Late last week I took a short trip to Laredo, Texas and while downtown I snapped this photograph with my cell-phone:
The photo is of Juarez Street, looking north from the intersection with Zarzamora. This downtown street is part of a commercial district near one of two international bridges linking Laredo with its cross-border sister city of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas.
For those who may be reading this blog for the first time, Laredo is my birthplace. I was born there in 1975 and lived there during my teenage years from 1988 to 1993. My mother's side of the family is from Laredo and I am a direct descendant of the man who founded the city in 1755: Tomás Sánchez de la Barquera y Gallardo.
While I was in Laredo that day, temperatures were up close to 100 degrees, but as I left downtown the thermometer on my truck read 111 degrees, probably from being in direct sunlight. Nevertheless, Laredo was the same hot, dusty town it's always been, ever since it was populated by settlers struggling to eke out a living on the South Texas plain.
The title of this post will sound familiar to those who recall an old western song by the same name, or perhaps by its alternate name, "The Cowboy's Lament." Here is Johnny Cash's version of the tune:
The origins of the song are a bit murky, but a nineteenth-century Irish song entitled "The Bard of Armagh" was sung to the same melody. Here are its first two verses:
Oh list' to the lay of a poor Irish harper,
And scorn not the strings in his old withered hands,
But remember those fingers, they once could move sharper,
To raise up the strains of his dear native land.
It was long before the shamrock, dear Isle's lovely emblem,
Was crushed in its beauty by the Saxon's lion paw,
And all the pretty colleens around me would gather,
Called me their bold Phelim Brady, the Bard of Armagh.
Both songs harken to distant, difficult times when life was much shorter, violent, and less luxurious than today. The daily grind of life may often be dispiriting, but we should be mindful that oftentimes our ancestors faced far greater challenges and discomforts.
This past Monday I was reading Victor Davis Hanson's A War Like No Other when I came across this passage on page 164:
Nothing is worse than for a state to have nearby enemies and distant friends – as the lonely experience of Armenia, Cuba, Taiwan, and Tibet attests. Adversaries loom daily on the horizon; far-off allies often pledge support that they cannot really provide, thereby ensuring that their friendship is as costly as it is undependable.
It is very timely observation considering what has transpired in the nation of Georgia since August 8. In that distant republic, neighboring Russia acted swiftly and brutally to ensure that the breakaway autonomous regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia would remain tied to Russia and that Georgia would be effectively cut off from her putative allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union.
However, Hanson's observation was not in reference to Georgia or any modern nation, but to the ancient Greek city-state of Plataea:
The city of Plataea – like poor Poland squeezed between Germany and Russia – had the misfortune of resting on the border of powerful and hostile Thebes while miles away from stronger and friendly Athens.
Plataea occupies an exalted place in Greek history because of two major events. The first occurred on August 27, 479 BC, when the city-state was the site of one of the two final battles of the Greco-Persian Wars – the other being the Battle of Mycale, fought on the same day.
More relevant to Hanson's analysis is the later role Plataea played – in the Peloponnesian War. Plataea, despite its proximity to Thebes, had remained independent from the Theban-led Boeotian Confederacy for many decades by the time of the Peloponnesian War's outbreak in 431 BC. In 431, the Thebans had tried to topple Plataea from within by sneaking three hundred Thebans into the city to spark an insurgency that would overthrow Plataea's democratic government, but the Theban attempt at subterfuge failed. Two years later, in 429, the Spartans put Plataea under a siege that was to last for two years, until the starving 200 or so defenders of the embattled city-state (most of its residents having relocated to Athens at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War) surrendered.
Hanson notes that Plataea's long independence was not maintained by the alliance with Athens, but rather by its formidable defenses:
In fact, for much of the latter fifth century the Plataeans owed their independence from Thebes' Boeotian Confederacy not to tangible Athenian military assistance or its strategic location on the main road into Attica. Instead, the backward state of Greek siegecraft meant that the city's impressive stone walls could still guarantee it autonomy from the entire Boeotian Confederacy – despite the latter's aggregate population of at least 100,00 people and nearly one thousand square miles of territory.
To break Plataea's defenses would require a well-executed plan, and as is often said in the realm of politics, you cannot win without a plan. To wit, war being politics by other means, Ralph Peters provides this cogent analysis of Russia's invasion of Georgia:
Let's be clear: For all that US commentators and diplomats are still chattering about Russia's "response" to Georgia's actions, the Kremlin spent months planning and preparing this operation. Any soldier above the grade of private can tell you that there's absolutely no way Moscow could've launched this huge ground, air and sea offensive in an instantaneous "response" to alleged Georgian actions.
As I pointed out Saturday, even to get one armored brigade over the Caucasus Mountains required extensive preparations. Since then, Russia has sent in the equivalent of almost two divisions - not only in South Ossetia, the scene of the original fighting, but also in separatist Abkhazia on the Black Sea coast.
The Russians also managed to arrange the instant appearance of a squadron of warships to blockade Georgia. And they launched hundreds of air strikes against preplanned targets.
Every one of these things required careful preparations. In the words of one US officer, "Just to line up the airlift sorties would've taken weeks."
The question facing the US government is this: just how far should we be willing to go to help Georgia's struggling democracy against a re-emergent Russia? In the early years of the Peloponnesian War, the Athenians decided that Plataea was not worth a full defensive effort on their part, mostly because Athens was beset with a horrible plague that ended up killing anywhere from one-quarter to one-third of the population, including Pericles, Athens' iconic leader. The United States has no plague to deal with at present, but given our commitments to Afghanistan and Iraq, it appears that the realities of physical distance may limit what assistance we may be able to provide to the beleaguered Caucasian country.
In his WorldNet Daily column on August 4, 2008, Vox Day wrote about The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides and how it may presage the fate of America's present global hegemony. The column comes at the conclusion of a three month-long guided reading of Thucydides (specifically, the Landmark version of The History of the Peloponnesian War) that Day himself led and that I covertly participated in. Day writes thusly about the course and adds a couple of observations:
During the last three months, about 30 amateur armchair historians and I have been methodically working our way together through the eight books of "The Landmark Thucydides," a beautiful edition that quite credibly bills itself as the comprehensive guide to "The History of the Peloponnesian War" recounted by Thucydides. (If you're interested in testing your knowledge of the classic conflict, you can do so here.) Throughout the course of the study, two things became apparent:
1. Politics and politicians have changed surprisingly little in the last 2,440 years. With a few minor adjustments, some of the speeches made by men such as Themistocles, Cleon and Alcibiades could be given by Gordon Brown, John McCain, and Barack Obama today and it would be unlikely that a single journalist would even notice anything unusual.
2. War leads to unpredictable changes taking place in the warring parties. These changes are seldom for the better.
I agree with Day's observations here, for as I noted in a previous entry, societies may change but human nature rarely, if ever, does.
As for human nature and mankind's predilection for warfare, Thucydides knew well that the most basic motivations for the Athenians going to war were not rooted in such lofty conceits as making the world "safe for democracy," as Woodrow Wilson would justify America's entry into the First World War more than two millennia later. Rather, in Book One (1.76) of his History, Thucydides recounts a speech by Athenian envoys to the Spartan assembly, noting the true motivations of human warfare:
You, at all events, Spartans, have used your supremacy to settle the states in the Peloponnesus as is agreeable to you. And if at the period of which we were speaking you had persevered to the end of the matter, and had incurred hatred in your command, we are sure that you would have made yourselves just as galling to the allies, and would have been forced to choose between a strong government and a danger to yourselves. It follows that it was not a very remarkable action, or contrary to the common practice of mankind, if we did accept an empire that was offered to us, and refused to give it up under the pressure of three of the strongest motives, fear, honor, and [self-]interest. And it was not we who set the example, for it has always been the law that the weaker should be subject to the stronger.
Fear, honor, and self-interest – or as the Greeks would have put it: phobos, doxa, kerdos. Those are the basic motivations of all mankind, a fact duly noted in this outstanding essay by author Dan Simmons two years ago.
Returning to the column in question, Day notes a seemingly disturbing parallel between the modern United States and ancient Athens on the matter of finances:
The Athenians considered themselves more than equal to the numerous Peloponnesians because their allies in the Delian League were "contributing" 600 silver talents a year to Athens, which by today's prices was equal to around $9.2 million. This funded a 250-ship fleet which no other Greek city could think to match. The United States presently enjoys a similarly powerful military based on air and sea supremacy that is funded by a public debt of $9.6 trillion, a significant percentage of which is owed to China, Russia and unnamed "oil exporters."
The American situation doesn't quite mirror that of Athens, as the debt owed to China, Russia and others is credit that was voluntarily extended to the US or assumed from previous creditors. I'm not certain how much of an Achilles heel the public debt truly is, for it seems that in the past quarter-century dire predictions have been issued on the basis of our enormous debt, but none have panned out. I don't dismiss Day's point on this matter, but I am skeptical.
As for the oft-stated American goal of spreading democracy:
Of course, all of the ominous parallels between latter-day Athens and America notwithstanding, it must be admitted that history seldom repeats itself with any great degree of precision. It is said to rhyme, however, and there can be no doubt that while America attempts to sponsor democracy in the autocratic Middle East, America's European allies are moving away from democracy and toward oligarchy in much the same way that formerly democratic Athenian allies in Samos, Mytilene, Corcyra and Chios did. As America attempt to forcibly install democracy in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine, it has all but vanished in Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and 21 other member states of the European Union, in which only the citizens of Ireland are permitted a voice in their own governance.
The post-Cold War transformation of the European Union from a loose economic association to a burgeoning, intrusive, bureaucratic behemoth is indeed ominous. Given the arrogant manner in which Eurocrats have responded to the various "No" votes to the Maastricht and Lisbon treaties, it is becoming ever more obvious that the intent behind the creation of the EU is not to create a democratic hegemon, but something of an authoritarian oligarchy. Looking at it that way, Tom Kratman's Carrera series may prove quite prescient.
Concluding his comparison of modern America with ancient Athens, Day rites:
The lessons of history suggest that America's ongoing Arabian Expedition will not only have the effect of degrading the American military, harming the U.S. economy and increasing fuel prices, but it could very well wind up causing significant changes in the system of American government. Of course, it's worth noting one major difference between the two invasions: Unlike the Athenians, Americans never voted to wage this war.
By slipping in a sly analogy between our adventures in the Middle East and the failed Syracuse Expedition of Athens, Day is on shaky ground. As Victor Davis Hanson noted in a reply to Pat Buchanan (concerning Buchanan's latest book, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War – reviewed on this blog last month), the only way in which the analogy would work would be if the Unites States had deployed its forces not to Afghanistan and Iraq, but to democratic India for the purpose of taking control of that country. Syracuse was not a neglected backwater like contemporary Afghanistan or a failed authoritarian republic like Iraq, but rather a democracy like Athens with significant allies of its own.
Also, there is the matter of Day asserting that Americans did not vote to wage the current war in the Middle East. That is true, but when have Americans ever voted en masse for a war? If America's government functioned like that of ancient Athens, his point would make more sense.
Despite the points of disagreement with Day in comparing the Peloponnesian War with America's campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, I believe he is essentially correct in trying to understand the problems that Athens faced over 2, 400 years ago in light of present-day geopolitics. As a rule, most historians (myself included) try to avoid doing so for fear of committing "presentism" – failing to understand the past on its own terms and imagining that human society now is essentially the same as in the past. For purposes of understanding human nature, though, applying the lessons of the past to the present is essential, and from Thucydides one can learn how hubris may effectively undermine even mighty, prosperous, and seemingly stable nations.
On Friday, House Republicans held a protest on the floor of the chamber after the Democratic majority decided to adjourn without scheduling a vote to allow offshore drilling, despite millions of Americans being overburdened by high fuel prices. Pelosi and her gang of clowns care nothing about what regular Americans think, preferring to dream of "saving the planet" from non-existent crises while flying in their gulfstream jets to chic vacation spots like Aspen and Hyannis Port.
Having none of it, Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-Mich.) said: "This is not Pelosi's politiburo." Champagne Bolsheviks like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama would have you pay higher gas prices for the sole purpose of assuaging their guilt-ridden consciences. And if you disagree, you should just shut up because they are doing it for your own good. What arrogance, what condescension. If the voters of this country decide to extend the Democrats' Congressional majority past this November, it will be proof that many, if not most of the electorate is simply stupid. But as H.L. Mencken once said, "Democracy is the theory that the people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
***
The people of California are certainly getting it good and hard from their elected representatives at the state level. Based on junk science as flimsy as that warning of the "danger" of second-hand smoke, California's legislature and governor voted to impose a ban on trans-fats in restaurant food. From U.S. News and World Report:
California last week became the first state to ban trans fats in food sold in restaurants, the Los Angeles Times reports. Found in many oils and margarines, trans fats extend the shelf life of products but have been linked to clogged arteries, diabetes, and other serious health conditions.
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, known for being health-conscious, signed the bill into law Friday. By Jan. 1, 2010, California's restaurants are required to use margarines, oils, and shortening that contain less than half a gram of trans fat per serving; deep-fried bakery products must adopt the standard by Jan. 1, 2011.
Fewer and fewer people seem to give a damn about liberty in this country. The retreat from liberty is most pronounced in the blue states, but the red states are hardly immune. Five years ago the San Antonio City Council imposed it's own ban on smoking in "public" places. I put public in quotes because I do not consider private business to be public establishments, despite what Tranzi ninnies insist. In the words of Wendell Phillips, "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." And the price of utopia is always slavery.
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To date, the funniest bumper sticker I ever read was this one I saw on the back of a pickup truck ten years ago: "Keep Texas beautiful. Put a Yankee on a bus." A frustrating interaction with a colleague on Friday reminded me of that.
However, liberty-loving (former and current) Yankees like Tom Kratman, JW, and others reading this blog are always welcome in the Lone Star State. Just so y'all know.
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Sorry for the lack of posting lately, but with an entire semester being compressed into five weeks, I've been overwhelmed with grading and lecture preparation. Right now I'm reading A War Like No Other by Victor Davis Hanson, after which I'll re-read Tom Kratman's Caliphate. Rather interesting how the lessons learned by way of a Greek civil war over 2,300 years ago remain so relevant at present. Societies change, but human nature never does.
Published in 2003, A State of Disobedience was Tom Kratman's first novel, and re-reading it five years later I find it to still be a thrilling tale of love, duty, honor, country, and all-around political incorrectness. The story centers around several characters, among them a disaffected Texan named Alvin Sheer, a power-mad American president named Wilhelmina Rottemeyer, a feisty Texas governor named Juanita Seguin, and an aging but determined Texas National Guard officer named Jack Schmidt.
Kratman's story begins eight years from now (in 2016), when Rottemeyer, a far-left Democrat, is narrowly elected to the presidency, promising to use the might of the federal government to forcibly create the leftist social utopia that she and her ilk have long desired. Doing so will not be easy, but Rottemeyer is more than willing to break a few eggs to make her omelet.
The first eggs to be broken are the residents of a small Catholic mission in Waco, Texas named Dei Gloria. They are targeted for sheltering a priest who had the unmitigated gall to protest the secular sacrament of abortion…outside of an abortion clinic. Refusing to hand the cleric over, the mission is besieged by federal law enforcement in a manner similar to what took place at nearby Mt. Carmel in 1993, with similar results. The Texas National Guard, at the orders of Governor Seguin, detains the feds involved, including the Director of the FBI who was on scene to witness the massacre.
At that point, the fight is on between Seguin and Rottemeyer, Seguin using the Texas National Guard to curtail further abuses within the borders of her state by Rottemeyer's lackeys in the federal bureaucracy. In response, the enraged Rottemeyer uses every underhanded tactic at her disposal (including ordering a military assault upon Texas) to prevail in the standoff. Meanwhile, the aforementioned Alvin Sheer makes his way toward DC, determined to avenge his wife's death which was brought about Rottemeyer's intrusive social workers and substandard universal government medical care. Like a Texan patriot from an earlier era – William Barret Travis – Seguin and Sheer are determined to see their respective struggles through to the end, death notwithstanding.
Naturally, throughout the novel I found myself cheering for the rebellious Texans and jeering the dictatorial, self-righteous leftists. The novel was even more of a joy to read than I had remembered. Reading it again after having read Kratman's other novels, I was pleasantly surprised to see a cameo appearance by a couple of Panamanian arms dealers who bore a striking resemblance to two characters from Kratman's Carrera series. And finally, I marveled at how a non-Texan (originally from Massachusetts, no less) could do such a fine job crafting Texan pride into literary form. However, it was John Steinbeck who long ago noted that "Texas is a state of mind." With A State of Disobedience, Kratman has proven so.
Harry Turtledove's latest alternate history series takes place on a continent that in our reality has only existed in myth and legend: Atlantis. The point-of-divergence in Turtledove's latest alternate universe occurs 85 million years in the past, when continental drift causes part of North America east of the Mississippi River to break away, remaining effectively stationary in the Atlantic Ocean while North America drifts farther and farther to the west in the millions of years that follow. Atlantis develops as a unique continent where birds, not mammals, evolve to be the dominant life forms. The continent goes unnoticed by humanity until the 1460s when a Breton fisherman named Francois Kersauzon tells an English friend of his named Edward Radcliffe (who is also a fisherman) about a mysterious new land to the west he has found. This new land is uninhabited by humans, has abundant cod in its coastal waters, and is home to a large, tasty, flightless bird known colloquially as a "honker" because of its loud, disconcerting call.
And so begins the three hundred year-long epic tale of Opening Atlantis, beginning with Edward Radcliffe's efforts at establishing the first English settlement on the new continent and concluding with a great eighteenth-century colonial war fought between England and France, with Edward's descendant Victor Radcliff leading a motley band of colonial irregulars through battle after battle. As with most of his novels, Turtledove creates an intricate universe in which his main characters play decisive historical roles while never allowing those characters to lose that personal aspect to which the reader can relate.
The reader can also relate to Atlantis itself as it is settled and developed by colonists, proceeding along an historical timeline not too different from that of early colonial North America in our universe. On that point, some notable historical figures from our timeline emerge in Turtledove's Atlantean saga, enabling the reader to remain historically oriented within his imaginative world.
As the series is not yet complete, I hesitate to render a final verdict, but I like what I have seen so far. The next installment in this series – The United States of Atlantis – is due out this December. I trust it will live up to the promise of its predecessor.
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In other news, Bane posted this excellent comment in the thread to this post at Vox Popoli, the weblog of WorldNetDaily columnist, software developer, and sci-fi author Vox Day:
A Natural Law At Vox Popoli:
At some point in the thread, having exhausted all semblance of supposedly rational, intelligent discourse, some commenters will devolve into making accusations of bestiality, homosexuality, and the general retardation of anyone who disagrees with them.
Atheists will prove their Progressive open mindedness by denigrating the beliefs of anyone who does not believe as they do.
People with unique and, dare I say insane sets of beliefs will come in and write large columns, paragraph after paragraph of general lunacy, often involving Sparta, or the Catholic Church.
People will begin to say "Nuh uh!" a lot. Then the combatants will run off and pout, sure of their rightness, no matter what evidence was provided as to the contrary. Renee will talk about her vagina. People will get drunk, those that are left.
It will all begin the next day, simply because the sun came up.
Undoubtedly, this "Natural Law" could apply at many other blogs. Such is the nature of cyberspace.
Sorry for the lack of posting this week, but things have been especially busy with work and other matters. Since my last entry, I managed to finish Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War by Patrick J. Buchanan. Once finished, I then read some reviews by John Lukacs and Victor Davis Hanson (here and here).
In his book, Buchanan argues that Great Britain (via Winston Churchill) committed a serious blunder by going to war against Nazi Germany in 1939. Taking a broad view of the early twentieth century, Buchanan states that in the future, historians may regard the First and Second World Wars as two phases of a "Great Civil War of the West" that did not reach its ultimate conclusion until the end of the Cold War in 1989. The notion of the time period of 1914 to 1989 being one of continuous conflict is not Buchanan's alone – in The Shield of Achilles, Phillip Bobbitt refers to it as the "Long War" of 1914-1990. One could also argue that the war is not even over as of 2008, for since 2003 in Iraq, the United States has been engaged in a project of restoring political order to a part of the Middle East that has not known long term peace since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Perhaps a better term would be "The Forever War" – coined by science fiction author Joe Haldeman in his classic novel of the same name.
In any case, Buchanan's narrative is thought-provoking. The start of what would come to be known as World War I signaled the end of a long period of global Western expansion. By the early twentieth century, several European nations – Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, Germany, and to a lesser extent Spain, Portugal, and Belgium, had amassed massive colonial hegemonies, the largest of which was the British Empire. Without a doubt, the West dominated the world politically, economically, militarily, and territorially. However, by the end of the First World War, Germany's colonial empire abroad was no more - having been carved up by Britain, Japan, Australia, and South Africa – and several monarchial dynasties had fallen, among them the houses of Hohenzollern (Germany), Hapsburg (Austria-Hungary), and Romanov (Russia). And in the war's aftermath there emerged a rising world power: the United States of America.
Also emergent in the two decades after World War I were totalitarian dictatorships in Italy, Japan, Russia, and Germany – led by men who would plunge the world into a second global conflict that would dwarf the first in terms of physical destruction and loss-of-life. In the aftermath of World War II, the British Empire upon which the sun once never set would cease to exist, as the United Kingdom, strapped for funds and manpower, was unable to hold on to its far-flung possessions, leaving the United States and the Soviet Union as the world's two remaining hegemons, the latter of which would collapse by the end of the 1980s.
Buchanan places the blame for the end of Western global domination upon Winston Churchill, who Buchanan believes was instrumental in leading the British Empire to its ultimate demise. Churchill held key positions within the Liberal government that oversaw Britain's entry into World War I and was a leading member of the Conservative Party by the 1930's, ultimately becoming Prime Minister of the United Kingdom upon Neville Chamberlain's resignation in 1940. Buchanan portrays Churchill not as the "Last Lion" who courageously stood up to the scourge of Nazism when all appeared to be lost, but rather as a war-hungry toff who loudly agitated for Britain's involvement in two continental European wars in which Britain had no overriding national interest. Without Britain's entry into either war, Buchanan maintains that the first would have been a mere replay of the 1870 Franco-Prussian War and that the second might have been no more than a slugfest between Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin – a war in which both sides might have been weakened sufficiently to the point that neither would ever have threatened the peace-loving democracies of the West.
That is tricky territory for any historian, academic or amateur, to tread upon as there is simply no way to prove or disprove such counter-factual assumptions. But Buchanan marches on, claiming that Churchill and others among Britain's war party were recklessly irresponsible in pushing Britain into entering a costly war with Imperial Germany, imposing a "Carthaginian Peace" (as South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts called it) upon Germany at Versailles, and ultimately committing a series of diplomatic blunders that pushed Benito Mussolini into Hitler's arms, allowed Hitler to re-arm, and goaded Hitler into attacking Poland in September 1939 – a country which Britain and France foolishly (and unrealistically) promised to protect in the event of a German invasion.
Criticisms of Buchanan's thesis have been harsh. In the July 2, 2008 issue of The American Conservative, historian John Lukacs (pronounced LOO-kash) criticizes Buchanan for committing the logical fallacy of special pleading, selectively quoting a renowned historian like A.J.P. Taylor who maintained "Only Danzig prevented cooperation between Germany and Poland" to support his thesis, but then ignoring other quotations (Churchill being "the savior of England") from Taylor that undermine it. Throughout the book, Buchanan posits Hitler as more of a passive player in the diplomatic games of 1930s Europe, rather than the belligerent aggressor he actually was. On Buchanan's dichotomy of an aggressive Churchill/Britain vs. a passive/reactive Hitler, Lukacs writes:
A man has, or more precisely chooses, his opinions. The choice, ever so often, depends on his inclinations. In this review it is not my proper business to speculate about Buchanan's inclinations. I must restrict myself to his arguments.
Another historian who takes issue with Buchanan's arguments is Victor Davis Hanson. One argument Hanson finds spurious is Buchanan's assertion that Britain's issue of a war guarantee to defend Poland was directly responsible for such atrocities as the Katyn Forest massacre, the death camps of Treblinka and Auschwitz, the destruction of the Polish Home Army, and the half-century of Soviet repression that followed. Hanson responds:
This is reprehensible. Now British military weakness is blamed for Auschwitz, rather than the innate sinister nature of Nazism? Does Buchanan believe that had Britain not tried to stop Hitler, the death camps would never have occurred? Does he know of the prewar Nazi precursors to the Final Solution, the geneses of which were clear from Germany's own treatment of its chronically ill and mentally disturbed?
Indeed, Buchanan does fall into the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc on this point, much like the conspiracy theorists and revisionist historians at lewrockwell.com who assert that Franklin Roosevelt goaded the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor and that American foreign policy was culpable for the events of September 11, 2001, rather than the Japanese militarists and Islamic radicals who committed the respective heinous acts. It is, to put it simply, complete nonsense.
But what is not nonsense, and quite refreshing, is the other side of Churchill that Buchanan exposes his readers to. The Churchill we see here is not the hagiographical icon feted by so many admiring historians, but rather a talented, intelligent, brave, but occasionally flawed man whose career was far from spotless. For example, it was Churchill who, as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1915, bore direct responsibility for the disaster that was the Battle of Gallipoli in which more than 200,000 British, Australian, and New Zealander troops lost their lives, and who as Prime Minister was responsible for ordering the disastrous raid on Dieppe in 1942, just to give a couple of examples.
I certainly do not agree with all of Buchanan's assertions, nor do I agree with his overall indictment of Churchill or the parallel he draws between 1930s Britain and early twenty-first century America. I do, however, appreciate Buchanan's ability to force his readers to re-examine long-held assumptions – and because of that, I recommend this book.
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Having completed Buchanan's book, I am now finishing up Harry Turtledove's Opening Atlantis and will shortly begin re-reading Tom Kratman's A State of Disobedience. Good weekend wishes to all!
Originally posted at The Festering Swamp on January 17, 2008
With this entry, I conclude my series of old Festering Swamp blog posts, for I have no others left except for a Thanksgiving Day post by Dana from last year. With Dana's permission, I'll post it again this coming Thanksgiving. As the first paragraph indicates, I originally wrote this in response to the commonly-held belief that the Republican Party has not been at the forefront of the historical expansion of political rights in this country. This was the very last entry I posted at The Festering Swamp, for I resigned as a contributor eight days later. – Mike LaRoche
In the comments to my previous entry, Luke Y. Thompson raised a valid point, writing: "I really must've missed the part in history when Republicans were behind the initial great strides in women's rights and worker's rights. Please fill me in." With this entry, I will attempt to do so.
To understand the long-standing Republican commitment to civil rights, it is best to begin with the post-Civil War Reconstruction era. In April 1866, Congressional Republicans (against the strong opposition of President Andrew Johnson, a Unionist Democrat), introduced the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. This amendment entailed the following:
All native-born or naturalized persons in America were officially made American citizens, and states were prohibited from depriving citizens of their life, liberty, or property without the due process of law.
States were compelled to extend voting rights to blacks, for the amendment stipulated that state representation in Congress could be reduced if some citizens were unjustly barred from voting.
Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment in June 1866, and it was forwarded to the states for ratification. Johnson fought hard against the ratification of this amendment throughout the summer and fall of 1866, but his efforts were futile as state after state outside the South approved it (all of the Southern states, except Tennessee, voted it down).
In February 1869, the Republican Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which was subsequently ratified by the requisite number of states. This Amendment guaranteed voting rights to all citizens regardless of their race, color, or former slave status.
During Ulysses S. Grant's presidency, more measures were taken by Congress to protect blacks against harassment. One significant piece of legislation, the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, made it a felony to interfere with voting rights and authorized the use of the army for the law's enforcement. A similarly strong law passed was the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which broadly outlawed public racial discrimination.
More than a dozen years after Reconstruction ended, Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge (R-MA) tried to push his Force Bill through Congress, which would have restored voting rights to African-Americans throughout the South. At the time, Southern state governments (under the control of Redeemer Democrats) were busy enacting legislation to marginalize blacks politically and socially. Cabot's bill failed largely because of Democratic opposition and continuing strife over the passage of the unpopular McKinley Tariff Act.
It should also be remembered that the Republican Party's commitment to civil rights was alive and well during the twentieth century, for it was President Dwight D. Eisenhower who used federal troops to force the state of Arkansas to admit black students to Little Rock's Central High School. And as Dmac mentioned in my previous entry's comments, Sen. Everett Dirksen (R-IL) was instrumental in pushing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress. On the matter of Sen. Barry Goldwater's (R-AZ) stance against the legislation, Goldwater's position was rooted in concerns over provisions in the bill that granted federal agencies excessive power in enforcing the legislation – a very valid worry in retrospect.
Regarding women's rights, Republican support for female suffrage was evident as early as the 1860s, when the very Republican territory of Wyoming became the first to allow women to vote (h/t to Eric Blair for the Wikipedia link):
"In 1869, Wyoming extended much suffrage to women, at least partially in an attempt to garner enough votes to be admitted as a state. In addition to being the first U.S. state to extend suffrage to women, Wyoming was also the home of many other firsts for U.S. women in politics. For the first time, women served on a jury in Wyoming (Laramie in 1870). Wyoming had the first female court bailiff (Mary Atkinson, Laramie, in 1870) and the first female justice of the peace in the country (Esther Hobart Morris, South Pass City, in 1870). Wyoming became the first state in the Union to elect a female governor, Nellie Taylor Ross, who was elected in 1924 and took office in January 1925."
The first woman elected to Congress was also a Republican: Rep. Jeanette Rankin (R-MT) of Missoula, who also holds the dubious distinction of being the only member of Congress to vote against America's entry into both World War I and World War II.
Also, it was a Republican Congress that in 1919 passed the 19th Amendment, granting women nationwide the right to vote. This was done over the loud objections of then-President Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat.
On the subject of worker's rights, it was President Benjamin Harrison, a Republican, who in 1890 signed the Sherman Antitrust Act. The Sherman Antitrust Act outlawed pools and trusts, stating that there could be no more collusion among businesses to restrict competition. Specifically, the law stated that there could be no "conspiracy in restraint of trade."
Another Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt, took even more aggressive action. In 1901, Roosevelt declared that "the absolutely vital question" facing the country was "whether or not the government has the power to control the trusts." Evidence of this change of focus on the trusts came when the federal government, at Roosevelt's direction, filed an antitrust suit against the Northern Securities Company after an exhaustive investigation had turned up evidence of illegalities.
Corporate leaders such as J.P. Morgan were shocked, but Roosevelt was adamant that government be used as an instrument to control business. In response to the indignation expressed by many business leaders, one newspaper editor wryly stated: "Wall Street is paralyzed at the thought that a President of the United States would sink so low as to try to enforce the law."
Another sign of the change in business and labor policy under Roosevelt was apparent with his handling of an anthracite coal strike in Pennsylvania in 1902. In this case Roosevelt chose to have the government mediate in this dispute between labor and management: commonplace now, but unprecedented then.
In May of 1902, nearly 50,000 coal miners in Pennsylvania went on strike to demand higher wages, shorter hours, and recognition of their union, known as the United Mine Workers (UMW). The strike dragged on through the summer and fall, but with winter approaching and with the price of coal reaching all-time highs, President Roosevelt called representatives from both sides to meet in October 1902. Management at first refused to speak with the union leaders at the meeting, insulting the President. In response, Roosevelt threatened to seize the mines and operate them with federal troops – a threat that quickly brought management around. With J.P. Morgan's encouragement, the mine owners agreed to arbitration and in the end the miners won a reduction in work hours and a wage increase. Management received a concession in that they did not have to recognize the UMW.
Ultimately, Roosevelt was steadfast in his belief that the government should act independently of big business, and he characterized his actions during the anthracite coal strike specifically as an attempt to give both labor and management a "square deal."
Although I titled this entry "The Secret History of the Republican Party," there really is nothing secret about what I have discussed. The facts are easily available but have been consistently ignored (if not distorted) for years by many so-called professional educators across the country – due to either ideological bias or just plain ignorance. Oftentimes in the pursuit of historical truth, the most critical step is to unlearn what you have previously learned.
Originally posted at The Festering Swamp on April 18, 2007
Here are my thoughts on last year's Virginia Tech massacre, which if I'm not mistaken, took place in Tom Kratman's hometown. As an academic, I wish the Texas legislature would pass a bill allowing people who carry Concealed Handgun Licenses, like me, to carry their weapons while at work. Banning guns from campus does nothing to protect faculty, staff, or students from gun-wielding psychopaths. Rather, it just turns us into sitting ducks. – Mike LaRoche
Not surprisingly, the recent shootings at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University have sparked calls from the usual suspects to renew efforts at restricting gun ownership rights. Gun control advocates reason that if Virginia had stronger sales restrictions on firearms, the massacre at Virginia Tech may have been prevented. Statistics from the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, however, undercut their own thesis that stronger gun control laws make citizens safer. Check out Of Arms and The Law, a pro-Second Amendment blog, for further information.
History is not on the side of the gun control lobby, either. The historical origins of the right to bear arms date back to early modern England. In fact, up until the early twentieth century, Britain had a laissez-faire policy toward individual handgun ownership. In a 2002 review of Guns and Violence: The English Experience by Bentley College historian Joyce Malcolm, Glenn Reynolds writes:
It is a standard observation in American and English debates over gun control that England has strict gun controls and low crime rates, while America has (comparatively) liberal gun laws and higher crime rates. It is usually assumed that there is a cause and effect relationship, with the low crime stemming from the strict gun controls in England, and vice versa in the United States.
This turns out not to be the case. As Malcolm observes, violent crime rates in England, very high in the 14th century, fell more or less steadily for five hundred years, even as ownership of firearms became more common. By the late 19th century, England had gun laws that were far more liberal than are found anywhere in the United States today, yet almost no gun crime, and little violent crime of other sorts. (An 1870 act, which was seldom enforced, required the payment of a small tax for the privilege of carrying, not simply owning, a gun.)
Despite a well-armed populace, Malcolm reports, "statistics record an astonishingly low rate of gun-related violence in the late nineteenth century." How low?
In the course of three years, according to hospital reports, there were only 59 fatalities from handguns in a population of nearly 30 million people. Of these, 19 were accidents, 35 were suicides, and only 3 were homicides; 3 an average of one a year.
Despite these rates, which Malcolm is right to call astonishingly low, the British government decided at the turn of the 20th century to begin a program of gun control that would ensure "that nobody except a soldier, sailor, or policeman, should have a pistol at all." The claimed justification was the "enormous" number of handgun injuries.
After World War I, the divergence between American and British gun laws became wider, with the United States continuing the laissez-faire tradition inherited from Britain, while Britain itself opted for a more statist model.
The bottom line for Britain is this: over time increased handgun restrictions have resulted in a rise in crime - a trend continuing to this very day. Not coincidentally, other individual rights in Britain have eroded as well. The old adage of "fear a government that fears your guns," while perhaps trite, is very true.
In Carnifex, Tom Kratman continues the Terra Novan saga of Patricio Carrera and the Legiones del Cid begun in A Desert Called Peace. At the novel's beginning, operations in Sumer are developing positively. Salafi terrorists in Sumer have been dealt blow after terrible blow by the Legion and their Sumeri allies under the command of Gen. Adnan Sada (who is subsequently elected president of the new Sumeri republic).
Meanwhile, weariness in the Federated States of America over the ongoing war against the Salafists has resulted in the election of the leftist Progressive party to power over the conservative Federalists. Newly-elected President Karl Schumann and his Secretary of Defense, James K. Malcolm are determined to terminate the FSA's contract with Carrera, and do so in a ham-handed manner by dispatching a low-level flunkie named Kenneth O'Meara-Temeroso (who, along with another character named Micah Fen, bears an uncanny physical resemblance to the traitorous filmmaker Michael Moore) to deliver the message to Carrera. Unfortunately for the Federated States, as the situation in Sumer is stabilizing, that in Pashtia (home base for the Salafists) is growing more and more chaotic along with increasing piracy along the Xamar Coast and the Straits of Nicobar.
Back in the Legion's home country of Balboa, Carrera's friend and ally Raul Parilla is planning to challenge incumbent President Manuel Rocaberti in the upcoming elections, but the presence of Tauran Union "peacekeepers" in the country could pose a potential problem. And all the while, High Admiral Martin Robinson of the decaying Peace Fleet of the United Earth government is trying to figure out how he can undercut the FSA and its allies and preserve the hold that the Consensus has over Old Earth, lest such independence-minded Terra Novans one day return to their ancestral home and restore liberty and independence long lost.
During the course of the novel, Carrera's policy of no quarter toward the Salafists grows ever more intense, with rather creative interrogation methods being applied to gain useful information from the worst offenders. With the experience of having dealt successfully with insurgents in Sumer, Carrera has perfected counter-insurgency warfare to an art by the time that the Legiones del Cid are inevitably re-hired by the Progressive leaders of the Federated States to reverse the growing chaos in Pashtia.
Throughout the story this song kept running through my mind:
The song is called "Open Season," coming off of the album Southern Born Killers by rap-metal band Stuck Mojo. I first came across this video at Bane's blog last year. Now while rap-metal is not the type of music I typically listen to, I was very impressed with both this song and the album (which I later purchased).
As with A Desert Called Peace, what I also liked about Carnifex was the richness of the characters and the allegorical references one could draw from some of them. Kratman uses one character in particular to refer to Rudyard Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King. Which character? You'll have to read the novel to find out.
As with all of Kratman's novels, the reader of Carnifex is treated to an author's afterword, where Kratman expounds on the themes of the preceding story. Of particular interest are Kratman's thoughts on the proposition – much loved by Tranzis – that nationalism and patriotism are "arbitrary" and therefore "illegitimate." Just two days before Independence Day, Americans were treated to this heap of lefty asininity from Matthew Rothschild of The Progressive. Of patriotism, Rothschild concludes:
Admit it. We don't have a lot to brag about today. It is time, it is long past time, to get over the American superiority complex. It is time, it is long past time, to put patriotism back on the shelf—out of the reach of children and madmen.
I disagree. I say it is long past time that we Americans got over the guilt-ridden inferiority complex of Mathew Rothschild, Barack Hussein Obama, and their brethren. The true children and madmen are those who proclaim the existence of a "Family of Man" that has never existed in the entirety of human history. Children and madmen of the leftist type that blogger Noel of Sharp Knife nailed down cold:
Groups, to paraphrase Orwell, of nudists, sex-maniacs, 'Nature Cure' quacks, youthful snob-Bolsheviks, secret teetotallers with vegetarian leanings, food-cranks, pistachio shirt-wearers, professional Communists, astute young social-literary climbers, dock labourers, street hawkers, derelict people, beggars, criminals, tramps, prostitutes, Nonconformists, complete asses, literary intelligentsia, social outcasts, pickpockets, the croyant et pratiquant Socialist, fallen women, fallen animals, the thin-skinned, tear-in-the-eye, pre-war humanitarians, typical left-winger anti-imperialists, drunken fish-porters, the life and soul of cocktail parties, kissing the bums of verminous little lions, card-cheats, Beaujolais-sippers, hygiene-obsessed Utopians, Men-Like-Gods, Etruscan, Pelasgian, Aztec &, Sumerian-romancers, Marxist prigs, vegetarians with wilting beards, Bolshevik commissars (half gangster, half bullhorn), earnest ladies in sandals, shock-headed Marxists chewing polysyllables, escaped Quakers, birth-control freaks, Democrat Party backstairs-crawlers, half-baked antinomians, Pacifist Internationalists, feminist fem-phibians, free-love lizards, divorce-reformers, atheists, overweight hunger-marchers, Daily Worker-readers, high-minded Socialist slum-visitors, bare-bodied pornographers, the foaming denouncers of the bourgeoisie, reformers and 'all that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of 'progress' like blueflies to a dead cat'.
As mentioned in my entry of June 28, 2008, ancient Greek scholars like Plato and Thucydides understood that what motivates mankind is not "tolerance," peace-at-all-costs, universal harmony, or any such concepts revered by Tranzis the world over. Rather Plato and Thucydides correctly understood that the basic motivations of men revolve around phobos, kerdos, and doxa: fear, self-interest, and honor. Patriotism embodies this understanding, producing social order that can restrain the worst aspects of human nature.
Throughout history, the nation-state is in fact the only human construct that has demonstrated a proven capability to overcome concentric social circles like race, class, and religion. Kratman notes that nations (and especially powerful ones like the United States) have such unifying traits as a common language, culture, body of laws, and social mores. All of which the "Family of Man" lacks. The point is that when it comes to arbitrariness, the "Family of Man" is far more so than any nation-state. Nations have existed for the duration of history and have provided the social stability necessary for mankind's intellectual, technological, and moral development. By contrast, the morally and culturally anarchic "Family of Man" never has existed, and God willing, never will.
Yesterday, Ben Ross of Dissentposted in the comments, contesting the etymology of the term "neoconservative" that I cited back on May 25, 2008. Evidently, Michael Harrington was not the one who coined the term in 1973, as Jonah Goldberg (and others, including me) have been led to believe. In an article from the Summer 2007 issue of Dissent, Ross writes:
The word neoconservative has (Internet search tools now reveal) a long prehistory of use in academic and quasi-academic writing to describe any new variant of conservatism. I found it used in 1883, in a periodical that featured excerpts from Karl Marx’s new book Capital.
In the late 1960s, it seems, neoconservatism began its transformation from academic neologism to part of the language. By this time, the term had developed two specific meanings for historians alongside its more general usage. It designated either the integral nationalists of Weimar Germany, such as Arthur Möller van den Bruck or the American historians who reacted against Charles Beard, Carl Becker, and their liberal interpretation of the Revolutionary era. It was in the latter sense that the word made its first appearance in the New York Times, in a May 26, 1968, book review by Columbia University historian Richard Morris. It described—of all people—Staughton Lynd, in some of whose work Morris found “an updated and perceptive brand of neoconservatism.” It recurred annually in the Times thereafter.
Later, Ross explains that at Dissent, the term was being used to describe conservatives (like Russell Kirk) who had taken conservative thought in new directions in the recent past as well as to define Cold War liberals like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz who had found a new home on the right by the early '70s. Thus:
A neoconservative, for the Dissenters of the early 1970s, was either someone with a new variant of conservatism or a former leftist who had moved right. The term was applied to the [latter] group that evolved into today’s neocons, simply because they were the new conservatives of immediate concern. But its meaning was not limited to them. It was elsewhere that neoconservatism became a name rather than a description.
It is an informative article that is well worth your time to read. Thanks to Ben Ross for pointing me to it.
***
On a less-weightier note, while surfing the web yesterday I came across this old entry at Ace of Spades about a would-be Internet diva. While self-confidence is necessary trait to have, it must always be tempered by humility, as I'm sure Ms. Passey came to discover.
A review of Tom Kratman's A Desert Called Peace will be posted tomorrow. Happy Monday!
On Thursday, Eric Blair pointed me to a couple of fascinating essays by author Dan Simmons. One was a short story of sorts where Simmons is visited by someone he terms the Time Traveler from several decades in the future, telling Simmons of the grim future that awaits the United States as a result of the Century War, as the Global War on Terror has come to be known. The next was Simmons' response to the enormous amount of hate mail received after posting the previous essay. Both essays mesh well with the central theme of Tom Kratman's A Desert Called Peace, which I am now one hundred forty pages from finishing.
Even before I read these essays, I was already aware of how well-read an author Simmons is. In The Terror, Simmons shows his extensive knowledge of the background of the expedition's commander (Sir John Franklin) and executive officer (Capt. Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier), both of whom were real historical figures. Moreover, Simmons' ability to combine historical fact with his own special brand of speculative fiction makes what should be an unbelievable tale of horror (featuring a Lovecraftian-type monster picking off the crew one-by-one) into an intensely believable story of misery and hardship.
That being known, I was not surprised to see that Simmons applied a similar level of historical background to his two essays. Among the books he consulted were The Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan, The Book of War: 25 Centuries of Great War Writing edited by John Keegan, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within by Bruce Bawer, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order by Samuel P. Huntington, Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History by Lee Harris, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History by Philip Bobbit, Replay by Ken Grimwood, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris, Robert D. Kaplan's Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethic, and Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism. Having read a few of the books mentioned, I have a general idea where Simmons is coming from.
In the first essay, the Time Traveler visits Simmons at home, telling him of the horrible state of the world several decades hence. In so doing, the Time Traveler brings up a conflict from ancient Greek history: the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC). The conversation between the time traveler and Simmons continues thus:
"What do you know about Syracuse?" he [the Time Traveler] asked suddenly.
I blinked again. "Syracuse, New York?" I said at last.
He shook his head slowly. "Thucydides' Syracuse," he said softly. "Syracuse circa 415 B.C. The Syracuse Athens invaded."
"It was . . . part of the Peloponnesian War," I ventured.
He waited for more but I had no more to give. I loved history, but let's admit it . . . that was ancient history. Still, I felt that I should have been able to tell him, or at least remember, why Syracuse was important in the Peloponnesian War or why they fought there or who fought exactly or who had won or . . . something. I hated feeling like a dull student around this scarred old man.
"The war between Athens and its allies and Sparta and its allies – a war for nothing less than hegemony over the entire known world at that time – began in 431 B.C.," said the Time Traveler. "After seventeen years of almost constant fighting, with no clear or permanent advantage for either side, Athens – under the leadership of Alcibiades at the time – decided to widen the war by conquering Sicily, the 'Great Greece' they called it, an area full of colonies and the key to maritime commerce at the time the way the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf is today."
I hate being lectured to at the best of times, but something about the tone and timber of the Time Traveler's voice – soft, deep, rasping, perhaps thickened a bit by the whiskey – made this sound more like a story being told around a campfire. Or perhaps a bit like one of Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon stories on "Prairie Home Companion." I settled deeper into my chair and listened.
"Syracuse wasn't a direct enemy of the Athenians," continued the Time Traveler, "but it was quarreling with a local Athenian colony and the democracy of Athens used that as an excuse to launch a major expedition against it. It was a big deal – Athens sent 136 triremes, the best fighting ships in the world then – and landed 5,000 soldiers right under the city's walls.
"The Athenians had enjoyed so much military success in recent years, including their invasion of Melos, that Thucydides wrote – So thoroughly had the present prosperity persuaded the Athenians that nothing could withstand them, and that they could achieve what was possible and what was impracticable alike, with means ample or inadequate it mattered not. The reason for this was their general extraordinary success, which made them confuse their strengths with their hopes."
"Oh, hell," I said, "this is going to be a lecture about Iraq, isn't it? Look . . . I voted for John Kerry last year and . . ."
"Listen to me," the Time Traveler said softly. It was not a request. There was steel in that soft, rasping voice. "Nicias, the Athenian general who ended up leading the invasion, warned against it in 415 B.C. He said – 'We must not disguise from ourselves that we go to found a city among strangers and enemies, and that he who undertakes such an enterprise should be prepared to become master of the country the first day he lands, or failing in this to find everything hostile to him'. Nicias, along with the Athenian poet and general Demosthenes, would see their armies destroyed at Syracuse and then they would both be captured and put to death by the Syracusans. Sparta won big in that two-year debacle for Athens. The war went on for seven more years, but Athens never recovered from that overreaching at Syracuse, and in the end . . . Sparta destroyed it. Conquered the Athenian empire and its allies, destroyed Athens' democracy, ruined the entire balance of power and Greek hegemony over the known world at the time . . . ruined everything. All because of a miscalculation about Syracuse."
The fictional Simmons, thinking that the Time Traveler's story may be a criticism of America's invasion of Iraq, responds:
"All right, goddammit," I said irritably. "Your point's made. So we shouldn't have invaded Iraq in this . . . what did you call it? This Long War with Islam, this Century War. We're all beginning to realize that here by the end of 2005."
The Time Traveler shook his head. "You've understood nothing I've said. Nothing. Athens failed in Syracuse – and doomed their democracy – not because they fought in the wrong place and at the wrong time, but because they weren't ruthless enough. They had grown soft since their slaughter of every combat-age man and boy on the island of Melos, the enslavement of every woman and girl there. The democratic Athenians, in regards to Syracuse, thought that once engaged they could win without absolute commitment to winning, claim victory without being as ruthless and merciless as their Spartan and Syracusan enemies. The Athenians, once defeat loomed, turned against their own generals and political leaders – and their official soothsayers. If General Nicias or Demosthenes had survived their captivity and returned home, the people who sent them off with parades and strewn flower petals in their path would have ripped them limb from limb. They blamed their own leaders like a sun-maddened dog ripping and chewing at its own belly."
And so it continues to be the case to this very day. Radical Islamists plot the death of our citizens while maleducated Tranzi prats on the Supreme Court and elsewhere wail about about the "rights" of terrorists and how our country is being viewed by elitist pseudo-sophisticates in Europe. What such people fail to comprehend is the fact that not all people are motivated by a desire to "just get along" – to live in peace and harmony. Radical Islamists do not want to live with us in harmony, they want to destroy our civilization and restore the past glory of their own.
Ancient philosophers understood that the basic motivations of all men did not include tolerance, but rather what Plato called phobos, kerdos, and doxa: fear, self-interest, and honor. The point being that war is not an aberration of the human condition, it is the human condition. The Islamofascists are acting accordingly, and it is high time Western civilization (or what is left of it) did so as well.
…we're talking about the modern man. In Spain, that is. On Wednesday, June, 25, 2008 the environmental committee of Spain's parliament voted to pass resolutions calling for the government to adhere to the Great Apes Project. According to the Reuters article, the Great Apes Project was
…devised by scientists and philosophers who say our closest genetic relatives deserve rights hitherto limited to humans.
"This is a historic day in the struggle for animal rights and in defense of our evolutionary comrades, which will doubtless go down in the history of humanity," said Pedro Pozas, Spanish director of the Great Apes Project.
Oh it will go down in the history of humanity all right, Mr. Pozas. As yet another act of monumental stupidity by a country whose leader, Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, began his first term of office by kowtowing to al-Qaeda back in 2004 after the Madrid train bombings. Astonishingly, a plurality of Spain's electorate voted to re-elect this limp-wristed, anti-American, socialist clown earlier this year.
As I've written before, I love Spain. My maternal ancestors were from there, my grandfather was the project manager for the building of a nuclear power plant (Spain's first) north of Madrid in the 1960s, and my mother attended graduate school at the University of Madrid. My family maintains close ties to Spain to this very day.
Thus, it is heartbreaking for me to see a once-proud country reduced to a mere province of the gutless socialist kleptocracy known as the European Union. This is the country that in the past gave us such heroic men as Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (El Cid), Hernán Cortés, and Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. This is the country whose people successfully undertook a centuries-long struggle – La Reconquista – against Muslim invaders in their own homeland and later broke Turkish control of the Mediterranean at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. This is the country that by the mid-1500s had established a global empire, unequalled in might and reach. And this is the country that gave us such great place-names as Matamoros (Spanish for "Moor-killer") and Despeñaperros (literally translating as "throw-dogs," the "dogs" in question being Moors).
Nowadays, instead of raising an army (like the fictional Legion del Cid in Tom Kratman's A Desert Called Peace) to fight the scourge of Islamic fundamentalism, Spain's government prefers to fret over the "rights" of chimps, orangutans, and bonobos. Just pathetic.
Legend has it that as Boabdil (King Muhammad XII – the last Arab king of Granada) and his family were leaving Granada after having lost the kingdom to the invading Spanish, Boabdil began weeping as he looked upon the Alhambra (his palace) for the last time. His mother scolded him, saying "You do well to weep for like a woman what you would not fight for like a man." The spot upon which this occurred came to be known as The Moor's Last Sigh.
I hope that Spain soon comes to its senses, for I would not care to see the legendary event repeated as The Iberian's Last Sigh.
Following Bruce Bawer's While Europe Slept and Claire Berlinski's Menace in Europe, the latest tome on the subject of Europe's decline I have read is The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent by Walter Laqueur. Laqueur's perspective on Europe's crisis differs from that of Bawer and Berlinski in part from his personal circumstances. Unlike Bawer and Berlinski – American expatriates living in Europe – Laqueur is a native European (born in Germany in 1921) who emigrated to the then British Mandate of Palestine (later the Republic of Israel) and has since become an American citizen, living alternately in the United Kingdom and the United States.
In his book, Laqueur categorically analyzes the crises facing Europe at present, first taking note of how birthrates have declined across the continent over the last century. Laqueur anecdotally recalls that his maternal grandfather raised a family of six children, but three of the six had no children of their own two had two apiece, and one had a single child. This says Laqueur "is the story of the rise and decline of the population of Europe." A decline which started about the mid-to-late 1800s and by the outbreak of World War I had fallen below the reproduction rate – the birthrate needed to maintain a steady population past the current generation. The question raised is this: why did the European birthrate decline and why is it continuing to do so as of the early twenty-first century? Of the many possible reasons bandied about, Laqueur writes:
More important was the fact that more and more women accepted (or felt compelled to accept) working full-time and did not want their careers interrupted by pregnancies and the need to take care of their babies. To give but one example, half
