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HISTORY

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Margaret Thatcher: Retired, but Far from Retiring John O’Sullivan

By on July 18th, 2020

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/06/margaret-thatcher-retired-but-far-from-retiring/

Margaret Thatcher embarked on 1989 at the height of her political authority at home and abroad. She was the recipient of Ronald Reagan’s last message as president, as she had been his last official visitor in November 1988. That visit had been a nostalgic celebration of their joint stewardship of the Anglo-American special relationship. She was the guest of honour at dinners given by Reagan and his successor George H.W. Bush and at a farewell lunch given by Secretary of State George Shultz. As a former Thatcher aide living in Washington, I was invited to the last of those occasions, which was bathed in an atmosphere of warm affection. She and Shultz had generally been on the same side in diplomatic rows and even inter-agency disputes within the administration—and to amused applause he gave her a large expensive handbag as a parting gift.

Most observers assumed that the British Prime Minister would continue to enjoy the same warm personal and political alliance with the first President Bush. They had been friends during the previous eight years, liked each other, and were on the same broad ideological wavelength. But the expectation of another Anglo-American partnership unravelled quite quickly.

Bush spent early 1989 conducting a review of foreign policy. The first smoke signals from it suggested that the Bush administration would be tougher than Reagan on the Soviets. That might have helped Thatcher, who since Reykjavik had worried that US policy was dangerously flexible on nuclear weapons. Soon, however, a different mood music began to be heard: the Brits were too obstructive not only on NATO but also on European integration; Germany was the leading economic power in Europe and US policy should reflect that; and Thatcher, though admirably brave and principled, could sometimes be rigid and preachy; and not least, Kohl, a loyal ally, needed NATO’s help to stay in office on the issue of medium- and short-range nuclear weapons in Europe, which Germans feared might one day be landing on both sides of their East-West border.

As Charles Moore makes clear in the third volume of his superb biography of Thatcher, it also became clear by degrees that though Bush liked Thatcher, he wasn’t comfortable or easy with her. He was too much the gentleman to say so. But his aides were not averse to taking her down a peg.

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The Second Islamic Conquest of Hagia Sophia By Cameron Hilditch

By on July 15th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/the-second-islamic-conquest-of-hagia-sophia/

President Erdogan’s power play should not go unanswered by the liberal-democratic West.

The Church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople is a purpose-built structure, and its purpose is the worship of the Christian God. This particular function is not incidental to the way the church was designed and built by its two visionary architects at the high meridian of the Byzantine Empire. Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus were what their contemporaries called mechanopoioi, a term that is best translated, according to Richard Krautheimer, as “architect–scientists.” Their elite proficiency in mathematics and physics suited them to the task they’d been given by the emperor: building an originally Christian place of worship. In the sixth century, Christians were still drawing on the aesthetics of pagan antiquity, and the basilicas and colonnades of classical Rome had been accepted as the supreme expression of architectural grandeur. Hagia Sophia changed all that.

When Emperor Justinian entered the church for the first time after its completion, he is said to have boasted, “Solomon, I have vanquished thee!” He, or rather his two architects, certainly had. With an interior space of almost 43,000 square feet, it was at the time the single-greatest building ever constructed. Its crowning jewel was its gravity-defying central dome, which in a single stroke supplanted the basilica as the defining feature of church architecture in Eastern Christendom. The dome serves as a mirror to heaven, believed in late antiquity to be the most distant in a series of concentric spheres, and its 40 windows allow light from above to shine upon the glittering religious mosaics inside the church. But its most important religious function is musical. The interior of Hagia Sophia was designed for the antiphonal singing of the Christian liturgy, with two choir sections alternating chants across from one another. The dome captures and enhances the sound of this exchange. Musical notes usually reverberate for two to three seconds in a modern concert hall. In Hagia Sophia, they resound for up to twelve seconds, enveloping worshippers in the sounds of the liturgy — or at least they did, until the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453.

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The Day That Shook the Earth The Trinity nuclear test brought peace in 1945 and proliferation in decades to follow. By Warren Kozak

By on July 15th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-day-that-shook-the-earth-11594767449?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Seventy-five years ago, on July 16, 1945, the world’s first atomic explosion, code-named “Trinity,” jolted the New Mexico desert just before dawn.

Gathered to witness the detonation was an extraordinary conglomeration of intellect. There were European émigrés Edward Teller, Leo Szilard and Enrico Fermi as well as Berkeley’s Ernest Lawrence and Harvard’s James Conant. The project was led by physicist Robert Oppenheimer and Army Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves. If only the U.S. could establish an equally strong partnership among the military, industry and academia today.

The device, nicknamed the “Gadget,” was around 5 feet in diameter and covered with cables, metal fuse boxes and masking tape, not at all like today’s immaculate weapons. It could have been a component of an elevator. The plutonium core was transported separately in the back seat of an Army sedan. Oppenheimer didn’t want to risk blowing up any towns along the way.

There was a betting pool among the scientists on the bomb’s yield (its TNT equivalent in kilotons). Norman Ramsey, the pessimist, guessed low at zero. Edward Teller wagered high at 45 kilotons. Nobel laureate Isidor Isaac Rabi won the pool at 18. He entered late and that was the only number available.

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Never Forget: Republicans Ended Democrat-Backed Slavery And Segregation Lewis K. Uhler and Peter J. Ferrara

By on July 13th, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/07/13/never-forget-republicans-ended-democrat-backed-slavery-and-segregation/

Black Lives Matter and Antifa are not organizations of “protestors” seeking justice for Black people. They are defacing and seeking to overturn monuments to the very historical leaders who fought and ended slavery, former U.S. Presidents Abraham Lincoln and General Ulysses S. Grant.

The Republican Party was formed in 1854 to abolish slavery. By the 1850s, Lincoln  was a rising leader of the National Abolitionist movement, and the new Republican Party.

In 1858, Lincoln challenged the re-election of Illinois Democrat Senator Stephen Douglas, spawning the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates.  Douglas argued for “popular sovereignty”, with each new state to decide the issue of slavery by popular vote.  Lincoln argued against this expansion of slavery, proclaiming “all men are created equal” as set forth in our Declaration of Independence.

Douglas won the election, but Lincoln won the debate. In 1860, Lincoln ran for president, nominated by the anti-slavery Republicans, winning in a four-way race.  Even before his inauguration, Democrat southern states began to secede from the Union, creating the Confederate States of America.

War began in April 1861, when Confederate artillery fired on the U.S. Army at Fort Sumter, South Carolina.  The Civil War involved southern Democrats shooting and killing northern Republicans, and visa versa, a much more partisan affair than currently recognized and remembered.

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Rage Produces Much Heat but Little Light by Amir Taheri

By on July 12th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16220/rage-riots

When he attended theology classes in Medina, Malcolm X was known as “the American brother” because he did not wish to discard his American-ness. His message was one of hard work and self-betterment rather than moaning and commerce with victimhood.

In recent weeks, anti-American cabals have unleashed much sound and fury but little of substance; much heat, but little light. Their aim is to terrorize the majority by pretending that hatred of America is more widespread than it really is.

In Texas, during the Mexican-American war, Ulysses S. Grant, then a lieutenant, accompanied by another officer, goes to investigate the howling of what sounds like a huge pack of wolves. When they arrived, they saw that: “There were just two of them; they had made all the noise we had heard. I have often thought of this incident since when I have heard the noises of a few disappointed politicians… There are always more of them before they are counted.”

It is too early to tell whether the recent riots in the United States were inspired by genuine concern about chronic racism in parts of American society or fostered by political calculations linked to the next presidential election.

However, one thing is certain: traditional America-bashing circles in Europe and elsewhere have seized the opportunity to portray the United States as a nation unwilling to even acknowledge the grievance felt by the “African-American” component. Skimming through magazines gives the impression that the European elites have been observing events in the US with a more than usual degree of smugness. They ignore a few facts.

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The original black American patriots By Fritz Pettyjohn

By on July 6th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/07/the_original_black_american_patriots.html

The American cause hung by a thread in the summer of 1781.  The British were entrenched in New York, and the main Continental Army commanded by George Washington was incapable of dislodging them.  In Virginia, a British Army of 7,000 men led by Lord Cornwallis wreaked havoc, opposed only by 900 Continentals under General Lafayette. Governor Thomas Jefferson and the Virginia Assembly had been chased from Richmond and Charlottesville.  Vital supplies to General Nathaniel Greene’s army in South Carolina were cut off.

Washington’s appeals to the states for reinforcements had gone unanswered, and when he decided to march south to confront Cornwallis, he had only 2,500 able-bodied men.  They were actually outnumbered by the accompanying French force of 3,000 soldiers.  It was a fateful decision.  Failure would almost certainly be fatal to the war for independence.

When they reached Virginia in September of 1781, Cornwallis was holed up at Yorktown.  His force had been decimated by malaria, the curse of all Europeans south of the Mason-Dixon line.  The rest of the history of the Battle of Yorktown is familiar to most literate Americans.  The British surrender effectively ended the War of Independence.  American sovereignty was born.

The small force of American soldiers who marched south with Washington 239 years ago had very few veterans left from the armies of 1775 to 1780.  These original Continentals had served their terms of enlistment and had returned to their farms and families.  Washington took anyone who would serve, and hundreds of free blacks joined the cause, eager for gainful employment.  Of the 2500-strong force who arrived with Washington at Yorktown, as many as 20% were free blacks.  They had an inherent genetic advantage over the Europeans.  Because their ancestors came from sub-Saharan Africa, they were naturally resistant to malaria, and were strong, healthy men, fully capable of discharging their duties.

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Tall Ships, Netanyahu & America Gerald Honigman

By on July 3rd, 2020

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/8775

It was a moment in time never to be forgotten – July 4, 1976.

I was watching those spectacular tall sailing ships from numerous countries passing under the Verrazano-Narrows 
Israel must concentrate on the first part of Hillel’s famous quote.
Bridge in Brooklyn in salute to America’s two hundredth birthday. Tears of pride were in many of our eyes that day.

I was there with my best friend Arie, who is from Israel. At almost the very same moment that those tall ships were sailing by, something else was happening which would link Israel and America together in many a mind forever after.

During the night before and the early morning hours of July 4, 1976, Israel launched Operation Thunderball AKA Operation Entebbe AKA Operation Yonatan.

On June 27, Air France Flight 139 was hijacked by Arabs and some European soul mates. The plane was taken to Idi Amin’s Uganda, where the hijackers were met with open arms.

The passengers were soon asked to form two lines – one for Jews, the other for Gentiles. Most of the latter were freed, but the Jews became Idi Amin’s “guests”. Amin’s buddies next announced that the Jews would be killed if demands were not met.

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H.L. Mencken: Misfit In 21st-Century America By virtue of the unsettling, bracing originality of his ideas, Mencken is rendered as inaccessible to the American reader today as an alien from deep space. By Ilana Mercer

By on June 30th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/29/h-l-mencken-misfit-in-21st-century-america/

H.L. Mencken, a contrarian polemicist and the consummate critic, who wrote prolifically and prodigiously from 1899 until 1948, may no longer seem relevant, but the fault would not be his.

Mencken was a well-read bon vivant with a taste for Teutonic philosophy and a fidelity to immutable truth. He was also a brilliant satirist and a writer whose facility with the English idiom and grasp of intellectual history remain unsurpassed.  

How can a phenom like Mencken appeal in our age, The Age of the Idiot? 

He can’t. He should, but he can’t.

Henry Louis Mencken cannot appeal to the bumper crops of humorless, dour “dunderheads” America is now siring. He cannot resonate with those who are afraid to question received opinion, who cannot conjugate a verb correctly, use tenses, prepositions and adjectives grammatically and creatively, or appreciate a clever turn-of-phrase.

How could Mencken, author of The American Language (1919), be relevant in an America in which the rules of syntax are passé, pronouns are politicized and neutered, torrential prolixity is in, concision and precision are out, and “editors” excise nothing, preferring to let mangled phrases and lumpen jargon spill onto the page like gravy over a tablecloth?   

Not for nothing did one wag say that the history of ideas is the history of words. And since Mencken was, first and foremost, a man of ideas (and hence, words)—no discussion of Mencken and his ideas is complete without a reference to English, the language he deployed with such verve and vim. 

Thus, when “a few newspaper smarties protested” Mencken’s verbal virtuosity, Mencken tartly noted, in his Preface to A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949): “Thousands of excellent nouns, verbs and adjectives . . . are still unfamiliar to such ignoramuses. Let them . . . leave my vocabulary and me to my own customers, who have all been to school.” 

Written at a considerable level of abstraction, for a prosaic people that, by Mencken’s estimation, “cannot grasp an abstraction,” a Mencken essay is certain to furrow the brow of the above-average American reader, writer, and editor these days. Unlike the tracts disgorged by Conservatism, Inc., the least complicated of Mencken’s editorial writings would place excessive demands on the unsupple minds of young activists, who are busy striking a selfie on social media or running to CPUKE conferences.

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Slavery: Is there a Monopoly of Suffering? by Amir Taheri

By on June 28th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16165/slavery-suffering

[Jesse] Jackson, [Sadiq] Khan and Mrs. Obama are simply wrong.

Let’s start with Mrs. Obama’s claim [that she was in “a house built by slaves”], the easiest to dismiss. The White House she lived in for eight years was first rebuilt in 1902 and achieved its present shape in the 1950s, long after the US abolished slavery in 1865 and granted former slaves citizenship in 1869. There may have been some blacks, later to be dubbed African-Americans, among the builders; but they were no longer slaves.

Slaves, most of whom in history were white and not black, were not the only victims. Even people who were neither slaves nor slave-owners paid a heavy price in slow economic development and poverty. When it comes to slavery, no one has a monopoly of suffering.

Do Western nations, notably the United States and Britain, owe their wealth to black slaves from Africa?

This, and related questions, in circulation for years, acquired a new life in recent weeks thanks to protest marches in the US and Europe.

In 2009, at an international seminar hosted by then French President Nicholas Sarkozy in Evian, we listened with amazement as the American Reverend Jesse Jackson told the audience that African slaves built America as a home that turned out to be a prison.

In 2016, then US First Lady Michelle Obama told TV audiences how she woke up every morning in the White House thinking that it was “a house built by slaves.”

Last week, London Mayor Sadiq Khan brought his own water to the mill. He said: “It is a sad truth that much of our wealth derived from the slave trade.”

There are at least three problems with that discourse.

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70 Years After the War, No Resolution in Korea The dynamics driving conflict remain strong. Full reconciliation is as likely as open conflict. Walter Russell Mead

By on June 25th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/70-years-after-the-war-no-resolution-in-korea-11593039440?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

The Korean War began 70 years ago, on June 25, 1950, when Kim Jong Un’s grandfather sent troops across the 38th parallel into the South. Pyongyang seemed bent on commemorating that event this year by trash-talking—literally. North Korea plans to retaliate for packages sent over the border by defectors containing derogatory information about Kim Jong Un along with South Korean soap operas on memory sticks. According to Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency, “12 million leaflets of all kinds reflective of the wrath and hatred of the people from all walks of life” have been printed, and 3,000 balloons are being prepared to unleash a massive propaganda blitz against the offending South.

The master strategists of Pyongyang plan to include bundles of trash with the propaganda. “South Korea has to face the music,” the North’s news agency said. “Only when it experiences how painful and how irritating it is to dispose of leaflets and waste, it will shake off its bad habit. The time for retaliatory punishment is drawing near.”

Or maybe not. On the eve of the anniversary, North Korea announced that Mr. Kim had told officials to put the campaign on hold.

The forces behind the conflict on the Korean Peninsula are as strong as ever. The Kim dynasty is grimly determined to hang on, and its estimated stockpile of 30 to 40 nuclear warheads plus its proximity to China ensures that none of its enemies dare to attack the North. The South longs for national reunification, but the South poses an existential threat to the Kim dynasty simply by flourishing as a democracy. Of the great powers nearby, neither China nor Japan really wants Korean unification. The U.S. would like to see North and South move closer together, thus reducing the chance that American troops would be ensnared in a second Korean War. But North Korean hostility poses riddles that no U.S. president has been able to answer.

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