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The Gulag Archipelago: A New Foreword by Jordan B. Peterson written by Jordan B. Peterson

By on November 2nd, 2018

https://quillette.com/2018/11/01/the-gulag

Editor’s note: The following essay is Jordan B. Peterson’s new foreword to the new edition of The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Penguin, November 2018, 544 pages). Reproduced with the kind permission of the author.

Once we have taken up the word, it is thereafter impossible to turn away: A writer is no detached judge of his countrymen and contemporaries; he is an accomplice to all the evil committed in his country or by his people. And if the tanks of his fatherland have bloodied the pavement of a foreign capital, then rust-colored stains have forever bespattered the writer’s face. And if on some fateful night a trusting Friend is strangled in his sleep—then the palms of the writer bear the bruises from that rope. And if his youthful fellow citizens nonchalantly proclaim the advantages of debauchery over humble toil, if they abandon themselves to drugs, or seize hostages—then this stench too is mingled with the breath of the writer. Have we the insolence to declare that we do not answer for the evils of today’s world?…

The simple act of an ordinary brave man is not to participate in lies, not to support false actions! His rule: Let that come into the world, let it even reign supreme—only not through me. But it is within the power of writers and artists to do much more: to defeat the lie! For in the struggle with lies art has always triumphed and shall always triumph! Visibly, irrefutably for all! Lies can prevail against much in this world, but never against art…

One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world.

–From the speech delivered by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to the Swedish Academy on the occasion of his acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

* * *

First, you defend your homeland against the Nazis, serving as a twice-decorated soldier on the Eastern front in the criminally ill- prepared Soviet Red Army. Then, you’re arrested, humiliated, stripped of your military rank, charged under the auspices of the all-purpose Article 58 with the dissemination of “anti-Soviet propaganda,” and dragged off to Moscow’s infamous Lubyanka prison. There, through the bars of your cell, you watch your beloved country celebrating its victory in the Great Patriotic War. Then you’re sentenced, in absentia, to eight years of hard labor (but you got away easy; it wasn’t so long afterward that people in your position were awarded a “tenner”—and then a quarter of a century!). And fate isn’t finished with you, yet—not by any means. You develop a deadly cancer in the camp, endure the exile imposed on you after your imprisonment ends, and pass very close to death.

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Geoffrey Luck: Muhammad’s Bloody Creed-Reveiw of Robert Spencer’s “The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS”

By on November 1st, 2018

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.

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How A KGB Double Agent Saved Britain And Won The Cold War For The West Historian Ben MacIntyre’s new book, ‘The Spy and the Traitor,’ tells the thrilling story of how the KGB’s Oleg Gordievsky helped check the Soviet Union as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan fought communism.By Tony Daniel

By on October 26th, 2018

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.

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Eternal Jihad: Islam Will Never, Ever Stop By Andrew E. Harrod

By on October 23rd, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/10/eternal_jihad_islam_will_never_ever_stop.html

The “West and Islam have been mortal enemies since the latter’s birth some fourteen centuries ago,” warns Islam scholar Raymond Ibrahim in his recent book Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West. His extensive analysis bears out the apt title of this volume, whose documented history is equally ill remembered and yet vital for modern Westerners.

Ibrahim begins by elucidating the disturbing conceptual core of Islam and its seventh-century Arab prophet, Muhammad. “The appeal of Muhammad’s message lay in its compatibility with the tribal mores of his society,” Ibrahim notes.

For seventh-century Arabs – and later tribal peoples, chiefly Turks and Tatars, who also found natural appeal in Islam – the tribe was what humanity is to modern people: to be part of it was to be treated humanely; to be outside of it was to be treated inhumanely.

Accordingly, Islam “deified tribalism, causing it to outlive its setting and spill into the modern era.” Islamic doctrines like al-wala’ wa al-bara’ (“loyalty and enmity”) created an umma faith community or “‘Super Tribe’ that transcends racial, national, and linguistic barriers.” Not surprisingly, the Arabic umma “is etymologically related to ‘mother’ (umm) – to one’s closest kin.”

Ibrahim “records a variety of Muslims across time and space behaving exactly like the Islamic State and for the same reasons” – namely, Islam’s promotion of warfare against non-Muslims. Islam’s deity “incites his followers to war on the promise of booty, both animate and inanimate – so much so that an entire sura, or chapter of the Koran, ‘al-Anfal,’ is named after and dedicated to the spoils of war.” Jihadists following Islamic canons thus “‘use’ or ‘loan’ their lives as part of a ‘bargain’ or ‘transaction’ – whereby Allah forgives all sins and showers them with celestial delights.”

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Compulsory Futility Beyond basic literacy and numeracy, formal schooling is a waste of time for most people, argues a contrarian. Gene Epstein

By on October 22nd, 2018

The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, by Bryan Caplan (Princeton University Press, 400 pp., $29.95)

In The Case Against Education, a persuasive indictment of his own industry, George Mason University economics professor Bryan Caplan quotes Harvard professor Steven Pinker on his teaching experience at America’s most storied institution of higher learning. “A few weeks into every semester,” says the eminent psychologist and polymath, “I face a lecture hall that is half empty, despite the fact that I am repeatedly voted a Harvard Yearbook Favorite Professor, that the lectures are not video recorded, and that they are the only source of certain material that will be on the exam.”

Pinker adds: “I don’t take it personally; it’s common knowledge that Harvard students stay away from lectures in droves.”

Such apathy is the norm. According to data cited by Caplan, 25 percent to 40 percent of college students don’t show up for class, even when attendance counts toward the grade. What share of the rest would bother to show up if that weren’t the case? As for high school students, for whom cutting class is a serious offense, two-thirds report being bored in class every day, according to a survey Caplan cites.

Caplan’s subtitle promises to explain “why the education system is a waste of time and money.” He exempts the teaching of essentials like reading, writing, and basic math, and professional and vocational programs that develop in-demand job skills. As for the rest of the curriculum, forget it. “Teach curious students about ideas and culture,” he suggests. “Leave the rest in peace and hope they come around.” The core question that Caplan addresses is why employers so richly reward high school and college degrees, when the content of the coursework has so little to do with the jobs employers offer. Yet college graduates earn substantially more than high school graduates, who earn more than high school dropouts.

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Our Orwellian tax code by Andrew C. McCarthy

By on October 21st, 2018

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.

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A martial nation needs Churchill to inspire us Daniel Johnson

By on October 17th, 2018

From Boadicea’s chariot to Britannia’s trident, the British have always been fond of martial metaphors. That is not the same as a “national obsession” with “war-worship”, which David Cameron’s former speechwriter Clare Foges, writing recently in The Times, blamed for “leading us to Brexit and the mess we are in”. She claims that our constant references to the Second World War and “the casual elision of evil bastards back then with earnest bureaucrats today” have “been poisonous to relations with Europe”. As evidence for this, Ms Foges cites the former German ambassador, Peter Ammon, who said that back in Berlin they could not believe that the British saw Germany as dominant in the EU, adding that “if you focus only on how Britain stood alone in the war, how it stood against dominating Germany, well, it is a nice story, but it does not solve any problem of today”.

For my own part, I find it revealing that someone so close to the prime minister who accidentally precipitated Brexit is still so naive about Germany’s role in the EU that she accepts such an artful gambit at face value. Mr Ammon knows perfectly well that his country’s political and economic (but not military) dominance in Europe is taken for granted by the elites of every one of the EU’s 28 member states, including his own. To admit as much in public would be a faux pas for a postwar German diplomat, but not for a British one: Sir Paul Lever, ambassador to Germany from 1997 to 2003, has written an entire book on the subject with the self-explanatory title Berlin Rules: Europe and the German Way. Sir Paul isn’t anti-German; he merely seeks to explain how the EU works. Only last month it emerged that Brussels broke its own rules by installing Martin Selmayr as Secretary-General of the European Commission. Will he now be removed from office? Of course not: Dr Selmayr is perhaps the most ardent living exponent of the ideology of European federalism, which has been an article of faith for every German chancellor since Adenauer and is now largely enshrined in EU law. Many Continental Europeans accept this fait accompli as the natural order of things. As far as they are concerned, Berlin rules OK.

What, though, about the war, and the part played in it by Britain — what Ambassador Ammon called “a nice story”? Is it really no more than that? Are we deluding ourselves with our habit of “war-wallowing”, to which Ms Foges cheerfully pleads guilty? Have we, in fact, constructed our entire national identity on the basis of a convenient untruth, a necessary fiction — or even a deliberate lie?

That, in a nutshell, is the argument of a new book by Peter Hitchens: The Phoney Victory: The World War II Delusion (IB Tauris, £17.99). Dedicated to his father, a Royal Navy commander, this white-hot polemic is intended to expose those who unnecessarily plunged the British people into a catastrophic war for which they were unprepared and for which they paid the price: a pyrrhic victory that bankrupted the economy, reduced a global empire to an American satellite and sacrificed much that had made Britain great.

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Lionel Trilling’s Jewish Problem A leading light of the famous New York Intellectuals harbored deeply conflicted feelings about his own Jewishness, and exceptionally harsh views on Jews and Judaism. Edward Alexander

By on October 16th, 2018

https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2018/10/lionel-trillings-jewish-problem/

Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) was the grand master of America’s “Age of Criticism.” A renowned literary authority who taught for many years at Columbia University, Trilling was an influential member of the grouping that came to be known as the New York Intellectuals, a highly respected voice in public arguments concerning matters social, cultural, and political—and a Jew with (to put it mildly) conflicted views on Jews and Judaism.

While a full biography of Trilling remains to be written, he makes a central appearance in numerous studies of intellectual and political culture in mid-20th-century America as well as in memoirs by his wife Diana Trilling and by many friends, colleagues, students, and sparring partners. There is also a collection of his major essays, The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent (edited by Leon Wieseltier, 2000). And now, most recently, both the man and his work speak for themselves in Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling. The volume is edited by Adam Kirsch, an accomplished critic and poet and himself the author of an earlier brief study, Why Trilling Matters (2011).

Life in Culture, a kind of epistolary biography, consists of 270 letters culled from the thousands available. All of them but one were written by Trilling himself; there is none by his interlocutors, though Trilling does frequently quote passages from their letters in the course of grappling with their thoughts. Kirsch helpfully identifies these interlocutors, but the book lacks a glossary, and Kirsch’s own annotations are minimal—a possible obstacle for readers unacquainted with the persons, the issues, or the circumstances being addressed.

Trilling was a prodigious correspondent, who once estimated that he wrote about 600 letters a year. That he was also a generous correspondent I can testify as a former student whose letters he never failed to answer (and for whom he also performed two remarkable acts of personal kindness). Nor did he fastidiously decline to respond to non-literary people asking for advice about “writing” from a famous English professor; to the contrary, as Life in Culture demonstrates, they would get wise and feeling replies.

Many of the letters in Kirsch’s book are copious, and some are of enormous length, especially when Trilling is engaged in argument and quoting his adversary in full or near-full. From Kirsch’s selections, three major themes emerge: Trilling’s politics; his ambivalence about his own literary vocation (is he a critic, or a novelist?); and his permanently uneasy relation to Jews and Judaism. For our purposes here, I’ll focus only on the last.

In his magisterialintellectual biography (1939) of the great Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold, begun as a Columbia doctoral dissertation, Trilling gave a detailed account of the strident opposition mounted by Arnold’s father, a prominent educator and liberal church leader, to the admission of Jews to London University. Thomas Arnold could not countenance a scheme that would mark “the first time that education in England was avowedly unchristianized for the sake of accommodating Jews.”

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Lionel Trilling: America’s Matthew Arnold Edward Alexander

By on October 16th, 2018

http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/7269/full

The recent publication of a selection of letters by Lionel Trilling — 270 chosen out of thousands available to an editor in the archives — affords an opportunity to reflect on the importance of this grand master of the Age of Criticism in the middle of the last century. Trilling rose to prominence in 1950 with the publication of his third book, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. It sold in numbers unprecedented for a book of criticism — 70,000 copies in hard cover, and 100,000 in paperback — and made Trilling the most influential mind in the culture of the Fifties.

But Trilling’s importance in the development of American literary culture and the place of Jews in that culture goes back to the time when he was a doctoral candidate at Columbia University in New York and to a now unremembered predecessor there named Ludwig Lewisohn. Lewisohn, a Berlin-born Jew who made himself into a southern Christian gentleman in Charleston, had to leave Columbia in 1903 without his doctorate because he was, in the eyes of Columbia’s English Department faculty, irredeemably Jewish. Like many a Jewish student of English after him, Lewisohn was told that he should not (or could not) proceed in his studies because the prejudice against hiring Jews in English departments was insuperable. Two decades later, reflecting on the appointment of a number of Jewish scholars in American colleges, he noted that in one discipline alone the old resistance remained firm: “Prejudice has not . . . relented in a single instance in regard to the teaching of English.” Perhaps this was because the study of English, unlike that of science or philosophy, was intimately bound up with the particularities of culture, for it was precisely the study of the mind of Western Christianity. What Bernard Berenson called the “Angry Saxons” who ran English departments were determined to protect Tennyson’s “treasure of the wisdom of the West” from barbarous Eastern (European) invaders. (I heard the very same story of rejection decades later from Irvin Ehrenpreis, who recovered sufficiently to become the consummate biographer of Jonathan Swift, but never got a PhD in English.)

Almost nothing of this part of Trilling’s story appears in this volume of letters (Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $35, edited by Adam Kirsch). But Trilling did tell it, and very sardonically, in his notebooks of April and May of 1936, when Columbia’s English faculty tried to discontinue his appointment. “The reason for dismissal is that as a Jew, a Marxist, a Freudian, I am uneasy. This hampers my work and makes me unhappy.” His colleagues would undertake to cure his unhappiness by dismissing him before he could complete his degree and thereby strengthen his claim on a tenured position.

Trilling, never one to avoid a fight, confronted his professorial “accusers,” indeed “made date to annihilate [them],” and particularly his dissertation supervisor Emery Neff, who reportedly complained that Trilling had “involved himself with Ideas,” that he was overly “sensitive,” and didn’t really “fit [in] because he was a Jew.” This was not the last time that Trilling’s mentor would abandon him. Twenty-three years later, after Trilling had given a famously “heretical” lecture about Robert Frost’s poetry that aroused a storm of controversy, he wrote to me as follows: “Since we speak of teachers and scholarship, you will readily understand that the startling — and grotesque — part of the incident was that my old teacher Emery Neff, who taught me most of what I know about scholarship, denounced me with no knowledge of the text of what I had said.”

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KEN LANGONE :”I LOVE CAPITALISM-AN AMERICAN STORY”

By on October 5th, 2018

Ken Langone is an American original whose book could easily be titled “I Love America.” The narrative describes his life as a poor boy in Long Island who became one of America’s most successful businessman, former director of the New York Stock Exchange, a co founder of Home Depot, and a black-belt philanthropist who most recently guaranteed all tuition costs to all accepted students at NYU’s medical school.

Langone is proud of his Italian heritage and family but eschews hyphenation. He is a religious Catholic who prays and attends mass often. He attributes his outsize success to capitalism-free enterprise that gives inspiration and impetus and possibilities to every American. In his words:

This book is my love song to capitalism. Capitalism works! And I’m living proof — it works for everybody. Absolutely anybody is entitled to dream big, and absolutely everybody should dream big. I did. Show me where the silver spoon was in my mouth. I’ve got to argue profoundly and passionately: I’m the American Dream.

His book is an optimistic and patriotic and sunny paean to America.

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