RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/barack-obama-hates-israel-and-wants-you-hate-it-robert-spencer/

Great news: Barack Hussein Obama is now not only a Nobel laureate, but he has opened up a big lead among the presidents as the one with by far the most autobiographies. The marvelous narcissist now leads all other presidents who have written autobiographies by two, as he has written three, compared to a number of his peers who are tied at one. However, his latest one, A Promised Land, is more than just an update on the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of the Most Undeservedly Celebrated Man on the Planet; it’s a full-on apologia for his policies as president, and a program for his impending third term, aka the Biden administration.

The weighty 768-page tome not only tells you more about His Wonderfulness than you ever thought you wanted to know; it also provides a potted Leftist history of Israel that abundantly illustrates how Leftists see our most reliable ally in the Middle East, and why they hate it with such focused laser-beam intensity.

Obama portrays Britain and then Israel as occupying powers in Palestine, without ever explaining who actually owned the land they were and are supposedly occupying. He makes no mention of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine. As The Palestinian Delusion explains in detail, the Mandate directed the British to encourage “close settlement by Jews on the land” for “the establishment of the Jewish national home.” What gave the League the right to do such a thing? The dying Ottoman Empire had ceded Palestine to the League in 1918. Jews had lived in that land from time immemorial, and it was otherwise sparsely populated. It was a perfect place for the Jews who faced discrimination, harassment and worse in Europe and elsewhere to settle.

Congressman Devin Nunes (R-CA) has always stood up for justice.  He has written a pamphlet book, Countdown to Socialism in the style of what Thomas Paine had distributed preceding the Revolutionary War. In the late eighteenth century, pamphlets electrified the colonies and helped to forge American democracy, ringing the alarm for what was wrong and what needed to be done. Now, Congressman Nunes is warning Americans that something needs to be done before this country loses its morals and values.  American Thinker had the privilege of interviewing him.

In Chapter One, he wrote, “the Left has wholly rejected the fundamental principles that bound Americans together and allowed us to work out our differences democratically and peacefully. They now reject free speech, a fair voting system, private property, and the rule of law. They don’t dare yet admit it publicly, but as you’ll see in this book, their policies and rhetoric are incompatible with any of these principles as we understand them today.”

He explained in the book, “Socialist regimes tend to excel at propaganda. By necessity socialism is a resentful ideology that exploits and widens class conflict, racial strife, and other social cleavages, pitting countrymen against one another. Their proposals have one thing in common: they will increase the Democrats’ vote count. At both the state and national levels, they are working hard to fundamentally change the voting system by abolishing the Electoral College, greatly expanding mail-in voting, enfranchising felons, legalizing vote harvesting, lowering the voting age, and allowing current non-citizens to vote through mass amnesties and other means,” not to mention packing the Supreme Court by expanding it.

https://artsfuse.org/217348/book-review-from-left-to-right-the-story-of-holocaust-historian-lucy-s-dawidowicz/

This biography of Lucy S. Dawidowicz performs the invaluable function of gathering relevant documents and drafting a narrative that rescues a fascinating historian from oblivion. But it does not add much to the history of the New York intellectuals.

From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History by Nancy Sinkoff. Wayne State University Press, 538 pp., $34.99.

There were several reasons I wanted to read a biography of historian and public intellectual Lucy S. Dawidowicz (1915-1990). First, From Left to Right is yet another piece of the extensive feminist project of writing overlooked women back into history. Set mainly in 20th-century Manhattan among the New York Jews who then dominated its intellectual life, From Left to Right foregrounds a wren against a background of peacocks such as Alfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling, Clement Greenberg, Meyer Schapiro, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Irving Howe, Irving Kristol, and Norman Podhoretz — all male, with the notable exceptions of the formidable Hannah Arendt and Diana Trilling.

I was also interested in many particular facets of Lucy S. Dawidowicz’s life. As a girl, Lucy Schildkret was a graduate, like Cynthia Ozick and Hortense Calisher (and later Elena Kagan and Avril Haines), of Hunter College High School — the only American public school for intellectually gifted girls. After school, she pursued a Yiddish-language education at the secular nonpolitically-affiliated Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute. She graduated from Hunter College in 1936 and began a Master’s program in English literature at Columbia University, but dropped out after two weeks. She eventually obtained a Master’s in history but not a PhD.

Like many other intellectually gifted women of her generation, Dawidowicz would spend far too many years — the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s — working out of public view as a secretary, translator, or researcher for men whose publications rarely acknowledged her in print. Finally, in 1967, at the age of 52, she published her own book, a massive anthology of primary sources titled The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe, and was hired to teach at Yeshiva University’s all-female Stern College, where she created one of the first courses in what is now called Holocaust Studies.

https://www.amazon.com/Brothers-Down-Harbor-Aboard-Arizona/dp/0316560529/r

A deeply personal and never-before-told account of one of America’s darkest days, from the bestselling author of The Admirals and MacArthur at War.

The surprise attack at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 remains one of the most traumatic events in American history. America’s battleship fleet was crippled, thousands of lives were lost, and the United States was propelled into a world war. Few realize that aboard the iconic, ill-fated USS Arizona were an incredible seventy-nine blood relatives. Tragically, in an era when family members serving together was an accepted, even encouraged, practice, sixty-three of the Arizona’s 1,177 dead turned out to be brothers.

In Brothers Down, acclaimed historian Walter R. Borneman returns to that critical week of December, masterfully guiding us on an unforgettable journey of sacrifice and heroism, all told through the lives of these brothers and their fateful experience on the Arizona. Weaving in the heartbreaking stories of the parents, wives, and sweethearts who wrote to and worried about these men, Borneman draws from a treasure trove of unpublished source material to bring to vivid life the minor decisions that became a matter of life or death when the bombs began to fall. More than just an account of familial bonds and national heartbreak, what emerges promises to define a turning point in American military history.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/12/17/what-we-neglect-in-tocqueville/

Democracy in America is about a lot more than democracy .

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) was a French aristocrat and one of America’s very best friends, the special, rare kind that tells you the truth. His Democracy in America is quoted often for support, but less often sought for advice. Here are a few points in his great book, often neglected, from which we can learn. (An anniversary is a time to celebrate, but any time is a good time to learn.) 

The meaning of democracy. Many readers today wonder how Tocqueville could speak of “democracy” in 1835, when women had no vote and blacks were enslaved. Tocqueville specifies “equality of conditions” to define democracy, a state in which each individual thinks he has sufficient intelligence to rule himself, resulting in the rule of the majority of such individuals. It’s not that individuals are equal, but that they think they are. Others are held to be “similar” to oneself, neither inferior nor superior. Democracy is not a self-evident truth taken from nature’s God but a plausible convention held to be true. Democracy can become more equal — give women the vote and abolish slavery — when the majority rules it to happen, but the majority can also accept imperfections and inequalities if it wishes and still remain democratic. Such inequalities, for example offices filled by elections, often make democracy work better. Even in its normal functioning, even when officials have powers unequal to those of citizens, democracy has hidden aristocratic aspects necessary to its good functioning.

Democracy and aristocracy. Tocqueville — an aristocrat himself, living just after the French Revolution — knew the contrast between the Old Regime and the democratic future that he found in America in a way we cannot today. For us there is only one way to live justly and reasonably — in democracy. Even the hateful regimes we know, such as communism and Nazism, are perversions of democracy. Tocqueville refers to the “providential fact” that democracy in our time is inescapable, but he explains democracy to itself in constant contrast with its rival, aristocracy.

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2020/11/28/a-holiday-gift-idea-new-books-by-joshua-mitchell-michael-walsh-and-brandon-weichert-n1179894

Three new books that every conservative should read appeared in time for the holiday season, and I recommend them enthusiastically as holiday presents. (I assume you’ve already read my book You Will Be Assimilated: Chiina’s Plan to Sino-Form the World, which would have done nicely for Halloween).

The first is American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time, by Joshua Mitchell of Georgetown University. Here’s what I wrote about it:

“American Awakening” is a tour-de-force, the sort of book that forever changes the way one looks at the subject. It is the most important book on American politics of the past several years. Joshua Mitchell argues persuasively that America’s political crisis has a religious origin, and that the extremes of identity politics are an expression of a dislodged Protestantism.This is a bold and deeply convincing alternative to  conventional thinking that combines a subtle grasp of theology with profound insights into American political process and deep knowledge of history. So skillful a writer is Prof. Mitchell that the reader has the sense of remembering something that was always known, while learning something that was never imagined.

Mitchell diagnoses America’s spiritual maladies with a unique religious sensibility. It’s the best book on American politics since Joseph Bottum’s An Anxious Age  in 2014.

Second on my holiday list is Michael Walsh’s Last Stands: Why Men Fight When All is Lost. I’ve read the first third or so, and it’s riveting. Michael  is a Renaissance man, a successful Hollywood screenwriter and novelist, as well as a fine classical pianist and former music critic of Time Magazine. Here’s what VIctor Davis Hanson says about it:

Last Stands is a thoroughly original study of doomed or trapped soldiers often fighting to the last man, from Thermopylae to the Korean War. But Michael Walsh’s book is more than a military history of heroic resistance. It is also a philosophical and spiritual defense of the premodern world, of the tragic view, of physical courage, and of masculinity and self-sacrifice in an age when those ancient virtues are too often caricatured and dismissed. A much needed essay on why rare men would prefer death to dishonor, and would perish in the hope that others thereby might live.

Last but not least is Brandon Weichert’s Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower. Brandon is a brilliant strategic analyst and an adviser to several parts of the US military, and he has a unique understanding of how our future security depends on space. Here’s what Dennis Prager had to say about it:

There are many good books published each year, but few truly important ones. This book is truly important. If America fails to heed this warning, it will no longer be the world’s superpower. And that will be a calamity not just for America, but for mankind and the cause of freedom on Earth.