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Things Worth Remembering: Winston Churchill’s Christmas Message to America Douglas Murray

By on December 23rd, 2024

https://www.thefp.com/p/douglas-murray-things-worth-remembering-winston-churchill-christmas-message-america

As we near Christmas, I am reminded of the wonderful, 393-word speech delivered by the inimitable Winston Churchill on Christmas Eve of 1941. He spoke from the South Portico of the White House, in the midst of war.

You may recall that I opened the second year of “Things Worth Remembering” with the eulogy given by Churchill on the occasion of his political rival Neville Chamberlain’s funeral, in November 1940.

I am returning to Churchill now because he’s simply the best English-speaking orator of the last century, and because his words and his sense of moral urgency feel especially necessary, as the multipronged war for Western civilization that we find ourselves in grinds on like an acephalous beast. There have been moments in this civilizational struggle—which extends from the Ukrainian forests to the tunnels of Gaza to the Christmas markets of Europe—when I have wondered whether we would prevail. If only, I’ve thought, we had our own Churchill to lead us.

The story behind Churchill’s Christmas Eve speech perfectly captures something essential about the man. Two days earlier, the British prime minister stepped off a plane at an airfield near Washington, D.C., where he was warmly greeted by the American president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. “I clasped his strong hand with comfort and pleasure,” Churchill later recalled.

It had been just over two weeks since Imperial Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor, leaving nearly 2,400 Americans dead. Within days, the United States, along with Britain, was officially at war with the Japanese and Nazi Germany.

Churchill’s visit to the United States was meant to be for strategizing: Should the Allies prioritize defeating Japan or Germany? Where should they focus their manpower? And so forth.

But the British prime minister was also keen on solidifying the alliance between the U.S. and Britain, and he obviously wanted to signal to the whole world—starting with Adolf Hitler—that the Western democracies were now united in their mission to crush the Axis.

There was, as always with Churchill, a subtle psychology at work—an awareness of the emotions and competing interests preying on those around him. He had a knack for harnessing those emotions and interests in a constructive way—one, in this case, that might save civilization.

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Hayek’s Nobel—50 Years Later The economic lessons Hayek taught us are as relevant today as they were 50 years ago. Peter Jacobsen

By on December 13th, 2024

https://fee.org/articles/hayeks-nobel-50-years-later/

Fifty years ago, Friedrich Hayek and Karl Gunnar Myrdal won the Nobel prize “for their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena.” Hayek’s Nobel is notable for several reasons, and each relates to the importance of intellectual humility.

First, his Nobel address—delivered 50 years ago today—was an exercise in humility, as highlighted by FEE’s own Larry Reed. Hayek even went so far as to argue that there really shouldn’t be a Nobel prize for economists due to the disproportionate intellectual authority the prize bestows.

Second, Hayek’s work, including much of the work he won his Nobel for, is based on recognizing the limits of the intelligentsia to plan society and, in particular, the economy.

To understand Hayek’s work, we must understand two key contributions of his mentor Ludwig von Mises. It’s no surprise that Hayek’s Nobel would be connected to Mises. Nobel-winner Paul Samuelson, who departs from the work of Hayek and Mises on many points, has previously argued that Mises himself would have won the Nobel had it been awarded earlier in history.

Economic Fluctuations

First, Hayek’s prize was linked to his work on money and economic fluctuations. There’s no doubt that this work is placed under the umbrella of Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT). ABCT is by no means an invention of Hayek. Rather, he developed the theory which has its foundations at the beginning of the Austrian school with elements in Carl Menger, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, and finally Mises.

Hayek, in particular, focused on how capital goods transform over the various stages of production. As capital goods advance in time toward the customer, they fundamentally change in kind. So, when a central government monetary policy (such as an increase in the supply of money) causes an increase in long-term loans, these-long term loans change the structure of capital goods in society.

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Kristallnacht November 9, 1938

By on November 9th, 2024

On November 9–10, 1938, Nazi leaders unleashed a series of pogroms against the Jewish population in Germany.  This event came to be called Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass) because of the shattered glass that littered the streets after the vandalism and destruction of Jewish-owned businesses, synagogues, and homes. 

During the pogrom, some 30,000 Jewish males were rounded up and taken to concentration camps. This was the first time Nazi officials made massive arrests of Jews specifically because they were Jews, without any further cause for arrest.

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The Victory That Saved Western Civilization Commemorating the anniversary of the battle of Tours. by Mark Tapson

By on October 15th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-victory-that-saved-western-civilization-2/

We have just passed the anniversary of an epic event that is not widely known in America except among history buffs, but which nonetheless dramatically shaped the future of the Western world, and which may still hold inspiration for us in the West today.

After the death of the Muslim prophet Muhammad in 632, Islam spread like a bloody tide throughout the Arabian peninsula, north to the Caspian Sea and east through Persia and beyond, westward through Egypt and across North Africa all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. From there it crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and consumed virtually all of the Iberian peninsula, or al-Andalus as the Saracens called it. In a mere one hundred years, the warlord Muhammad’s imperialist legacy was an empire larger than Rome’s had ever been.

By 732 that fallen Roman empire had devolved into a patchwork of warring barbarian tribes across what is now continental Europe. When Abd-al-Rahman al-Ghafiki, the governor of al-Andalus, crossed the Pyrenees with the world’s most successful fighting force and began pillaging through the south of what would become France toward Paris, there was no nation, no central power, no professional army capable of stopping them.

No army except one – led by the Frankish duke Charles, the eventual grandfather of Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne. His infantrymen, as historian Victor Davis Hanson puts it in a fascinating chapter of Carnage and Culture, were “hardened veterans of nearly twenty years of constant combat against a variety of Frankish, German, and Islamic enemies.” Hanson writes that the Roman legions had crumbled “because of the dearth of free citizens who were willing to fight for their own freedom and the values of their civilization.” But the seasoned warrior Charles had gathered spirited, free fighters under his command who were willing to defend their Christian society, and he led them to intercept the marauding infidels leaving a ravaged trail toward the ultimate prize, Paris.

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Niall Ferguson: My Journey From a Jerusalem of Ghosts to the Living Jerusalem To make sense of this bloody year, I had to go back to Lithuania. By Niall Ferguson

By on October 8th, 2024

https://www.thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-my-journey-between-jerusalems?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

To make proper sense of the bloody events of the past 12 months in the Middle East, I had to go to Vilnius. 

That may strike you as bizarre, as Vilnius is the capital of Lithuania and roughly 1,600 miles from Tel Aviv. But Vilnius was once “the Jerusalem of the North”—that’s what Napoleon called it when he passed through in 1812.

It is a pretty city today, with all kinds of charming eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings, many of them creatively renovated since Lithuania regained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Yet Vilnius is a city of ghosts. That so much of its baroque architecture survived the brutalities of first Soviet, then Nazi, then Soviet occupation is remarkable. The Jewish inhabitants were not so fortunate.

To understand Israel today, you must first understand what befell the Jews of Europe. It is the story of what can happen to a people without a nation state. It is the story of a people without an army of their own. And it is a story of what could happen again if the enemies of the Jewish people are given a chance, once more, to fulfill their fantasies.

What today is Vilnius was once Vilna, a part of the Pale of Settlement in the Tsarist empire, and then, between 1918 and 1939, Wilno in the Republic of Poland. The condition of much of the Jewish population was impoverished and insecure. A British member of Parliament who toured the Pale of Settlement in 1903 was appalled by Vilna’s “pestilent” cellars. 

Yet the city was also the most important Jewish cultural hub in Eastern Europe—a center of Jewish learning and culture from the 1560s until the 1930s. The greatest Talmudic scholar of the eighteenth century, Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, was known as the Vilna Gaon. The man who pioneered the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, studied in Vilna. That cultural vitality did not abate after the city’s incorporation into the Polish republic. YIVO, the center for Jewish studies that is now based in New York, was originally founded in Wilno in 1925.

In 1939, when Poland was partitioned between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, the city was handed over to Lithuania. This seemed providential. For Jews fleeing Nazi and Soviet rule, Vilnius looked like a sanctuary. Indeed, many of the city’s Jews celebrated the end of Polish rule. 

But the celebration was premature. In June 1940, along with neighboring Latvia and Estonia, Lithuania was annexed by the Soviet Union. A year later, the regime changed once again—this time fatally. 

With the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the fate of the Jews of Vilnius was sealed. Between 190,000 and 196,000—more than 90 percent—of Lithuanian Jews were murdered: a higher share than in any other country the Nazis occupied. Their destruction was swift: Most Lithuanian Jews perished before the end of 1941. 

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End of Empire: Careful What You Wish For Mervyn Bendle

By on October 1st, 2024

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/civilisation/the-end-of-empire-careful-what-you-wish-for/

“The Future So ended civilization in the once thriving Roman province of Britainnia. The lessons for Australia seem obvious: the collapse of an Imperial order brings only economic and political chaos, death and destruction, and regression into an era of civilizational darkness from which it takes many centuries to emerge, if ever. Perhaps those shrill ideologues, academics, teachers, media propagandists, and other useful idiots demanding the end of American Imperialism, and an ill-defined ‘End of Empire’ should do some historical research or, at the very least, should be challenged to justify their nihilistic demands. The global reality is clear, we live in an increasingly dangerous and uncivilized world where the sole guarantor of our liberal democratic system and way of life is the United States: Make America Great Again!”

The End of Empire For many years it has been de rigueur on the Left to denounce ‘American Imperialism’ and demand the end of ‘the American Empire’, usually in favour of an ill-defined ‘socialist alternative’, or some global socialist system (modelled on the European Union, or the United Nations, or Communist China) or, at an even more extreme level, a global Islamist theocracy (modelled on Iran or the Taliban). Such demands are quite shrill in Australia and are emitted with monotonous regularity by the Greens, the Socialist Left of the ALP, Islamist organizations, the various Trotskyite groupuscules, most academics and teachers in the humanities and social sciences, and much of the media and the arts. But what has been the historical experience when empires die? And, specifically, how has such an event impacted on nations, such as Australia, that exist on the periphery of an empire?

Case Study: Roman Britain  The fate of Roman Britain provides a case study of this traumatic experience. Indeed, it provides a particularly vivid example of what happens on ‘the edge of empire’ when that empire dies, and it is not at all a re-assuring picture. The Fall of Rome and the sacking of the eternal city had ramifications not only for the Italian Peninsula but for all the Roman provinces, which were closely integrated into the Imperial system; as the centre fell apart they found themselves exposed to unprecedented internal stresses and external threats, which they were ultimately unable to resist, plunging into the Dark Ages from which it took a millennium to emerge.

Britannia Perched in the Great Ocean, on the farthest margins of the Empire, by the beginning of the 5th Century, the island province of Britannia had enjoyed some 300 years of the Pax Romana. In that time, its settled and cultivated area had expanded inland from the southern and Channel coasts across fertile and productive fields to the frontiers of Scotland and Wales, beyond which lived ancient tribal societies with little interest in being integrated into an Imperial system, the immensity and complexity of which they couldn’t even begin to comprehend.

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Hannah Arendt and the Evil of Anti-Semitism Mervyn Bendle

By on August 23rd, 2024

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2024/05/hannah-arendt-and-the-evil-of-anti-semitism/

Incredible as it may seem, it is now no longer possible to ignore the growing parallels between the present onslaught of anti-Semitism in Australia and elsewhere in the West, and the situation of the Jewish people in Germany and Europe during the inter-war years, culminating in the Holocaust and the attempted extermination of the Jewish race. Above all, there should be no doubt that the well-organised coalition of Progressivist and Islamist forces wishes the greatest possible harm upon not only Israel but the Jewish diaspora as a whole.

This danger is especially acute in a multicultural society like Australia which has imported entrenched anti-Semitism, and where key sections of the political elite and civil society, including academia, the education system, the media and the arts have been captured by these forces, while federal and state governments are seeking to withdraw or render incapable all relevant levels of protection for Australian Jews. This deliberate anti-Semitic policy has already been implemented by the New South Wales and Victorian police forces in their refusal (presumably under political instruction) to apply the laws relating to hate-speech and anti-Semitic demonstrations, while the Australian Human Rights Commission has similarly remained deliberately inactive in the face of clear violations of human rights suffered by our Jewish citizens.

It is possible to illustrate the great dangers, especially of complacency and disbelief, that exist by focusing on the experience of Hannah Arendt, one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, as she was brought from her comfortable and beloved “life of the mind” to confront the dark malignancy that came to convulse Europe during her lifetime, and that led her to write two of the most important books of the century, exploring these issues. The principal message here is that nothing can be taken for granted, there is no room for complacency, the horrific times could well return, and the most vigorous resistance to the age-old evil of anti-Semitism must be mounted.

* * *

On May 22, 1960, the Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, rose to his feet in the Israeli parliament to announce that ex-SS Lt. Col. Adolf Eichmann had been captured and would stand trial facing fifteen charges including crimes against humanity and crimes against the Jewish people for his part in the murder of six million Jews. Eichmann had escaped the Allied authorities after the Second World War and had joined many other Nazi fugitives in South America. Eventually, he was tracked down to a suburb of Buenos Aires by Mossad agents after he became careless and began to boast. (“I will jump into my grave laughing, because the fact that I have the death of 5 million Jews on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction.”) He was kidnapped, sedated, disguised, taken to the airport, placed on an airliner and spirited away to Israel. His trial (below) ran from April 11 to August 15, 1961.

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Pogrom at Kibbutz Be’eri: Jews Under Fire by Nils A. Haug

By on August 21st, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20885/pogrom-at-kibbutz-beeri

“As word came that murderous hordes were approaching, the Jews attempted to flee. Those who could not, barricaded themselves indoors and prayed for a miracle.”

This moving narrative describes not the shocking events of October 7, 2023, at Kibbutz Be’eri and other communities in Israel, but the massacre of eastern European Jews nearly 400 years earlier by Cossacks during the 1648 Khmelnitsky pogroms, in what is now Ukraine.

Although Jewish settlements in the greater Kievan Rus region, Ukraine and Crimea included, can be traced to the 8th -10th centuries, a record of pogroms took some time to emerge. Not limited to the Rus region, pogroms were widespread in middle ages Europe as a whole. In the Rhineland area, the First Crusade of 1096 led to mass slaughter of Jews who had settled there, and the same later in Palestine when the Crusaders arrived. In England, the York pogrom of 1190 resulted in the expulsion of Jews from the land for nearly 400 years.

The long and woeful history of eastern European pogroms: the massacre of innocent, peace-loving Jews in their small villages, their shtetls, commenced about a thousand years ago and continues today. Out of these pogroms came the words of Rabbeinu Gershom, who in the 10th century wrote in his work, Zechor Brit Avraham (Recall the Covenant of Abraham):

“Wounds, bruises, and fresh blows
are inflicted on the daughter of Israel
She is pained and embittered in a foreign land
hunted like a bird from Mt. Moriah.”

The year 1391 witnessed the infamous Spanish pogrom in which Sephardic Jewish communities were destroyed, and those who refused to convert to Catholicism were murdered. By 1492, the date of final expulsion, there were few, if any, openly practising Jews left in Spain.

Nearly 400 years later, in 1881, a continuous four-year pogrom occurred in southern Russia, when thousands of shtetls with their Jewish occupants were eliminated. With numerous pogroms in between, some 40 years thereafter, between the years of 1918 and 1920, major pogroms were instigated throughout Ukraine, in which more than 250,000 Jews were murdered. The mass migration of Ashkenazi Jews from Ukraine and Russia to America can be traced to those events.

Only one day after Israel’s declaration of Independence in 1948, “murderous hordes,” like the Cossacks of before, once again sought to purge Jews in the region through an existential attack by five Arab armies. This time was different, however: the Jews had weapons and successfully fought back against the intended massacre.

In 2021 at the city of Lod, Israel, an intended pogrom of “violence and terror” by contemporary “murderous hordes” was attempted, but fortunately with limited success. In a repeat of history, and despite relocation to their ancestral homeland of Israel, Jews were forced once again to “barricade themselves in their homes in fear of the rampaging mobs while others chose to flee the city until calm was restored.” Still, this was not yet the Be’eri pogrom of 2023.

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Explaining the Greatness of the Founders By Jack Butler

By on July 5th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/explaining-the-greatness-of-the-founders/

Founding-era historian Gordon Wood identifies some important sources of the Founders’ genius.

EXCERPT:

Through their noble yet accessible commitments, the Founders not only distinguished themselves from their predecessors and English contemporaries. They also provided a template, whatever its imperfections, that stands out to us today. It is a template of which many — most — modern leaders fall short. We are fortunate, then, that the Founders possessed sufficient virtue to have “accomplished a revolution which has no parallel in the annals of human society.”

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Have you ever wondered what happened to the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence? Charlotte Baker

By on July 5th, 2024

Five signers were captured by the British as traitors, and tortured before they died. 

Twelve had their homes ransacked and burned. 

Two lost their sons serving in the Revolutionary Army; another had two sons captured.

 Nine of the 56 fought and died from wounds or hardships of the Revolutionary War. 

They signed and they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. 

What kind of men were they? 

Twenty-four were lawyers and jurists.

Eleven were merchants. 

Nine were farmers and large plantation owners; men of means, well educated. 

But they signed the Declaration of Independence knowing full well that the penalty would be death if they were captured. 

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