfur as previously in Somalia, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Eritrea…the U.N. does basically nothing but call meetings, engage in lofty rhetoric, and issue watered-down Security Council Resolutions and Statements. Humanitarian supplies are ferried to the needy when they can get in. On the other hand, the principal parties to the conflict become entrenched in their positions, the villian as well as the victim, while the friends of the villian on the Security Council provide shelter.

  Margaret Thatcher once asserted that, “Consensus is something no one objects to, but which no one believes in.” No other assessment could more perfectly sum up why the U.N. culture of diplomacy, negotiation, and endless meetings will never be effective in the world of hard knocks. And judging by the accounts in the latest issue of The New Republic, we are in the world of hard knocks with a vengeance when we are in Darfur. The U.N. doesn’t address the fundamental problems: that is, mere negotiations aren’t going to work against the radical Islamist and Arab-supremicist regime in Khartoum.

  U.N. member state self-interest also plays a role here: since Sudan, as a national entity, is not viewed as being particularly important politically on the world stage, it is not seen as even being close to a vital strategic or international security interest. That means, astonishingly for us, other issues can take priority in the Security Council over stopping the genocide, such as Sudanese oil for China, a Perm Five member, or more U.N. troops for Chad and Cote D’Ivoire (both former colonies of France, another Perm Fiver). It’s another chapter in the same sorry story of international relations since the post-Cold War period began: the U.N. can’t do its job, bogged down not only by self-interest in the Security Council and in the General Assembly, but also by its mania for consensus. When something is actually decided, miracle of miracles, the truth seems to be that U.N. peacekeeping troops would have trouble separating two cats squabbling over a can of tuna. U.N. troops are only allowed to observe. And anyway, Sudan, just simply as a U.N. member state, has the right to veto any deployment of U.N. troops on its soil.

  The Save Darfur movement can’t stop the genocide either, and the reason is instructive. The activists do sometimes advocate the use of force in Darfur– but they want the U.N. on the ground, not America. Advocating America would look too much like being in favor of imperialism (as if America is an empire, and has always been so). But it is only America, now relegated to the sidelines, that could have done something effective– and so the band plays on, with the militarily feckless U.N. running things. If the Save Darfur movement were more responsible, they would have adovcated with all due diligence the only thing that would have worked: NATO bombs. (“Covenants without the sword are but words.” –Thomas Hobbes)

  The New Republic asks this week: “How could we have known and yet done nothing?” I have a good part of the answer: anti-Americanism. We purposely busied ourselves with stuff that wasn’t going to work (meetings as a sign of something being done, negotiations that only allow more time for the wrongdoers to get stronger, the emphasis on U.N. troops), so that we wouldn’t have to address the underlying reason why the genocide wasn’t being stopped. If we had acknowledged that anti-Americanism was the main thing that stood in the way of doing good in Darfur, we would have had to question the ludicrous assumptions upon which anti-Americanism rests.

  America is so constrained by the criticisms and stigma of the world, it can’t so much as think of intervening in a region that is without strategic influence or weight. In an otherwise terrific and riveting article this week in The New Republic, Richard Just writes, illogically, ”True, we were poorly served by a small-minded president and his bungling administration. But did liberals demand the right things of him?…Or did we get trapped by the inclinations of our worldview…?” Beyond the absurdity of the implication that only liberals would care about Darfur, there is the illogicality: that is, calling Bush small-minded when Bush clearly favors a broad-minded policy of American strength, responsibility, and humanitarian intervention. Correspondent Just does give some credence to the idea that anti-Americanism played a part in the Darfur failure up to now, but he simultaneously commits just such an act of anti-Americanism when he calls Bush small-minded. That’s a second illogical move. All the same, Just deserves considerable credit for his candid stance when he asks, “Or did we get trapped by the inclinations of our worldview…?” That’s a Rashomon moment to be proud of. Maybe it will spark a much-needed season of reflection on the left.

  The criminal regime of Omar Bashir in Khartoum is responsible for the genocide, of course, but that regime pursued its odious designs under cover of something– what? Quite simply, it was under the cover of the confusion caused by discrediting the United States. Without that, the Darfur genocide doesn’t go on and on sickeningly. This may be a simplistic, pat answer, but consider what changes would be wrought in the international system without anti-Americanism. The world would turn gratefully to American military might, and encourage America to keep that system safe from genocidal thugs and depraved gansters: if you don’t play by the rules, you get popped. But instead, without America, we have the world Jimmy Stewart experienced in It’s a Wonderful Life: a world in which the fox has taken over the chicken coop, to say the least.

  Malcolm X said, infamously, that it was “the chickens coming home to roost” when JFK got assassinated. Nothing could be further from the truth than this uninformed assertion, but Malcolm X’s ability to inspire and capture the imagination has given currency to that false idea about America. The contradiction in The New Republic article reveals plainly the cognitive dissonance, even the doublethink, of the political left. That is, the left wishes to take the moral highground, but that entails for them the idea that America should be downplayed, and not looked to for leadership. But then here come the monsters, and as it turns out, only America is strong enough to do anything about them.

  The left at this point runs into the incongruence between its theory and the real world: if America is evil, then why is it that only America is a plausible answer to the question of doing something about the monsters? But since America has been stigmatized, it is out of the game, and thus the monsters win. This is shooting yourself in the foot with a vengeance. But what right does anyone have to deny the people of Darfur the chance at American intervention? But that’s essentially what some Westerners do, indirectly, every time they say something like “Put out no flags,” or, “The rubble is more beautiful than the original buildings were,” or, “Bush is small-minded.” Are you proving your leftist bona fides? Why not relieve oneself of the needless burden of the doublethink? Why do some feel it’s morally OK to both enjoy the security we have from America’s power, and yet to stigmatize America at the same time as morally bad? People are getting ripped to shreds while the moral Vanity Fair rolls on.

T.D.

Thanks for the visit.

The cul-de-sac of the Resentful

 

 

 

The cul-de-sac of the Resentful

 

There are a variety of ways for an American of the political left to oppose the Iraq war, all of them susceptible to refutation. This refutation can be done either by taking them as a whole or by taking them as individuals.  

So first, taking them as a whole, it’s necessary to point out initially that the leftist anti-war position is an instantiation of anti-Americanism. Eliminate the alleged moral authority of this anti-Americanism, and the nihilism of the anti-war stance is thus exposed, if not completely undermined. 

Thus, the chief characteristics of anti-Americanism are the gullibility of its sensibility and the hypocrisy of its moral narcissism. Those Americans who have a tendency towards tartuffery are especially vulnerable to the glamorous seductions of a fashionable anti-Americanism. They are told that, as Americans against America, they are on the right side of history, on the side of the morally non-contingent against the merely arbitrary and selfish. 

They believe this out of the credulousness created by their vanity: anti-Americanism is an alter ego, a longing for an elusive identity that cannot exist in reality. They choose a fictitious world, based on the warrant of Plato’s idealism, to call the real. Moreover, the visceral strength of anti-Americanism can be put down confidently to the hold of irrationality on the human mind. Only when this alter ego is relinquished, under the force of vivid and stark experiences, can such as these respond without irrationality to reasoned argument about the war.   

A second general defining characteristic of anti-Americanism is the belief in social determinism, that is, the view that foreign populations cannot help but hate the US, since they are driven to their own violence by our violence. For them, history is a crime that must be undone, “a nightmare from which one is trying to awake.” This perspective suffers from the wildly mistaken idea that human beings are nothing but revenge addicts, and it relies overmuch on chronological explanations. Post hoc ergo propter hoc is a fallacy–the violence of al-Qaida and their ilk is caused solely by their neurotic desire for complete power. Any other explanation puts the cart before the causal horse.   

Taking the particular instances of the leftist anti-war position now, it’s clear that the mother of all doctrines here is Marxism. This is the first and foremost way to be anti-American, the very flagship of the fleet. (To be anti-American here is to be anti-Iraq war, by logical extension.)  Marxism claims to possess the key to the interpretation of history: social class struggle. But this is just as risible as the claim of Nazism that race struggle is the key concept of historical interpretation. Marx and Engels posited class struggle as their central concept simply so as to legitimate in advance the precise crime they were about to commit: getting people to bite the hand that feeds them. An ironic aspect of Marxism is that it’s a case of upper class intellectuals vehemently telling lower class workers how hard life is.  

But the concept of class struggle as history’s key is only pseudo-science posturing as verified empirical science, since it was only a ploy with which to get a pathetic movement going. It was only an apple of discord rolled into the banquet room of civilization. It is not even close to being impartial science. No matter how many thousands of books, no matter how many millions of pages Marxism writes in proof of itself, it cannot escape at least one ineluctable fact: it is based on the disingenuous resentment of the rabble and intelligentsia.  

Next there is the predilection for diplomacy: this is only an avoidance syndrome, a shying away from the acknowledgement of totalitarianism. Negotiations would be to no avail here, they would on the contrary only encourage, since the desire to negotiate would be rightly perceived as capitulation. One can only negotiate with those who are not ideological fanatics–those who make themselves voluntarily subject to the international system, and to its law and order. To offer negotiations to those who are fanatics (and how could they not be known fanatics?) is clearly a caving-in, an attempt to get them to go easy on us, to mollify them.  

Then there is multiculturalism, or moral relativism: this is the belief that all cultures are equal, and we cannot therefore take decisive and forceful action against another culture. This labors under an unjustifiable self-abasement, and, if its proviso had always been observed, the British Empire would never have put an end to the international slave trade (which it did magnificently in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). Enough said on this one.   

Last there is multilaterism: here we are told that we must never act alone, since this practice alienates our allies and sets world opinion against us. The fallacy of this is the assumption the US wants to act alone. As a matter of fact, it doesn’t want to act alone. We would be happy if the allies continue to help fight the criminal regimes of the world. This is shown abundantly by the penchant of US presidential administrations for visiting the capitol cities of the world, seeking to an amazing degree a consensus with the allies.  

All these ways of being anti-war have in common the counsel of inaction. But why? Has a patina of shame accrued to bold self-defense? Has resentment accrued in the hearts of those incapable of action? Oh please, James Joyce, wake me from that nightmare!