The Treason of the Intellectuals & ‘the Undoing of Thought’ Benda’s call for faith in transcendent truth remains a beacon amid the turmoil of contemporary cultural debates. Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/10/the-treason-of-the-intellectuals-the-undoing-of-thought/

Last week, the commentator Lee Smith had me on “Words That Matter,” his show for Epoch TV. He had recently come across an essay I had written some thirty years ago about Julien Benda’s 1927 book La Trahison des clercs, “the treason of the intellectuals,” and was struck by its contemporary relevance. We covered a lot of ground in the half hour allotted to us. The show will air in a week or two.  I hope you will watch it.  In the meantime, I share the original essay, with some modifications, below. 

“When hatred of culture becomes itself a part of culture, the life of the mind loses all meaning.”
—Alain Finkielkraut, The Undoing of Thought

“Today we are trying to spread knowledge everywhere. Who knows if in centuries to come there will not be universities for re- establishing our former ignorance?”
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-99)

In 1927, the French essayist Julien Benda published his famous attack on the intellectual corruption of the age, La Trahison des clercs. I said “famous,” but perhaps “once famous” would be more accurate. For today, in the United States anyway, only the title of the book, not its argument, enjoys much currency. “La trahison des clercs” is one of those memorable phrases that bristles with hints and associations without stating anything definite. Benda tells us that he uses the term “clerc” in “the medieval sense,” i.e., to mean “scribe,” someone we would now call a member of the intelligentsia. Academics and journalists, pundits, moralists, and pontificators of all varieties are, in this sense, “clercs.” The English translation, “The Treason of the Intellectuals,” sums it up neatly.

The “treason” in question was the betrayal by the “clerks” of their vocation as intellectuals. From the time of the pre-Socratics, intellectuals, considered in their role as intellectuals, had been a breed apart. In Benda’s terms, they were understood to be “all those whose activity essentially is not the pursuit of practical aims, all those who seek their joy in the practice of an art or a science or a metaphysical speculation, in short, in the possession of non-material advantages.” Thanks to such men, Benda wrote, “Humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honored good. This contradiction was an honor to the human species and formed the rift whereby civilization slipped into the world.”

Europe: Fear of the Elephant and Its Mahout by Amir Taheri

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20469/europe-fear-trump

European dislike for the person of Trump, who is cast as the antithesis of the Davos-approved globalist worried about global warming, not interested in chest-beating about Palestine, and demanding that others not treat the US as a “room service” reachable by pressing a button, is running shivers down many spines in Paris and Berlin among other places.

This is why many Europeans prefer to see the Democrat donkey rather than the Republican elephant in the room. They miss the fact that the absent, that is present in the room, is neither the elephant nor the donkey but the leviathan.

In the recent summit in Paris of European Union leaders on Ukraine, there was an elephant in the room: The US Republican Party and its current mahout, former President Donald J. Trump.

According to those who were able to peep into the session, much of the discussion was about what the US will or won’t do in case the volatile mahout rides his elephant into the White House in November.

Trump’s musings about ending the war in Ukraine and taming Vladimir Putin without war and his quip about refusing to support a NATO member not paying its share, if attacked by Russia, took up a disproportionate part of the discussions. Then came the French President Emmanuel Macron’s bombshell about boots on the ground in Ukraine.

CHAPTER 9: Norman Dodd Interview Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier––Reality Is [upcoming release April 2024]

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27601/chapter-9-norman-dodd-interview
Globalism is a replacement ideology that seeks to reorder the world into one singular, planetary Unistate, ruled by the globalist elite. The globalist war on nation-states cannot succeed without collapsing the United States of America. The long-term strategic attack plan moves America incrementally from constitutional republic to socialism to globalism to feudalism. The tactical attack plan uses asymmetric psychological and informational warfare to destabilize Americans and drive society out of objective reality into the madness of subjective reality. America’s children are the primary target of the globalist predators.

The philosophical rationalization and justification for Barack Obama’s shift to Outcome-Based Education (OBE) was presented by John W. Gardner in the 1950s. Gardner served concurrent tenures as president of both the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (CFAT) and the Carnegie Corporation[i] in the mid-1950s.

In 1961 Gardner published Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent Too? The book is a reflection on American excellence that debates the relative merits of focusing on equality and focusing on excellence, and asks if it is possible for society to do both.

Our Founding Fathers advocated meritocracy, a system based on ability, achievement, and equal opportunity. They understood that equality of opportunity achieves excellence. Gardner examines an alternative theory that focuses on equality of outcome, also known as equity, and argues that the goals of excellence and equity are not incompatible.

In 1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Gardner secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. His appointment institutionalized America’s move away from meritocracy, establishing the collaboration of government in the weaponization of American education for political purposes. Meritocracy was replaced with equity as the foundation of American education, and equal outcome became the educational objective. What was the political purpose of this fundamental change?

International Law or Antisemitism? by Bat Ye’or

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20461/international-law-or-antisemitism

In his study on this subject, David Elber demonstrates that the UN has no possession of territorial sovereignty and therefore cannot decree the allocation of a territory over which it has no sovereignty (on the basis of the universal principle of law nemo dat quod non habet — no one can give what he does not possess), especially when this decision violates previous treaties endorsed by the UN itself. Resolution 181 only made suggestions to avoid the threat of war from the Arabs.

With the Venice Declaration, the European Economic Community demanded the creation of a Palestinian state on the territories liberated by Israel in 1967, which had been illegally occupied and rendered Judenrein [ethnically cleansed of Jews] by Arab countries since 1949. Since that time, the EEC/EU have never ceased to impose the concept of “Palestinian people” instead of Arab refugees, in order to justify its claim to a state that it has been striving to build for decades by monitoring, restricting and harassing Israelis in their own country, recognized by international treaties.

For the past 40 years, the EEC/EU, which wants to get rid of Israel at all costs, has invented a false people, the Palestinians, devoid of national particularisms and history, artificially constructed as a look-alike to Israel, even though they claim to follow the Koran, embody jihad against unbelief and adhere to Nazism.

UN Resolution 181, falsely called international law, authorizes the delegitimization of the Jewish presence in Jerusalem according to the 2,000-year-old anti-Semitic tradition, and the reduction of the Jewish state to an indefensible parcel that will soon be made to disappear. It has already created Palestinian ministries and ambassadors for a people that is not a people, but which it is determined to create in homage to the Hitler-Husseini alliance that symbolizes the jihad against Israel.

Over the last few decades, the EU’s alliance with the Palestinian jihad — a war to Islamize the planet… In its relentless fight against Israel, Europe has sacrificed its own territory and people to Palestinianism. Today, in a strange coincidence, we see the same alliances as in the 1940s: the majority of European countries, united under the government of the Third Reich, allied with Islam and at war with Russia and the Jewish people in a global anti-Semitic tsunami.

In its relentless fight against Israel, Europe has sacrificed its own territory and people to Palestinianism. Pictured: PLO chairman Yasser Arafat shares a laugh with French President Jacques Chirac at the Élysée Palace in Paris, on July 26, 1995. (Photo by Remy de la Mauviniere/AFP via Getty Images)

It is commonplace to hear it proclaimed everywhere and at every turn as a proven truth that the State of Israel is violating international law. Interviewed by Sonia Mabrouk on February 11, Manuel Bompard once again made this accusation, even specifying a date to a violation that dates back 70 years! This accusation, which determines all the European Union’s relations with the Jewish state, justifies, for example, discriminatory practices against Israel that are unprecedented and never applied against any other state.

Iranian Regime’s Sham ‘Elections’: Perpetuating the Deception by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20465/iran-sham-elections

Iran’s so-called “elections” stand out as a grotesque parody of democracy. Yet… the mainstream Western media persistently mislabel these charades as “elections,” thereby bestowing legitimacy upon a regime entrenched in authoritarianism and dictatorship.

For decades, Iranians have endured oppression, censorship, and violence at the hands of a regime that masquerades as a legitimate government while trampling on their basic rights. To dismiss their struggle by equating their aspirations for freedom with a sham electoral spectacle is to disregard the sacrifices made by countless activists, journalists and ordinary citizens who dare to dream of a better future.

It sends a dangerous message to the Iranian people and to the world at large: that autocracy masquerading as democracy is acceptable, and that tyranny can cloak itself in the trappings of legitimacy.

Now, as the Iranian regime is about to realize its dream of obtaining nuclear weapons, does anyone think that a government that treats its own people so brutally will treat its neighbors any better?

Iran’s sham “elections” are nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to legitimize authoritarian rule. By mislabeling these orchestrated spectacles as elections, mainstream Western media perpetuate the regime’s propaganda and undermine the struggle for democracy within Iran. It is time to call out this charade for what it is and lend our voices to the chorus demanding true democracy and freedom for the Iranian people.

In the annals of political theater, Iran’s so-called “elections” stand out as a grotesque parody of democracy. Yet, despite the blatant manipulation and lack of genuine choice, the mainstream Western media persistently mislabel these charades as “elections,” thereby bestowing legitimacy upon a regime entrenched in authoritarianism and dictatorship.

The Mythologies of the Middle East: Part Two Victor Davis Hanson

https://victorhanson.com/the-mythologies-of-the-middle-east-part-two/

The Myth of “Proportionality”

As a general rule, in the long history of war, victory is found only by being disproportionate in the use of force. That is a truism so banal as to need little elaboration. When both sides are “proportionate” in their ability to harm their opponents, the result is either a bloody tactical deadlock such as at Verdun or the Somme, or an open strategic sore like Vietnam and Afghanistan, or decades-long “proportionate” killing such as the Peloponnesian War or Thirty Years’ War.

The whole point of Western aid to Ukraine apparently and logically is to allow it to harm Russia disproportionally, especially given the vast imbalance in resources, both human and material. The great tragedy of this horrific two-year war is the reality that Ukraine has only been able to achieve proportional success against Russia, as the current deadlocked map of the battle space attests.

Hamas began its war on October 7, seeking to achieve a disproportionate success; that is, to kill more Jewish civilians in any single day since the gas chambers at Auschwitz. It knew the Israelis possessed a disproportionate ability in strictly military terms to retaliate and do real damage to Hamas. But the Hamas terrorist leaders in turn assumed they had a disproportionate ability to appeal to the larger Muslim and Arab Middle East of 500 million people, as well as hundreds of millions of supporters in the old Third World as well as in the U.S. and Europe. Their logic was brutally simple: while the West, the UN, and the rest would for a moment deplore their tactics, Hamas assumed that privately they either would approve of the damage inflicted on Israelis or at least tolerate it and thus use their various levels of influence to restrain the Israeli response.

The Mythologies of the Middle East: Part Three Victor Davis Hanson

https://victorhanson.com/the-mythologies-of-the-middle-east-part-three/

The Myth of the Oppressed Palestinians

There are lots of refugees in the world with much longer claims of displacement than the Palestinians, and also some with much more recent suffering. And yet we hear nothing about them. Does anyone challenge Turkish president Erdogan for his ongoing threats to send missiles into Athens or to brag that he has a solution like his “grandfathers” for the Armenian “problem”?

Or do they lament the 1974 ethnic cleansing of northern Cyprus that resulted when the Turkish military invaded the island, created a puppet separatist regime in the north, appropriated land that had been Greek for three millennia, and then slaughtered Greeks and drove them down into the south of the island? Are there protests today demanding justice and a “right of return” for the Greek Cypriots? Do we talk of “colonialist” or “settler” Turks who were moved from the mainland to Cyprus to alter the demography of the island?

For that matter, do any lament the fate of the Volga Germans (nearly two million) who were packed up by Joseph Stalin and uprooted from their ancient homes in 1941–42?

Are we aware that until 1939 western Ukraine was the ancient home of millions of Catholic Poles, who were driven out by communist Russia in its hideous 1939 deal with Hitler and never returned after the war?

Or do we lament the 13 million East Prussians who were ethnically cleansed after World War II to give lands to a new Poland that was robbed by Stalin of its old domains? Are any of these peoples today considered UN refugees? Do octogenarian Germans dangle the keys of their old homes in Danzig to cameras, as if they will someday have “a right of return” to present-day Poland?

Eitan Fischberger No Ramadan Ceasefire Pausing military action during the Islamic holiday could embolden Hamas.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/no-ramadan-ceasefire

As the March 10 start of Ramadan nears, international pressure has significantly increased on Israel to reach a ceasefire agreement with Hamas in exchange for the release of Israeli hostages. While the idea of advocating for a ceasefire with a genocidal terrorist organization is fundamentally misguided, the notion that Israel should halt its military efforts to respect Ramadan is even more perverse.

Historically, Palestinian terror groups have used Ramadan as a bargaining chip to pressure Israel into making concessions in exchange for calm—a ploy that the Biden administration has bought wholeheartedly. Those who support Israel’s making such concessions argue that failing to appease Palestinians during Ramadan might incite further terror.

The data, however, don’t align with that contention. As Hill Frisch from the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security wrote in 2023, “Almost none of the most tumultuous periods of Palestinian violence occurred during the month of Ramadan.” Frisch even argued that “A reading of the data strongly suggests that the dangers [of disproportionate violence during Ramadan] are grossly exaggerated, if not entirely false.” In other words, according to Frisch’s research, American and Israeli officials’ concerns about Palestinian terror during Ramadan are at least overstated.

While Frisch’s research suggests that Palestinians are not more likely to commit terror acts during Ramadan, that doesn’t mean that such attacks never happen. Historically, such Ramadan-tied incidents typically follow Palestinian leaders’ prolonged incitement efforts, which culminate in their exploiting the holiday for a preexisting political objective. This time, that objective would be Hamas’s survival.

Air Force Memo Reveals Racial Quota System By Will Thibeau

https://tomklingenstein.com/leaked-air-force-memo-reveals-racial-quota-system/

Editor’s Note: While the imposition of group outcome equality in universities and corporations has begun to spark outrage among the public, there is one institution that has been imposing quotas far longer and far more comprehensively than any other, but that has largely escaped criticism: the United States military. Will Thibeau, an Army Ranger veteran and director of the American Military Project at the Claremont Institute, takes a deep dive into the logic of the military’s group quota system, and ponders where that logic may lead the rest of the country.

The American Military Project has uncovered an internal Air Force memo from 2022 in which General C.Q. Brown, now President Biden’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, directed the service “to develop a diversity and inclusion outreach plan aimed at achieving” set numerical quotas for the racial composition of officer applicant pools. This previously unreported memo is clear evidence that a group quota system is operating in the U.S. military, though Pentagon leadership are exceptionally careful to avoid using the term.

On July 26, 1948, President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9981, establishing “that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.” 

In so doing, Truman explicitly called upon the spirit of the Founding. In a democratic nation for which the equality of man counted among the highest principles, to privilege one class arbitrarily over another could not be justified — certainly not in an institution whose character and fate were so entwined with that of the regime at large. This sentiment, of course, was born of long-standing national beliefs but brought to maturity by the course of history — namely, by the American experience in the Second World War. Black Americans had served ably and honorably throughout the conflict, and many had come home to less than a hero’s welcome. Integration — the old ethos of equal opportunity — was driven in large part by a sense of justice.

Yet the war had produced pragmatic lessons, too. The battle for Europe was waged on a scale and scope the likes of which the young American nation had not yet encountered. (Even our own bloody civil war, while presenting a graver political threat, amounted to a far less substantial military challenge compared against world war.)

Liberal Elites Against Democracy Biden’s polling is in the gutter, and the Democrats’ sprawling anti-Trump lawfare apparatus is on life support. Laugh all the way to a crushing loss in November, ladies. Let’s see who’s laughing then. Josh Hammer

https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/09/liberal-elites-against-democracy/

I remember learning about democracy back in grammar school. We learned about it in the context of the American Revolution: Britain’s King George III may have ruled as a capricious monarch, but the intrepid colonists fought for the then-novel concept of democratic self-government.

A cursory glance at Merriam-Webster is instructive. That venerable dictionary defines “democracy” as “government by the people” or, more elaborately, as “a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections.”

Simple enough. But someone ought to remind our nation’s liberal elites and the foot soldier activists of today’s Democratic Party.

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a unanimous rebuke of the recent Colorado chicanery that rendered former President Donald Trump ineligible for the state’s GOP presidential primary ballot. That all nine justices agreed with Trump’s core legal argument—state actors cannot strike from the ballot alleged “insurrectionists” absent specific implementing legislation from Congress—is nothing short of remarkable.

For months, liberal pundits and anti-Trump legal “experts” assured us that the 14th Amendment “insurrection clause” argument for Trump’s ballot disqualification was ironclad. Who can forget how, after the Colorado Supreme Court legitimized Trump’s removal in December, one-time conservative judicial stalwart turned Trump Derangement Syndrome patient zero J. Michael Luttig opined that the court’s logic was “masterful,” “brilliant,” and “unassailable.” Left-wing cable news outlets platformed countless other guests who ceaselessly pushed the same argument.

In the end, the argument garnered zero votes at the Supreme Court. Even Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson didn’t debase themselves by going along with such a half-baked, anti-democratic ruse. So much for “unassailable” logic!