RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/the-great-resenter/

THE GREAT RESENTER

Patricia O’Toole’s The Moralist is yet another hagiographic account of the mission and martyrdom of Woodrow Wilson, the patron saint of American internationalists. With minor variations, O’Toole sticks to the Received Account as told by John Milton Cooper in Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (2009) and by A. Scott Berg in Wilson (2013). In this view, the 28th president came close to ushering in the millennium after World War I, but his prickly self-righteousness lost the great moment. Under the diabolic influence of Republican Henry Cabot Lodge, the story goes, the Senate refused to ratify the League of Nations treaty that Wilson had brought back from the Versailles Peace Conference. Wilson then destroyed his health in a desperate effort to persuade the American public about the League, and the world plunged back into a dark age of atavistic nationalism. O’Toole, whose previous books include biographies of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Adams, thinks of Wilson as a moralist rather than a politician, and attributes his failure to a combination of excessive high-mindedness and an inadequate blood flow to the brain that ultimately led to his incapacitating stroke in October 1919. She deduces the latter from the translucence of the president’s ears upon his return from Versailles.

It is quite wrong to speak, as this book’s subtitle does, of the world that Woodrow Wilson made, for he made no world at all; he merely signed the Versailles Treaty by which Britain’s David Lloyd George and France’s Georges Clemenceau turned the Great War into the opening salvo of a new Thirty Years’ War. So utterly utopian was Wilson’s vision that it is unfair to characterize the internationalism of Bill Clinton or George W. Bush as “Wilsonian.” Clinton and Bush threw America’s weight around after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but they did not propose—as Wilson did—to replace America’s sovereign decision-making with a global council. Wilson’s League of Nations was closer to the conspiracy theorists’ notion of the United Nations. The commonplace belief that minor concessions on his part would have won ratification of the League of Nations treaty is untenable.

* * *

Wilson was a latecomer to the matter of collective security. William Howard Taft, whom he defeated in the 1912 presidential election, formed the League to Enforce Peace in 1915, which proposed a collective security agreement that pledged members to arbitration and to wield economic and military force against aggressors. Wilson’s nemesis of 1919, Henry Cabot Lodge, endorsed Taft’s League the following year, remarking that “[p]robably it will be impossible to stop all wars, but it certainly will be possible to stop some wars and thus diminish their number.” Wilson at that time still was reluctant to enter World War I, to the frustration of hawks like Theodore Roosevelt.

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.