On the right there is a branch of demography especial to the calculation of the futility of everything. Western civilization's wane is much easier to assert when data shows a half-century of cultural, economic and procreative stagnation, and such has inspired predictions that are often judged according to their dreariness.
Some forecasters are more serious than others, like Theodore Dalrymple and Mark Steyn. The two have raised to erudition the task of rousing the free world from complacency — but even they are pretty well inclined to chart a vector from Point A, a few decades of the modern era in which historical trends saw sharp reverses; to Point B, doom. A central factor is the shrinking average birthrate of the democratic world as observed until, it seems, just recently: Michael Barone of US News & World Report announced that the United States is fecund again. Barone, a sanguine skeptic, took care to qualify apperception: "The lesson of the past is that America keeps changing and growing, often in ways we fail to anticipate."
It doesn't convince to assume population growth to be the only variable not accounted for or, too, that this country, despite capitalistic and libertarian advantages, is the only one capable of restitution. Not that Dalrymple and Steyn don't recognize that the world changes: Steyn himself rebukes European statists for "think[ing] of the present as a kind of a permanent state." But Barone's observation illustrates an open society's corrective strengths that the demography branch overlooks. We are left with the irony of members of a generation that seized iconoclasm as a birthright coming close to saying that just what can be seen is all there is.
Celts, the first peoples in Britain? That is what is stated in a Scotsman report on a recently completed study. John Derbyshire disagrees and so do I. It sounds like the journalist got it wrong. The first humans on the British Isles were Iberians, the Britons, who were displaced and absorbed by Celts about 2,500 years ago.
Derbyshire notes the "waves of invaders" infused into the country's population and indeed, England's history is rich. Buttressed by the anthropological work of men like Carleton Coon, we know the ethnic heritage of the Isles to be sedimented. That fact makes for a wonderful reductio ad absurdum counter to the occasional appeal for American Indian land reparations.
Here's how it goes: First, the Germans shall return the throne to the Normans; the Normans shall give England back to the Anglo-Saxons, who shall give it back to the Danes, who shall give it back to the Anglo-Saxons, who shall split and share it for a while with the Danes before giving it to the Danes, who shall give it back to the Anglo-Saxons so the Saxons can enjoy it a bit for themselves, at which point they shall give it back to the Romans, who shall give it back to the Celts, who shall give it back to the Iberians, who shall leave the place for God and the beasts.
Listening to a foreign policy speech of George Bush's, when in general agreement with him, leaves one encouraged but not without a sense of anticlimax. If what the man talks about is patent, when is it more of a tautology than a reminder?
Addressing the United Nations General Assembly today, the president avowed that a) electoral democracy is the only acceptable form of government, and that the claim has both moral and evidentiary standing; that b) many countries have denied inalienable rights to citizens, but not so uniformly as the Near East; and c) what come of said privations are often violent political or cultural movements, today manifested as, for one, Islamist fascism. Bush identified three national actors: Iran, for its terrorist machinations; Syria, for the same; and the Sudan, for a domestic brand of religious counterfeit instructing genocide. Enemies of freedom, Bush warned, would be combated. The president might even have confronted a popular saying and explained how the only "opportunity" five years ago that he "squandered" was the United States' indefinite residence in national victimhood.
OK, we knew all of that. Keep in mind, it was a United Nations audience to which the president spoke, the common language at Turtle Bay a euphemistic dialect of English. George Bush actually used it just twice, once about Israel and its neighbors and again to praise the military pledges of Paris and Rome — otherwise he referenced it to refute it. Several paragraphs into such a castigation comes the thought, How can they keep quiet while he tells them what they really are? Those who heard the radio broadcast wouldn't have been able to see the delegates knit their brows, shuffle their feet, and fold their arms.
Andrew McCarthy, whose rhetorical trend against Islam I have written about several times, most recently three weeks ago, this morning confirmed my observation — that he reached a point where it was "impossible" for him to be doing much else than imputing Near East fascism to Koranic observance — with two contributions to National Review's Corner. The instance of Pope Benedict XVI's use, for a public address, of a 14th-Century Constantinopolitan denigration of Mohammed's teachings, has brought about what press and comment portray as an international Islamic riot. The depth of wounded religious dignity we don't know, and that countries heavily populated by the faithful are also dictatorships doesn't help us — free expression itself is a breach of etiquette over there, piety and opportunity a corporate policy. Radical implantations, London to Baghdad, transmit the same.
Events of the past few days were sufficient for McCarthy to offer three verses from the Koran as a whole statement, its implication that from the Koran comes violence; a statement which McCarthy affirmed when colleague Andrew Stuttaford asked for a clarification and moderation. "There's plenty of rough stuff in the Bible," wrote Stuttaford, and he was correct. One Koranic excerpt is an instruction to "slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captive, and besiege them, and prepare for them each an ambush." It is a favorite, but it has Biblical parallels.
In Deuteronomy Jehovah exhorted the Israelites to build a kingdom through military conquest. "When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace. If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced labor and shall work for you," said the Lord, adding "in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes." When Joshua inherited leadership from Moses, God led him and brought about the obliteration of Jericho. God's messages were to Moses and Joshua for a specific and ancient divine purpose, as an example of God's will for His people. They were not license to expropriate but Pope Urban II used them as such anyway. Alexius Comnenus petitioned Urban for help with southerly Seljuk Turks; Urban, in his demented exegesis as transcribed by Robert the Monk, decided that the land of milk and honey was his, too, and commenced the First Crusade.
Turn back to Benedict who, drawing from the same holy book, responded to the question of "spreading the faith through violence" with animadversion. What moved him — heresy or reason? What is interposed between papacies nine hundred years apart, or more to the point, what is it Christianity has contended with that Islam really hasn't, yet? Review contributor Clifford May repeated McCarthy's error, conflating sacred text with its misappropriation by authoritarians. He quoted the Ayatollah Khomeini celebrating rule by force. He doubts there is any "wiggle room" in Khomeini's remarks — wait a moment, when was Khomeini infallible but in the opinion of people whose opinions we reject?
Islam, a practical target, is the wrong one. By the end of the Cold War a paralogism was on the West's escutcheon: because all communism was evil, all evil was communism. If we run from a religion, judging nations by their Islamic denomination — ignoring the greater relevancy of dictatorship, of cultures of fear and domination — we will deliver ourselves out of the presence of one tyranny yet into another's, again.
Popular Mechanics began expostulating on distorted revisions of the September 11th attacks with an article printed in early 2005. This past summer the magazine formalized its rejection of conspiracist accounts by publishing a book on the subject. Blogger Glenn Reynolds heralded the release of Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand up to the Facts with an August interview of the book's editors, and today directs attention to an opinion piece written by Popular Mechanics' editor-in-chief.
My personal encounters with conspiracists have been mercifully few, especially since the peddlers were otherwise well-intentioned and intelligent — if distant — acquaintances. That thematic consistency trumps coherence suggests pathology, as does a similarity in behavior. The conspiracists start with adumbration and in response to or anticipation of a challenge, swiftly distance themselves from claims. Just, you know, repeating what they heard. Arguments with some basis in fact I will confront as politely as I can. Depreciating the lives and deaths of thousands of people — one delusive favorite, the denial of the existence of Flight 77 — is intolerable. Unfortunately, the prerequisite for becoming a conspiracy theorist is either a willful evasion of logic or an incapacity for its use. It was Popular Mechanics' first piece that I forwarded to a conspiracist — the magazine has done good work, but for those who revel in anti-American fancy one may as well explain to a dog why it can't understand English.
Can we agree that former President Bill Clinton, during his eight-year tenure, did not realize how a military retreat from Somalia and a statutory response to bombing attacks would invite Near East terrorists to broaden their catastrophic enterprise? No, Mr. Clinton protests, and was last heard condemning the decision of Disney chief Robert Iger to air The Path to 9/11, a miniseries deprecative of his efforts as federal steward, after a phone exchange could not foreclose. What about the failure of those under Clinton to follow the commander-in-chief's implicit orders — secretaries, professionals, careerists? Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has been joined by Clinton's advisors on national security and counterterrorism, Sandy Berger and Richard Clarke, to insist that they have been defamed.
At the very least, is it OK for ABC to broadcast historical fiction, even if the historical figures are contemporary and they don't care for the fiction? In fact, signatures from a Democratic senatorial quintet were at the bottom of a letter to the network expressing the opinion that the public interest as defined by the Communications Act of 1934 involves limiting editorial content to that which no one can factually dispute; which means, one guesses, that Peter Jennings ought to check his mail, too.
With free expression there is the expectation and the allowance for one public personality to tell another to stop, or shut up. This becomes unseemly and unconstitutional when the first party ignores the second's right to do what the first doesn't like. That is where some on the left appear to be going, and the general public may well find the miniseries not nearly as fissiparous. For the right, advice: first, sit back and marvel; second, do not fault the former president for not having done the impossible, to prevent an attack like that on September 11th or halt the growth of terrorism simply by curtailing the leadership of al Qaeda with a button-push. Bill Clinton's goose is George W. Bush's gander.
Mario Loyola got some trouble for his comparison of statements from Michael Moore and Nazi propagandists but his defense — "[America's detractors] don't realize that half their talking points are straight out of the propaganda of the people they most hate" — is solid.
In his derisive "Antwort" rebuttal to a diplomatic telegram from President Franklin Roosevelt, very nearly a stage performance to the Reichstag in late April 1939, Adolf Hitler disparaged the founding of America with lines that — if placed before a reader unaware of its origins — could readily be mistaken as tu quoque objections employed by those whom former Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick in 1984 named the Blame America First Crowd. Hitler's prevaricating appeal for equal judgment, noted by William Shirer in his classic The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, is as follows:
The freedom of North America was not achieved at the conference table any more than the conflict between the North and the South was decided there. I will not mention the innumerable struggles which finally led to the subjugation of the North American Continent as a whole. ...[Germans] had held out with infinite heroism against a whole world for four years in the struggle for its liberty and independence. They were subjected to even greater degradation than can ever have been inflicted on the chieftains of Sioux tribes.
Isn't this familiar? Emphasizing a liberal society's failures and diminishing its self-corrections is a counter to moral arguments so typical of Kirkpatrick's accused as to be reflexive. Lost in recrimination is the independent value of human dignity, as if a violation of one kind at one time excuses that of another in the present; out of a benefit of the doubt, therefore, do we assume Moore et al. believe they are working at cross-purposes to fascism.
A Time magazine account of Hitler's burlesque, written ten days after, exhibits two antiquities of mainstream American reportage: direct references to a dictator as a dictator; and evident disapproval and distrust not only of Hitler but also Benito Mussolini. Poignant is, then, to the right of the article for the time being, an advertisement for the latest edition of Time wherein the fifth anniversary of September 11th is to be marked by a cover story on America's posited "overreaction" to 3,000 dead.
Iain Murray has printed a letter from a British Conservative friend of his that is, to put it mildly, critical of American maintenance of the "special relationship" between London and Washington. The White House, writes the friend in one magmatic passage, is "willing to see us sold down the river to a bunch of cod-socialist Euro fanatics." Murray turns to readers: what do Americans take from this?
Well. Murray's friend's lamentation comes off like that of a typical postmodernist, to wit, "What's in it for us?" Her charge of diminution is curious, considering the documented volume of Tory contempt for policies of the American right, notably martial assertion in the war and democratization. Most tendentious is the depiction of the prime minister as a "toady." Which wing of the alliance was it, Anglo or American, that insisted on hanging in for a final, vain round of Security Council negotiations in early 2003, paring the indictment of Saddam Hussein for the sake of votes from Ba'athist Baghdad's most loyal Franco-Russo trade partners? Which wing had the power to refuse to go along, but instead deferred to the other out of respect?
The friend means well, I am sure, but we have here a backbencher screed and little else.
Related thought: America is an earnest belle, broad-faced and winsome. England is her cleverly waspish savant friend who plays foil when the suitors come.
Dysgenics makes the clerisy giggle, and so it is with talk of a movie on the subject that jokes about intelligence and affluence are swapped. One family, broken, two boys, comes to mind: the mother with an IQ below average and the biological father, now long gone, a thoroughgoing man of the underclass. The mother, nearing sixty now, is warm-hearted but still mostly careless; one son means well but is lowbrow and aimless. The other son, however, is motivated and articulate, determined to enter a career that will, in all likelihood, mean his transcendence of unpromising beginnings. He's the one who moved away with good reason, who decided that he could do better than drudgery. From a few hundred miles away, he looks after his mother.
Odds are against success to be had by those of lesser faculties and fortunes but they can be beaten, and done so through character — inspired by something other than blood or books — absent from the smart and disdainful.
National Review editor Rich Lowry cites an article by Jackson Diehl, who reports that Iraqi leaders are building their country assiduously but deliberately, and not — as is the political mandate in Washington — expeditiously. A corresponding reader of Lowry's, whose letter Lowry reproduced on the Corner three weeks ago, emphasized the axiom that neither success nor failure are complete, ever. From early 2003 there has been a notion in the West that the liberation and strenuous rebirth of Iraq are plot devices in a story; every month, every day taken with the constant expectation of peripety. This is faulty and dangerous thinking.
