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Ruth King

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What’s the Point of a Liberal Education? Don’t Ask the Ivy League Few top colleges explain their purpose to students. They want to talk gender and inequality instead. By Peter Berkowitz

By on September 16th, 2017

American colleges and universities should be bastions of self-knowledge and self-criticism, simply because they exist to teach people how to think. But in recent years America’s campuses seem to have abandoned this tradition. Worse, the meager course offerings on the topic of liberal education tend to reinforce misunderstandings about its character and content.

I reviewed the course listings at five top private universities: Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, the University of Chicago and Yale; six high-ranking public research universities: UC Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan, North Carolina and Virginia; and five distinguished liberal arts colleges: Amherst, Middlebury, Swarthmore, Wellesley and Williams.

Few of the liberal arts and sciences faculty at these schools offer courses that explore the origins, structure, substance and aims of the education that they supposedly deliver. Instead they provide a smattering of classes on hot-button topics in higher education such as multiculturalism, inequality, gender and immigration. This is no trivial oversight, as the quality of American freedom depends on the quality of Americans’ education about freedom.

A tiny number of elective classes on the curriculum’s periphery—taught for the most part by part-time professors—approach the heart of the matter. Harvard presents a few freshman seminars on the history of the university and issues in higher education. One called “What Is College and What Is It For?” addresses “what constitutes a liberal arts education.” Michigan offers a first-year seminar that considers a university education’s purpose. In Stanford’s freshman program “Thinking Matters,” students examine the relation between the university’s pursuit of knowledge and its pursuit of justice.

Not one political science department at the 16 top schools I reviewed offers a course on liberal education. Isolated offerings concerning the topic are taught in Williams’s philosophy and English departments, as well as in Education Studies at Yale and American Studies at Stanford. Meantime, Princeton, Wellesley and the Universities of North Carolina and Virginia teach their own history.

Overall, the pickings for courses on liberal education are slim. And they tend to reinforce the politicization that afflicts higher education by focusing on the extent to which education advances social justice.

Don’t expect to find much guidance on liberal education in the mission statements of leading American colleges and universities. They contain inflated language about diversity, inclusion and building a better world through social transformation. Missing are instructive pronouncements about what constitutes an educated person or on the virtues of mind and character that underlie reasoned inquiry, the advance of understanding, and the pursuit of truth. Instruction on the ideas, norms and procedures that constitute communities of free men and women devoted to research and study are also scarce to nonexistent.

Hope should not be pinned on colleges and universities to reform themselves. Perhaps a university president or provost who prioritizes recovering liberal education will emerge, but progressive ideology remains deeply entrenched in administrations and faculty. Tenured professors want to reproduce their sensibilities in their successors, and huge endowments insulate the best universities from market forces that could align their programs with the promise of liberal education.

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The Price of Free Speech at Berkeley Security for Ben Shapiro’s speech cost more than $600,000.

By on September 16th, 2017

The University of California at Berkeley’s new chancellor, Carol Christ, has done a democratic service by defending free speech on campus. But who would have thought that protecting speech would be so expensive in the place where the Free Speech Movement began in the 1960s?

The former Breitbart writer Ben Shapiro spoke unimpeded Thursday night on campus, but the university had to spend $600,000 to provide adequate security. The university relied on officers from all 10 campuses in the University of California system. Before the speech, Berkeley’s City Council rescinded a ban on the police use of pepper spray for the first time in two decades. Berkeley largely kept the peace, though nine protesters were arrested, including four who allegedly carried banned weapons and one suspected of battering a cop.

The security costs will grow later this month, when the university hosts Free Speech Week. The arriviste Milo Yiannopolous claimed in a news release that the lineup will include Steve Bannon, Ann Coulter, Pamela Gellar and other controversial speakers he hand-picked. Already, more than 200 faculty are calling for a boycott, claiming the event imperils students’ “physical and mental safety.”

We wish Berkeley’s students were hearing from conservatives who seek to persuade more than merely provoke like the Milo Gang. The Berkeley Patriots, the student group behind Free Speech Week, have yet to provide Ms. Christ with signed speaker contracts or the basic information campus police requested, though the deadline is fast approaching. The success of Mr. Shapiro’s speech showed Ms. Christ’s good faith, and the Berkeley Patriots need to show some mutual respect.

Ms. Christ has said she sees the cost of security as a worthwhile investment, though she laments that $600,000 per event is “certainly not sustainable.” Berkeley has an operating deficit, and we wonder if students who are unwilling to entertain contrarian arguments realize they may be raising their own tuition. Or perhaps they’re attending on federal student loans they never plan to repay.

How far we’ve come in 50 years when the New Left began the Free Speech Movement to fight the establishment. Now the not-so-new left wants to use violence to shut down free speech no matter the cost. Ms. Christ deserves thanks for standing up to the thugs.

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The Alternate Nostril Breathing of Lady Macbeth : George Neumayr

By on September 16th, 2017

Hillary plays the victim in her campaign memoir, then rips the peasants for not treating her like a man.

Hillary’s campaign memoir, What Happened, is as awful as expected, serving as yet another cracked window on her phoniness. She remains the baby-boomer feminist fraud, still pouting over alleged sexism even as she hurls herself upon various fainting couches.

She writes about her defeat with the emotional intensity of a parent who lost a child — a chilling and neurotic proof of her clawing, bottomless and now forever thwarted political ambition.

She is a failed Lady Macbeth, but a Lady Macbeth who wants us to feel sorry for her, what with her chardonnay-chugging and alternate nostril breathing after the election. She writes: “If you’ve never done alternate nostril breathing, it’s worth a try.… It may sound silly, but it works for me. It wasn’t all yoga and breathing: I also drank my share of chardonnay.”

But in the course of acknowledging her post-election emotional tailspin, she gets in a curious dig at her husband and friends. She wants us to know that she is not as screwed up as they are. “I remember when Bill lost his reelection as Governor of Arkansas. He was so distraught at the outcome that I had to go to the hotel where the election night party was held to speak to his supporters on his behalf,” she writes. “For a good while afterward, he was so depressed that he practically couldn’t get off the ground. That’s not me. I keep going.”

About her friends, she writes that they “advised me on the power of Xanax and raved about their amazing therapists.… But that wasn’t for me. Never has been.”

See, she is still the strong one! It is true that Bill did moon about after his defeat in 1980. He would hang out in grocery stores, following people to their cars as he explained why they should give him another shot. But it is not clear why Hillary thinks that is more pathetic than her frantic closet-cleaning, taking to her bed on election night (while her crying supporters sat stupidly at the Javits Center waiting for her to appear), or any of the other attempts at “self-care” that she reports in the book.

Hillary, when not insisting upon her own claimed superiority, sounds less like Lady Macbeth than Madame Bovary. Hillary, Bovary-like, cops to a frenzied attempt to find pleasure and meaning in the void of her denied dream, in everything from movies, plays, and evening soaps to sentimental books to even religion. “I prayed a lot,” she writes. “I can almost see the cynics rolling their eyes.”

They should, especially after she likens her defeat to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. She ludicrously quotes a Methodist minister who told her, “You are experiencing a Friday. But Sunday is coming!”

The book is full of inadvertent humor. She pats herself on the back for the generosity that she showed the “4,400 members of my campaign staff” in the midst of her grief, such as when she re-gifted 1,200 red roses to them that a woman’s advocacy group had delivered to her Chappaqua mansion. It sounded less like a gift than more closet-cleaning.

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Terror in London . . . Again Jihad in the West has reached a new stage. By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on September 16th, 2017

The latest reporting indicates that 22 people were injured, but fortunately none killed, in this morning’s terrorist bombing in the London subway transit system.

An improvised explosive device detonated at the Parsons Green Tube station in West London shortly after 8 a.m. British time. According to Sky News, at least one witness reports seeing “a white builder’s bucket” and a “foiled carrier bag.” The bucket is said to have had “wires hanging from it and a strong smell of chemicals . . . a chemical smell more than a burning smell.”

It is the fifth terrorist attack this year in the United Kingdom.

Police are hunting for at least one suspect, who has not been identified. President Trump, who has been briefed, took to Twitter to rail about another attack “by a loser terrorist.” He added a comment that suggests British authorities were aware of the suspect(s) before the strike: “These are sick and demented people who were in the sights of Scotland Yard. Must be proactive!” It would be a mistake to read too much into that, though, at this premature stage. At the moment, we don’t know who did this, although strong suspicions of jihadism are certainly justified.

On that score, there are two points to consider.

First, it has been the fear of American and European counterterrorism officials that the routing of ISIS in Syria and Iraq would heighten the terrorist threat in Europe. Jihadists fleeing from their “caliphate” have been dispersing, and many are making their way back to the Western countries from whence they came. The problem, of course, is that these are quite motivated fighters who have received military training. Our own experience in the U.S. — much of it featured in evidence we presented in the terror trials of the Nineties — shows there is a great deal of prestige, in fundamentalist Islamic circles, attached to any Muslim who has fought in what the Blind Sheikh used to call “the fields of jihad”: Afghanistan, Bosnia, Syria, Iraq, and so on. So, these jihadists are not just competent when it comes to conducting attacks; they are also very effective inciters, recruiters, and fundraisers.

The second point combines frighteningly with the first. Jihad in the West has reached a new stage. For many years, terrorists aspired to major operations — spectacular strikes that required know-how, discipline, and coordination. We were able to say with confidence that if we focused on training — not just ideological fervor but whether the would-be militant had been to a jihadist camp — we would have a reasonably good handle on who posed a threat. This is why, for example, we amended immigration law after the 9/11 attacks to preclude from entry into the U.S. any alien suspected of receiving jihadist training.

Again, it’s too early to draw conclusions about today’s attack. But based on other recent attacks, we can say that it doesn’t require any training to, say, plow a car into a crowd of people.

Terrorist organizations like ISIS have encouraged sharia-supremacist Muslims to attack in place — i.e., where they live in the West — rather than come to Syria. We are thus seeing more of these ad hoc strikes that require little or no expertise to pull off. In the Nineties, we used to be ironically relieved that the jihadists always wanted to go for the big bang; 9/11-type attacks are horrific, but they are extremely tough to pull off, and there are usually opportunities (as there were with 9/11) to disrupt them. That’s why they so rarely succeed. We worried that someday it would dawn on these monsters that there is a great deal of low-hanging fruit out there (virtually indefensible targets, like subways and crowded streets) that would be easy to attack, almost no preparation or coordination required.

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Sarah Halimi’s killer suffered a bouffée délirante by Nidra Poller

By on September 16th, 2017

The long-awaited psychiatric evaluation of Sarah Halimi’s killer, Kobili Traoré, was revealed in the media on September 13th. Forensic psychiatrist Daniel Zagury concludes that Traoré committed the crime under the influence of an “acute bouffée délirante” that altered but did not abolish his discernment. This psychopathological state was aggravated, according to doctor Zagury, by the consumption of cannabis, a total of 15 cigarettes. The voluntary drug intake somehow balances out the potential irresponsibility of some sort of temporary insanity in proportions that a judge will be trusted to decide. It is not incompatible with a criminal trial and, according to some reports, Kobili Traoré has already been transferred from a mental facility to the Fresnes prison.

On the night of 4-5 April, Kobili Traoré, a 27 year-old of Malian origin, burst in on Malian neighbors in a state of agitation. The neighbors took refuge in one room of their apartment and called the police. Hearing Traoré reciting koranic verses, the police called for reinforcements. While they waited in the hallway, Traoré climbed over to the neighboring balcony, broke into the apartment of his Jewish neighbor Sarah Halimi, a retired physician who lived alone in the apartment upstairs from the Traore’s. Shouting allau akhbar and koranic imprecations, he bashed and battered his victim with relentless fury and then threw her to her death from the 3rd floor balcony. By then, a heavily armed commando had arrived. Too late. Traoré was considered unfit for interrogation, placed in a mental health facility, and finally charged with voluntary manslaughter and sequestration. The aggravating circumstances of antisemitism were not added to the charges. [http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/sarah-halimi-case-will-truth-lead-to-justice/]

A virtual media blackout of the horrific crime was followed by months of dim silence. And now we have a puzzling psychiatric evaluation that confirms the impression of a perverse cover up of a savage Islamic anti-Semitic torture/murder, a systematic refusal to confront the genocidal antisemitism that runs like a deep dark river in Arab-Muslim societies here in France, in Europe, in the countries of origin. How could armed policeman stand down as an enraged man was venting his fury on a defenseless woman? If the killer was possessed by an acute bouffée délirante, the police must have been paralyzed by a bouffée of delirious panic. They reportedly assumed that Traoré must be a terrorist… because he recited koranic verses. Therefore, it would be too dangerous to intervene before the arrival of commandos.

Why did it take more than five months to present this psychiatric evaluation that looks to the naked eye like a whitewash? One more whitewash in an endless series of evasions. Like pre-emptive jail breaks. It has nothing to do with Islam, the car rammer was mentally disturbed, the stabber was depressed by an impending divorce, the mass murderer at the wheel of the truck driving wasn’t even religious, the throat slitter had never read the koran.

And now the enraged Muslim that batters his Jewish neighbor was a victim of an acute bouffée délirante. My search for the English equivalent of this fearsome psychic state came up with some curious specifics (in italics):

“A French term for a culture-bound symptom complex described in West Africa and Haiti, characterised by an abrupt onset of agitated and aggressive behaviour, confusion and psychomotor excitement.” http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Bouffée+Delirante

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Did Susan Rice Spy on Trump Officials for Muslim Brotherhood? Daniel Greenfield

By on September 15th, 2017

After months of denials, the pretext for Susan Rice’s eavesdropping on Trump officials has finally been made public. It had been widely known that Obama’s former National Security Adviser had contrived to unmask the names of top Trump officials who had been spied on by the administration. And the same media that still treats Watergate as the Great American Scandal had claimed that there was nothing “improper” in an Obama loyalist eavesdropping on members of the opposition party.

Every time Obama Inc. was caught eavesdropping on opposition politicians, it presented its spin in a carefully packaged “scoop” to a major media outlet. This time was no different.

When Obama Inc. spied on members of Congress to protect its Iran nuke sellout, it packaged the story to the Wall Street Journal under the headline, “U.S. Spy Net on Israel Snares Congress”. The idea was that Obama Inc. was “legitimately” spying on Israel, that it just happened to intercept the conversations of some members of Congress and American Jews, and that the eavesdropping somehow meant that its victims, Jewish and non-Jewish, rather than its White House perpetrators, should be ashamed.

The White House had demanded the conversations between Prime Minister Netanyahu, members of Congress and American Jews because it “believed the intercepted information could be valuable to counter Mr. Netanyahu’s campaign.” This was domestic surveillance carried out under the same pretext as in the Soviet Union which had also accused its dissident targets of secretly serving foreign interests.

Obama and his minions had used the NSA to spy on Americans opposed to its policies. Including members of Congress. They did this by conflating their own political agenda with national security.

Since Obama’s spin was that the Iran Deal was good for national security, opponents of it were a “national security” threat.

And its fig leaf for domestic surveillance was that a “foreign leader” was involved.

Now get ready for a flashback.

Susan Rice’s excuse for unmasking the names of top Trump officials in the Obama eavesdropping effort was that they were meeting with the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates. The carefully packaged CNN story, which reeks of the Goebbelsian media manipulations of “Obama whisperer” Ben Rhodes, tries to clumsily tie the whole thing to the Russians. But for once it’s not about Russia. It’s about Islam.

The UAE has become best known for being the first regional Muslim oil state to turn against the Muslim Brotherhood and the entire Arab Spring enterprise. It helped mobilize opposition to the Qatari agenda. The ultimate outcome of that effort was that Egypt was stabilized under a non-Islamist president and the Islamist takeover in Libya is looking rather shaky. The Saudi coalition against Qatar, the sugar daddies of Hamas, Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood, has its origins in that effort.

When Obama Inc. spied on members of Congress before, it was to protect Iran. This time around, the gang that couldn’t spy straight was trying to protect the Muslim Brotherhood. The Iran Deal was never about stopping Iran’s nuclear program. It certainly does not do that. Nor was it ever meant to do it.

Instead the real goal of the Iran negotiations was a diplomatic arrangement with the Islamic terror state. The fruits of that arrangement can be seen from Beirut to Baghdad. They are written in blood and steel across Syria, Israel and Yemen. And that arrangement had to be protected at all costs.

Even if it meant spying on Americans. Even if it meant spying on members of Congress.

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Did Susan Rice Lie, Again? The former Obama administration national-security adviser doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. By David French

By on September 15th, 2017

Let’s begin with a brief flashback. On March 22, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes conducted a bizarre press conference on White House grounds. His claim? That Obama-administration officials had monitored members of the incoming Trump administration as part of routine surveillance of foreign officials.

The whole episode was strange enough that it ultimately led Nunes to recuse himself from the Russia probe. After all, he’d gone to White House grounds to “brief” the president on information he’d obtained from the White House. He did so without sharing that information with his committee and as part of a transparent effort to help the Trump administration muddle through one of its many self-imposed public firestorms. (In March, Trump had tweeted claims that Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower before the election.) In short, he did the wrong thing the wrong way.

But that didn’t mean that all of Nunes’s claims were wrong. He asserted that he’d seen evidence that Obama administration officials had “unmasked,” or disclosed in intelligence reports, the identities of Trump officials who met or communicated with representatives of foreign governments and that “none of this surveillance was related to Russia.” These were serious claims, and while they may not involve criminal behavior (“unmasking” isn’t a criminal offense), it would be highly improper — corrupt, even — to abuse America’s national-security resources for partisan political advantage.

Former national-security adviser Susan Rice was at the center of the storm, accused of making a vast number of unmasking requests. What was her response? On the very day of Nunes’s press conference she said, “I know nothing about this. I was surprised to see reports from Chairman Nunes on that count today.”

Here’s the video:

Over time, however, her story evolved. She later clarified that she was simply saying that she didn’t know “what reports Nunes was referring to.” In April she said she never did anything “untoward with respect to the intelligence” she received. So, what was the truth? Did she “know nothing” or did she do nothing “untoward”? Those aren’t the same statements, and the differences matter.

Let’s flash forward to yesterday. Lost amidst the news of the Trump “deal” with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer was this little scoop from CNN:

Former national security adviser Susan Rice privately told House investigators that she unmasked the identities of senior Trump officials to understand why the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates was in New York late last year, multiple sources told CNN.

Allegedly, the meeting happened before the UAE tried to “facilitate a back-channel” between Russia and Trump transition officials. The story continues:

The Obama administration felt misled by the United Arab Emirates, which had failed to mention that Zayed was coming to the United States even though it’s customary for foreign dignitaries to notify the US government about their travels, according to several sources familiar with the matter. Rice, who served as then-President Obama’s national security adviser in his second term, told the House Intelligence Committee last week that she requested the names of the Americans mentioned in the classified report be revealed internally, a practice officials in both parties say is common.

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Why Trump Is Right and the Experts Are Still Wrong about the Iran Deal Iran is technically in compliance with its weak terms, which tells us why the deal was a historic blunder. By Jonathan S. Tobin

By on September 15th, 2017

The experts all agree. They are very nervous about the Trump administration’s continued dithering about whether it will again certify Iran’s compliance in the nuclear deal. As the New York Times helpfully pointed out in an article about a joint letter signed by what we are told is a list of 80 of the world’s leading authorities on nuclear nonproliferation, the experts believe that Trump’s inclination to ditch the deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA) has nothing to do with “the merits” of the question.

Much of his national-security team reportedly seeks to persuade Trump to keep the deal, despite his publicly expressed belief that it is a mistake. But the letter from the experts should make him doubly suspicious of their arguments.

Among the many factors that led to Trump’s unexpected victory last November was a deep and abiding skepticism among many voters about the wisdom of experts. To his supporters, Trump, the ultimate non-expert on most policy issues, had the savvy to do the right thing even on topics to which neither he nor they had ever previously given much serious thought. While that cynicism is not always wise, the groupthink in the foreign-policy establishment and among nonproliferation professionals is proof that Trump’s instincts are not always wrong.

Like the International Atomic Energy Agency and the other five nations that signed the JCPOA, the 80 experts say that Iran has been complying with its terms. They worry that ditching the deal because of “unsupported contentions of Iranian cheating” would cancel out the deal’s main achievement, which is “reducing the risk” of Tehran’s getting a bomb. They insist that whatever complaints the U.S. might have about Iranian behavior since the deal went into effect are irrelevant because the whole point of the negotiation was to focus solely on the nuclear-proliferation issue and nothing else. They predict that a Trump decision to blow up the deal will only lead to Iran’s resuming nuclear activity and will make it impossible for the international community to do anything about it.

Trump should ignore their arguments and those inside the administration who are echoing them. It’s wise to have some skepticism about experts’ opinions; their consensus can have little to do with achieving the goals they’re tasked with accomplishing. But the problem is not only that the deal was a bad one. It’s also that plenty of experts place more value on diplomacy per se — getting a piece of paper signed and then defending its value — than on the conviction that diplomacy will stop Iran from getting a bomb.

The agencies that monitor the deal all agree that Iran has kept to its terms. But their certification of Iran’s compliance vindicates Obama’ critics, who warned that once in the deal was in place, the signatories’ desire to preserve it would lead them to ignore a host of small violations. Over the past three years, the IAEA and Washington have routinely ignored reports about a variety of problems, including obstruction of inspections, illegal attempts to purchase nuclear and missile technology, and exceeding the limits on uranium enrichment and production of heavy water.

Viewed in isolation, each violation is insufficient to justify threatening Iran with new sanctions or an end to the deal. So the signatories ignore or rationalize the infractions. In the negotiations that led to the deal, Obama and the secretary of state jettisoned their demand that Iran end its nuclear program and stop advanced nuclear research, and that it concede it had no right to enrich uranium, They always saw getting an agreement on any terms as more important than the details. The same applies to keeping it in place despite multiple violations.

That’s why the arms-control community wound up endorsing a deal that did not put an end to the Iranian threat; at best, it kicked the can down the road for a few years on proliferation.

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The Chuck and Nancy Amnesty

By on September 15th, 2017

President Trump had dinner Wednesday night with Chuck and Nancy, as he familiarly calls the Democratic leaders he apparently hopes will become his new governing partners.

Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi left the repast and promptly announced that they had reached a deal with the president over codifying DACA. According to the Democrats, they had agreed with the president to seek legislation that would provide amnesty for illegal immigrants once covered under DACA in exchange for unspecified border-security measures, but not funding for “the wall.” Trump denied there was actually a deal, but confirmed the basic structure of a prospective agreement. According to Trump, DACA will be reinstituted in exchange for “massive” and “extreme” new border security, but not funding for the wall.

Who knows what will ultimately come of this, but it’s not encouraging. Since announcing the end of DACA, Trump has signaled that merely writing its provisions in legislation would constitute a triumph. But the point of rescinding DACA was not just to enshrine it into law via constitutional means (which is certainly better than the alternative). The point was also to extract concessions from Democrats that would create a better immigration system and cushion the effect of the amnesty. Almost from the beginning, Trump has undermined his own leverage and made this less likely.

As we’ve argued repeatedly, a sensible deal isn’t hard to discern. The problem with any amnesty is that it serves as a magnet for new illegal immigrants, and its recipients could become the next link in chain migration if granted legal status or especially citizenship. Pairing an amnesty for so-called Dreamers with some combination of a mandatory E-Verify for new hires and portions of the RAISE Act that will reduce chain migration would directly address the negative consequences of codifying a version of DACA.

The legislation that Trump, Schumer, and Pelosi are talking about would likely do neither. Trump wouldn’t even get funding for his signature border wall. (The wall is largely symbolism, and a trade of a permanent amnesty for some one-time funding for the wall would be a bad deal.) The parameters of this agreement appear to be about what you would expect from a negotiation between Schumer and Pelosi on one hand and Trump on the other. The Democrats are opposed to any meaningful tightening of the immigration system — they want to go in the opposite direction — while Trump has been a restrictionist, although one not well-versed in the policy implications of that position, to put it mildly.

We hope that the White House realizes what a mistake this deal would be, and failing that, that the Republican congressional leadership, with a push from immigration hawks, puts the kibosh on it and demands something better. Whatever Trump might think, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi aren’t his friends, and certainly aren’t the friends of sound immigration policy.

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What’s the Matter with Germany?, Part II By Robert Curry

By on September 15th, 2017

In my recent article, “What’s the Matter with Germany?” I argued that under the leadership of Germany, “Europe is committing ‘suicide by Islam.’” Adolf Hitler imagined a Thousand-Year Reich, with Germany dominating Europe and the globe. Today, Germany’s rulers imagine a multicultural world, where Germany and other European nations no longer exist.https://amgreatness.com/2017/09/14/whats-matter-germany-part-ii/

This does not represent an about-face from Germany’s imperial tendencies. It is, rather, just a new expression of it. The Germans tried to destroy Europe twice in recent history. Is it so surprising that Germans are welcoming an invasion that is on track to accomplish what Germany failed to do?

It’s very strange. Western history began with the account by Herodotus of the Greeks’ heroic resistance to the invading Persians. Today, Germany is bullying Europe to yield to an ongoing Muslim invasion. The Germans are welcoming the invaders, and Europe is abandoning its 2,500 year project of defending itself from Eastern conquerors.

Though strange, this is understandable, if one first understands Germany. I believe most Americans assume Germany is a Western nation like any other. The narrative would go something like this: Hitler was an unfortunate and tragic anomaly. He was a spellbinder with fantastical rhetorical powers that played on Germany’s historical resentments, and during his time he actually did manage to “fundamentally transform” Germany, changing it into the Hitler nightmare. Since Hitler has exited the scene, however, and the ravages of the Cold War are in the rearview mirror, Germany has returned to being a more-or-less normal Western nation.

But if this version of Germany’s story is true, why is Germany again bullying Europe, this time to yield to the Muslim invasion?

In my previous article I wrote that the Germans emerged from the Enlightenment era as the counter-Enlightenment people. This is not to deny any of the intellectual achievements of the German people. German music during the Enlightenment era, the time of Bach and Mozart, reached a peak which may never be equalled. And Germany’s achievements in science, mathematics, and technology have been of the first order. But in philosophy and especially political philosophy, the definite break between Germany and the rest of the West cannot be denied. Instead of being a part of the ongoing Enlightenment concerning the natural and political rights of man—a project started in England and taken up by America (with much success) and by France (with mixed results)—Germany was the heartland of the rejection of these ideas.

Romanticism, the 19th-century intellectual movement that gave the era after the Enlightenment its name, may be understood in shorthand as a rejection of Enlightenment thinking. And it started in Germany. The German thinkers who opposed the Enlightenment project loomed over 19th and 20th centuries. Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche are perhaps the most influential of these thinkers.

As I have argued, politically, the Enlightenment project was all about rights. But German intellectuals would have none of it. Hegel rejected individual rights and exalted the state. Marx rejected private property and the free market. Nietzsche exalted the will to power.

Unfortunately, German professors read—and worse yet, revered—those German thinkers and taught that reverence to their students. No one understood better than F. A. Hayek how this played out. Hayek, who won the Nobel Prize in economics, was one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century. Here is what he wrote about the situation in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century:

For more than seventy years the German professors of political science, history, law, geography and philosophy eagerly imbued their disciples with a hysterical hatred of capitalism, and preached the war of “liberation” against the capitalistic West…At the turn of the century the immense majority of Germans were already radical supporters of socialism and aggressive nationalism. They were then already firmly committed to the principles of Naziism [before the term itself was invented].

German professors prepared the way for that charismatic leader who emerged after World War I to fill the role in German society made ready for him by the German intellectuals of the Romantic era.

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