RUTHFULLY YOURS

Gaza was surrendered to the Arabs in 2005. The lush and productive farms which provided produce to millions of people,, state of the art irrigation technology, and modern and updated gardening tools and equipment were purchased for the local Arabs by two Jewish American philanthropists. In response to “independence” all farms, homes and equipment were trashed and rendered useless as soon as the Israelis vacated. Furthermore, rockets were launched into Israeli population centers. And Gaza was taken over by terrorists who drove the population into chaos, shortages and dismal conditions.

As Andrew Bostom reminds me it was ever thus. For 12 centuries since its Muslim conquest conditions have been brutal. In “Land of Dust”-Palestine at the Turn of a Century” by the late Middle East Scholar Saul S.Friedman, the author describes Gaza:

“Gaza itself, the city of Samson’s torment, proved to be a place of straggling and mean appearance, where 35,000 residents lived in the meanest and most sordid way……The people lived in squalid hovels….their veiled women drew water from brackish wells. And many of the adult males supported themselves by theft or smuggling to the bazaars of Jerusalem.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/the_end_of_merit.html

Everywhere we look, the principle of merit is compromised or regarded as the worst form of unfairness. Sanctioned mediocrity is now the order of the day. Standards of achievement are diluted, hard work goes unacknowledged, and the desire to excel in one’s field or to accept responsibility for one’s actions and even for one’s failures is in abeyance. Individual talent, intelligence, entrepreneurial success, and personal discipline are dismissed as unjust advantages deriving from the exploitation of the dispossessed. “You didn’t build that,” as Obama notoriously proclaimed. The inevitable result is the devitalizing of political, intellectual, and professional life to the point where a society finds itself in a state of “progressive” deterioration.

Examples abound.

The American (and Canadian) university system is in precipitous freefall, filled with students largely incapable of scholarly ability and civil decorum, professors who do not or cannot teach, gender studies mavens who pollute the curriculum with feminist groupthink, administrators infected by political correctness who propagate “hate speech” laws and shut down controversial debate, and so-called “diversity officers” inimical to diversity of ideas. In effect, the university has opened its doors, in the name of affirmative action, student empowerment, and equity hiring, to a cohort of self-righteous incompetents and mischief-makers. The consequence is predictable. The weak and the undeserving profit at the expense of the shrinking cadre of the committed and the qualified, and society is the worse for it.

Journalism, once a respected profession, has lost its reason for existence, having scrapped its mandate to report on events and to act as public watchdog. Instead, it devotes itself to dishing up propaganda, fake news, and outright lies. Media outlets hire not journalists in the established sense, but journolists, partisan peons poorly trained in linguistic proficiency and utterly devoid of ethical standards. Those who depend on the media for information are thus systematically deceived, leading to a further coarsening of public cognition.

Similarly, our various welfare organizations and government departments, originally conceived as a social safety net, have violated their founding impetus and have come instead to celebrate failure and ineptitude. The ambulance network in drug-infested Vancouver, for example, is too busy responding to its constituency of addicts to provide prompt service to tax-paying citizens. Municipal authorities are dedicated to saving those mired in the throes of self-abuse while ignoring the rightful claimants to paid for social services.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/06/06/no-donald-trump-hasnt-especially-bad-rule-law/

If your contention is that Donald Trump has the propensity to sound like a bully and an authoritarian, I’m with you. If you’re arguing that Trump’s rhetoric is sometimes coarse and un-presidential, I can’t disagree. I’m often turned off by the aesthetic and tonal quality of his presidency. And yes, Trump has an unhealthy tendency to push theories that exaggerate and embellish small truths to galvanize his fans for political gain. Those are all legitimate political concerns.

Yet the ubiquitous claim that Trump acts in a way that uniquely undermines “the rule of law” is, to this point, simply untrue.

At National Review, Victor Davis Hanson has it right when he argues that “elites” often seem more concerned about the “mellifluous” tone of leaders rather than their abuse of power. “Obama defies the Constitution but sounds ‘presidential,’” he writes, “Trump follows it but sounds like a loudmouth from Queens.”

But while Obama’s agreeable tone had plenty to do with his lack of media scrutiny, many largely justified, and even cheered, his abuses because they furthered progressive causes. But not only did liberals often ignore “the rule of law” when it was ideologically convenient, they now want the president to play by a set of rules that doesn’t even exist.

Partisans always tend to conflate their own policy preferences with “rule of law” — or “democracy” or “patriotism.” Even taking that tendency into consideration, the pervasive claim that Trump undermines law typically amounts to little more than questions of how he comports himself. Rarely, if ever, does it have anything to do with the Constitution.

The Normandy Invasion, also called Operation Overlord, was launched on June 6, 1944 with the simultaneous landing of American,British, and Canadian forces on five separate beachheads in Normandy,France. By the end of August 1944 all of northern France was liberated, and the invading forces reorganized for the drive into Germany where they would eventually meet with Soviet forces advancing from the east to bring an end to the Nazi killing machine and an end to the Holocaust.

Two brothers Henry King, age 21 and George King 24 were killed on the beaches only a few days apart. In President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s letter to my husband’s grieving family, he stated:

“…..Freedom lives and through it he lives in a way that humbles the undertakings of most men….”

Freedom, alas, did not live for the millions upon millions who were enslaved and murdered by the communist tyrannies of the Soviet Union and China when World War 2 was over. Read ” Reflections on a Ravaged Century” by the late and incomparable historian Robert Conquest.

The near miraculous rescue of Dunkirk was completed on June 4th, 1940. The last of the British soldiers left on June 3 under heavy fire and strafing and bombing by the Nazis. Churchill ordered the Royal Navy to return on 4 June to the French rearguard.
Altogether, about 338,000 men were rescued in the Dunkirk evacuation, including 123,000 French soldiers – 26,000 French on that final day.

“We must be very careful,not to assign this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations…..We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air…..We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

http://thefederalist.com/2018/06/02/whats-next-conservatism/

Conservatives tend to be skeptical of joining great political movements because they tend to be skeptical of both politics and movements that are great. They prefer the little platoon, the shire, which they know to be safe—or at least probably safer than what lies beyond. Not all politics may be local, but all politics that isn’t local tends toward the totalitarian, however far short of it it may actually fall.

That sounds almost like a philosophy of government—though not a government that any American alive today has experienced. But times can change, and they have with the election of Donald Trump. Conservatives who have been asking, “Where do we go from here?” have discovered the answer may be: “Where Donald Trump is going.”

Most conservatives and many Libertarians saw the conservatism of William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of modern American conservatism, as a compromise (today’s Libertarians tend to see it as just compromised). Buckley was a free marketeer who opposed radical social experimentation. But he accepted the superstate (even knowing it was a threat to freedom at home) because it was necessary to do battle with the threat to freedom from abroad: communism, the force of darkness that threatened the globe for almost half a century.

Today’s young Libertarians, who came of age as Ronald Reagan was readying history’s dust bin for the Evil Empire, think the previous age consistently overrated communism’s threat. It didn’t; and the youngsters should show more respect for the analytical ability and survivalist instincts of their freedom-loving forebears whose blood ran strong for so long—even as they should respect their forebears’ desire to preserve a culture free from, and opposed to, radical social experimentation unmoored from the truths and traditions that sustained Western Civilization for centuries.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/does_gun_control_lead_to_genocide.html

Rational conversations about gun control are difficult to come by. Hyperbole as well as deliberate misstatements only lead to emotional tirades. With this in mind, I will tread carefully toward illuminating the question posed by this article.

In their 1997 paper titled “Of Holocausts and Gun Control,” Daniel D. Polsby and Don B. Kates, Jr. note:

The question of genocide is one of manifest importance in the closing years of a century that has been extraordinary for the quality and quantity of its bloodshed. As Elie Wiesel has rightly pointed out, ‘This century is the most violent in recorded history. Never have so many people participated in the killing of so many people.’

Yet:

Contemporary scholars have little explored the preconditions of genocide. Still less have they asked whether a society’s weapons policy [contributes] to the probability of its government engaging in some of the more extreme varieties of outrage. Though it is a long step between being disarmed and being murdered – one does not usually lead to the other – … it is nevertheless an arresting reality that not one of the principal genocides of the twentieth century, and there have been dozens, has been inflicted on a population that was armed.

Considering the point that “one does not usually lead to the other,” some factual background might be useful.

In 1929, the Soviet Union established gun control. From 1929 to 1953, 20 million dissidents were rounded up and murdered.

An account by Gabriella Hoffman, who writes “My Family Fled Communism. Stop Pushing Soviet-Style Gun Control Here,” highlights this history.

Compared to the United States, Soviet-occupied Lithuania was gun-free except for those in elite governmental positions. My dad always said the Soviets succeeded in oppressing Lithuanians and others by first disarming them. I always knew he was right, but aimed to confirm his assertions. Low [sic] and behold, he was right about gun confiscation as a pretext to installing tyranny in a country.

Here’s a case study from Firearms Possession by Non-State Actors: The Question of Sovereignty (2004) published in the Texas Review of Law & Politics.

https://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/the-long-march-reckoning-with-1968s-cultural-revolution-50-years-on/

What William Faulkner said about the past — it isn’t dead: it isn’t even past — seems especially true about that convulsive decade, the 1960s. For many observers, 1968 was the annus mirabilis (or perhaps “horribilis” would be more accurate) and the month of May, with its many protests, student demonstrations, acts of violence, and drug-related spectacles, was the epicenter of the year. Now that the fiftieth anniversary of May 1968 is upon us, what does the wisdom of hindsight tell us about that curious moment?

I took a crack at conjuring with the meaning of the Sixties nearly two decades ago in my book The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America. May 2018 seemed to offer an opportune moment to revisit the issue by reprising and updating some thoughts. As with previous anniversaries of the Purple Decade and the Magic Month, there have everywhere been nostalgic backward glances: Youth! Freedom! Sex! Were not the Sixties the Last Good Time, an era of hope, idealism, the promise of emancipation from — well, from everything? Some think so. “Only a few periods in American history,” the New York Times intoned in an editorial called “In Praise of the Counterculture”:

… have seen such a rich fulfillment of the informing ideals of personal freedom and creativity that lie at the heart of the American intellectual tradition. … The 60’s spawned a new morality-based politics that emphasized the individual’s responsibility to speak out against injustice and corruption.

A “new morality-based politics,” eh? It seems so long ago, shrouded in a Day-Glo glaze of grateful recollection. But when it comes to the Sixties, and especially the fulcrum year of 1968, Time magazine is right: “50 Years After 1968, We Are Still Living In Its Shadow.” Indeed, paroxysms of the 1960s, which trembled with gathering force through North America and Western Europe from the mid-1950s through the early 1970s, continue to reverberate throughout our culture. The Age of Aquarius did not end when the last electric guitar was unplugged at Woodstock. It lives on in our values and habits, in our tastes, pleasures, and aspirations. It lives on especially in our educational and cultural institutions, and in the degraded pop culture that permeates our lives like a corrosive fog.

It’s graduation time, and from nursery through high school, college and graduate schools, pop psychology feel-good platitudes will be delivered. Here is a pithy message from my favorite columnist at my favorite Australian journal, that you won’t hear at any graduation.

Not Angry? You Should Be Peter Smith (Excerpt)

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/05/angry/

“We are witnessing the dilution and deliberate deconstruction of our peerless culture. This isn’t just a matter of immigration and numbers, though these are much too high. Rather, it is question of a judicial and political class re-shaping our world as they wish it to be.

We don’t have any natural right to be prosperous. It has to be earned and re-earned every day. Put economic malaise together with cultural malaise and this lucky country might be running out of luck. And I haven’t even covered the progressives’ march through our schools and universities.”