RUTHFULLY YOURS

I am grateful to R.R. Reno, Walter Russell Mead, and Peter Berkowitz for their careful comments on my essay, “Nationalism and the Future of Western Freedom.” Here I offer some thoughts relating to their most salient points. http://mosaicmagazine.com/response/2016/09/in-defense-of-our-national-and-religious-traditions/

The fundamental question in political philosophy is the choice between an order of independent national states and one seeking to bring all nations under a single international regime. These are perhaps not the only options—the biblical book of Judges, for example, examines the possibility of a life without any central government at all, “each doing what is right in his own eyes.” But if we accept the biblical conclusion that, in large numbers, men cannot live without a government to rule them, then a choice must be made: either free nations or empire.

In his response to my essay, Walter Russell Mead emphasizes that neither order can be the answer to the human condition. “Both have important capacities. Both are subject to terrible temptations,” he writes. “The real task of politics and statecraft is to determine what—in a particular situation, in a particular circumstance, at a particular time—is the right blend.”

I agree with Mead that real-world circumstances are messy things, and that what may be desirable as a matter of general principle can prove ruinous in practice. For instance, one need only read Michael Doran’s excellent new book, Ike’s Gamble, for a detailed indictment of President Eisenhower’s misguided support for Arab nationalism and self-determination in the Middle East. This was a policy that helped to demolish the British empire and end Winston Churchill’s career, only to give rise to the pan-Arab dictatorship of Gamal Abdel Nasser—who repaid America’s kindness by taking Egypt into the Soviet imperial orbit. Examples of this sort make it clear that, in practice, a blind support of national self-determination against empire may be self-defeating.

This having been said, however, I cannot accept Mead’s conclusion that since both nationalism and empire have their flaws, we have no choice but to strike an ad-hoc balance between them. Monarchical and republican forms of government each have their characteristic flaws as well; nevertheless, we recognize that republican government is preferable in principle, and believe this remains the case even if circumstances force us to compromise and accept one-man rule in a given time and place.

Similarly, we must choose whether it is better to live in a world in which power is distributed among many different, competing nations than in one in which power is concentrated in the hands of a single international regime. There should be no doubt as to which better serves the cause of human freedom, which is truly possible only where power is distributed so that persons encumbered or persecuted under one government may seek relief and support from another. Nor is there any doubt that such an order of national states is as difficult to maintain internationally as is republican government domestically. Like republican government, it too must be vigilantly and constantly defended or else it will slip from our grasp.

On this point, I believe R. R. Reno and Peter Berkowitz are largely in agreement with me, even as each also raises important issues concerning the particulars of my case.

Berkowitz, for his part, questions my emphasis on the Protestant character of the order of national states, and my grounding of this order in an intellectual tradition built upon the teachings of the Hebrew Bible (or “Old Testament”). Without denying the biblical basis of modern nationalism, Berkowitz fears that for contemporary men and women the Bible will be controversial, lacking in authority, and theoretically insufficient to the task of defending the principles of a free national state. Better, he writes, to build a broad-tent conservative coalition around the liberal tradition descended from such modern philosophers as John Locke.

Before turning to questions of tactics, it is necessary to ask whether such a liberal interpretation of history accords with what actually happened The truth is that the modern world was overwhelmingly a construct of Protestant Christianity (albeit with important contributions, as Reno points out, from medieval Catholicism). “The American Constitution has many intellectual fathers,” Irving Kristol wrote, “but only one spiritual mother. That mother is Protestant religion. . . . The [American] Revolution . . . had been conceived out of the wedding of the Protestant ethos with American circumstances.”

Why should Kristol, a Jew, dwell on this point? Why not simply say that while Western freedoms were originally of Protestant and biblical provenance, the liberties we enjoy today have long since been detached from those parochial origins? One reason to remain alert to the Protestant character of modern freedom is this: for 400 years, the Western institution of the national state and many of its familiar rights and liberties flourished principally and reliably in Protestant nations: Britain, the Netherlands, the United States, and elsewhere. By contrast, non-Protestant countries like Mexico and Nigeria that attempted to import versions of the American constitution failed miserably.

The Sunday New York Times for September 18 carried a story by Eric Lichtblau about a “study” by “researchers” at the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at the San Bernardino campus of California State University, purporting to show that “hate crimes against US Muslims are not just “on the rise” but have “soared to their highest levels since the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.” While the FBI’s hate-crime statistics are not going to be released until November, data from this center, which is compiled from police reports, suggest that “hate crimes” against Muslims have risen 78% in one year. Some “scholars” of the subject believe that the anti-Muslim animus cannot be linked to the attacks all over the place, in Europe and America, by Muslim terrorists, nor to the attacks carried out in the Middle East – in Syria, Iraq, and Libya – by members of the Islamic State, nor to the aggressive, often criminal, behavior, of so many Muslim migrants in Europe, with the constant stream of news about gang rapes, mob violence, property crimes large and small. No, it’s all the fault of some remarks of Donald Trump about the need to keep out, or at least vet more thoroughly, Muslim migrants. It’s not what Muslims do, it’s not what anyone can read in the Qur’an and Hadith, it’s what people like Trump say that supposedly explains the rise in these “hate crimes” against Muslims.

The Times article never mentions the scandal surrounding reports of “hate crimes” against Muslims, which is that more than a few such reports have later turned out to be false. And even were we to accept at face value every one of those claimed to be an anti-Muslim “hate crime,” for 2015 it amounts to 260, that is, five a week, less than one a day, in a country with 325 million people. Does this really constitute a “soaring” rate? And the evidence suggests that we have a right to be doubtful about some of those counted as “hate crimes.”

Here are a few examples: a fire supposedly set at a Texas Islamic Center in February 2015 turned out to have been set near the mosque, by a homeless man, Quba Ferguson, just trying to keep warm. In New Jersey, a Muslim man, Kashif Parvaiz, exploited the willingness of people to believe that there is murderous and rampant Islamophobia, claiming that an anti-Muslim killer had shot his wife in front of their son, screaming “terrorist” as he did so. It turned out that the man’s mistress was the killer, put up to it by him so he could rid himself of his wife and marry her. Nothing “anti-Islamic” about it.

Qur’ans were burned at an Islamic Center, and the Center’s imam, calling for restrictions on “free speech” (meaning anti-Islam speech), was joined by the media, all in a frenzied state about this supposed “hate crime.” Eventually it turned out that the book-burner was one Ali Hassan Al-Assadi, a Muslim angry with people at the local mosques, who said he burned the Qur’ans in retribution.

Want more? There’s the University of Texas Muslimah who claimed that “a gunman followed her to the campus and threatened her.” She finally admitted to making up the whole story.

Or yet another story of mosque vandalism, this time in Fresno where, after CAIR went wild with claims of yet another “hate crimes,” it turned out to have been prompted by a private grievance by one Asiuf Mohammad Khan against a Muslim woman and her family.

Google away, and you’ll find many more examples of crimes first reported as anti-Muslim “hate crimes” that turn out to have been the work of Muslims, or of non-Muslims whose motive had nothing to do with Islam.

And sometimes the original false story of a “hate crime” refuses to die, and for many becomes the accepted version of what happened, even if the investigators long ago concluded otherwise.

During the last days of the Ancien Régime, French Queen Marie Antoinette frolicked in a fake rural village not far from the Versailles Palace—the Hameau de la Reine (“the Queen’s hamlet”). “Peasant” farmers and herdsmen were imported to interact, albeit carefully, with the royal retinue in an idyllic amusement park. The Queen would sometimes dress up as a milkmaid and with her royal train do a few chores on the “farm” to emulate the romanticized masses, but in safe, apartheid seclusion from them.

The French Revolution was already on the horizon and true peasants were shortly to march on Versailles, but the Queen had no desire to visit the real French countryside to learn of the crushing poverty of those who actually milked cows and herded sheep for a living. It is hard to know what motivated the queen to visit the Hameau—was it simply to relax in her own convenient and sanitized Arcadia, or was it some sort of pathetic attempt to better understand the daily lives of the increasing restive French masses?

The American coastal royalty does not build fake farms outside of its estates. But these elites, too, can grow just as bored with their privileged lives as Marie Antoinette did. Instead of hanging out with milk maids in ornamental villages, our progressive elites, at the same safe distance from the peasantry, prefer to show their solidarity with the dispossessed through angry rhetoric.

Take the case of Colin Kaepernick, the back-up quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers who makes $19 million a year (or about $20,000 per minute of regular season play). He has been cited by National Football League officials in the past for his use of the N-word, yet he refuses to stand for the pregame singing of the national anthem because he believes that his country is racist and does not warrant his respect. His stunt gained a lot of publicity and he now sees himself as a man of the revolutionary barricades. A number of other NFL athletes, as well as those in other sports, have likewise refused to stand for the national anthem to express solidarity with what they see as modern versions of the oppressed peasantry. But Kaepernick and his peers make more in one month than many Americans make in an entire lifetime. Still, for these members of the twenty-first-century Versailles crowd, the easiest way of understanding the lives of the underclass is expressing empathy for them for no more than a minute or two.

Lately, the entire Clinton clan has created a sort of Hameau de la Reine of the mind. Chelsea Clinton, for example, is married to hedge-fund operator Marc Mezvinsky (whose suspect Greek fund just went broke), and she once made over $600,000 for her part-time job as an NBC correspondent. She serves in a prominent role and is on the board of the non-profit billion-dollar Clinton Foundation, which has been cited for donating an inordinately small amount of its annual budget (often less than 15 percent) to charity work, while providing free jet travel for the Clinton family and offering sinecures for Clinton political operatives in between various Clinton campaigns. Explaining why she works at the Clinton Foundation and for other non-profits, Chelsea confessed, in Marie Antoinette style, that “I was curious if I could care about [money] on some fundamental level, and I couldn’t.” She cared enough, though, to purchase a $10.5 million Manhattan apartment not long ago rather than, say, rent a flat in the Bronx.

When you chance on a book by a former NATO chief, your eyes glaze over. Please, not another “Whither NATO?” or a compendium of boilerplate, stitched together by a ghostwriter. Yet crack open “The Will to Lead” by Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who also served as Denmark’s prime minister for eight years, and the glaze will vanish.

This book reads like a letter to an American friend, written by a “European classical liberal who has always counted on American leadership.” On the cusp of a new administration, this European doesn’t pine for yet another pledge of American allegiance. Instead he exhorts the U.S. “not to abandon its vital role as champion of freedom and guarantor of the global order.”

He sees the “global village” burning while its inhabitants bicker. So “we need a policeman to restore order; we need a fireman to put out the fire; we need a mayor, smart and sensible, to lead the rebuilding.” That sums up the role the U.S. ditched after World War I—and brilliantly reclaimed after World War II.

Why the alarm? Because, as Mr. Rasmussen writes, neo-isolationism, economic as well as strategic, is on a roll on both sides of the ocean. TTIP, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, is on the way to the morgue, as may be TPP, the Pacific version. Under Barack Obama, the U.S. has pulled out of Iraq while downscaling in Afghanistan. He has turned away from old allies in the Middle East, working hard to secure a nuclear deal with the theocrats of Iran. He has given the Russians an all but free ride in Ukraine and in Syria.

When Mr. Obama trumpeted the “audacity of hope,” he forsook the first rule of statecraft: It is better (and cheaper) to man the lines than to return. Being there deters; pulling out suggests indifference, if not an invitation to rivals. “Leading from behind” may work with grazing sheep. It does not in wolf country.CONTINUE AT SITE

Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday faulted the Russian government for continued violence in Syria and for the accompanying collapse of a diplomatic process aimed at eventually solving the more than five-year-long civil war.

“The cause of what is happening is Assad and Russia wanting to simply try to pursue a military victory,” Mr. Kerry told reporters during a trip to Cartagena, Colombia, referring to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The Syrian regime, supported by Russia, on Monday pressed ahead in eastern Aleppo with an offensive that has killed hundreds and come under fierce criticism from the U.S. and other world powers.

Mr. Kerry, despite growing frustration, said he would continue to try to repair a cease-fire deal with Russia that took effect Sept. 12 and collapsed about a week later.

“It would be diplomatic malpractice” not to pursue talks, Mr. Kerry said.

The chief U.S. diplomat said Russia and Mr. Assad “seem intent on taking Aleppo and destroying it in the process,” which he said doesn’t create good faith toward a negotiation process.

“We will have to see whether or not anything can develop in the next days that indicates a different approach from the Russians and from the regime,” Mr. Kerry said.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday that Russia is concerned that “terrorists” are using the truce to regroup, replenish their arsenals and prepare for more attacks. Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem said the cease-fire “is not dead yet.”

Meanwhile, the Pentagon made note of an uptick in violence in and around Aleppo, as well as in Hama and east of Damascus.

“We have unfortunately seen only an increase in hostilities in recent days,” said Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman. CONTINUE AT SITE

http://www.thepostemail.com/2015/12/11/who-is-donald-trump/ by Don Fredrick, ©2015, blogging at The Complete Obama Timeline Donald Trump’s campaign slogan is “Make America great again!” (Dec. 11, 2015) — The better question may be, “What is Donald Trump?” The answer: A giant middle finger from average Americans to the political and media establishment. Some Trump supporters are like the 60s […]

It was hard to resist the captivating premise of “Designated Survivor,” in which Kiefer Sutherland plays Tom Kirkman, a cabinet member of relatively modest status who finds himself head of the nation after a bomb attack on the Capitol during the State of the Union that kills the president and virtually every other significant member of the government. Among those still alive, there is powerful resistance to a colorless and inexperienced nobody like Kirkman in the role of president. But it’s clear that this Clark Kent will soon be soaring aloft, defiant in his own mild way—he’s determined to lead the country.

Designated Survivor

Wednesdays, 10 p.m., ABC

The problem comes in the second episode, along with a suddenly increased capacity to resist everything about “Designated Survivor.” Here we come up against the show’s message, or more precisely its gross political tendentiousness: its vision of a vicious American nation, in the aftermath of the attack, hunting down its Muslim citizens; its pictures of police racing around Dearborn, Mich., dragging Muslims out of their homes, beating a teenager to death, all at the behest of the Michigan governor.

Not surprisingly, President Kirkman stands firmly against this brown-shirt brutality, a product of fevered writerly imaginations particularly loathsome to behold given the facts of history—in particular the actual terror attacks of 9/11, after which, through all their fear and rage, Americans comported themselves with the utmost dignity.

It’s now probably irrelevant to note that for all his splendid talents, Mr. Sutherland may not have been the best choice for the role of a virtuous milquetoast concealing a heart of steel—the milquetoast part dominates even when the steel is flashed. Something inside may be alerting him to the nature of this enterprise—possibly the Jack Bauer in him.

In the summer of 2013, Iran was sliding into geopolitical, diplomatic, and economic chaos. The Iranian economy was within a few months of a downward spiral that Tehran had no good options for halting. A binding United Nations Security Council resolution had ordered Iran to halt all uranium, plutonium, and ballistic-missile work, and to disclose the full scope of its previous nuclear cheating, or face increasing isolation.https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/lets-make-a-bad-deal/

The Iran Wars

By Jay Solomon view book

Then the Obama administration led the P5+ 1 powers in launching negotiations with Iran. In exchange for sitting down and talking, the Iranians would get hundreds of millions of dollars monthly, stabilizing their economy. Eventually U.S. diplomats offered Iran a deal that legalized full-blown uranium, plutonium, and ballistic-missile work on a timeline—with international sponsorship for Iranian work in the meantime—and did not force the country to disclose its previous nuclear cheating.

The deal also immediately released roughly a hundred billion dollars to Iran, shredded the international sanctions regime, would have American officials traveling to drum up business for Iran, removed restrictions on a range of Iranian terrorists, and allowed Iran to keep spinning thousands of centrifuges throughout the deal—and then, to sell all of that, the president and his allies said that American diplomats did the best anyone could have.

In his essential new book, The Iran Wars, Wall Street Journal chief foreign-policy correspondent Jay Solomon chronicles the changing nature of the American approach to Iran following 9/11. As he makes clear, beginning in 2006, officials from the Treasury Department had been traveling around the world systematically building pressure on Iran because of its nuclear program. American officials occasionally cajoled, but just as often they unapologetically deployed American economic power against reluctant foreign entities: businesses, banks, and countries were told they had to choose between having access to the U.S. financial system or doing business with Iran.

Top American officials devoted careers to traveling the globe personally delivering warnings, and then having to back them up. Banks who tested American resolve found themselves facing billions of dollars of fines. So did nations: India faced financial chaos when the U.S. made good on threats to cut off sanctions-busting institutions. There were outcries in almost every case, but U.S. officials used American power and Iran’s toxic reputation—this was the era of Iran’s Holocaust-envying President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad—to systematically isolate Iran.

Solomon matter-of-factly describes Barack Obama as obsessed with changing the U.S. position toward Iran, and willing to subordinate much of American foreign policy in service of that goal. Obama started his administration sending secret letters to the head of state, the Ayatollah Khamenei, which recognized the prerogatives of the “Islamic republic” and foreswore regime change. He broadly cut funding to anti-regime groups and specifically abandoned Iranian moderates during the early days of the Green Revolution in 2009, after the regime fixed an election. When nuclear talks seemed to be stumbling, he sent another letter to Khamenei effectively offering Syria as within Iran’s sphere of influence.

Walter Ze’ev Laqueur is an American historian and political commentator. He was born in Poland in 1929. He is author of may outstanding and prescient books…rsk

For many Europeans of my generation—those who came of age before World War II—Romain Rolland (1866-1944) was not only the most important writer of our time but a beacon of light in a very dark world. Novelist, essayist, dramatist, art historian, humanist, pacifist, idealist without compare, he was our great guide in the battle against philistine obscurantism on the one hand, creeping barbarity on the other.http://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2016/09/romain-rolland-beacon-of-light-or-apologist-for-evil/

Were we right about him? Since his name is now all but unknown, it would be helpful to start with the bare facts.

Born in a small town in Burgundy, France, Rolland was early on recognized as a budding young intellectual star. After attending the elite Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, he became a teacher and lecturer in the history of art and music. In those days, he seems not to have had much interest in politics; throughout the furor over the Dreyfus affair, the great political battleground of his thirties, he appeared to favor neither side.

The same irenic (or perhaps non-committal) temperament informs Jean-Christophe, the huge ten-volume novel that made him famous. Appearing in installments from 1904 to 1912, it tells the cradle-to-grave story of a young German composer who makes his way to Paris, what he experienced there—especially his burgeoning friendship with a young Frenchman—and how these experiences influenced him and shaped his life and ideas. For that novel, and for his writings at the outbreak of World War I urging Germany and France to resolve their differences through a shared devotion to the lofty goals of truth and humanity, he was awarded the 1915 Nobel Prize in Literature. Fittingly, he passed along the prize money to the Red Cross in Geneva. Later on he wrote a series of what would become known as “heroic biographies”; among the passionately admired figures profiled in these books were Beethoven, Michelangelo, Tolstoy, and Gandhi.

It was Rolland’s stand in the Great War, and specifically his stirring denunciations of the senseless mass murder that sustained it, that made him so influential at the time, and even more so in later years when that conflict came to be seen as the root from which sprang the subsequent scourges of fascism, Communism, and World War II. In the 1930s, he became the leading intellectual supporter of the anti-fascist cause in Europe.

And here things began to become more complicated. An incurable romantic, Rolland was a fervent admirer of German culture, and the most eminent interpreter of Germany in France. After 1933, although saddened by the rise of Hitler in Germany, he still regarded Italian fascism and Mussolini as a greater danger than Nazism. (The fact that his earlier books were still being published in Germany may have affected that judgment.) At the same time, however, he also came to adore Josef Stalin, going so far as to justify almost all of the Soviet tyrant’s crimes. No Marxist, not even a socialist, he defended the Soviet Union as a leading force in the battle against fascism, and that conviction, together with his impulsive political romanticism, enabled him to suppress any misgivings he might have had about the Moscow show trials of 1936-1938 and the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939.