RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quillette.com/2018/12/03/the-unsafe-feminist-rebecca-
The Unsafe Feminist: Rebecca West and the ‘Bitter Rapture’ of Truth

In an era when indulgent university administrators and professors treat students like spoiled children, one longs for intellectuals who address their audience as adults. The British novelist, biographer, literary critic, travel writer and political commentator Rebecca West (1892-1983) is the tonic we need. Like other great authors of the 20th century—including George Orwell and Doris Lessing—West never received a university education. That may help explain her intellectual non-conformism and free-wheeling spirit.

West brushed against orthodoxy like barbed wire against chiffon. She was a suffragist who rejected pacifism in the First World War (and the Second); a leftist who fought communism; an internationalist who spoke up for small nations; an individualist who valued authority and tradition. West never crouched in one position. She was unflinchingly realistic. Human conflict, she said, is inescapable. It is as much a feature of art as it is of states. Eros, too, creates antagonism, for sex is dangerous. Yet human co-operation is ubiquitous. Women and men need each other, and can and do love each other. A feminism that treats women as if they were vulnerable children, and that blames a man for a woman’s own irresponsibility, was seen by West as absurd. Needless to say, her attitude to life is as far from the nursery-school feminism of today’s university—smothering, alarmist, bureaucratic—as it is possible to be.

Freedom carries obligations, West believed—the first of which is to grow up. “I believe in liberty,” she declared in a 1952 credo, particularly the liberty of a person to “be able to say and do what he wishes and what is within his power.” Because every individual is unique, each person “must know some things which are known to nobody else.” The transmission of such knowledge, which “could not be learned from any other source,” requires a space in which people are able to speak their minds.

The contrast between a state of innocence and a mature comprehension of life’s intractable demands (the “hard task of being adult,” as she put it in her 1931 book Ending in Earnest) is central to Rebecca West’s philosophy. We do not expect children to be active in politics; we protect children from politics. Nor do we consider adults who behave like children to be competent human agents. Maturity is the sine qua non of liberty because a pluralist society, unlike an authoritarian one, requires actors of independent mind who can draw a distinction between their civic responsibilities and private sentiments, who are sufficiently restrained to care for the world even as they pursue their own pleasures, and who are willing to take on onerous public burdens. Like great art, the liberal pursuit of freedom demands intelligence and discernment—a readiness “to test the veracity” of fantasies that all of us harbor to some degree and to evaluate “their importance in the light of the intellect.”

Maturity is evidenced, in short, where individuals embrace the “bitter rapture which attends the discovery of any truth,” and where they would rather be disconsolate in “communion with reality” than comforted by orthodoxy. West’s thesis is reminiscent of German social scientist Max Weber’s belief that a politics of responsibility requires “realistic passion.” What marks a mature person (ein reifer Mensch), Weber wrote in Politics as a Vocation (1919), is an attitude of principled realism enabling one to bear the perversity of the world without succumbing to cynicism.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/12/03/the-tales-of-adventure-and-romance-behind-world-war-iis-flying-tigers/

Good review with a poor end- a ridiculous conclusion “There are many differences, but parallels exist between what Chennault did for China in World War II and what T.E. Lawrence did for the Great Arab Revolt in World War I. Remnants of both men’s efforts live on to this day. Chiang’s Kuomintang governed for decades in Taiwan, and exists now as an opposition party in a multi-party democracy. The remaining Hashemites from Prince Faisal’s family rule over the Kingdom of Jordan, an island of stability in a turbulent region.” Huh????rsk

A new history by Sam Kleiner, ‘The Flying Tigers: The Untold Story of the American Pilots Who Waged a Secret War Against Japan,’ tells the story of how some of America’s most legendary pilots and mercenaries helped win Word War II.

Before appeasement at Munich, before the invasion of Poland, before Dunkirk, and before the attack on Pearl Harbor, one American man was already fighting in World War II. That man’s name was Claire Chennault. His story, and that of his American Volunteer Group (AVG), is the subject of The Flying Tigers: The Untold Story of the American Pilots Who Waged a Secret War Against Japan, a fascinating new book by historian Sam Kleiner about the eponymous pilots.

The Flying Tigers, formally the AVG, recruited members mostly from the American Navy, Marines, and Army. Their covert actions began eight months before Pearl Harbor, and were authorized by President Franklin Roosevelt without the knowledge of the isolationist Congress. These men wanted to fight, to see the world, and to be paid well to do it.

So they resigned from the military, left their bases, and were contracted under the authority of the Chinese government to battle Imperial Japan. Readers unfamiliar with the group may recall the iconic images of their P-40 Tomahawk fighter planes, purchased by the Chinese through a third-party corporation, whose noses the airmen painted with shark teeth and eyes.

Sent halfway around the world, these roughly 100 pilots and their ground crew flagrantly violated their country’s official neutrality and trained in Burma during the second half of 1941. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, they were perfectly positioned to enter combat, to keep China in the fight against Japan, and to ensure that America’s enemy could not focus all of its might on a shaken and unready United States.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/11/bonginos_emspygateem_exposing_the_obamaclinton_deep_state_criminality.html

Former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino’s explosive new book (with D.C. McAllister), Spygate: The Attempted Sabotage of Donald J. Trump, spotlights the left’s broken trust with the American people and the blatant criminality of the Obama/Clinton Deep State. Since the moment Donald J. Trump and his wife Melania glided down the Trump Tower escalator into history, the Democrats and the allies in the Deep State have been committed to crushing him.

For Trump, it was obvious that draining the swamp was never going to be easy because everything possible would be done to disguise and protect the illegal activities of the Obama/Clinton administration. But who thought they would go this far?

Bongino has painted a highly detailed account of how the Obama administration criminalized our intelligence communities as well as other government agencies to stop Trump, and when that didn’t work to try and bring down the president of the United States.

The book relies heavily on left-leaning news outlets CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Reuters, CBS News, The Hill, London-based The Guardian and numerous others. All of this is carefully footnoted in the book. In a recent speech, Bongino said,

“The reason I wrote the book, is because of this whole spy scandal, this debacle, this atrocious disgrace of a scandal that happened to our president. We deliberately did not use footnotes from right-leaning resources. I used (the mainstream media) because anyone who tells you oh, this didn’t happen, just go to the footnotes and say, did you read this article? It happened, folks. The President of the United States had the intelligence community and the law enforcement community of the United States, at the highest levels, weaponized against him.” [emphasis added]

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/11/robert-conquest-human-spirit-c
COMMUNISM AND THE COLD WAR-ON ROBERT CONQUEST- THE BEST HISTORIAN ON THE SUBJECT RSK

Robert Conquest (left) was an extraordinary man in the seamless way he combined his literary with his historical endeavours. He was also a notable public figure in British, European and Western life. I first heard a poem by Robert Conquest when I was thirteen years old and an English master at my school read out the “Excerpt of a Report to the Galactic Council”. So I knew him as a poet many years before I had any idea about the astonishing contribution he made to the analysis of Soviet totalitarianism.

The book that made a worldwide impact for him was The Great Terror, published in 1968. We all now use the term “the Great Terror”. Robert Conquest invented it. It was used only privately in Russia before communism started to collapse. Now it is used generally. Millions of people were killed in 1937 and 1938. Millions of people were also killed, starved or otherwise abused both before and after, but especially in that two-year period of the Great Terror. The euphemism that was applied to it was the period of the cult of the individual. Robert Conquest tore down the veil of preposterous euphemism and called things by their names. His poetry, for all its wonderful refinement, is similar in its determination to use plain words when plain words will do. The basic Conquest interpretation of totalitarianism is one with which I overwhelmingly agree.

That fine book, The Great Terror, was welcomed by people who accepted a fundamental set of ideas. This was that the USSR had invented a one-party, one-ideology terror-based state that poured people into its Gulag labour camps; that it systematically built up propaganda in favour of militant atheism; that it practised legal nihilism—these ideas were fundamental to Robert Conquest’s oeuvre. The remarkable achievement of the book was that it was welcomed by people along the political spectrum from Trotskyists through the middle of Western political life to the further reaches of the political Right.

Robert Conquest was an open-ended writer. You could read him and find out what you wanted for yourself. But when reading him, you could not overlook his essential message that there was something utterly rotten about how the Soviet model had originated and developed in Russia and how it was spread, not just to one or two countries, but to a third of the world in the six decades after the October revolution.

As a public figure, Robert Conquest insisted that something had to be done about removing the communist blight. The result was that whereas he was welcomed for having written The Great Terror, he was shunned and disliked by many who rejected his appeal for action against communism worldwide. He urged that it simply wasn’t right for Western policy to ignore the fate of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and the countries to the west of those Baltic States. He declared that a much firmer Western policy was morally and practically desirable. And he pursued this objective throughout his literary and political life, a life which made him a controversial figure.

He is no longer controversial, for the basic reason that most of his ideas now form part of the conventional wisdom. They weren’t greeted in this way at the time when he was first expressing them. He had to stand up for them against a blizzard of criticism.

https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2018/11/eternally-ours
On the world’s favorite ruin, occasioned by the publication of The Rome We Have Lost, by John Pemble.

Her inhabitants are allowed to grumble. And so they do: about traffic, trash, politicians, potholes—and tourists. But tourists to Rome have reasons to feel cheerful. For one thing, the very impact of tourism is, in relative terms, not too bad. Unlike Venice or Florence, Rome has been absorbing large numbers of visitors, rich and poor, for over a millennium. And since most secular pilgrims nowadays content themselves with just a few sights—the Colosseum, the Trevi Fountain, the Sistine Chapel—many of the city’s absorbing attractions, such as the Palazzo Massimo museum, remain pleasantly unthronged. Further causes for happiness are readily listed according to individual preference. Some find the prevailing palette of civic decor, with its basis of yellow ocher, incomparably soothing to the eye. Others will applaud the proliferation of vendors specializing in artisanal ice cream, or the fact that even in the centro storico one can get a genuine cappuccino at a bar for little more than a euro. Capitals elsewhere vaunt more vertiginous architectural drama. But Wordsworth begs to be corrected. In terms of an urban panorama, surely earth has not anything to show so fair as Rome’s skyline viewed from the terrace of the Capitoline Museums.

And yet there is no place like Rome for inducing melancholia. Psychologically, to those who immerse themselves in it, the city is depressing. Sigmund Freud—who immersed himself repeatedly—noted that effect without diagnosing the cause. It may have perplexed him, since he also recognized the contentment of exploring ancient ruins—a return (of course) to the bourn of a maternal embrace. Rome is always feminine, thus the eternal mother. Yet eternity unsettles us. If only the city would crumble. If only it would obey the laws of vegetable growth and decay, or else have the decency to fossilize like Troy and Nineveh. If only Rome were to match those other great cities of Classical antiquity, Athens and Alexandria, and fashion of its past glory a definable museum. Then we might take some comfort from observing the limits of longevity. But Rome resists those expectations. Mere mortals may strut along the Corso now. Soon enough they must stagger, then collapse. The street has seen it all before, and will see it all again. So this city, unlike any other, tells us that our lives are carved in water.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/12/03/corrosion-of-conservatism-book-review/

The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right, by Max Boot (Liveright, 288 pp., $24.95)

Those who have been left unsated by the multipart series that the Washington Post is currently running on Max Boot’s evolving voting preferences will be overjoyed to learn that Boot has spun his thoughts into a full-length book, The Corrosion of Conservatism, in which he switches away from his usual topic, foreign policy, and reflects at length on the question of whether he can still use the same words to describe himself as he once did. If that sort of thing appeals to you, the book will too. If you can think of nothing less interesting than the endless auto-examination that is the hallmark of journalists in our age, it will not. I am unabashedly in the latter camp.

Unlike, say, his colleague Jennifer Rubin, Max Boot has not actually changed his mind about the core political questions of our era. Rather, he has decided that most of the people with whom he has historically teamed up are appalling, that they are defective in some way, and that this reflects so badly upon their party that it must be de­stroyed. Alas, this renders the book rather dull — more a treatise on personality than an exploration of ideas. Throughout, Boot insists that he is on an “ideological journey” that has led him to sort out “what makes sense and what doesn’t in the conservative Weltanschauung.” And yet, in the final chapter, he reveals that he still believes almost everything that he believed before. What’s changed is that he doesn’t like the GOP anymore.

A more accurate title for the book would be “I Don’t Like the Republican Party at the Moment,” but I suspect that nobody would have published that. And so, in an attempt to ram yet another “I hate Trump” book into the ideas category, we are treated to a tale of “conversion” that is almost entirely semantic. There is only so much that even gifted and intelligent writers can spin out of a story that begins and ends with “I changed my party registration last year . . . ”

As political analysts, we are drawn to people who argue “against interest” — or, more prosaically put, who “swing” in their partisan preferences. Boot, who likes to button his declarations with the reminder that he Used to Be a Repub­lican!, clearly wants us to see him in this light, and wants us to take his admonitions seriously as a result. But the tactic falls flat in the execution, for, by the end of his book, it has become painfully clear that Boot has sacrificed very little by walking away from the GOP. As he was before his great awakening, Boot remains a non-religious, pro-choice, pro-gay-marriage, socially liberal, pro–New Deal “Eisenhower Republican” who considers that climate change requires harsh government action; hopes for strict gun control, including a ban on “assault weapons”; remains warm toward markets and trade; and favors an aggressive and interventionist foreign policy. Which . . . well, makes him precisely the sort of the person who would have been able to weather a Hillary Clinton presidency without too much fear — or, given her more hawkish instincts and views on abortion, guns, religious liberty, and welfare spending, would have arguably preferred it.