RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/becoming-review-the-sound-of-striving-1542066271?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=4&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

Like all VIP memoirs, “Becoming,” Michelle Robinson Obama’s foreordained best seller, has many subtexts. Record-straightening, reputation-cleansing, friend-thanking and foe-bashing: It’s all there and already warming the hearts of the former first lady’s millions of devotees, among them the international press. But “Becoming” has considerable value for more skeptical readers, not so much for its depictions of familiar headline events but for its narrative vividness and its insight, some of it unwitting, into recent racial and cultural history.

Mrs. Obama was raised on the South Side of Chicago in the mid-1960s into a bygone world of black, working-class aspiration. “I spent much of my childhood listening to the sound of striving,” she begins, referring to the struggling piano students taught by her exacting great aunt in the apartment below the one occupied by her father (a boiler attendant at a water-treatment plant), her homemaker mother, her older brother and her small self. The family, descended from South Carolina slaves, had come to Chicago as part of the Great Migration in the 1930s, though political and union leaders continued to deny black men entry to the city’s well-paid industrial jobs. Her aging great uncle, a former Pullman porter, insisted on his dignity, wearing suspenders, dress shirts and a fedora even when mowing the lawn.

A feisty child, as she readily confesses, Michelle learned to discipline her energies through the gentle nudges of her orderly and watchful parents. “My family was my world, the center of everything,” she explains. Holiday meals took place at her grandfather’s house two blocks away; there were family board games and trips to the drive-in as well as summer vacations at Dukes Happy Holiday Resort in western Michigan. “Leave It to Beaver” is what her Hawaiian-born, peripatetic future husband would call her childhood.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

“As the sun slanted toward the west, the cries of plovers and curlews echoed off the hills

and the breeze carried a tang of burning peat from the hearth of a far-off cottage.”

Robert Harris

The Thirty-one Kings

Richard Hannay was the creation of John Buchan, Lord Tweedsmuir as he became known. Buchan was born in Scotland in 1875. He was a product of a time when chivalry was a powerful force, when war was viewed heroically, before the slaughter at the Somme, Verdun, Passchendaele and Meuse Argonne. Buchan was a novelist, historian and politician who was serving as Governor General of Canada at the time of his death in 1940. Hannay, his character, is a Scotsman who bears the traits of a Victorian gentleman. During the Great War, Mr. Buchan wrote three novels in which Richard Hannay appeared:The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), Greenmantle(1916), and Mr. Standfast(1918). Two more Hannay novels were published after the War:The Three Hostages(1924) and The Island of Sheep(1936). In a posthumously published novel, Sick Heart River (1941),Buchan predicted that Hannay and his friends would be going back into action, as clouds of war descended over Europe. Mr. Harris has provided that opportunity. Readers of a certain age will recall those novels, along with the Alfred Hitchcock 1935 movie, “The Thirty-Nine Steps”starring Robert Donat. The book has never been out of print.

Robert Harris was asked by Polygon, which currently publishes Buchan’s books, to create a new series. The Thirty-one Kingsis the first. Like Buchan, Harris is a Scotsman, a graduate of St. Andrews, a classicist, historian, popular author and designer of the fantasy board and digital game “Talisman.” The rubric at the top of the page indicates how closely he mimics John Buchan.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/11/armistice-day-spitfire-pilot-remembers/

Geoffrey Wellum’s memoir does not glorify war. On the contrary it demonstrates its folly, cruelty and tragedy. On this day, November 11, it also serves as a reminder of all who bent their will to persist with something they hated in the name of a noble cause.

I have only just discovered First Light by Geoffrey Wellum. Published in 2002, it is an account of the author’s experiences as an RAF fighter pilot in 1940-43. It is based on notes he kept at the time, but which lay dormant for nearly forty years before he was able to confront and write about his memories of that time.

It is one of the most authentic books I have read about the Battle of Britain and the early war years as seen through the eyes of a young Spitfire pilot. It is not a gung-ho “Biggles” adventure, quite the reverse. Rather it provides an unfolding tragedy as a young man with a passion for aircraft and flying is caught up in the horrors of war. Pain and sadness soon replace excitement and exhilaration.

Wellum left school aged 17 in 1938 and in early 1939 was accepted as a trainee pilot by the RAF. After a brief period of instruction, first flying a Tiger Moth biplane and then graduating to the lumbering American-built Harvard, his training was suddenly cut short and he found himself posted to an operational fighter squadron. It was the time of the Dunkirk evacuation. As Churchill put it, the Battle of France was over and the Battle of Britain was about to begin. The RAF’s fighter squadrons had been losing pilots all through the Battle of France (especially those flying early model Hurricanes against the latest Messchersmitt 109s), and Wellum and his colleagues at the training schools were drafted into the real world up to a year before they would normally have been considered ready.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/peace-at-last-review-remembering-flanders-fields-1541968562

Of all the British traditions, the observance of Remembrance Day, which marks the end of World War I on Nov. 11, 1918, is surely the most poignant and deep-rooted. Every year, millions gather in churches or public squares—or take part in somber parades—to commemorate not merely the 900,000 or so British and Empire men who died in 1914-18 but also the British war dead since. For the two weeks or so leading up to the day, an imitation poppy—the flower of Flanders, where most of the British losses in the Great War were suffered—is widely worn. It is a sober, moving day, a fixture in the national calendar.

The original Armistice Day, as Guy Cuthbertson shows in “Peace at Last,” was very different from the current Remembrance Day. It was characterized by striking contrasts. On the Western Front, the morning started as usual, with continued small-arms and artillery fire as the Allies made their final “push.” The last British soldier to be killed in action was George Edwin Ellison, a middle-aged man with the Royal Irish Lancers who fell at Mons, in Belgium, near where he had been involved in some of the first fighting at the start of the war in August 1914. His death, like those of the other men who were killed on the war’s last couple of days, has often been described as futile, because the combatant countries had by then agreed on a precise timetable for the cessation of fighting. In fact, hostilities continued up to the last hour to ensure that the Germans did not wriggle out of their armistice obligations, which were effectively terms of surrender.

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Hemingways-Jewish-bullfighter-571011

Nostrils flare dripping with venomous anger, the eyes are big, onyx and lifeless; crimson blood pours from its back consecrating the arena; the front hooves beat the ground relentlessly as dust, sweat and rage hang heavy in the afternoon sun; it snorts and roars with contempt; the head, crowned with piercing horns, is lowered; and the pent-up energy is unleashed with a furious charge at the taunting matador who turns on his axis elegantly to enshroud the incensed bull in his blood red cape as man and beast engage in a choreographed macabre dance of death.

It was at the Pamplona Fiesta in Spain in the 1920s that Hemingway fell in love with the metaphysics of bullfighting, which became a metaphor for his search for meaning and the essence of life and death. The result of this quasi-religious experience was his masterpiece Death in the Afternoon.

Not surprisingly, Hemingway intensely admired Sidney Franklin, a sublime bullfighter, who was born in Brooklyn, New York to Orthodox Jewish parents. Writing in Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway said, “Franklin is brave with a cold, serene and intelligent valor, but instead of being awkward and ignorant, he is one of the most skillful, graceful and slow manipulators of a cape fighting today. His repertoire with the cape is enormous, but he does not attempt by a varied repertoire to escape from the performance of the veronica as the base of his cape work and his veronicas are classical, very emotional, and beautifully timed and executed. You will find no Spaniard who ever saw him fight who will deny his artistry and excellence with the cape.” Hemingway adds, “He is a better, more scientific, more intelligent, and more finished matador than all but about six of the full matadors in Spain today and the bullfighters know it and have the utmost respect for him.”

In his book Double-Edged Sword: The Many Lives of Hemingway’s Friend, the American Matador Sidney Franklin, Paul Bart observes that Death in the Afternoon describes Franklin as having the “ability in languages, the cold courage and the ability to command of the typical soldier of fortune.”

“Yet Franklin wasn’t any kind of soldier,” writes Bart, “resembling instead the womanly Europa in the classical Greek myth where Zeus disguises himself as a bull to rape Europa.” Benjamin Ivry expands on the theme of rape when he writes that Franklin’s bullfighting career was punctuated by genuine violations of his body. In a particularly horrific 1930 episode requiring multiple surgeries, a dying bull’s horn “caught Sidney at the base of his tailbone, plunging into his abdominal cavity through the rectum, piercing the sphincter muscle and large intestine.” Franklin repeatedly risked similar gory disasters long after this 1930 catastrophe.

https://www.city-journal.org/winston-churchill-biography

Churchill: Walking with Destiny, by Andrew Roberts (Penguin, 1,152 pp., $40)

Greatness is terrifying. The ancients understood this, but nowadays, we forget. Even after Alexander the Great’s death, the mere sight of a statue of him frightened one of his generals. When a tribune of the plebs tried to stop Caesar from breaking into Rome’s public treasury, Caesar threatened to kill him, adding, “You surely know, young man, that it is more unpleasant for me to say this than to do it.”

Plutarch, who reports this story, had no illusions about the interplay of sunshine and shadow in the lives of the noble Greeks and Romans. Now, like a modern Plutarch, Andrew Roberts gives us a biography in the round of Winston Churchill, one of the last century’s leading men. Roberts’s brilliant new book is not only learned and sagacious but also thrilling and fun. An award-winning historian and biographer, an expert on statecraft, leadership, and the Second World War, Roberts writes with authority and confidence. Enriched by such previously unseen material as King George VI’s wartime diaries, Walking with Destiny should stand as the definitive one-volume Churchill biography.

An infinitely more genial character than Alexander or Caesar, and much more respectful of constitutional limitations, Churchill nonetheless could be every bit as unreasonable. And, as Roberts points out, his pugnacity wasn’t always in the service of a good cause. He remained a convinced imperialist, for example, long after the inhabitants of Britain’s colonies sought independence. He opposed women’s suffrage. He underestimated Japanese military ability in 1942, largely because of his bigotry. His numerous military misjudgments spanned two world wars, and included sticking with the Gallipoli Campaign after its sell-by date in March 1915 and describing the rugged Italian Peninsula in 1943 as a soft underbelly. Yet Churchill got it right when it most mattered, on the three biggest threats to democracy: Prussian militarism, Nazism, and Soviet Communism.

https://quillette.com/2018/11/02/an-

A review of An Imaginary Racism: Islamophobia and Guilt by Pascal Bruckner. Polity (November 2018), 204 pages.

It is embarrassingly easy to write about the collapse of the Left in the twenty-first century. The explosion in identity politics that has led to the automatic use of “white” as an ethnic insult in condemnations such as “white privilege” and “white, straight men” has made race as defining a factor in left-wing politics as it is in extreme right-wing politics. Meanwhile, the willingness to excuse antisemitsm, misogyny, tyranny, and obscurantism, as long as the antisemitic, misogynistic, tyrannical obscurantists are anti-Western, has called into question whether leftists—or at least the noisiest voices on the Left—have lost all connection to their better values.

I have said as much many times, and in his new book the French political theorist Pascal Bruckner says it again. Bruckner once struck me as the best the French intelligentsia had to offer. In 2007, he provoked an intellectual scandal with the “Racism of the Anti-Racists”, an essay for Sign and Sight, in which he excoriated liberals who denied Ayaan Hirsi Ali and other Muslim dissidents the rights they took for granted. Meanwhile, I admired his Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism enough to call it “a brilliant defence of liberalism and a deservedly contemptuous assault on all those intellectuals who have betrayed its best values.”

The title of Bruckner’s new polemic ought to have warned me that betrayal is not an exclusively left-wing vice. Far from being a principled defence of liberal and secular values, An Imaginary Racism: Islamophobia and Guilt is an unconscious illustration of how easily those who profess to hold enlightened ideals can slip into the ethnic favouritism and intellectual double-standards of the counter-Enlightenment.

Most liberal Muslims and ex-Muslims recoil from the word “Islamophobia.” TellMama, the main monitoring centre for violence and abuse against British Muslims, fought a doomed campaign to enshrine the use of “anti-Muslim hatred” instead. Hard won experience had taught its activists that “Islamophobia” was a weapon in the arsenal of the Islamist Right. Opposing bigotry with the language of bigots, who sought to re-define criticism of religion as racism, struck them as self-defeating to put it mildly.

TellMama keeps its office address secret. Its workers receive threats, not only from white racists, but also from Islamists. (They have taken advice from Jews who monitor antisemitic violence in Britain, and gay rights campaigners who monitor homophobia, and are thus damned in the eyes of the fanatical.) If all Bruckner wanted to do was to criticise the use of the term “Islamophobia” to incite violence against freethinkers and feminists who challenge clerical power, he would be performing a useful service—albeit one that has been performed many times before. But his book is representative of our debased times because it’s far from clear that Bruckner can extend his opposition to Islamism to cover the purveyors of anti-Muslim bigotry.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/11/muhammads-bloody-creed/

Islamic groups, leftists and empty-headed multiculturalists did everything they could to foil the publication of Robert Spencer’s new book on the history of jihad. No wonder. With the possible exception of thuggee stranglers, there has never been a religion more devoted to rape, murder and conquest.
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Once upon a time in a primitive land of polytheist idolaters far, far away, an egomaniac zealot with high ambitions hit on a bright idea. On learning of the ancient Jewish prophecy of a Messiah, and the newish Christian communities’ worship of Jesus as the “Chosen One”, he decided to nominate himself as the latest in the line – the Messenger of Allah and the Seal of the Prophets. If the Angel Gabriel could give the name ‘Jesus’ to Mary, why couldn’t Gabriel be recruited to authenticate Muhammad’s pronouncements?

The polytheists who worshipped 360 idols in the Ka’aba of Mecca thought this was fake news and made life difficult for the would-be prophet-poet. In thirteen years he attracted only 150 followers. So he decamped to another town. The Jews of Medina first welcomed him as a protector, but after they heard his story about travelling to Jerusalem and then to Paradise on a winged white horse with a human head, and questioned him on religion, they declared him a phony. Muhammad decided a new business model was needed: conversion by the sword. Beginning as a highwayman raiding passing caravans, he invented a unique rallying cry: “Allahu Akbar!” (My) God is the Greatest! The shout inspired his followers to kill, loot and enslave. It continues to terrify the world 1400 years. later.

I have paraphrased and simplified a complicated and disputed history of the origins of the most powerful movement the world has seen. Nobody can be certain of these events because the first account, by Ibn Ashaq, relying on hearsay and legend, was not set down until a hundred years later. But what is clear from Islam’s texts is that Muhammad set himself up as spokesman for Allah and, therefore, gatekeeper to hell and paradise. What sets Islam apart from Western notions of warfare, and the horrific excesses of the most brutal dictatorships (which it resembles), is that holy war is a central tenet, waged essentially for spiritual reward. Often seemingly irrationally. But before his death Muhammad could claim: “I have been made victorious with terror.”

That is the important message in Robert Spencer’s new book, The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS. Heavily documented but eminently readable, its magisterial sweep reveals Jihad as a holy war to convert the world, or at least compel non-believers into submission. From the Battle of Badr in 624 to the latest suicide bombing or vehicle ram-raid, there has been a continuum of atrocities with a single purpose. The immense extent of the horrors of jihad are largely unknown, or have been forgotten. For too many, especially those in authority, they have been conveniently ignored, as they welcome millions of migrants into their midst.