The Roots of the Terror Wars

Steven Den Beste links to and comments on this must-read analysis of the roots of the Terror Wars by Haim Harari. Because of who he is - really, his nationality, as he is Israeli - this will be ignored by many who should take it seriously. In brief, Harari carefully and convincingly:

• shows that Israel is not a primary cause of the troubles in the Middle East, nor is America or poverty or Western civilization;
  
• demonstrates the utter failure of Arab/Muslim societies in the area between Pakistan and Morocco;
  
• notes that "[i]t is also a fact that almost everybody in the region blames this situation on the United States, on Israel, on Western Civilization, on Judaism and Christianity, on anyone and anything, except themselves", and that "the vast silent majority of these Moslems are not part of the terror and of the incitement but they also do not stand up against [Islamist terrorism]" and as such "become accomplices, by omission";
  
• makes a case that the coming together of four issues has created the current wars: suicide bombing, lies and Orwellian double-speak, money, and complete disregard for laws and for civilized norms of human behavior;
  
• discusses each of these four issues in detail, and in the process describes the structure of Arab/Muslim society and how it creates hatred and xenophobia and terrorism, and effectively constructs a superstructure of terrorism as a primary social institution;
  
• points out the dilemma between our notions of honor and decency and humanity and civilization, and the situations we find ourselves in because of terrorists exploiting these notions:

  Do you raid a mosque, which serves as a terrorist ammunition storage? Do you return fire, if you are attacked from a hospital? Do you storm a church taken over by terrorists who took the priests hostages? Do you search every ambulance after a few suicide murderers use ambulances to reach their targets? Do you strip every woman because one pretended to be pregnant and carried a suicide bomb on her belly? Do you shoot back at someone trying to kill you, standing deliberately behind a group of children? Do you raid terrorist headquarters, hidden in a mental hospital? Do you shoot an arch-murderer who deliberately moves from one location to another, always surrounded by children? All of these happen daily in Iraq and in the Palestinian areas. What do you do? Well, you do not want to face the dilemma. But it cannot be avoided.

  
  
• delineates the shortcomings of international law in the changed world;
  
• discusses the physical surrounding of Iran and Syria while the US is engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan;
  
• names Iran as the primary threat abroad in the world today [editorial note: I concur], and lists some of the reasons why this is so;
  
• discusses some of the necessary changes in Western society in order to fight the terrorists (including such subtle ideas as not giving money to people who give money to terrorists);
  
• and points out that democracy is only a long-term solution if it means creating a culture of Enlightenment values, rather than just putting elections into place.

The author does neglect the fundamental nature of Islam which lies at the heart of the social, cultural and political behavior of the Arab/Muslim world, and including a bit on this would have strengthened his presentation immensely. Nonetheless, this presentation is a critical step in understanding the nature of the current war, and I hope that you will read it in its entirety.

Strength

Bill Whittle has a new essay, Strength, in two parts: 1 2. It examines the underlying nature of the Terror Wars, including our domestic enemies, and our fundamental strength: the idea of America. Read it all. Here is a small bit on our foreign enemies:

We are a co-operative society. Compromise, agreements and webs of trust run through our culture in mind-blowing levels of complexity. The most virulent Islamist Arabs, on the other hand, live by completely different rules and values, and time and again we who should know better by now refuse to try to see things through Arab eyes because the view is frankly so jaundiced and horrible we really can’t believe what we are seeing.

Honor and shame trump everything in that world. A pithy sentence, eh? So instead, think about what it would take for you to kill your own daughter with a knife, with your bare hands, because she was seen in the company of a man not her husband or a relative? Think about that. Think long and hard. What kind of hatred and shame could drive a human being to do such a thing? What kind of pressures does that society bring to bear on an individual to make him capable of that? How different is their view of women, of family, of honor and shame? What would it take for you to murder your daughter with a knife, or a knotted cord – with your own two hands and against her pleading, her protestations, and her begging for her life? If your response wasn’t “there is nothing that could make me do that,” then stop reading right here and get the hell off my property.

Multi-culturalists will respond that Honor Killings are not the norm and not representative of Islam and life under Shariah. We can debate the exact numbers of these horrors for days, but the fact remains that no matter how many individual cases there are, there is de facto legal protection for committing these crimes. When Islamic schoolgirls attempting to escape a burning building with their faces uncovered were sent back inside to die by the religious police rather than dishonor Islam …well, that is a brush that will carry a lot of tar.

There is a simple enough reason why these Islamists so hate and despise the West, and America especially. It has little to do with our foreign policy. We have taken the side of oppressed Muslims in Kosovo, Chechnya, Kuwait and many other places. We spend billions of dollars a year in aid to Egypt. We’re still waiting for the love to pour in.

No, this is not about reason, as we understand the term. This is about shame, it is about denial, and it is about transcendent revenge. Shouts of Allahu Akbar! were not overdubbed by western propaganda agencies as they sawed through Nick Berg’s throat and twisted off his head. Those are authentic. As they got down to their filthy work they were screaming, over and over in a fit of religious ecstasy: God is Great! Nick Berg was nothing more than an animal sacrifice to them. That is Radical Islam.

The only thing that will appease them is your blood. All of it. Remember that.

And here is a small bit on our domestic enemies:

Senator Kennedy claims Abu Ghraib is simply Saddam Hussein’s torture chambers “under new management – U.S. management.” Taking him at his word – a somewhat iffy proposition right out of the gate – he apparently cannot see the difference between the humiliation and bullying of enemy combatants, which is shameful, disgusting and reprehensible, and the gleeful, mocking murder, torture and gang rape of over 300,000 innocent men, women and children -- which is something worse. So Senator, here is a helpful analogy which you may find useful: The difference is about the same as pulling over and leaving a young female secretary on the curb in the rain, which is shameful, disgusting and reprehensible, vs. leaving her trapped in the car at the bottom of a river while you look at the bubbles and ponder the political repercussions.

Which is something worse, Senator.

Americans living today have never known torture or oppression or state-sponsored murder, and so it becomes nothing more than a rhetorical concept for most of us. People who defend Saddam and Kim and Castro have no idea at all about what that life entails. None. And so, in their safe and antiseptic little worlds of coffee shops and chat rooms, it all reduces to rhetoric. And since, in the end, it’s nothing but words anyway, they feel they can win an argument because their rhetoric goes up to eleven.

Bushitler.

In extreme cases – sadly rising in frequency -- these people not only hate America. They hate everything. They see nothing in American history beyond slavery and the Indian Wars. They often claim to live, or would prefer to live, in more refined, decent and civilized nations, like Canada and Britain and New Zealand: as if white, English-speaking Canadians grew out of the ground like corn on an empty, Indian- and Eskimo-free horizon, or the thousand years of English conquest over India, China, Africa, Ireland, Scotland and Wales was in a parallel universe, or that the warlike Maoris invaded and took over the North and South Islands from the peaceful, indigenous white settlers. As if France were not the most blood-soaked patch of land on the surface of the earth, as if Russia’s leaders never so much raised a hand against its own suffering people, as if Scandinavia was not the epicenter of centuries of rape, pillage, murder and misery, as if the Aztecs said gracias in Castilian Spanish as they cut the living hearts out of their prisoners. As if the Spanish themselves had never known the Inquisition, Italy no Papal Wars or Duces or Ethiopias, as if Belgium had no Leopold and Leopold no Congo, as if Germany…well.

As if African slaves were only held by whites and Christians, as if Japan has practiced nothing but calligraphy and origami for a millennia, as if South America was a spotless white linen of freedom of expression and individual rights, as if China was a champion of democracy and the common man, as if Indians never spat on anyone, as if, as if…as if the entire bloody history of conquest and war and displacement were the unique domain of America alone, or, equally absurd, that we deserve to die for not being born perfect and without sin – as they, in their own self-obsessed, one-person Universes expect everyone else to be.

And so they trot out every single example of human atrocity as if they were Atticus Finch sweating under the heat in that courtroom in their mind; these snipers and critics and ‘activists’ who have no plans of their own, no solutions, no answers to these dirty and difficult and eternal issues, and so sit in the warm cocoon of perfection afforded the man who attempts nothing. And while better men and women – better men and women by every measure – struggle and fight and bleed to make the world a better and safer place, they grow more and more disconnected from the essential ugliness and brutality that is half – and only half – of this flawed and broken and hopeful and noble human existence.

And because we are all born with this legion of devils inside every heart, more than anything else in the world they hate themselves. Carrying all the guilt of the world on their stooped and broken spirits, their eyes cast so far down that they can see nothing of nobility or progress or redemption of any kind, these people are broken. They are miserable, bitter, cynical husks. And we all know what misery craves.

See them for what they are: nothing more than the Comic Book Guy on the Simpsons: Worst. Country. Ever.

They are useless people. They have heeded the last and final boarding call and pushed back from the gate of reality. They have left the building.

Fight or Die

Porphyrogenitus nails the problem caused by the "inner enemy" - the Westerners who themselves see Western culture as a threat to humanity:

European governments express concern over things like [Islamic militants in European countries calling for Shari'a in Europe], but if you judge real concern by action, it's hard to see much. We do not expect other cultures to tolerate movements dedicated to their destruction, but there is a level of passivity throughout much of the West to not only threats, but actions, based on that desire. I have written before that I am adamantly in favor of welcoming immigrants of whatever background who want to join our society and live within our civilization. But that is not the same as welcoming a viper to your bosom.

One thing that needs to be noted is that Europeans don't actually travel much. They boast about how many countries they've been to, and deride Americans for mostly staying here, without realizing that most of their countries are smaller, less populous and less culturally diverse that American States. Not to mention, Americans actually do travel out-of-Continent more frequently than Europeans, largely due to overseas military and foreign policy committments and student study-abroad programs. (I've got to dig up the link for that, because it's an important point to have direct evidence for.) As a result, I think that Europeans are less likely to understand the cultures outside of their own, less able to put their culture in a worldwide context (and less able to put their culture in a historical context, due to the debased Marxist form of history commonly taught in Old Europe), and thus less capable of fearing what threatens to consume them. Sadly, I don't think that Old Europe will understand the threat until it's literally "fight or die".

Three Way Struggle

Steven Den Beste discusses the three factions in the current war, which I have written about before, both directly and indirectly (see the list under the MORE... link). You should really read this, as it lays out the current conflict really well.

Note that there were originally four factions in this conflict. In addition to the West's internal conflict between what Den Beste calls the realists and the idealists, there was an internal conflict in the Arab/Muslim world between the islamists and the pan-Arab nationalists. These two sets of competing factions were pitted against each other by the attack of September 11. While pan-Arab nationalism was already in serious decline, I don't think that it's an exaggeration to say that the US destroyed that philosophy as a factor when we invaded and conquered Iraq. (Hopefully, we can have as devastating an effect on islamism by conquering Iran, which will be necessary within the next few years, I suspect.)

My posts on this topic include:

• Three Visions
  
• The Enemies of Liberty
  
• Axis and Allies
  
• Cultural Marxism
  
• What France is Playing At
  
• Schisms (badly written, but gets the core idea out there)
  
• Against Freedom
  
• The War on Bad Philosophy - referencing Armed Liberal's excellent essay here
  
• One Half of the War
  
• France
  
• The Fruits of Socialism
  
• Where did all the Fascists Go?
  

Three Visions

Wretchard of Belmont Club has two exceptional entries that, taken together, give a glimpse of the shape of political and foreign policy argument for perhaps the next fifty years.

In The Common Law of Nations, Wretchard examines the epemeral support for the US after the 9/11 attacks. This support, both in its shallowness and in its hasty withdrawal, is due to the false hope of the Left saw this as a natural way for the US to turn over control of its power to the UN (and particularly, to France and Germany):

As that dominance grew in the last decade of the 20th century, the potential of harnessing American might to the bidding of the "international community" became irresistible to the globalists. Under the model that they tried to construct, sole "legitimacy" would be vested in the world government; i.e. the United Nations, thus acquiring the exclusive lawful use of the US armed forces. As the sole civil authority, the "international community" could constitute a posse, consisting almost entirely of American arms, for whatever purposes they deemed lawful.

The curious antipathy of the Germany and France towards unilateral American action following September 11 was driven not by a sudden revulsion for American culture, but by the loss of something they deeply coveted: the means to exercise supranational police power under the aegis of international treaties. In the days following Osama Bin Laden's attack on New York, hopes ran high in Paris, Berlin and Moscow, that America in her grief would deposit her strength in the hands of the "international community" who, thus armed, promised to put a stop to terrorism and uproot its causes.  To provide the violins, the capitals of Europe expressed the utmost sympathy for the American loss and deluged embassies with flowers and letters of support. "We are all Americans now". For a moment, matters hung on edge, the most critical instant in modern history. Then the haze passed, and America shook the expectant, extended hand and said "I'll take care of it myself". The response was immediate and incandescent. The internationalists rounded on America with as much hatred as the sympathy they had professed mere moments before.

In The Postwar World, Wretchard looks at the need for a new world order from a different light:

t seems clear that any successor institution to the United Nations must be designed for meaningful action rather than intentional paralysis, within a framework of checks and balances. It must come to terms with the single most salient reality of the postwar world: the de facto supranational police power of the United States. The existence of this vast power is a temptation to create a world government, which is for the first time in history feasible, and for that reason utterly to be shunned. Instead of using it directly, which would be corrupting, international institutions should promote the spread of freedom and civil society, exploiting the historical opportunity of the existence of a power that provides a lower bound on the misbehavior and rapacity of rulers.

This opportunity for freedom has come before on a smaller scale, at Runnymede and Philadelphia. Not upon the promise of government but on the absence of tyranny. The world does not need a new framework of treaties, least of all a world government, but the freedom to prosper as nations on a planet in which everything except oppression is permitted. For it is self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with unalienable Rights, that the only excuse for government is to secure these rights and that these words can be translated into every living tongue.

It seems clear to me that there are three competing visions right now for ordering the world.

In the first vision, Transnational Progressivism, nation-states are outmoded. Group identity is the only important identity, with individual and national identities suppressed in favor of a transnational identity, under the control of a global dictatorship of Leftist "vanguard" activists. (It's not phrased this way, of course, but that's the logical end state of an agenda which removes government accountability from the governed, and reposes it in an unaccountable body whose power base and staff are both drawn from the Leftists and Transnationalist cadres.)

The second vision, global Islamism, is remarkably similar in end state to Transnational Progressivism, differing primarily in that the governing body would be fundamentalist Islamic clerics (as opposed to the UN, staffed by a Leftist elite) and the governing law would be Sha'ria (as opposed to "international law" as interpreted by the Transnational Progressivists). The other major difference is that the Islamists believe violence is the first and natural resort in the battle to bring this about, while the Transnational Progressives are far more willing to try to persuade (though they are certainly willing to resort to violence when necessary, and usually by proxy, direct violence having failed during the Cold War).

It appears that each of these two groups is currently trying to subvert the other. Transnational Progressives are hoping the Islamists and other tyrants bring about conditions where the powerful nations of the world turn sovereignty over to them (the Transnationals) in frustration. In turn, the Islamists see the Transnationals as a force to weaken the Western will to fight, as another weapon to be manipulated and weakness to be exploited. This is why you will frequently find groups like International A.N.S.W.E.R. (Communist front) aligned with groups like CAIR (Islamist front) in pushing "anti-war" demonstrations.

The third vision for a post-Cold War international order is what I will term, for lack of a better term, the "League of Free Nations" vision. In this vision, the nations of the world which are fundamentally free (which remarkably align closely with the "Coalition of the Willing" working together in Iraq) will band together in a free trade and mutual self-defense organization, replacing the UN. Such a League would be a free association of nations, and would work towards expanding democracy and free-market economics to the rest of the world. I wrote about such an organization here, but others have explained the same concept more eloquently.

I think that it's up in the air right now. Whether or not we in the post-Enlightenment West will be able to preserve those values in the face of challenges from within and without is not certain. I'd say that the odds are on our side, though, as long as the leaders of the West remain active in their unflinching support of freedom.

Steven Den Beste appears to be thinking along the same lines as Belmont Club.

How to Look at the War on Terror

David Horowitz has a magnificent essay in FrontPageMag (hat tip: Mrs. du Toit), dealing with perceptions of the war on terror, the importance of being on the offense, and where help can be found. Apropos that last point:

The way to think about the war on terror is to ask yourself who is supporting President Bush and the American military in this life and death engagement, and who is not?

Help is certainly not coming from the European nations who armed and then appeased Saddam Hussein and opposed the liberation of Iraq and who now refuse to aid America in securing the peace.

Far worse, with exception of fading candidates like Joe Lieberman and John Edwards, it is certainly not coming from the leaders of the Democratic Party who from the moment Baghdad was liberated have with ferocious intensity attacked the credibility of America’s commander-in-chief, the justification for our mission in Iraq, and the ability of our forces to prevail.

The Enemies of Liberty

Outside of a very few political junkies, few Americans are paying any attention to the Hutton Inquiry. This is an inquiry in the UK into the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr. David Kelly, after it was revealed that he was the likely source for a report on the BBC damning the Blair government for falsifying information in its justifications for war. It turns out that it is likely that the BBC "News" reporter, Andrew Gilligan, most likely wrote the story pretty much in advance, with the desired political tilt, then sought out someone to say something that included the words "Blair", "government", "dossier" and some version of imprecision.

This post at the Karmic Inquisition gives a good reason why this matters so much. I've said before that this is a four-way war: the Enlightenment West vs. the Post-Modernist West, against the Pan-Arab National Socialists vs. the Islamist Radicals. It is the battle within the West that Adam Sullivan's piece focuses on, and it is really an important facet to understand: there are those in the West who are the enemies of individual liberty, and they are in positions of great influence, and they want to win because they think they are in the right. If the Enlightenment West doesn't win against the Post-Modernist West, then it really doesn't matter whether the Post-Modernist West or either faction of the Arab/Islamist culture wins, because all of those routes lead to tyranny for the West - either the tyranny of dhimmitude, or of a mix of fascism and socialism, or of Orwell's 1984 regime.

Responsibility

Yes, that's it, exactly. When you give up your responsibility, you give up your power. Those who want you to forsake your responsibility, and accept comfortable mediocrity, are the ones who want your power so badly they can taste it. But what you give up as "power to", they take as "power over", and not to your benefit.

This essay has me thinking in so many directions that I cannot get them all out, so I'll just make a few notes here, and likely follow up later.

First, I've been thinking about a good response to Francis Poretto's comment on this post of mine about Derrida. My nascent plan is to create a CGI that will do an Eliza-like function, where the text it spits back is some of Derrida's babble. I'm just going to feed the non-English bits through Babelfish, without any editing, as the amount of sense they make is unchanged. (That is to say, they make no sense no matter how presented.) I just haven't figured out yet whether to randomly pick out quotes, or to pick them out based on keyword parsing of the text that's entered. Is it real, or is it Derrida?

Another thing that this has me thinking about is how we stop the schools from indoctrinating our kids with the idea of collective existence. I've always despised this, but never really given it much thought beyond homeschooling our own kids and decrying the ideological brainwashing done in schools in general. Clearly, I need to give this more thought.

Also, this reminds me somewhat of something my wife wrote about 7 or 8 years ago, that I need to go reread.

I wonder what the viability would be of a candidacy for high political office focused around precisely the function and nature of responsibility and freedom. I have always assumed that people who tell the truth are unelectable, but is that really true?

Finally, I am immensely proud to live in a country that can produce people even now, after all of the watering down of the last century, who can think like Bill Whittle. I am proud to live in a country that produces people like Frank J., and attracts people like Kim du Toit and Eugene Volokh. I am not proud that we also not only produce, but many of our fellow citizens celebrate, people like the racist demagogue Al Sharpton, the blatant extortionist and sham Jesse Jackson, and the profoundly disturbing Pat Robertson. Still and all, I'm grateful for the good, and resolved to work against the bad.

Against Freedom

Porphyrogenitus takes a look at a Financial Times article. There are two philosophies fighting it out in the West right now: the Enlightenment ideals that underly the Anglosphere, and the Socialist ideal that underlies the EU. This article is an example of the philosophy underlying elite European and American Leftist ideology, and it can be summed up by the fact that the article places the word freedom in scare quotes.

Clash of Cultures

It annoys me to realize that Osama bin Laden is right in one way: this war is a culture clash between fundamentalist Islam (militant Islamism, for lack of a better term) and the Enlightenment West. Both civilizations will come out of the clash changed, and one will come out overthrown and replaced with a culture more like that of their foes. The pssibility of militant Islamism winning is terrible to contemplate, and so I focus on how the West can defeat the Islamists, preserving our Liberal, Enlightenment culture and reforming their repressive and backwards-focused culture.

I hope that Tarek Heggy's ideas of Muslim alternatives to Islamic fundamentalism are being voiced in the Middle East, as well as in the West. I hope that we have the wisdom to recognize those voices, and to support them where we find them.

I think that it's inevitable that Islamic societies will have to undergo a reformation, and it's good to know that there are Islamic traditions which would facilitate this - and even the more radical reform of an Islamic Enlightenment. The alternative is terrible to contemplate, because the US is not going to leave the Arabs alone, sitting on a sea of oil (and thus cash), with the will to acquire nuclear weapons, and with an inimical hatred of Outsiders (including, of course, us).

The War on Bad Philosophy

Armed Liberal termed this conflict we are in, in all of its manifestations, the War on Bad Philosophy. Prime Minister Blair has laid out a very strong, classically liberal, Enlightenment-derived case for what we must do to win the war.

I initially approached this war from a very pragmatic and realpolitik viewpoint: we were attacked, and we have to kill those who attacked us. I still believe that that is a valid viewpoint, but I have been beginning to think that it is an incomplete view - in fact that it is the lesser view. The greater, the more important view is that we - not just Americans, but we free peoples who inherited the Enlightenment, who built true freedom and prosperity not only here, but in nations once our enemies - we all have an idealistic responsibility to make all people free. Only when all people are free - when all nations are able to stand up proudly and say that they chose their government and their government serves them - then and only then will we be able to call this war done.

It is a huge undertaking, and it requires two precursors to bring it about: a stated philosophy, and an institution dedicated to achieving the principles of that philosophy. So here are my questions:

What are the hallmarks of a free person? What must a person be able to truthfully say, that differentiates him from a person who is not free?

What would an organization look like, whose goal was to bring freedom - personal, political and economic - to the entire world?

One Half of the War

I've said before, more than once, that there are two enemies we are fighting: radical Islamism and radical Leftism. The former seeks to use America and Israel as a proxy enemy for the real enemy: moderate Islamism. The latter also has a real enemy, and it is not the one that attacked us on September 11; it is the Enlightenment liberal ideology on which the United States is founded. In other words, we are struggling against those who would destroy the West from within because the West's ideals don't fit with theirs, and those who would destroy the West from without because it allows them to attack their own moderates' position, without directly attacking the moderates (which is, in Islam, pretty seriously forbidden).

Porphyrogenitus talks about the internal half of that equation, and says a lot of things I have been thinking, far better than I could have said them. I don't know how we can defeat our internal enemy, except by espousing a public ideology which explicitly rejects theirs. The problem, of course, is that the internal enemies of the West control the educational institutions, entertainment companies and many of the religious institutions, which together make up the major methods our society has for forming a public ideology. I think that the solution will require, in part, forcing the forces of anti-Enlightenment thought (at least in the anglophone countries) to support themselves. In other words, cut them off the government dole which gives them time, money and a platform to speak.

As to the external forces, I have more hope. Attacks by Muslims upon other Muslim factions, such as those which happened recently in Pakistan and Afghanistan, are the fruit of our labors so far. It has become so difficult to successfully attack the West, and Israel has been attacked to the point where pushing much further would lead to a slaughter of the Arabs, that Muslim radicals are being forced to attack their moderate Muslim enemies directly.

A Geneology of Anti-Americanism

This article, by James Caesar in the American Prospect (hat tip: Grim's Hall), discusses the history of Anti-American thought among Western intellectuals (particularly in Europe). Here's the conclusion:

Not only does anti-Americanism make rational discussion impossible, it threatens the idea of a community of interests between Europe and America. Indeed, it threatens the idea of the West itself. According to the most developed views of anti-Americanism, there is no community of interests between the two sides of the Atlantic because America is a different and alien place. To "prove" this point without using such obvious, value-laden terms as "degeneracy" or the "site of catastrophe," proponents invest differences that exist between Europe and America with a level of significance all out of proportion with their real weight. True, Europeans spend more on the welfare state than do Americans, and Europeans have eliminated capital punishment while many American states still employ it. But to listen to the way in which these facts are discussed, one would think that they add up to different civilizations. This kind of analysis goes so far as to place in question even the commonality of democracy. Since democracy is now unquestionably regarded as a good thing - never mind, of course, that such an attachment to democracy arguably constitutes the most fundamental instance of Americanization - America cannot be a real democracy. And so it is said that American capitalism makes a mockery of the idea of equality, or that low rates of voting participation disqualify America from being in the camp of democratic states.

Hardly any reasonable person today would dismiss the seriousness of many of the challenges that have been raised against "modernity." Nor would any reasonable person deny that America, as one of the most modern and the most powerful of nations, has been the effective source of many of the trends of modernity, which therefore inevitably take on an American cast. But it is possible to acknowledge all of this without identifying modernity with a single people or place, as if the problems of modernity were purely American in origin or as if only Europeans, and not Americans, have been struggling with the question of how to deal with them. Anti-Americanism has become the lazy person's way of treating these issues. It allows those using this label to avoid confronting some of the hard questions that their own analysis demands be asked. To provide just one striking example, America is regularly criticized for being too modern (it has, for example, developed "fast food"), except when it is criticized for not being modern enough (a large portion of the population is still religious).

A genuine dialogue between America and Europe will become possible only when Europeans start the long and arduous process of freeing themselves from the grip of anti-Americanism - a process, fortunately, that several courageous European intellectuals have already launched. But it is also important for Americans not to fall into the error of using anti-Americanism as an excuse to ignore all criticisms made of their country. This temptation is to be found far more among conservative intellectuals than among liberals, who have traditionally paid great respect to the arguments of anti-American thinkers. Much recent conservative commentary has been too quick to dismiss challenges to current American strategic thinking and immediately to attribute them, without sufficient analysis, to the worst elements found in the historical sack of anti-Americanism, from anti-technologism to anti-Semitism. It would be more than ironic - it would be tragic -- if in combating anti-Americanism, we were to embrace an ideology of anti-Europeanism.

France

I was going to link to all of Steven Den Beste's recent articles on France, but Winds of Change has saved me the effort, as well as adding some additional information. In additon to these, the Dissident Frogman and Merde in France have additional (and ongoing) information, and Innocents Abroad also has frequent information.

What is happening in France is scary. I do not believe that France is on the verge of collapse. Rather, I believe that one of two scenarios is likely: either France will decline (relative to the rest of the liberal democracies) over the next 20 years, leading to a series of increasingly-appalling crises and possibly concluing in a civil war between the native-born French and the unassimilated Muslims; or France will actually convince Europe to go along with the EU superstate concept, which will drag all of Europe into the French crisis, but at a slower pace. Demographics is destiny, and the piper will be paid.

Slightly less likely than either of these two outcomes is the possibility of a revolution and formation of a new Republic, some time in the next dozen years or so. While this would be violent, it would be on the order of massive strikes and the associated intimidation and beatings, rather than outright civil warfare. France has done this repeatedly, and there is a deep revolutionary character in France. If this happens, the most likely outcome is a radical socialist (not social democratic) regime with an aggressive foreign policy and a domestic policy towards Jews, Muslims and other minorities resembling fascism more than liberal democracy. In actual fact, such a government would, even if it allowed large amounts of personal freedom for the native French, rapidly deteriorate into nationalism and tyranny. Please note that this would be without doubt a popular and populist revolution, and the resulting government would be fully legitimate in every meaningful sense. I'm not suggesting an insurrection fomented by outside powers, here.

The third outcome I can see happening in France is less likely, but would be more immediate. It is certainly possible that the EU could collapse as an attempt to form a superstate, reverting to a mostly-economic arrangement. It is also possible that the resulting loss of face for France, as well as loss of superpower-level influence, would cause the French voters to turn out the government and bring in Le Pen or a similar nationalist. Such a government would almost certainly attempt to bust the most powerful unions, which would most likely lead to the revolution and institution of outright socialism described above. However, it is possible that the nationalists would be successful in breaking the power of the trade unions. If that were to happen, and then the French were to turn out the nationalists for a social democratic government, and that government were willing to attempt to assimilate the Muslims at the same time they were reducing the welfare state, it is possible that France could come through without the massive dislocations described above.

The other thing that I keep thinking, reading about the trade unions in France, is how glad I am that Reagan broke up the air traffic controllers strike in the early 1980s. Had he caved, the results would have been catastrophic in the long-term.

Whither France?

I think that the biggest question raised for me by this article, is whether France will see its sixth republic, or whether it will be able to forestall that by plunging Europe into the depths. And if Europe falls in line behind France, will Europe in the next decade resemble Europe in the 1930s?

Misdirection, or Just a Hyperlink?

Either way, go read about Magic.

The Pursuit of Happiness

Juan Non-Volokh links to this article about how property rights enforcement can prevent the (seemingly otherwise inevitable) destruction of commercially-viable fisheries.

What does this have to do with the pursuit of happiness? Locke's original formulation was life, liberty and property. These are the natural rights which government exists to protect. In fact, they are the description of freedom. If a government has arbitrary rights to take your life, liberty or property, that society will inevitably deteriorate into tyranny, as power accumulates towards the center, and the exercise of that power requires ever more arbitrariness in order to grow.

Jefferson's innovation, "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness," expands upon Locke in one important way: it recognizes that property ownership is a means to an end. Having property means that one has the ability to support one's self without the need for any outside agency - you could if necessary grow your own food and clothes stocks, make whatever implements you need and so forth, as well as sell your products for cash to pay taxes and buy needed goods you can't produce yourself, so long as you have enough land. (The necessary amount of land is remarkably small.) However, property ownership is really only a way of ensuring that you cannot be made desperate and miserable by others because of lack of food/money. The critical natural right is the ability to pursue happiness in whatever way you choose. Property rights allow you the resources to pursue that happiness.

The article about fisheries describes how property rights could prevent the destruction of this vital renewable resource, and how well-intentioned governments and environmentalist groups are actually making it more likely that the fish stocks will be depleted.

Deconstructing Chomsky

Keith Windschuttle critiques Noam Chomsky in The New Criterion. (hat tip: Tim Blair)

This view of both journalists and audiences as easily-led, ideological dupes of the powerful is not just a fantasy of Chomsky and Herman’s own making. It is also a stance that reveals an arrogant and patronising contempt for everyone who does not share their politics. The disdain inherent in this outlook was revealed during an exchange between Chomsky and a questioner at a conference in 1989 (reproduced in Chomsky, Understanding Power, 2002):

Man: The only poll I’ve seen about journalists is that they are basically narcissistic and left of center. Chomsky: Look, what people call “left of center” doesn’t mean anything—it means they’re conventional liberals and conventional liberals are very state-oriented, and usually dedicated to private power.

In short, Chomsky believes that only he and those who share his radical perspective have the ability to rise above the illusions that keep everyone else slaves of the system. Only he can see things as they really are.

Noam Chomsky provides, to a very large extent, the ideological underpinnings of the radical leftists. The violent anarchists and extreme neo-Marxists who make up the core of the "anti-war" movement draw much of their rhetoric from Chomsky. As Glenn Reynolds would put it, they're not anti-war, they're just on the other side.

Post-Modernism

Vinod has interesting comments on post-modernism here and here. Also see Sgt. Stryker's post here and here.

Discipline, Courage, Humility, Humanity, Morality, and...

Victory

The Fruits of Socialism

This article does a good job of taking apart the "International Bill of Rights" propounded by a bunch of Berkeley academics and lawyers. This "Bill of Rights" is, basically, an attempt to impose socialism worldwide. I wish I could say it was a joke. This, in a nutshell, is the ideology that we must defeat if the Enlightenment values are to be preserved in the West.

Honor and Dishonor

The Weekly Standard has an article on winners and losers in the war, and where honor is granted. It has this interesting paragraph (actually the whole article is interesting):

The funhouse of the postmodern academics was built around the two closely related themes of postmodernism and multiculturalism. Together they displaced the idea of truth and its cousin, empirical evidence, with the notion of "narrativity." All the world was simply words. There was no reality, just a series of competing stories all of which were mere social constructs and none of which was more correct than any other. In political terms, the campus postmodernists identified with the pre-modern rebels against modernity in the Arab world. But with the war in Iraq, those on campuses who, like Al Jazeera, believed "Baghdad Bob's" account of events discovered that lo and behold there is such a thing as an empirically grounded reality.

Freedom

The cornerstone of being free is being able to maintain that freedom against all threats. Sadly, the greatest threat to any free people is their own government. Governments, after all, have the ultimate tool of forcible coercion: the police and army. There is a way to prevent the government from taking away your freedoms, though, and Bill Whittle nails it. If I could convince every American to read one thing, it would be this: Freedom.

Where Did All the Fascists Go

Jim Bennet examines what happened to the fascist movement after WWII.

European fascism was like a large river, flowing and carrying along millions of willing and enthusiastic adherents across the European continent. The question now is, where did this river disappear to in 1945? These people and their underlying sentiments were the culmination of generations of political evolution. It defies reason to believe that they simply changed their minds, all of them.

He then answers the question, in some detail. Here's the money quote, though:

Above all, fascists everywhere enshrined the role of the state as the focus of national life and the source of meaning and value. This separates fascism from other movements of political violence and racial caste conflict (like the Klan, for example) and unites it with the superficially liberal but state-exhalting European nationalist movements of the 19th century of which fascist movements are ultimately mutated descendents. This value also unites fascism with the purposive and directive state of European bureaucrats today.

See here for more on posts in this category.

Light in the Darkness

A while ago, I wrote the first of what was intended to be a series of posts, discussing in some detail the intellectual and political foundations of the West, which came out of the Enlightenment, and the enemies of the West as an idea (as opposed to being enemies of specific Western nations). It was really badly written (which is why there's no link here), and I didn't write any of the followon posts, because the war intervened and I was too caught up in current events. I went back and looked at the original post, and realized that rather than making the argument myself, I should let those more eloquent than myself make it.

As a consequence, I have created this category, Light in the Darkness, to track articles on the web, and discussions of paper sources as well, that address these fundamental themes:

• Natural vs. civil rights
  
• Citizens vs. subjects
  
• Limited constitutional governance vs. elitism
  
• Free markets, free trade and property rights
  
• Individualism vs. collectivism
  
• Republic vs. democracy
  
• Federalism vs. national governance
  

Below, I summarize each of these points.

The original concept of rights was they accrued to a sovereign power, chosen by God, and disseminated downwards to the aristocrats (and bishops) in exchange for service to the king (or pope). There was no concept of individual people having rights. The Enlightenment introduced the concept of natural rights; that is, that rights are given by God to the people individually, and through an act of will on the part of the people, certain of those rights would be vested upwards into governments, for the betterment of all. (Just read the American Declaration of Independence and the preamble to the Constitution for a summary of what this means.) Later collectivist movements, particularly fascism and communism, spoke instead of civil rights; that is, rights granted by the already-sovereign to the individuals, as an act of beneficence or convenience.

Prior to the Enlightenment, the concept of Citizenship was basically non-existent, because citizens can only exist where individual sovereignty exists. As far as I can tell, the only place where this concept existed in any widespread form prior to the Enlightenment was in the Roman Republic, whence actually comes the word "citizen." Instead, individuals were subjects of a particular sovereign. Political power was limited to a select group of aristocrats, and the individuals were effectively coerced into service of the elite. The Enlightenment reintroduced the Roman concept of citizenship, wherein each person meeting certain criteria (generally chosen so as to ensure that those people would have a natural inclination to act for the good of society at large) held political power of their own, and only by convincing a large number of citizens to support him could a person wield official power over others, and this power would continue only so long as the officer was supported by the citizens, who held the ultimate power to remove an officer.

In an anarchy, it is inevitable that a few people will, generally through sheer brutality, gain the power to control others. As these people fight amongst themselves for power, more and more authority becomes invested in fewer and fewer people. Eventually, a national autocracy of some sort arises, generally to the detriment of the individuals who are not aristocrats to that autocrat, which is to say, it is a detriment to almost everyone. Paradoxically, the more individual rights are granted, the closer to the edge of anarchy (and thus to the risk of tyranny) the society comes. A slight instability can cause a free people to descend into anarchy. The Enlightenment's cure for this has proven to be the only enduring way yet found to keep free people free: limit the power of the government to act, so that it can only act in very limited ways and in very limited circumstances, primarily so as to avoid civil strife and protect against foreign control. This ensures that the instabilities that would topple free and peaceful societies into anarchy are controlled, while not giving the government the ability to take away the natural rights of the citizens. Becaues the powers of the government are strictly defined in a written document, the government cannot simply accrue power to itself. It must instead convince the citizens to yield power to it.

In contrast, every other form of government either magnifies instabilities (pure democracy) or results in some form of elitest control. Monarchy, aristocracy, and so forth are just political labels for an elite few, who deem themselves to have the right to decide everything for everyone else, because, well, they're just better than you and I are. As Robert Heinlein put it:

Political tags - such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth - are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.

Free markets allow people to make choices for their own betterment; free trade expands those choices; property rights allows the wealth accumulated by commerce to be stored and passed on. They inherently erode central control of daily life, because they make that control irrelevant. Any time someone is trying to "protect" you by limiting your rights to buy and sell, to anyone anywhere, or to use your property as you see fit, they are trying to control you.

With all of the focus of the Enlightenment on individuals, prior forms of elitism became very much marginalized in the West. This left the elites scrambling around for a way to have influence above their due, and they found it in ideologies like fascism and communism. World War II destroyed fascism as a reputable label, and the Cold War destroyed communism similarly. This search continues, though, into the present, as witness the arguments made by Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election, which basically came down to, "I know what's good for you, and you don't." For that matter, witness France's behavior on anything these days. The current drive to transfer control to the elites goes by many names with one face: transnational progressivism, postmodernism, multiculturalism, and so on. These are all, in the end, ways to devalue the individual and even whole cultures and nations, and chain them in the service of a self-selected elite.

A democracy, in its pure form, is governance by vote and poll. Thomas Jefferson and others have referred to democracy as "the tyranny of the masses." Democracy sounds great on its face, but it has two problems. First, it is unstable, and descends rapidly into anarchy if sufficient stress is applied to the society; "mob rule" is just democracy in the process of descent into anarchy. Second, it actually minimizes the power of the voter, since any opinion not capable of getting a majority is not protected. The more democratic a society, therefore, the more that elections become horse races, and minorities are persecuted rather than protected. In contrast, a republic limits who can vote, generally in ways designed to ensure that the voter's natural self-interested choices coincide with what is necessary to keep society functioning and healthy over the long term, without governmental interference in individual matters. This effectively aggregates the vote, maximizing the chances of one vote changing the power structure, and thus protecting minority viewpoints.

This tendency is magnified if those powers given to the government by the people are in fact spread in layers, so that one layer of government controls street maintenance, while another controls the militia and police for local stability, while still another controls the armed forces for protection from foreign aggressors. When all power congregates in one level of government, the stakes become so high that votes are traded in the legislature so that everyone gets their pet projects through. Over time, this tends to lead to a corruption, in that power accumulates, money accumulates and the common voter is less able to influence the officer. If I go to the city council meeting, there are only a few dozen people there, and I am heard. If I go to the state legislature, there are thousands of people clamoring from a hearing, and I am dimly heard, if at all. If I go to the Congress, I am part of the background din of millions of petitioners, and am not going to get heard at all.

These, then, are the issues that this category will address, through the writings of others.