“What is the West?” asks Mr. Hart, a thunderous question if ever there was one; and then he goes on to answer it: the West is Athens and Jerusalem.

An enormous amount is at stake here. [No kidding] “Athens” stands for the view that truth is discovered through intellect. “Jerusalem” stands for the view that truth is delivered through the insights of recognized genius. “Athens” stands for cognition, philosophy, and science. “Jerusalem” stands for the spiritual aspiration to holiness, or purity of soul.

From these two wellsprings surges a great cataract of creative energy, unpredictable, explosive and violent at times, almost appalling in its rush to redact, attach, refine, even overturn its own corpus of ideas and material.

Athens and Jerusalem are at the core of Western Being —- not Confucius, not Buddha, certainly not Mohammed, nor the Aztecs and Incas. And it is the tension between Athens and Jerusalem that generates the peculiar and powerful energy of the West. There is tension between the goal of knowing through intellect, and the goal of spiritual aspiration to holiness. They are not incompatible, but they are not altogether compatible either. Off at the edge, do we place our final be on intellect or on inspired insight that has been confirmed by experience? Both have claims. There are immensely powerful intensities behind who we actually are. And they are unique in human history.

Well. Thanks to Mr. Hart for clearing all this up.

Interesting, isn’t it, that the “spokesman” [for the Times] expects us to take on trust that the newspaper “took appropriate steps” to make sure that its disclosure of classified information was responsible —- otherwise, why did he not spell out what those steps were, who took them, the evidence he gathered, and the reasoning by which he reached his conclusions? —- while the whole point of the disclosure was that the paper itself takes nothing on trust from a democratically elected government? If the people’s representatives say that it is dangerous that a piece of information should be made public, there is no question of accepting their claim without independent confirmation, whereas if the unelected and unrepresentative New York Times says that it is not dangerous we are expected to accept that claim implicitly.

This rather flagrant discrepancy dovetails nicely with the general tone of self-righteousness adopted by the Times in its approach to contested political questions: Our credibility is impeccable, assert the editorialists (who regular contaminate the supposedly “objective” news pages); you can trust our judgment, even if we do not so much as sketch out the logic and assumptions behind it, but only a fool would take the word of a politician at face value. Of this latter prescription I am inclined favorably, with the addendum that some politicians can in fact be trusted, when that trust has been earned; but I would go on to broaden the prescription to include ideologues masquerading as journalists, a category which sadly has comes to include the editorial voice of The New York Times.

There have been countless tyrants, political demagogues, military conquerors and racial bigots, and there will be many more. What made Hitler different in kind from traditional despots was his embrace of scientific modernity, as he understood it. Like his fellow revolutionaries Vladimir Lenin and Stalin and Mao, Hitler was no mere gangster, but a deluded visionary who believed he was furthering human progress by drawing on the latest in scientific thought. Of course, Hitlerian racial science was as bogus as Marxist-Leninist economics and sociology. But its essential modernity was captured by Winston Churchill in his speech of June 18, 1940, when he warned of “a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”

That last point is an important one: Nazism was to its core a creature of modernity. It was not a “reactionary” movement, but a horribly, wickedly progressive one; it was an acceleration without scruples of many of the principal trends of the Modern Age; and the whole enterprise was cast in the lurid modern light of supremely liberated Man, freed from all those features of civilization which restrain his base impulses, namely, the Christian virtues.

In a particularly brilliant passage in his great work of synthesis and artistry, The Conservative Mind, Russell Kirk imagines a sort of dialogue or intellectual badinage between John Stuart Mill, the colossal expounder of modern liberalism, and Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, the prototype, if you will, for scrupulous liberals turning to conservatism as they watched in stark horror as liberalism transformed into collectivism. This feature has been with us ever since, with each generation of conservative thought profiting immensely from defectors to its cause, provoked to defection by the multifarious excesses of the Left. These two were contemporaries, both geniuses of men, whose disagreements prefigured one of the central dynamics of modern politics: what Jacques Barzun has dubbed the “Great Switch” —- when the philosophy of liberty, that is, liberalism, consumed by fevered visions of egalitarianism and the perfect society, threw aside its heritage in liberty and plunged down the dark road that led to Great Purge and concentration camp and Gulag. The item in question is the nature of force, and its role in law and government.

Mill had written that compulsion is justifiable in society only until the “time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion.” [And Mill’s theory was that the age of discussion had arrived, that power could now be distributed collectively] Was there ever a time, asks Stephen, at which no man could be improved by discussion? Are not even savages improved by discussion, and do they not employ it? But every previous society has found it necessary to reinforce discussion by the buttress of force, and our age cannot afford to dispense with this prop to order. “No such period has as yet been reached anywhere, and there is no prospect of its being reached anywhere within any assignable time.” Let us be candid: force (or the potentiality of it) is, if anything, more influential in our own time than in previous ages. Lincoln employed a force which would have crushed Charlemagne and his peers like so many eggshells. “To say that the law of force is abandoned because force is regular, unopposed, and beneficially exercised, is to say that night and day are now such well-established institutions that the sun and moon are mere superfluities.” Through their armies, their police, and their means of rapid communication, modern states are supported by a potential force more promptly and effectively, in case of need, than ever before. The comparative orderliness of our society is the product not of logic-chopping and diffident persuasion, but of this reservoir of force.

Kirk’s touchstone was Edmund Burke, that great Irish statesman; and Burke’s teaching upheld the delicacy of society, which is in essence an organic thing. Grounded in sturdy Christian theology, Burke never strayed from an appreciation for the incorrigible rebellion of man from God. His disdain for utopian schemes was total, unyielding; one cannot emancipate man from his sinfulness, Burke instructed. But one can surely and tragically, though perhaps unintentionally, emancipate him from all the supple and intricate edifice of habit and prescription, in a word, from tradition, which stands lonely guard over the baseness and rebellion of men in the world. Tradition is compulsion made regular and easily-anticipated; it is the replacement of force by habit and custom and prescription. One can hack wildly, with that crazed ambition of the madman, at the structures of tradition felt to be intolerably repressive, but which perform the tremendous task of restraining the mutiny of the soul that subsists in everyone. And those structures will fall, but the mutiny will remain, and now there will be nothing to contain, dispel, oppose, hinder, and finally punish it. Into tradition, said Burke, has been lodged the shared wisdom of man in his struggle with iniquity, sin and vice. The French revolutionaries unleashed upon the world an emancipatory spirit which has never taken its fill of blood and tears; Edmund Burke was perhaps the very first to pounce on the destructiveness of this spirit with vigor and sober sanity.

To ignore the role of force, as Mill does, is to expose society to the contagion of a ravaging sickness. For the mass of men require restraint; they cannot adequately curb their own passions or their own sloth, and so must be compelled to acknowledge the suzerainty of law, which is sanctioned by force. “Estimate the proportion of men and women who are selfish, sensual, frivolous, idle, absolutely commonplace and wrapped up in the smallest of petty routines, and consider how far the freest of free discussion is likely to improve them. They only way by which it is practically possible to act upon them at all is by compulsion or restraint . . . It would be as wise to say to the water of a stagnant marsh, ‘Why in the world do you not run to the sea? You are perfectly free.’” This is not all. Nature, abhorring a vacuum, always supplies force to fill any conspicuous cavity in society, and if the state abandons its sacred function of directing social force into the service of law, then new groups and agencies will seize the opportunity to use force for their own ends, subverting law and state —- indeed, perhaps creating a new state governed by themselves upon the ashes of the preceding state which forgot its own function.

These arguments resound like blasphemy in our day, blasphemy against the Church of Emancipation which maintains its dominion over us; yet there is great truth here, and its subtlety is lost on a people who regard pornographers as champions and the Christian church as an enemy of freedom. Men “must be compelled to acknowledge the suzerainty of law”: today men hardly acknowledge anything beyond the suzerainty of the own appetites, often embodied in our ever-ramifying language of rights. Last week The New York Times and the New Jersey Supreme Court divined a “right” of the voters to a “competitive” political race, thereby, if logic holds with any regularity, invalidating about 300 U.S. House races, where districts are gerrymandered through the connivance of both parties to insure one or the other party’s near-invincible dominance. Public debate is so saturated with complacent reference to inviolable rights that participants not persuaded by such parlance might as well speak a foreign language.

Now, in point of fact, J. S. Mill achieved a thunderous victory against Stephen, as evidenced by the fact that no one even remembers the latter, while the former still ekes out a place in our increasingly stunted historical imagination. Indeed, so profound was his victory that Mill is occasionally called upon today by conservatives, as I myself did several months ago when I explained that Mill viewed any financial largess distributed by the state to a citizen as sufficient reason for excluding said citizen from voting rights. Because one grievous threat to a democracy is the threat of corrupt voters. Imagine a socialist (or at least a proto-socialist) writing such things! Legislation along those lines today would very simply put the Democratic Party out of business in sort order. But even though Mill was victorious in the debate, he was yet wrong in the essence of his philosophical innovations to the body of liberalism; for the socialist experiment, after exacting a truly unspeakable cost, has been conceded by all but the most impervious to reality as a failure. Burke (and his descendants like J. F. Stephens) had the last word: “Experience is the school of mankind, and he will learn at no other.”

“Poll Says Bush Needs to Pay Heed to Weak Economy,” written up by Times correspondents Adam Nagourney and Janet Elder, and awarded pride of place —- the front-page lede —- in yesterday morning’s edition, isn’t just slanted (or misleading or imbalanced or overstated or any other word commonly applied to such things). The story is an outright fraud, a falsehood, a work of fiction.

This thing has received quite some attention in print and online, but I cannot pass it up: I know intelligent and serious people for whom the Times functions almost as a secular scripture; and it appalls me that a venerable institution like this would so brazenly betray their trust. Let me also state that as a matter of principle I see no problem with the Times adopting a distinct philosophical or political viewpoint; indeed, I would welcome the candor; I regard it as a hindrance to a journalist’s intelligence when he must always concern himself with guarding against possible lapses in this incessant prostration before the Objectivity god. What appalls me is the guile and shameless deception, the basic dishonesty in attempting to advance their viewpoint while retaining that coveted mantle of impartiality.

The face of the occupying force will matter not just in Iraq’s cities but also on its borders. Whoever controls Iraq will need to station forces along its most vulnerable frontier —- the long flank with Iran, where at least half a million soldiers died during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war. The Iranians will notice any U.S. presence on the border. “As an occupying power, we will be responsible for the territorial integrity of the Iraqi state,” says Charles William Maynes, of the Eurasia Foundation. “That means we will have to move our troops to the border with Iran. At that point Iran becomes our permanent enemy.”

This I had not seriously considered, but it seems in the main beyond dispute that an American occupation of Iraq will exacerbate tensions with Iran; moreover, it seems equally beyond dispute that even under the provisions of a most exiguous of nation-building mandates we must discharge this responsibility in a post-Saddam Iraq. An unprotected border would present to Iran, a nation which aspires to regional dominance, an almost irresistible inducement to aggrandizement, particularly if actualization of said aspiration could be manipulated in order to abate or disperse the rumbling discontent among the Iranian people. Mr. Fallows cites one expert as imagining an American occupation force of no less than 75,000, and even if that number could be reduced by the assistance of the British and other allies, the additional strain on an already over-deployed military would be substantial. Stanley Kurtz, tireless in expounding the necessity of invasion and occupation of Iraq, has also energetically advocated a renewal of the draft, which he argues is equally necessary.

In addition to this sober and illuminating cover story, there is a short piece by Robert Kaplan, prince of the realists and espouser of the “pagan ethos” required for survival in a chaotic world, on the same topic; several excellent columns by such luminaries as Mr. Kelly and P.J. O’Rourke; and a thoughtful if flawed review of a provocative new book the very premise of which fascinates: animals rights from the perspective of a Roman Catholic vegetarian conservative. Oh yeah, and its reviewer is that bundle of creative tensions Christopher Hitchens.

Then there is the crown jewel: a resplendent, rip-roaring piece of reportage by Black Hawk Down author Mark Bowden. Mr. Bowden, whose riveting account of Saddam’s terror regime appeared in the May issue of the same magazine, hung out for a while with the crew of the Air Force’s 391st Fighter Squadron, which flew 230 sorties over Afghanistan last year. His report is a snapshot or glimpse of 21st century warfare, of precision and endurance, of hilarity and thrill, of astonishment and grace. It is very simply journalism at its best. This magazine is a treasure.

This Zoo is characterized by, among other things, providing a public forum for an assemblage of the world’s thugs, dictators, bullies, autocrats, tyrants, satraps, and sycophants to play at democracy and government by deliberation while brazenly disregarding the great and unspeakably elaborate moral firmament which buttresses and makes possible democracy and self-government. Moreover, the Zoo is a kind of consummation or triumph of form and process over substance; a divorce between reality and perception so complete that the introduction of a bit of reality here and there has all the trappings and thrill of real scandal.

Mr. Buckley wrote a book about his experience called United Nations Journal: A Delegate’s Odyssey. The hypocrisy at this place can take on gargantuan forms. For instance, he reports that back then everyone learned rather quickly that, “the convention is very simply to ignore Soviet infractions against the stated ideals of the organization.” One of the first addresses he heard in the General Assembly was a stern reprimand by the Soviet foreign minister directed toward Israel for its occupation of the West Bank. That speech, delivered by the representative of the most ruthless imperial power on earth, contained the following lines: “The only wish of the Arab States who fell victim to imperialist aggression is to retrieve what was seized from them by force.” And what about the Poles and the Czechs and the East Germans behind the Iron Curtain? Was a similar retrieval of liberty not their “only wish”? Irony has fled when words like that can be spoken by characters like that with a straight face.

But such is the nature of the UN, and of the credulity of the world in its approach to this lumbering, tragicomic institution.

David Warren, in another illuminating column, describes a typical item in the UN catalogue of fatuity:

It has also emerged that Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, has been active behind the scenes, helping the Iraqis frame and phrase both of the diplomatic stunts that have subverted the U.S. and British diplomatic effort. He helped the Iraqis write the letter on Sept. 16, deceitfully offering “inspections without conditions,” and has since kept them informed of diplomatic developments, helping them time their second intervention, in which they anticipated and rejected the proposed U.S. resolution draft. The U.S. State Department has the documentation on this . . .

Mr. Buckley’s book, supple, surprisingly lacking in bitterness, even mirthful, is worth a look for a little dose of reality –- along with a smile and a resigned sigh.

[Soccer player Sayed Tahir] first made a name for himself internationally a few months ago when he scored a stunning goal, broadcast around the world, against a team of international peacekeepers in Kabul.

“One of my best memories was when I scored a great goal playing against ISAF (International Security Assistance Force). I was greatly encouraged by international footballing bodies and by my own people,” he told Reuters during a recent training session.

At his humble, clay-brick home in Kabul Tahir showed off his soccer paraphernalia. With his infant son and daughter on each knee, he said his ultimate hero was Argentinean soccer genius Diego Maradona.

Afghanistan’s future is obviously precarious, but its people are free of the yoke of fascism; they were liberated, though you’ll hardly hear a word of acknowledgement from the anti-American Left and the Arab tyrants.

Columnist Michelle Malkin calmly details the career of New Jersey’s own apologist for terror and hatred, who has been coddled and funded by the state for around forty years. The indictment is illuminated, if no longer surprising.

(1) Broadly, the principal failure of the administration since September 11 in my view has been clarity of purpose. Things could be much worse on this count, and it is a bit difficult to point to many specifics here, but there have been genuine and debilitating missteps in articulating a comprehensive yet easily-apprehended statement of who we are fighting and why. To do such a thing immediately after the terror attacks, to be sure, would have been an almost Herculean task, and it may simply be too much to ask from modern political leadership in such a moment of crisis. Nonetheless, the failure is there, and it is with language, I think, that it most obviously manifests itself: The administration, for instance, chose to declare a “war on terrorism,” which, as many have noted, cannot, even sympathetically, be said to be wholly coherent. One does not declare war on a method of warfare, however repugnant that method may be; does it make sense to proclaim a “war on submarine warfare” or a “war on high altitude bombing”? Weapons of mass destruction are a deadly serious matter, but the emphasis on them these days can also tend to reflect a strained and careless way with words. In point of fact, it must be a human actor who employs the repugnant method, and it is he with whom we are at war. Various outgunned but fiercely committed actors in conflicts of almost every scale have employed terrorism as an appallingly effective method.

A related point: The administration should have requested from Congress, in the days after the attacks, a formal declaration of war, because such action is still, last I checked, required by the Constitution, and because it would have been an immensely unifying and clarifying decision. A few cranks would have howled about our lack of knowledge of our enemies, or the unconventional nature of the war, or whatever else; but they could have been defeated by the simple remark that a declaration of war means only that a state of war exists between the United States and those who attacked it. Constitutionally, politically, and morally our collective sense of purpose and resolve would have been consolidated by this formal declaration. And legally, innovations in criminal law for unconventional warriors operating in the United States —- terrorists whose sinister movements are assisted and concealed by the machinery of freedom —- could thereby have been more efficaciously promulgated and argued. I wrote about this several months ago.

(2) The administration has at times exhibited a distressing unwillingness to vigorously argue its views; instead, it seems to prefer the fait accompli approach, or, as the Democrats so elegantly put it, the “my way or the highway” approach. This unaccountable tendency is rather strange considering that when the President and his able and cogent advisers have set themselves to arguing a case, they have usually prevailed. A good example, unrelated directly to the war, is the case of the International Criminal Court. Now the ICC is undoubtedly a very bad idea. Its undemocratic, illiberal nature; its menacing and unspecified powers and disdain for nuance; its roots in European and Third World intellects whose commitment to individual rights and detached judgment is dubious; the obvious threat it poses to a hegemon like America which naturally arouses envy and hostility; all these characteristics provide ample reason for the United States to resist. But the administration hardly made a public case; rather, it just threatened the ham-handed retaliatory measure of defunding all UN peacekeeping mandates, which was surely effective in the immediate short-term but, without concomitant public arguments against the ICC, it seemed arrogant and inexplicable, and therefore alienated even those who might have been sympathetic to the arguments.

For quite a while this same hauteur fluttered about the American approach to arguing its Iraq policy: the administration, for several months, scarcely even argued for it at all. Perhaps this was intentional, part of a contrivance structured around military and political timetables; and anyway, fortunately, it has changed rather dramatically in the last month or so, both here and abroad, with fairly dramatic results.

(3) But a similar ham-handedness has characterized much of the administration’s dealings with Europe in general. Europe is a huge place, and even talking about it as one entity is almost an affront to reality. Does anyone really think Britain has more in common with Germany or Italy than with America? Nor are European opinions accurately reflected by European elites. Most Europeans —- not just the British —- are quite sympathetic to American determination to smash Islamic terror; and most Europeans countries have been thoroughly helpful, with military assistance, intelligence, law enforcement, etc, etc. Moreover, I think the idea, popular with a lot of conservatives, of “to hell with the Europeans!”, however attractive in moments of exasperation, is misguided and reckless. There is simply no plausible coalition of allies at the moment that could even begin to compare favorably with our European allies.

To overcome European reluctance, which is real, requires some delicacy and equipoise, but it can be done. Chiefly, it consists of playing the European nations against one another in order to undermine the primary problem that looms in Europe: a consolidated European superstate which finds its only meaningful identity in rivalry with, or even hostility toward, the U.S. That is the ambition of many European Union bureaucrats and other elites; but it is not an ambition, by and large, shared by the bulk of the European populace. And it is an ambition which should be opposed —- quietly, perhaps, but resolutely. Because a Europe unified to some degree in opposition to the U.S., with its own security force replacing NATO, is no laughing matter. It is not hard to imagine this rival superpower some years on, its relations with America now strained, seeking an alliance with a rising China, or even with some assortment of resentful Arab states whose emigrants have moved north and west in such numbers to have established a solid constituency for pro-Arab policy in Europe (this is already happening, in fact). Then where would we be? In a far more precarious world, that’s where.

Yet administration policy is still one of basically unqualified support for European integration. Moreover, as John O’Sullivan, whose indispensable essays on this topic ground much of my argument, wrote recently:

It would be comforting to report that American conservatives had criticized and opposed this State Department drift [of favoring European integration]. Unfortunately, with few exceptions, they have accepted the false picture of a Europe already unified in opposition to the U.S., denounced it in apocalyptic terms, and gone on to advance strategic fantasies of replacing NATO with an anti-Islamic alliance built on Turkey (an Islamic country), Russia (which just signed a trade deal with Iraq), India (which is violently hostile to America’s client, President Musharraf of Pakistan), and Israel. It is, of course, an achievement of sorts to have produced a foreign policy even more unrealistic than that of the U.S. State Department.

A achievement indeed. Yet the ominous consolidation, centralization and homogenization plans roll on: Two years ago the European Union passed a law making it illegal for journalists to criticize its policies. In March The Wall Street Journal reported that EU anti-trust officers may conduct “dawn raids” of businesses, without a search warrant, to locate evidence of “price-fixing or abuse of market power”; any evidence seized may be used to assess huge fines (Volkswagon was assessed $78 million in 2000) without any judicial hearing and review. “The only approval needed,” the Journal reported, “is from the EU’s antitrust chief, Mario Monti, who usually bases his decision on whether the haul of evidence will likely be big enough to justify the time and expense.” Mr. Monti would like to expand his powers to include arbitrary searches of executives’ personal residences, and the authority to interrogate employees, again without judicial review. And there is a push to “harmonize” enforcement throughout the fifteen EU member states. Another proposal would make racism and “xenophobia,” very nebulously defined, crimes punishable by prison sentences; the primary consequence of this legislation would probably be a coerced silence on immigration policy —- an arena of public policy already so poisoned by rhetorical violence that it cost the life of one unorthodox Dutch politician. This is not the kind of integration we ought to be endorsing; vigilance of despotic trends in Europe, of all places, should not yield to complacency; there are quite enough American military cemeteries over there already.

That last remark may be exaggerative, but how short is our memory? Outside of Britain and France, no European nation right now has a military of global reach, but it wouldn’t take long, after the decommissioning of NATO, for that to change, especially with the bureaucratic consolidation continuing, as seems likely, unabated. There are already these inchoate, or not-so-inchoate, ideas floating around about a European “rapid reaction force.” As Steve Sailer observed acerbically, “Iraq is just a sideshow compared to maintaining peace in Northwest Europe.” Who will gainsay that statement?

We cannot wash our hands of Europe; the mere entertaining of such an idea does indeed border on the delusional. Nor should we want to. The anti-Americanism so often cursed is real, but it is not comprehensive. There are huge constituencies of European voters deeply suspicious of the EU consolidation, its disdain for tradition and community, and these, I’ll wager, are very frequently the same voters who are most sympathetic to U.S. robustness against Islamofascism. We do ourselves harm when we simultaneously paint them with the same reproachful brush as we do the leftist elite and turn a deaf ear on their concerns about the direction of Continental politics.

I want to stress here that my complaints about the administration, and the public figures of the American Right, are petty things in contrast to what might have developed under, say, a Gore administration. I shudder just thinking about the alternatives to the moral and strategic clarity that characterizes this president and his advisers, whatever their failure and miscalculations.

Update: Two of the real heavyweights, Mark Steyn and V. D. Hanson, have stepped into the ring on the question of American-European realtions. I appear to be at least thinking about a crucial question, though I quail at the notion that neither man places as much importance on our European alliance as I. Another important essay on this topic is Robert Kagan's from some months ago.

About the possibility of freedom for Cubans, this bit of candor: “Ultimately it’s up to Cuba, it’s not up to us. It’s their country, and if there are going to be changes in Cuba it will be the Cubans who make those changes.” Thanks, Jesse. When you spend your days hunted by secret police, your family threatened, your willpower draining in the face of debasement and the brutal jackboot of the totalitarian state, what’s a little leisurely contempt from an American celebrity?

Candidly also, Mr. Ventura rebuked the Cuban human rights activists for not coming to him! “They know where my hotel is.” They also know where Florida is, in a general sense, and quite a few have chosen rather… unorthodox means of arriving there. Many others, of course, have perished in the attempt, because one does not willingly choose unorthodox means to traverse 90 miles of saltwater.

Apparently these two men of candor discussed the Kennedy assassination. It so happens that the very same man whose film contrived (rather successfully) to traduce the history of that historical event in the minds of modern movie-goers, Oliver Stone, is now at work on a project about one Fidel Castro. Imagine that: having feverishly mined that vast quarry of conspiracy-theory material, America’s “military-industrial complex,” Mr. Stone will now favor us with a hagiography of the world’s elder tyrant. A certain symmetry there.

Like so many other moral cripples of our age, Mr. Ventura pronounced Castro a very bright and articulate man, or some such thing (Norman Mailer once compared him glowingly to an erect penis). This kind of thunderous foolishness, grounded in a kind of blatant intellectual negligence, overflows the borders of mere stupidity into the category of cruelty. As Myles Kantor concludes in a short, sharp piece,

Minnesota’s governor prides himself on bluntness, so I’ll be blunt: You’re despicable, Governor Ventura, but not because you went to Cuba. You’re despicable because you chummed with a slave master, snubbed his victims, and acted as if Cubans’ future belongs to them.

The problem with abandoning deterrence is that you give up deterring the enemy from doing his worst. Our 1999 attack on Yugoslavia seems to have disappeared down the memory hole, but it offers a perfect example. NATO was successfully deterring Milosevic from ethnically cleansing the rebellious Muslims from Kosovo, by keeping British inspectors on the ground in Kosovo and threatening air strikes. But, then, Madeleine Albright had her private little psychodrama and demanded in writing that Milosevic let NATO invade Serbia proper. He of course said no, so NATO gave up on deterrence and started dropping bombs on his capital. With nothing left to lose, hours later the Serbs started expelling the Muslims.

That’s a danger in invading Iraq —- we’ve successfully, and quite easily, deterred Saddam from making trouble for his neighbors for a decade, but once we start trying to conquer him, then deterrence stops working and he’s likely to lash out with a See You In Hell! attack.

Ramsey Clark, who served president Lyndon Johnson as attorney-general and then moved drastically to the left, set out in 1994 to find a lawyer for Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian who was charged with conspiring to bomb the UN and several New York bridges and tunnels. The story of Clark’s search bears in a perverse way on what I wrote last Saturday about the left’s affection for dictators and demagogues.

To defend Rahman, Clark recruited Lynne Stewart, a New York “movement lawyer” who often represents radicals. She knew little about Rahman’s followers, Egyptian terrorists who prey on Coptic Christians and others. She was logically Rahman’s enemy, since he’s a religious fascist and she’s a feminist and an atheist. But Clark told her (George Packer reported in a superb article in last Sunday's New York Times magazine) “that if she refused, the Arab world would feel betrayed by their friends on the American left.” An amazing thought, with alarming implications.

She took Rahman’s case, lost it, helped him appeal, then (the government charges) illegally transmitted his political instructions to his murderous followers. For that she’ll be tried next spring, and perhaps imprisoned for life. But what astonished me was Ramsey Clark’s argument. Who knew that eight years ago Arab terrorists already depended on the American left? Not me. Who knew that terrorists would feel betrayed if such help did not materialize? How did American leftists, such as Clark, connect with Islamists? The fever swamps of American left-wing politics turn out to be darker and more tangled than most of us guessed.

Not long after September 11, I wrote on an email discussion list that, “It is a truly remarkable thing to witness elements of the radical Left, many of whom insist on calling themselves ‘liberals,’ driven by their constitutive hatred of America into the arms of one of the more illiberal historical impulses in human history, namely, Islamic fanaticism.” I did not then adequately appreciate the depth and brazenness of this truth; nor the almost unaccountable and languid pervasiveness of it. This weekend two Democratic congressmen were in Baghdad, cavorting around with Saddam’s poltroons and prevaricators, broken men whose loyalty is insured through a mélange of fearsome intimidation, blackmail, agony, and moral debasement of the most appalling sort. And these two patriots stood there among this cavalcade of human depravity and wretchedness and one of them declared on American television that Americans can trust Mr. Saddam Hussein but they cannot trust their president, Mr. George W. Bush.

The mind reels.

Enough with the compliments.

It would be difficult to imagine a more irresponsible speech than what Mr. Gore delivered on Monday. It was bitter, disingenuous, misleading, and incoherent; it added nothing to the debate over Iraq policy expect rancor and diversion; and it emboldened other Democrats to further displays of irresponsibility, namely Tom Daschle, who fulminated two days later against the “politicization” of the war by, he said, the President. This was classic displacement, of a vaguely Freudian variety —- for though the President may have been sloppy with some campaign rhetoric, it was in fact Al Gore who degraded the war debate with shameless political calculation; which calculation, of course, was focused on 2004, not 2002, and mainly threatens potential Democratic primary contenders, including one Tom Daschle.

When was it, precisely, when the Democratic Party developed such disdain for democracy? We ought to thank Providence that this war debate comes during an election season, allowing we the people to have a real voice in this critical political decision. President Bush says to Congress and the nation (if I may be so bold as to paraphrase): “Are we serious? Are we serious about what it takes to defend this country? I take as my principal duty the protection of the people of this country; and I regard as the gravest threat we face the possession of weapons of mass slaughter in the hands of anti-American madmen, the first of which is Saddam Hussein. This man has violated every agreement he has ever signed, and has flaunted pledges he undertook to save himself from the wrath of the U.S. Army, which could have rolled right up to his front door ten years ago. I know there are other terrorists, other madmen, other organized threats arrayed against us, but this one is the most serious, and we must deal with it. Can we not walk and chew gum at the same time? Are we serious about this war?” And the Democrats replied, very simply: “Of course we’re not serious. And how dare you expect us to be serious in an election season?”

Fortunately, the Democratic Party does not consist of politicians exclusively. It consists also of thinkers and writers and serious people, who have taken up the debate with vigor and, well, seriousness (a few examples are here). “The battle is joined,” Peggy Noonan wrote Friday.

It will be waged over the next six weeks. It is going to be hot. It is going to dominate public discourse. This is good. We need and deserve a debate that is worthy of the moment, and worthy of the people —- the millions of them —- who could be affected by America's decision one way or another.

And by the way, it is not bad for a critical world to see how a great democracy, the world’s oldest, goes about resolving questions of the utmost gravity. This is a good time to remind them who, and what, we are.

I was pleasantly surprised by Mr. Tam’s missive. In the past year, I’ve been called a hatemonger thousands of times by various correspondents, but this is one of only a handful to accuse me of factual error. Most sail past anything so prosaic as facts and simply say that the column in question is “hateful.” (“No free speech for hate speech!” as they say at Concordia, in between beating up Holocaust survivors.)

That last remark refers to several horrifying events at Concordia University in Montreal involving a riot among Palestinian protestors, some mob violence against Jews –- you know the storyline (See here and here).

This is in line, incidentally, with the general emotionalism of the anti-war crowd. This week, The Guardian in London accused Mr. Bush for the umpteenth time of “arrogance.” So what if he is? Jacques Chirac’s arrogant, so’s John Ralston Saul, and Pierre Trudeau, and Bob Hope. “Humility? I pass.” That was Bob, but it could just as easily have been Pierre or John or Jacques. Ol’ man Yasser struck me as pretty arrogant when he was squawking away to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour (“You have to be accurate when you are speaking with General Yasser Arafat! Be quiet!”) and then hung up on her. But, even if he were charmingly modest and endearingly sheepish, it wouldn’t change my view of him: His manner is not the issue.

Mr. Steyn goes on to reassert, with conclusive additional evidence, the fact called into question by his correspondent; which fact, namely, is the percentage of rapes committed in Denmark by criminals of “foreign origin” –- in plain language, by Muslims. His reassertion, as I say, is conclusive.

Then, a point so rudimentary it verily boggles the mind that the thing requires such elaborate rhetorical and logical calisthenics to establish:

What should the West do about this problem? Well, we could start by acknowledging it. Fact: Almost all Denmark’s rape victims are ethnic Danish girls or women. Fact: An ethnic Danish girl is far more likely to be raped by a Muslim than an ethnic Dane. Fact: Immigration means that more Danish women get raped. You can argue about the way to change these stubborn facts —- curtail immigration vs. increase outreach, cut welfare vs. educate immigrant parents —- as the People’s Party and the Muslim Youth League are doing. These are tenable positions in the debate. But, when you insist someone’s a “hatemonger” even for mentioning these awkward demographic trends, you’re just trying to shut down the debate . . .

Of course, plain unassailable logic will hardly convince anyone among Mr. Steyn’s voluble and fierce interlocutors. Yet more grounds for resigning ourselves to a fact I wrote about before: reason does not hold sway over the minds of most people.

Professor Esposito has an academic partnership with one Azzam Tamimi, a Palestinian residing in London. They have co-edited a book. Tamimi has published another book in a series edited by Esposito (in the preface, Tamimi calls Esposito “my ustadh,” my teacher). Tamimi also runs something called the Institute of Islamic Political Thought in London. Esposito sits on its board of advisors—the only American to do so. In short, this seems to be a close liaison. The problem is, Azzam Tamimi is Hamas.

Mr. Tamimi also gave an interview to a Spanish newspaper last November in which he declared his admiration for the Taliban and pronounced that “everyone” in the Arab world celebrated the fall of the Trade Towers. His anti-Semitism, it goes without saying, also is palpable and lethal.

Whatever value of Mr. Esposito’s scholarship, and that has been called into question (see here and here), his judgment is, to say the least, untrustworthy.

Last year, the Trinidad-born British writer V. S. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Though virtually no one doubts the power, suppleness, and aesthetic facility of his works of fiction, he was nonetheless a highly controversial Prize-winner, chiefly because of his blunt renunciation of the insidious ideology of political correctness that pervades much of the literary establishment. This repudiation is most salient, perhaps, in his works of nonfiction; and therefore the controversy is most potent surrounding these as against his novels. In particular it surrounds his Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey, an admirable piece of cultural journalism drawing on Mr. Naipaul’s travels through the non-Arab Islamic world, from Iran to Indonesia.

It is clear early-on to the reader of Among the Believers why it generates so much indignation: Mr. Naipaul combines subtle and eloquent prose with considerable powers of observation and discernment to produce a work of immense, analytical, candid insight about a failed civilization. Moreover, the author’s unmistakable sympathy, even tenderness, for the people he encounters makes his judgments all the more resounding in their bleakness. Islamic civilization, he says, is desolation.

This is not a conclusion likely to be absorbed serenely by those of a more politically correct disposition. The very notion that a civilization can fail; that, by implication, some are superior to others, is anathema to all that political correctness asseverates. So Mr. Naipaul’s tragic judgments, irrespective of their accuracy, are positively unpalatable to many of his peers among the literati.

Among the Believers was published in 1981; it’s follow-up, Beyond Belief, in 1998. We tend, these days, toward greater impatience with ideological-inspired spinelessness that limits hardheaded judgment, particularly when that judgment concerns those who plot our destruction, and who target us for death for our association with a single idea: America. Perhaps it was impatience with political correctness, too, that animated the Swedish Academy last fall. Or perhaps it was mere coincidence that scarcely two months after Islamic fanatics reduced the World Trade Center to a crematorium the world’s most prestigious literary award was presented to one of the world’s greatest interpreters of the crisis of Islam.

Whatever the reasons —- there are many available —- for the honor bestowed upon him, Mr. Naipaul’s perceptive inquiries and his incandescent musings should be allowed to speak for themselves. Here I offer them in short, pertinent excerpts:

A central theme of Among the Believers is that within Muslim societies Islam cannot be contained; there is no civil society, no secular buffer to the fiery passion of fundamentalist Islam. The situation is profoundly unhealthy: Faith spills forth into the other areas of life —- political, economic, aesthetic, individual —- effacing all that was there. It leaves the society barren of everything but Islam. Mr. Naipaul quotes Sir Mohammed Iqbal, a poet whose ideas about a separate Indian Muslim state were crucial to the establishment of Pakistan in 1947: “The religious ideal of Islam, therefore, is organically related to the social order which it has created. The rejection of the one will eventually involve the rejection of the other. Therefore, the construction of a polity on national lines, if it means a displacement of the Islamic principle of solidarity, is simply unthinkable to a Muslim.” Muslims must have an Islamic state; church and state must be united for Islam to thrive. Mr. Naipaul then speaks of the “simple, terrible flaw” of this ideal:

Muslim passions were strongest among those Muslims who felt most threatened, and they were in that part of the subcontinent which was to remain Indian. Not all of those Muslims, not a half, not a quarter, could migrate to Pakistan. The most experienced Muslim political organizations were rooted in Indian India rather than Pakistan. Indian Muslim politicians, campaigners for Pakistan, who went to Pakistan became men who overnight had lost their constituencies. They became men of dwindling appeal and reputation, men without a cause, and they were not willing to risk elections in what had turned out to be a strange country. Political life didn’t develop in the new state; institutions and administration remained as they were in the British days.

Into that void rushed the military, the only organized political entity; and then came, almost inevitably, military despotism. A populist dictator followed, with no relief from the secret police. He goes on,

The state withered. But faith didn’t. Failure only led back to the faith. The state had been founded as a homeland for Muslims. If the state failed, it wasn’t because the dream was flawed, or the faith flawed; it could only be because men had failed the faith. A purer and purer faith began to be called for. And in that quest for the Islamic absolute —- the society of believers, where every action was instinct with worship —- men lost sight of the political origins of their state.

Mr. Naipaul then asks the hard, incisive questions:

Wouldn’t it have been better if the creation of Pakistan had been seen as a political achievement, something to build on, rather than as a victory of the faith, something complete in itself? . . . Wouldn’t it have been better for Muslims to trust less to the saving faith and to sit down hard-headedly to work out institutions? Wasn’t that an essential part of the history of civilization, after all: the conversion of ethical ideals into institutions?

Mr. Naipaul’s sympathy for the Muslims of the subcontinent is evident, but it does not yield to his unflinching analysis —- and what an analysis it is!

Another overarching theme is the incapacity of Muslim societies to reconcile themselves to the matrix of creativity and freedom that powers the Western world —- the engine of technological and material prosperity. They look upon Western energy and see only decadence and spiritual sterility, things that are unquestionably there —- I have written of them frequently. But to mistake the waste products of freedom for freedom itself is a miscalculation of shattering proportions. It is precisely that miscalculation which lies at the heart of Muslim folly, and Muslim frustration, and rage.

After hearing a speech full of rage and fulmination and malevolence from Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, Mr. Naipaul writes,

It was his call to the faithful . . . He required only faith. But he also knew the value of Iran’s oil to countries that lived by machines, and he could send Phantoms and tanks against the Kurds. Interpreter of God’s will, leader of the faithful, he expressed all the confusion of his people and made it appear like glory, like the familiar faith: the confusion of a people of high medieval culture awakening to oil and money, a sense of power and violation, and a knowledge of a great new encircling civilization. That civilization couldn’t be mastered. It was to be rejected; at the same time it was to be depended on.

Again, he writes of the phenomenon of rejection: “That expectation —- of others continuing to create, of the alien, necessary civilization going on —- is implicit in the act of renunciation, and is its great flaw.”

And again, this time of Malaysian Islamic extremists: “Their rage —- the rage of a pastoral people with limited skills, limited money, and a limited grasp of the world —- is comprehensive. Now they have a weapon: Islam. It is their way of getting even with the world.” This hardened theology and the psychic refuge it provides “is passion without a constructive programme. The materialist world must be pulled down first; the Islamic state will come later —- as in Iran, as in Pakistan.”

Those are poignant, deeply uncomfortable words, written as they were twenty years ago. It seems it is Mr. Naipaul’s vocation to be uncomfortable, unsparing —- as is often the vocation of the great writer. Now they have a weapon: Islam. It is undeniable that in matters of material excellence and creative energies, the West surpasses the Muslim world by leaps and bounds. But in matters of the spirit, it seems also true that Islam exceeds the West, though the spirit has been tortured, as I wrote before, by infusions of Western radicalism. Who among us feels such fervency of faith that he comes to disdain life itself? There is in the West virtually no concept of martyrdom outside of the ancient tradition of the Catholic Church, and that a martyrdom of capitulation, not violence, like St. Francis who longed for a martyr’s fate but did not seek it actively. To us moderns the very idea: martyr seems uniquely disturbing, alien in what it says about the faith of our enemies.

Mr. Naipaul has seen, first hand, and with true acuity, the rumbling tumult in the collision of these twin discrepancies. We would do well to consider even the discordant, contrarian voices, like Mr. Naipaul’s, that are among us —- for in those voices there can be great insight, and now is not the time to recoil from insight because we do not like what it tells us.

I have not seen Barbershop, but it appears to be a magnificent breath of fresh air, a truly liberating piece of art amid the welter of mendacious malice and rarefied bigotry that passes for art in Hollywood.

Mr. Dreher concludes,

Here’s the best news: Before Eddie [one of the characters in the film] begins his iconoclastic monologue about Rosa Parks, et al., he prefaces it by admitting that he wouldn’t say this in front of white people. Of course, the filmmakers knew white people would be watching this movie, which makes this line both a confession and a sly declaration of independence, an acknowledgement that the sense of racial solidarity that kept these things from being discussed openly is outdated, and no longer serves the interests of black Americans. Barbershop is an example of black self-confidence, and an affirmation of traditional values against the culture of grievance, shiftlessness, and dependency that has kept so much of inner-city black America down. And its makers defiantly say they don’t need anybody’s permission to say these things.

Three cheers for them.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.

It will always be a bit exasperating to hear from people that our grandfathers may know us better than we know ourselves; that the Greeks, say, understood democracy better than we; that, to wit, progress of the intellect is a myth. Mr. Patrick Ruffini senses the approach of this ever-unpopular asseveration and communicates a mild and understandable irritation with it. Instead, he offers a sort of dialectical dynamic, where competing ideas face off and ultimately the superior ones emerge victorious, albeit in an amalgamated form. The welter of forces impinging on the culture will, after some trial and error, and the operation of reason, perhaps some rational self-interest, produce something satisfactory or better.

I must admit that I am deeply suspicious of this kind of optimism, because I am less than sanguine about Man’s sensitivity to reason. No amount of evidence will drive most people to abandon long-held beliefs, much less a complete ideology; the socialist enterprise, despite catastrophic failure after catastrophic failure, yet endures in the minds of an astounding number of people, and would indeed be re-implemented, history, experience, evidence be damned, if these people, who are never very far from power, were to dramatically reclaim it. Mr. Ruffini speaks of the failed social policies of the 1960s, which plunged many American cities into ugliness and decrepitude and squalor, and remarks that had we known in 1955 what these policies would do, things would have been quite different. But as Mr. Judd points out, we did know. In fact, “we” knew long before the policies were even formulated: Tocqueville wrote a book of stunning penetration, which is not exactly obscure, about the beguiling tendency of democracy to reduce men to bondage.

Thus, after taking each individual by turns in its hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.

That sparkling sentence was written some one hundred and sixty-five years ago, and I’ll be damned if a more consummate and prescient arraignment of the welfare state has been written since. Well, John Derbyshire came close when he wrote of the English underclass, similarly produced by idiotic social policy:

Americans may find it surprising that most of the people wallowing in this slough of ignorance, illiteracy, promiscuity, bastardy, intoxication, vice, folly, lawlessness, and hopelessness are white English people. Much of what is described here is the sort of thing Americans instinctively associate with this country’s own black underclass. There is some satisfaction, I suppose, though of a very melancholy kind, to be drawn from the revelation that sufficiently wrong-headed social policies, persisted in with sufficiently dogged refusal to face simple truths, will visit moral catastrophe on people of any race.

Now it bears a moment’s attention to note that Britain’s experience came predominantly after America’s own; that, in other words, even the stark exhibit of failure across the Atlantic did not disabuse the British socialists of their social policy dogmas. And of course the Brits are not alone in this despondent, incorrigible “refusal to face simple truths”: opposition here to welfare reform, perhaps the single most successful domestic policy in a generation, is still truculent and inspired, and its potential to roll back what was achieved continually threatens.

Reason alone is simply not a solid enough foundation upon which to build a civilization; it does not hold final sway over the minds of human beings; stronger elements must be employed: habit, prejudice, prescription. That was Burke’s teaching, and I do not think it has been refuted, neither by argument nor by experience. Burke does not disdain reform. But it must be done with care for the organic thing that is human society, for the traditions into which men of genius and of modesty alike have infused their hard earned wisdom and lessons for posterity. Tradition should be venerated; that the past is full viciousness and injustice only strengthens the necessity for taking it seriously.

I want to emphasize that I have no reason to believe that Mr. Ruffini has any dispute with all this. His piece was just a mild demurral from something previously remarked, which provoked the above inscribed thoughts.

The Resistance faces off with one of the most barbaric regimes on earth in Sudan —- a regime which aims at Taliban-style theocracy and maintains the most extensive trade in human chattel slavery in the world. Records Mr. Novak,

The Sudanese may have suffered more than any other people in the world during the last two decades from torture, enslavement, the carrying away both of women and young men for sex slavery, the enforced starvation of scores of thousands at a time, imprisonments, beatings, amputations, lashes, the forced migration of millions, indiscriminate shelling and mining of civilians from armies in the field, and high-altitude bombing of field hospitals and food centers and refugee camps, in an effort to prevent peoples from settling in one place. Yet they remain, if their resistance leaders are any example, capable of an extraordinary warmth, comradeship, and mutual acceptance of differences, showing a delicacy of feeling and courtesy that are, as the world goes, striking.

The leaders of the Resistance were intensely interested in what Mr. Novak had to say on the thorny problems of the interaction between church and state. The Muslims among them abhor Islamofascism, but love Islam; the Christians search for a path between a dangerous radicalism of their own and the dreary, deracinated secularism of the West. And they echo Mr. Novak in making a penetrating point that has been much overlooked in the many discussions of radical Islam and its clash with the West. The term “fundamentalist,” deployed censoriously to at once describe and condemn religious militancy, is intolerable: it obliterates important distinctions and thus damns the innocent with the guilty.

The press and pundits of all sorts should stop speaking of politicizers and abusers of Islam as “fundamentalists.” Why approve of their own false propagandistic claims? They are “extremists,” not fundamentalists. They contradict the fundamentals of Islam. What they are proposing is a flagrant abuse of Islam.

One of the ideological architects of political Islam in Sudan is a man named Turabi, who quite frankly admitted that his teaching was modeled on a careful study of Stalin and the Fascists of the early 20th century. Any and every means possible should be used, he learned, in the effort to organize cadres to build up a utopian, perfect, totalistic regime.

In other words, so-called “radical Islam” or “Islamic fundamentalism” of the new political type is in fact a bastard modernization of authentic Islam, corrupting Islam by the worst of all modern impulses. As one of our professor-guerrillas put it, If they were going to modernize Islam, why didn't they choose the best features of modernity to bring into Islam, like the Universal Declaration, and democracy, and human rights? Why the worst features —- Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler? He expressed the last sentence with exquisite disdain, to vigorous agreement from others.

This, I think, is a crucial point. Whenever I hear references to the “fundamentalist” or “medievalist” nature of our enemies, presumably drawing on the disdainful popular half-memory of, say, the Spanish Inquisition, I cringe, and reflect on two historical facts: 1) Whatever the horrors perpetrated by the medieval Inquisitors, they pale in comparison to what modern man has produced. Over half as many people died on September 11 alone as did in the entire three-century history of the Spanish Inquisition, and these latter were at least favored with a trial of some deliberation, indicating an individual rather than collective idea of guilt. Those whose bones were ground to dust under molten steel in Lower Manhattan were not given so much consideration. 2) The Inquisition is not called the Catholic or Christian Inquisition for good reason: it required the mobilization of the Spanish state to operate; and recall that the state is an innovation of modernity.

Now this is not some romantic cri de coeur for a return to the Middle Ages. But it is a cry for humility to a people generally ignorant of history. I myself know very little about the Middle Ages; but I know enough not to tar them with broad, implacable comparisons to a violent politico-religious death cult which counts its salvation by the numbers of massacred innocents. Moreover, I firmly suspect that when historians have achieved a sufficient detachment, they will begin to look on the Modern Age, with its mountains of corpses sacrificed by wild-eyed utopians at the altar of the State, with a bit less triumphalism than we do. Indeed I am tempted to agree with the great Evelyn Waugh, whose lapidary delivery was without peer, when he wrote of the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939: “The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms.”

Islamofascism is as much a creature of Lenin as it is of any Islamic figure. The modern West’s wretched revolutionary philosophies; its menacing arguments for social reconstitution from the ruins of an eradicated old order; its Benthamite notions of society as a scientific construct, remediable by abstract calculations; its tendentious twaddle assigning blame for the ills of the Third World exclusively to a caricature of European imperialism; all these elements have been fused to a puritanical interpretation of the Muslim faith to yield a great multifaceted monster. Just as we provide the technology to facilitate the instruments of terror, so our decadent intellects have sown the seeds of ideological Islam.

Mr. Novak’s enthusiastic essay (in contrast to this rather bleak essay of mine) suggests that one of the great callings of this war is for the sagacious, morally-confident among us to reach out to those Muslims who reject the fever of Fascism that has seized their faith; to arm and support them where they fight; to encourage and nourish them where they think and write; and to declare firmly that their struggle is our struggle. To do this thing will be so delicate and perilous a challenge that my mind swoons, and I cannot say I am confident about our chances for success. An insidious rot drives to the heart of the Western intellect, enfeebling our powers of discernment and enervating our spirit. This rot attacks the authority of Truth in the order of men and society, and it leaves the very flesh of intellect blackened with gangrene. The hull lurches on, but its limbs increasingly fail to respond to their summons, as they are little more than carrion clinging to a once vital body. The revolt of the intellectuals against authority, the trahison des clercs, cloaked though it always is in the parlance of sublime liberation, is a core element of the Modern Age. In the late nineteenth century Orestes Brownson, an ample New England Catholic, proclaimed defiantly, “We have heard enough of liberty and the rights of man; it is high time to hear something of the duties of men and the rights of authority.” Few heeded his call; and I am struck by how deeply contrarian, even reactionary, his words still sound, even now, with eighty-five years behind us of blood flowing like rivers in the name of liberation. Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, one hundred and twenty-five years earlier, when it consumed even him and set the world afire, should have told us enough: were Man a creature susceptible to the tender prodding of reason and pity. But he is not.

I digress from the issue at hand: that of the Western roots of Islamic terror, which we have hardly even begun to face; because we have hardly even begun to face the restless, intransigent spirit of liberation which reduced the science of politics to homicide, and the guilt of individual men to the guilt of whole classes, peoples, and races. And we have exported this cancerous, inchoate doctrine; not even a doctrine —- a prejudice, a mental impulse. We have exported it: not with shame or foreboding, but with ceremony and self-satisfaction. Dear God, forgive us.