Cella's Review

2007-05-07T08:49:00.000-04:00

Some months ago my friend Josh Trevino closed up shop on another blog of his, Enchiridion Militis. Because of the generosity of a reader, who offered to host and maintain us, a successor site has been launched. The phrase enchiridion militis refers to book by Erasmus which, translated, still captures our purpose: A Handbook for the Christian Soldier.

The new site takes its name from the title of a small bold by G. K. Chesterton: What's Wrong with the World. Its statement of purpose begins: "What’s Wrong with the World is dedicated to the defense of what remains of Christendom, the civilization made by the men of the Cross of Christ. Athwart two hostile Powers we stand: The Jihad and Liberalism."

Please come by and have a look if the subject interests you. As a taste of what you can expect there, consider this fine interpretation of Neoconservatism by my friend and contributor Jeff Martin.

Thank you for your attention.

2007-04-10T10:47:00.000-04:00

Well, well, well. Another sign of the Apocalypse of Toleration, which is the latest crisis of Liberalism: “Teachers drop the Holocaust to avoid offending Muslims.” This in the UK, a once proud nation of hardy men, now sadly reduced to a tocsin of warning for the rest of us.

It was once thought, with some justice, that what is called the Holocaust but which in truth can have no name, was the very height of evil. Good Liberals thought this, and swore to us all that they would teach this lesson to all mankind. Already they have failed, for they have abandoned this their most precious vow: abandoned it because their political philosophy, always inclined to chase after fashion, has now added to fashion the impetus of bone-chilling fear. The fashion is Tolerance as a kind of political god, and the fear of Islam is evident.

Schools are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils, a Government-backed study has revealed.
It found some teachers are reluctant to cover the atrocity for fear of upsetting students whose beliefs include Holocaust denial.

What need be added to this? Only this:

Our governments, friends and patriots and men of the West, will become our enemies in this war before it is over, so long as they answer to the call of Tolerance. This doctrine must be repudiated. The material might of the West will be of no account, or may even be added to the enemy’s side of the ledger, if we choose to disarm ourselves intellectually. And make no mistake, the choice is being made every day: the Liberals are choosing dishonor over defeat. The Socialist mayor of London, where the Jihad struck less than two years ago, sides with the Jihad. The feminists silence their shrill vituperation in the presence of Muslims. The progressives hang their fellows toiling under Islam out to dry. Who can fail to perceive this?

2007-04-10T08:32:00.000-04:00

Among the foundational Conservative values is simple appreciation. Gratitude for the good that he, somehow, through no merit of his own, is able to enjoy and recollect, will always be at the very heart of what animates the Conservative. It will not do for us to forget this, and accept the pretense that Conservatism is just another variety of political activism, always exercised by discontent and annoyance. This is the pretense of the professional political operatives, whose livelihood depends upon the continued agitation of segments of the population. Their business is not the happiness of man, but his unhappiness. Political operatives we will always have with us; yet the Conservative at least knows their place. And knowing the place of things is a fine formulation for wisdom.

Conservatism has given pride of place to gratitude. This is the ground of its politics.

Few have elucidated this teaching with greater care (some might even say pedantry) than the English political philosopher Michael Oakeshott, as when he wrote, “The disposition to be conservative is, then, warm and positive in respect of enjoyment, and correspondingly cool and critical in respect of change and innovation”; for change “appears always, in the first place, as deprivation.” The conservative disposition appears when “what is sought is present enjoyment and not profit, a reward, a prize or a result in addition to the experience itself.” The Conservative is grateful for the good things he enjoys, and wants to preserve them. These good things, moreover, are only occasionally associated with political things, and very rarely with exclusively political things. They happen mostly in private life: in the fellowship of good friends, in solitude with the beauty of Creation, in corporate worship of the Creator. The Conservative therefore understands much of his political duty to be the restraining of politics from encroaching on the private good that he and his countrymen enjoy. It might even be fruitful to think of Conservatism as gratitude organized into a political movement. It appears whenever a people feels its dearest things menaced by the machinations of its political class.

Now it is important to briefly note two things: (1) that this principle of appreciation, and the prudence by which it is implemented, precedes the Conservative’s judgment of the proper role of the State; and (2) that it need not be moved to action only by the actions of the State. The natural commotion of the free market might just as easily threaten something held dear by many men, and thereby call to life a Conservative resistance. If, for instance, the Conservative senses that political enthusiasm for free enterprise (a system he generally approves of) is issuing in a deadening reductionism that makes economic calculation the measure of all things, he will not hesitate to oppose it; for he will see in it a threat to some incommensurable goods. On this point the Conservative must part ways with his occasional allies the Libertarian and the Capitalist.

It is true, of course, that long experience has taught the Conservative a deep distrust of the modern State. But the Conservative, knowing his history, also knows that the modern unitary State, with its tendrils reaching into almost everything, is a consequence of a revolution made in human politics: a leveling of the older social order, with its rich tapestry of authority, distinction, and variety, and its independent sources of power. The power available to the modern State, which rushed in to fill this vacuum produced by this revolution, is beyond anything ever conceived by the most ambitious despots of the older tradition; and thus the despotisms of the modern age, as wise men like Burke foresaw, have exceeded anything ever before seen. To borrow a phrase from Evelyn Waugh, what Burke saw in Revolutionary France was the modern age in arms, a proto-totalitarian state where politics is all there is.

So the Conservative’s view of the State is ambiguous and skeptical — skeptical not only of the claims of statists, but even of the claims of anti-statists. The modern State is available for manipulation, and it is an instrument of terrible power. But it is not always in the interest of sheltering what is dear to him to effect a weakening the State. To sweep aside all laws against indecency, obscenity, or blasphemy, for instance, may indeed momentarily diminish the power of the State; and concomitantly diminish the capacity for ordered liberty. Here the Conservative may, upon examination, find that he is grateful for the mild application of legal sanction against the obscene or indecent, which would pollute the public life of his community and poison the minds of his own children. It is not true, always and everywhere, that to reduce the role or size of the State is to enlarge liberty. For off at the end, the obliteration of all those apparently trivial or even petty laws against vice may issue in a vicious people; and a vicious people, ruled by mere whim and appetite, will either be governed by a firm despot or not governed at all. Anarchy or despotism will be the lot of such a people; or worse, both at once. It does not require a great insight into the nature of things to see that men who will not govern their own appetites, and who throw up elaborate legal sophistries to protect their license, are unlikely make for a free, as in self-governing, people.

But the Conservative discovers, often to his acute regret, that his opponents are usually malcontents of some variety — “energumens,” in a term favored by Russell Kirk: men possessed. What so exercises them against the settled things of their society will always remain something of a mystery to him. But that this agitation issues in a habit of mind inimical to what the Preamble of the Constitution refers to as “domestic tranquility” is not so mysterious. The language of discontent positively permeates our politics. Senators sound more like generals when they talk of the necessity that Supreme Court nominees be prepared to “fight for women’s rights.” Our leaders conceive of new “wars” on social blights every other year. We hear talk of our country rent into “two Americas”; of the great and unending “struggle” against discrimination and prejudice; and so on. In this idiom there seems little to enjoy in the world, little to be grateful for, and much to be incensed about. Oakeshott again:

To some people, “government” appears as a vast reservoir of power which inspires them to dream of what use might be made of it. They have favourite projects, of various dimensions, which they sincerely believe are for the benefit of mankind, and to capture this source of power, if necessary to increase it, and to use it for imposing their favourite projects upon their fellows is what they understand as the adventure of governing men. They are, thus, disposed to recognize government as an instrument of passion; the art of politics is to inflame and direct desire.

This sort of politics — politics as “an instrument of passion” — fills the Conservative with alarm. It begins in some vaunted dream of a better world; it ends in cataclysm.

It is not that the Conservative is inclined to dismiss the long train of abuses, crimes, usurpations, perfidies, frauds, deceits, pillages, despoliations and betrayals that characterize so much of human history. Nothing could be farther from the truth. But the Conservative is certainly inclined to dismiss the malcontent’s delusion that only these things constitute reality, while the good things of life are mere chimeras. This bitter frame of mind, so ubiquitous in our politics, which would have various factions and constituencies provoked to unreason by the ceaseless threats to what they have so laboriously achieved, and their quietude broken by manufactured alarm — such a frame of mind the Conservative regards as dreary and pernicious heresy.

The irony is, of course, that Conservatives are often lamented as incorrigible pessimists, as crabbed and bitter old men whose only solace in a crumbling world is to wail against the iniquities of their age, like the prophets of old. It is a mistake for the observer to suppose this. Sure, there have been and still are some of these sad and romantic figures; but they are rare even in Conservative ranks. In truth most Conservatives are grateful men; and the misjudgment of them (when it is not borne of simple mistrust and malice) derives from an overestimate of the importance of politics. The Conservative often has, admittedly, a low opinion of politics, especially modern politics with its feverish Rationalism; but only with men whose estimate of the importance of politics is wildly inflated could this admission lead naturally to the conclusion that the Conservative has a low opinion of life. The Conservative, in other words, may indeed be deeply pessimistic about politics, may indeed be given to the suspicion that politics in a democracy often resolves itself into authorized plunder and choreographed vandalism; but he is certainly not so morbid an optimist as to imagine that politics is life.

The Conservative, it must be remembered, does not despise but rather honors and cherishes tradition, custom, habit, even prejudice — all constituents of, if you will, non-political life. He has not forgotten Chesterton’s aphorism that tradition is the “democracy of the dead,” which gives votes to “the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors” and “refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who just happen to be walking about.” He is firmly opposed to the strange modern compulsion to drag every principle or institution we have inherited before the tribunal of a narrow rationalism and lay out an indictment against it. But unfortunately, it is this compulsion that has become the primary preoccupation of modern politics; and thus for the Conservative politics appears all too often as an anarchic but determined assault on those things most dear and venerable to him.

Some examples:

¶ Over the last fifty years and more, the opponents of Conservatism, a motley and vigorous lot, have regularly been seen celebrating and advancing what is referred to as “the separation of church and state.” Now the Conservative generally has no problem with the principle (from which this catchphrase derives) of religious freedom as it was understood by the Framers and articulated in our founding documents: Contrary to received opinion, there have been very few theocrats within the ranks of modern Conservatives. Liberty of conscience is indeed dear to us. But when the Conservative learns that, according to the Ninth Circuit Court, the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance is a violation of religious freedom, but having public school students recite Muslim prayers, adopt Muslim names, and perform Muslim customs, is not, the Conservative suspects that a fine political principle has been conquered and transformed by the politics of the malcontents and must be regarded, in most cases, as an instrument of the enemy. Such a peculiar contortion of the constitutional principle could only be accomplished by abrogating the force of tradition and prescription. Despite the ineradicable fact that America’s heritage is Christian, something evident to all until about 1970, it is asserted that Islam, atheism and Christianity must be approached from a position of rigid rational equality, with even a certain favoritism extended to the minority. For such ahistorical mania the Conservative has little patience. To a man grateful that he may worship his Maker in peace, his conscience protected, though never imagining that error should be given equal stature as truth, it can only be a drab and degrading nightmare for irreligion to make religious liberty its instrument of usurpation.

¶ Over a similar range of time, the brazen celebration of sexual deviancy — which is increasingly the mark of our popular culture — and the concomitant denigration of normalcy, has filled the Conservative with dismay and revulsion. Having few illusions about the power of the sexual impulse in human beings, the Conservative sees this also as a poisonous anarchy of discontent. The spectacle of confused men and women actually making a formal political identification of themselves by their sexual proclivities, this dreary politicization of the intimate, is yet more evidence of the sickness of our politics. And on this point the Conservative emphatically breaks ranks with the Capitalist, for nothing is more certain than that our Capitalists have joined the madness, are exploiting and profiting by it.

¶ The transformation of patriotism into ideology is another trend that the Conservative views with apprehension. Patriotism, rightly understood, is a quintessentially Conservative sentiment, for it is rooted in gratitude, and is activated by the feeling that something precious is threatened. For most normal men, patriotism is as natural as filial piety, love and affectation for one’s kindred; and since a normal man hardly needs a carefully-reasoned treatise to discover that he loves his father, neither (in the view of the Conservative) does he need an elaborate ideology in order to love his country. Patriotism is resistant to precise articulation, and does not in any way require precise articulation to carry its power. Grown men do not grow teary-eyed at the chords of “America the Beautiful” or “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” because they have been argued into a love of their country. It is obvious (or should be) that patriotism is not itself a virtue, but rather the effect of a prior virtue, which we might label piety or loyalty. The Conservative worries that only an impious age would attempt to replace instinctual loyalty with abstracted intellectual conviction. For if to love one’s country means endorsing an ideology — the ideology, say, of democracy and the rights of man — then what meaning have we given to treason: no longer active disloyalty and treachery but mere disagreement?

When the Conservative looks outward upon his world, he sees a great deal to love and cherish. Much is dear to him, and his contentment is often very evident. His world is not shattered by the revelation that men are, more often than not, rapacious and deceitful. He feels deep indignation at injustice, but he does not expect true justice from man, much less from the politics of men. What he expects are approximations of justice; and he perceives that, certainly in our day, most classes of injustice lie not in some obstinate clinging to poor approximations, but in impatient betrayals of good ones. His objection to Progress is usually just an objection to decay and obscurantism masquerading as progress. History is really not replete with aspiring tyrants or fatal visionaries who safely advertised their calamitous ideas as awful, oppressive, sanguinary Decline, thus allowing good men to thwart them. Quite the contrary. Oakeshott gave us a fine phrase for the proper politics of Conservatism: the “politics of repair.” Not merely, as should be immediately apparent, repair of the good things undone by the malcontents, but also repair of those good things that have grown frail or exhausted: the reform of what ought to be preserved but will not survive the impatient intrigues of our impatient times.

2007-02-19T10:49:00.000-05:00

Reviewing a recent book called American Islam in the last weekend’s Wall Street Journal (subscription only for the full article), Shawn Macomber begins with a real head-scratcher of a paragraph:

After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, most Americans recognize that there is no Islamist fifth column in the U.S. If even a small fraction of the four to six million Muslims in America were part of such an enterprise, the color-coded terrorist-threat levels would consist only of several shades of red and the Council on American-Islamic Relations would have more pressing concerns than the latest season of “24.”

If you've ever wondered how much confusion can be packed into a couple sentences, the above two should at least provide a benchmark. The first, aside from being singularly infelicitous of composition, is bereft of any functional meaning at all: the relation of its first clause to its second is either fantastically obscure or positively perverse. And the second sentence, while perhaps less obscure in meaning, is even more superficial in meaning. The paragraph is, in short, cut-rate sophistry. It tries to pawn off a very dubious assumption by means of some very awkward sleight-of-hand.

Later we read of one Osama Siblani of Dearborn, a man who, from humble beginnings, founded a newspaper that has become influential in local and regional politics. “From pauper to kingmaker,” comments Macomber; “truly the best of America.” Soon, however, we learn that this example of the best of America is on record supporting “the Iraqi resistance against American forces,” and publishes in his newspapers such fare as “U.S., U.K., and Israel: The Real Axis of Evil.” Sedition: the best of America.

Macomber notes several examples of Muslim outrage at American sexual license. According to the book under review, two thirds of American Muslims regard America as “immoral” on these grounds. Macomber’s gloss on this is as follows:

Yes, America is the Land of Opportunity. It’s also, famously, the home of “Sex and the City” and “The Sopranos.” It’s true enough that American citizens need to show cultural sensitivity to diverse newcomers; but sensitivity is a two-way street. A pluralistic, affluent society needs to be understood on its own terms, too: It is a great place to escape repression and economic stagnation, but it is most certainly not fertile ground for suburban caliphates based on seventh-century mores.

Now this is an arresting summary for at least two reasons. First, because it implies that American identity is found in pluralism and affluence, the former exemplified by the fact that, as he states elsewhere, “women here dress and behave as they please,” and latter by the fact that much of our wealth is tied up in the success of fabricated depictions of depravity and decadence, like the above-mentioned television shows. And second, because it implies that opposition to this identity can only be the product of “seventh-century mores.” America the Decadent, love it or leave it.

This is how a right-wing newspaper and an up-and-coming right-wing writer handle the complicated problem of Islam in America. On the one hand by simply assuming, in a particularly clumsy and unpersuasive way, that there is no “fifth column” threat from Muslims in this country; and on the other hand by formulating the character of American identity is emphatically Liberal terms.

The most concise way to sum all this up is to say that Mr. Macomber, sadly like so many on the Right, has made two grievous errors: he has erred in his estimate of the enemy, and he has erred in his estimate of us.

Since September 11 there have in fact been quite a number of razzias, launched against Americans by jihadists in our midst. Most of them have been forgotten — precisely because remembering them is too distressing. The assumption that there is no fifth column must be maintained: and so these jihadist raids are forgotten. The DC snipers. The El Al ticket counter shooting at LAX. The Seattle Jewish center shooting. The hit-and-run attack by an Iranian student at the University of North Carolina. The grenade attack by a Muslim soldier on the eve of the Iraq war. Razzias, each of them — and perpetrated by members of American Muslim communities. That the press, both right and left, for the most part resolutely refuses to make the connection between these crimes and the doctrine of jihad, does not mean there is no connection, or that it is not evident to the discerning mind. It means only that something prevents the operation of critical intelligence upon this matter. It means only that men cling more tightly to their ideological assumptions than they do to their patriotism. It means only that it is more important to them to think proper thoughts about a sensitive topic, than to think truly. It means, in fine, that they have disabled their reason, in order to accord properly with the prejudices of the age.

The second error is a problem outside the scope of my brief essay here. I will content myself with noting how really remarkable it is to observe soi disant conservatives rendering the identity of America purely in Liberal terms. Material advancement — “from pauper to kingmaker” — and a “pluralism” which abjures all moral censure on sexual matters: these, according to the right-wing scribes of today, are what define America. They have taken for granted the left-wing argument of a generation ago. They are conserving Liberalism.

2007-02-16T13:19:00.000-05:00

“I don't want my 17-year-old son to have to pick tomatoes or make beds in Las Vegas.” That, reportedly, is what Karl Rove pronounced recently as a defense of his boss’s immigration policy. Mark Kirkorian answers it well here. Mr. Kirkorian bemoans the fact that it is now necessary “to explain why this is an obscene statement”; I agree with him. The Republican Party, under the leadership of George W. Bush and Karl Rove, has come to believe and teach that some work really is beneath us, that the lawyer or financial analyst really is “somehow better than the parking-lot attendant.” It is difficult to imagine an uglier trend in our politics than this.

Karl Rove is not alone in his expression of this trend. We have heard its like many times. It is rather horrifying to see this brazen appeal to class interests; and the horror is only magnified by the denigration of some category of honest work. A rather provocative way to state the problem is that the Republican Party, under its current leadership, is advancing a plutocratic theory of politics: an aristocracy of wealth. But even this does not capture the full ugliness of the thing, for in a true plutocracy, no form of wealth is derided. That a man made his fortune by, let us, “picking tomatoes” or “making beds,” does not bar him from entry into power. But here it is indicated that some occupations are dishonorable by nature, and that even success at them is contemptible.

It is noteworthy to me that this position flips the whole “jobs American won’t do” argument on its head. It’s not that there are jobs Americans won’t do: it’s that there are jobs we shouldn’t, because we are better that. Some are born to be served; and some are born to serve.

This sort of arrogance and elitsim, I submit, positively permeates the immigration enthusiast position among political strategists. There are those who are immigration enthusiasts out of a misplaced idealism, an overconfidence in a culture that has lost its nerve, compounded by a complacency with the sedition in the street and treachery in the administration of our laws. But the idealists have a strong and influential ally in the calculators and sophisters, who do not share their admirable idealism. For this latter faction, I do not hesitate to use words like “betrayal,” “treachery,” and even “treason.” They have betrayed the ideals of their party; and the effect of their machinations is to subvert the ideals which are integral to the American political tradition.

I suspect that the betrayal derives from despair or resignation. These men are realists, by and large: they are not possessed of any illusions about the mettle of American culture; they are well aware that the assimilationist ethic has been overthrown; they have seen the failure of such eminently mild things as removing bilingual education, and have read the writing on the wall. Except this writing is not the doom of God’s judgment, but of Mammon’s. They want to get ahead of the wave of the future; plutocracy, servitude, balkanization, the dissolution of the Republic and the dispossession of our inheritance as Americans.

We may not, in the end, be able to defeat their contrivances; but God help us if we join them. If we are to lose this struggle, let us leave a monument for our descendents that, should it survive the scrubbing of history contemplated by the coming regime (a scrubbing already perceptible in our public schools, in our new myths and legends, in the falsification of history our academics peddle), will teach those who care to know that not everyone was lost to despair and false hopes when the Republic was imperiled.

2007-02-16T13:08:00.000-05:00

Last Fall, ISI released yet another college guide. But this one is different, and worthy of particular attention. It’s editor is John Zmirak, author of Wilhelm Röpke: Swiss Localist, Global Economist and The Bad Catholic’s Guide to Good Living. I recently interviewed him via email.
______________________

Paul Cella: Mr. Zmirak, thank you for taking the time to answer a few questions. First, if you would, tell us briefly how All-American Colleges differs from all the other college guides out there.

John Zmirak: There are several ways in which our guide sets itself apart. First of all, it is based on a solid vision of what education ought to be, against which we are able to judge the institutions we consider. That vision is the same one most eloquently described by John Henry Newman in his The Idea of a University: A place which is not primarily concerned either with research or political activism, but rather with passing along the great body of knowledge that has accumulated (and continues to accumulate) in various disciplines. This should happen first through the medium of a solid core curriculum which introduces students to the history, culture, institutions, arts and literature of the civilization which “hosts” that educational institution. In China, such a curriculum ought to be Confucian (though nowadays it will still be infused with that toxic Western export, Marxism). In the Germany, it ought to focus on German culture, and in the U.S. it ought to stress Anglo-American institutions and history.

Second, building on that core, students’ specializations should be serious, foundational, and grounded in the real historic development of each discipline; what is more, the course work should be structured, with prerequisites such as highly informative survey courses mandated before students are permitted to delve into the sort of arcana which professors like to study — because it complements their research.

Third, a school should be focused on teaching, and should reward faculty members at least as much for serving their paying customers and intellectual wards — the students — as for contributing ever more recondite articles to the stacks of unreadable academic journals that litter our libraries.

Finally, a school should provide a wholesome, civil, safe and decent environment — where parents can be confident that their children will at least have the opportunity (although they cannot be compelled) to practice the virtues and carry on the beliefs which the parents strove to inculcate in their young.

We have chosen some 50 schools, out of many worthy candidates, where we believe that many or most of the above ideals are realized.

PC: In your Introduction, you elegantly define “true liberty” as “the capacity and inclination to choose the good.” How has the average established American university departed from this ideal of liberal education? Is this departure reversible?

JZ: The old ideal of American education was always progressive in a genuine sense; teachers and administrators strove, in our newly democratic environment, to provide the children of farmers, workers, recent immigrants, et cetera, who had the talent to learn, with the best fruits of the Western heritage which (as we remembered back then) were what made a liberal society possible. In the 1940s and 50s, even closeted Marxist professors saw the extraordinary value of teaching the classics, of trying to raise the sons of the working class to the cultural level previously only available to the aristocracy. Historically black colleges undertook the same task for the descendants of slaves. In the 1960s, the radicalism of the New Left abandoned the goal of elevating America’s poor — a grim task, which had previous generations of leftists working with coal miners to organize labor unions — and embraced exotic ideologies, hedonism, grossly lowered academic standards, and cheaply acquired “virtue” attained by shrugging off the heritage of centuries’ struggle for liberty, order, and prosperity. As timorous administrators gave into their demands, education descended into the welter of polemic, grievance-based indoctrination, and utter mediocrity which characterizes most universities today — with isolated exceptions of good, old-fashioned teachers who hold out against the odds in various academic departments at otherwise compromised colleges. In our other guide, we try to give the names of some of these holdovers from better days, and lay out the best courses students can take even if they find themselves at a bad school.

PC: In a recent article, Larry Arnn of Hillsdale College (one of the schools examined in All-American Colleges) refers to a Draft Report out of President Bush’s Department of Education, which “does not mention religion, God or morality. It does not mention history as a subject of study. It does not mention the Constitution, either for what it commands or allows, or as a subject of study. Although busy governing, the Report does not mention government as a subject of study. Philosophy, literature, happiness, goodness, beauty are not to be seen.” This sort of rootless, sterile, technocratic document has become standard for education experts of both parties. Do you see any reasonable hope for restoration from the political world?

JZ: The only hope I would hold out for a restoration of education from political sources would come in the form of funding cuts to the humanities. In most public and elite universities, these fields are hopelessly compromised, almost entirely in the hands of tenured radicals who cannot be removed, and who vote to choose their future colleagues and successors. I would be loath to see the federal government try ham-handedly to impose educational goals and political fairness on such departments; such an attempt would probably work about as well as “No Child Left Behind,” Title IX, affirmative action laws, and our futile attempt to turn Iraq into Switzerland by making the rubble bounce. A large-scale withdrawal of federal and state funds from university programs — except those in math, the sciences, and foreign languages which have some relevance to national security — would force universities to cut back on programs which exist mainly to transfer leftist ideology to impressionable young minds, and to seek funding from donors (such as parents and alumni) who are much more effective at exerting positive pressure on college administrators than political hacks who work for legislators.

2007-01-31T14:24:00.000-05:00

With the promulgation of A Reactionary’s Shorter Catechism — and despite its probable deficiencies, beginning even in its questionable character as, indeed, a catechism — we hoped to provoke a conversation. Conversations, after all, are what republics are all about. As distinguished from democracies where the exercise of will is not delayed by a deliberative institution, a republic filters its sovereignty through representative assembles whose primary purpose is to talk. These deliberative assemblies are instituted in order to represent the people, in whom rests the final sovereignty — in the idiom of the Federalist, it rests in “the people themselves” — and therefore the debate inside these institutions is expected to reflect a larger debate outside them, that is, out there in the republic.

One of the clear points of contention in the conversation that ensued upon the promulgation of the dubious Catechism, concerned the status of what was called the “Liberal pact.” This pact is probably best described as of Lockean providence; and it signifies that quintessential “functional atheism” of modern political philosophy. Man is conjectured, at least for political purposes, as driven primarily by his acquisitive passions. He is defined by his desires. He is through and through a material being. Thus politics becomes an enterprise of peace-making in the midst of what would otherwise be a ruthless pursuit of these things, a “war of all against all.” The peace-maker is accepted by all men, in their emergence from this brutish “state-of-nature,” and this contract is the foundation of the State. In the darker visions, where a solid sense of the Fall endures, the State becomes Leviathan. In the brighter versions, it becomes a mere adjudicator of competing rights-claims. But in all versions, the permanent questions of God and Man — or, if you like, of the nature and destiny of man — are, as my co-author put it, “bracketed” and removed to the private realm.

Much of our conversation concerned the status of this theory — another common phrase for it is “social contractarian” — in the American political tradition. Is America, or is she not, a nation founded upon a strict social contract model of politics?

Now let us not underestimate the importance of this question. A great deal hangs upon it; and until we dispel the confusion that surrounds it — one need only look at the long and convoluted comments discussing it to realize that there is considerable confusion indeed — the progress of our conversation (which, to repeat, is what republics are all about) will be hindered. For instance, if the pact is in force, if it enjoys constitutional status, then our Liberals are quite right to fear and loathe the encroachment of religion upon politics; for these encroachments, even when they have no official state sanction, augur a dangerous usurpation of the contract from whence comes the very legitimacy of the state. In constituting ourselves a people we deliberately set aside such questions; our first act as a nation was to “bracket” questions of the nature and destiny of man. Nor is that all: for not only is religion a usurpation, or at any rate an aspiring one — so, also, is justice, or at least justice defined as anything other than the fulfilling of contracts. As one of the Republic’s great writers put it, “This effectively decrees the end of all morals legislation” — except that the statement was true, not merely when Justice Scalia wrote it, in a dissent to a 2003 Supreme Court ruling, but from the moment when the American Republic began. Morals legislation means laws designed to, as it were, interfere in even private contracts for no other reason than that the moral sense of the community is offended by them. Morals legislation, strictly speaking, does not speculate that the activity to be proscribed is physically harmful (though it may occasionally call upon physical harm as an ancillary argument), and thus, in the social contractarian view, it cannot be justified, because only physical harm, a threatened reprise of the “war of all against all,” can rouse Leviathan. Quite apart from its validity — a question which the Peace-maker State remains pristinely agnostic about — the Peace-maker State is not in the business of enforcing the morality of the community.

Nor is that all: the acceptance of the social contract model as fundamental to our political tradition means that the Libertarian view of Free Speech is unassailable. It is obvious that the peaceful adjudication of competing desires requires a free interchange of ideas and expression. It is clear, moreover, that only physical violence may rouse Leviathan. Therefore, a sort of Free Speech absolutism must reign. Exceptions from this orthodoxy (and even the strictest Libertarian must recognize some exceptions) will be afforded only the most grudging of acknowledgements, and even then only by various legal devices of dubious character. Again, the point to emphasize is that the Liberal pact will not allow the exercise of the moral sense of the community to operate through legislation.

I do not flatter myself that this debate can be ended here and now. My more humble purpose is to merely advance the conversation. With that in mind, I will offer a few brief sketches of the sort of solid evidence that this theory must contend with in order to be persuasive. In short, I aim to offer counterpoints to the argument that the Liberal pact is at back of the American political tradition.

(a) The Preamble to the United States Constitution. In a word, it is not the sort of prefatory note one would expect from strict social contractarians. It sets out six purposes toward which “We the People” aspire; and several of them do not fit the bill of the Liberal pact at all. One of our purposes is Union or unity. Another is the establishment of Justice. Yet another embraces not merely “ourselves” but also “our Posterity,” thus unmistakably expanding the supposed contract to men and women not yet even alive, and therefore quite unable to assert their desires.

(b) Self-government. One of the most crucial phrases in the Federalist is this one: “the deliberate sense of the community.” Both Hamilton and Madison use it, and moreover use it will sweeping implications. Madison (No. 63): “the cool and deliberate sense of the community ought, in all governments, and actually will, in all free governments, ultimately prevail over the views of its rulers . . .” Hamilton (No. 71) “The republican principle demands that the deliberate sense of the community should govern the conduct of those to whom they intrust the management of their affairs . . .” Now this sounds suspiciously like an endorsement of moral legislation. If the deliberate sense of the community on obscenity, on sedition, on deceptive advertising, or on a dozen other things, is to be thwarted by the social contract at back of our tradition — why, then, according to Publius both “free government” and “the republican principle” is frustrated by the very document by which we made ourselves a republic under a free government. In other words, the Liberal pact stands in opposition to self-government; indeed it prevents self-government on some matters touching on things, judging by the intensity of the debate on them, of deep importance to a great many people. We are, according to this theory, a republic that thwarts the republican principle; and a government that by design stands in contrast to “all free governments.”

(c) Lincoln and purpose. “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” In this most famous of all sentences in American oratory, Abraham Lincoln actually sets forth four propositions. (1) “Our fathers brought forth . . . a new nation.” (2) It was “conceived in Liberty.” (3) It was “dedicated” to a “proposition.” (4) This proposition was “that all men are created equal.” All but one (the first) of these propositions is in tension with the Liberal pact. Lincoln may be espousing a contractarian theory of sorts, but it is emphatically not one defined by the adjudication of material desires. Proposition 3 alone seems quite irreconcilable with the Liberal pact. The new nation is “dedicated” to a higher purpose, which is something much more than mere procedural neutrality. If equality — so high a purpose as to require the bloody butcher’s bill commemorated by Lincoln in his brief oration — is conceived as nothing more than the neutrality of the state in the peaceful pursuit of acquisition, well, then I’m a donut.

(d) The Declaration of Independence. In American literature there is also a most famous of all passages — the one to which Lincoln hearkened back. Usually its later clauses are emphasized, but it seems to me that the ringing phrase with which it opens deserves more careful attention: “we hold these truths.” Our fathers brought forth a new nation, and they set its foundation upon truths held in common: shared beliefs about, if I may be so bold in rounding out my argument, the nature and destiny of man. To fancy that these shared truths extend only to the neutral character of the state, and the desire for peace in the midst of competition is, I’m afraid, to render much of the power and nobility of the American tradition absurd. It is a strange and almost pathetic man who, “with firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence,” pledges his Life, his Fortune and his sacred Honor to the cause of procedural neutrality in the service of acquisition.

Those who set the Liberal pact at back of the American tradition have some tangles indeed to unravel.

2007-01-31T14:22:00.000-05:00

With this — “There is no place in our society for discrimination. That’s why I support the right of gay couples to apply to adopt like any other couple.” — Tony Blair has proclaimed the constitution of Liberal society. Of course, even in this, there is mendacity, for what the British Prime Minister is actually supporting is not any “right” but a piece of coercion. His Government will provide no exemption from its supreme principle of non-discrimination for the Catholic Church; the latter will be coerced into compliance, or she will cease to facilitate the adoption of children. “There can be no exemptions for faith-based adoption agencies offering public funded services from regulations that prevent discrimination.”

Britain has enthroned Nondiscrimination as its King; and he is a jealous monarch indeed. But he is quite feeble. He can tyrannize his own but he cannot protect them. He commands no respect, but rather provokes contempt. It is said by many terrorism experts that London is the most dangerous city in the world. Well over a dozen countries have suffered terror attacks perpetrated by residents of that city: London, the very cradle of liberal democracy. One would be hard-pressed to discover a more resounding refutation of the idea of democracy as an antidote to the Jihad than this.

There is no place for discrimination in Great Britain, says Tony Blair; but there is a place for the soldiers and propagandists of the Jihad. Logically, there must be, because Britons, by law, cannot discriminate against them. Even the “moderate” mosques preach sedition, and are protected in this by the titles and honors awarded by this new King. This is liberal democracy, pursued to its logical ends. Discrimination implies inequality, while equality is the very mark of democracy.

The vital thing to understand is that the correction for this madness cannot come from within Liberalism itself. It cannot. The principle of nondiscrimination is unassailable on Liberal theory. “There can be no exemptions.” To check the madness one must look elsewhere.

A number of American Conservatives have cultivated an understandable affection for Tony Blair. They remember that he stood with us in our hour of need. They remember his friendship to America. Understandable this may be (I feel it myself); tenable it is no longer. Tony Blair’s Britain is but a shadow of the Empire. He has overseen the construction of the perfect Liberal State, feeble, licentious, despotic, haven for terrorists but inhospitable for Christians. He is truly the minister of the King.

2007-01-31T14:19:00.000-05:00

In an age when so much of what is called conservatism seems to consist of a tenacious defense of the structures of thought which have ushered in our decline — when, in short, conservatives make their boldest efforts to conserve the Liberalism that paralyzes us — there is just cause in adopting the label “reactionary.” It is, after all, only sane to react against madness. “Reaction,” averred Paul Elmer More, “it is essentially to answer action with action, to oppose to the welter of circumstance the force of discrimination and selection, to direct the aimless tide of change by reference to the co-existing law of immutable fact, to carry the experience of the past into the diverse impulses of the present, and so to move forward in an orderly progression.” More was a man of uncommon insight and learning. That he is forgotten, even by his direct descendents on the American Right, is only a mark against them. Below is A Reactionary’s Shorter Catechism, hammered out by myself and long-time Redstate reader Maximos, with input from many others. It is offered in the spirit of More’s further remarks: “If any young man, feeling now within himself the power of accomplishment, hesitates to be called a reactionary . . . let him take courage. The world is not contradicted with impunity, and he who sets himself against the world’s belief will have need of all a man’s endurance and all a man’s strength.” Herewith, we contradict the world:

¶ Human nature is not elastic, but rather constant; and the corrupt aspects will always be with us.

¶ Man is indeed a reasoning being, but often he is moved by nonrational factors. These latter do not bear an intrinsic mark of censure.

¶ There is great peril in the reckless use reason to pry into the nonrational aspects of our history and traditions: like Noah’s son looking upon his nakedness, the brazenness of reason my issue in ruin.*

¶ If progress occurs at all, it is slow, unsteady and often obscure.

¶ The misuse of the label progress has concealed some of the most terrible political calamities in history; the very word has been rendered untrustworthy.

¶ The institution of the State emanates from the nature of man, who is a political animal, organizing collectively to shelter his tradition and community.

¶ Man always expresses the sociality of his nature; the only differences are those of degree. Pure “state-of-nature” individualism is an illusion or a willed act of renunciation.

¶ Prudence, the “the cause, root, mother, measure, precept, guide, and prototype of all ethical virtues,”† is fundamental in politics. It represents a man’s vital connection with things as they are, without which any action is futile. A man must sit in silence before what is before he can act rightly.

¶ The political realm is the expression of a people’s will-to-survive, and their desire to perpetuate themselves and their culture; it is not an expedient by which the accumulation of wealth is to be made as free of obstacles as rationally conceivable.

¶ No right is more vital to the liberty of a people than the right of private property. A business corporation is but a derivative of private property, and its standing in law should reflect this fact.

¶ Bereft of order, liberty cannot exist. A functional order is the sine qua non of a legitimate state. Moreover, a beneficent civil order is a precious and fragile thing, and requires public vigilance and private virtue to maintain.

¶ There is a presumption in favor of Free Speech, but it is hardly absolute. Few clauses of the Philadelphia Constitution have been more abused, and twisted from their original meaning, than the First Amendment.

¶ Disloyalty is a permanent political problem, and historically has been a particularly ruinous one. There is no facile solution to it. Excesses on either side of it have issued in catastrophe.

¶ A State may legitimately claim the loyalty of its citizens or subjects. This claim, however, is far from absolute.

¶ There no presumption of protection for political discourse ranging over questions of the violent replacement of the Constitution, as the latter not a suicide pact. Sedition is a crime and ought to remain one.

¶ A healthy polity will have a majority population and culture; contemporary orthodoxy on diversity tends towards anarchy and strife.

¶ The right of a community to maintain its identity, autonomy, and independence is among the first principles of a free polity.

¶ A government may become destructive of these ends, calling forth resistance from the community. Revolt, like war, should be analyzed through the two-tier method of traditional Just War doctrine: jus ad bellum and jus in bello. A just cause for revolt may be dishonored by its conduct; and even an unjust cause may be conducted honorably.

¶ The variety of human life is most vivid in the organic development of traditional life. Its deepest wellsprings are in patterns of thought and custom, in mores and liturgy, not superficial qualities. To delight in it is natural; to crush it unnatural and tyrannical; to shelter its natural limits one of the basic duties of the state.

¶ Tradition and custom need not constantly explain or justify themselves as practice or policy. The presumption is in their favor. To drag them before the bar of a rigid rationalism is profound impiety.

¶ Men, and societies of men, are ultimately more apt to maintain loyalties among those who are like them. This is natural and not to be either deplored or extirpated, but rather disciplined by civic virtue.

¶ Cultures and civilizations vary widely and profoundly, not only in customs, but in terms of mindsets, ways of seeing the world, and potential for humane achievements.

¶ Indiscriminate blending of cultures is thus undesirable, and more often than not an at least implicit act of aggression against the existing majority culture.

¶ The Liberal compact, by which questions of ultimate existential import are bracketed, and questions of temporal prosperity and the adjudication of rights-claims pursued, is an act of violence against human nature, a displacement that occasions the rise of messianic political doctrines.

¶ Economics is a tool, which answers to other masters. We cannot use economics to articulate our picture of the good life any more than we can use biology to tell us why human life is sacred, or chemistry why a glass of beer after a hard day’s work is such a great pleasure, or physics why men look to the heavens with such awe.

¶ Science, like economics, must learn its place — subordinate to the higher values of civilization, and not master of them.

¶ The traditional family — mother, father and children — must be privileged in law and in society; no other relationship is permitted to assert equality or parity with it.

¶ Freedom is impossible without virtue. Republican self-government is impossible without private self-control. The discipline of self-denial is a prerequisite of public liberty.

¶ Voting is not a right but a privilege. Its abuse is rampant, and to contain it is a valid object of public policy. More damaging to a republic than corrupt politicians are corrupt voters.

¶ In a republic, the Legislative Branch of government, being at once most representative and most deliberate, must be, if not supreme, at least primary over the other branches. This principle was built into the very fabric of our Constitution, and can be seen clearly in the veto-override, the impeachment power, the Necessary and Proper clause, and other devices.

¶ The American traditions of federalism, states’ rights, and localism deserve the deepest respect and cultivation: for in them is the truest protection of liberty.

__________
* Burke: “we have consecrated the state . . . that no man should approach to look into its defects or corruptions but with due caution; that he should never dream of beginning its reformation by its subversion; that he should approach to the faults of the state as to the wounds of a father, with pious awe and trembling solicitude. By this wise prejudice we are taught to look with horror on those children of their country who are prompt rashly to hack that aged parent in pieces, and put him into the kettle of magicians, in hopes that by their poisonous weeds, and wild incantations, they may regenerate the paternal constitution, and renovate their father’s life.”

† Josef Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues.

2007-01-24T13:50:00.000-05:00

GKC, "Three Acres & a Cow"

It is by now almost a truism to say that a society’s celebration of “diversity” appears to be inversely related to its actual respect for it. America under the tyranny of political correctness has become a place of deadening uniformity, coerced at times, but more often than not chosen individually under the pressure of convention. People actually prefer to annihilate the variety that is in them. I work with a considerable number of bright young women, blessed with that wonderful accent of the American South, who outlay large amounts of time and money to obliterate it — through speech classes and the like. It is a deliberate dispossession in the service of stultifying sameness.

One thing that will immediately strike anyone who takes the time (and it will be time well-spent) to engage the older literature of American Conservatism, is the marvelous variety of these characters. Here you will find real diversity. Here, if you are a person of sensitive and critical intellect, you may be purged of the unthinking prejudice of our age, which tells you that diversity consists in the superficial — in matter and not in mind.

Old Russell Kirk wore a cloak, was a masterful teller of ghost stories, repudiated the automobile (a “mechanical Jacobin”) and the television, and quietly opened his home to young journalists, refugees and the homeless. Willmoore Kendall, son of a blind itinerant preacher, was so savage a debater that he stands still today (so they say) as the only Ivy League professor whose contract was bought out in order to rid the place of his devastating polemics of reaction. He could drink most people under the table, upon conversion secured from the Vatican two simultaneous annulments (which may be another first), and finished his career with brilliant treatises which discovered in the American founding a restatement of classical Natural Law. Frank Meyer, author of the doctrine of “fusionism” between Conservatives and Libertarians, was an incorrigible night owl and chain-smoker, commencing interminable arguments and discussions over the phone into the wee hours of the morning. A pugnacious atheist for his whole career, he converted to Rome on his deathbed. Anyone who has seen William F. Buckley on television will discern instantly what a character he must be. Whitaker Chambers was a haunted man, having gone “off the grid” for a decade as an agent of Communism — before discerning, in an flash of grace and insight, that God is real and thus Communism is madness and treason. He found Hope, but never what is called optimism. He became a farmer. The “auxiliaries of Conservatism,” Chesterton and Belloc, were men of extraordinary verve and personality. You can hardly read a line of verse or prose from them without realizing you are in the presence of a real character.

My point is that these men were examples of the real practical variety of human life that the ideologues of Diversity would annihilate. Kirk even made variety one of his Six Canons: Conservatives affirm an “affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of traditional life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems.” Sometimes this comes down to something so simple as being able to hold two complex thoughts in mind at the same time; for example, that a regime which countenances or even embraces a great evil like slavery or abortion, may yet produce good and admirable men. Or that even soldiers fighting for wicked men and wicked causes are capable of valor and gallantry.

This variety, which in my view is one of the glories of the Conservative tradition, is also partly explains the difficulty of holding such people together in a political movement. Why are Conservatives so bad at political machination? Why do they tend toward factionalism? Because their interests and passions and personalities are so marvelously varied. Very few of them really care for the exercise of political power; even fewer care for the grasping and clawing that attends the approach toward political power; almost all of them chafe unbearably under the shackles of bureaucracies. They do not live and breathe politics. Official Washington repels them. Unless they are natives, they rarely have a high opinion of New York City. They love their homes in distant cow-towns. They are Westerners, or Southerners, or lovers of the Great Plains. Kendall’s Conservatism, he often said, was an “Appalachia to the Rockies” sort of philosophy. The entry of these people into politics is usually reluctant, spurred on by a perception of a threat to their homes.

America — or America for most of her history at any rate — was careful to shelter these people. Long after the war was over General Lee was still admired, even in the North, for his principled stand with his country, which was, of course, the Commonwealth of Virginia. And even down in the Deep South, after defeat and subjugation, schoolchildren were asked to memorize a short speech by an Illinois frontier lawyer, delivered almost as an afterthought at the little college town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. America was a magnanimous place; a place of variety and an expansive spirit.

What is left of this after the long march of centralization and regimentation is difficult to say. American variety is not yet lost, but it is dying. We might mark the stages of its death by observing the ascendance of the ideology of Diversity. King Diversity will suffer no rivals to his lonely throne.

Capitalism is as much to blame for this as Socialism. It is Capitalism, after all, that inflicts upon us all a mass culture that is fundamentally pornographic and often simply vile. During last Sunday’s football games, there had to be at least a half dozen lucid commercials for these preposterous horror films — films, I’m told, that are among the most reliably profitable of any genre — that made me grateful my girls were playing in the other room. In short it is not government; it is not Leftism; it is Capitalism that has made even a football broadcast untrustworthy. It is Capitalism as well that insists upon the dispossession of our culture for cheap labor. It is, in other words, Capitalism that lubricates the skids toward a centralized uniformity. Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal carried a fascinating article about the preparations being made among the captains of industry for conformity to climate change orthodoxy. Now I don’t have a strong opinion about climate change, but from the article it seems pretty clear that what is coming is yet another demonstration of the difference between Capitalism and Free Enterprise. The former is not inherently hostile to State intervention, much less to centralization; it is concerned foremost with insuring that the intervention can be made profitable.

Conservatism is a sense can be understood as a defense of normalcy against deviancy. But this formulation, whatever its merits, seems to shortchange the enormous variety contained in “normal.” The confusion and disorder in our age can be seen in our romance of the deviant and our derision of the normal. It can also be seen in the truth of Chesterton’s remark that asserting any of the cardinal virtues today “has all the exhilaration of vice”; or in his admonition: “Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which you are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked. It may be that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal, and that you are a paralytic.”

We have forgotten the adventure of the normal life of virtue. We have forgotten that evil is banal and goodness vital and lively. That “Appalachia to the Rockies” Conservatism, its great and lively figures who would indeed be shocked at what we are accustomed to, can teach us again what we once knew well. Down with King Diversity; he is a tyrant and a usurper. Let us have back our freedom and our variety.

2007-01-22T12:52:00.000-05:00

I have said that Jihad is a wicked doctrine. I have said this because I believe it. But I have not said that Islam is a wicked religion. Nor have I said that Arabs are a wicked people. The bewilderment attendant to this issue is so great as to make repetition of these distinctions necessary. But there is a curiosity here. For at least two years following September 11, 2001 (the date when my education in Islam really began), I was prevented from arriving at this judgment of the wickedness of Jihad by two things; the first was ignorance of Islam, and the second an ideological assumption that religious doctrines cannot be fundamentally evil.

The curiosity is that the correction of the former forced a reassessment of the latter; and reassessment exposed the astonishing feebleness of latter. Once acknowledge that religious doctrines can be wicked, and it does not take much intensive study to discover that Jihad must be named among the most wicked. The natural reason of every ethical man revolts against a doctrine which bestows upon things like unprovoked conquest, subjugation, plunder, expropriation, and massacre the radiance of piety. This point was carefully (but still controversially) made recently by none other than the Bishop of Rome. Not enough was made of his appeal, in good Thomist fashion, to the natural reason of all men. For it is natural reason, rightly ordered, which discloses that such a doctrine as this is incompatible with justice or charity, and thus incompatible with God. The almost touching faith of the Pope in reason is the sort of thing that ought to shake the hubris of the New Atheists, but it may be doubted whether these apostles of Reason have a real comprehension on their idol. In any case it was this faculty to which he appealed.

But there is more to it than mere rationalism. It includes sentiment: it might be called a union of reason and passion. This faculty — in American terms what we might call, with Publius, the “deliberate sense” of the people — is where I aim my condemnatory appeal against the doctrine of jihad as well. Another way to look at it is through the older tradition of Christian moral philosophy, in which prudence is called the “mother” of the other virtues. Josef Pieper put it vividly: “prudence is the cause, root, mother, measure, precept, guide, and prototype of all ethical virtues.” This statement seems almost bizarre to our ears because the word prudence has been debased by misuse. But in this context prudence is understood to mean our vital connection with objective reality, our “realization of the good.” Our capacity for other virtues depends upon our right perception of things as they are. It is the virtue of prudence which shows us, again in Pieper’s words, that “so-called ‘good intention’ and so-called ‘meaning well’ by no means suffice.” Our good intention must be linked to an accurate perception of the world if we are ever to do good. We must cultivate, with patient care and discipline, the virtue of prudence if we are ever to act rightly.

The urgency with which I make my arguments against the Jihad thus stems primarily from a belief in the misestimate of reality by our political leadership. Good intention will not suffice. Unless they — and also we, because We the People are sovereign of this republic — come around to a truer estimation of what Jihad is, they (and we) will labor in vain. We must “realize the good” of the Jihad, which in this case means a kind of final negative against it. It has no good in it.

It would also be fair to say that my arguments exhibit urgency because I believe the situation is urgent. We do not understand our enemy with anything approaching sufficiency. The urgency — which, to repeat, I believe is justified by reality of the situation — also explains the rhetorical strategy I have employed, which strikes many readers as unduly provocative. No doubt I have failed in this strategy as much as I have succeeded — for instance, I think now that an article some weeks ago on Assimilation began with two sentences that were indeed unduly provocative — but I think the overall strategy is sound. There is a lassitude of spirit which afflicts this republic, and a cold precision of reason will not alone break it. In technical language, dialectic only is inadequate. I do not hide my rhetorical purpose, for as Richard Weaver put it:

The most obvious truth about rhetoric is that its object is the whole man. It presents its arguments first to the rational part of man, because rhetorical discourses, if they are honestly conceived, always have a basis in reasoning. . . . Yet it is the very characterizing feature of rhetoric that it goes beyond this and appeals to other parts of man's constitution, especially to his nature as a pathetic being, that is, a being feeling and suffering.

I am of the opinion, with Weaver, that there is more to man than his rational part. I am further of the opinion that, while certainly our misestimate of the Jihad has its rationalistic aspects, its primary cause is not rational. It lies in a spiritual lethargy which attacks our prudence and induces us to self-deception. To awaken us from this lethargy is a job for stronger elixirs than cold reason alone.

Some of the character of this lethargy can perhaps be grasped by consideration of an observable drift of comment to my recent article, “Make them give us battle.” I was quite amazed (and driven to some annoyance) by the number of commenters whose primary argument consisted of the assertion, or argument from apparent authority, that my purpose of “making them give us battle,” was impossible. Not just difficult, as I myself readily admitted, but impossible. The conjecture is that the “newness” of our guerilla enemy, his cunning and determination, forces us to admit no weakness in fighting men for glory and hotheadedness. The rabble of Falluja are too wily to be brought out in a fury. This assertion’s innocence of the historical character of the warrior class of men, even when organized into mere guerilla bands, is quite a thing to behold. In fact that class is most famous for its vulnerability to being provoked to irresponsible aggression. Consider the decisive handful of years in the latter half of the 16th century, when a shaky alliance of Christian powers succeeded in checking Turkish command of the Mediterranean. It was the provocation of the Knights of Malta that drove the Sultan to launch a bold and ultimately unsuccessful invasion of that island; and it was, in part, the provocation of the Knights successful defense of the island, that caused the Sultan to give battle to the great fleet of the Holy League at Lepanto, when a policy of evasion, patience and intrigue would likely have taxed the already tenuous alliance of Italians and Spaniards beyond the breaking point, making battle quite unnecessary.

Now of course the agents of Jihad today are not world-conquerors like the Turks, but treacherous saboteurs and terrorists. That they still consider themselves soldiers, however, cannot be doubted. That they are warlike in mentality and outlook, and as such susceptible to the weaknesses inherent in that mentality, cannot be doubted. Their tradition of war-making is very different than ours (for them the question of justice hinges on the whether the enemy is an infidel, for example: if he is, everything is permitted), but it is still a warrior tradition. And it is not invulnerable to exploitation.

Aristotle defined rhetoric as the discipline of discerning the available means of persuasion. Reason alone may be insufficient, and usually is — precisely because man is, as Weaver put it, a “pathetic being.” In my judgment, there is nothing more pressing for the patriots of this republic than persuading our countrymen of nature of the Jihad: its essential depravity, its permanent menace, its organic emanation from the Islamic tradition, its principles, limitations, expositions, applications, and especially its vulnerabilities. The deliberate sense of the American people must be made to compass this doctrine and policy of our enemy — compass it with that freedom of examination and expression that is our birthrate. We cannot shrink from this. It is highly probable that in the course of this compass, we will hear more voices, ranging from the cool and plausible to the shrill and intimidating, calling for silence. Indeed we have heard these already. The latest example of this obscurantism consists of the argument that by talking critically about Islam we will encourage the recruitment of the enemy. Even conceding arguendo that this speculation is accurate — that a sustained discussion of the Islamic doctrine of Jihad will alienate some Muslims, driving them into open sympathy for it — it hardly follows that this should cause us to quiet our critical faculties. What sort of people attempts to make war without giving offense? What sort of people fears to even talk about making war, lest they give offense? Only a servile people, I fear.

Americans have not often been called servile, and I am confident that this newest counsel of servility will be rebuffed. What must continue, instead, and even in the teeth of this sort of folly, is the pain-staking work of self-education. We must cultivate our prudence. We must achieve a realization of what Jihad is. We must cultivate a proper war-rhetoric with which to approach it. And we must do this in defiance of the whole panoply of tired orthodoxies which would bully us into silence.

2007-01-18T13:40:00.000-05:00

The appalling fact is that a very considerable portion of the American Left hates the prospect of a vigorous, determined and self-assured America, steeled to wage real war against her enemies, far more than it hates our enemies themselves. The real question is whether a considerable portion of the American Right does too. I think it does. But the self-loathing Left has one advantage at least over its counterpart on the Right, and that is this: it has a clearer picture of what a vigorous, confident, and self-assured nation looks like. Such nations — and we have the reliable instinct of the Left as solid evidence of this — look like something hateful to Liberalism.

They disdain abstract equality. They discriminate. Very often they oppress, as that word is bandied about by Liberals. They make good on their claims of the loyalty of their subjects or citizens. They punish what seems sacred to Liberals: the opinions of men. They announce intolerance of some opinions, and take resolute steps to enforce it. More than that: they take these steps in the knowledge that not all will work out as planned, that some mistakes will be made, some injustices perpetrated. But this does not deter them. If they are made of magnanimous people, these nations answer injustice with contrition and attempts to make good; but they do not concomitantly dismantle the policies which reflect their determination to crush the enemy.

In short, they repudiate a certain thin-skinned strain of Liberalism which might subcategorize as Civil Libertarianism.

Now, I am not a Liberal, much less a Civil Libertarian. In my judgment none of the above-mentioned measures are objectively unjust. A state may rightly move to insure loyalty among its subjects and punish disloyalty. We owe no special protection, in law, to wicked opinions, and it is permissible to punish opinions judged sufficiently wicked or seditious. I do believe that great care should be taken in this sort of endeavor; that it ought to be approached with trepidation and assiduity. Great dangers await the reckless. But I do also think our crisis today demands that we risk these dangers.

So I am not a Liberal. Neither, in my judgment, is the American political tradition Liberal. There is a rich history, attendant upon the political life of this country from the very beginning, of reacting to domestic disloyalty with a firm hand. Seditious movements in American history have been treated roughly, and few before about 1960 cared a fig about it. But note this: they have been treated roughly, but not (for the most part) cruelly. Seditionists have been arrested, tried by a jury of peers, and imprisoned; in times of declared war, yes, the methods have been harsher. But mostly this history consists of famous trials. Consider Mr. Geoffrey Stone’s book Perilous Times, a fine catalogue of the travails of Americans judged by their peers to be seditionists, provocateurs, anarchists, Jacobins, Communists, revolutionists, etc. Stone takes a position quite at odds with mine, of course, but his book had the effect in me of only strengthening my pride in my country’s political tradition.

We have had our share of revolutionary movements, alright, hurling their bitterness and monomanias against what is, in fact, one of the finest of all political settlements in human history, but we have had mercifully little of the sort of sanguinary episodes that usually follow the emergence of such movements in history. We have done nothing, really, that even approaches the brutality of Rome or the British Empire against insurrections (the latter much less brutal than the former), both of which powers we are regularly compared to. Our dhimmia against a subject minority was terrible indeed, but it lasted eighty years, not eight centuries. There is nothing in our history comparable with the savagery of the Spanish against the Moors, or the Spanish against the Calvinists, or the Turks against the Orthodox, or the Communists against Christians and, well, almost everyone else, in Eastern Europe.

The problem of disloyalty is an eternal feature of human politics; and there is no easy solution. It will ever be a part of the political troubles of man, until the crack of doom. It is, indeed, a problem from both sides: that is, a problem from the perspective of the individual, who must in the end depend upon his prudence to determine how much his country merits his loyalty; and a problem from that of the state, which must always weigh the application of coercive force to enforce order against the dangers of its use. And I say that on this political problem, there is ample reason for gratification in what we Americans have at once accomplished and avoided.

But all this, to get back to my original point, is an analysis outside the lineaments of Liberalism. Even talking about it, I imagine, will make many men, some of whom may assent to Liberalism more than they know, uneasy and alarmed. A vigorous, determined and self-assured America is an America that will enforce loyalty and punish disloyalty, and moreover recognize these things as vital aspects of a war launched against us in a colossal act of treachery. This sort of America — which, to repeat myself, is an America operating well within her admirable political tradition of suppressing disloyalty — is perhaps the most awful of all things to segments of the Left. Against it they will fight, and their success will cripple us. More: this sort of America is indeed an awful thing to some (much smaller, but hardly insignificant) portions of the Right. Against it, they too will fight; and the baleful irony is that some of them, in other moments, will pine for the very thing they resist when it appears. They want an America which has recovered her will; but they hate the application of that will. They have fallen into C. S. Lewis’s “ghastly simplicity” of demanding the function while removing the organ. They too may cripple us.

2007-01-17T14:16:00.000-05:00

At the Battle of Gaines’ Mill, in late June of 1862, John B. Hood’s Texas Brigade delivered a blow against a strong Federal line that provoked from Stonewall Jackson this elegiac tribute, when he came to behold the carnage it required of the victors: “The men who carried this position were soldiers indeed.”

They were soldiers indeed because these men marched across a swamp under savage fire with their weapons unreadied. Their casualties were staggering, yet they never staggered; and the force of their boldness, when finally combined with a great volley of musketry at short range, broke the Union line. It was Lee’s first victory. They were to distinguish themselves again in battle, many times, not the least of which was the charge they made on the second day at Gettysburg against the Federal far left, down in the Round Tops and the aptly-named Devil’s Den — a charge that, in the end, could not hold its ground gained, but earned its way into memory by way of the courage it demanded of these men.

What is it in men that gives them the power to accomplish such deeds? It is one of the things that, despite all the terrors of war, forbids us to condemn it utterly. It is the virtue of fortitude. It is courage.

Among recent films — and I daresay film is the best medium for depicting fortitude — the final episode of The Lord of the Rings delivers an unforgettable depiction. Arriving near the gates of the White City, and in rear of the great host of Mordor’s Orc army, the Riders of Rohan, the Rohirrim, make their Ride. Horns sound to announce their arrival, the enemy turns in some disarray to receive their charge, and streaks of sunshine gleam over their shoulders. The king’s words are minimal: he does not really need to inspire these cavalry-men, for they know well what awaits them.

“Arise! Arise! Riders of Théoden! Spears shall be shaken, shields shall be splintered! A sword-day! A red day, ere the sun rises!”

As the charge begins, the men shout Death! They do not fear it, and many of them will meet in here today. This gallantry is felt — profoundly felt, I thought, for the scene is masterfully rendered — and the viewer is taught again that valuable lesson, which if he was lucky he learned long ago, that not everything in war need be evil.

We do not, as a rule, teach military history in this country. We teach that wars happened, that they were terrible, what they accomplished, or failed to accomplish, or inflicted; but we really do not teach how they were fought, or who fought them and why. This fact probably goes a long way to explaining why our young men are so historically ignorant. The one sort of history that will reliably move boys to that excitement with learning which is alone capable of inspiring them, has been removed from our curricula.

Meanwhile, in the public media, our soldiers in the field have become mere types in the Liberal caricature of Victimization. The stories we tell of them all, or at any rate most of the stories, ring with despondency and helplessness; or with mere stale partisanship. In film the trend is almost worse: American soldiers are regularly portrayed as madmen, dupes, degenerates, or heartless criminals. And alongside this spiritual degradation, we strive ever more eagerly to turn our military institutions into playgrounds for social experiments. The educational neglect makes the fighting man incomprehensible; the rendering of him through the ideological lens of victim makes him contemptible; and the social innovation imposed on his tradition undermines his virtue.

There are, in every society, men who actually like to fight, and who will excel at nothing else. War must be recognized as their vocation. This is a fact. Judge it how you like, it must acknowledged. It is one of those most ancient of political problems that such men cannot be destroyed, transformed, or ignored for long; but they may be disciplined into useful and honorable service; and it is a measure of the character of that society how well this is done. For the pitfalls are countless, usually reducing to an alternative of either (a) effective military power and systematic cruelty, or (b) feebleness and foreign subjugation. Fortitude is exalted, and the other virtues are abolished; or fortitude is abolished, and the others rendered impossible. But fortitude can be harnessed. We might almost say it can be baptized. There have been soldier-saints.

It is a joy to learn how successfully Americans have avoided the many pitfalls of this martial instinct in men. We have not come close to perfection, but we have for the most part avoided calamity; and we are excelled by almost no other society. What a glory of our tradition that our fighting men have been so honorable in victory and defeat! The tragedy of the Civil War, for example, was in the wickedness that made it unavoidable, not in the wickedness with which it was conducted; for by and large it was conducted justly and even magnanimously. Of how many other civil wars can the same be said?

This noble American achievement is being steadily undermined. The sappers have been at their grim work for some time now. That our military has endured as long as it has, is a testament to the tradition upon which it stands, and to the men it has trained up to continue that tradition. But it is the meanest of follies to assume that what is precious is also indestructible.

It is tempting argue, at this point in a sketch like this, that the problem is the Feminization of the military. But this is too facile. The failure here lies primarily with men: men who allow their sons to be treated like girls; men who fail to honor women, and thereby teach no honor in their descendents; men who will send their wives and sisters to war to satisfy their itch for abstract equality. I would like to ask those who here who have made their peace with women in combat (which is our de facto policy today, considering the absence of any true “front line”) if they really think the history of human warfare is conspicuous for its respect for women. Think hard on that. That it is conspicuous for rather the reverse should give some indication of how profound our achievement is: the fruit of the long, pain-staking, patient, to be sure imperfect, but noble work of our ancestors stretching back over centuries upon centuries. The honor code that made the American fighting man one of the few exceptions from the rule of pillage and rapine as a concomitant of war, is the same code that stands in implacable opposition to abstract gender equality. Erode it with incessant innovations and you may unshackle a monster.

In the event of such a catastrophe as the final loss of the Western code of jus in bello, will there be an accounting for the innovators whose ministrations robbed our fighting men of their virtue? Doubtful, for there is none for the innovators who, for instance, robbed our inner cities of the tenuous order once achieved and enforced, now lost, perhaps forever; or for those who emancipated pornography and now wail and gnash their teeth at its rotten fruit at, i. e., Abu Ghraib.

Our armed forces still produce Stonewall’s “soldiers indeed.” Our own Jeff Emanuel has documented some, and there are many, many more. But it is to be doubted how long this will remain true if we cannot muster a fortitude of our own sufficient to stop and reverse the depredations inflicted on our martial tradition.

2007-01-11T14:36:00.000-05:00

What prevents me from supporting President Bush amounts to this: I do not trust his judgment. Put another way, a man whose judgment has been demonstrated to be so suspect cannot claim my trust.

The most resounding evidence against his judgment is his administration’s intolerable negligence of domestic security. How a politician whose government reacts to a kind of citizens’ arrest in the sky of a troop of Jihadist provocateurs, by ordering a new round of sensitivity training for security officers, can possibly hope to retain the trust of the patriots of this republic, is a matter for our soothsayers to explicate. For me, is a matter, piled on top of a dozen others and more, for disgust and disappointment. Is it possible that the President and his close advisers do not realize the demoralization they cause when, to take another example, they take no notice of brigandage on our southern border? This banditry is probably perpetrated by the sort of increasingly globalized criminal gangs which would have no qualms about alliance with the Jihad. The Jihad, its roots in oil-rich nations, has money after all. Is all this obscure to them? Or is it obscure to them that their studied ignorance of the whole menace of the Jihad domestically undermines the trust they draw on for political support?

It is hard not conclude, alas, that the President simply doesn’t care about domestic security outside the narrow focus of law enforcement. It is hard not to conclude, what is more worrisome: that the President has no real grasp of the lineaments of this war. If he cannot see the danger that is caused when, in the face of agitation from sympathizers of the enemy, his administration folds like paper doll — why, then we just cannot trust him.

This Presidency’s political lifeblood is draining out of it: it is losing the support of the Right. You can hardly escape it if you are attentive to those sectors where Conservative voices are prominent. On talk radio, hardly a segment goes by without a caller, once supportive of Bush, now hostile. Old Left rags like The Nation are able to somewhat plausibly write about the “growing anti-war movement in the military.” On the blogs, disillusionment is everywhere. When the Democrats say they have a majority of the people behind them in opposition to the war, they are probably not perpetrating an illusion. That party has finally fumbled upon a slogan that may actually resonate beyond Washington and New York: the slogan that Iraq is the responsibility of Iraqis, we cannot do it for them. There is undoubtedly some cynicism in this rhetoric — everywhere else we look, Democrats are urging that we “do” something for somebody — but is has a core of truth. In stark terms, it means this: if the Iraqi people do not want democracy and liberty, we cannot give it to them.

These were the hurdles President Bush faced when he went on the airwaves last night. They may have been from the outset insurmountable. As a politician who rested on the trust of the people, the loss of that alone may put his presidency beyond recovery. Moreover, his second fundamental source of political capital — the treachery and madness of the Left — while unquestionably profiting him, also, like gold for the Spanish and oil for the Saudis, corrupted him. George W. Bush won reelection in 2004 against an insufferable and unlikable opponent only by the narrowest of margins; and he has retained sympathy throughout his time in office largely by virtue of his personal appeal (though this has always mystified his adversaries) and the unceasing tissue of abuse and invective launched against him. But none of these assets will avail him in the teeth of a loss of trust among his core supporters on the Right. Conservatives represent the largest constituency ordered around philosophical principle in the country; no right-wing candidate can survive their disillusionment.

Thus the only hope, I believe, for retrieval of domestic political support, which is of course a prerequisite for any renewed vigor in Iraq, is the patient work of earning again the trust of the people who once supported him. The easiest way to do this would be to talk and act like there is indeed a war on — a war which began for us, not with a shock somewhere in foreign lands, but with perfidy and massacre by agents of the Jihad who had penetrated our security apparatus and struck us at home. To lose sight of this stolid and stark fact, is to lose sight of what this all about.

2007-01-11T14:32:00.000-05:00

During the Cold War there was a phenomenon known infelicitously as anti-anti-Communism; it consisted primarily of Liberals who, though cool on Communism, reserved their greatest alarm and antipathy for Communism’s determined opponents. They felt they had more to fear from their own countrymen, in whose judgment the Communist enterprise was, indeed, an evil empire, than they did from the Imperialists of the Marxist State. We can see the remnants of this persuasion in some tendentious histories, like the one someone gave me years back which nonchalantly presented Sen. Joe McCarthy as the leader of a nascent American Fascism.

The problem with anti-anti-Communism is quite simple: it was wrong. Stupendously wrong. The point can, I think, be illustrated easily enough: imagine what we would think today of a political movement of the 1930s animated by antipathy for opponents of National Socialism. Indeed, the point is even stronger when we consider that by the time anti-anti-Communism had reached its full flower in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, Communism itself was a form of National Socialism, Stalin having made full use of the proud nationalism of the people of Russia. A just historical estimate, therefore, must render a severe censure against the judgment and reasoning of the anti-anti-Communists.

I begin with this rehearsal of some recent history because a parallel is emerging today. It lineaments can be guessed at well enough. For some, the opponents of the Jihad are greater cause for alarm than the Jihad itself. Here is an Israeli academic, one Fania Oz-Salzberger, who says that, at a European Coalition for Israel conference last fall, “The tone was belligerent, the linkage crude: ‘The enemies of Israel are also a threat to Europe,’ delegates were told. And also: ‘In only two generations, most parts of Europe will be under Islamic law.’ Other self-declared friends grimly speak of Londonistan and augur the coming of the European Caliphate.” What an abominable horror that men might react to the massacre of civilians on commuter rails and bus with belligerent tones! She magnanimously allows that these statements “may reflect genuine concern” — again because, one supposes, “concern” is an acceptable emotion provoked to feel when confronted with treacherous acts of war — but goes on to aver that the statements “are disconcerting when made on European soil.” But only a couple sentences earlier, there was not even this allowance for “concern”: “These new pro-Israel voices base a love of Jews upon the hatred of Muslims.” Later, the clever sneer: “Beware of Islamophobes bearing gifts.”

The only evidence registered against these European Friends of Israel is the “tone” of their “belligerence” and the “crudity” of their rhetorical “linkages.” For the rest the author relies on what can only be described as racial guilt. Since Europeans made these statements, they are suspect — not because of what the actual Europeans in question have done, but because of what their ancestors once did: “Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may be threatening the existence of Israel today, but no Muslim power has ever dealt the Jews such calamities as brought upon them by Europe.” (A particular irony, in this context, is the fact that a British Jew, Melanie Phillips, may be credited with giving the term “Londonistan” its currency.)

Ms. Oz-Salzberger’s column may be fairly described as tame compared to the deranged vitriol of Col. Ralph Peters some months ago. But the effect of it is the same: It lays down a dogma of quietism. There can be no use of rhetoric, and emphatically none that might be labeled “war rhetoric,” which impinges directly, or even by implication, upon the Islamic religion. The civilization and creed which incubates our enemies — the sort of men whose piety embraces the butchery of innocents — may not be criticized with anything but the most detached academic discourse. Islam shall be protected from severe criticism. It shall, moreover, be protected by the formidable of shield of political correctness, and all the thuggery implied by it. Its methods, as usual, consist of insinuation and intimidation. Opponents of the Jihad hate Muslims: bigots and xenophobes, all. Like the anti-anti-Communists before them — who assured us that Communism was no real threat, and whose public discourse urged coexistence with a wicked doctrine — these latter-day scolds urge acceptance for wickedness. Their monomania weakens our resolve. Somewhere a clever writer and global content provider is penning another elegant and amusing exhortation to the West to recover its “will”; and looking over his shoulder with mistrust for his own countrymen is the ever-watchful censor, his mind alert for some breach of his monomaniacal code of propriety. If a man, reflecting upon the day when the Jihad came to Lower Manhatten, or the day it came to London, or the day it nearly came to Germany, begins to speak with a bit of fire in his belly, the dutiful censors will move to silence him. If another man, pondering the contemporary surfeit of references to Winston Churchill’s war rhetoric, avows his agreement with the great man’s comparison of the Koran to Mein Kampf — a manual of “faith and war: turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with its message” — he will be rebuked for the impropriety. What are we, really, to make of this: that while war is being made against us by men animated by an Islamic doctrine, we are harassed and abused for the “belligerence” of our rhetoric? To repeat: for some, the opponents of the Jihad are greater cause for alarm than the Jihad itself; while the latter has incinerated thousands of Americans, and hundreds of Israelis and Europeans, the former have committed a graver crime still: they have uttered hard words about Islam.

In this predicament, we must — for of course I count myself among those prepared to violate the sham propriety that shields Islam from criticism — do three things. First, if the anti-anti-Islamists ever get around to making their accusations to our face, of actually asking us, “are you are hater?” — we should answer, “Yes, sir, I do hate some things. Like the devil and all his works; and the doctrine of Jihad is of the devil. I do indeed hate it.” Second, we should calmly remind our antagonists, every once in a while, that a doctrine is not a man; that we believe we owe no charity to doctrines; and that no amount of rhetorical bullying will dislodge this elementary principle from our minds. Third, and above all, we should avoid being dragged into a paralyzing debate over these matters. Reason will probably have little effect on this monomania, and our time can be better spent talking past these tormented souls. They are entangled in their own web of euphemism and platitude; and it cannot be our duty to disentangle them.

— Because we have much larger duties to attend to: duties that will require, I am afraid, a belligerent tone and even some crudity of linkage. The duty, namely, of preparing this republic for the hard work of deliverance from the very real and very pressing threat of the Jihad. Our troops have shown their valor time and again. But that will be of little consequence if our people cannot discover in themselves the qualities of fortitude and defiance. Fortitude to endure the inevitable setbacks of war, and defiance to escape the monomania of our chattering-classes, including this new faction of anti-anti-Islamists.

2007-01-05T10:02:00.000-05:00

Gettysburg National Battlefield

Everyone has seen them. They are all over the Web. I mean those video clips of a brief encounter between a unit of Jihadists, often in the midst of conspiring to maim and massacre by treachery, and some fighting men of the United States. Often the video is of poor quality, or filtered through some night vision contraption. Invariably it is at once exhilarating and horrifying. It puts one in the mind of a grim lament like that of Robert E. Lee, “it is well that war is so terrible; we should grow too fond of it.” But the example serves to demonstrate a somewhat curious fact of this war: our enemy will not fight. He avoids battle like few adversaries we have come to grips with before.

So aside from my recommendations about how to approach Islam and Jihad as political matters, and acknowledging from the beginning my deficit of expertise on military matters, I say that one of our strategies in this war should be to maneuver our enemies into a real battle, or series of them. This, I suspect, was a considerable part of the justification for the invasion of Iraq, though it was not often very well articulated; and should it have worked — should, that is, the invasion have compelled the disparate elements of the Jihad to give us battle on any scale where defeat for either side would have been damaging — its value to us would have been manifest.

Accomplishing this compulsion to battle will be an exceedingly difficult maneuver, to be sure. I cannot possibly hope to speculate on how it would be done as military matter, on the level of tactics, but I think the republic could be served by a discussion of how on the political level. Now, it cannot be doubted that a discussion such as this will have the distinctive character of a wartime discussion; and thus, that many of our countrymen, who believe there is no war on, will be alarmed and dismayed by it. This cannot be helped. If the citizens of a republic judge that war is being made against them, even if they cannot command a majority in assent to this opinion, they must be free to talk about it — even if this means a certain defiance of those who do not share it. Indeed, in my view what we have here is actually something approaching a solid majority: but one that, like so much in our politics, is oppressed by a kind of passive conspiracy by the elite. In any case, the questions, by means of which we could “get at” this conundrum, might look something like the following.

(1) How can we provoke the enemy to recklessness? How can we make him lose his reason? How can we drive him en masse into the field of battle, and keep him there? Once this is done, I think our military forces will be eminently capable of delivering him savage repulses, and pursuing these to resounding victories against him.

(2) How can we insure that this battle will be fought on his soil and not ours? Or, more precisely perhaps, how can we insure that any such battle, while fought elsewhere, will not have terrorist repercussions on our shores? It cannot fail to be part of our calculation that the enemy is here, amongst us; that not merely his fanatics and planners, his mercenaries and saboteurs, but also his propagandists and subversives, are prepared to leverage our domestic vulnerabilities, which are considerable, for the advance of the Jihad. But the purpose of securing a favorable ground for combat operations is an excellent one. And here, again, I think we come in contact with a piece of reasoning — again poorly articulated — behind the Iraq war. I’m not here entering into a discussion of that conflict, except to say (a) it hasn’t worked out as planned and (b) at any rate it hasn’t been accompanied by real vigilance domestically. Similarly, a lot people are now talking — as they should be — about what to do about Iran. Do they ever think about what Iran might be capable of in America? We cannot neglect an estimate of what sort of resources of mayhem, sedition and intimidation the Persian Jihadists might have here in the United States. We know, for instance, that Hezbollah is active; we have good reason to suspect it even wields political influence in some regions. This is a problem no patriot can ignore.

(3) How can we get a better handle on the enemy’s inherent mental vulnerabilities? How can we discover his points of psychological pressure, the advantages he presents to us by virtue of his own character? The means of answering this is obvious enough: let us recur to history. That sounds like a platitude, but it is an eminently practical measure. So far in this war, it has been for the most part philosophers and strategists (broadly-conceived) that have counseled us. It was a philosophical argument that led us to the Democracy Project, for instance. But history is what we really need. We need speeches delivered from the Oval Office and the floors of the houses of Congress; lectures in classrooms of the military academies; and a general climate of historical curiosity in the public square — all concerning the character and antiquity of the Jihad. We must educate ourselves, and come to better know our enemy. To do this effectively, we will also need another aspect of that measure of defiance mentioned above. The people of this republic must find in themselves a real fortitude in the teeth of the dreary orthodoxies of Tolerance and Secularism. We face a cruel, cunning and patient enemy; resisting him we require more mental toughness than we have thus far shown.

I think one thing that will be shown by this sketchy exercise of contemplation is what an oppression these orthodoxies are. Their effect has been, very simply, to prevent us from talking like the citizens of a free country at war. The one excellence that is universally said to be ours, is not allowed to operate upon the subject of our enemy. We talk so much about freedom; let us win some for ourselves and be rid of these paralyzing, pitiful pieces of yesterday’s pedantry. They are so manifestly innocent of reason and fact! Men are called racists based on their criticisms of a religion, or merely certain doctrines of a religion. Critical thinking, once thought the sine qua non of Liberalism, is abandoned as a matter of principle. Idiot historical comparisons become convention. If our philosophers cannot see that on this vital issue their orthodoxy of Tolerance stands in stark antagonism to freedom . . . well, we cannot help them. We must go on without them.

We have an enemy; his agents and soldiers are among us; his resources, though scarce in some categories, are hardly inconsiderable. In many ways his weaknesses are our strengths, and ours his. Thus, as one of our overwhelming strengths is military might, we must set our minds — that is, the minds of the sovereign people of the republic — upon the question of how we can force him to give us battle.

2007-01-01T10:36:00.000-05:00

Not long ago, I happened to see a graphic representation, thrown up briefly on a cable news network, of American casualty figures (deaths, to be precise) in several wars. One does not see this very often. I suspect this is because the plain striking fact of, say, 58,000 (Vietnam), set in comparison to 3,000 (the current war in Iraq), is enough, almost on its own, to dispel the phantom invocations of Vietnam, at least in those not afflicted by a kind of obsession with that earlier war. The effect could be amplified, of course, by including mention of the 3,600 in one day at Antietam, or the nearly 8,000 in three at Gettysburg.*

Mere numbers, to be sure, do not do a war justice. Certainly any American who has lost a brother or son (or, God forbid, a sister or daughter) will be forgiven a certain instinctive outrage at any discussion of mere numbers. And there are, in my view, factors that could be added to balance sheet of Iraq — for example the spectacular and paralyzing failure, which is ongoing, to reckon with the religious conflict at back of it — that would render it a greater horror. But these factors cannot possibly be held to actually inflate the historical importance of Iraq beyond that of Vietnam. It is possible, I suppose, that Iraq will one day gain that infamy; but this is highly doubtful and at any rate unknowable. My own conjecture is that the historical importance of Iraq will eventually be swamped by the historical importance of the larger conflict of which, for good or ill, it is a part.

In any case I do not think a comparison of Iraq to the Vietnam War can really be sustained in the face of the irrefragable fact of casualty figures. I say this, indeed, as a skeptic of Iraq, and an outright opponent of current American policy vis-à-vis Islam (the fact that we have no stated policy on that is suggestive enough; and an interesting further question is what the reader may suppose the character of that policy would be, if the “deliberate sense” of the people were allowed to bear upon it?); and neither part of this two-fold judgment, in my case, can be reasonably applied to Vietnam.

To compare Iraq to Vietnam is simply an irresponsible historical analogy. Equally irresponsible is the analogy (this one usually made to be aid and comfort for people on the other side of the debate altogether) of our predicament today, to that of some Allied nation at some point in the Second World War. The most useful historical comparisons to Iraq, in truth, must reach much further back in history — because to have any validity on the political and, as it were, world-historical level, they must make contact with a war where religion played at primary part. This fact — and here is a really vital point — we cannot change. We may in time come to profess no religion at all; we may heed the counsel of our least trustworthy citizens, and repudiate religion as a force for good and inspiration for gallantry; that our enemies do very vigorously profess a religion makes our war religious in character.

That this fact — which, I say again, is not reformable by any art we here possess — is still, nearly four years into the Iraq war, and well over five into our bloody and unwilling entry into the larger conflict of which it is a part, by and large neglected by our politicians and statesmen, our thinkers and soothsayers, speaks of an error of judgment and imagination far greater than anything justly attributable to the statesmen who prosecuted Vietnam (who at least understood the importance of defending an ally in a great global struggle). On that intellectual level, Iraq is a greater catastrophe than Vietnam. But an error of judgment can always be corrected, and the effort in the Middle East in time retrieved; and this all in ample time to yet avoid the magnitude of bloodletting, and the loss of so many of our soldiers, as that of Vietnam.

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* These latter may, momentarily at least, serve also to heighten the disparity between Vietnam and Iraq, because so often “casualty” is conflated with “dead.” Iraq still stands as several orders of magnitude less bloody than Vietnam, though it is already approaching half the duration of the war in southeast Asia.

2007-01-01T10:33:00.000-05:00

Okay, I’ll say it. It irks me that the Peach Bowl is now the Chick-fil-A Bowl. It vexes me to hear the mandated phrase “Invesco Field at Mile High.” I grieve the loss of the old and honored place-names of sports: Candlestick Park, Three Rivers Stadium, Jack Murphy Stadium. A living tradition — which, as Chesterton famously wrote, is a democracy of the dead — by this process is obliterated, and a sterile materialism replaces it. The whole point of a free enterprise system is that there is no guarantee of endurance for any specific enterprise.* That corporate names, attached to stadiums by means of vast expenditures, can make no claims to the people’s veneration, as opposed to their fleeting fancy, is no mere controversial assertion on my part — it is an admitted feature of the principle of the system.

Now Chick-fil-A, as far as I can tell, is a fine enterprise; in many ways, indeed, an admirable one. The service is generally superior to the competitors; the product is good; the marketing strategy is often genuinely amusing; and the moral character of the corporate countenance is commendable. (I once bore witness to a rather astonishing debate which featured three or four obnoxious atheists delivering sanctimonious censure against Chick-fil-a for the intolerable inconvenience imposed by the closure of its stores at airports on Sunday.) But even granted these laudable qualities, I do not hesitate to admit my embarrassment last night upon hearing the game announcers refer to the Peach State’s signature bowl game by the name of a fast-food chain famous for its clever cows.

This whole business illustrates the difficulties of attempting to make, in the celebrated phrase, so creatively-destructive a system to form a basis, or at any rate an element of the basis, of the political tradition of a nation. I tradition is a thing that endures; its quality lies inescapably in its longevity, and in the reverence it acquires in the course of surviving the vicissitudes of men and history. To set a tradition upon a foundation of tumult and instability, no matter how creative, is to some extent to contradict the essence of the things itself.

The example of Chick-fil-A is itself instructive: for what makes this company admirable is its resistance, in certain respects, to the disorder of the free market. Its kids’ meals distribute storybooks the lessons of which are anchored in the older tradition of philosophical and moral order. Its closure on Sundays harkens back to an even older tradition rooted in a profounder understanding of what the creative nature of man is. For even this, as I have noted, Chick-fil-A is singled out for opprobrium. That this older moral order is the only substrate upon which a healthy system of free enterprise (indeed, freedom of any kind) can grow, is an oft-forgotten truth. It was not often forgotten my our fathers, as a cursory review of their statements on the matter will show.**

The importance of sports to our civilization is not to be overlooked. Therefore I will not overlook the ominous portents contained in the trend of effacing older traditions, to be replaced by a kind of anti-tradition of corporate musical chairs.

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* This tenet is part of what distinguishes, in my mind at least, Free Enterprise from Capitalism: under the dominion of the latter, favored enterprises are protected from annihilation, for various reasons; the former makes no such provision of favoritism.

** “Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom. No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue; and by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.” — Patrick Henry. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” — John Adams. “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim tribute to patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness — these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. . . . reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principles.” — George Washington.

2007-01-01T10:32:00.000-05:00

In my view the wisest strategy of resistance to the Jihad is not engagement but isolation — not isolation of ourselves, but of them. We should make it our policy to have as little contact with the Islamic religion as possible. A sizeable and dynamic faction of this religion, with roots stretching back to the antiquity of Islam, is committed to an uncompromising principle of revolution. Its adherents aim to transform our country utterly, by any means available. Sedition is their piety. Our ability to distinguish this faction from the broader society of Muslims is piteously inadequate. Our capacity for even the rudiments of clear thinking on this subject, for even the first steps of firmness and vigor in our public counsels, is very meager. Our readiness to be cowed by simple tactics of intimidation, to be brought to heel by a few tired slogans, seems almost boundless.

It is something of a mystery to me that many of those who are most energetic about a policy of engagement with Islam, are also those who are least confident about our ability to impose our will at home. We can impose our will upon distant lands and alien peoples, but it is a horror to attempt such a thing upon the aliens in our midst. Now assimilation, as we often talk about it in American history, is just that: the imposition of will upon the alien. I realize it makes men uncomfortable to talk like that, but this is a fact. The neoconservative Norman Podhoretz, perhaps the most energetic of all democratizers — that is, those who support a policy of democratization of the Islamic world — relates in one of his books how his grammar-school teacher in 1930s Brooklyn took it upon herself, with no consultation with his parents, to eradicate his Yiddish accent: in short to destroy this vestige of his immigrant culture and replace it with something American. At times in American history, the force of this imposition of will became almost an element of the atmosphere itself: vague, indefinite, but very real. Someone back in my ancestral past (my ancestors include the first Italian family to arrive in Denver) felt this pressure to such an extent that he changed the pronunciation of his last name: from Ch-ella to S-ella. Italian became American. At other times, the imposition of will was tangible indeed, as when, confronted with a rebellion in New York City against the Conscription Act, fomented in part by immigrant gangs, Lincoln did not hesitate to send in steely veterans of Gettysburg, backed by grapeshot, to effect obedience to the law.

My point is that assimilation — the principle upon which, when pressed, defenders of generous immigration policies (including, for our purposes here, policies generous to aspiring Muslim immigrants) almost invariably retreat — is very often indistinguishable from coercion. In many cases it is a painful dispossession of a cultural inheritance. In some cases it amounts to a kind of despotism. Until this fact is realized — until, in practical terms, we see at least in embryo a movement to require this sort of cultural dispossession from the immigrant communities that, willfully or otherwise, incubate our enemies — we are authorized to doubt the seriousness of those who seek to assuage us with invocations of assimilation. We want to dispossess Muslim communities of the doctrine of jihad; and the plain fact is that any attempt to do so will be perceived by a great many people as attacks on Islam itself. We can make all the distinctions between doctrine and religion that we like (and indeed the distinction is a real and meaningful one): it will not disarm the grievance-mongers and sophisters, whose manipulation of our obsessions will undoubtedly sow perplexity and alarm. A man who cries loudly when pressed: “noble Assimilation, make our country whole,” but who sees any manifestation of it as little more than bigotry, is not, in fact, a man who venerates the principle of assimilation.

Engagement, which is the policy we have pursued since September 11th, has resulted in assimilation, alright: the assimilation of us to them. Government bureaucracies and corporations beyond count have forced their employees through Islamic sensitivity training, but I have yet to read of a Muslim organization putting its employees through American sensitivity training. We read now that the military is similarly assimilating to Islamic mores and traditions. Marines at Quantico, for example, are “allowed to have some time off to prepare for their fasting break and not to go to physical training” during Ramadan.

Were the assimilation moving in the other direction, we might read of the military’s demand that Muslims recruits change their name to accommodate easier pronunciation; or the insertion of a line repudiating the doctrine of jihad in the Oath of Enlistment; or the institution of special background checks for Muslims recruits (if the reader considers this question of no practical importance, it may be useful to recall the cause of the first American casualties in the Iraq war); or the implementation of careful and intrusive additional oversight of military imams; or a dozen other of the sort of policies that would verily scream “discrimination” into the sensitive ears of our Liberals but would actually mean “assimilation” — or at least the attempt at it.

I would genuinely like to hear from the devotees of Assimilation: how would you react to policies and pressures which, when brought to bear in a serious way, would mean uncomfortable and even painful demands on Muslims immigrants? Would you be prepared to defend a school teacher (were such an intrepid soul to emerge) who imposed assimilation on Muslim students is a way similar, mutatis mutandis, to young Podhoretz’s English teacher? Would you stand and be counted with the adversaries of CAIR, quickly heaped with abuse and slander by a pliant press, when it launches its media campaign against a proposed loyal oath for Muslim enlistees in the Army? Would you support a federal bureaucrat who, perhaps a bit sanctimoniously, made himself a cause célèbre by refusing to submit to Islamic sensitivity training until the outfit that demanded it asks its employees to enter classes in American history and government? Would you willingly set yourself under the black paintbrush of calumny, and stand with a Congressman who proposed a resolution (not even binding legislation) declaring America’s firm intolerance of the doctrine of Jihad and demand that American Muslims renounce it at once? Would you, in short, stake your reputation on the enforcement of the principle you promote?

If you answer No to all of these hypotheticals (or other similar ones that might be imagined), then I would say to you, with respect, that your commitment to assimilation is a shallow one indeed; that wherever this stated and abstract commitment comes in contact with the hard work of actually making it so, your resolve falters and your ideal is betrayed; and that your endorsement of a policy of Engagement, given the feebleness of your support for Assimilation, is tinctured with darker things like Surrender and Appeasement. And since I suspect that the effort of will required to replace this feebleness with resolution is beyond the means that we here possess, prudence counsels an alternative policy. If we cannot muster the strength and self-possession to impose our will, as our fathers before us did, let us try to avoid exacerbating the cultural confrontation, underway all over the world, which can only result in the imposition of someone’s will upon someone else. Let us take steps to isolate of the Islamic world.

2007-01-01T10:30:00.000-05:00

Mr. Lee Harris (not to be confused with the insufferable Sam Harris), expansively reviews Andy Bostom’s The Legacy of Jihad and in the process advances the discussion on Islam and the West a step forward. Now it will surprise no one to learn that I am a great admirer of Dr. Bostom’s somewhat overwhelming volume. In my judgment it will someday hold a similar pride of place as Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror: an early exposure of something anyone could know, had he only the will to learn. What anyone could know in Conquest’s case was that the Soviet Union, well before the Second World War, was a place of unimaginable horrors; and that its guiding principle, Communism, was a doctrine of extreme wickedness. What anyone could know today is that Jihad is a doctrine of extreme wickedness which has visited horrors upon men across continent and century, really unlike anything else in history.

But Lee Harris advances the debate further, by pointing out, (a) that “what accounts for” the “uniqueness” of Jihad, is “not the fanaticism and brutality with which” it has been “systematically carried out,” but its success in “transforming whatever cultural traditions fell before it,” in short its effectiveness as an imperial instrument; and (b) that the Jihad need not conquer to succeed; it need only wreak enough destruction to paralyze; in other words, that the model is not a clash of civilizations, in the ubiquitous catchphrase, but a crash of civilization. In Harris’s crystalline prose:

If Muslim civilization only decided to clash with ours, we could clash back, and with overwhelming military force. If we were confronting the armies of Omar or of Tamerlane, there is little doubt which side would secure the victory. But the objective of jihad is not Clausewitzian politics continued by other means. Its objective is the destruction and dissolution of politics as we have come to understand it in the West. The jihadists are not interested in winning in our sense of the word. They can succeed simply by making the present world order unworkable, by creating conditions in which politics-as-usual is no longer an option, forcing upon the West the option either of giving in to their demands or descending into anarchy and chaos.

The chief strength of any established order is order. [. . .] It is by destroying order, by undermining the normal rules and regulations that preserve order, that those who wish to overthrow the status quo succeed. They do not need to achieve the same degree of force that is the monopoly of the established order. In the crash-of-civilization paradigm — contrary to Clausewitzian warfare — the enemy of a particular established order does not need to match it in organizational strength and effectiveness. It needs only to make the established order reluctant to use its great strength out of the understandable fear that by plunging into civil war it will itself be jeopardized. This fear of anarchy — the ultimate fear for those who embrace the politics of reason — can be used to paralyze the political process to the point at which the established order is helpless to control events through normal political channels and power is no longer in the hands of the establishment but lies perilously in the streets.

My sense is that this insight has not yet been assimilated by . . . well, but almost anyone. Such assimilation would yield some obvious transformations in our thinking on this crisis. Allow me to sketch a few that occur to me:

(1) A correction of the spectacular imbalance in our public counsels between the ideas of Liberty and Order. The latter holds a fixed position in the American political tradition, not perhaps as prominent as the former, but certainly more prominent than convention today allows. Consider the Preamble to the Constitution, and the six purposes of that document contained therein: Union, Justice, domestic Tranquility, common defence, general Welfare, and the Blessings of Liberty. Three of these are plainly on the side of Order, while only one is plainly on the side of Liberty. A deeper appreciation of Order — a recognition that it is this, and not so much freedom or liberty, that is threatened by the Jihad — might, for instance, send us back to investigations of how the American tradition has in previous ages come to grips with the problem of seditious factions and subversive movements. The current impulse is to recoil from this aspect of our tradition. I submit that a thorough study of it will reveal that it is, comparatively speaking, among our shining triumphs.*

(2) A recognition that the domestic (as in domestic Tranquility) aspect of the resistance we must mount against the Jihad is as important, if not more important, than the foreign policy aspect. Mary Eberstadt, also writing in Policy Review, endeavors here to show what lengths Western thinkers and politicians have gone to in order to avoid this uncomfortable fact; but even she will not take the obvious next step and propose restrictions on Muslim immigrants. I submit that anyone who dismisses out of hand the proposition that we should aim at a gradual and peaceful reduction in the number of Muslims in America, cannot be taken seriously in his other political judgments.

(3) A recognition that Islam as such is a problem. I have said, here and elsewhere, that Jihad should constitute the point of our legal attack against the enemy — not least because while we protect men under law, we do not protect doctrines — but leaving aside for the moment specific legal manifestations of policy, we have got to start thinking hard about possibility that the union between Islam and Jihad cannot be broken by any means we here possess. We have got to open this question, and fear not where its consideration will lead.

Lee Harris generally eschews policy prescription — a constraint I hope he will throw off when the times comes (perhaps with his forthcoming book). It is clear enough (I hope) to most of us that the class of professional policy prescripters, if you will, is bankrupt in this country. That is no just cause for despair; we do not yet live in an oligarchy or aristocracy, but rather a republic where, according Publius, the “cool and deliberate sense of the community” shall govern. Few things are more vital to the healthy operation of this republic than that we start talking openly with one another on this problem, recognizing the final location of sovereignty in a republic, and preparing to stand in defiance of the oligarchs and aristocrats of official Washington and the plutocrats of commercial New York. They are untrustworthy. If the deliberate sense of Americans is also untrustworthy, then we are well and truly doomed, but happily our country’s history is punctuated by episodes where the defiance by the latter of the former, saved both.

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* It has often been noted, with pride by the sane and dismay by the mad, that America was spared a real brush with socialist revolution of the kind that roiled Europe beginning in the nineteenth century; it is far less often pointed out, in this connection, that America had on her lawbooks several strong sedition laws, which were routinely employed against anarchists and Communists, and which eventually provoked the wrath of the Liberals who lost their former repugnance of Communism.

2006-12-12T14:12:00.000-05:00

A clique of intrepid Redstate readers have over the past few months joined me — or perhaps, as these are in general generous men, it would be better to say they have indulged me — in an occasional debate that we might set under the head, On the Nature of Patriotism. As with all good debates between men, this one will never end; as with all good debates online, it is no insult to the participants, or the forum, to say that it would be much better — more boisterously, more warmly, more fruitfully — conducted over mugs of strong beer late at night, to the consternation of attached women. Alas, this true form of the masculine self-government is unavailable to us, so we will make use of what we have.

Some years ago now, I began a project on Patriotism, with the intention of turning it into a book. The impetus was not mine, but rather a well-known editor’s, who astonished me by approaching me on the subject. This project never came to fruition, mostly for reasons deriving from my difficulties getting a handle on it; but I have never lost interest in the subject. On the contrary: my interest has only grown, even as I have taken up another project dealing with what has already, or certainly will soon become the primary object of the indignation and antagonism of American patriotism: namely, the Islamic religion; or more precisely, the wicked doctrine of Jihad, which is one of the darker offspring of the Islamic religion. This project is moving along nicely. The expectation is that it will be published by Spence in mid-2007. Anyway, in the earlier project, I had gone as far as discover what must be the title for what may be the central chapter in my now-imaginary book on patriotism. Titles being indispensable things, I was quite satisfied with this one: the Partition of Patriotism.

The Partition is an attempted violent separation of things that are in fact an integrity; a partition like that which preceded the Civil War, or followed the various conspiracies of subjugation visited upon Poland by European powers; the breaking of an organic union. The union in question here is of mind and viscera, “head and belly” as C. S. Lewis put it: “The head rules the belly through the chest — the seat,” he continues, “of emotion organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by the intellect he is mere spirit and by appetite mere animal.” Patriotism is a thing of the chest. I might almost say it the quintessential thing of the chest.

But it is also, like so much else that is true, a thing of irresolvable paradox. It is the paradox of the sort proclaimed in the Sermon on the Mount; that of small being great, of poor being rich, of weak being strong. This is not a mere clever verbalism, but rather a reflection of the feebleness of our apprehension of reality — the ineradicable limitations of our perception. The meek shall inherit the earth is a verbal contradiction that has been repeated in reality a hundred times over, not least in the conquest of the great Roman Empire by the meekness of the early Christians, or, more basically, in the meekness of the infant who was God. And patriotism too begins in meekness. Only by feeling that our home is small and unheralded and very dear, can we ever realize that it is great. When we discover that our country is weak, unutterably weak and broken, subjugated and beset — then our love for her grows to a grandeur equal to the word patriotism. That poet laureate of Imperialism, Rudyard Kipling, once asked a pregnant question, with a ring of thunder: what can they “know of England who only England know?” Here, as Chesterton perceived, Mr. Kipling let his worldliness oppress his patriotism, and lost his way. For the patriot is a lover; and thus cosmopolitanism is adultery. The patriot may surely come to learn much about other countries, and come to admire some as he detests others; indeed, only a very narrow patriot will abjure that intuitive delight in variety which is the birthright of man. But this is something quite different than “knowing” as we are using it here. The ancient writers of Scripture even refer to the conjugal act as “knowing” your wife; and if the reader can forgive my pressing of this earthy parallel still further, the English patriot, lest he debase his love, can indeed “only England know.”

All this is suggested, more reliably than my scribblings ever can, in the striking language of natural beauty that permeates our patriotic songs. They are, indeed, a kind of love song. “Purple mountains majesty,” “woods and templed hills,” “oceans white with foam” — this is the poetry of the lover. It is the particulars of the beloved that inspires the emotion. It is even, if you will, the smallness of these particulars. And being small they are vulnerable, which is what moves the patriot to action. What is “The Star-Spangled Banner” (its most familiar stanza, at least) but a hymn to the vulnerability of something beloved? We would have a strange anthem indeed if the flag venerated therein were seen as vast and indestructible; if the poetry rang with unflagging optimism about its endurance. Does the flag of that song not feel small and dear? — silent against the shattering report of the bombs bursting; soon to vanish in swamping darkness of perilous night; distant and feeble against the breaking dawn; dwarfed by the glowering ramparts? There is even a solid edge of surprise that it has survived the night, that small and menaced flag. And this small and menaced banner could not possibly wave over the land of the free unless the latter were also, in a sense, small and vulnerable.

Sometimes, as with most loves, patriotic love will move men to amusing acts of that folly which is actually wisdom. There are unique delights in every man’s warm feeling for his home. He may remember a certain valley, or the glow of a sunset at a certain time of year; he may be surprised by some long forgotten smell, or reminded of warm memories by an old tune. But at any rate he can hardly describe these things with any exactness. They are the inexpressible particulars of any love. Poetry and song are their best approximations. For example, whenever I hear the opening chords of the Allman Brothers’ song “Blue Sky,” I feel patriotic. It is silly and even embarrassing; it is also true. The lyrics of that song are really quite banal; but the song is beautiful to me, because it reminds me of the American South, which has become my home — the vast sun-drenched majesty of the South, which sometimes feels so small and vulnerable.

In other words, Patriotism cannot be properly understood — understanding cannot even begin — unless we first see that its “belly” is anchored in the intuition of something weak but tenderly adored that is threatened: the intuition of meekness under threat. A passion has been stirred by this intuition. Not an argument; a passion, and a particularly vital one. That passion is Indignation; and the whole world, in a sense, must be, at least potentially, the enemy.

Alright. How, then, does the “head” enter the puzzle? How is this passion of Indignation “organized by trained habit into stable sentiment”? First, it enters in concrete acts of discipline, the intentional impression of order upon anarchic things. We feel a passion, and we train it by ritual, custom, prescription. At every sporting event in the country, even the half-drunk crazies with faces painted like mediaeval warriors remove their hats and stand quietly for the national anthem. We send great volleys of pyrotechnics into the air, and give ordered liberty to the pyromania of young boys, on Independence Day; it used to be (and still is, in some places) that on that same day families would gather round for readings of legendary American oratory and text. The passions are ordered according to their nature, in a sort of renewal and reformation. Even in this collective work of the intellect is rooted in the particular. And it is important to realize that this discipline is emphatically not a purely individualistic thing: it springs from that great “democracy of the dead,” which is tradition. It is an attempt at a sort of communion with the American mind across the generations, embracing the living, the dead, and the as yet unborn.

But it is here, when we come to the question of the role of the intellect, that, alas, the heresy of Partition wreaks its havoc. For the instinct of modern men, even those inspired to defend patriotism against other moderns who would like to have done with it altogether, is to introduce a Universalism that appears to enlarge but really only narrows. The attempt is made, by this theory, to attach the love of country to a variety of political doctrines. Mostly these are fine political doctrines — liberty, rule of law, free enterprise — but they cannot be the stimulus of truly human passion, because they exist only as abstractions. We need only give cursory consideration to the sanguinary Twentieth Century to observe the sort of inhuman passions wayward abstractions can stimulate. Sloppy talk and sloppier thinking allows such phrases as the “threat to democracy” to pass unremarked almost daily, but the pulverizing fact is that “democracy” has no concrete existence of its own. There is no democracy as such; there can only be American democracy, or French, English or Iraqi democracy. Men only talk of a threat to democracy because they perceive a threat to their country, which they have associated, through the rarefied parlance of Western politics, with this system called democracy.

But the only way to force this conflation of political abstraction with concrete reality — and thus the only way to achieve an approximation of the passion of Indignation — is through the abbreviation of reality we call an Ideology. This is why I say Universalism narrows, despite its claim to do the opposite: the whole vast organic tangle of attachments, memories, prescriptions, and intuitions, which are conjured by the word “country,” and which inspire such songs of love as our patriotic ones, and which become the seedbed of our national patriotic rituals, is contracted into a set of stock phrases of political discourse. No political discourse, no matter how sensitive, no matter how inspired, no matter how comprehensive, can possibly capture even a fragment of the living tradition that is within a man when he reflects on his country. Reality is too vast for words. Ideologies have their uses, of course, but they must always be abbreviations of reality.

For example, it is said that Capitalism is a part of the American creed, and as such should be part of the object of our patriotic affections. But I do not love Capitalism, and never will. I see its uses, and sometimes I suspect that it is merely a term we use to denote “the way things are,” but in any case I shall never love it. And indeed, there are times when this passion of Indignation has risen in me with great fury against it — usually when Capitalism has made a dark alliance with darker forces to oppress my home, as when, for example, a local homeowner must jump through a hundred bureaucratic hoops to remove a dead tree that threatens his house, while the large developer can remove a whole copse of trees with impunity. Small property is fettered; capitalist collectivism is emancipated. The vulnerability of the American South to these dark alliances is acute; and I confess that there are moments when I feel that nothing is so great a threat to my home as these. There are parts of the South which have been so tortured by Capitalism, so visited with unthinking ugliness, that one can feel only hatred — a hatred for the devil and his works. This is the passion inspired at times by Capitalism.

But of course, Capitalism is primarily a matter for adjudication by reason; the place for passion is small. Ugliness is certainly not the greatest evil, and anyway Socialism has far outdone Capitalism in producing ugliness. But if someone tells me that Capitalism must be included in my patriotic love, I will simply answer: “you do not know what patriotism is.”

To summarize, then: the whole effort of Universalism, which for our purposes here consists of the attempt to replicate the natural passion which impels patriotism, and attach it to a set of political abstractions arranged into an ideology, amounts to a partition of the patriotic force from its elementary source. To recall our earlier image, wherein patriotism was compared to a marriage, we might say the proffered universalism is very often merely an invitation to promiscuity. When what is wanted is fidelity, universalism seduces with a sanctified adultery.

Universalism is really not universal. So often universalism has been the mere projection of certain particulars of the world, onto the whole world: an overlay of provincialism upon all the provinces. A political creed can only be an abbreviation of a living tradition; and it can be only a terrible truncation of the object of a patriot’s love.

Now to say this is not to say there are no universals; it is only to urge caution, considering how many of them have been exposed as false and pernicious. More germane to my argument, it is to say that, while there certainly is a transcendent order of justice, to which all men owe an accounting, it is not the same as a country. The patriotic loyalty is not the same as the duty we owe to Justice. The first is, strictly speaking, parochial and particular; the second universal and abstract. I feel that I am on firm ground leaving most of the latter, in the field of politics, to prudence. It is said, for instance, that democratic government is universal. Perhaps. But this is a matter of some dispute. A much more solid proposition, it seems to me, is that government is universal. But in at rate, by entering such a discussion, we have left the question of patriotism behind.

Recall that I said patriotism is first about a passion, not an argument. A man can no more argue about his elementary patriotism than he can argue about his vivid and jealous love of the color green; he can no more contend like a formal disputant for his love of his country than he can for his love of his venerated old eccentric of an uncle. To be forced to lay out the evidence for his uncle, like a forensic debater, is already to do an injustice to the man: most of the jury or audience will only see the eccentric and not the uncle, for he is a man, and a man is too large a thing to be embraced by any forensic science. Part of the evil of divorce, for example, is that it forces this terrible rationalistic contraction: it forces people to spread out the character of their loves and attachments like organs in a dissection. They are inevitably demeaned. And patriotism is inevitably demeaned when it is compelled into a forum where ideas are set before the bar of rationalism and weighed in abstraction. I can almost see the pitiful figure of captive Patriotism, suddenly constrained to answer the slashing dialectic maneuvers of the cross-examiner in the elusive language of poetry. To the hard question: “How long can the patriot’s love endure his country’s wickedness?” — Patriotism can only answer as in song: “America! America! God mend thine every flaw.” To the even harder question: “When must the fealty of the patriot submit to the higher claims of justice?” — Patriotism can only murmur: “Eternal Father, strong to save, whose arm hath bound the restless wave, who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep its own appointed limits keep.” You can see how such replies might dissatisfy the stern rationalist, or the ambitious prosecutor.

No, Sir (as the old orators would say), the purpose of the intellect is the ordering of the passions. For nothing can be more certain than that the passions of man want ordering. Patriotism, like any other passion, can be destructive if untamed. And so the integrity of patriotism lies in the word rule. The head must rule the belly. My disputants in this debate have hurled the accusation of relativism. We who emphasize the particular that is the anchor of patriotism, they say, fall into a relativism which forsakes the transcendent order of justice to which all men owe obedience. I share their revulsion of that heresy; but I say to them: It is not our heresy. We do not denigrate Justice by refusing to call it Patriotism. The two are not one. A man does not apply reason to discover if his love of country is just; he discovers that he loves his country, and applies reason to set this love in its proper place. It is not Patriotism (recalling our image from above) that should be cross-examined; it is Man. And among the resources and particularities in each man is his love of his home, which is a passion impelled by his sense of menace to his home. Since each man’s home is a portion of creation, which God declared was good, then I cannot think otherwise than that this passion has its roots in something good; that this love is a just love; and that it only becomes unjust when a man’s reason fails. Patriotism must always be seen in the context of the paradox of the man who loves his earthly home, but knows it is only a temporary home; the man who feels a duty to his land, but a higher duty to a transcendent order of justice. The duties are not the same, and one of the tragedies of the Fall is that they may even stand at times in opposition. Then, indeed, his freedom will be a burden, for he will know that his choice will be judged. Sin, a disordering of the will, has made in us the original Partition; and there is no clearer awareness of the Fall than when a man must choose between his loves. “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

2006-11-29T13:14:00.000-05:00

The stunning figure of Orion is rising in the southeast around 9pm this time of year. My children are eager to see Betelgeuse, the impressive star on the northeastern edge of the constellation, not least because of its amusing name. Alas: the trees are too dense around our home, and so Betelgeuse is really not visible until after 10. “Next month,” I keep telling them.

Even in the center of a great city like Atlanta, bathed in artificial light, the reddish hue of this giant is perceptible. My Field Guide to the Night Sky reports that Betelgeuse really is a monster: a “red supergiant” with a diameter comparable to the orbit of the planet Venus (or maybe larger than that: according to Wikipedia, its outer edges would extent to Jupiter; and then there is this comparison of volume: if our Sun were a beach ball, Betelgeuse would be a large stadium). The star is dying. In a thousand years or so, a few moments in the life a star, it will likely explode in a colossal supernova which, according to some astronomers, will achieve an apparent magnitude equal to a full moon. For several months, the holocaust of this star’s demise will be easily visible even during the day.

“Beetlejuice, Daddy! Let’s go look at Beetlejuice,” my children cry; and I am glad. A child, I figure, who lives in anticipation of seeing the stars, is a child still alive to wonder.

To look upon the stars on a clear night, as your eyes make their gradual adjustment to the darkness and the little pinpricks of radiance emerge, is to be struck in a very graphic way by the astounding mystery of being. Out of darkness there is light. There is no necessity behind the existence of the stars, no matter what tangled sophistries our materialists will weave: they just are, and they might not have been. The bare truth is that not even the most subtle science can demonstrate causality: in strict logic in can only demonstrate sequence. Causality is in the mind of man. And I confess that often there is more that is sympathetic in the heady astrologist who sees vast and intricate earthly causality in the movement of the stars, than in the austere materialist who would, by his sterile rationalism, drive wonder from the child-stargazer by teaching a sham causality of Fate. It is all in the tremendous difference between saying “Betelgeuse is a red supergiant” and merely “Betelgeuse is.” The latter is outside the realm of science, and I would sooner trust the wild imagination of the child who tells me a great horned Beetle hid its crimson egg in the sky to protect it from the birds, than the portentous narrative of the materialist that amounts to nothing exploding into something.

I once awoke in early June from a vivid and disturbing, though instantly forgotten dream into that condition of dazed wakefulness which often lends itself to memorable mishaps. For some reason I wandered outside and looked up in the clear summer night. A wave of unforgettable emotion followed; awe, fright and alarm: for it was no longer June but nearer to November. Bright and prominent Vega had drifted up and across the sky; Arcturus was gone, along with Jupiter, which had for some weeks hung in the full radiance of opposition near the constellation Virgo; and the famed Big Dipper had plunged beneath the trees in the northwest. I was disconcerted and oppressed by these shocking changes; my mind reeled.

And then full wakefulness came, and it immediately dawned on me that dawn was near. Relief and not a little embarrassment followed; and, sheepishly, thankful that no one in the neighborhood was around to observe my fretting, I went back inside. Since then, however, I have often fancied that my original alarm might be the truer reaction: for alarming it is that a whole half-year would pass in a single night. In my state of half-sleep, I grasped the essential and shocking precariousness of existence. The Big Dipper, Ursa Major the Great Bear: he might plunge with his guardian Arcturus beneath the northern horizon — and never return. Jupiter might wander off into conjunction behind the sun, and then wander off into nonexistence. Orion the Hunter, and his shoulder Betelgeuse, might vanish forever.

We do not have access to causality in the physical world. That Betelgeuse rose last night around 9pm (invisible behind the clouds) does not, in strict logic, imply that it will rise again tonight. All the rationalism of our materialists cannot demolish, in the end, the surprise we feel, when we have our wonder intact, at the solid fact that things are. Causality is not discoverable in the world; it comes from the mind of man, which has been imprinted by the Mind of God. Seeing is not believing but rather the reverse. And the great enduring sanity of the Christian philosophy was aptly summarized in the wit of Chesterton, that most intuitive of Thomists who, having merely flipped through as mass of Aquinas authorities sat down and dictated what one of the greatest authorities called “without possible comparison the best book ever written on St. Thomas”: “If the morbid Renaissance intellectual is supposed to say, ‘To be or not to be — that is the question,’ then the massive medieval doctor does most certainly reply in a voice of thunder, ‘To be — that is the answer.’”

Once acknowledge the mystery and miracle that things are, and a man can live like a man and not a morbid intellectual; he can play with his children under stars called beetles, and drink beer with reverence; he can contend for what is true, and laugh at what is not; he can be still and know that He is God — he Whose very Name is given to us, by the wonderful feebleness of the English language, in the phrase which in its ineffable abundance shatters the all sophistries of the materialists: I AM.

2006-11-22T12:57:00.000-05:00

Writing in Commentary, Daniel Johnson provides a neat summary of the precipitous decline of Britain toward full-blown dhimmitude. As one might expect, considering the sad history of that remarkable people, the Jews are among the first to feel the pressure. A left-wing legislator who declares, “The pro-Israel lobby has got its grips on the Western world — its financial grips”; A right-wing politician who pronounced the Israeli war against Hizballah, “a war crime gravely reminiscent of the Nazi atrocity on the Jewish quarter of Warsaw”; Britain’s widest-circulating newspaper publishing “a cartoon depicting two scenes of devastation, one labeled ‘Warsaw 1943’ and the other ‘Tyre 2006.’”; a dramatic acceleration in anti-Semitic attacks, Muslims being “overrepresented” in the class of assailants — this is the new Great Britain.

In the streets of London the signs read: “we are all Hizballah now.” In the august corridors of the House of Lords, two peers come to blows when one dared to utter a word about Israel’s right to self-defense. In central London a mosque is being built that will be the largest in Europe, auguring what sort of capital that great city will soon be. A local Muslim activist, after disrupting a press conference, is promptly invited on the BBC to give his assessment of things: Home Secretary John Reid is a “murderer,” Blair an “an enemy to Muslims and an enemy to Allah,” and finally, Britain “doesn’t belong to you, or to the Queen, or to the government, but to Allah. He has put us on earth to implement shari’a law.” On the fifth anniversary of September 11, one of the most prominent Muslims in Britain delivers this threat in the Sunday Telegraph: “If that demonization [of Muslims] continues, then Britain will have to deal with 2 million Muslim terrorists — 700,000 of them in London.” The Conservative Party leader delivers a speech, not to stand against this sedition, but to mollify Muslim opinion, expounding on the true nature of the Islamic religion in all the right tones of confident timidity. This is what mass immigration of Muslims into Britain has wrought. This is what the conventional line of appeasement — a “religion of peace” —, repeated by virtually every Western head of state since September 11, has wrought. Britain, the cradle of liberal democracy, the parent of our own constitutional system, as ancient and as venerable an incubator of the habits of liberty and order as there is, has, in the course of less than a decade, walked right up the edge of dhimmitude.

It is staggering to consider the rapidity of this enslavement. Can anyone doubt that British support, however tenuous, for Israel will not long endure after Blair? How long, indeed, before Britain goes the way of Spain — the way, that is, of open capitulation?

It is by now acknowledged, for the most part, that the menace to England is real. The fact that a staid organ of mainstream conservative opinion like Commentary prints so alarming an article as this, is testimony enough. But rarely are any conclusions drawn for our country. The steady stream of Muslim immigrants to America has not slowed since September 11; rather it has increased. Few here have yet dared to consider the sorts of tools so often used in past by this country when she was confronted by systematic subversion: sedition laws, loyalty oaths, and suchlike. The quick and easy resort to platitude, to the old glib words of silence and intimidation, is hardly less quick or easy. It is thought that somehow, by some magic, what has happened there cannot happen here. This would be a strained and unwise assumption even in previous ages when the assimilationist ethic was robust (the same ages, of course, when sedition laws and loyalty oaths were also robust), for Islam is an older, deeper and certainly truer thing than Communism, Jacobinism or Fascism; but today, having watched this ethic, which was once our glory, dismantled by a cacophony of petty ideologies, such an assumption merits a more severe description. Dangerous.

2006-11-16T11:59:00.000-05:00

Redstate recently conducted a broad debate, a sort of symposium, on Iraq. Here is my contribution.

My trouble with the Iraq war boils down to a pair of vexations: (1) democracy is a profoundly inadequate and possibly perverse answer to what threatens us; (2) and the imposition of democratic theory upon our Iraq policy has introduced a crippling conceptual corruption of our idea of victory. Victory is now said by our leaders to consist of a long series of holding actions against the enemy: first by American troops, and eventually (it is hoped) by Iraqi themselves. Destruction or subjugation of the enemy is not even contemplated. Such a goal can only be conceived as “victory” by a brazen debasement of the word.
On the question of democracy, it is not that Islamic peoples will prove “incapable” of democracy; it is rather that they will prove quite remarkably capable of it, and the result will be the addition of force and legitimacy to radicalism. Under the rubric of democracy we run the terrible risk of abetting the establishment of Jihadist regimes, and lending to them all the authority and prestige of our favored doctrine. If an Islamic democracy chooses Jihad as its driving principle, on our own theoretical grounds how can we gainsay it?
Men thought they knew despotism in the form of the ancien regime; but the introduction of radical democracy by the Revolution in France soon made the world realize that it did not yet know the full range of tyranny; and from that Revolution virtually every revolutionist of the twentieth century derived his utopia. This bloodiest of ages was not foreseen by the men who laid its foundations; and we cannot foresee what will be built upon the foundations we have lain.
In our country democracy and liberty have achieved a curious conflation. The terms have become almost interchangeable, though in strict definition they clearly mean different things. It must be recognized how unusual this is. Lord Acton, for example, wrote of the “elementary antagonism between liberty and democracy.” Tocqueville also perceived an inherent tension between the two: much of the second half of his great work consists of a haunted reflection on the perils of democracy. Rousseau, “first among the theorists of radical democracy” according to Irving Babbitt, is not often thought a great champion of liberty. Yet we — from the President on down — often talk as if the two were one. I do not deplore this instinct, this ingrained conceptual elision — for part of the true genius of America has been this improbable fusion. Here we touch on a signal feature of the American political tradition. And herein lies the difficulty:
President Bush and his men have been careful to repeat at every opportunity their unwillingness to impose “our traditions” upon the people of Iraq. In his Second Inaugural, Bush gave a firm reassurance against imperial democracy: “[W]hen the soul of a nation finally speaks, the institutions that arise may reflect customs and traditions very different from our own. America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling.” Or again, in his 2006 State of the Union address: “Democracies in the Middle East will not look like our own, because they will reflect the traditions of their own citizens.” (Emphasis added to all quotations.)
Thus at the crucial moment, President Bush takes steps to repudiate the specifically American content of the principle he has been celebrating. At the very moment when his doctrine of Democracy turns its attention to the Islamic world, it jettisons, at least in part, the qualities which, flowing from the singular American amalgam of democracy and liberty, make it uniquely fit to disarm the dogma of our enemies, and diminish the conditions which empower that dogma. “Our traditions” are what transform democracy, from being merely an engine of popular passion, or mere factional passion, into a rich tapestry of civilized life, by which liberty may be sheltered. There is in this a devastating theoretical error, which will — indeed it already has — issue in dire practical consequences.
These problems also had consequences in the recent election — the most important being, in my view, the demoralization of a large number of Conservatives, many of whom ended up casting their votes for Democrats in swing districts, especially in the Midwest. Here the conceptual debasement of victory was of greatest importance. The election did not evidence a failure of will on the part of the American people; it demonstrated, once again, their congenital impatience with foreign wars whose connection to national interest is obscured by sophisticated political sermonizing. The debasement of the concept of victory finally, on November 7th, exacted its price.

2006-11-16T11:57:00.000-05:00

Let’s add to our list of woes, shall we: the Republican Party has, in the past six years, deserted the cause of racial equality, and signed on to the antithetical cause of “diversity.” This according to Harry Stein, writing in City Journal. One of the few bright spots amidst the gloom of last week’s election was the victory of the anti-affirmative action measure in Michigan. This victory came altogether without institutional support from the GOP, and in the teeth of a rich, egregious and bitter opposition. It is the former obstacle, however, that is most galling.

It has not often be recognized, for example, that although the Bush Administration filed briefs against affirmative action in the 2003 Supreme Court cases Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger, it conceded the most important ground of all — the ground of “diversity” as “an important and entirely legitimate government objective.” This, of course, was the argument used by Justice O’Connor to, rather deviously as it turns out, consolidate a regime of racial inequality.

As Stein writes,

What the party’s revised stance on race has done — aside from bolstering a civil rights establishment whose prestige had sharply declined and that remains unremittingly hostile to all that the Republican Party stands for — is leave longtime allies more vulnerable than ever to the toxic charge of “racism.” [. . .] Bereft of institutional support, the [Michigan Civil Rights Initiative] runs on a shoestring, operating out of executive director [Jennifer] Gratz’s apartment outside Lansing, where the campaign’s three young full-time workers sleep on the floor. Campaign manager Doug Tietz is only semi-facetious when he points to a state map and remarks, “This section here represents 6 million people — Clark’s in charge of that — and John handles this area, 4 million people.”

These are brave people: for months they were subject to rhetoric violence and political thuggery of the kind that has come to characterize the reactionary socialists of the Left. And the Grand Old Party left them dangling in wind.

Despite all this, they won. Republicans across the country got their hats handed to them, but lonely and beleaguered, a little band of idealists stood for one great ideal of the Party of Lincoln and secured a victory. Three cheers for Ward Connerly, Jennifer Gratz, and the few who stood against many. Shame on the false allies who abandoned them.

2006-10-29T12:14:00.000-05:00

ISI has very kindly sent me a copy of a new book that will surely endure: The Solzhenitsyn Reader, edited by Edward E. Ericson, Jr., and Daniel J. Mahoney. It is a sizeable volume, with selections from the great man’s essays, speeches, histories, novels, and poetry — some of which have never before appeared in English. It is handsomely bound, includes a thoughtful introduction, and shorter introductions to each selection. It has something of the appearance of a school textbook, though it is doubtful, and being doubtful also a sad comment of the state of higher learning in the West, that many of our academic institutions will use it as such. The Solzhenitsyn Reader is, in any case, a very welcome achievement.

Here, for instance, we find Solzhenitsyn’s farewell address to a townhall meeting in Cavendish, Vermont, where he had taken up quiet residence, by the sufferance and generosity of these New Englanders, for eighteen years of a life that was anything but quiet. The people of Cavendish respected his privacy: the only note of his residence in the town appeared on a sign at the general store: “No directions to the Solzhenitsyn home.” When he came in 1976, they gave him a standing ovation; when he left to return to a Russia broken by Communism, in 1994, they did the same.

Here are some excerpts for that final speech:

Citizens of Cavendish, our dear neighbors,
At thus town meeting seventeen years ago I told you about my exile and explained the steps which I took to ensure a peaceful working environment, without the burden of constant visitors.
You were very understanding; you forgave me my unusual way of life, and even took it upon yourselves to protect my privacy. For this, I have been truly grateful throughout all these years; and now, as my stay here comes to an end, I thank you. Your kindness and cooperation helped to create the best possible conditions for my work.
I have worked here for almost eighteen years. It has been the most productive period of my life. I have done all that I wanted to do. Today, I offer those of my books that have been translated well into English to the town library.
Our children grew up and went to school here, alongside your children. For them, Vermont is home. Indeed, our whole family has felt at home among you. Exile is always difficult, and yet I could not imagine a better place to live, and wait, and wait for my return home, than Cavendish, Vermont. [. . .]
Here in Cavendish, and in the surrounding towns, I have observed the sensible and sure process of grassroots democracy, in which the local population solves most of its own problems on its own, not waiting for the decisions of higher authorities. Unfortunately, we do not have this is Russia, and that is still our greatest shortcoming.
My sons will complete their education in America, and the house will remain their home.
Lately, walking on the nearby roads, taking in the surroundings with a farewell glance, I have found every meeting with any neighbor to be warm and friendly.
And so today, both to those of you whom I have met over the years, and to those whom I haven’t met, I say: Thank you and farewell. I wish all the best to Cavendish. God bless you all.

For those interested, there is a reception for the launch of this book, with remarks by the editors and Solzhenitsyn's sons, at the Union League in Philadelphia on November 3rd. More information here.

2006-10-24T11:15:00.000-04:00

According to Heather Mac Donald, who delivered another atheistic polemic, this time in USA Today, “The Founders crafted America's constitutional framework based on their knowledge of human nature and their commitment to Enlightenment ideals. They left God out of the Constitution. This omission horrified many of the drafters’ contemporaries, who predicted that divine vengeance would follow.”

Now, it may be that some did predict divine vengeance. But divine vengeance, as it happens, is in fact a calamity somewhat mysterious in nature. I think even if I were a rugged atheist, with piety for empiricism and none for mystery, I might tread lightly on the subject of divine vengeance. Our dear freethinkers and rationalists, their imaginations narrowed into that shriveled state that only free-thought can accomplish, can only conceive of divine vengeance as something obvious and inexpressibly cartoonish — a frowning bearded man descending from the sky with fire and steel or something. It just does not occur to them that an Intelligence beyond the ways of man might manifest his terrible justice in ways dissimilar from the cartoons we make for children.

When we look at Scripture, however, what we see of divine vengeance is often very far indeed from the picture assumed by narrow rationalists. The first curse of man, delivered upon the woman at the Fall, is the pains of childbearing, followed by desire for her husband and submission to him. Upon the man the curse comes in terms of “toil,” “thorns and thistles,” “sweat,” and finally death: “you are dust; and to dust you shall return.”

In the book of Exodus, vengeance appears in the awful mystery contained in that repeated phrase: “and the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart.” Something similar is taught by St. Paul in his Letter to the Romans: “So God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts.”

As a mere speculation, because — as Mac Donald teaches us — we must guard against ever letting reason and revelation commingle, I wonder what this sort of divine vengeance might look like in terms of a polity like the United States, which provokes it by affecting to set up, in impiety and defiance, an infidel republic. It is an idle question, because of course the American framers did no such thing. Indeed, despite Mac Donald’s assertion that “they left God out of the Constitution,” they did not. The United States Constitution in fact contains two oblique references to God, humble and unobtrusive — as befits a republic set up by men influenced by a robust estimate of the limitations of man and his works. A few years later an infidel republic indeed was set up in France, and its guarantor was the guillotine.

But in the American Constitution there was something impious and wicked — a special compromise with evil. And those of us beggared by that incorrigible itch to mix reason and revelation, might be inclined to wonder what terrible doom would come to America if the Lord hardened her heart on the question of slavery. Might it be remembered with names like Shiloh, Sharpsburg, Chancellorsville? And we might be inclined to ask, “what more can we say of the theoretical course of the planter society of the American South from Madison and Washington to Calhoun and the ‘firebreathers’ of the Confederacy, than that their hearts were hardened?”

And in fact a certain great American, not often thought a friend of Christianity, when he turned his subtle and perspicacious mind to this very question, did render statement that might fairly be called a prediction that “that divine vengeance would follow.” For it was Jefferson the rationalist who said, “I tremble for my country when I reflect hat God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.”

So God gave them up to the lusts of their hearts.

2006-10-04T11:48:00.000-04:00

Mr. Dean Esmay, a “conservative liberal” by is own description, has delivered a passionate essay calling out Conservatives to “start making a distinction between Muslims who hate us and want to kill us, and Muslims who believe in freedom, democracy, and religious tolerance.” His sincerity cannot be doubted; but this is an exceedingly difficult business. And the truth is most of the difficulty would not be alleviated by a clear answer to Mr. Esmay’s question; it will remain as uncomfortable as ever. In other words, I don’t think Mr. Esmay’s fears will be relieved if I answer, “yes, I agree, let’s start making that distinction.” Or at least, “let’s start doing a better job of making the distinction” — I leave aside the question of whether, as Mr. Esmay implies, American Conservatives have indeed “done a piss-poor job of making such vital distinctions”; it will surprise no one who knows my writing to learn that I suspect the error lies more in the other direction: toward an crippling fastidiousness and anxiety of painting too broadly.

In any case, first, it must be said that there some sizeable obstacles in the way of making this distinction.

There is, for example, the Islamic teaching of taqqiya or calculated dissimulation, which is abetted by the craven reluctance of the Western press to ask tough questions. Thus jihad sympathizers will assure Western reporters that Islam condemns the killing of innocents; but since in the classical tradition of jihad no infidel — that is no unbeliever who has legitimately heard the call to submission — is innocent, this statement is mere prevarication. Americans, Englishmen, Europeans, most Christians: all have heard the call; that they have failed to submit betrays their rebellion and thus authorizes jihad against them. Another obstacle is the incapacity of so many in the West to form a true estimate of what motivates the enemy. Whether the enemy represents the true voice of Islam, or merely a perversion of it, is immaterial to the plain pulverizing fact that he is exercised by religious convictions. His war his not primarily ideological; it is not political; it is religious. That his religion acknowledges no distinction between the religious and the political, is only a source of confusion for us, not for him. The enemy really does believe that there is piety — real piety, which will render unto him a sensual reward in paradise — in massacre and subjugation. He really does believe that the founder of his religion authorizes, nay, obliges treacherous war against what we in the West call “innocents.” He really does believe that a terror war is a just war; indeed that any war, of any character, that intimidates, frightens, or cows the kafir; that weakens his resolve; that enervates or destroys his political institutions — is a just war. In other words, making Mr. Esmay’s distinction does not relieve us of the duty to recognize that the war we are fighting is primarily religious in character. We have to get this through our heads.

So I say: by all means let us take up Mr. Esmay’s noble challenge to recognize friend and foe. Let us indeed be careful to know the enemy and not confuse him with those merely associated with him by accident of religious confession. This will be an exceedingly difficult thing to do, but I agree that it must be done.

But now I will issue a challenge to Mr. Esmay, and to the likeminded: Having distinguished between friend and enemy, don’t we need to start thinking much more seriously about the enemy? Because the enemy is not limited to just the active terrorist, to the foot soldier prepared to strap on a suicide belt and massacre our countrymen. The enemy is also the jihad recruiters, who are active in English, French, German, Spainish and American mosques. The enemy is the propagandist, the prevaricator, the professional expounder of taqqiya, who sits in plush offices in organizations like CAIR. The enemy is the radical imam who pushes out the moderate, as in a recent San Francisco case [scroll down] where a moderate was driven from his own mosque, by manipulating the law to his advantage. The enemy is street demonstrator, who calls for death against Danish cartoonists. The enemy wears many guised, and only rarely does he openly wear the garb of the terrorist.

We need think hard about how we can attack him in these other guises. We need to think about how we can turn the instrument of law against him. In my view we should legislate in such a way that we make clear that jihad (or the “lesser” jihad for you pedants) is proscribed, in thought, word, and deed. We need to remove the doctrine of jihad from the protection of Free Speech and Free Exercise, and expose it to sedition prosecution. We need to demand that Muslim immigrants renounce jihad as a condition of entry into this country. We need to say — in the manner republics “say” things — that jihad is not welcome here, and will be subject to various legal disabilities, of increasing severity based on how plain its espousal is. We need to say, in short, that this totalitarian strain of Islam will not find shelter in our laws, but will be removed from that shelter by dramatic and decisive steps.

So just as Mr. Esmay would challenge Conservatives to be more careful in their distinctions, I would challenge Mr. Esmay to be more firm in his opposition to the enemy, and more clear in his conception of him. The enemy is anyone who accepts the Islamic doctrine that there is piety and justice in treacherous war and mayhem against the infidel; not merely those who are prepared to act on this doctrine, but anyone who has invested his conviction in so wicked doctrine.

POSTSCRIPT: Mr. Esmay writes, “This very statement — that Islam is incompatible with democracy — is why I fight so hard with many of my friends on the Right: accepting that statement means we have to declare war on the entire Muslim world if we’re to hope for human freedom to survive.” Now this is foolish. More than that, it is irresponsible. The assumption underlying it is that any people which rejects (whether congenitally or philosophically) the ideal of democracy, becomes by that action a legitimate object of war. We shall make war against all antidemocrats. I hope readers can see the lunacy in that proposition; and I hope Mr. Esmay will rethink his reckless statement here. Human freedom’s survival, thank God, does not depend on the universalism of democracy.

2006-09-22T13:39:00.000-04:00

In Andrew Bostom’s excellent column today, he gives us a glimpse of the classical Muslim attitude toward religious dialogue. Ibn Khaldun is considered perhaps the greatest mind the Islamic world ever produced. Here is his opinion of Christians:

We do not think that we should blacken the pages of this book [the Muqaddimah] with discussion of their [Christian] dogmas of unbelief. In general, they are well known. All of them are unbelief. This is clearly stated in the noble Koran. To discuss or argue those things with them is not up to us. It is for them to choose between conversion to Islam, payment of the poll tax, or death.

Conversion, subjugation, or death. Three choices.

Today I watched the President of the North American Islamic Association television. She (yes, a burka-clad woman) discussed the Pope controversy, and her points were three: (1) Benedict “has not only apologized but is taking steps now to meet with muslim leaders, to engage in a further discussion” and this “shows that he's serious about his apology.” (2) She had read his speech, “and it was very provocative because he not only spoke in a negative manner or quoted quotation, citation about the Prophet Mohammed that was very offensive, but in fact, he was giving a kind of political framework for Europe. Indicating that he's concerned that Europe is losing its Christian identity, and that somehow Muslims might not quite belong in European society as it should historically be structured, according to his views. That's a very disturbing idea because Muslim minorities in Europe are already under very difficult circumstances.” (3) When pressed on the violence of the reaction: “we have to put these reactions in context” followed by a formulaic condemnation of violence against innocents. (But of course, a defiant dhimmi is no innocent; by his defiance he has violated the dhimma contract, and thus removed himself from its protection.)

In short, she interpreted the apology as the abject capitulation of a dhimmi, assailed the speech for so much as hinting that Europe’s identity may be Christian, and gave no ground — not an inch — on the intransigence of her coreligionists.

Our enemies are maneuvering, and we do not even know who they are. Can there be any doubt about the dangers we run by giving Muslims any further influence in our society?

2006-09-11T13:08:00.000-04:00

Today at TCS, I have an essay commemorating another September 11, and thus attempting to locate the one we remember today in its proper historical context.
___________________________

Across Europe news of the bravery of Knights -- outnumbered five to one or more -- rang like a great tocsin. All throughout that brutal summer on the sun-baked isle, the Turks had been repulsed, time after time, in their attempts to take the Christian fortresses of Malta. One such fortress had been reduced to rubble by Turkish artillery, and its garrison (almost every one of them already dead) desecrated by enraged Turks; but the other had held. Casualties among the Sultan's army had been terrible, and disease ran rampant. The stiffness of the resistance, added to the depredations of pestilence and heatstroke, had won for Western Christians their first great victory over the Turk. La Valette's final address to his men has come down to us:
"A formidable army composed of audacious barbarians is descending on this island. These persons, my brothers, are the enemies of Jesus Christ. Today it is a question of the defense of our faith -- as to whether the Gospels are to be superseded by the Koran. God on this occasion demands of us our lives, already vowed to his service. Happy will be those who first consummate this sacrifice." [more]

2006-08-08T12:12:00.000-04:00

Once again I must apologize for the lack of activity here. Most of my online work has of late appeared elsewhere. Below I have reprinted several of the more recent essays. I do not intend to abandon this blog. As a friend once put it, it is quiescent, not moribund.

2006-08-08T12:10:00.000-04:00

I have often thought, and perhaps even dared to put my thoughts to paper, that one of the more noble effects of the sort of policy I have called for, of ruthless intolerance of totalitarian Islam, is the succor it would give to true Muslim moderates. What if a moderate Muslims, harried by the antipathy of his more pure fellows, threatened with death, driven from respectability, rendered mute and weary, could expect the law to favor his sanity over the insanity of his coreligionists? What a blow would be struck in this war if the jihadists that have infiltrated, and in many cases conquered the prominent Western Islamic political organizations, felt a pressure to hold their tongue against the despised moderate, for fear that the latter had the force of law behind him!

Alas, it is not so.

A spokesman for moderate Muslims has resigned from the Muslim Canadian Congress, citing death threats and safety concerns.
Tarek Fatah said his wife and daughters encouraged him to step down as communications director for the organization following an alarming number of threats and harassing phone calls.
“I’m just exhausted, it’s too much,” he told CBC.
“I’m physically drained and fatigued and disappointed by how much leverage these extremists have,” he said.
Fatah said he has been assaulted both verbally and physically, including an incident in which he was attacked at an Islamic conference in Toronto by dozens of young Muslim men.
He also said that an associate informed him of a discussion she overheard in which young men were discussing how Fatah should be killed.

In June, The Wall Street Journal reported on a chilling case [scroll down] in San Francisco, where, by shrewd legal maneuvering, another moderate was driven from the mosque he founded by a wild-eyed preacher who hardly spoke English but knew a moderate when he saw one — and hated him.

These, friends, are again the wages of Tolerance. If the law must remain pristinely neutral between religions, then it cannot distinguish and condemn the Islam that affirms as just and noble any cruelty, any oppression, any terror, as long as it is visited upon the infidel (or the apostate, which is what the moderate is to this sort of Muslim). It must wait until he acts; it cannot attack his doctrine. The law cannot become the instrument of the deliberate sense of the community in saying that this doctrine of jihad — this doctrine which lends to brutality and treachery the glow of piety — is depraved and intolerable. Under the tyranny of Tolerance, we the people have no legal means available to us to say something so simple and so just as this:

“Whether or not it is proper to primitive or ‘true” Islam, whether or not it is an authentic doctrine of the religion of Mohammed, whether the jihadist is the ‘true voice’ or Islam or an unspeakable perversion of it, one thing is true, and we are not afraid of saying it is true. We say it without apology, for part of the who we are is that we hold these truths: The doctrine of jihad (or the ‘lesser jihad’ for you pedants) is a wicked doctrine, and we will not tolerate it.”

I say again, Tolerance is a terrible tyranny — a tyranny most of all of the mind; and it, more than most anything else in the whole wide world, oppresses us, and obstructs an effective prosecution of war against our enemies.

2006-08-08T12:08:00.000-04:00

Ever since it began, I was skeptical of the American adventure in Iraq. I do not write on it very often, for various reasons of principle and expedience, but I want to take a moment to set down some thoughts on the matter — thoughts that, in truth, amount to merely a fragment of an essay. It will take the form of a revisitation of an earlier essay.

On the very eve of war, I wrote an article for TCS which laid out some of my unease with the (then prospective) American invasion of Iraq. There has been very little since then to make me regret my words. On the contrary, there has been much to reinforce it. Below is a sketch of my assessment of that essay today. It may be of interest to readers, or it may not. That it is of interest to me may be taken as evidence of a petty vanity, of idleness, or merely of a kind of innocent astonishment that writing set down three years ago does not now embarrass me.

I wrote that “I support a war of self-defense, but I am very skeptical about the idea of preemptive war” — and I stand firmly by this. The issue of preemptive war, which focused the controversy back in 2003, has since receded from view because the supposition of Iraq’s possession of nuclear weapons proved false; but I remain profoundly wary of it. The justice of any war will always be a matter of intense controversy; but as a matter of principle, it is not enough that there is a potential threat; the threat must be manifest, imminent. I don’t know who among the cast of characters urging war more alarmed me, those who endeavored by skillful sophistry to make the doctrine of Just War embrace preemptive war, or those who, recognizing that it could not, abandoned it without apology.

The consequences of this war, on our prestige in the world, on our freedom of action, on the vicissitudes of our domestic politics, have been considerable. We have exposed our military to some of the most terrible duties it has ever seen; and our want of preparedness for the occupation has exposed it, also, to the sort of dreadful corruptions that exploded into our living rooms with the Abu Ghraib scandal. It fills me with horror and anger to imagine some poor reservist thrown into duty as a prison guard in a dusty prison in Mesopotamia, guarding men who may or may not deserve to be there, speak not his language, intensely resent his presence, and may or may not be wicked terrorists. Where all this question of detainees and interrogations and torture will eventual lead is a matter for conjecture, and there can be no doubt that the disloyal instincts of many on Left have sown confusion all around us, but the situation is a spectacular muddle and disgrace, and possibly will prove to a be a terrible dishonor. We have on our hands, as well, a bloody insurgency, which shows no signs of abating. The boldness and ruthlessness of our enemy, and his callousness, beggars the imagination. What effect our war has had on that faction of Islam which is our enemy, which has been our enemy, in fact, for many a long century but which only became real to us on September 11, is difficult say. It has made clear his bottomless depravity. It has made clear, as well, that we have no better answer to a terror war than anybody else.

I wrote, also, that “I am frankly fed up with the fanciful, even utopian schemes of some conservatives about a huge and comprehensive democratic revolution in the Arab world.” This point, which comprised the bulk of my article, stands today as all the more pressing. There have been occasional salvos on the question of Democracy over the past few months, but the quarrel has hardly diminished in importance or controversy. Several days ago a collection of the ever-earnest politicians of the Democratic Party boycotted a historic speech in the House Chamber by the Prime Minister of Iraq — precisely because this representative of Iraqi democracy was insufficiently hard-line in is pronouncements about a terrorist organization. There was certainly cynicism afoot in this ostentation, and the irresponsibility of a frustrated opposition as well; but it points again to the problem we have wrestled with at regular intervals — a problem that can be adequately summed up in the question, What if democracy in Islamic lands issues in solid victories for our enemy? What if totalitarian Islam, against all the cherished and hoary universalism of our idealists, is actually popular? What then, my dear enthusiast of Democracy? I have on occasion thrown at my interlocutors in this quarrel a quotation from Edmund Burke: his definition of Jacobinism as the idea “that all government, not being a democracy, is a usurpation.” Burke, who was once held in the highest esteem by the progressives of his day, made himself a lonely and largely friendless man by the end of his life, by bringing all his power of oratory and fulmination to bear against the Jacobin movement. Burke is, of course, the father of Conservatism; and here in America he is afforded a particular affection because he delivered in the House of Commons two speeches in defense of our Revolutionaries of unparalleled brilliance. This passage here is one of my favorites; no one in England knew America better than Burke, and here in one flourish of genius, he shows why England’s policy was folly:

The temper and character which prevail in our Colonies are, I am afraid, unalterable by any human art. We cannot, I fear, falsify the pedigree of this fierce people, and persuade them that they are not sprung from a nation in whose veins the blood of freedom circulates. The language in which they would hear you tell them this tale would detect the imposition; your speech would betray you. An Englishman is the unfittest person on earth to argue another Englishman into slavery.

From Burke we Conservatives have learned a hard principle: the “temper and character” of a people are “unalterable by any human art.” It matters not that the party which has been for twenty-five years the bearer of Conservatism in America has of late announced its repudiation of this principle: the Conservative must stand by it. The temper and character of Islamic peoples are indeed unalterable by human art; but in their veins not the blood of freedom but of piety and honor circulates. That our philosophers have since the 15th century worked to drive piety from the world of politics; that their epigones, marching with the preachment of their later implications, have forgotten this project; that, in short, we have made our own political theory ignorant as mud when it comes to religion, does not alter its influence elsewhere. A faction in our politics has worked itself into a frenzy over a looming Theocracy, erected by American Christians; this would comical were it not so distracting from more important matters. In truth most of our Christians in politics are advancing a political theory that emerged from a revolt against the authority of Christianity. It is possible, though in my view unconvincing, to read John Locke as a friend of Christianity; it is not possible to extend that favor to Niccolo Machiavelli or Thomas Hobbes. Yet these are our teachers. Witness the immediate recourse of so many commentators to the language of economics, which is of course the issue of a political theory which cast God out of the public square and grounded human political equality on self-interest. All men are equal because they share a desire to possess, or to acquire, or to dominate and command respect. The philosophers who sought to free acquisitiveness, the libido dominandi of St. Augustine, from the chains by which earlier Christians (and earlier pagans) had bound it, were in point of fact subversive of Christian authority; and it is something of a puzzle why later moderns, many of them Christians, would come to imagine that the political creed of this revolt, should command assent on account of the status still afforded Christianity. According to Christian doctrine, all men are brothers under (1) the Fatherhood of God and (2) the judgment of the Fall. According to modern political philosophy, all men are brothers — and orphans — on account of their material desires.

I see that I have ranged too far afield. My point is that the political theory behind the war in Iraq is, to my eye, a sloppy admixture of Christian sentimentality and a theory of politics subversive of Christian and Conservative teaching. How Conservatives — even if they thought Saddam was an imminent threat — can in good conscience sign on to this, is hard to understand; unless we stipulate that either (1) they do not know their political theory or (2) they do not know their history. Of the partisans of Democracy — or at least a particular class of them — I deployed a biting quotation from Cardinal Newman: “they ‘are so intemperate and intractable that there is no greater calamity for a good cause than that they should get hold of it.’” This strikes me as uncharitable, but perhaps there will be some allowance for the irritation a man feels when his cherished doctrine is rather awkwardly conflated with a dogma antagonistic to it — and everyone acts as if there has been no change.

2006-08-08T12:04:00.000-04:00

Crowds of journalists have of late flocked to Cyprus, that storied island nation, and as it happens Cyprus was in the news on this very date — exactly 435 years ago, at the Siege of Famagusta.

Cyprus can lay claim to being the first country on earth governed by a Christian sovereign, the Roman proconsul Sergius Paulus, converted by St. Paul, along with Sts. Barnabas and Mark, on his first missionary journey. It remained Roman (and Byzantine) for 800 years, excepting a brief period of Arab occupation, until its conquest by the Crusaders under Richard the Lionhearted. By the mid-15th century, when all the Christian world was shaken by the fall of Constantinople, it came under Venetian influence, and soon after became an important possession in that illustrious city’s Mediterranean empire. The coat of arms of the Lion of St. Mark, and the protection of her galleys, preserved the island in Christian hands until July of 1571.

On some pretext, authenticated by a pliant mufti, the Sultan succeeded in nullifying a treaty of peace he had signed with Venice; and he declared, on fine Islamic principle, that since Cyprus had once been Muslim, it should again come under the peace of the ummah. “Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the earth!” He raised an army of nearly 100,000 men, many of them the dreaded Janissaries, and put it under the command of an ambitious general, Lala Mustafa Pasha, his former tutor. The invasion force landed in July of 1570 in the southern district of Limassol. Lala Mustafa did not expect much resistance. The Greek Cypriots were Orthodox and agrarian, and had little fondness for their Catholic and Capitalist Venetian masters. After a six-week siege, the city of Nicosia, in the center of the island, capitulated on a guarantee that the lives of the Venetian troops and Cypriot townsmen would be spared. But Lala Mustafa betrayed his pledge and put most of them to the sword, many after terrible torture. The young boys and girls were enslaved and sent to the harems of leading Turks. One among their number merits particular mention: Amalda de Rocas by name, she choose death over dishonor and captivity, setting fire to the powder magazine of a slaver ship before it even reached Anatolia.

Famagusta is on the eastern side of the island, a fortress town. Its governor was a proud Venetian, Marcantonio Bragadino, and his resolve was only stiffened by Lala Mustafa’s macabre gift to him of the head of Nicosia’s governor. The Turks laid siege to Famagusta, and commenced a fearsome bombardment; but the town, defended by men outnumbered almost twenty to one, nonetheless resisted valiantly. The fury of Lala Mustafa was exceeded only by the impatience of the Sultan, who had visions of sailing his enormous fleet up the Adriatic to invade Venice itself. The banners of St. Mark still flew over the town nearly a year later. Venice was never more deserving of her emblem the Lion of the Sea. The determination of the Venetians, and their Greek subjects (who now, in the face of a pitiless enemy, we may guess, had set aside their resentment of the Italians), postponed a renewed Ottoman war against Mediterranean Europe, and secured precious time for Pope St. Pius V to organize, through patient negotiation, the Holy League of Catholic Europe, which under Don John of Austria met the Turks several months later in the Gulf of Corinth at one of the bloodiest and greatest naval battles in history: Lepanto.

At last, in July of 1571, a section of the main wall of Famagusta was, after countless costly attempts, blown apart, and the defenders — now reduced to a mere two thousand men — were forced to surrender. The terms of their surrender were remarkably favorable: military honors, safe passage, and the liberty of the townsmen. Whether Bragadino trusted his enemy’s word, when he rode out on August 4, beaten but unbowed, to deliver the surrender, can only be conjectured; that he recognized his defeat was clear enough. In the event Lala Mustafa, enraged at the pride of the Venetians, turned to treachery again; and, as Paul Fregosi writes, “Now began one of the most horrendous scenes of individual savagery recorded in the history of the Jihad.” The Janissaries fell upon Bragadino’s honor-guard, dismembering them; they cut off Bragadino’s ears and nose and threw him into a dank cell, where he languished for two weeks before being dragged out, beaten and humiliated, and flayed alive. His ruined body, filled with straw, was hoisted on Lala Mustafa’s galley and carried away to Constantinople.

News of this cruelty reached the marines and sailors of the Holy League only two days before the Battle of Lepanto began. Bragadino’s own brothers commanded two of the Venetian navy’s newest innovation: the massive galleasses, capable of delivering six times the firepower of a Turkish galley, which would prove instrumental at Lepanto. Word of the Agony of Famagusta spread throughout the fleet, and hardened the Christians against their enemy. “It is a good day to die,” declared another Venetian. And on that day the cruelty of the Turkish conquerors of Cyprus was avenged, and the menace of the Turk on the Mediterranean delivered a blow from which it would never fully recover. The Ottoman Standard, a banner inscribed 28,900 times in gold with the name of Allah, a treasure once carried by the Prophet himself, can still be viewed — in Venice.

2006-05-16T13:29:00.000-04:00

Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight But roaring Bill who killed him Thought it right.
— Hilaire Belloc

What have the last four and a half years taught Conservatives about war? One thing is that a treacherous and spectacular attack against her will make a republic more warlike. This rather platitudinous statement is nonetheless lost on a surprising number of people. I am certainly more sympathetic to the Old Right, with its isolationist and pacifist tendencies, than perhaps anyone else around here; but even I think the remnants of that strident and vigorous faction have made themselves blind on this point. As have the “pale Ebenezers” among our Liberals. The caricature of hawkish principles erected by these characters is positively stultifying of fruitful debate. Consider this simple theoretically problem for pacifism: There is, I think, justice and nobility in a man refusing to defend himself, in essence laying down his life in the name of peace. There is no justice, and indeed great injustice, in a man refusing to defend those for whom he is responsible. If I am home alone and a man enters my home with murderous intent, I am free, if I have the courage, to abjure resistance. I have no such freedom when my wife and children are there with me. Not to resist, when resistance might very plausibly prevent violence against the innocent — and specifically the innocent in my charge — is, it seems to me, a vicious act of presumption. How a principled pacifist is to escape this dilemma I leave to some skillful sophist to disclose; but I can attest that I have personally debated people who really think the dilemma can be dismissed merely by the assumed righteousness of the pacifist position.

Oh, but we have learned more than this.

We have learned (though relearned would be a better word for all of this) that the Old Right was emphatically on to something when it declaimed against the tendency of war to expand the role of the Servile State, to drive out private enterprise, to enfeeble self-government — in short, to truncate liberty. We have seen, and are seeing, the emasculation of this libertarian wing of Conservatism (not the sort of libertarianism that confuses itself with libertinism, but rather the sort that reveres free enterprise, fears the State, holds dear the liberty of local community, and venerates greatness and excellence). And whatever differences we may have with this wing (I for one have many), no historically self-aware Conservative can imagine American Conservatism without it.

We have learned, in short, that what we need is not more war but less. Totalitarian Islam is at war with us, and will be at war with us until one or the other capitulates or is destroyed. This is a fact, unmovable and bleak. But how we carry out our defense need not take the form of “war” as we know it. I have called for an immediate end to all Muslim immigration, or, failing that, for additional oaths of loyalty, taken on pain of perjury, for Muslims seeking to immigrate here: in fine, for institutionalized discrimination against the Islamic religion in our immigration policy, to put the matter in its starkest form. I have called for this in part because Europe is showing us, as a kind of omen, just how easily the growth of large Muslim populations can carry a society rapidly toward civil war. Is the prospect of civil war implausible? Only to the blind. I have proposed the introduction of specific sedition laws that mention the Islamic religion by name, taking note of the uniquely pressing threat of totalitarian Islam. Again, I think such legislation justified in part because throwing a man in prison for two years on a wrongful sedition conviction is indeed an injustice; but it is a pittance compared to what injustice might await that same man, and his family, when legislation is no longer an option, when anarchy and civil war are upon us. I say “in part” because there are other justifications as well: justifications not premised on the speculation of civil war. One is that totalitarian Islam, quite aside from its threat to us, is a wicked doctrine and should not receive the protection of our laws. Another is that we can fight totalitarian Islam by prohibiting it, by letting its stand naked without the shelter of the civil liberties which it seeks to obliterate.

We have learned, moreover, that a country can be dragged into war decidedly against its will. More: that a country can be dragged into religious war against its will. Roaring Mohammad who killed him thought it right. Five years after September 11, when calculating men, reasoning from the premises of their faith, rendered parts of Lower Manhattan a mass grave — and still it is fiercely controverted that we are in the midst of a religious war. But what wants repeating is that only one side need launch war for war to be. Totalitarian Islam desires religious war; our most fervent desires to the contrary mean nothing: religious war is what we have.

We have learned, finally, that terrible lesson about war as hell. Say what you will about the justice of the Iraq war (and I say nothing here on that head), there will be unexpected and ugly consequences, beyond what we have already seen, from the exposure of our fighting men to the fanaticism and bloodletting of that ruined country. That exposure may have been a dreadful necessity, but it will not be without cost. Violence and mayhem do terrible things to some men. Whatever comes of our collision with totalitarian Islam, we will emerge from it certainly less innocent and likely less free.

2006-04-18T13:16:00.000-04:00

Of that Byzantine empire, the universal verdict of history is that it constitutes, without a single exception, the most thoroughly base and despicable form that civilization has yet assumed. There has been no other enduring civilization so absolutely destitute of all forms and elements of greatness, and none to which the epithet “mean” may be so emphatically applied . . . The history of the empire is a monotonous story of the intrigues of priests, eunuchs, and women, of poisonings, of conspiracies, of uniform ingratitude.
— W. E. H. Lecky, A History of European Morals, 1869.

The conventional posture of our politics is firmly against prejudice. This because the rigid Rationalism that undergirds our politics has made war on prejudice. It is an oppression of the mind that can, and usually does, issue in more tangible and grinding oppression. To escape oppression, this conventional argument runs, is the object of a decent politics; it is an ineluctable element of progress.

But in fact prejudice — that is, prejudgment — is a neutral thing, which can indeed issue in oppression, but can also issue in liberation. To cultivate in men a prejudice against some abiding error, or against some recurrent evil, is to free them from oppression, not set the yoke of it upon them. It is well that we have a prejudice against, say, the evil of polygamy; and it is no piece of progress that some of our favored innovations have put us on the road to renovation of it.

Moreover, few prejudices are more oppressive than the one which holds that, because of Rationalism’s antipathy for prejudice, it has no prejudices itself. The above quotation, from the right-wing Rationalist Lecky, is as stunning a prejudice as can be imagined. To condemn a vast and bewildering and vibrant civilization, which endured for over a thousand years, to such contemptuous oblivion, based on some asserted “universal verdict of history,” is almost the very definition of oppressive prejudice.

As John Julius Norwich notes in the introduction his three-volume history of Byzantium, is it, even on the face of it, difficult to see how the story of “the intrigues of priests, eunuchs, and women, of poisonings, of conspiracies, of uniform ingratitude” can be characterized as monotonous and uninteresting. We might as well say that depictions of the Italian mafia are monotonous and uninteresting; and if so, that Americans have developed a strange fascination with the monotonous and uninteresting.

But in addition to the kind of palace intrigues and webs of deceit that make episodes of 24 seem plausible, there is this: Byzantium was the legitimate inheritor of that Classical culture which is so wildly celebrated as heralding the arrival of the new rationalism of the Renaissance. Indeed, the roots of the explosion of creativity and learning that we call the Renaissance lie in part in the sudden influx of Greek scholars, theologians, philosophers, orators and suchlike, in Italy after Constantinople fell to the Turks.

Which brings us to my final point — the pressing relevance of the history of Eastern Roman Empire (the term Byzantine, of course, or all its mystery and romance, was originally reconceived with a kind of malice, to distinguish the “base and despicable” Greek Christians of the Later Roman Empire from the admirable Greeks and Romans of pagan antiquity) to our current ordeal. From August 20, 636 at the Yarmuk River near the Sea of Galilee to May 29, 1453, when Constantinople fell, the Byzantines stood against the protean might of Islam. 800 years. Have we even a bare fraction of such endurance?

It is truly an oppression of the mind — a crippling one if left uncorrected — to follow the base prejudice of the rationalists, and scorn the vivid and moving tale of the civilization built upon the Golden Horn.

2006-03-28T13:27:00.000-05:00

There has been a basically sane and occasionally fruitful running debate on immigration over at Redstate. My contributions are here and here. My colleague Leon Wolf made a reasonable compromise proposal here. The debate rages in the comments section of each of these posts, if you have the interest and patience to engage yourself in such business.

As has been said a thousand times over the past few days, this issue is not going away. Nor should it.

2006-03-15T13:37:00.000-05:00

Islam has, throughout the history of its aggression against the West, benefited immensely by, and in many cases cunningly exploited the divisions within the West. Some of the first Byzantine provinces to fall after the Mohammedan Revolution were those, like Egypt and North Africa, whose internal repose had already been shattered by the conflagrations of the great heresies of Christian antiquity. Many Arian, Nestorian, and Donatist communities had been subject to oppressions and persecutions from the Empire in the decades immediately preceding the rise of Islam, and they welcomed the Muslim invader, even, in some cases, collaborated with him. The rabble of the People's Crusade ravaged the Anatolian countryside — populated, by and large, by Greek Christians — before succumbing to the Turkish counterattack. The Crusader Bohemund, who betrayed his oath of fealty to the Emperor, made himself Prince of Antioch and never marched with the rest to Jerusalem, later returned to Rome and convinced the Pope that the real enemies of the Latin West were the Byzantines. His intrigues in the Vatican were as damaging to the endurance of Christendom as anything the Turks ever did.

When Constantinople was besieged in 1453, there were many Greek Christians among the Sultan's legions (and some few Turks among the city's defenders). A Christian engineer oversaw the construction of the guns that broke the city's great walls. The Venetians squabbled with the Genoese, and only sent a relief convoy after it was too late (though many individual Venetians and Genoese fought valiantly to the end). It is estimated that when she finally fell to Mehmet II, the great capital of Eastern Christianity, which had stood for eleven and a half centuries, could summon only a mere four thousand men to defend her.

Even at our great victory at Lepanto, the unity of the Christian forces was achieved only by extraordinary efforts, and by the extraordinary leadership of Don John of Austria. Chesterton's unforgettable picture of this disunity should be enough to emblazon it in our minds:

The cold queen of England is looking in the glass;
The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass;
From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun,
And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.

Or again:

The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes
And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise,
And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room
And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of doom,
And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee,
But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea.

Part of the dhimma contract extended to conquered Christians and Jews included the requirement those communities give their resources, when asked, to the cause of Jihad. In many instances these resources were quite substantial. The Janissaries were only the most salient, costly and terrible of these expropriations. It might be speculated that some significant portion of the success of the Ottoman Turks was due to the riches, both material and human, that they seized from the Greek world. We need only consider the explosions of creativity evident in the Western world as Latin Christendom gradually appropriated the learning and culture of antiquity.

The significance of this history for us today, who in our lassitude have forgotten it, cannot be particularly obscure. It seems to me remarkably relevant to the vexatious and pressing problem of American policy toward Europe. My old friend Orrin Judd speaks for some number of American patriots with his auguries that Europe under Islam will be a dramatic improvement over Europe under secular nihilism. There is, I admit, some real merit in this position. Certainly Islam contains more elements of truth than secularism. A religion which declares the awesome oneness of the sovereign God cannot but be superior to that despair which, denying God, embraces the emptiness of man. But it is this very grasp of some tremendous fragments of truth that has made Islam such a tenacious foe of our civilizations. Secular nihilism cannot sustain a civilization. It deprives a people of vigor, piety, foresight, and all that mysterious recklessness that we call creativity. Secularism cannot really be an enemy; it can only be a suicide.

But Islam can emphatically be an enemy, and one that commands respect and fear. Respect because of the doggedness with which it has laid hold to some very profound truths about God and man; fear because of, as Chesterton incisively put it, that “void made in the heart of Islam which has to be filled up again and again by a mere repetition of the revolution that founded it.” Islam cannot really settle down to the work of sustaining a culture. Even if some Muslims desire just that, their theology betrays them. Real stability is unachievable short of the final accomplishment of that peace which is the only kind Islam knows: the peace of unbelief defeated — destroyed utterly or subjugated. Chesterton continues, “The only thing that can happen is a sort of apocalypse, as unique as the end of the world; so the apocalypse can only be repeated and the world end again and again.” He speaks of the chronic danger inherent in the religion of unleashing “lawless prophets almost as numerous as priests.” “The very dogma that there is only one Mahomet produces an endless procession of Mahomets.”

There is no reason to expect that Islam, which once absorbed the great Christian cities of Antioch, Jerusalem, Alexandria and Hippo, and later, Constantinople and the bulk of the Greek empire, will be unable to absorb the wealth and material resources of Europe. There is no reason to expect that the gradual subjugation of Europe to Islam, which we are already witnessing, will presage Europe’s decline as a economic and political power. Only the most brassbound and morbid of optimists could imagine that it will presage her decline as a military power. And I ask the contemners of Europe, like the one-man Global Content Provider, to calculate what contempt will remain when the factories of Germany are turning the tanks of our enemies; when the slippery diplomats of Belgium, having made their peace with Islam, will make its aims their own; when the clique of Eurocrats that dominates the ever-proliferating transnational institutions that would truss and check our action, have adopted the goals of Jihad; when we are all alone to enjoy our boasts about the superiority of Islamic Europe to secular Europe.

It is true enough that secular Europe is more hateful; it will be left to our children and grandchildren discover which is the more potent enemy.

2006-03-15T13:34:00.000-05:00

It is not obvious that true privacy in our day will endure the ministrations of its narrow partisans. There is a bizarre sort of double effect on the idea of privacy right now: a simultaneous exaggeration and diminution. Its deterioration as a firm principle of life proceeds at once with the hoarsest and most desperate cries in its defense; almost as if a howling mob of revolutionists, their hands bloodied from the work of expropriating and uprooting, now turn around and with all the sincerity of madmen, demand that their appointed despots reinstate Tradition, so that they may live by the simple customs and prejudices by which simple men lived before the Revolution. It is like the most ferocious Jacobin turning monarchist just as the guillotine’s blade falls on the King; and stridently claiming he was monarchist all along. It has an air about it, undoubtedly inspiring a certain human sympathy, of furtive penitence; perhaps it is the confession of faithless men. In any event, it is an intriguing phenomenon.

Say something shocking like “I favor censorship” to the average American, and you will not likely hear in reply a statement taking cognizance of privacy. But in truth part of the motivation for censorship has always been a robust notion of a bright demarcation between public and private spheres. Censorship is a way to insure that what is of necessity public does not encroach upon what is properly private. And the republican principle empowers a community to legislate to enforce this demarcation. More: the republican principle positively demands it, because the republican principle contains within it an ineradicable element of what is suggested by the ancient word virtue. It is unlawful, declare the good people of Anytown, USA, for commercial enterprises to depict graphically in public what is appropriately recognized as uniquely private — especially when what is depicted is a uniquely private sin. As a signal of the poverty of our politics, and more unmistakably the poverty of our idea of privacy, many Americans have come to imagine that such legislation is unconstitutional because it infringes on the principle of free speech. This despite the fact that laws against obscenity, pornography, etc., were already on the state law books at the time of the Bill of Rights, and that many more were passed later, with hardly a word ever spoken against them as infringements on free speech. It wasn’t until the enlightened twentieth century that such laws began to be overturned. There is a simple and even plain reason for this: Free speech for our forefathers always meant public speech, in the sense of debate and argument on matters of public controversy. A film of nameless choreographed encounters of the flesh is not an argument. And our error inheres precisely in the fact that, having obliterated the natural demarcations between public and private, we have thrown ourselves into a bleak confusion about what the free speech clause protects. In our confusion, we consent to vitiate the republican principle that is our inheritance; and endure a quiet cheeping despotism of unaccountable judges.

I find it fascinating that the people who castigate any natural or republican move toward censorship, like when Mr. Rudy Giuliani came to the defense (as he so often and so defiantly did) of New York Catholics who felt an understandable annoyance at the deliberate blasphemes of their icons at public galleries, are the same people who shout “privacy!” whenever an equally natural or republican act of legislation conflicts with their sexual “liberation.” The State should stay out of the bedroom; instead it should fund and endorse bringing the crudest and ugliest representations of the bedroom to public spaces. The public square, in Fr. Richard J. Neuhaus’ apt phrase, should remain “naked” — pristinely free of any religious argument or sentiment — yet in its nakedness should be teeming with base allure and temptation to lust. Our confusion about public and private has made a mockery of our politics. There is an unnerving sense that the American privatists really cannot imagine that the legal protections afforded to pornographers might possibly be quite ludicrous. They really think Larry Flynt is a free speech hero; their own bombastic rhetoric, which has its roots in the farcical drama that so often characterizes our legal system, beguiles them. They believe their own formulaic hyperbole. They deceive mainly themselves. One is tempted to speculate that future generations, looking back from a saner age, may regard us with that kind of befuddlement, or almost bemusement, reserved today for Prohibitionists and Puritans. We are puritanical about our vice: no touch of virtue or hint of public restraint will tarnish it. Pornography, at its nihilistic core, is the annihilation of privacy. That an enterprise dedicated to the crude exhibition of private things as grotesqueries or perversions is defended on the grounds that restricting it is a offense against liberty, is just the sort of insanity the modern world is capable of producing.

I restate here what I wrote in the midst of another controversy. The intensely vulgar public square we are confronted with today is simply not the work of democracy — if by democracy we mean the prevailing of popular will. It is more nearly the work of oligarchy or aristocracy. An example I often turn to is the example of the film American Beauty — a film celebrated by Hollywood beyond all reason. Well acted and cleverly written, the movie nevertheless did nothing so effectively as projecting onto a fictionalized Middle America all the pathologies and obsessions of Hollywood. In that its creators were almost comically manipulative, fancying (sincerely, perhaps) that the rest of the country shared the particular disorders of their class. Now Hollywood is probably as near as America comes to a truly aristocratic society, as Adam Bellow demonstrated in his recent study of nepotism. What emerges from it, whatever the pressures of the market may be, is still largely the product of a segregated and complacent elite. The despair and frightful decadence of American Beauty is the despair and decadence of an elite (which is not to say that what issues from the elite does not infect the people.)

There is also what we might call the supply-side insight: that supply generates its own demand. Economists of a certain stripe are happy to argue that high tax rates are counterproductive even from the taxman’s point of view; that, in other words, reducing taxes will stimulate the “supply-side” of the economy — the producers of wealth, who are in turn the primary sources of government revenue. Emancipate the economic activities of the productive class from the fetters of taxation, and you will enrich the federal treasury. But these economists, also often being of a libertarian cast of mind, are less eager to acknowledge that the supply-side of vulgar oligarchs and complacent aristocrats in the entertainment business benefits from this mechanism as well. Their clever filth generates its own demand.

One might argue that the rise of the modern mass entertainment industry presaged the defeat real privacy. The rapacity of exposure of the former crushed the flourishing of the latter. The entertainment industry feasts on temptation and the exploitation of the feeble and vulnerable. I once argued my charges against American Beauty with some colleagues, and was told by one that the “moral” of the film was not, as I contended, that bourgeois life is soulless, but that “things that appear fine on the outside are probably a mess underneath.” In other words, there is value in annihilating privacy, so that we may discover once again that man is a strange and sinful creature. The idea might be more palatable, or least more fruitfully provocative, if it did not stand alongside this incessant chirping about privacy. The filmmakers and their ilk seem to say that bourgeois respectability is contemptible because it is a dreary façade for human frailty and ugliness. But is not the façade also, whatever lies behind it (and I certainly reject the hypothesis of the film that behind it always lies perversion and alienation), a kind of organic fortress of privacy? Do families not present a front of respectability in order to deflect prying eyes? to maintain their sanity and integrity in an honorless world of exploitation? And if the façade or the front is contemptible, what does that imply about the principle of privacy?

Now I admit that I rest quite a lot of polemical weight, as it were, on inferences drawn from a single film. But note the reception in Hollywood that American Beauty received. Note the magnification of its effect on subsequent Academy Award aspirants. I recall hearing it reported that this particular film made considerably more money after it was awarded the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1999. That is a striking fact; perhaps it is a broader trend than I know. In any case it suggests to me that hardly anyone cared about this sorry specimen until Hollywood lent its weight to promoting it. And let us not underestimate the potential of the most profitable industry in the most prosperous nation in history to promote what it likes.

What remains an open question at the moment is whether privacy will survive the privatists.

2006-03-08T14:55:00.000-05:00

My EM colleague Daniel Larison has a fine essay in The New Pantagruel about the relation between Conservatism and the Enlightenment.

He concludes with three practical proposals for restoring and revitalizing Conservatism:

1) An extensive revival of a knowledge of patristic thought, especially patristic thought of the first seven or eight centuries, and the re-establishment of patristic authors as the core of a new canonical literature to be learned beginning during formative education and continuing thereafter (along with the classical languages in which this thought was originally expressed) to acknowledge its centrality not only generally for all subsequent “Western” thought but also to affirm the decisive, defining significance of this thought for what it means to be Christian as well as what it means to create and sustain a robust Christian social and political order. If Christian civilisation is what we wish to restore, we must acquire the common mind that fashioned it in the first place.
2) An elaboration of ethics founded in Christian personalism and so premised on the very nature of the One God in Trinity in koinonia (communion), which would strive to abandon conceptions of agency connected with notions of autonomy, self-interest and choice and affirm a morality rooted in asceticism, festivity (the natural complement to asceticism) as well as communion.
3) A recasting of discussions of the proper role of government in terms of chartered liberties (as opposed to natural rights) and the government’s duty to the welfare of the commonwealth or republic.

2006-03-01T14:00:00.000-05:00

The Cartoon Jihad has provoked some valuable discussion, but we are still very far from where we need to be. We are still very far from the kind of discussion that a free republican people, jealous of its liberty, must undertake. We are still very far from satisfactorily discharging our duty of self-government.

The Boston Phoenix now admits that it refused to publish the cartoons not out of respect, but out of fear.

Our primary reason . . . is fear of retaliation from . . . bloodthirsty Islamists who seek to impose their will on those who do not believe as they do . . . Simply stated, we are being terrorized, and . . . could not in good conscience place the men and women who work at the Phoenix and its related companies in physical jeopardy. As we feel forced, literally, to bend to maniacal pressure, this may be the darkest moment in our 40-year-publishing history.

It is all well and good to denounce those who have produced this climate of fear; it is well and good to refer to them as “bloodthirty Islamists,” or to invoke, against them, the heroic images of the dissidents of the past, as Jeff Jacoby does. But the question hangs in the tense air like a silent accusation: what are we going to do about them?

This question — the uncomfortable practical one — is the very one we must raise amongst ourselves. We must place it before the sovereign, which is the people, acting through their duly-elected representatives. We must raise this question and set ourselves with sagacity and resolve to an open deliberation about it, while we still remain free to do so. I think such a deliberation, unburdened by the sort of ideological shackles that characterize the media discussion, will soon issue in some effective policies.

The first and most obvious sector to strike at is Muslim immigrants, especially those here illegally. Let us draw up legislation emphasizing the priority of deporting illegal Muslim immigrants. I repeat: illegal Muslim immigrants. If we encounter defiance of this simple act of republican will, much as our immigration laws have been brazenly defied by local officials before, let us draw up legislation withholding federal funds from localities that resist. There can be no doubt whatever about a local municipality’s obligation to obey Congress on this, and Congress’s authority to retaliate in the event of insubordination.

But let us go further. Let us draw up legislation declaring that any Muslim immigrant, here by our forbearance, who so much as breathes a word of jihadist threat against an American, whether on a placard in the streets of New York, or in some screed on the Internet, will be arrested and deported forthwith. Let us make clear that we will not tolerate such threats, and that, taking cognizance of recent world events, we consider them qualitatively different that run-of-the-mill incitement to murder; consider them, rather, an aspect of a shadowy and complicated war being made against us, and thus deserving of particular attention and firmness.

I ask the reader to consider what effect the mere introduction of such legislation in the United States House of Representatives might have. Should we not be thinking about how to turn the climate of fear around a bit? When the seething jihadist, his sensibilities inflamed by a half dozen sensationalized examples of “disrespect,” goes to his dirty little apartment with his poster-board and his crayons, let him pause for a moment, recalling the most recent CAIR online alert, and calculate the possibility that taking that colorful placard to the street one morning might, willy-nilly, result in his being on a plane to Pakistan that afternoon. Let another seething jihadist, preparing to post some wild diatribe on a Islamist website from his comfy workstation at the company office, stop short and ponder whether an agent of the hated infidel lurks out there among his hitherto trusted interlocutors, and whether this post will be the one that earns him a revoked visa and a one-way ticket to Riyadh. Let the jihadists and their sympathizers, isolated in the unseen enclaves throughout our great cities, soak in two or three weeks of media hysteria over that bill introduced by Representative So-and-So, the very New McCarthy himself, which actually cites by name several of the more problematic doctrines of Islam, and declares them anathema to the traditions and liberties of America; which bill, moreover, seems to be somehow gaining support in both houses of Congress.

In short, let us proclaim publicly, by means of our very own republican institutions, that our sufferance of this lunatic faction of the Islamic religion has come to an end. This faction is outside the protection of our laws; outside the security of our liberties; outside the shelter of our traditions. It stands naked before the power of the State.

Is this problem too difficult, too sensitive, too explosive, to be even addressed in the Congress of the United States? To answer Yes is, in strict cold logic, to affirm the death of republican self-government in America.

2006-03-01T13:56:00.000-05:00

Dr. Andrew Bostom, whose persistence, energy and courage gave us The Legacy of Jihad, which is, very simply, the best single resource we have on the doctrine, tradition and history of jihad, delivered a talk recently at James Madison University. And a strange thing happened afterward. It was one of those striking little disclosures, whether accidental or deliberate, which recalls the thrill of truth erupting onto a field saturated with falsehood and fraud.

A local newspaper reported on the talk objectively [pdf file].

Lee Zion of the Virginia Valley Daily News-Record shamed the bigshot mountebanks of our leading media organizations by simply reporting what was said.

Despite recent attempts to re-brand jihad as internal struggle, it is in the main an Islamic war of conquest. It started with the military activities of Muhammad himself, described in the Muslim sacred texts, [Bostom] said.

It is to be wondered, without much exaggeration, whether a paragraph of such simple honesty has ever appeared in a major American newspaper, even in the context of merely reporting what was said at some event, as is the case here.

The reporter does not attach sly words of deprecation like “controversial” or “divisive” to his description of Bostom; nor are we treated to some furtive and condescending editorial passage. We are given a summary of what Bostom said, and how it was received. That’s it. Magnificent.

2006-03-01T13:52:00.000-05:00

Here is a marvelous little polemic by Prof. Anthony Esolen.

2006-02-21T08:57:00.000-05:00

The standard attitude on the American Right toward Europe has moved beyond irritation, frustration or outrage into contempt. Conservatives generally take note of Europe nowadays with a sneer — at her socialism, her secularism, her sterility, and, most recently, her escalating ordeal by Islam, which is really just a resumption of a very old ordeal.

This attitude is, I’m afraid, itself contemptible. The time for deriding Europe is long past. We have seen enough of this petty little game for deracinated souls. There is no honor in scorning a friend in need. The pious man does not dismiss his brother because his voice has been taken from him. A patriot does not mock the torment of his allies.

The Canadian/American/English journalist Mark Steyn has come to exemplify this contemptible attitude of contempt. The burden of his commentary (for the American audience) on Europe is this: Europe is doomed demographically and her confidence is shattered; Islam is ascendant, and will soon be triumphant; there is little or nothing we can do. The critical reader may be forgiven for detecting the occasional note of pleasure in Steyn’s reporting of this coming catastrophe; and he will certainly be forgiven for failing to detect anything like sorrow or mourning. Not only is Europe dying: it will also be an unmourned death.

One is inclined to interject a few points in the midst of this harangue of inevitable decline. (1) The history of Christian Europe has hardly been an uninterrupted tale of shining resistless advancement, and she has seen dark days (and ages) before. (2) Often when collapse did come, it came by betrayal: We do not need even look past the history of the final centuries of the great Christian city of Constantinople, broken by the treachery of the West in 1204, and then deserted, but for some few Genoese and Venetians, in its last agony in 1453. (3) Demographic projections are not even, properly, predictions; the future is always like the present, until that moment when it is not.

What should our attitude toward Europe be? It should be one of solidarity, challenge, magnanimity and defiance: solidarity with her ordeal, challenge to her lassitude, magnanimity with her failings, and defiance of her enemy, which is, of course, our enemy. The day may soon dawn when we must approach all of Europe as we approached Eastern Europe under Communism: as a gallant people, subjugated by a foreign oppressor. What wisdom is there in preparing for that day by cultivating contempt against her in our hearts?

2006-02-14T11:10:00.000-05:00

I have joined on with yet another blogging adventure, which may seem to whatever readers I have left here to be a rather comical ambition considering the late decline of my output. Nevertheless it is an eminently worthy project, conceived by my friend Josh Trevino; and to it I will lend what meager talents I have.

The weblog is Enchiridion Militis, taken from Erasmus’s work Enchiridion Militis Christiani or Handbook of the Christian Soldier. It is dedicated explicitly to the defense of what is left of the West, against enemies both foreign and domestic.

Long may it prosper.

2006-02-03T13:57:00.000-05:00

On the golf course this weekend, I will be drinking Danish beer and saluting what bravery remains in Europe.

2006-01-25T11:38:00.000-05:00

The brilliant journalist Heather MacDonald has illuminated many things about the invasion that we call an immigration policy. Recently she turned her attention to the relentless perfidy of Mexican diplomats in the United States.

Mexican officials here and abroad are involved in a massive and almost daily interference in American sovereignty . . . [Illegal immigrants are here] thanks in part to Mexico’s efforts to get them into the U.S. in violation of American law, and to normalize their status once here in violation of the popular will. Mexican consulates are engineering a backdoor amnesty for their illegal migrants and trying to discredit American immigration enforcement — activities clearly beyond diplomatic bounds.

MacDonald’s revealing article is the kind of thing that ought to provoke fury in any man possessed of even a spark of patriotism. But I forget myself: patriotism in America, as our wise men have taught, is not about a real country, her people, integrity, sovereignty and traditions; it is only about ideas. And since Mexican diplomats are not out there traducing Democracy and Liberty, they are not threatening America the Abstraction. Therefore our noble patriots shall remain quiescent.

Mexico, we learn from MacDonald, has set up a unique arm of its security services — known by the comic-sounding name Grupo Beta — to protect illegals crossing the border. “In April [2005], it worked with Mexican federal and Sonoran state police to help steer illegal aliens away from Arizona border spots patrolled by Minutemen border enforcement volunteers.” The government is also responsible for the notorious “how-to” comic book for illegal entry into the U.S. and the manifest subversion of the matricula consular card. As a former Mexican foreign minister put it upon the announcement of the matricula consular program: “We are already giving instructions to our consulates that they begin propagating militant activities — if you will — in their communities.”

The article details the extensive efforts by Mexican consuls in various cities to undermine virtually every attempt to enforce our laws against illegal immigrants; to contest and enervate new laws; to vilify immigration skeptics; even to deploy international legal sanctions against the U.S. for the mildest of measures.

Moreover,

Mexico’s governing class . . . also tries to ensure that migrants retain allegiance to La Patria, so as to preserve the $16 billion in remittances that they send to Mexico each year. Mexican leaders have thus tasked their nation’s U.S. consulates with spreading Mexican culture into American schools and communities.

100,000 textbooks distributed to the Los Angeles Unified School District. Advocacy and support for bilingual education. Adult-enrichment materials to libraries and community colleges. Study questions for students that ask “what happened to your territory when the U.S. invaded?” A government-sponsored drawing contest promoted in the Orange County schools entitled, “This is My Mexico.” Visits by Mexican teachers (with the collaboration of the U.S. Dept. of Education) that “suggest methods by which American teachers can incorporate Mexican dance, songs, and history, especially the indigenous cultures of the Toltec, Mayas, and Mistecas, into their lessons.” MacDonald notes sardonically, “Immigrants have often tried to hold on to their native traditions, but not until recently did anyone expect American schools to help them do so.”

Such devotion to other countries’ folkways would be unimpeachable if students overflowed with knowledge of America’s history. As survey after survey has found, however, American students know next to nothing about their country’s past. Only one-third of seniors at elite colleges could pick out the general at the battle of Yorktown from among William Sherman, Ulysses Grant, Douglas MacArthur, and George Washington, according to a 2000 American Council of Trustees and Alumni survey.

MacDonald then makes a point that needs to be made more often: “The audacity of Mexico’s interference in U.S. immigration policy stands in sharp contrast to Mexico’s own jealous sense of sovereignty. It is difficult to imagine a country touchier about interference in its domestic affairs or less tolerant of immigrants.” Mexico deports illegals crossing its southern border with admirable dispatch. Mexico knows its identity, likes it, and wants to keep it. They are saner than us on that count.

Is it too much to describe the current situation as an invasion? It may lack systematic coordination (though it surely does not lack sporadic coordination), and its effects, being gradual and cloaked by the miasma of multiculturalism, may be blurred from immediate view; but its consequence will hardly be less grave. Against their will the character of the American people will be transformed. A revolution will be made in the constitution of the nation. Our elites have always been thoroughly impatient with the instinctual conservatism of America on this point of dispute, have always been inexpressibly irritated by that inclination (or prejudice, if you insist) to treasure one’s identity, however elusive that word made be. If the American people will not go along with the dreams of elite, why, then we shall construct us a new people.

And let us have no illusions: this surely has a military component. Earlier this week we learned that, according to a Dept. of Homeland Security memo, “Mexican alien smugglers plan to pay violent gang members and smuggle them into the United States to murder Border Patrol agents.” Last month on the House floor, Rep. John Culberson of Texas presented photographs of stockpiles of weapons captured after a firefight on the Texas-Mexico border: automatic rifles, pistols, a dozen grenade launchers and ammunition. Now I don’t know anything about grenade launchers, but the things sure looked like the standard RPGs we are accustomed to seeing elsewhere in the world. As Culberson explained to the House, “this is just another week at the office for our law enforcement officers on the Texas border.” Another week trying to check the invasion we will not acknowledge.

2006-01-25T11:23:00.000-05:00

Books found at the last three or four “Friends of the Library” used book sale:

H. L. Mencken, The American Language.
John Dos Passos, Mr. Wilson’s War.
Winston S. Churchill, The Grand Alliance.
Norman F. Cantor, Medieval History.
William F. Buckley, ed., The Committee and Its Critics: A calm review of the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

Total cost: approximately seven dollars.

2006-01-17T10:37:00.000-05:00

I have a book review of Thomas E. Woods, Jr.’s How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization in the current issue of Touchstone, for any interested readers.

2006-01-17T10:33:00.000-05:00

What a stirring story this is. A bill came before the Massachusetts Legislature, including among its 160 members exactly twenty Republicans, which would have given in-state tuition benefits to illegal aliens — thereby extending to them a privilege that American citizens from other states do not enjoy. Nine other states have made such rotten generosity a part of their laws, but let us be clear about what is meant by these laws. What is meant is an established inequality which favors the citizens of a foreign power, here illicitly, to our own people.

The vote was all but secure in favor of yet another usurpation, but then . . . I will let Mac Johnson tell the tale:

But then it happened. A small revolt began. In the crackling electromagnetic hinterlands of talk radio (conservative even in Massachusetts), people began to gather and passions began to rise. Numerous talk-show hosts, foremost among which was Howie Carr of WRKO in Boston, took up the cause in disgust and sparked a surprisingly intense grassroots wildfire.
Apparently, people are sick of the games and the giveaways and the corruption and the pandering associated with illegal immigration.
They are sick of the concept of citizenship being treated as some sort of anachronistic technicality. They are sick of politicians believing they can do anything to get one more vote from illegal interest groups and that the citizens they are supposed to serve will never do anything about it.
And they are sick of working by the rules everyday under the burden of heavy taxation and regulation just to see their money frittered away on the undeserving — while opportunities for their own children are threatened.

The supporters of the bill could only manage three more votes than they had sponsors, and this Legislature, totally controlled by Liberals, repudiated the proposal.

When something like this occurs in the most liberal state in the country, despite the best efforts of the one-party machine, the speaker of the House (Sal DiMasi), the Boston Globe, the state attorney general and gubernatorial wannabe (Tom Riley), and the other anointed elites, a turning point has been reached. Such an event has national political implications.

Johnson quotes a Democrat as saying, “America is fighting for its sovereignty today,” and notes astutely that “when Pat Buchanan’s words begin coming out of a Massachusetts Democrat’s mouth,” we have come pretty far. Yes, we have. The immigration enthusiasts, in their intransigence, are prepared to shake the political settlement of this country to its very core.

2006-01-11T13:08:00.000-05:00

SUB SPECIE ATERNITATIS: “Today I wonder just how much longer the world — and the Church — will flee from the innocence of Christmas. Innocence is a nice-sounding word, but if properly understood it is a thing to be feared. The soul confronted with innocence is forced to deal with its own culpability. That, I believe, is why the world hates children: when it can’t get them aborted, it aborts their siblings and cousins, breaks up their families, herds them into socialist indoctrination camps called ‘schools,’ rots their brains with television, poisons their souls with popular music, deprives them of truth and beauty, robs them of sacramental grace, and otherwise assaults them with every kind of depravity known to man.”

— Jeff Culbreath’s Christmas reflection.

2006-01-03T14:11:00.000-05:00

Last week The Wall Street Journal served up a real laugher of an editorial. Yet upon reflection derision is really not the proper response to it. More nearly pity is.

Quoting Representative Tom Tancredo’s praise for a recent immigration bill passed in the House, the Editors aver that “Tancredo has done everyone a favor by stating plainly the immigration rejectionists’ endgame — turn the United States into the world’s largest gated community.”

That brought a smile to my face. It suggests desperation and perhaps even a tinge of derangement. It is, let us say, less than certain that readers of the Journal are innately and irretrievably hostile to gated communities.

Yes, yes: we all know that the rise of gated communities is deplorable; we all know that the desire to maintain the identity of one’s community is mere bigotry; that virtue consists in submitting oneself to the dislocations and depredations of cities as they decay. We know this, of course, to the extent that we are self-loathing Liberals. Yet the gated communities keep popping up. Propriety says they are bad; interest, sentiment and prudence says otherwise.

In any case, this is hardly an auspicious start to an argument. Most nations across history have indeed been “gated” communities in the sense of achieving and maintaining a specific territorial integrity. We might even say that the definition of a nation-state is that political entity which is capable of preserving over time and against various threats, the territorial integrity of a society and the cultural identity which it embraces. It certainly seems a much more functional definition than the alternative peddled by such publications as The Wall Street Journal, which fancies a nation to be a grouping of people, conceivably including every man on earth, who assent to certain vague abstractions.

“The legislation is aimed at placating a small but vocal constituency that wants the borders somehow sealed,” warn the Editors. “Small but vocal,” in this instance, refers to between 60 and 70% of the American electorate. One is tempted to reply that “placating” them might be better described as republican self-government.

Sponsors of the legislation, led by House Judiciary Chairman James Sensenbrenner and Homeland Security Chairman Peter King, [are] also forcing the business community to simultaneously create jobs and kill jobs. The bill would make it incumbent on employers to establish the immigration status of all hires and empower local police to enforce federal immigration laws. This means small-business owners soon could find themselves not only inconvenienced by a mandated hiring database system but also threatened with the prospect of bankruptcy due to repeated raids and high fines. Some will throw in the towel on the GOP.

Most would, more rationally, throw in the towel on illegal immigration, which is precisely the point. But again we see the perilous tendency of the WSJ (which speaks for a truly “small but vocal” faction) of regarding America first as a market and only secondarily as a nation — a nation possessed of a concrete identity which is threatened by mass immigration. It is rather remarkable, in my view, that a sentence like this would be brought out against the bill: “The bill would make it incumbent on employers to establish the immigration status of all hires and empower local police to enforce federal immigration laws.” Pure tyranny, that. Nor is it a particularly effective argument to complain, as the Editors do, that the bill oppresses “law-abiding aliens” (a strange term for those who have unlawfully violated our national sovereignty) and “smears” them as “lawbreakers,” which, in point of stubborn fact, they are.

The editorial concludes by lamenting the White House’s praise for the House bill and challenging the President to either “get behind the Statue of Liberty or [get behind] Tom Tancredo’s wall.” Once more, a symbol is offered in place of something concrete and real; more than that, the abstract is set in opposition to the concrete. The American ideals symbolized by the Statue of Liberty (and I do not deny that they are American ideals; I deny that they are the only or even the controlling American ideals) are assumed to preclude the maintenance of our territorial integrity. We must abolish our borders, de facto if not de jure, in order to cleave to the ideas which make us American.

What a pinched and demoralizing theory this is! What pernicious mischief is has exposed us to! We can have liberty only by traducing law; we can have prosperity only by subverting nationhood. Erect a wall to preserve our identity as a nation, and we have renounced what is good and inspiring in our national tradition. What can be the end and climax of a public philosophy which places patriotism in bondage to economics; which sets loyalty against aspiration and piety against tradition?

Can the Editors of The Wall Street Journal (and those for whom they speak) really hold to the degrading polarity they have constructed, or is it merely the consequence of the crabbed rhetoric they have chosen?

2005-12-22T08:47:00.000-05:00

The Vatican seems to be taking a significantly more realistic and therefore confrontational attitude toward Islam. On December 13, Monsignor Walter Brandmüller, president of the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences, gave a talk on the occasion of the fifth centenary of the birth of Pope St. Pius V, victor in the great naval battle of Lepanto. It is unflinching:

But on the part of the Muslims, from the earliest times, even while Mohammed was still alive, conversion was imposed through the use of force. The expansion and extension of Islam's sphere of influence came through war with the tribes that did not accept conversion peacefully, and this went hand in hand with submission to Islamic political authority. Islamism, unlike Christianity, expressed a comprehensive religious, cultural, social, and political strategy. While Christianity spread during its first three centuries in spite of persecution and martyrdom, and in many ways in opposition to Roman domination, introducing a clear separation between the spiritual and political spheres, Islam was imposed through the power of political domination.
It therefore comes as no surprise that the use of force occupies a central place in Islamic tradition, as witnessed by the frequent use of the word “jihad” in many texts. Although some scholars, especially Western ones, maintain that jihad does not necessarily mean war, but instead a spiritual struggle and interior effort, Samir Khalil Samir again clarifies that the use of this term in Islamic tradition — including its usage today — is essentially uniform, indicating warfare in the name of God to defend Islam, which is an obligation for all adult Muslim males. Those who maintain that understanding jihad as a holy war constitutes a sort of deviation from the true Islamic tradition are therefore not telling the truth, and history sadly demonstrates that that violence has characterized Islam since its origin, and that Mohammed himself systematically organized and led the raids against the tribes that did not want to convert and accept his dominion, thus subjecting the Arab tribes one by one. Naturally, it must also be said that at the time of Mohammed warfare was part of the Bedouin culture, and no one saw anything objectionable about it.

Brandmüller also firmly rebuts the regnant prejudice against the Crusades:

According to this representation, Western Christians were invaders in a peaceful region that was respectful of the different religions — the Holy Land, which back then was part of Syria — using religious motives to disguise imperialist ambitions and economic interests.
But the idea of the crusades emerged, above all, as a reaction to the measures that the Fatimid caliph Hakim bi-Amr Allah took against the Christians of Egypt and Syria. In 1008, al-Hakim outlawed the celebrations of Palm Sunday, and the following year he ordered that Christians be punished and all their property confiscated. In that same year of 1009, he sacked and demolished the church dedicated to Mary in Cairo, and did not prevent the desecration of the Christian sepulchers surrounding it, or the sacking of the city’s other churches. That same year saw what was certainly the most severe episode: the destruction of the Constantinian basilica of the Resurrection in Jerusalem, known as the Holy Sepulcher. The historical records of the time say that he had ordered “to obliterate any symbol of Christian faith, and provide for the removal of every reliquary and object of veneration.” The basilica was then razed, and Ibn Abi Zahir did all he could to demolish the sepulcher of Christ and any trace of it.

Next Msgr. Brandmüller expounds the “biggest difference between Christianity and Islam”: the understanding the human person. “From a historical point of view,” he avers, the very idea of the rights of man “is a cultural fruit of the Christian world”; while under Islam, “the concept of the equality of all human beings does not exist, nor does, in consequence, the concept of the dignity of every human life.” Islamic law “is founded upon a threefold inequality: between man and woman, between Muslim and non-Muslim, and between freeman and slave.” More: the human male “is considered a full titleholder of rights and duties only through his belonging to the Islamic community” [my emphasis]. “The most irrevocable of these inequalities is that between man and woman, because the others can be overcome — the slave can be freed, the non-Muslim can convert to Islam — while woman’s inferiority is irremediable.”

The conclusion simply draws out some of the uncomfortable implications in all of this:

If this characterization of Islam is destined to remain unchanged in the future, as it has been until now, the only possible outcome is a difficult coexistence with those who do not belong to the Muslim community: in an Islamic country, in fact, the non-Muslim must submit to the Islamic system, if he does not wish to live in a situation of substantial intolerance.
Likewise, on account of this all-embracing conception of religion and political authority, the Muslim will have great difficulty in adapting to the civil laws in non-Islamic countries, seeing them as something foreign to his upbringing and to the dictates of his religion. Perhaps one should ask oneself if the well-attested difficulties persons coming from the Islamic world have with integrating into the social and cultural life of the West are not explained in part by this problematic situation.
We must also recognize the natural right of every society to defend its own cultural, religious, and political identity. It seems to me that this is precisely what Pius V did.

I find this most encouraging.

2005-12-21T10:10:00.000-05:00

Mr. Bill Luse sallies forth against a tenured debunker to vindicate the good name of St. Thomas More. Bill does not give us these longer essays very often these days, but when he does we are reminded of why we wish he would.

2005-12-21T10:07:00.000-05:00

“This is a victory for Islam! Islam won! Islam Won! ... Islamic power is extending into Canadian politics.”

So declared an exhilarated Omar Alghabra upon winning the Liberal Party nomination for a parliamentary district in Toronto. Oddly, he delivered this exclamation to an audience that included many Coptic Christian — who not likely to be particularly receptive to it.

Victor Fouad of the Canadian Coptic Association was there, and fired off this letter to several newspapers:

Having won the Liberal nomination for Mississauga-Erindale, Omar Alghabra shouted to the audience, “This is a victory for Islam! Islam won! Islam Won!” He went on to praise how “Islamic power is extending into Canadian politics.” His performance was witnessed by hundreds including Rogers Cable, and his theocratic rant was cheered by many in the audience.
These are chilling words to a nation that has been identified as a terrorist target by Osama Bin Laden and has witnessed how “Islamic power is extending” itself into Western democracies through the slaughter of innocents in Madrid, London, New York, Beirut, Netanya, Bali and practically every country in the world. The Islamist declaration of Liberal candidate Omar Alghabra could have come from an al Qaeda mouthpiece.
And the Liberals dare to say that Stephen Harper is scary! I will take my chances with a free vote on same-sex marriage over a Liberal parliamentarian preaching the same expansionist Islamic rhetoric that incites those who will kill and maim innocent Canadians.
Clearly, the lives and values of Canadians are expendable to the Liberal party as long as they have a winning candidate.

Mr. Fouad also wrote Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin, but received no response. “I was surprised that Prime Minister Martin showed no interest in such a dangerous mixing of religion and politics,” said Mr. Fouad. “Since he has said nothing about it and this candidate is still representing the Liberal Party of Canada, I have to assume that Alghabra has the endorsement of the Prime Minister.”

Perhaps not the endorsement, but certainly the acquiescence, which is quite sufficient. In any case, Alghabra’s exclamation is decidedly truer than the impotent platitudes that Liberalism erects as barriers to this militant faith.

2005-12-16T11:43:00.000-05:00

It has not attracted as much attention, but something similar to what happened some weeks ago in France is now happening in Australia: Urban strife with clear racial and religious undertones.

Four churches in Sydney’s southwest have been attacked in 24 hours as the city’s riots spread from race to religion.
A community hall linked to a Uniting church was burned to the ground early yesterday, carol-singers were spat on and church buildings peppered with gunfire. [. . .]
Police believe the attack on the hall, in the suburb of Auburn, was intended to destroy the Uniting church next door, while nearby St. Thomas’s Anglican Church, which has a primarily Chinese congregation, had all its front windows smashed. Three of the attacks were on churches within minutes of each other. The night before, Molotov cocktails were used in an attack on an Anglican church in Macquarie Fields in the city's far southwest.

The situation is complicated by the fact that a sizeable portion of the Arab population is Christian:

Arab Christians have suggested the attacks on churches may have been meant as a violent attempt to “shame” the city’s Lebanese Christian community into supporting Lebanese Muslims in the race-hate war, which began as a battle against young white males over use of suburban beaches.

But the statements of public officials leave little doubt about the unambiguous racial character of the violence.

NSW Premier Morris Iemma has called on people not to renounce their Australian identity in the face of intimidation by Lebanese gangs — even if it means being bashed.
His advice came after victims of rioting in Sydney told how they were asked if they were Australian before being attacked by large groups of Middle Eastern men. [. . .]
He said if he were approached by such a gang he would say he was “proudly Australian”, even if it meant being attacked.

We have, as well, the usual intimations, carefully veiled, of insufficient vigor from the politically correct bureaucracies that oversee the police:

The police response to the riots came under the spotlight last night when it emerged that officers were ordered to stay away from a gathering of Lebanese men in Sydney's west on Monday.
The Seven Network said a police incident report instructed officers to stay clear of Punchbowl Park, from where gangs later travelled to the riot hotspot of Cronulla.

Discerning observers have been anticipating this catastrophe for quite awhile: It does not require any great quality of prescience, but only some immunity to the virus of Liberalism, to predict that the social consequences of mass immigration will not all be happy. For a long time we the West have been content to imbibe the illusions projected before us by Liberalism — that all peoples are perfectly compatible, that the identity of a nation is infinitely elastic, that differences of culture and religion are ultimately superficial — and it is increasingly plain that our disillusionment will be shattering. It may even be fatal.

It is often answered that the solution to mass immigration is integration or assimilation; these words are repeated almost like an incantation. But the sad irony of this cast of mind — which has been aptly described as “right-wing Liberalism” — was perhaps captured best in a brilliant passage in C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, in which he lamented the ceaseless “clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function.” The right-Liberal removes the organ of national identity and demands the function of assimilation. He abets the liquidation of the very identity to which the immigrant is expected to assimilate.

Assimilation in the past came precisely because the American identity was affirmed without apology. Norman Podhoretz, in his book My Love Affair with America, gives us a good picture of this process when he describes, in his boyhood, the concerted and successful effort by a New York City public school teacher to eradicate his Yiddish accent. Podhoretz remarks that without this rather brutal force of assimilation, which essentially destroyed an element of his ethnic identity, his success in America would never have been possible. By giving young Norman a proper command of spoken English — and consequently, he notes, a love of the language — she set him on the path he later took to literary success. I ask the reader to consider the manifold obstacles we have subsequently erected in the path of any school teacher who aspires to such an undertaking in her, let us say, Hispanic students. Not merely do we now condemn such forceful assimilation, but we positively encourage its opposite.

The right-Liberal clamors for the very qualities he is rendering impossible. He censures the citizen who affirms the culture of his homeland against the culture of the foreigner; then turns around and assures us that the foreigner will naturally adopt, without pressure or incentive, the very culture the affirmation of which he has censured.

The results of the experiments in this dubious theory are slowly coming in — in Europe and now Australia.

2005-12-15T11:08:00.000-05:00

One of the most heartening reports I have read in a very long time is here. According to Paul Sperry:

[A] key Pentagon intelligence agency involved in homeland security is delving into Islam’s holy texts to answer whether Islam is being radicalized by the terrorists or is already radical. Military brass want a better understanding of what’s motivating the insurgents in Iraq and the terrorists around the globe, including those inside America who may be preparing to strike domestic military bases. The enemy appears indefatigable, even more active now than before 9/11.

Sperry quotes a sensitive briefing paper: “Political Islam wages an ideological battle against the non-Islamic world at the tactical, operational and strategic level. The West’s response is focused at the tactical and operation level, leaving the strategic level — Islam — unaddressed.” All too true. And the analysts are not cringing from difficult conclusions:

So far the conclusions of intelligence analysts assigned to the project, who include both private contractors and career military officials, contradict the commonly held notion that Islam is a peaceful religion hijacked or distorted by terrorists. They’ve found that the terrorists for the most part are following a war-fighting doctrine articulated through Muhammad in the Quran, elaborated on in the hadiths, codified in Islamic or sharia law, and reinforced by recent interpretations or fatwahs.

One almost wants to stand up and cheer. Then there is this:

In analyzing the threat on the domestic front, the Pentagon briefing draws perhaps its most disturbing conclusions. It argues the U.S. has not suffered from scattered insurgent attacks — as opposed to the concentrated and catastrophic attack by al-Qaida on 9-11 — in large part because it has a relatively small Muslim population. But that could change as the Muslim minority grows and gains more influence.

It would be difficult to imagine a conclusion more perfectly calculated in its implications to inflame the sensibilities of the politically correct. That the Pentagon is contemplating it is cause for celebration.

The public conversation on Islam has often had an almost surreal aspect to it. The plain words of an enemy who understands himself to be acting under the mandate and with the blessing of his religion, and in this belief finds ample justification in the scriptures and traditions of this religion, cannot be taken seriously. In their place we get platitudes or, if platitudes fail, denunciation. The enemy declares that we are marked for death or subjugation because we are unbelievers. He declares that enslavement, massacre, plunder and deceit — all are acceptable in the war against the unbeliever. He cites chapter and verse, and in many cases great Islamic philosophers and jurists across the centuries, to defend his actions. And we are told to ignore his words. The enemy does not mean what he says. The whole drift of this mentality is to ask us, off at the end, to die for political correctness.

There are many causes worth dying for, but this pathetic ideology is not one of them.

2005-12-15T11:04:00.000-05:00

My friend and former colleague Josh Trevino opposes capital punishment. He does so with all the force of his gifted pen.

He argues that what really provides the base of support for the death penalty in America is “organized death-as-spectacle.”

This is the rationale for the death penalty in the United States. It is not a deterrent; it is not a just punishment; it is not a pragmatic alternative to incarceration. It is a shoddy acquiescence to the same impulse that sent gladiators and hapless blacks to their deaths in bygone days. How, really, may an unseen green chamber deep within a California prison compare to the spectacle of the Colosseum, or a bonfire with a writhing Negro? In America, it must do.

He refers, of course, to the late Stanley “Tookie” Williams, recently executed in California for the murder of four people. Josh has no patience for him or his defenders; “Stanley Tookie Williams spent the flower of his youth as a hideous slaughtering beast, and there is no reason to take his much-touted redemption as anything but cheap charlatanism . . . He dies a martyr in the eyes of those who mourn and admire him. These people are fools.”

But, according to Josh, no less fools are those who sought his execution. “They are men who do not examine their endorsement of this killing overmuch. It does not bear examination.” They are many of them hypocrites: “They are likely to be the same men who decry government inefficiency and denounce the activist state, except, of course, when it’s killing people. Then, presumably, big government comes into its own.” Much worse, they are impious, because the policy they endorse “usurps” what is properly God’s alone and precludes “the possibility that the condemned may find mercy and repose in the Lord.” [There is a reply to this, which St. Thomas gave, that even if the criminal is unrepentant, he is benefited by being prevented from committing more sins.]

This is not the realm of reason. Stanley Tookie Williams was never within it; and those who wished him dead followed in his bloody footsteps in their surrender to the urge to slaughter. The former, at least, lived as amoral outright.

Josh’s strictures against those of us to support capital punishment are severe indeed. One must strain to discover in his polemic any space for respectful disagreement. We have departed the “realm of reason” and “followed” in the “bloody footsteps” of the killer himself to “surrender” to our “urge to slaughter” and our “base urge” to make Williams “a corpse.”

The implications of this stridency are significant, and I respectfully submit that they have not been thought through with sufficient vigor. The reader of this argument longs to hear how exactly Josh will extract the doctrine of Just War from the enveloping logic which casts any notion of justice that deliberately contemplates the taking of human life from the purview of the State. If justice on this earth excludes the possibility that we might will the death of sufficiently evil men, how it is possible to pursue a just war?

But the true rationale for capital punishment is indeed justice. It is an approximation of the transcendent order of justice which God has ordained and which the legitimate sovereign, that is, the State, has an obligation to protect, despite the impossibility of its perfect achievement here below.

That a great many mistake vengeance for retributive justice is beyond dispute; that others simply revel in the spectacle Josh eloquently describes is also surely beyond dispute; but these dire evils do not mitigate the duty imposed upon the justly-constituted sovereign to protect the transcendent moral order.

Some (including the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church) answer that the modern secular State no longer recognizes the transcendent moral order, and therefore has no authority to protect a thing it denies. The argument is cogent and powerful, but the implications are equally so.

For of course the Just War theory hinges as well on the recognition of a transcendent moral order, which it is the State’s duty to protect. A State which does not recognize this order cannot wage war to vindicate a justice it denies. I do not say that the Catholic position (which Josh seems to cleave to) forces us into pure pacifism, but it does narrow the range of just war very dramatically. It leaves, as I see it, only a war of manifest and immediate defense within the realm of licit action.

I for one am not yet willing to concede that the modern State has abandoned higher law; but when that day comes (as well it may), reason and obedience will compel me, not merely to renounce my support for capital punishment, but also to move dramatically toward the pacifist position.

2005-12-09T11:02:00.000-05:00

Peggy Noonan, as is her wont, manages to articulate a common enough argument in a way that is somehow new and striking. Yesterday she gave us the old “rule of law” argument against illegal immigration, but, indeed, somehow it sounds novel.

What does it mean that your first act on entering a country — your first act on that soil — is the breaking of that country’s laws? What does it suggest to you when that country does nothing about your lawbreaking because it cannot, or chooses not to? [. . .]
If you assume or come to believe that that nation will not enforce its own laws for reasons that are essentially cynical, that have to do with the needs of big business or the needs of politicians, will that assumption or belief make you more or less likely to be moved by that country, proud of that country, eager to ally yourself with it emotionally, psychologically and spiritually?

Any man who scoffs at these questions is, I submit, scoffing at patriotism itself, and is, I further submit, no better than the most febrile of our multiculturalists whose contempt for patriotism is forthright.

Mass immigration in this country functions in many ways like crippling inflation — an inflation of something most precious: our citizenship as Americans. As John Zmirak once put it, “It’s like turning the Federal Reserve over to the General Assembly of the United Nations, so that other countries could inflate the dollar out of existence” — except that it’s worse. For along with our citizenship, we inflate into oblivion or sovereignty. How often do we hear, in the course of the bitter dispute* over immigration, that this or that plan of enforcement is too impractical to carry off? That the border is too long to secure? That the numbers of illegals are too large to deport? That convictions of employers are too difficult to attain?

What is this, in its mass, but a confession that, as a friend of mine once sharply put it, we are no longer a sovereign nation? Our territorial integrity cannot be preserved. A kind of invasion from without cannot be stopped. Our laws are transgressed with impunity. All that we might do to safeguard our national sovereignty is vanity. This is the counsel of the immigration enthusiasts. Ms. Noonan is quite right to read them her stern lectures about what is means to love a country, and what is means to spit on it.

“Our elites are lucky people.” Born into privilege, they “run the world from a desk.” They are complacent and reckless with dear and delicate things. “The problem with our elites,” these lucky complacent people, is not an overabundance of “compassion and open-mindedness.” No: when it comes to immigration, “they are unknowing and empty-headed.” Without much forethought on the matter, they have consented to make America in their minds primarily a market and only derivatively a country. They “ignore the human questions.” “They don't know, most of them, what others had to earn, and how much they, and their descendents, prize it and want to protect it.”

This means that “this great question, immigration,” which points to even greater questions like the question of our nature and destiny as a people, “is going to be decided by people who . . . don't know what it is to grieve the old country and embrace the new country.” By people who “think it was without a cost, because it was without cost for them.” In short, by people who know not what citizenship means, and care not whether it endures.

The standard reply to an argument like this is a sharp shout of “nativist!” I welcome Peggy Noonan to the ranks of the nativists.

__________________
* Bitter because few issues give evidence like immigration of a more concerted thwarting of the republican will of the country.

2005-12-06T13:26:00.000-05:00

Mustafa Akyol’s recent essay on Western materialism and Islam certainly raises some intriguing questions, such as: How much of the antipathy that so many Muslims feel toward the West can be explained by reference to our “naked public square”? That is to say, are most Muslims who wish us harm energized in their detestation by the atheistic decadence of our popular and academic cultures?

Addressing ourselves to this question with the seriousness it deserves would be, I trust, a fruitful enterprise in many ways; but I have grave doubts about how finally fruitful it would be in illuminating the true reasons for the clash of civilizations between Islam and the West. In short, I fear that the inquiry into our decadence, a decadence which derives in large part from the philosophical quackery and nihilism of the modern academy, would prove a distraction from the question of Islam and the West. We need only reflect on the ineffaceable fact that the confrontation between Islam and Christendom — that more solid and coherent ancestor to “the West” — antedates the arrival and ascendance of atheistic materialism as the organizing principle of Western philosophy by some eight hundred years. Our ancestors were struggling against the Turk and the Muhammadan before even the arrival of the nominalists.

In the second half of his essay Mr. Akyol elaborates his opinion that Intelligent Design might act as a “bridge” between Islam and the Christian West:

As the history of the cultural conflict between the modern West and Islam shows, ID can also be a bridge between these two civilizations. The first bricks of that bridge are now being laid in the Islamic world. In Turkey, the current debate over ID has attracted much attention in the Islamic media. Islamic newspapers are publishing translations of pieces by the leading figures of the ID movement, such as Michael J. Behe and Phillip E. Johnson. The Discovery Institute is praised in their news stories and depicted as the vanguard in the case for God, and President Bush's support for ID is gaining sympathy. For many decades the cultural debate in Turkey has been between secularists who quote modern Western sources and Muslims who quote traditional Islamic sources. Now, for the first time, Muslims are discovering that they share a common cause with the believers in the West. For the first time, the West appears to be the antidote to, not the source of, the materialist plague.

I leave the merits of ID entirely to the side here, for they are irrelevant to my point. But let us posit, arguendo, that ID does prove capable of beating back the “materialist plague” in the West, and thus kindling a new-found respect for Westerners among Muslims. Are we to believe that this development would dim the passions of totalitarian Islam and remove the goad that drives fervent men to jihad? I don’t think we can reasonably expect that. The goad of jihad is not in the West; it is in Islam, and it is felt keenly by that (not insignificant) faction of this great religion which understands itself to be faithfully carrying out the clear mandates of the faith when it murders and tyrannizes in the name of Allah. And in this path of holy war, of course, that faction finds ample justification in the scripture and traditions of Islam.

Christians and Jews, no less than materialists, when they hear the call to the Muslim faith, must submit. It is true that “People of the Book” are offered, instead of the stark choice between conversion or death, a third option of brutal subjugation under dhimmitude. But the hard fact is that for totalitarian Islam, the mandate to conquest and subjection, pillage and enslavement, will not be mitigated in the least by the conversion of the West to the way of light and reason. The Prodigal Son of Western thought will return not to a quiet home of merry-making, but to a tense standoff between his house and a very old adversary.

2005-11-30T08:26:00.000-05:00

Sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late. It is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists. It is no answer to say, with a distant optimism, that the scheme is only in the air. A blow from a hatchet can only be parried while it is in the air. — Chesterton

Now and then we get a good look at the drab horror of the tyranny of political correctness. Like much that is evil, it strikes the active mind as both awful and banal. Recently in France its malicious gaze fell upon the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut.

Those who know him say the 56-year-old Finkielkraut has been in distress for the past four years, since Jews have become targets of North African immigrants.
The November 18 Haaretz interview with Finkielkraut, who has said in the past that harm coming to Jews reminded him of the dark days when Jews were taken from their homes to concentration and death camps, did not surprise many Jews.

Finkielkraut’s interview touched upon, of course, the recent riots in France.

Finkielkraut said in Haaretz that the message of the rioters was “not a cry for help or a demand for more schools or better schools. It’s a desire to eliminate the intermediaries that stand between them and their objects of desire. And what are their objects of desire? Simple: money, designer labels, sometimes girls.”
He was also quoted as saying: “In France... they teach colonial history as an exclusively negative history. We don’t teach anymore that the colonial project also sought to educate, to bring civilization to the savages. They only talk about it as an attempt at exploitation, domination and plunder.”

Le Monde excerpted the interview, and then

Only hours after publication, leftist organizations were vying with each other over who would be first to sue him or file a police complaint against the philosopher for incitement to racism.
Thursday, after receiving death threats, the philosopher decided to respond and repent. In an extensive interview in Le Monde yesterday, he said he “despised” the man who appeared in the article (in Le Monde). “He is he and I am I. To my shock, since Wednesday, it appears that he and I share the same name.”
Finkielkraut, who went out of his way to praise the immigrants, said his original statements had been an attempt to force the political echelon to take responsibility for what was happening in the poor suburbs. “Integration is our obligation,” he said.

We ought to have no illusions about the goals of the p.c. faction, which gains power daily, not merely in distant and decadent Europe, but here in our dear and decadent America: It wants to criminalize our views, to silence us by coercion, to break us as free men possessed of free minds. It will happily imprison a man for opinions once the proud heritage of common sense.

It is tyranny when to criticize anarchic rioters is to “incite to racism.” It is tyranny when organizations are empowered to launch lawsuits and police complaints for the opinion that colonialism might not have been all bad. And it is the foulest tyranny to force a man to debase himself, to renounce his own free thought, in short to denounce himself, as the leftist-Muslim tyranny of France has done to Alain Finkielkraut.

Half of the words written here would be subject to this tyranny if the p.c. faction had its way. Remember that, and remember Mr. Finkielkraut, when you feel inclined to scoff political correctness.

2005-11-22T09:50:00.000-05:00

SUB SPECIE AETERNITATIS: “National Shame,” declared a New York tabloid headline in six-inch type. The Times carried a long op-ed by New Orleans author Anne Rice: “But to my country I want to say this: during this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us ‘Sin City,’ and turned your backs.” America turned its back by watching and praying day and night, by sending tens of thousands of volunteers, by opening its cities and homes to hundreds of thousands of refugees, by donating nearly a billion dollars through churches and voluntary organizations, not to mention more than $200 billion in federal aid and reconstruction. Callous, unfeeling, hard-hearted America.

— Richard J. Neuhaus, First Things, November 2005.

2005-11-15T14:32:00.000-05:00

Here we have a typical article involved in a typical daydream. The argument it makes concerning the problems that European nations face with their Muslim populations, and how to begin to solve those problems, is considerably less important that its single major assumption. In short its argument is superficial because it fails to penetrate to the crucial premise upon which it is based — a premise that is certainly not self-evidently true.

“The French,” avers Mr. Frederick Kempe, the columnist, “live in denial over the dangers posed to themselves and the world from their common inability to integrate growing Muslim minorities.” And later:

For the moment, the 577-member French National Assembly has no Muslims representing mainland France. They are strikingly scarce as well on national television. French officialdom, to its credit, is increasing merit scholarships, training schemes and apprenticeships for troubled youths. What will be more difficult will be implementing what's most needed — tough antidiscrimination laws or affirmative action programs in a country where racism is rampant but whose official ideology still doesn't allow registration of minorities.

He also speaks of a French economy that, “has failed to create the growth and jobs that would do most to integrate Muslim youth,” and of the need in Europe to “produce minority role models of the sort the U.S. has in abundance: from Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice to a host of business and academic leaders.”

Integration, in brief, is the solution that Mr. Kempe offers to the problem of the French insurrection. He goes on at some length discussing how it might be better accomplished, why it has thus far failed, what must change, and suchlike.

What he does not do — does not, it think it safe to conjecture, even contemplate doing — is ask whether integration is possible. The major assumption, the hidden premise, upon which the whole discussion hangs, is that effective integration of Islamic minorities is an achievable goal.

But that is big question, is it not? That is the whole huge throbbing difficulty behind all of this genteel conversation. And Mr. Kempe is hardly unique in avoiding it. He is actually rather typical. (I note the irony that Mr. Kempe holds out as the great American example two “minority role models” who have been the subjects of savage vituperation from the community from which they emerged. Both accomplished statesmen, and admired leaders, it is nonetheless true that their office as minority role models is hardly undisputed.)

It is fair to distrust the sagacity of commentators who resolutely decline to take up the question that really needs addressing. It is fair to question the judgment of counselors whose advice rests on arguable assumptions of supreme importance. The great preponderance of our opinion-shapers have been quite unwilling to subject to searching scrutiny the audacious and even dubious assumptions that underlie their views on this matter; until that changes, their work will amount to a vast evasion.

2005-11-09T08:36:00.000-05:00

A journalist named Paul Belien, writing on the website The Brussels Journal (it’s motto is fitting: “all the news that never gets printed”), reads like a cool breeze in the stifling air of Western self-censorship. But what he has to say is hard and grim.

What is happening in France has been brewing in Old Europe for years. The BBC speaks of “youths” venting their “anger.” The BBC is wrong. It is not anger that is driving the insurgents to take it out on the secularised welfare states of Old Europe. It is hatred. Hatred caused not by injustice suffered, but stemming from a sense of superiority. The “youths” do not blame the French, they despise them.

Mr. Belien quotes a “young and charismatic” Arab leader in Brussels, one Dyab Abou Jahjah: “We reject integration when it leads to assimilation. I don’t believe in a host country. We are at home here and whatever we consider our culture to be also belongs to our chosen country. I’m in my country, not the country of the [Westerners].” The press is finally talking about this attitude of rejection, but only grudgingly. The staid German paper Der Spiegel admits the possibility of a “nightmare scenario of entire neighborhoods and communities separating themselves from the state and essentially declaring their independence” — but then submerges this admission in a sea of enervating conventional wisdom.

Otherwise thoughtful men strain to heroic yet disastrous ends to deny that this insurrection might ultimately spring, not from social exclusion or penury, but from the religion of Muhammad and the culture formed around it. We are told that jihad is not what it is. We are told that history is not what it was; that conquest and subjugation from Persia to Spain, from Indonesia to Byzantium, accompanied the expansion of Islam as a mere coincidence. We are told reassuringly that Islam prohibits the murder of innocents; but we are never told that under jihad, no infidel who has heard the call to submission can ever be innocent, that warfare under jihad simply does not recognize the category of innocent as Western man has conceived it, that, in short, the infidel is judged guilty by his unbelief.

Our detestation should be particularly aroused by the absurd and pitiful spectacle of Marxism providing the standard analytical framework for this insurrection. It is as if, under the pressure of an unfamiliar and terrible creed, the demoralized Westerner retreats to the chants of our antique street protestors: Blah blah blah POVERTY! Blah blah blah UNEMPLOYMENT! Blah blah blah ALIENATION!

Did we not refute this Rationalist gibberish 25 years ago? Have we forgotten the brilliant critique that issued from the first generation of neoconservatives, and truly, whatever has become of that word today, accomplished change for the better? Do we forget what James Q. Wilson and Irving Kristol and Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Commentary and The Public Interest and all the rest taught us — that the reason a community or a city degrades into lawlessness is not economics but culture? In America that culture can be isolated (if oversimplified) in one word: fatherlessness. Rend the family asunder, tear fathers away from mothers and children, introduce sexual license — and you will have squalor and despair; you will even have poverty, unemployment and alienation.

I speak to my fellow Conservatives: for God’s sake do not listen to the Liberals! They are stuck on stupid. The poverty of their imagination astonishes. Economic reductionism will not illumine this problem. Economics can tell us many useful things, and many true things; but it can never tell us the most important things of human politics. We know this, Conservatives. The secularism so dear to the Left (which in this case has become economic determinism) blinds it to the deepest motives and inspirations in men. Arising from those very motivations the Left has made itself ignorant of, a great struggle confronts us, and it appears new but it is extraordinarily old. Rare is the war that occupies the leaders of more than one generation of men; rarer still is the war that occupies leaders of more than one age of men. This one has occupied mediaeval men, modern men, and it will surely implicate postmodern men. Already it implicates us, despite our best efforts to cultivate an intoxicating ignorance. It began in what we call the Dark Age and has not yet ended; it gazed with patient jaded eyes on the battle of Manzikert, the fall of Constantinpole and the Siege of Vienna; the victory of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and her defeat; the break up of Catholic Europe and the decay of Protestantism; and the rise and fall of Feudalism, Monarchy, Aristocracy, and Democracy, each in turn. The very last thing that will help us understand it is a tendentious ideology that drags everything before the tribunal of its pinched Reason, and stands in mute bewilderment, or impotent rage, at anything that will not honor that tribunal. The very last thing we should do, is imagine that all those Marxist pieties, translated through the emollients of Liberalism, which nearly ruined half our great cities forty years ago, should now regain their currency to sooth our distress while dazing our minds.

Not economics: culture. Mr. Belien puts it succinctly:

Unlike their fathers, who came to France from Muslim countries, accepting that, whilst remaining Muslims themselves, they had come to live in a non-Muslim country, the rioters see France as their country. They were born here. This land is their land. And since they are Muslims, this land, or at least a part of it, is Muslim as well. The society they live in is a homogeneous Islamic one. For them that is society, there is no other.

Curse me if you must for implicating Islam itself — which I have indeed done. Denounce me for my pessimism. Answer my argument on its merits with bitter contempt. But, in the name of all that is holy, do not resurrect the most discredited ideology ever conceived by men. Close your ears to the siren’s song of economic determinism. Consider whether you really think it plausible to reduce living men, each possessed of the ineffable gift of Mind, to mere flotsam on the waves of great economic currents. Show some true respect for the religion that has stood against us, now surging, now retreating, for nearly fifteen centuries; the religion that conquered and extinguished great Christian cities with names like Galatia, Ephesus, Antioch, Alexandria; the religion that broke the great Roman Empire and reduced so many of her former dominions.

More than that, learn what jihad is and has always been. It has been truly said (by Richard Weaver among others) that to resist a falsification of history, a man must be possessed of a solid picture of truth. Mere skepticism is not enough.

The resources are available. Purchase and study Dr. Bostom’s book or Miss Ye’or’s books; or Robert Spencer’s less-scholarly but still useful books. Surely they are wrong on some things, and have misinterpreted others; and even if their history is near-perfect, it does not follow that their prescriptions are sound. But nothing could be surer than that we have been deceived about Islam, where we have not been left in ignorance. And I lay it down as a principle and a challenge, that all free citizens of the West are under an obligation to begin (first if necessary an unlearning about Islam and then —) a study of the faith of Muhammad with eyes undimmed by the fashions of our age.

2005-11-02T13:47:00.000-05:00

Few things are as detestable as the treatment given to black Conservatives and Republicans. The civility that makes public life tolerable does not, it seems, extend to them. But it cannot have escaped the notice of these brave men and women, that their opponents exhibit a partisanship quite undimmed by charity, a malevolence of almost tribal concentration, and a poverty of imagination that speaks of simple desperation.

Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele is running for the U.S. Senate. He is a black Republican. Maryland is one of the more reliably Democratic states in the country. Thus, by the logic of this ugly charade, he must be subjected to a level of slander and malice that is not, as one might hope, whispered in shame but bellowed in self-righteousness.

Delegate Salima Siler Marriott, a black Baltimore Democrat, said Mr. Steele invites comparisons to a slave who loves his cruel master or a cookie that is black on the outside and white inside because his conservative political philosophy is, in her view, anti-black.
“Because he is a conservative, he is different than most public blacks, and he is different than most people in our community,” she said. “His politics are not in the best interest of the masses of black people.”

Observe the partisanship compounded by insularity. Note that there is no argument upon which to ground a defense of the attacks; there is only a tendentious assertion. The whole great bulk of American political debate — which usually resolves in the end to a confrontation between Liberalism and Conservatism — is brazenly subsumed into this assertion. It is not necessary to even argue that Liberalism is better for blacks. It is not necessary to even consider the claims of Conservatism when they are made by a black man.

There is not much more that can be said here. We should denounce this cruel vitriol in no uncertain terms. We should wish Mr. Steele well, admire his perseverance, and hope that his example might inspire more like him: that this dreary, depressing episode might one day be a thing of the past, like so many of the other episodes where race threatened to break America.

2005-11-01T13:09:00.000-05:00

Just in case there was any doubt: New Orleans was a basket case before Katrina.

2005-10-31T10:53:00.000-05:00

“What indeed would it mean for Notre-Dame to become Hagia Sophia on the Seine? The victory of Mohammed over Christ is what it would mean; the Incarnate Son of God displaced by the desert seer with the multiple wives.”

— William Murchison, Touchtone.

2005-10-31T10:41:00.000-05:00

This little piece of absurdity reminds me of two facts often neglected.

Despite our perfectly antique progressives, who regard them as lumbering machines of reaction, businesses are rarely very reliable as bulwarks of tradition or conservatism. Instead we find them regularly jumping on the bandwagon of social innovation. The reason for this is sound enough: it is not particularly profitable to take a stand on some polarizing issue, thereby alienating countless current or potential customers. But a conservatism that trusts in business to shelter a nation's traditions from the energumens is bound for disappointment.
An aging pluralistic society has little defense against an active and passionate religious minority. The whole structure of pluralism is formed by its commitment to this proposition: “all religious questions are open questions.” The whole structure of an active, passionate religious minority is formed by its commitment to the proposition that some religious questions are quite closed. And if the minority in question is animated by injunctions which know knowing of and concede nothing to pluralism — injunctions thoroughly inimical to pluralism — then the pluralist society is in a real bind. It will either belie its professed ideals and close questions by its own prejudices, or it will be gradually dismantled.

This is not the place to begin an extended critique of pluralism. But I think we can make a sketch of the real problem by noting the contradiction inherent to it. When a society makes its guiding ideal “all questions are open questions,” makes itself, in theory at least, an Open Society, it has entangled itself in one of the great blunders of modernity. For to pronounce that all questions are open, is to close at least one question of supreme importance — the question, namely, of whether all questions are open. It is to cast religion from the public square, and adopt a kind of implicit theology of noncommitalism or indifference; and every sincere believer, who hears the clear sounding of trumpets calling him to a service which transcends the troubled settlements of the ephemeral City of Man, cannot easily abide this public theology. He knows that his final allegiance cannot be given here below, and this, off at the end, is what the pluralist cannot abide.

A satisfactory solution to this ancient problem is not on offer. We are talking here about one of the oldest and most intractable of all political problems, which has exercised the great minds of philosophers and theologians and historians since we became self-aware. The pluralist’s conceit is that he has solved it for good.

2005-10-31T10:33:00.000-05:00

The actor Omar Sharif played Saint Peter in an Italian film. Afterward he was quoted as saying: "Playing Peter was so important for me that even now I can only speak about it with difficulty. It will be difficult for me to play other roles from now on."

The response from some of his fellow Muslims:

Omar Sharif has stated that he has embraced the crusader idolatry. He is a crusader who is offending Islam and Muslims and receiving applause from the Italian people. I give you this advice, brothers: you must kill him.

Anyone content to regard this threat as empty should consider the fate of Theo van Gogh.

Anyone given to agonizing over "why they hate us" should consider the mentality that makes a man marked for death for speaking tenderly of another religion.

2005-10-19T12:06:00.000-04:00

Dr. Andrew Bostom is a physician specializing in Epidemiology. Since 1997 he has been part of the full-time medical faculty at one of the two major teaching hospital affiliates of Brown University. His current research focuses on the relationship between kidney and cardiovascular disease. Bostom is also the editor of the newly-released book The Legacy of Jihad, a compendium of writings, both modern and ancient, on the uniquely Islamic institution of Jihad. I interviewed him for Redstate via email over this past week.

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PC: Dr. Bostom, thank you for agreeing to this interview. Your new book, The Legacy of Jihad, is a rich and chilling catalogue of the horrors visited upon peoples across the centuries and continents by the Islamic doctrine of holy war and its attendant corollaries; it is scholarly in form and execution, including a number of texts never before available in English; yet you yourself are by profession a medical doctor. Can you tell us about how you became interested in Islam, and how that interest developed into so ambitious a book?

AB: September 11, 2001 shocked me out of the complete absorption in my career in medicine and an accompanying uninformed complacency about world affairs. I grew up in New York City, spending the first 34 years of my life there, and the wife of one of our nephrology fellowship trainees barely made it out of the second World Trade Center tower before it collapsed. The cataclysmic events of 9/11 had very little context for me, so I set out to learn about Islam, reading voraciously. Starting with the writings of Karen Armstrong and John Esposito (how naïve and ironic it seems in retrospect!), I became thoroughly dissatisfied, in short order, with the entire genre of thinly veiled, treacly apologetics, sadly characteristic of modern popular and “academic” works on Islam. So I began what has become a ceaseless endeavor to educate myself, making liberal use of the vast research resources of the Brown University system. Learned, patient mentors, in particular Bat Ye’or and Ibn Warraq, facilitated my efforts. They encouraged me to complete what became The Legacy of Jihad, sharing the view, expressed so appositely by the prominent Middle East Studies Professor, Dr. Raphael Israeli, that the book filled a “yawning gap” in the literature on jihad. That is why in one rather large volume I combined a comprehensive analysis of both jihad theory and practice, the latter being a detailed survey of the brutal way jihad campaigns have always been waged — using a physician’s favorite learning and teaching tool, the mnemonic, in this case “MPED” — massacre, pillage, enslavement, and deportation.

PC: The Legacy of Jihad begins with “A Note on Cover Art” that alone is probably enough to shock and disturb readers unfamiliar (as many will be) with the centrality and antiquity of jihad in Islamic doctrine. Why did you choose the painting you did? To what extent is the event depicted there a pattern for how the Islamic religion came to understand itself?

AB: Tedious research lead to a wonderful discovery. In pouring through each written entry from an enormous catalogue of Persian miniatures held by the British Library (via The British Museum), I came across an item entitled, “The Prophet, Ali, and the Companions at the massacre of the prisoners of the Jewish tribe of Beni Kuraizah [Banu Qurayzah].” Three months later when a CD-ROM arrived in the mail, I was ecstatic to learn that the British Library staff had responded to my special request — based only the title of the miniature — and reproduced what turned out to be this striking image.

September 622 C.E. marks a defining event in Islam — the hijra. Muhammad and a coterie of followers (the Muhajirun), persecuted by fellow Banu Quraysh tribesmen who rejected Muhammad’s authenticity as a divine messenger, fled from Mecca to Yathrib, later known as Medina. The Muslim sources described Yathrib as a Jewish city founded by a Palestinian diaspora population which had survived the revolt against the Romans. Distinct from the nomadic Arab tribes, the Jews of the north Arabian peninsula were highly productive oasis farmers. These Jews were eventually joined by itinerant Arab tribes from southern Arabia who settled adjacent to them and transitioned to a sedentary existence.

Following Muhammad’s arrival in Medina, he re-ordered Medinan society, eventually imposing his authority on each tribe. The Jewish tribes were isolated, some were then expelled, and the remainder attacked and exterminated. A consensus Muslim account of the massacre of the Qurayzah — one of the Jewish tribes of Medina — has emerged as conveyed by classical Muslim scholars of hadith (putative utterances and acts of Muhammad, recorded by pious Muslim transmitters), biographers of Muhammad’s life (especially Ibn Ishaq), jurists, and historians. This narrative is summarized as follows: Alleged to have aided the forces of Muhammad’s enemies in violation of a prior pact, the Qurayzah were subsequently isolated and besieged. Twice the Qurayzah made offers to surrender, and depart from their stronghold, leaving behind their land and property. Initially they requested to take one camel load of possessions per person, but when Muhammad refused this request, the Qurayzah asked to be allowed to depart without any property, taking with them only their families. However, Muhammad insisted that the Qurayzah surrender unconditionally and subject themselves to his judgment. Compelled to surrender, the Qurayzah were lead to Medina. The men with their hands pinioned behind their backs, were put in a court, while the women and children were said to have been put into a separate court. A third (and final) appeal for leniency for the Qurayzah was made to Muhammad by their tribal allies the Aus. Muhammad again declined, and instead he appointed as arbiter Sa’ad Mu’adh from the Aus, who soon rendered his concise verdict: the men were to be put to death, the women and children sold into slavery, the spoils to be divided among the Muslims.

W.H.T. Gairdner, the renowned early 20th century scholar of Islam, also relying exclusively upon Muslim sources, highlights the pivotal role that Muhammad himself played in orchestrating the overall events, concluding:

The umpire who gave the fatal decision (Sa’ad) was extravagantly praised by Muhammad. Yet his action was wholly and admittedly due to his lust for personal vengeance on a tribe which had occasioned him a painful wound . . . The arbitration of Sa’ad . . . had been forced on him by Muhammad; for Sa’ad first declined and tried to make Muhammad take the responsibility, but was told “Allah has commanded you to give sentence in their case.” From every point of view therefore the evidence is simply crushing that Muhammad was the ultimate author of this massacre.

In the immediate aftermath of the massacre, the Muslims benefited substantially from the Qurayzah’s assets which they seized as booty. The land and property acquired helped the Muslims gain their economic independence. The military strength of the Muslim community of Medina grew due to the weapons obtained. The captured women and children were sold for horses and more weapons. The Jewish tribe of the Qurayzah ceased to exist.

Abu Yusuf (d. 798), the prominent Hanafi jurist who advised Abbasid Caliph Harun al-Rashid (d. 809), made the following observations about the Qurayzah massacre in his writings on jihad, which highlight how the Qurayzah’s grisly fate became a normative model in Islamic Law:

Whenever the Muslims besiege an enemy stronghold, establish a treaty with the besieged who agree to surrender on certain conditions that will be decided by a delegate, and this man decides that their soldiers are to be executed and their women and children taken prisoner, this decision is lawful. This was the decision of Sa’ad b. Mu’adh in connection with the Banu Qurayzah . . . It is up to the imam to decide what treatment is to be meted out to them and he will choose that which is preferable for religion and for Islam. If he esteems that the execution of the fighting men and the enslavement of their women and children is better for Islam and its followers, then he will act thus, emulating the example of Sa’ad b. Mu’adh.

PC: In a recent speech President Bush insisted that the “ideology” of the terrorists, who “distort the idea of jihad,” is “very different from the religion of Islam” and indeed “exploits Islam to serve a violent, political vision.” In your view, is the President’s assessment sound?

AB: The President’s comments regarding jihad were a profound disappointment. Indeed, such words could have been written and uttered by the most uninformed, or deliberately disingenuous apologists for this devastating institution, which is uniquely Islamic, well over a millennium old, and still wreaking havoc today.

The origins of the Muslim institution of jihad are found in the Qur’an. Sura (chapter) 9 is devoted in its entirety to war proclamations. There we read that the Muslim faithful are to “slay the idolaters wherever you find them. . . . Fight against such as those who have been given the scripture as believe not in Allah. . . . Go forth, light-armed and heavy armed, and strive with your wealth and your lives in the way of Allah. That is best for you, if ye but knew.” From such verses in the Qur’an and in the hadith, Muslim jurists and theologians formulated the Islamic institution of permanent jihad war against non-Muslims to bring the world under Islamic rule (Shari’a law).

The consensus on the nature of jihad from major schools of Islamic jurisprudence is clear. Summarizing this consensus of centuries of Islamic thought, the seminal Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun, who died in 1406, wrote:

In the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty because of the universalism of the mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force. The other religious groups did not have a universal mission, and the holy war was not a religious duty for them, save only for purposes of defense.

Only Islam, Ibn Khaldun added, “is under obligation to gain power over other nations.”

Muhammad himself waged a series of proto-jihad campaigns to subdue the Jews, Christians and pagans of Arabia. For example, within a year after the massacre of the Banu Qurayzah, referred to earlier, Muhammad, according to a summary of sacralized Muslim sources,

. . . waited for some act of aggression on the part of the Jews of Khaybar, whose fertile lands and villages he had destined for his followers . . . to furnish an excuse for an attack. But, no such opportunity offering, he resolved in the autumn of this year [i.e., 628], on a sudden and unprovoked invasion of their territory.

Ali (later, the fourth “Rightly Guided Caliph”, and especially revered by Shi’ite Muslims) asked Muhammad why the Jews of Khaybar were being attacked, since they were peaceful farmers, tending their oasis, and was told by Muhammad he must compel them to submit to Islamic Law.

The renowned early 20th century scholar of Islam, David Margoliouth, observed aptly: “Now the fact that a community was idolatrous, or Jewish, or anything but Mohammedan, warranted a murderous attack upon it.”

Within two years of Muhammad’s death, Abu Bakr, the first Caliph, launched the Great Jihad. The ensuing three decades witnessed Islam’s most spectacular expansion, as Muslim armies subdued the entire Arabian peninsula, and conquered territories which had been in Greco-Roman possession since the reign of Alexander the Great.

The essential pattern of the jihad war is captured in the classical Muslim historian al-Tabari’s recording of the recommendation given by Umar b. al-Khattab (the second “Rightly Guided Caliph”) to the commander of the troops he sent to al-Basrah (636 C.E.), during the conquest of Iraq. Umar reportedly said:

Summon the people to God; those who respond to your call, accept it from them, (This is to say, accept their conversion as genuine and refrain from fighting them) but those who refuse must pay the poll tax out of humiliation and lowliness. (Qur’an 9:29) If they refuse this, it is the sword without leniency. Fear God with regard to what you have been entrusted.

By the time of al-Tabari’s death in 923, jihad wars had expanded the Muslim empire from Portugal to the Indian subcontinent. Subsequent Muslim conquests continued in Asia, as well as Eastern Europe. The Christian kingdoms of Armenia, Byzantium, Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia, and Albania, in addition to parts of Poland and Hungary, were also conquered and Islamized. Arab Muslim invaders engaged, additionally, in continuous jihad raids that ravaged and enslaved Sub-Saharan African animist populations, extending to the southern Sudan. When the Muslim armies were stopped at the gates of Vienna in 1683, over a millennium of jihad had occurred. These tremendous military successes spawned a triumphalist jihad literature. Muslim historians recorded in detail the number of infidels slaughtered, or enslaved and deported, the cities and villages which were pillaged, and the lands, treasure, and movable goods seized. Christian (Coptic, Armenian, Jacobite, Greek, Slav, etc.), as well as Hebrew sources, and even the scant Hindu and Buddhist writings which survived the ravages of the Muslim conquests, independently validate this narrative, and complement the Muslim perspective by providing testimonies of the suffering of the non-Muslim victims of jihad wars.

It is the consensus view of orthodox Islamic jurisprudence regarding jihad, since its formulation during the 8th and 9th centuries, through the current era, that non-Muslims peacefully going about their lives — from the Khaybar farmers whom Muhammad ordered attacked in 628, to those sitting in the World Trade Center on 9/11/01 — are muba’a in the Dar ul Harb. And these innocent non-combatants can be killed, and have always been killed, with impunity simply by virtue of being “harbis” during endless razzias or full scale jihad campaigns that have occurred continuously since the time of Muhammad, through the present. This is the crux of the institutionalized ideology that we are fighting, i.e., jihad, notwithstanding President Bush’s unfortunate public mischaracterization.

PC: The term dhimmitude has entered general parlance in many intellectual circles, due in large part to the work of Bat Ye'or. You rely on it in your book as well. Can you give us a description of its genesis and development?

AB: In The Laws of Islamic Governance al-Mawardi (d. 1058), a renowned jurist of Baghdad, examined the regulations pertaining to the lands and infidel (i.e., non-Muslim) populations subjugated by jihad. This is the origin of the system of dhimmitude. The native infidel population had to recognize Islamic ownership of their land, submit to Islamic law, and accept payment of the poll tax (jizya). al-Mawardi highlights the most significant aspect of this consensus view of the jizya in classical Islamic jurisprudence: the critical connection between jihad and payment of the jizya. He notes that “The enemy makes a payment in return for peace and reconciliation.” Al-Mawardi then distinguishes two cases: (I) Payment is made immediately and is treated like booty, however “it does, however, not prevent a jihad being carried out against them in the future.” (II). Payment is made yearly and will “constitute an ongoing tribute by which their security is established.” Reconciliation and security last as long as the payment is made. If the payment ceases, then the jihad resumes. A treaty of reconciliation may be renewable, but must not exceed 10 years. In the chapter “The Division of the Fay and the Ghaneemah” (booty), al- Mawardi examines the regulations pertaining to the land taken from the infidels. With regard to land taken through treaty, specifically, he indicates two possibilities: either the infidels convert or they pay the jizya and their life and belongings are protected. And the nature of such “protection” is clarified in this definition of jizya by the respected Arabic lexicographer, E.W. Lane, based on a careful analysis of the etymology of the term:

The tax that is taken from the free non-Muslim subjects of a Muslim government whereby they ratify the compact that assures them protection, as though it were compensation for not being slain

Another important aspect of the jizya is the widely upheld view of the classical schools of Islamic jurisprudence about the deliberately humiliating imposition and procurement of this tax. Here is a discussion of the ceremonial for collection of the jizya by the 13th century Shafi’i jurist an-Nawawi:

The infidel who wishes to pay his poll tax must be treated with disdain by the collector: the collector remains seated and the infidel remains standing in front of him, his head bowed and his back bent. The infidel personally must place the money on the scales, while the collector holds him by the beard, and strikes him on both cheeks.

Two remarkable accounts demonstrate the humiliating conditions under which the jizya was still being collected within the modern era. An Italian Jew traveling in Morocco in 1894, reported the following:

The kaid Uwida and the kadi Mawlay Mustafa had mounted their tent today near the Mellah [Jewish ghetto] gate and had summoned the Jews in order to collect from them the poll tax [jizya] which they are obliged to pay the sultan. They had me summoned also. I first inquired whether those who were European-protected subjects had to pay this tax. Having learned that a great many of them had already paid it, I wished to do likewise. After having remitted the amount of the tax to the two officials, I received from the kadi’s guard two blows in the back of the neck. Addressing the kadi and the kaid, I said “Know that I am an Italian protected subject.” Whereupon the kadi said to his guard: “Remove the kerchief covering his head and strike him strongly; he can then go and complain wherever he wants.” The guards hastily obeyed and struck me once again more violently. This public mistreatment of a European-protected subject demonstrates to all the Arabs that they can, with impunity, mistreat the Jews.

And in a letter from January 30, 1911 by Avram Elmaleh, Head of the Fez boys' school, to the President of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, Paris, we learn the degrading conditions imposed upon the rabbinical leaders of the Moroccan Jewish community, in connection with “community business” (i.e., such as payment of the jizya), even into the second decade of the 20th century:

I have the honor to acknowledge receipt of your letter No. 1283 of 30 January, enclosing a letter from Rabbi Vidal Sarfaty. The rabbi asks you to intervene with Si Mohamed el Mokri, the Moroccan Minister of Foreign Affairs, at present in Paris, for the abolition of the degrading custom imposed on Jews, not to enter Dar el Maghzen except barefoot. Unfortunately, the facts given in Rabbi Vidal's letter are correct. Jews must take off their shoes at the gate of Dar-Maghzen. Quite apart from the humiliation involved in this measure, it is an intolerable suffering for our co-religionists to be obliged to stand many hours barefoot on the earth of the Palace courtyard, which is either cold and damp or white-hot from the summer sun. Rabbi Vidal. a regular visitor to the Dar-Maghzen in connection with community business or on behalf of individuals, has often returned ill from a rather too long sojourn in front of the offices. It is my opinion that it would be impossible to obtain an order from the Sultan to allow Jews to enter the Palace with their shoes on. It is a concession which his pride would not permit, and one quite contrary to the Muslim conception of the relative positions of the Jews and themselves.

The “contract of the jizya,” or “dhimma” encompassed other obligatory and recommended obligations for the conquered non-Muslim “dhimmi” peoples. Collectively, these “obligations” formed the discriminatory system of dhimmitude imposed upon non-Muslims-Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, Hindus, and Buddhists-subjugated by jihad. Some of the more salient features of dhimmitude include: the prohibition of arms for the vanquished non-Muslims (dhimmis), and of church bells; restrictions concerning the building and restoration of churches, synagogues, and temples; inequality between Muslims and non-Muslims with regard to taxes and penal law; the refusal of dhimmi testimony by Muslim courts; a requirement that Jews, Christians, and other non-Muslims, including Zoroastrians and Hindus, wear special clothes; and the overall humiliation and abasement of non-Muslims. It is important to note that these regulations and attitudes were institutionalized as permanent features of the sacred Islamic law, or Shari' a. The writings of the much lionized Sufi theologian and jurist al-Ghazali highlight how the institution of dhimmitude was simply a normative, and prominent feature of the Shari'a:

The dhimmi is obliged not to mention Allah or His Apostle.. .Jews, Christians, and Majians must pay the jizya [poll tax on non-Muslims]...on offering up the jizya, the dhimmi must hang his head while the official takes hold of his beard and hits [the dhimmt] on the protruberant bone beneath his ear [i.e., the mandible]... They are not permitted to ostentatiously display their wine or church bells...their houses may not be higher than the Muslim's, no matter how low that is. The dhimmi may not ride an elegant horse or mule; he may ride a donkey only if the saddler-work] is of wood. He may not walk on the good part of the road. They [the dhimmis] have to wear [an identifying] patch [on their clothing], even women, and even in the [public] baths...[dhimmis] must hold their tongue.

Bat Ye’or is the most informed and insightful contemporary scholar of those unique Islamic institutions which regulate the relations between Muslims and non-Muslims: jihad, and its corollary institution, dhimmitude, the repressive and humiliating system of governance imposed upon those non-Muslims (i.e., dhimmis) subjugated by jihad. Although she coined the term dhimmitude, Bat Ye’or’s characterization of the salient features of this institution is entirely consistent with the views of important scholars from the early 20th century, for example, Sir Jadunath Sarkar, and Ivo Andric. Sarkar, the pre-eminent historian of Mughal India, wrote the following in 1920 regarding the impact of centuries of jihad and dhimmitude on the indigenous Hindus of the Indian subcontinent:

Islamic theology, therefore tells the true believer that his highest duty is to make “exertion (jihad) in the path of God,” by waging war against infidel lands (dar-ul-harb) till they become part of the realm of Islam (dar-ul-Islam) and their populations are converted into true believers. After conquest the entire infidel population becomes theoretically reduced to the status of slaves of the conquering army. The men taken with arms are to be slain or sold into slavery and their wives and children reduced to servitude. As for the non-combatants among the vanquished, if they are not massacred outright — as the canon lawyer Shaf’i declares to be the Qur’anic injunction — it is only to give them a respite till they are so wisely guided as to accept the true faith.
The conversion of the entire population to Islam and the extinction of every form of dissent is the ideal of the Muslim State. If any infidel is suffered to exist in the community, it is as a necessary evil, and for a transitional period only. Political and social disabilities must be imposed on him, and bribes offered to him from the public funds, to hasten the day of his spiritual enlightenment and the addition of his name to the roll of true believers [. . .]
A non-Muslim therefore cannot be a citizen of the State; he is a member of a depressed class; his status is a modified form of slavery. He lives under a contract (“zimma,” or “dhimma”) with the State: for the life and property grudgingly spared to him by the commander of the faithful he must undergo political and social disabilities, and pay a commutation money. In short, his continued existence in the State after the conquest of his country by the Muslims is conditional upon his person and property made subservient to the cause of Islam.
As the learned Qazi Mughis-ud-din declared, in accordance with the teachings of the books on Canon Law: “The Hindus are designated in the Law as ‘payers of tribute’ (kharaj-guzar); and when the revenue officer demands silver from them, they should, without question and with all humility and respect, tender gold. If the officer throws dirt into their mouths, they must without reluctance open their mouths wide to receive it. By these acts of degradation are shown the extreme obedience of the dhimmi, the glorification of the true faith of Islam, and the abasement of false faiths. God himself orders them to be humiliated, (as He says, ‘till they pay jaziya’) with the hand and are humbled…The Prophet has commanded us to slay them, plunder them, and make them captive . . . No other religious authority except the great Imam (Hanifa) whose faith we follow, has sanctioned the imposition of jaziya on Hindus. According to all other theologians, the rule for Hindus is ‘Either death or Islam’.”
The dhimmi is under certain legal disabilities with regard to testimony in law courts, protection under criminal law, and in marriage…he cannot erect new temples, and has to avoid any offensive publicity in the exercise of his worship . . . Every device short of massacre in cold blood was resorted to in order to convert heathen subjects. In addition to the poll-tax and public degradation in dress and demeanor imposed on them, the non-Muslims were subjected to various hopes and fears. Rewards in the form of money and public employment were offered to apostates from Hinduism. The leaders of Hindu religion and society were systematically repressed, to deprive the sect of spiritual instruction, and their religious gatherings and processions were forbidden in order to prevent the growth of solidarity and sense of communal strength among them. No new temple was allowed to be built nor any old one to be repaired, so that the total disappearance of Hindu worship was to be merely a question of time. But even this delay, this slow operation of Time, was intolerable to many of the more fiery spirits of Islam, who tried to hasten the abolition of “infidelity” by anticipating the destructive hand of Time and forcibly pulling down temples.
When a class are publicly depressed and harassed by law and executive caprice alike, they merely content themselves with dragging on an animal existence. With every generous instinct of the soul crushed out of them, the intellectual culture merely adding a keen edge to their sense of humiliation, the Hindus could not be expected to produce the utmost of which they were capable; their lot was to be hewers of wood and drawers of water to their masters, to bring grist to the fiscal mill, to develop a low cunning and flattery as the only means of saving what they could of their own labor. Amidst such social conditions, the human hand and the human spirit cannot achieve their best; the human soul cannot soar to its highest pitch. The barrenness of intellect and meanness of spirit of the Hindu upper classes are the greatest condemnation of Muhammadan rule in India. The Muhammadan political tree judged by its fruit was an utter failure.

Andric, a trained historian and Nobel Prize winning historical novelist, analyzed the “rayah” (meaning “herd”, and “to graze a herd”) or dhimmi condition imposed upon the indigenous Christian population of Bosnia, for over four centuries. Those native Christian inhabitants who refused to apostasize to Islam lived under the Ottoman Kanun-i-Rayah, which merely reiterated the essential regulations of dhimmitude originally formulated by Muslim jurists and theologians in the 7th and 8th centuries. Andric mustered

a wealth of irrefutable evidence that the main points of the Kanun, just those that cut the deepest into the moral and economic life of Christians, remained in full force right up to the end of Turkish rule and as long as the Turks had the power to apply them…[thus] it was inevitable that the rayah decline to a status that was economically inferior and dependent.

Andric cites a Bosnian Muslim proverb, and a song honoring Sultan Bayezid II, whose shared perspectives reflect Muslim attitudes toward the Christian rayahs:

The rayah is like the grass Mow it as much as you will, still it springs up anew
Once you’d broken Bosnia’s horns
You mowed down what would not be pruned
Leaving only the riffraff behind
So there’d be someone left to serve us and grieve before the cross

These prevailing discriminatory conditions were exacerbated by Bosnia’s serving as either a battlefield or staging ground during two centuries of Ottoman razzias and formal jihad campaigns against Hungary. Overcome by excessive taxation and conscript labor,

Christians therefore began to abandon their houses and plots of land situated in level country and along the roads and to retreat back into the mountains. And as they did so, moving ever higher into inaccessible regions, Muslims took over their former sites.

Moreover, those Christians living in towns suffered from the rayah system’s mandated impediments to commercial advancement by non-Muslims:

Islam from the very outset, excluded such activities as making wine, breeding pigs, and selling pork products from commercial production and trade. But additionally Bosnian Christians were forbidden to be saddlers, tanners, or candlemakers or to trade in honey, butter, and certain other items. Countrywide, the only legal market day was Sunday. Christians were thus deliberately faced with the choice between ignoring the precepts of their religion, keeping their shops open and working on Sundays, or alternatively, forgoing participation in the market and suffering material loss thereby. Even in 1850, in Jukic’s “Wishes and Entreaties” we find him beseeching “his Imperial grace” to put an end to the regulation that Sunday be market day.

Christians were also forced to pay disproportionately higher taxes than Muslims, including the intentionally degrading non-Muslim poll-tax.

This tax was paid by every non-Muslim male who had passed his fourteenth year, at the rate of a ducat per annum. But since Turkey had never known birth registers, the functionary whose job it was to exact the tax measured the head and neck of each boy with a piece of string and judged from that whether a person had arrived at a taxable age or not. Starting as an abuse that soon turned into an ingrained habit, then finally established custom, by the last century of Turkish rule every boy without distinction found himself summoned to pay the head tax. And it would seem this was not the only abuse…Of Ali-Pasa Stocevic, who during the first half of the nineteenth century was vizier and all but unlimited ruler of Herzegovina, his contemporary, the monk Prokopije Cokorilo, wrote that he “taxed the dead for six years after their demise” and that his tax collectors “ran their fingers over the bellies of pregnant women, saying ‘you will probably have a boy, so you have to pay the poll tax right away . . . The following folk saying from Bosnia reveals how taxes were exacted: “He’s as fat as if he’d been tax collecting in Bosnia.”

The specific Kanun-i-Rayah stipulations which prohibited the rayahs from riding a saddled horse, carrying a saber or any other weapon in or out of doors, selling wine, letting their hair grow, or wearing wide sashes, were strictly enforced until the mid-19th century. Hussamudin-Pasa, in 1794 issued an ordinance which prescribed the exact color and type of clothing the Bosnian rayah had to wear. Barbers were prohibited from shaving Muslims with the same razors used for Christians. Even in bathhouses, Christians were required to have specifically marked towels and aprons to avoid confusing their laundry with laundry designated for Muslims. Until at least 1850, and in some parts of Bosnia, well into the 1860s, a Christian upon encountering a Muslim, was required to jump down from his (unsaddled) horse, move to the side of the road, and wait for the latter to pass.

Christianity’s loud and most arresting symbol, church bells, Andric notes, always drew close, disapproving Turkish scrutiny, and, “Wherever there invasions would go, down came the bells, to be destroyed or melted into cannon.” Predictably,

Until the second half of the nineteenth century, “nobody in Bosnia could even think of bells or bell towers.” Only in 1860 did the Sarajevo priest Fra Grgo Martic manage to get permission from Topal Osman-Pasa to hang a bell at the church in Kresevo. Permission was granted, thought, only on condition that “at first the bell be rung softly to let the Turks get accustomed to it little by little”. And still the Muslim of Kresevo were complaining, even in 1875, to Sarajevo that “the Turkish ear and ringing bells cannot coexist in the same place at the same time”; and Muslim women would beat on their copper pots to drown out the noise…on 30 April 1872, the new Serbian Orthodox church also got a bell. But since the . . . Muslims had threatened to riot, the military had to be called in to ensure that the ceremony might proceed undisturbed.

The imposition of such disabilities, Andric observes, extended beyond church ceremonies, as reflected by a 1794 proclamation of the Serbian Orthodox church in Sarajevo warning Christians not to

sing during . . . outings, nor in their houses, nor in other places. The saying “Don’t sing too loud, this village is Turk” testifies eloquently to the fact that this item of the Kanun [-i-Rayah] was applied outside church life as well as within.

Andric concludes, “For their Christian subjects, their [Ottoman Turkish] hegemony brutalized custom and meant a step to the rear in every respect.”

The degrading and discriminatory system of dhimmitude has never been acknowledged let alone condemned by either the governments, or elites of the (more than 50) contemporary member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. Thus, not surprisingly, dhimmitude has survived into the present era, wholly intact in the most repressive Muslim theocracies like (Sunni) Saudi Arabia and (Shi’ite) Iran, but also at least as a forme fruste, in every other Islamic nation. As a result, religious persecution against non-Muslim minorities remains endemic to Islamic societies, on an unparalleled scale.

PC: Given the nature of Islam as laid out by the Islamic authorities you have quoted, what is a Western policy toward Islam, including the sensitive issue of Muslim immigration to the West, consistent with these Islamic realities?

AB: I agree with the thrust of what Dr. Raphael Israeli described in his seminal analysis of modern jihad terrorism published in 2003. He proposes the creation of an Alliance of Western and Democratic States (AWADS), consisting of a nucleus of the United States, Canada, Australia, and Western Europe (and these core nations can sponsor other countries proven to conform to its rules and standards, for example, India), with the following six avowed “rules of engagement”:

Strict control of immigration from Muslim countries without reliance on the "efforts" of the countries of origin, who have shown neither the will nor the means to stop this massive flow, much of it already illegal. This policy should include interception and routine unceremonious repatriation of the illegal immigrants themselves, and expulsion from AWADS nations of those who assist them.
Reciprocal arrangements for controlled immigration, tourism and educational exchanges between Muslim countries and AWADS nations to guarantee equivalent, unimpeded bilateral flow — Muslim nationals to AWADS, AWADS nationals to Muslim countries — devoid of characteristic Muslim discriminatory regulations towards other races, faiths, or nationalities.
Rendering various forms of economic, technical/infrastructural, health, agricultural, and educational assistance by AWADS to Muslim countries contingent upon basic conditions met by the applicants, including: accountability; progress in human rights; meaningful efforts at population control; renunciation of force/violence in dealing with other nations/communities; and monitoring and controlling incitement to hatred and violence in mosques and media outlets.
Terminating all military assistance and weapons sales by AWADS to non-member states, supplemented by a policy that any weapons-manufacturing third party which sells or transfers weapons to those regimes will itself forfeit the right to deal with AWADS members.
Mosque construction, as well as the building of other Muslim institutions in AWADS nations, particularly projects funded by Saudi Arabia, will be contingent upon reciprocal arrangements to construct religious institutions for other faiths in Muslim nations, including each country situated on the Arabian peninsula, and the binding commitment by all parties — AWADS and non-members of AWADS — that no incitement or hatred will be propagated in any of these religious institutions.
The importation into AWADS nations from Muslim countries of cultural commodities and assets — books, movies, art shows and exhibits, performing arts groups, clerics and missionaries, print media or audio/video tapes — must also be reciprocal, contingent upon the unrestricted flow of similar AWADS assets into Muslim countries- and all such assets will be required by law to be devoid of messages that disseminate hate.

PC: Given the resistance among Americans to anything that smacks of discrimination, what steps might we take to emasculate the doctrine of jihad?

AB: Fifteen years ago (September, 1990), Bat Ye’or made these prescient observations regarding what needed to be done by the Muslim leadership and clerical and intellectual elites to initiate an Islamic version of Vatican II, a sort of “Mecca-Cairo-Qom-Najaf One (I)” self-examination, mea culpa, and reform process:

This effort cannot succeed without a complete recasting of mentalities, the desacralization of the historic jihad and an unbiased examination of Islamic imperialism. Without such a process, the past will continue to poison the present and inhibit the establishment of harmonious relationships. When all is said and done, such self-criticism is hardly exceptional. Every scourge, such as religious fanaticism, the crusades, the inquisition, slavery, apartheid, colonialism, Nazism and, today, communism, are analyzed, examined, and exorcized in the West. Even Judaism — harmless in comparison with the power of the Church and the Christian empires — caught, in its turn, in the great modernization movement, has been forced to break away from some traditions. It is inconceivable that Islam, which began in Mecca and swept through three continents, should alone avoid a critical reflection on the mechanisms of its power and expansion. The task of assessing their history must be undertaken by the Muslims themselves . . . There is room to hope that the ending of the contentious dhimmi past will open the way to harmonization of the whole human family.

Sadly, a decade and one half later, most Muslim (and many Western) intellectuals continue to justify the concept of jihad as an inoffensive spiritual engagement with one’s own evil instincts, or purely “defensive” combat for “justice,” and dhimmitude is still completely denied, ignored or obfuscated. Therefore non-Muslims of all kinds who have been victimized and continue to be victimized by these heinous Muslim institutions must abandon their silence and be encouraged to describe this history openly in the hope that this process will elicit a sincere movement of acknowledgement, reform, and reconciliation within the world Muslim community. Admittedly, we seem generations away from such an overall process now. Thus in the interim, those preaching the bigoted and murderous doctrines of jihad within the West should be deported. Moreover, we in the West must press our political and religious leaders to demand that such bellicose, hate-mongering “educational” practices be abolished in all Islamic nations, without exception, under threat of severe, broad ranging economic sanctions.

PC: Thank you for your time, Dr. Bostom.

2005-10-14T11:03:00.000-04:00

A fellow Redstate Editor, who goes by the pen-name Streiff, has given some thought to the implications of the Zawahiri letter, and his analysis, while cautious, is encouraging.

Ayman al-Zawahiri isn’t calling the shots in Iraq and it doesn’t look like he’s calling them anywhere else.
In July or August, US forces intercepted a letter from Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, erstwhile second-in-command and philosopher-in-residence of al-Qaeda to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda’s emir of Iraq.
The message that virtually screams from the pages of the letter is that al-Qaeda, as the organization existed in 2001, is either finished or very close to being finished.

There is some question about the authenticity of the letter. But even if it is a fake, one is inclined to wonder whether it is a “good” fake. Few things are more important than disturbing the confidence and equanimity of the enemy, of making him doubt his allies and question his means. The psychological character of this war should not be dismissed.

2005-10-13T21:40:00.000-04:00

The fine publishing house Liberty Fund generously sent me another of its handsome volumes. Liberty, Order and Justice by James McClellan. In my own opinion, and quite aside from the formidable fact that virtually everything published by Liberty Fund is worth reckoning, the aesthetic quality of these books is quite unparalleled in modern publishing. They are simply a pleasure to read. Rarely, however, are they particular easy to read; for Liberty Fund is not afraid to bring out something that will work the reader hard — by which I emphatically do not mean the sort of fabricated hard work that our brassbound literature professors, in their pompous obscurity, have been foisting on unsuspecting students for the last twenty-five years, but rather the kind of serious and exhilarating hard work that serious books once demanded, and occasionally still demand, of readers.

But I mention all this in order to take note of the quotation that greets the reader upon opening this book:

“Miracles do not cluster. Hold on to the Constitution of the United States of America and the republic for which it stands. — What has happened once in six thousand years may never happen again. Hold on to your Constitution, for if the American Constitution shall fail there will be anarchy throughout the world.”
Daniel Webster

Now that, friends, is the way to open a book on American government.

This reminded me, by one of those strange indescribable flashes of memory, of the prefatory note that the historian Paul Johnson appended to his grand book A History of the American People:

This book is dedicated to the people of America — strong, outspoken, intense in their convictions, sometimes wrong-headed but always generous and brave, with a passion for justice no nation has ever matched.

It occurs to me that many books have striking and powerful prefatory notices; the sort of thing that really grabs hold of your attention by telling you something at once defiant and reassuring about the book before you. I open this to my readers: Do you have any other examples? Leave a comment or email me and I’ll post them.

2005-10-13T11:15:00.000-04:00

My reply to the next GOP fundraising letter I receive: link.

2005-10-12T09:16:00.000-04:00

There is, I suppose, some hope in the analysis of this article. That there is evident dissension among the ranks of the jihadists is cause for, if not optimism, at least a certain satisfaction. We read, for example, of one Abu Baseer al-Tartusi, a Londoner and “major jihadi ideologue,” who has dissented from the dominant position that the massacre of civilians is justified by Islamic doctrine. Well and good. But then we get this:

Arguments can be built on Abu Baseer’s position that suicide attacks inevitably involve the killing of innocent civilians, including Muslims living in the West, and that these are difficult to justify in Islamic law. Rather than expelling him from his asylum in Britain, concerned authorities ought to allow Abu Baseer to remain in Britain and make his case, which amounts to one of the first principled arguments by a jihadi thinker against suicide bombings since 9/11.

In other words, we have one principled dissent from a scholar credible with our enemies in four years.

2005-10-06T14:11:00.000-04:00

A question that all of us on the Right are now wrestling with, and that many of us have been wrestling with for some time, is, Do we trust the leadership of President Bush and the governing coalition he leads? The proximate cause of the new intensity surrounding this question, of course, is the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. I will not rehearse the specifics of the dispute over this nomination (any reader of this website, and a hundred others, will be familiar enough with them), except to say again that it comes down to an issue of trust — trust in its very special application to the political leadership of a republic. The Right has seen its men carried in victory to the highest governing authority in America, has seen its leaders become the nation’s leaders, in politics and to some degree in the vast apparatus of opinion and public discussion surrounding politics, and yet the Right finds itself facing a lacerating question: Can we still trust them?

This question is one of no mean importance, nor is it one that admits of facile solution. It is, indeed, a reformulation in contemporary terms of one of the most basic and ancient of the political problems confronting mankind. It is the problem of patriotic allegiance. All great things — freedom, for instance, or justice — when they enter into human politics become problems. They become elusive and controversial and baffling; they cannot be perfected or perfectly preserved; yet neither can they ever be abandoned. They are problems: this one is among the greatest. And I think much of the passion and even ferocity of the debate over the President’s Supreme Court nomination can be better understood, and hopefully mitigated, when we recognize that the debate has managed to implicate the much larger problem of patriotic allegiance.

Now let us have no illusions about the terrible weight suggested by that phrase, “patriotic allegiance”: If we begin from the premise that no earthly leader can possibly fulfill the longings for true Leadership which lie within the hearts of all men, then we can quickly reason to a tremendous and likely insoluble dilemma. The problem of patriotism must always take into account the particular character of the leadership of the nation; and the answer it will give must always descend to the final prudence and judgment of the citizen. The citizen, having thought deeply about the quality and integrity of his nation, and in that context, the leadership of his nation, is called upon to decide for himself lineaments of his allegiance. It cannot be that his nation commands his allegiance absolutely; I think everyone will recognize that a patriotism which knows no moral limits is fanaticism. Patriotism is not the highest good. Thus the problem can be put this way: How does the citizen ultimately balance his loyalty to his city, his nation, his country, his homeland, with his loyalty to a transcendent order of justice?

At the very heart of the predicament of this nation — a predicament characteristic of all the Western world — is the firm resolution of many citizens, unspoken and unexamined though it may often be, that the balance is settled against their country; that, in short, their country has departed so far from obligations of justice that patriotic allegiance is no longer defensible. This resolution, I fear, very often rests on one of two dreadful blunders, the first about the nature of man, the second not so much a blunder as a derangement: (1) Many have implicitly imbibed that blunder which, imagining that man and society are perfectible, goes by the name utopianism. (2) Still more have fallen under a kind of displacement psychosis, where a single man (Bush) becomes the foil for all their burning resentments and bitter disappointment about their country. Led by these two blunders — and of course some are influenced by not one or the other but both — men have resolved that America is unworthy of allegiance, except in the most nebulous regions of abstraction. The resolution, moreover, is seldom uttered openly but rather whispered or hinted, or clung to in brooding silence; and being concealed and suppressed, it is all the more poisonous. But beyond any doubt a significant minority of Americans have given up on their country; they no longer love her, because for them she is no longer lovable. They are predominantly but not exclusively men of the Left, and while their sincerity is not to be suspected, their good faith is.

Whatever we may think of these poor souls — and most of us, let us say candidly, are horrified and disgusted by them — it cannot be said that the dilemma which broke them as patriots, the principled dilemma of allegiance, is easily dismissed. No indeed: we can see it ourselves, off in the distance, looming as it has over the human condition since the beginning; and now aggravated by a crushing disappointment on a matter of the profoundest gravity. We do not share our opponents’ confusion of the character of the nation with the character of its leadership, do not, in brief, allow President Bush to become a stand-in for all that we despise in our country; but we do emphatically share their dilemma. We do emphatically know, (1) that a good patriot might be forced to choose for his country even at the expense of the leader who seems to speak for her; and (2), off at the end, that the good man might be forced to choose between allegiance to his native land and loyalty to natural right. We do emphatically sense that oldest of conflicts between politics and philosophy.

To bring this discussion — which threatens by my own hand to race off into bewildering abstractions — back down to earth, I will set down four propositions. (1) The United States Supreme Court has established itself as the final constitutional authority on a great swath of the most perplexing and difficult issues before us. (2) Everybody realizes this and thus the nomination and confirmation of a new justice to the Court has become a principal drama in our political life. (3) This drama must, if we are to remain a republic, include not merely the influence, but the decisive influence of the sovereign people. (4) If it does not — if, that is, the people are removed from the position of sovereign, then a great many of the discerning among them will find themselves, almost against their will, forced to wrestle with that old and pulverizing question of allegiance: They will be forced to wonder whether a republic that is no longer a republic merits full loyalty; whether an illegitimate aristocracy of attorneys is a regime deserving of reverence; whether the usurpation of republican politics by the judiciary shall be allowed to continue with the acquiescence of both parties.

By no means do I say that President Bush precipitated this crisis alone by his nomination. Nothing could be further from the truth. The crisis has been growing on us like a cancer for forty years at least. It might even be that the possibility for this unique doom was unknowingly embedded in the very framework of our constitution as a people. Whatever be the truth, there can be little doubt that we will continue to have crises akin to this one so long as we suffer the Supreme Court to be our final authority on matters of great importance.

2005-10-03T13:16:00.000-04:00

National Review reprints its obituary for Tolkien, now thirty years old.

2005-10-03T08:18:00.000-04:00

And essay of mine appears in the current issue of the fine magazine Touchstone. “Mammon’s Mastery,” they have entitled it. But it’s not online. You’ll have to subscribe to read it.

2005-09-29T14:15:00.000-04:00

This remarkable Los Angeles Times article gives the reader a sense of the haphazard process that gave us that unspeakable usurpation Roe v. Wade. A most revealing report — and depressing.

2005-09-22T09:05:00.000-04:00

I have long been disdainful of the fashionable argument that formulates the problem of Islam almost exclusively in the terms of modern Western radicalism: the “Islamofascism” argument, in the shorthand of the day. This not so much because I doubt that Western radicalism has had an impact on the Mohammedan religion — Western radicalism has been so potent and demonic a force that is it difficult to imagine anything untouched by its hideous strength — but because I think it ultimately obscures more than it illuminates. It obscures difficult history by interposing a more familiar ideological narrative. Most perilously it prevents a full appreciation of the antiquity and permanence of jihad in the Islamic mind and civilization. Since the religion was founded, a fierce insistence on not merely the obligation, but also the piety of conquest has distinguished it. War is justly provoked not, as the Western tradition has always in principle maintained, by aggression, or, as the Western tradition has usually practiced, by interest, but by unbelief. To reject the revelation of Mohammed is to make oneself the just object of war, subjugation and even death.

Nevertheless, Western political radicalism has indeed added its own feverish energy to this incendiary doctrine. David G. Dalin’s essay, “Hitler’s Mufti,” in the last number of First Things, is a fine example.

It is possible to trace modern Islamic anti-Semitism back along a number of different historical and intellectual threads, but, no matter which one you choose, they all seem to pass, at one point or another, through the hands of one figure—Hitler’s mufti, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the viciously anti-Semitic grand mufti of Jerusalem and the leader of Muslim fundamentalists in Palestine, who resided in Berlin as a welcome guest of the Nazis throughout the years of the Holocaust. [. . .]
Then, in the early 1930s, al-Husseini began to make overtures to the new Nazi government of Germany. The alliance between Adolf Hitler and the Muslim fundamentalist world was initiated and forged by the grand mufti at the very beginning of the new Nazi regime. In late March 1933, al-Husseini contacted the German consul general in Jerusalem and requested German help in eliminating Jewish settlements in Palestine—offering, in exchange, a pan-Islamic jihad in alliance with Germany against Jews around the world. It was not until 1938, in the aftermath of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s infamous capitulation to Hitler at Munich, that Hajj Amin al-Husseini’s overtures to Nazi Germany were officially reciprocated, but by then the influence of Nazi ideology had already grown significantly throughout the Arab Middle East.

We are not talking here about admiration from afar, a kind of sick intellectual crush. No — far worse than that:

There is also evidence the mufti advised and assisted his German hosts in the destruction of European Jewry. His importance “must not be disregarded,” insisted Adolf Eichmann’s deputy Dieter Wisliceny in 1941. “The Mufti had repeatedly suggested to the various authorities with whom he was maintaining contact, above all to Hitler, Ribbentrop, and Himmler, the extermination of European Jewry.” At the Nuremberg Trials, Wisliceny was even more explicit: “The mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and adviser of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of this plan. He was one of Eichmann’s best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures. I heard him say that, accompanied by Eichmann, he had visited incognito the gas chamber of Auschwitz.” On this visit to Auschwitz, al-Husseini reportedly “admonished the guards running the gas chambers to work more diligently.”
In 1943 al-Husseini traveled several times to Bosnia, where he helped recruit a Bosnian Muslim S.S. company, the notorious “Hanjar troopers,” who slaughtered 90 percent of Bosnia’s Jews and burned “countless Serbian churches and villages.” Throughout World War II, al-Husseini preached regularly on radio broadcasts to the Middle East. On November 2, 1943, less than three weeks after the initial Nazi roundup of Roman Jews and the beginning of the Nazi occupation of the Italian capital, he used German radio to broadcast one of his most virulently anti-Semitic messages: “The overwhelming egoism which lies in the character of Jews, their unworthy belief that they are God’s chosen nation and their assertion that all was created for them and that other people are animals” makes them “incapable of being trusted. They cannot mix with any other nation but live as parasites among the nations, suck out their blood, embezzle their property, corrupt their morals.” “Kill the Jews wherever you find them,” the Mufti told his growing Arab radio audience in 1944. “This pleases God, history, and religion.”

We learn also that al-Husseini was a much beloved hero among the early leadership of the PLO, including the late Yasser Arafat, who described him as recently as 2002 as “our hero al-Husseini.”

Such viciousness — an import of the darkest dreams of Western nihilism into the heart of the Islamic world — should not go unnoticed as we endeavor to look hard upon our enemies and see them for what they are; but neither should we allow it, in its familiarity, to blind us to the older strains of strife and ruin inherent in Islam proper.

2005-09-21T12:24:00.000-04:00

The intrepid Jeff Culbreath delivers a rousing defense of traditionalism. Well said, friend.

2005-09-20T09:55:00.000-04:00

The subsequent reporting on the conditions in the New Orleans convention center after the hurricane has demonstrated that it was worse than we thought. The New York Times reported:

While those entering the Superdome had been searched for weapons, there was no time to take similar precautions at the convention center, which took in a volatile mix of poor residents, well-to-do hotel guests and hospital workers and patients. Gunfire became so routine that large SWAT teams had to storm the place nearly every night.

Capt. [Jeffrey] Winn [of the SWAT team] said armed groups of 15 to 25 men terrorized the others, stealing cash and jewelry. He said policemen patrolling the center told him that a number of women had been dragged off by groups of men and gang-raped — and that murders were occurring.

“We had a situation where the lambs were trapped with the lions,” Mr. Compass said. “And we essentially had to become the lion tamers.”

Capt. Winn said the armed groups even sealed the police out of two of the center’s six halls, forcing the SWAT team to retake the territory.

The Washington Post, in an equally heartbreaking story of the predatory depravity inflicted on so many innocents by the brutes of the city, reveals that “250 armed troops from the Louisiana National Guard”

were never deployed to restore order and eventually withdrew, despite the pleas of the convention center’s management. Louisiana Guard commanders said their units’ mission was not to secure the facility, and soldiers on the scene feared inciting further bloodshed if they had intervened.

“We didn’t want another Kent State,” said Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, commander of the active-duty military forces responding to Katrina. “They weren’t trained for crowd control.”

No doubt the general speaks truly when he admits this; but let us have no illusions about what is admitted. The invocation of the ghosts of Kent State here is evidence of a mental subjection to the narratives of political correctness — one such narrative being the one that lectures us about all the horrors of allowing the National Guard to quell revolts of the people, even when the “people” consists of thousands of exhausted, demoralized, vulnerable citizens and a handful of delinquents and madmen.

And that, friends, countrymen, is the truth about America; we will let each other die for political correctness. We all run in fear of offending these strange gods we have erected. Thousands of refugees from a savage hurricane and flood — many of them frail, weak, or small — are subjected to unrelenting brutality at the hands of intoxicated thugs right next door to 250 armed National Guardsmen, and the guardsmen do nothing, because their commanders fear that quelling the anarchy might not look good under media scrutiny. It might become inspiration for a bad song.

It is difficult to pass judgment on leaders operating under conditions such as those which we now know prevailed in the NOLA convention center; difficult not least because the penetration of this sickness — political correctness — into our collective psyche is so deep. One is even tempted to follow the haunting analysis of James Burnham, who argued that this ideology (he called it liberalism), is merely the epiphenomenon, so to speak, of our spiritual enervation. We no longer have the will or courage to act with dispatch and confidence, to do what is right and not count the potential cost, so we must explain to ourselves why that is. Liberalism, in Burnham’s view, is the body of ideas constructed and arranged, oftentimes in an implicit manner, to reconcile us to our own decline as a civilization, to make palatable the “terrible, soul-shattering loses, defeats and withdrawals,” to narcotize our affliction, to make death mild when it comes.

The ideology of modern liberalism must be understood as itself one of the expressions of the Western contraction and decline; a kind of epiphenomenon or haze accompanying the march of history; a swan song, a spiritual solace of the same order as the murmuring of a mother to a child who is gravely ill.

Burnham’s book was called Suicide of the West, and what better word is there for a nation that will let its most vulnerable die rather than cross the taboos of a dying ideology?

2005-09-16T11:55:00.000-04:00

This is good news:

WASHINGTON — Planners of a Sept. 11 memorial in rural Pennsylvania plan to alter its crescent-shaped design after critics said it could be seen as a tribute to the hijackers.
U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., and others had called on the Interior Department to reject an advisory commission’s preferred design, titled Crescent of Embrace, saying its arc of maple trees resembled the lunar crescent used as a symbol of Islam.

Of course, the article is unfortunately tinctured with the predictable prejudice that the critics here can only be the darkest of philistines. One is tempted to reply that there is probably some aesthetic sophistication lacking in the spectacle of accomplished architects insensible of the iconography of a red crescent.

But the architect’s statement concerning the matter is tolerably sensible: “It’s a disappointment there is a misinterpretation and a simplistic distortion of this, but if that is a public concern, then that is something we will look to resolve in a way that keeps the essential qualities.” A grudging concession, yes, but at least a concession to the solid fact that a memorial to war dead is not the exclusive province of fashionable architects, or even (contrary to the assumption of many observers) of the families of those who perished. Rather it is the province of all of us — all of us who, being infidels, are on the precepts jihad deserving only of servitude and death.

2005-09-14T09:27:00.000-04:00

The peoples of Europe have been further subjugated by the EU bureaucracy:

BRUSSELS has been given the power to compel British courts to fine or imprison people for breaking EU laws, even if the Government and Parliament are opposed.
An unprecedented ruling yesterday by the supreme court in Europe gives Brussels the power to introduce harmonised criminal law across the EU, creating for the first time a body of European criminal law that all member states must adopt. The judgment by the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg was bitterly fought by 11 EU governments, including Britain, and marks a dramatic transfer of power from national capitals to Brussels.

The President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, delivered a comment of almost comical absurdity: “This is a watershed decision. It paves the way for more democratic and more efficient lawmaking at EU level.” [my emphasis]

The ruling means that the Commission can propose an EU crime that, if passed by the European Parliament and a qualified majority of member states, must be adopted by all member states. This means that Britain could be forced to introduce a crime into its law if enough other members support it. It also gives the Commission the power to compel members to enforce EU criminal law if governments drag their heels or if their courts refuse to sentence people.

In short the ruling demolishes British democracy — and Italian democracy, and Polish democracy, etc., etc. — and subjects all Europeans whose governments have joined the EU to the whims of that splendid bureaucracy. The officialdom of Brussels has expanded its mastership over all of Europe.

Some, including the Blair Government in Britain, are downplaying the whole dirty business, insisting that the ruling “has implications only for areas where the EU has extensive competence — such as with internal market or environment laws — and not for standard criminal offences, such as burglary or murder.” But what but a brassbound utopianism could possibly argue against the expectation that once a national liberty is surrendered, its scope — now in the hands of the supranational elite — will broaden inexorably? Does anyone doubt that the European Court of Justice, having achieved this usurpation, will now sit quietly, satiated?

2005-09-12T11:08:00.000-04:00

The proposed memorial for Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, has been revealed, and it is, I’m afraid, simply contemptible. The “Crescent of Embrace” they are calling it; and do not think for a moment, dear reader, that the crescent shape is a mere accident.

The first Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article about the memorial did not even deign to mention the significance of the shape — a fine example of that studied ignorance of the immediately observable, which is the trademark of political correctness.

What an extraordinary comment on the sickness of our civilization this miserable episode is. The men and women of Flight 93 were our first citizen-soldiers in a war long declared and prosecuted by the enemy, but only on that day finally (if inadequately) acknowledged by us. “Let’s roll,” one of them said before they moved against the hijackers. But the memorial’s exhortation is closer to, “Let’s roll over.” It is a monument to surrender: it speaks of weakness when it should convey defiance.

We want to honor the memories of men and women murdered in the name of a religion; so we propose to erect a memorial conspicuous mostly for its resemblance to the haunting shape that has stood for centuries as the symbol of that religion. And when outraged observers call attention to the most conspicuous feature, the reaction from the promoters of this ugly little perfidy is one of indignation. One report concludes with these words of censure against those distraught by the symbolism: “To take this small-minded, bigoted view is disgusting and repellent.”

Good patriotic men may disagree about when is the time for openness to Islam.* But surely this memorial is no place to announce openness. Surely we can agree that openness to an implacable enemy is suicide. Surely we can agree that a war memorial (for that is what this must be) may be many things, but it may not be a capitulation to the enemy.

Four Muslims died on September 11, 2001 on that field in Pennsylvania. They died believing that by massacring innocents they would attain paradise. They died believing that their god commanded them to massacre and subjugate the unbeliever, and that by crashing that plane (preferably into a high-level target) they would strike a great blow in a holy cause. They died believing these things because they were Muslims.

There is no place for Islamic symbolism in this memorial.

____________

* My own answer would be “only after Islam publicly renounces -- in no uncertain terms -- some of its central doctrines, beginning with the doctrine of jihad.”

2005-09-05T12:14:00.000-04:00

Let us never forget the courage of the New Orleans police officers who stayed behind to protect a city in chaos. We have heard reports that as many as a third of the police force disserted. We have heard that others joined the looting, thereby contributing to the very anarchy they were struggling against. We have heard many things said against them; we have not heard enough of their brave perseverance in the face of terrifying conditions.

We need to hear more stories like that of Sgt. Joel Silve, as reported by one of CNN's war correspondents brought into a great American city. Sgt. Silve and four other officers protected a desperate landing area on the campus of the Univ. of New Orleans and facilitated, in the teeth of conditions almost unspeakable, the evacuation of some 3,000 people.

We felt like we was a warzone. We were in a couple of fights there. We trying to maintain calm. I mean, people were losing their minds. The biggest problem we had though — and I will say we tried to get out the older folks, then the women and children. Our biggest problem was the men. The men wanted to get out before the women. There are a lot of coward men out there. And that was our problem. We had men running to the chopper. We had to drag them off the choppers.

His comrade, Detective Patrolman Jimmy Ward:

We told them we would still be on the ground when the last person left. We gave them our word on that. We made sure we saw everybody leave on the second to last helicopter. We gave them our word and we kept that.

His voicing breaking, Sgt. Silve concludes: “I got those people out, and that's all I wanted. And we did it. Those babies — I can still see them in my mind. And those old folks.”

The final shot of the CNN piece was the officers leaving in the chopper. Hardened New Orleans cops, weeping in relief and exhaustion. Like a scene out of Black Hawk Down.

2005-08-22T14:21:00.000-04:00

The President is, first and foremost, the nation’s Chief Executive. Before all others his constitutional duty is the faithful execution of the duly-enacted laws of the country. It is true, of course, that over time the President’s office has acquired some notable accretions — making it, on the one hand, more and more akin to the office of a prime minister, and, on the other, more and more akin to the figure of a titular or symbolic sovereign. It can be reasonably argued that the institution of the Presidency has become much greater in scope and responsibility than what was envisaged by the framers. It can be also argued, perhaps more dubiously, that the Presidency has over the decades merely evolved in a manner natural to its original conception. But it cannot be argued that the Presidency has jettisoned its original mandate of Executive.

All this may strike the reader as annoyingly pedantic, but I submit that the laying down of first principles is never useless; it shall not return void.

On the evidence, the administration of George W. Bush has failed to discharge this first duty in the area of immigration law and border security. The evidence, also, points to a willful negligence — in short, it points not to incompetence but to treachery. When the highest officer of a republic, in the service of ideology, interest, or avarice, employs the power vested in him to subvert the very laws of the republic he serves, he justly opens himself to the sort of charges that our rhetoric usually reserves for the most extravagant of outbursts. But the extravagance here lies with the perfidy of the Administration.

That Mr. Bush personally dislikes and disagrees with our immigration laws is no strike against him; that he would have us change said laws, and bring them in accordance with his economic and political dogma, is no strike against him; that he would lend his authority and influence to the legislative effort to change them is no strike either. But that he would deliberately fail to enforce the laws his administration inherited, deliberately let them rot while adopting the pretense that they are unenforceable, is a strike not merely against his honor and his integrity as a public official, but also against his credibility as an advocate for change. It is particularly damaging in light of the fact that many of his appeals for liberalization of immigration law are, rhetorically at least, attached to promises of more vigorous enforcement. The pattern is cynicism compounded upon duplicity, and it amounts to this:

We will quietly undermine and sabotage your benighted laws, fellow citizens, and then appear on the scene as the disinterested lawgiver to reform the failing laws; we will introduce a poison, and then act the part of the loyal doctor with counsels of difficult but effective antidotes; we will impoverish those among without a voice and enrich those whose wealth gives them leave to whisper in our ear; we will subject you to our factional will with careful emollients of republicanism and tradition; we will subvert to strengthen, complicate to simplify, emasculate to fortify, and baffle to bring clarity.

To this amazing tissue of calculated sophistry and usurpation, our reply should be refreshingly direct: “No. Your promises of enforcement? — we don’t believe you. You must prove your fidelity to our laws, whatever you may think of them, before you come to us with reform. You must demonstrate that you can administer faithfully that which you do not hold in high estimate, and enforce what you would not advocate, before you seek to remake it to your own ideal. Show us real border security and we will show you reasonable compromise on amnesty; show us stern and cold deportations, and a stoicism in the face of the howls that will surely greet such difficult business, and we will give you thoughtful intercourse on increased legal immigration. Desist with your supplications to the Left and the plutocrats, both here and in Mexico, and we will show sympathy for your political entanglements. In short, treat us like citizens and not subjects and we will have little difficulty with your leadership.”

2005-08-18T13:03:00.000-04:00

Thomas F. Madden writes vividly in defense of the Crusades, and I say without reservation that they are worthy of defense, if indeed any war undertaken to liberate what was conquered by violence, rapine, and plunder is deserving of defense. If there was justice in the effort to liberate Europe from the yoke of the German invader in 1944, then there was justice in the effort to liberate Anatolia and Palestine from the yoke of the Muslim invader in 1099. And in both instances, the invader’s appetite was far from satiated. Madden writes,

With enormous energy, the warriors of Islam struck out against the Christians shortly after Mohammed’s death. They were extremely successful. Palestine, Syria, and Egypt — once the most heavily Christian areas in the world — quickly succumbed. By the eighth century, Muslim armies had conquered all of Christian North Africa and Spain. In the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks conquered Asia Minor (modern Turkey), which had been Christian since the time of St. Paul. The old Roman Empire, known to modern historians as the Byzantine Empire, was reduced to little more than Greece. In desperation, the emperor in Constantinople sent word to the Christians of western Europe asking them to aid their brothers and sisters in the East.
That is what gave birth to the Crusades. They were not the brainchild of an ambitious pope or rapacious knights but a response to more than four centuries of conquests in which Muslims had already captured two-thirds of the old Christian world. At some point, Christianity as a faith and a culture had to defend itself or be subsumed by Islam. The Crusades were that defense.

Now of course it will be objected that the Crusaders perpetrated massacres in the course of their journey — in the First Crusade, for example, massacring Jews in the Rhineland while on the march, and later in the thrill of victory massacring many of the inhabitants of Jerusalem. Conceded. The massacres occurred. But every army (indeed every large collection of men) contains within it murderers, brigands and madmen; every crowd contains the seeds of mass lunacy; and no war yet prosecuted proved bereft of massacres. Shall we repudiate the justice of the Second World War because we massacred the civilians of Hiroshima and firebombed German cities? These latter, in contrast to the Crusader crimes, were the deliberate action of Allied policy; and while many have agonized over whether they were justified, few have asseverated that they were but flashes of momentary passion envenomed by bloodlust and malice.

What is lost in the contemporary controversies, benighted as they are by ignorance and mendacity, is the high adventure of the Crusades, a romance that until recently was well understood by every Christian boy who cared to hear the legends of his forefathers. As Madden puts it,

By any reckoning, the First Crusade was a long shot. There was no leader, no chain of command, no supply lines, no detailed strategy. It was simply thousands of warriors marching deep into enemy territory, committed to a common cause. Many of them died, either in battle or through disease or starvation. It was a rough campaign, one that seemed always on the brink of disaster. Yet it was miraculously successful. By 1098, the Crusaders had restored Nicaea and Antioch to Christian rule. In July 1099, they conquered Jerusalem and began to build a Christian state in Palestine. The joy in Europe was unbridled. It seemed that the tide of history, which had lifted the Muslims to such heights, was now turning.

But this joy was short-lived, swept aside by the gradual defeat of the Crusader kingdoms and the continued expansion of Islam. Moreover, the great rift between East and West in the Christian church discloses, aside from their final failure, the real tragedy of the Crusades.

Thus betrayed by their Greek friends, in 1204 the Crusaders attacked, captured, and brutally sacked Constantinople, the greatest Christian city in the world. Pope Innocent III, who had previously excommunicated the entire Crusade, strongly denounced the Crusaders. But there was little else he could do. The tragic events of 1204 closed an iron door between Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox, a door that even today Pope John Paul II has been unable to reopen. It is a terrible irony that the Crusades, which were a direct result of the Catholic desire to rescue the Orthodox people, drove the two further — and perhaps irrevocably — apart.

We forget how threatened Christendom really was. The magnificent Byzantine Empire (which called itself Roman until the end: Byzantine” is our word) lay in ruins, the Balkans captured, much of Spain occupied, southern France menaced, Italy raided repeatedly, Vienna besieged. “The colossus of the medieval world was Islam, not Christendom,” writes Madden. He concludes,

[B]oth the medieval and the modern soldier fight ultimately for their own world and all that makes it up. Both are willing to suffer enormous sacrifice, provided that it is in the service of something they hold dear, something greater than themselves. Whether we admire the Crusaders or not, it is a fact that the world we know today would not exist without their efforts. The ancient faith of Christianity, with its respect for women and antipathy toward slavery, not only survived but flourished. Without the Crusades, it might well have followed Zoroastrianism, another of Islam's rivals, into extinction.

[More: “Crusaders and Historians,” First Things, June/July 2005.]

2005-08-18T08:01:00.000-04:00

SUB SPECIE AETERNATIS: It is something of a modern habit of thought (strange to say) to conceive of the soul — whether we believe in the soul or not — as a kind of magical essence or ethereal intelligence indwelling a body like a ghost in a machine. That is to say, we tend to imagine the relation between the soul and the body as an utter discontinuity somehow subsumed within a miraculous unity: a view capable of yielding such absurdities as the Cartesian postulate that the soul resides in the pituitary gland or the utterly superstitious speculation advanced by some religious ethicists that the soul may “enter” the fetus some time in the second trimester. But the “living soul” of whom scripture speaks, as John Paul makes clear in his treatment of the creation account in Genesis, is a single corporeal and spiritual whole, a person whom the breath of God has awakened from nothingness. The soul is life itself, of the flesh and of the mind; it is what Thomas Aquinas called the “form of the body”: a vital power that animates, pervades, and shapes each of us from the moment of conception, holding all our native energies in a living unity, gathering all the multiplicity of our experience into a single, continuous, developing identity. It encompasses every dimension of human existence, from animal instinct to abstract reason: sensation and intellect, passion and reflection, imagination and curiosity, sorrow and delight, natural aptitude and supernatural longing, flesh and spirit. John Paul is quite insistent that the body must be regarded not as the vessel or vehicle of the soul, but simply as its material manifestation, expression, and occasion. This means that even if one should trace the life of the body back to its most primordial principles, one would still never arrive at that point where the properly human vanishes and leaves a “mere” physical organism or aggregation of inchoate tissues or ferment of spontaneous chemical reactions behind. All of man’s bodily life is also the life of the soul, possessed of a supernatural dignity and a vocation to union with God.

— David B. Hart, in a cogent and illuminating essay in the current New Atlantis.