RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the 1990s, Western liberalism’s triumph seemed inevitable. The Soviet empire had disintegrated. Francis Fukuyama had proclaimed the “end of history.” By the end of the decade, the U.S. economy was surging, fueling higher living standards at every income level. More and more countries were seeking to establish the liberal political and economic systems that would allow them to share in the prosperity. At home and abroad, the future seemed bright, almost boundless.

In hindsight, however, the 1990s look less like the ascent of Western liberalism than its heyday. As it turned out, the late ’90s represented the only period since the early 1970s in which Americans enjoyed the benefits of economic growth so broadly; for more than four decades, with the exception of those at the top of the wealth distribution, incomes have remained mostly stagnant. Around the world, since the turn of the millennium, some 25 democracies have failed, and movements to liberalize—most notably, the Arab Spring—have generally ended in violent collapse.

In 2016, simmering fear and frustration boiled over as American voters elected a political outsider who expressed no interest in promoting the U.S.-led liberal order. And while optimists view Donald Trump as a historical accident, British journalist Edward Luce begs to differ. In “The Retreat of Western Liberalism,” he warns that Trumpism could prove less an accident than a portent in the United States and across the West.

“Western liberalism” can be a mushy term, and even though his book is premised on it, Mr. Luce offers no clear definition. He instead points to elements that, one presumes, are supposed to add up to a whole—texts like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the belief in democracy in the hearts of Westerners and the spread of democratic systems over time. Whatever this whole is, Mr. Luce sees it under assault. America has elected an essentially illiberal president who is “a big fan of walls and a big admirer of Vladimir Putin. ” Overseas, democratic capitalism’s broken promises have made the quick-fix pledges of demagogues more appealing. Britain’s “left-behinds” voted against the London elite and opted for Brexit; right-wing autocrats mounted serious campaigns in France, the Netherlands and elsewhere across Europe (albeit with mixed success). In every year since 2008 more countries have restricted freedom than have expanded it, according to the global watchdog organization Freedom House.Mr. Luce devotes much of his book to why this global rebellion is happening, and why now. His thesis is straightforward. While the rich enjoy greater opulence, living and working among themselves in isolated enclaves, half to two-thirds of Westerners have been “treading water—at best—for a generation” as globalization and robotics have combined to limit wages and eliminate jobs. Productivity growth fueled the economic surge that doubled living standards from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, but the productivity gains that the digital revolution was supposed to deliver haven’t materialized. Meanwhile, the costs of health insurance and higher education—both essential to upward mobility—have continued to rise, putting them increasingly out of reach of the classes that would benefit from them most and making social stratification more pronounced.

How does this growing inequality affect the liberal project? “Liberal democracy’s strongest glue is economic growth,” Mr. Luce argues. “When groups fight over the fruits of growth, the rules of the political game are relatively easy to uphold. When those fruits disappear, or are monopolised by a fortunate few, things turn nasty.” Across the West, Mr. Luce explains, the non-rich losers in this zero-sum game have started to turn against the status quo. For the United States, Mr. Luce cites as evidence the fact that “every single one of America’s 493 wealthiest counties, almost all of them urban, voted for Hillary Clinton. The remaining 2623 counties, most of them suburban or small-town, went for Donald Trump.”

“Europe is committing suicide,” writes Douglas Murray in the first sentence of his erudite, dispiriting, and indispensable new book, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam. In words that I agree with but that put the matter in a way so stark that they even made me catch my breath, Murray predicts that “by the end of the lifespans of most people currently alive Europe will not be Europe and the peoples of Europe will have lost the only place the world we had to call home.” This cataclysm, in Murray’s view, has two causes: mass immigration and Europeans’ loss of faith in European “beliefs, traditions and legitimacy.” Europeans feel guilty about their past; they’re “jaded,” weighted down by an “existential tiredness,” a feeling that their corner of the world “has run out of steam” and that their culture, for which they have insufficient regard, might just as well be replaced by another.

Murray (a prolific author, debater, and commentator who, at the age of 37, is perhaps Britain’s most eloquent critic of Islam and mass immigration) starts with his own country – namely with Conservative MP Enoch Powell, one of the most brilliant and accomplished men of his time, who in 1968 gave an extraordinary prescient oration, the so-called “Rivers of Blood” speech, in which he warned of the long-term results of UK immigration policy. Instead of prompting the immigration controls that 75% of his countrymen wanted even back then, the speech ended Powell’s career and made his name synonymous with hatred. Three out of four members of the general public were with him, but to the elite he was Hitler – and his instant official disgrace made it impossible, during the ensuing decades, to have anything remotely resembling an honest public debate on immigration. The Muslims kept pouring in, and though most Brits disapproved, they kept their heads down, shrugging silently. What else could they do? They knew that if they spoke up, they’d get the Powell treatment.

Meanwhile, slightly different versions of the same tragedy (or farce?) were being played out across northwestern Europe. Everywhere, the natives were lied to by their politicians and media: the scale of immigration, they were told, was far lower than widely believed; their country had always been “a nation of immigrants”; immigrants represented a net economic asset; crime statistics were inflated; and, naturally, Islam was a religion of peace. Those who criticized immigration – because they saw their culture disappearing, their secular democracy challenged, their taxes going to support indolent, criminal aliens, and their own access to housing and schools cut off by policies that favored foreigners – were called racists and nationalists, were accused of being fixated on skin color, and were ridiculed for failing to have a sophisticated enough appreciation of the value of cultural diversity.

If Britain had Powell’s speech, France had “a strange novel,” Le Camp des Saints (1973), in which Jean Raspail envisioned a rapid conquest of western Europe by shiploads of Third Worlders crossing the Mediterranean. Just as Merkel triggered the latest immigrant tsumani by setting out a welcome mat, in Raspail’s book the invasion is set off by an ill-advised invitation by the Belgian government. Murray calls Le Camp des Saints “deeply unpleasant” in its depiction of the immigrant hordes (I concur), but although it was almost universally dismissed as racist, it predicted with “uncomfortable precision” Europe’s response to today’s alien influx – from the dithering politicians to the naively magnanimous churchmen. (The main thing Raspail got wrong were the numbers: he imagined a million people invading Europe; the real figure has been much higher.)

Murray recalls other authors: the Dutchmen Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, who, demonized for criticizing mass Islamic immigration, ended up slain; the late Oriana Fallaci, whose cry of outrage, The Rage and the Pride (2002), sold millions. (Full disclosure: Murray, a longtime friend, is kind, too, to my own 2006 opus While Europe Slept.) How long ago all this seems! Fortuyn and Fallaci gained innumerable admirers. But what difference did any of it make? At certain moments all those years ago, some form of salvation seemed just around the corner. Yet the elites retained their power and kept banging away at the lies. And things just got worse.

Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform, by John F. Pfaff (Basic Books, 272 pp., $27.99)

John F. Pfaff’s Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform is probably the best book on so-called mass incarceration to date. A professor of law at Fordham, Pfaff doesn’t cherry-pick data to support some a priori theory; staying empirically grounded, he grapples directly with the data—an approach that makes his argument for reducing imprisonment a very tough sell. If, as Pfaff’s own figures demonstrate, violent crime and other serious offenses are the primary reasons for incarceration, then why should we reduce imprisonment?

The author’s main point is that the usual explanations for the rise in imprisonment—the “standard story,” as he calls it—are not only wrong but also counterproductive to de-incarceration efforts. The standard story has three components: the war on drugs, long prison sentences, and the growth of private prisons. Each of the three, Pfaff demonstrates, is a secondary contributor at best.

Pfaff quickly dismisses the contribution of the “prison industrial complex” to mass incarceration, noting that privately managed prisons house only about 7 percent of U.S. inmates, and that their management policies are no worse than those of the public sector. The drug war is a more serious contributing factor to rising imprisonment rates: drug convictions put thousands behind bars, especially during the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s. Michelle Alexander, in her much-ballyhooed 2012 book The New Jim Crow, writes that the “impact of the drug war has been astounding. In less than thirty years, the U.S penal population exploded from around 300,000 to more than 2 million, with drug convictions accounting for the majority of the increase.” But as Pfaff demonstrates, at the peak of the great crackdown in 1990, inmates serving time in state prisons for drug crimes accounted for 22 percent of the state-prison population, whereas violent inmates made up 47 percent—more than twice as many. When prison populations increased dramatically, from 1980 to 1990, drugs accounted for only a third of the increase. Even in that lock-’em-up decade, crimes of violence put a greater number, 36 percent, behind bars.

In the decades before and after the more punitive 1980s, the case for emphasizing drug imprisonments is even weaker. A 1974 survey of state prisoners found that only 10 percent were in for drug offenses, while 52 percent were incarcerated for violent crimes. From 1990 to 2009, Pfaff found, drugs contributed only 14 percent to state confinement; violence, a whopping 60 percent.

Pfaff thinks that false claims about drug imprisonment actually hurt the case for disincarceration, because reducing drug imprisonment leaves the main culprit—violent crime—unaffected. If all drug-law violators were freed tomorrow (and most of those in prison are traffickers, not simple users, so this won’t happen), then the number of inmates in our state prisons would drop by only 16 percent, leaving 1.1 million people behind bars. And, as Pfaff notes, the structural basis for another period of increased imprisonment in response to the next crime wave remains intact.

When imprisonment rates rise, it must mean either that more people are being incarcerated or that they are being confined for longer periods—or some combination of the two. Pfaff denies that longer terms of imprisonment are to blame for mass incarceration. Indeed, he says that time served in the United States is “surprisingly short, and there’s no real evidence that it grew much as prison populations soared.” In 2010, armed robbers, to take a particularly scary sector of the criminal population, were released in a median 2.3 years. Moreover, actual prison time has decreased in the last few years (few prisoners serve their maximum sentences).

One of the reasons for my fascination with books about World War 11, is the fact that was the last war America fought for unconditional surrender. Shinto imperialism and barbarity, and Nazi aspirations and genocide ended with total surrender and the world changed forever. Wars since then- even the Korean War with so many casualties and fatalities ended with a parallel leaving the Kim thugs in charge- and the various Middle East wars have been incursions changing nothing……rsk

In April 1945, as German troops surrendered en masse to American forces wheeling through the Ruhr Valley, news from the western Pacific seemed equally hopeful: Landings on the island of Okinawa had been largely unopposed. It was a high-water mark for public optimism regarding the prospects for the unconditional surrender of Japan and the return, at last, of peace.

That month, a U.S. government bureau forecast that an economy shackled by the restrictions of war production would make a smooth transition to normalcy. Although unpopular controls such as the curfew on nightclubs and bans on horse racing would soon be lifted, industrialists and labor unions alike were pushing back against the Army’s voracious needs and the government’s far-reaching management of the economy. President Harry Truman dared hope that Japan could be forced to quit before the home front finally turned on him, imperiling the yearslong struggle to defeat Japan on terms set long ago by Franklin D. Roosevelt and his Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Then Germany surrendered, and the Japanese emperor’s Okinawa garrison showed its teeth. Those two developments threatened to change everything.

This startling, nearly forgotten story is well documented in “Implacable Foes,” a valuable and revealing study by Waldo Heinrichs and Marc Gallicchio, historians at San Diego State and Villanova, respectively. The authors remind us how public weariness with the war and the difficulty of redeploying armies world-wide for a reckoning with Tokyo imperiled Truman’s plan to defeat Japan and avoid the type of economic disruptions that tested the nation after World War I.

Though the military campaigns carried out by the forces under Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Adm. Chester Nimitz from February 1944 forward are covered in this book, those oft-told tales are not the main event. The authors’ major contribution lies in bringing to life the turmoil of a home front “going sour,” as Secretary of War Henry Stimson put it, which pushed the finale of the Pacific campaign toward the precipice of possible failure or abandonment. Though that outcome was never in actual view, war planners did fear, as casualties mounted, what the authors call “a public psychology of complacency, slackening effort, and a drift of labor away from war work.” The special military advisor to the president, Adm. William D. Leahy, believed that at some point the clamor to bring the boys home could become irresistible.

From day one, Iwo Jima was a meat grinder. In late 1944 the volcanic isle had been so lightly defended that it could have been taken by a regiment. But by D-Day, Feb. 19, 1945, it had become a hive of stone. The Marines suffered more than 25,000 casualties in taking it. Though MacArthur used his well-cultivated relationships in the press to lobby otherwise, his own campaigns were equally costly.

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Another great addition to the Cyrus Skeen series.

Product Details

Celebrity News: A Detective Novel of 1930 (The Cyrus Skeen Mysteries Book 26)
Mar 23, 2017
by Edward Cline

Sparrowhawk, Book Six: War
byEdward Cline
Brilliant, maybe provocative to some, this series of 6 books is a major achievement in historical fiction. With vivid, believable characters Cline envelopes the story of the American Revolution in an enlightening aura of intellectualism, fierce love and loyalty, and ultimate sacrifice for a cause even deeper than the birth of a country. And, yes, there are also despicable, hateful characters and plenty of others that are mere fodder for disdain. We all know that America prevailed in the end, but those that read this amazing book will also finally know the deeper roles and natures of Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson and the far greater intrigue of the Revolution that a mere dumping of tea. Long live Lady Liberty! Bravo, Mr. Cline!

The suicide bombing which slaughtered nearly two dozen concertgoers in Manchester last week demonstrates yet again that terrorism is indeed becoming “part and parcel,” as London’s Muslim mayor Sadiq Khan declared, of European life. And yet the continent’s elites continue to live in denial of the religious roots of that terrorism. Few are willing to tell the truth about Islam and its impact on Europe; even fewer have dared to tell that truth in the gripping way that only fiction can. Controversial French novelist Michel Houllebecq’s bestselling Submission, for example, recently struck a chord among readers with its chilling tale of Europe’s embrace of sharia. And then there is Bruce Bawer’s new novel The Alhambra.

Critic, essayist, and political journalist Bruce Bawer is the author of over a dozen books, most notably While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within (2006), Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom (2009), and The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind (2012). He is a native New Yorker who has lived in Europe since 1998, and who continues to report on the continent’s decline and fall from the front lines. Full disclosure: I am honored to say that Bawer is a friend of mine.

FrontPage Mag readers are surely familiar with regular contributor Bawer’s incisive work. But some may not know that Bawer has just released a self-published international thriller that takes on the verboten topic of Islam’s infiltration and subversion of Europe. The Alhambra is set in early 2001, while America and Europe still slept, as Bawer put it in another book, prior to the September 11 attacks. It is the story of an American living in Amsterdam who overhears jihadists planning an act of terrorism, and finds himself caught up in the deadly intrigue.

Why did he decide to self-publish? As Bawer told me in an email, “My agent liked the book but thought the combination of gay characters and vile Islamophobia made it hopeless to try to place it [with a publisher].” The “vile Islamophobia” alone, of course, is enough to scuttle a novel’s chances with any traditional publisher, and of course Hollywood is far from likely to touch it either. But Bawer didn’t let that deter him from telling a story that needs to be told.

The novel’s protagonist is Steve Disch, a gay filmmaker pushing forty who moves impulsively to Amsterdam after his once-promising Hollywood career stalls out. He immerses himself in the city’s Old World charm but increasingly finds himself crossing paths with the city’s dark, threatening subculture of Muslim immigrants:

Block by block, the neighborhood grew shabbier. There was graffiti, garbage on the street. There were storefronts with signs in Arabic… He passed a group of men who looked like Arabs or Turks or Persians and who were standing on the sidewalk holding a loud, angry-sounding conversation in some Middle Eastern tongue. As he walked by, they all turned, every one of them, and gave him unfriendly, suspicious looks. One of them said something to him. He didn’t understand the words, but he could guess at the sentiment. Further down the street, he passed a woman in an Islamic head covering who was pushing a baby carriage and was flanked by two toddlers. Half a block later, he passed another woman, also covered; this one was pregnant and pushing a child in a stroller.