RUTHFULLY YOURS

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“Grand Strategy: The alignment of potentially infinite aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities.”“This, then, is a book about the ‘mental’ Hellespont that divide such leadership,on one shore, from common sense on the other. There ought to be free and frequent crossings between them, for it’s only with such exchanges that grand strategies – alignments of means with ends – become possible.” JohnLewis Gaddis

This is a short book (313 pages), with a large sweep of (mostly) Western Civilization, especially of its military leaders and observers. Professor Gaddis is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale. As well, the book is, as Victor Davis Hanson wrote in a review for The New York Times, “…a thoughtful; validation of the liberal arts, an argument for literature over social science, an engaging reflection on university education and some timely advice for Americans that lasting victory comes from winning what you can rather than all that you want.”

In ten essays, Professor Gaddis carries us from Xerxes, Pericles and Octavian to the Founders, Napoleon and Bismarck. He juxtaposes Augustine with Machiavelli, Elizabeth I with Philip II and Clausewitz with Tolstoy. He focuses on three U.S. Presidents: Lincoln, Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, showing us why Lincoln and FDR were successful, while Wilson failed to realize his dream “to make the world safe for Democracy.”

He cites maxims. Isaiah Berlin quoting the Greek poet Archilochus of Paros: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Augustine: “The higher glory is to stay war itself with a word, than to slay men with a sword.” Machiavelli: “…a man who wants to make a profession of good in all regards must come to ruin among so many who are not good.” Clausewitz, author of the unfinished On War: “war…must be subordinate to politics and therefore to policy.” F. Scott Fitzgerald, who said brilliance is the ability “to hold opposing ideas in [one’s] mind, while retaining the ability to function.”

Once the beating heart of world Jewish life, Europe has given way to the United States and Israel as home to the overwhelming majority of Jews. In fact, 21st-century Europe is once again shedding its Jewish population as it becomes an increasingly harder place for them to build their lives.

How did this come to pass? How can it be that less than a century after the Holocaust wiped out most of European Jewry, the continent’s remaining Jews face an increasingly hostile environment?

This is just one of the many question Jamie Kirchick tackles in his new book, The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age. In this podcast, Kirchick joins Jonathan Silver to discuss the book. They begin by examining the roots of Europe’s current economic and geopolitical discontents. But the conversation soon turns to the present situation faced by Europe’s Jews as the continent struggles to deal with a growing immigration crisis and resurgent populism on both the Left and the Right. As they explore the post-Cold War history of Europe, the decline of its cultural confidence, and the perilous future of European Jewry, Kirchick and Silver push us to consider the prospect of a Europe without Jews and what that would augur for the continent and the world.

https://militaryreviews.blogspot.com/2018/06/review-edward-cline-presence-of-mind.html
Ed Cline is a most prolific and articulate and intelligent writer. It is hard to keep up with his excellent columns, let alone his dozens of novels. Check out:

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_fb_1_13?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=edward+cline+books&sprefix=edward+cline+%2Cinstant-video%2C291&crid=1SDYNZ24YWHS6

Presence of Mind by Edward Cline is subtitled, “A Chess Hanrahan Novel.” It is one of four thrillers that feature private detective Hanrahan. Although published in 2010, the series was originally written in the 1980s. In chronological order the four books are: With Distinction, First Prize,Presence of Mind and Honors Due. First Prize was published by the Mysterious Press in 1988. All are now readily available for order online.

The first book of the series, With Distinction, takes place in a small college town where Hanrahan has retreated from the world. He’s essentially “on strike” from a country spiraling out of control. When a philosophy professor is murdered, police chief Hanrahan solves the case. Along the way, he learns a great deal about the causes of the country’s problems. At the novel’s conclusion, he decides to return to New York City to solve cases involving moral paradoxes.

Chess Hanrahan deals with some aspect of the “establishment’s” intellectual and moral corruption in each novel. In With Distinction it’s academia. First Prize deals with the aesthetic vandalism of the publishing profession. Honors Due lifts the rocks covering Hollywood and the stage in order to examine what’s underneath. In each case, he solves the paradox of how moral corruption under the guise of “idealism” can and does lead to murder. In Presence of Mind Chess confronts what is now called the Deep State’s foreign policy empire. As he explains to a traitorous villain who is selling out the United States to the Russians,

“I’d like to have been born a hundred years ago, so that as I grew older, I could witness the growth of civilization and enjoy its fruits. But, I wasn’t. I have to stand by and watch it being sabotaged and overrun by barbarians in this time. I want to understand why that’s happening and, when I can, to try and stop the carnage. Most people either aren’t aware that that’s what’s happening, or they’re aware but avert their eyes and minds.” I paused. “I’m a thinking man. I don’t want illusions.” (pg. 137)

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-world-as-it-is-review-a-witness-to-hope-and-change-1528755811

EXCERPTS:…..

“……… On the Palestinian question, Mr. Rhodes complains that the Israelis, who are “stronger” than the Palestinians, demanded unreasonable assurances of support when Mr. Obama pressed for a two-state solution. He ignores the special qualities of a conflict in which a democratic state must confront hostile militants who don’t hesitate to hide behind civilians to feed their David-and-Goliath narrative. When the subject is the Iran deal, Mr. Rhodes reduces Israel to Netanyahu, and Jews who opposed Mr. Obama’s policies toward Iran to pathological actors: They had “internalized the vision of Israel constantly under attack.” At no point does Mr. Rhodes engage with the real objections of people concerned with these conflicts—chiefly that Mr. Obama was trying to impose broad, sweeping change on a region whose historical particularities make change incremental at best. But to engage with this reality, Mr. Rhodes would have to defend the premises of the universalism he’s promoting.

Another area where Messrs. Rhodes and Obama refuse to engage their critics’ concerns involves Trump voters, whom Mr. Obama, in Mr. Rhodes’s telling, sees as irrational: “Five percent unemployment. Twenty million covered [by healthcare]. Gas at two bucks a gallon. We had it all teed up! . . . Maybe we pushed too far. Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.”

But choosing Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton was not a falling-back; it was a genuine choice between opposing sets of values. When Americans chose Mr. Trump, they were accepting less economic certainty for more cultural cohesion, fewer benefits of internationalism for more national determination. This isn’t a new phenomenon, and it isn’t an exclusively rightist one.

The Democratic Party is currently tribalizing itself into identity groups, a tribalism that explains itself as a response to oppression but that also reflects a normal human need: to collect into categories that confer belonging and agency. But it’s hard to imagine Mr. Obama or Mr. Rhodes being interested in this: It’s a different conception of human beings and politics, one that calls into question premises of their own.”

https://edwardcline.blogspot.com/2018/06/sharia-law-for-non-muslims.html

Bill Warner, a dissident author and advocate of the freedom of speech and an authority on the history of Islam, has provided us with a short, handy book (48 pages) on the chore of understanding Shania law as it applies to Kafirs, or non-Muslims. Sharia law for Non-Muslims is a must read for anyone confused by the jigsaw puzzle of Islamic priorities.

Warner cautions readers in the beginning that the book will treat Islam as primarily a political ideology, rather than as a religion. Islam, after all, is largely a political doctrine of supremacy over all other political doctrines, and is especially hostile to the doctrine of freedom in the U.S. One may see the imposition of Sharia as a political policy in Britain, Germany, and Sweden. Other European nations are steadily inching towards becoming Sharia dominated countries under the guise of “diversity.”

In the teaching program of The Center for the Study of Political Islam , Warner stresses that Sharia is intended to govern not only Muslims but non-Muslims, as well. That intention cannot help but be political.

https://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/

When most people hear or read of “enhanced interrogation” they automatically think of waterboarding or Abu Ghraib (Iraq) or torture. And even of Guantánamo Bay.

James E. Mitchell, author of Enhanced Interrogation: Inside the Minds and Motives of the Islamic Terrorists Trying to Destroy America, is a clinical psychologist, who, shortly after 9/11, served years in the CIA’s interrogation program of “debriefing” captured top al-Qa’ida leaders and terror suspects, held in “black sites,” to wheedle information from them about past acts of terrorism and those being planned.

Mitchell writes in his book that he has never been to Iraq or Guantánamo Bay. He does not identify the “black sites” where he interrogated prisoners; which is a good thing, for otherwise ISIS or some other terrorist organization would raid it. But, to read Mitchell’s book, is to get the impression that he is some kind of peace-loving Quaker. He often intervened in interrogation sessions when the CIA interrogators resorted to physical abuse of the prisoners. However, Mitchell is nothing if not patriotic. He begins his book in its preface. Some time after 9/11, he got an urgent call:

“You need to leave your home immediately.” It was the chief of security for the CIA on the phone. “We have a credible death threat by ISIS against your life, and we want you to evacuate until we determine how viable it is.” ISIS had tweeted a request that a jihadist cut my head off, and according to the CIA, someone had just volunteered to do the job and the person was already en route. It was December 2014 (p. 1)….

Over the next few years Mitchell and his co-interrogator, Bruce Jessen, also a psychologist, “interrogated” over a dozen captured terrorists and passed their appraisals and evaluations on to the CIA to have the information checked and double-checked against information garnered from other detainees elsewhere. When they dealt with a terrorist, it amounted to a mind game with the detainee. Mitchell and Jessen infrequently resorted to EITs Enhanced Interrogation Techniques), such as waterboarding, “wall standing,” sleep deprivation, and stress positions, only and unless a detainee was known to be lying or had been especially difficult, all approved – by the DOJ as legitimate means of interrogation. Reading through Mitchell’s account, one is educated, first, that they are not “torture” in the Inquisition or auto-da-fé sense, and that they are meant to persuade a terrorist to “squeal” the truth without actually harming him. Doctors were usually on hand to check on a detainee if it seemed he had been hurt.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/book-review-the-world-as-it-is-ben-rhodes-obama-reaction-trump-election/Barack Obama’s revealing reaction to Trump’s 2016 victory

Maybe you can help me out. I’m puzzling over a line in a New York Times story on The World As It Is, the forthcoming memoir from Barack Obama’s deputy national-security adviser Ben Rhodes. The article, by Peter Baker, is about the parts of Rhodes’s book that deal with Donald Trump’s surprise victory over Hillary Clinton.

“In the weeks after Mr. Trump’s election,” Baker reports, “Mr. Obama went through multiple emotional stages,” including flashes of “anger,” “rare self-doubt,” and taking “the long view.” Do not think, however, that during the final weeks of his presidency Barack Obama was withdrawn or more self-obsessed than usual. People needed him. The day after the election, Baker continues, “Mr. Obama focused on cheering up his despondent staff.”

For example — and here is the line that confuses me — “he sent a message to Mr. Rhodes saying, ‘There are more stars in the sky than grains of sand on the earth.’”

Say what? How does a dimly remembered Carl Sagan quote relate to 2016? Was Obama speaking in code? Was this an example of him taking the “long view” — implying that lol nothing matters because we are all cosmic dust adrift in the void? Was he suggesting the planet might be saved from Trump by an alien invasion? It sounds like the message you’d find inside an especially pretentious fortune cookie.

Obama’s words once again revealed his colossal lack of self-awareness. The passages of The World As It Is that Baker quotes in his piece reinforce the widespread impression of our 44th president as an aloof, smug, vainglorious chief executive totally divorced from political reality. The shock, disgust, confusion, and horror with which Obama and his team greeted the election results exemplified the very attitudes toward democratic procedure and populist conservatism that fueled Trump’s rise. The only lesson Barack Obama drew from the election was confirmation of his own moral superiority.

https://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Systematic-coordinated-genocide-556643

Father Patrick Desbois, a French Roman Catholic priest, has devoted the past 15 years to locating the mass grave sites of Jews who were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen, the Nazi mobile mass murderers. In his 2009 book, The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews, Desbois documented the shooting murders of 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews.

His second book, In Broad Daylight: The Secret Procedures Behind the Holocaust by Bullets uses interviews, wartime records and forensic methods to locate hidden, mass grave sites to provide yet another account of mass killings, this time of Jews in seven former Soviet bloc countries.

Desbois’s interest in the Holocaust began in childhood after he learned that his grandfather, a French soldier, had been deported to a Nazi prison camp during World War II. After studying Judaism, Jewish culture and antisemitism, he embarked on his quest to visit the Jewish execution sites in Ukraine and Belarus. Shortly thereafter, he founded Yahad-In Unum, an organization that collects information about the mass murder of Jews that took place from 1941 to 1944 in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Lithuania, Poland, Moldova and Romania.

Desbois and his organization have interviewed more than 5,700 witnesses and visited more than 2,700 extermination sites. With simplicity, he poignantly describes the timetable, coordination, mechanization and spectacle of the genocidal process committed in broad daylight. His accounts describe how these events occurred repetitively and systematically from village to village. As the Nazis arrived empty-handed, local resources became tools for killing and pillaging. Because every resident in the Soviet Union was required to register, the Germans had an easy time locating all the Jews.

Although many are familiar with the death camps where Nazis gassed millions of Polish and German Jews, fewer are aware of the extermination of Jews by firing squad in eastern Europe. While the deportation of Jews to concentration camps was handled discreetly, the “Holocaust by bullets” was conducted openly with full participation of local communities. The German killers moved from town to town, requisitioning what they needed from the local population, including labor, vehicles, food and other provisions. With clock-like precision and coordination, shooters, police, transporters, diggers, cooks and others worked together as part of a genocidal machine.