RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/10/26/how-a-kgb-double-agent-saved-britain-won-the-cold-war-for-the-west/

In his new book The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War, veteran espionage historian Ben MacIntyre confirms a troubling decision—or lack thereof—that some had suspected for years. This is the fact that in 1983 the man overseeing both British spy services MI6 and MI5, head of British Civil Service Robert Armstrong, knew that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s main opponent in the upcoming election was a KGB agent and did not tell her.

Labor Party leader, member of Parliament, and former employment secretary Michael Foot had been a paid KGB agent for decades, and was still on the KGB books as an agent of influence when he headed the British Labor Party and ran against Thatcher for leadership of England in 1983. Foot would have become prime minister if Labor had won.

MI6 told MI5, its domestic sister agency, and MI5 told Armstrong, but Armstrong kept Foot’s duplicity to himself. Nobody informed Thatcher. According to MacIntyre:

[Armstrong] did not tell Margaret Thatcher or her other top advisers; he did not tell anyone in the Civil Service, the Conservative Party, or the Labour Party. He did not tell the Americans, or any other of Britain’s allies. He did not tell a soul. Having been passed the unexploded bomb, the cabinet secretary put it in his pocket, and kept it there, in the hope that Foot would lose, and the problem would defuse itself. [MI6 operative] Veronica Price was blunt: ‘We buried it.’

With what seems in hindsight a misguided sense of higher duty and a display of undemocratic arrogance, Armstrong put the British Commonwealth in the position of possibly electing a genuine KGB agent as prime minister—a fact its intelligence services knew and did nothing about. MacIntyre confirms this state of affairs from multiple sources. Thankfully, Thatcher and the Tories won in 1983.

https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2018/10/our-orwellian-tax-code
A review of Liberal Suppression: Section 501(c)(3) and the Taxation of Speech by Philip Hamburger

Anyone who has ever been audited by the IRS—no, let’s check that. Anyone who has ever lived in fear of being audited (now I’ve got everyone’s attention) knows well that there is more to the tax code than even its voluminous girth suggests. Still, would even the most cynical among us suppose that the code, in just one of its most promiscuous provisions, reflects the uniquely American history of left-wing hostility to free speech?

Philip Hamburger would.

To be sure, the Columbia Law School scholar is better described as erudite than cynical. Professor Hamburger is best known in recent times for his deep dive into modern government’s sprawling, unaccountable fourth branch, Is Administrative Law Unlawful? (Spoiler: Yes!). But his oeuvre has long focused on another topic, similarly consequential to popular sovereignty in our constitutional republic: liberalism. Liberalism not just in the classical sense of being liberty-minded, but liberalism in the political connotation: the nigh-antithesis of liberty-mindedness, most familiar to contemporary Americans as progressivism (and, if I may interject, about as progressive as it is liberal).

In his latest offering, Liberal Suppression: Section 501(c)(3) and the Taxation of Speech, Hamburger builds on the scholarship of his 2000 law review article, “Liberality,” which unfolds the phenomenon of liberalism as more attitude than ideology….

The unexpected but entirely apt framework for the story is a dryly worded, decades-old statute which, as is the Orwellian wont of the tax code, taketh away in the same breath as it giveth. Section 501(c)(3) permits an exemption from taxation to nonprofit business entities, referred to throughout the book as “idealistic” organizations to encapsulate their broad-ranging religious, cultural, educational, and social missions—organizations such as the one that publishes this magazine, for instance.