RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/command-and-control/

This essay is adapted from Cage Fight: Civilian and Democratic Pressures on Military Conflicts and Foreign Policy (Hoover Institution Press, 2023).

In The Gathering Storm, the opening volume of his memoirs of the World War II era, Winston Churchill catalogues the causes of the conflict. Among them he lists “the structures and habits of democratic states,” which “lack those elements of persistence and convictions which can alone give security the humble masses. . . . Even in matters of self-preservation, no policy is pursued even for ten or fifteen years at a time.” From the birth of democracy in ancient Athens until the present, the political institutions that protect the freedom and rights of citizens have also been potentially dangerous in times of war—by complicating and interfering with the policies and decisions that, during a conflict, require swift execution, decisiveness, and persistence.

The “structures and habits” Churchill notes include regularly scheduled elections, by which the citizens hold their elected leaders accountable; the right of all citizens to speak openly and freely on all matters, including the conduct of foreign policy and the management of war; and the voicing of dissent against the war itself and the reasons for conducting it. Most important, in democratic states the military establishment and war are subordinated to the civilian institutions and offices accountable to the citizens through elections.

Voters Call the Shots

Regular elections, in the United States held every two years, make long-term military strategies vulnerable to the shifting moods of the electorate, which are expressed in frequent turnovers in Congress and the presidency. On the other hand, this critical instrument of political accountability can also change a dangerous course.

The iconic example in recent American history is the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. His predecessor, Jimmy Carter, elected after the disastrous abandonment of Vietnam, counseled that we should get over our “inordinate fear of communism” and prioritize human rights in US foreign policy rather than containing and pushing back on the Soviet Union’s adventurism in Latin America, Afghanistan, and Central Africa. Reagan, in contrast, announced that it was “morning in America,” exuded confidence and faith in America’s goodness, increased the military budget, pushed back against Soviet interventions in Latin America, and summed up his strategy for dealing with the Soviet Union as “we win, they lose.”

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/can-the-whole-world-be-wrong?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

One of the mysteries of the war against Israel is the extent to which a monstrously twisted narrative about Israel and the Palestinian Arabs — casting the former as evil and the latter as sanctified victims — has been absorbed by so many people.

Still stranger, this narrative seems to be the driver of progressive politics. It’s not just that “intersectionality” demonises the Jews, but that it is driven by an obsession with Palestinianism.

As Corinne Blacker wrote in Tablet: “In queer and women’s studies programs, the topic of Palestine is regularly inserted into the most unlikely contexts, to the extent that one student in a class about queer history told me that they discussed nothing but Palestine.”

The astonishing story of Mohammed al-Durah illustrates just how perverse this is. On Sept. 30, 2000, the French TV station France 2 broadcast footage from Gaza that apparently showed the 12-year-old al-Durah being shot dead by Israeli fire as he clung to his father during a demonstration.

This iconic picture detonated the second intifada, the Palestinian terrorist war waged against Israeli civilians that murdered more than 1,130 of them and wounded more than 8,000 between 2000 and 2005. The footage incited hysteria across the Arab and Muslim world.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/02/10/tocqueville-in-arabia-the-anxieties-of-the-democratic-age/

This essay is adapted from the new paperback edition of Tocqueville in Arabia: The Anxieties of the Democratic Age, by Joshua Mitchell (Encounter, 236  pp., $19.99.

The American mood, giddy and triumphal after the 1991 Gulf War, darkened into intermixed rage and despair after the ghastly live-broadcast death spectacle in New York and Washington, D.C., on that sun-lit morning of September 11, 2001. What followed in the way of primitive, not to say unjustified, retribution in the distant mountains and high plateaus of Afghanistan soon transformed and metastasized. 

Thin is the line between commensurate response and pride. On April 9, 2003, less than 19 months later, Baghdad fell to American forces who were now at war with two nations, markedly different from one another, each an inscrutable mystery to our military, to our intelligence agencies, and to all but a few remaining academics who had been trained before gaming and simulations came to constitute due diligence. They do not. 

Tocqueville is well-known for having invented the idea of American exceptionalism. There, in the author’s introduction to his 1835 masterpiece, Democracy in America, he announced that the term does not mean America is special. It means that America is the exception to the rule. What is the rule? The rule is that all the world now has, or once had, aristocratic social conditions. Not least, the Middle East, I add. America is the exception. 

America was born into democratic social conditions, more or less. This difference has momentous implications we must understand if we wish our nation to act wisely in the world. The vast swath of the world that retains its aristocratic social conditions, or is in some transitional phase away from them, will see in America both a rosy promise of liberation from the burden of its own aristocratic past and the haunting prospect of a disorderly, lonely, decadent, Godless future. 

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/01/a-book-for-australia/

Princeton-raised, Israel-residing political philosopher Yoram Hazony is the figurehead of the nascent Euro-American National Conservatism movement. Increasingly, his ideas are entering mainstream political debate. The 2022 National Conservatism conference in Miami opened with a speech from the now highly favoured Republican presidential hopeful, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Coalescing around him are a growing number of thinkers, young and old, intent on rejuvenating a movement which they acknowledge has largely failed to conserve that which it holds most dear.

I have attended two of Hazony’s conferences in the United States, and found them invigorating—earnest and open forums of debate, attracting public intellectuals and private citizens alike, all sincerely interested in building a better future for the nation.

Much of Hazony’s thinking has found its way into his latest book, Conservatism: A Rediscovery. Though I am sure he did not expressly intend it, I believe Hazony has written a book about Australia.

The book is about Anglo-American conserv­atism—that is, the instantiation, perpetuation, collapse and prospective renewal of an authentic conservatism in the British and American
bodies politic. This does not mean Hazony excludes the rest of the world from his project. However, the scope of his inquiry is necessarily focused on the reception of conservative thought in the two world-powerful English-speaking nations.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/27/socialism-a-grab-bag-of-superstitions/

During recent election cycles, “socialism” got quite a workout, without much detail about what it actually represents. For that knowledge, one of the best sources is Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the Twentieth Century by the late Sidney Hook, born in 1902, before any socialist country existed. 

“Socialism was a feeling of moral protest against remediable evils that surrounded us,” Hook writes, but there was more to it. “Our socialism was an ersatz religion in that we lived in its light, were buoyed up by its promise, and prepared to make sacrifices for it.” The great philosopher was also candid about the way it worked.

“Socialist faith contrasted the realities of the capitalist system with the ideals of a vaguely defined socialism, since at the time no Socialist system existed anywhere.” Once the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was established, Hook would conduct a proper comparison of the realities of capitalism with the realities of socialism, such as terror and violence, “the weapon of those who scorned argument and evidence.”

Lenin was the first to refer to those who did not support the Soviet regime as “vermin,” but like Stalin professed to believe that the victims of the “Red Terror” were guilty of something, however far-fetched. As Hook recalled, “they would never have admitted to the slaughter of the innocent but their apologists admitted it and justified it!” One of those apologists was dramatist Bertolt Brecht, author of The Threepenny Opera and other works. 

Of the victims of Soviet terror, numbering in the millions, Brecht said, “the more innocent they are, the more they deserved to be shot.” Hook said nothing, escorted Brecht out the door, and never saw him again.  

Soviet socialism was supposedly on the side of the workers, but as Hook discovered, “the workers could be exploited in a collectivist economy as well as in a free market economy.”

Soviet socialism professed to be “scientific,” but as Hook learned, there are no “national truths” in science, no “German science,” and no “Jewish science.” 

In similar style, there are no “class truths” or “party truths” in science; no “proletarian science” and no such thing as “bourgeois physics” and so forth. As the philosopher explains, “this is what happens when one is in the grip of a monastic dogma,” a dogma “sustained by systematic delusion.” 

Later in life, Hook came clean.  

https://www.frontpagemag.com/another-french-writer-is-alarmed-about-the-future-of-france/

Like Eric Zemmour, like Michel Houllebecq, the French writer and essayist Laurent Obertone is alarmed about the future of France. He sees the country as a likely victim of the Great Replacement. By this is meant the replacement of the indigenous Europeans by non-European migrants. More specifically, in France the worry is that the French will be demographically overwhelmed by millions of Muslim migrants and their large families. Laurent Obertone considers the bleak possibility of a civil war in France in an article from November 2022, but of course nothing has changed in the intervening months: “‘The more time passes, the less reversible the situation will be,’ says prominent author Laurent Obertone on risk of civil war in France,” by Olivier Bault, Remix News, November 17, 2022:

Renowned French author Laurent Obertone presents a bleak future of a France in conflict in his books, but he says that such a reality is not far from fiction.

An exclusive interview with French journalist, essayist, and novelist Laurent Obertone, author of the prophetic bestseller novel “Guerilla – The day everything went up in flames” (in French: “Guérilla – Le jour où tout s’embrasa”) and of several essays on the violent and totalitarian drift of French society (“La France Orange Mécanique” – Clockwork Orange France, “La France Big Brother” – Big Brother France, etc.). Following its big success in France, the novel “Guerilla” has also been translated into German, Italian, Hungarian, and Japanese, and will soon be published in Spanish.

https://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Four U.S. presidents have been assassinated; three of them within a thirty-six-and-a-half-year period: Abraham Lincoln in April 1865, James Garfield in July 1881, and William McKinley in September 1901. The fourth, of course, was John Kennedy on November 22, 1963. It was not until McKinley’s assassination that the president was assigned a secret service detail. Even then, ex-presidents were on their own. In 1953, President Truman and his wife Bess, famously, took the train home to Independence, Missouri, mingling with passengers and without secret service protection.

Ms. Millard tells the story of James Garfield, his abbreviated tenure as President, his assassination, and the times in which he lived. It was on the 36th ballot, at the Republican convention in Chicago in early June 1880, that Ohio Congressman and former Union General James A. Garfield was nominated for the Presidency – a position he had never sought. On November 3, 1880, he was elected the 20th President of the United States, narrowly defeating Winfield S. Hancock. “Although he was by nature,” Ms. Millard wrote, “a cheerful and optimistic man, like Lincoln, he had long felt he would die an early death.” On September 19, 1881, Garfield did die of septicemia and dehydration brought on by a bullet wound, inflicted by a deranged Charles Guiteau on July 2 at the Baltimore and Potomac railroad station in Washington, D.C.