Readers’ miscellany,11-11 to 11-15
A lot of readers’ e-mail has come in that I have not had time to sort and post. So here I’m combining a bunch of e-mails into one blog entry, with the more recent ones toward the bottom. I apologize to readers whose e-mails I may have overlooked.
Lindsay W. writes:
The failure of the Church.
The Church does NOT lead, the Church is silent. The Church promotes multiculturalism and liberalism. The Church is complicit with liberalism and socialism.
The Catholic Church promotes immigration. The Church preaches “tolerance”. As the Religious arm is confused and muddled, so is the Secular arm.
Without the Church, true Conservatism can not exist. Without hardcore Church support, political conservatism can not do anything.
I squarely lay the blame on the “Church”—a pack of weasels if there ever was one.
Lindsay W. continues:
It also boils down to the Church. The Church is what leads. Without that leadership, Without preaching, Without obedience, there is no Victory.
Furthermore, there are many Judases within the Church stabbing us in the back. The branch of your own Anglican Church, the Episcopal Church of America, is such.
Open borders. How can secular leaders take a stand when the Church DOES NOT. If the Church is afraid or compromised (which it is) how can the Secular leaders do anything.
Where is the Shepard? Where is the Teaching?
With over 90% of the Prots teaching multiculturalism, With the Orthodox Church clueless and the Catholic Church actually advocating open borders, What is the Secular Arm to do?
The Spirit leads the Flesh.
The Church leads.
Not only was there faulty leadership within the Republican Party but there is even greater cupablity within the Church.
Are the gates of Hell prevailing against the Church?
David B. writes:
A few comments on the Adrienne Shelly murder, if I may. By the way, I am an avid watcher of Court TV and the nightly “Crime News” shows.
First, Shelly’s husband runs a left-wing blog site called The Ostroy Report. It is dedicated to “Combating the Right-Wing Spin Machine.” It’s at http://ostroyreport.blogspot.com. He posted something today after not doing so after his wife’s murder. I wonder if Mr. Ostroy has been a proponent of legalizing illegal aliens?
As some have said, we don’t know for sure what if anything, Adrienne Shelly said to her murderer. He may have just been attempting to rob her apartment. You do see white women doing very dangerous things a lot these days. A few months ago, a 17-year old girl left her suburban New Jersey home for a night of drinking in New York City, Drunk out of her mind, she was wondering the streets around 2 AM. A black man offered her a ride home, which she accepted. He proceeded to rape and murder her, and place the body in a garbage bin.
These sort of crimes happen a lot. The Natalie Holloway Aruba case is another. She was drinking after midnight and got in a car with strangers. Once, I saw one of these female TV talking heads get angry at the idea that young women shouldn’t go out alone after dark. “Go out and drink if you want to. Don’t let anything stop you,” she said.
LA replies:
I looked at Ostroy’s site on Tuesday where he has a message thanking people for their moral support since his wife’s murder. Right in the middle of this message he congratulates his readers for the Democratic victory in the election. Leftist simply cannot refrain from politicizing the personal, even the most personal areas of life such as the death of a loved one. Remember the Paul Wellstone funeral?
Alan Levine writes:
I am surprised by the argument that anything other than a knowledge of their own history would be responsible for Eastern Europeans disliking Muslims more than Western Europeans do. Any Orthodox Christian knows the history of Turkish conquest and rule of their own coreligionists, and so do Hungarians…. and Poles, Croats and Slovenes had to fight hard against the Turks to escape the Sultans’ control. Even those who would be glad to forgive and forget and live alongside Muslims today are well aware of the past.
I might note also that the general attitude of blubbering and guilt toward non-Europeans in general is much more weakly developed among Eastern Europeans than those further West, for the good reason that they are generally well aware that their ancestors were much worse treated, whether by Khans, Sultans, Tsars, or Nazis than Asians and Africans ever were by the European empires.
LA replies:
But the question is, do they have an informed position on Islam. Or is it just a general, “those people did bad things to us.”
N writes on ”Neocons thrashing in their own coils”:
Here is my comment: what we have here is hubris. It is common for humans who have a certain world view, usually but not often connected with some big, glorious goal, to reject facts that do not conform to it. Thus we have liberals who continue to insist the Affirmative Action is a good thing that does no harm. Until recently we had leftists who insisted that somehow, some way, Communism could be made to work, despite the gross and horrible failures of the past.
As time goes on and evidence piles up, however, all but the most dogmatic must come to accept reality. Thus the Michigan law overturning Grutter passed by a respectable margin, despite opposition from both Democrat and Republican elites. The dream of the classless society is fading, save in some university faculty. So it must be with the mirage of Islamic Democracy.
However, this will not happen on its own. We do not rely on some grand, impersonal “historical inevitability” as the Left used to (and as too many neocons continue to). Instead we must rely on presenting the facts, plain and clear, whenever and wherever possible.
When the facts are rolled out, some will see and some will not.
As the situation in Europe worsens, more will see, and some will not. We don’t need to convince every muliticulturalist of the error of that idea, we just need to get a clear majority of people to see the reality and the facts.
Andy McCarthy is doing us a signal service at NRO by discussing this topic in an adult fashion. We should thank him, at the very least, with email to K. Lopez.
Arlene M. writes:
Regarding your discussion on Michael Rubin and his demand for ‘evidence’ that all people don’t desire freedom; I’ve found when discussing this with most neocon-types that they seem to consider it a truth that is obvious: everybody not only wants freedom in the exact sense that we understand freedom, and everybody is likewise just as suited to democracy as we are, regardless of their particular history and culture.
It seems to be important to the neocon agenda for people to believe that freedom and democracy are the universal destiny of all humankind, and that we have to be the carriers of those things, and the guarantors of them to the whole world.
I have wondered whether this is just something they feel the need to believe, as with liberals. They believe what ‘feels good’ to them, or whatever suits their ends, regardless of historical facts or empirical evidence. It might be that these people are simply products of bad modern education, because long ago when I went to school, it was simply Poly Sci 101 that ‘democracy’ was something of a rarity in human history, requiring specific conditions to take root and flourish.
Even in my high school Current Events class, my teacher, a very liberal type, taught us that democracy required certain preconditions, among them a solid middle class, an educated electorate with widespread literacy, the rule of law, and a free press. I think this was pretty much the accepted thinking up until recent years. The evidence of history supports it; democracy in our sense has been rare in human experience. A real conservative would be enough of a realist to base his beliefs on solid reality, not on some utopian vision for what ‘ought to be.’ This is more evidence that neocons, whatever they call themselves, are not truly of a conservative habit of mind.
And if freedom and democracy are subject to those preconditions that we were taught, then most if not all of the Islamic world would not qualify for democratic experiments. But of course as Condi Rice and the President told us, we are ‘racist’ for not believing in the democratization of Iraq.
David L., a long-time VFR reader, writes from California:
I believe your Indian reader and you are quite mistaken about how if amnesty for 30 or 40 million goes through, that somehow, American patriots will rise up, and all will be well. The logic you both use is highly suspect on this one, I’m afraid to say. Once amnesty is here there will be no way to turn the clock back.
First, when amnesty is passes, there will be an even larger flood than there is currently of illegals across the Mexican Border. Secondly, the news of amnesty will travel far and wide, all around the world, and will result in still millions more trying to get in thru Mexico, some of them terrorists (and some of these have already gotten thru, our government tells us). Thirdly, when amnesty arrives, it will be a HUGE victory for the likes of the Communist/anti-American pressure groups like the ACLU, MELDEF, La Raza, etc. It will give them incredible momentum, whereas the momemtum has clearly been with we anti-invasion types. Remember those millions of illegals marching last spring and summer? Try multiplying that tenfold if Amnesty passes! Also, it will greatly strengthen the Mexican government’s influence on our political and social lives.
What amnesty will also do is drive people like me into the streets, where we’ll be attacked by the rabid, radical leftists. Blood will undoubtedly be shed, more than likely our blood. I’m sorry, but that is one scenario that I and others who want to “crush” the Invasion and deport illegal aliens want to put off as long as we can. We must try to do everything possible to keep the House from passing amnesty, because amnesty will result in civil unrest that will further isolate people like us. Instead of the illegal aliens being put into holding cells and tent cities where they should now be, pending deportation, I fear that WE patriots will find our asses there awaiting trial for “general insurrection”. From what I’ve read, Halliburton/Bush have already set up such “detention centers” for just such a scenario. They’ve anticipated what SPP/NAU and Bush’s continued push for Amnesty will cause.
So, I’m sorry, but your Indian writer is sadly mistaken. Amnesty must be killed before it can be passed.
Van Wijk writes:
Below is a poem that I like to recite every year on this day.
The Parable of the Old Man and the Young
So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and strops,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
- - -
Wilfred Owen was killed in action at Sambre-Oise Canal on 4 November, 1918, exactly one week before the Armistice was signed.
Michael T. writes:
Subject: Balkans and Islam
There is widespread understanding that the hardships Balkans peoples suffered under Ottoman rule, and even Ottoman rule itself, were the result of the Islamic religion, not of mere ‘Imperialism’. I don’t know what effect trendy re-education efforts might have had in recent years, but the older generations understand Islam as an aggressive, expansionist religion with a mandate to conquer and subdue. For example, they understand that when their ancestors had to repair their churches under the cover of darkness it was because of Islamic religious restrictions on repairing (and building new) churches.
In any case, I would argue that, from a conservative perspective, such deeply felt opposition to Islam as exists in the Balkans is sufficient, even if it cannot be articulated to the nth degree. Centuries of coexistence with Muslims has not been enough to bridge the religious divide, to conquer suspicions and mistrust. Is it not possible that these people understand what coexistence with Muslims means better than any western professor of religion? Aren’t there similarities here to southern white apprehensions about blacks? Haven’t such apprehensions proved themselves well-founded? Yet how many southern whites were able to articulate their feelings at the level necessary to convince optimistic northerners?
I understand this won’t do what you want it to; it won’t warn Westerners about “what Islam really is”. Whites’ fears were dismissed as bigotry and racism, and so Balkans immigrants’ fears will be dismissed as Islamophobia. However, you can be sure that these people will gladly sign onto whatever opposition to Islam is articulated. A Bulgarian peasant’s inability to do it himself should hardly assign him the status of “just another ethnic immigrant” - an unfairly disparaging thing to say, considering the company - any more than an Sicilian peasant’s not crossing the Atlantic with a copy of Dante in his backpocket should.
LA replies:
What you’re pointing to is some kind of passive support for tough measures if they come. That’s not a big deal. And besides, this whole discussion has been speculative. The only thing that would impress me if if Balkan countries and groups came out and publicly warned the rest of Europe about Islam, warned them tha tthey must stop Muslim immigraton and remove many Muslims.
Charlton G. writes:
You wrote:
“Normal people can see that there is a difference between how well Jews fit into the West and how well Muslims fit into the West. But in the minds of Jews in general and neocons in particular, to admit that Muslims don’t fit into the West is to say that Jews don’t fit in either. Thus, in the neocons’ mind, to say that Muslims cannot be democratized is to say that Jews don’t fit into the West. And that is why they are so absolute and unthinking and unyielding in their democratism. Their democratism is not based on evidence. It is based on an instinctive (if distorted and incorrect and destructive) notion of Jewish self-protection.
“I believe that’s where this ideological madness comes from.”
I think you just answered that question about Mark Steyn I put to you some time back. That was a penetrating observation above. I believe that by confronting liberals with this might be one way of forcing them to articulate their ideology outside the usual framework of western white guilt. It is a powerful idea. It might flush out the left with their simple nihilistic creed and shine a light on the destructiveness of their beliefs. Keep digging in this direction.
David H. writes:
I received the following quote in my emails today and thought you might pass it on to your VFR readers. It certainly exresses my views!
“In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith, becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person’s becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American. There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag. We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language and we have room for but one sole loyalty and this a loyalty to the American people.” Theodore Roosevelt 1907
Comments from Diggers Realm (www.diggersrealm.com/mt/archives/001654.html):
Theodore Roosevelt indeed wrote these words, but not in 1907 while he was still president. The passages were culled from a letter he wrote to the president of the American Defense Society on January 3, 1919, three days before Roosevelt died. “Americanization” was a favorite theme of Roosevelt’s during his later years, when he railed repeatedly against “hyphenated Americans” and the prospect of a nation “brought to ruins” by a “tangle of squabbling nationalities.” He advocated the compulsory learning of English by every naturalized citizen. “Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or to leave the country,” he said in a statement to the Kansas City Star in 1918. “English should be the only language taught or used in the public schools.” He also insisted, on more than one occasion, that America has no room for what he called “fifty-fifty allegiance.” In a speech made in 1917 he said, “It is our boast that we admit the immigrant to full fellowship and equality with the native-born. In return we demand that he shall share our undivided allegiance to the one flag which floats over all of us.”
Larry G. writes:
Re: “Powerline adopts VFR-type approach to Iraq”
“How many times have I said that it would be vastly cheaper to have a three-week invasion once every few years to topple an unacceptable regime than to occupy and manage a Muslim country in perpetuity? But Paul couldn’t see-or at least couldn’t say-these obvious things, because he was a committed defender of the Bush/neocon fantasy extravaganza.”
I think that’s a bit unfair to Paul. We may well be doomed to perpetually intervene militarily in Muslim countries every few years to clean out the terrorists, just as we are doomed to intervene in Haiti every few years to restore order, simply because the natives are constitutionally incapable of forming decent societies that do not threaten us. But don’t you wish there was a better solution? In retrospect, the idea of democratizing Muslim countries was a naive hope born of ignorance of history and reality, but it seems natural to me to want to find a better solution to the problem than the one we faced. And I don’t think Bush intended to occupy the country in perpetuity. I remember the talk at the time before the war being that Iraq was a largely secular, relatively modern society, supposedly unlike the other Muslim countries in the region, and if we only freed them from Saddam they would rapidly reorganize into a democracy under our guidance. Obviously this idea was wrong, but was it an idea cooked up by Bush and the neocons? I think rather it was more the conventional view at the time.
LA replies:
Look, I tried to be fair on this issue. Several times at VFR in ‘03 and ‘04 and maybe even ‘05, I would lay out the three or four strategic options for which I would like to hear reasonable arguments. One of those options was “democratize and modernize.” So, while I was not a supporter of democratization, I was open to the possibility that democratization could be the way to fix the mideast. My main goal, as yours, was to find some way that the Muslim world would not threaten us. I was open to ANY approach that would work.
But the passage of events, plus learning more and more about Islam, made the impossibility of democratization (or at best democratization leading to jihadization) apparent to any thinking person. Not to the neocons. No siree bob. Their support for the Bush democratization policy (and for the notion of a “universal desire for freedom in every human heart” that underlay the Bush policy) remained intact, solid against any evidence to the contrary. So they are responsible for adhering to this view long after it had ceased to be plausible.
You write:
“I remember the talk at the time before the war being that Iraq was a largely secular, relatively modern society, supposedly unlike the other Muslim countries in the region, and if we only freed them from Saddam they would rapidly reorganize into a democracy under our guidance. Obviously this idea was wrong, but was it an idea cooked up by Bush and the neocons? I think rather it was more the conventional view at the time.”
I would say that that view was generated by those who favored democratization, i.e., the neocons. The great, the distinguished, the illustrious Bernard Lewis was key in this. He thought his secular Turkish friends were typical of the whole Muslim world, that there was this vast secular Muslim middle class longing for America to take them over the help them democratize. And with his brilliance he persuaded the adminsitration this was true. If you can get the transcript (or better the tape itself) of Lewis’s remarkable appearance on Charlie Rose in 2003 it’s worth seeing. I saw that show. I was bowled over by Lewis’s brilliance. So was Rose. (So imagine the effect he had on Bush & Co.) In fact, Lewis didn’t know what he was talking about. A person can be very brilliant and still be deluded.
A reader writes:
…is of an “America” that has cut itself off from its European cultural and racial roots and the whole past of Western man—
NO it’s not , Auster—you just can’t read and think very well because you’re primarily interested servicing your epphantine ego: NO ONE said ANYTHING about cutting ourselves off from our Europen cultural roots—which are available in libraries and museums and in architecture that echoes the past, such as in our capitol buildings. Your “and the whole past of Western man” is particularly risible.
Charles F. Bahmueller, Ph.D.
LA replies:
Thank you for your thoughtful contribution to the debate.
I might have said further to Doctor of Philosophy Bahmueller that he evidently has never heard of multiculturalism, never heard of the systematic lowering of our cultural standards and of our high culture institutions, never heard of George Bush saying we must welcome the cultural and linguistic Hispanicization of America, never heard of Peggy Noonan saying that national identity is “mud,” never heard of Sen. McCain saying that America is superior to other countries because it doesn’t have a culture, never heard of the systematic attack on the white race and the demand that all white majorities in the West come to an end, which will happen unless non-Western immigration is stopped and reversed; and on and on and on. He’s never heard of any of these things, yet he considers that when I speak of these things, I’m speaking nonsense and am only motivated by ego.
James R. sent this quote from the Brussels Journal, A quote from Dick Cheney, 7 April 1991:
I think for us to get American military personnel involved in a civil war inside Iraq would literally be a quagmire. Once we got to Baghdad, what would we do? Who would we put in power? What kind of government would we have? Would it be a Sunni government, a Shia government, a Kurdish government? Would it be secular along the lines of the Ba’ath Party? Would it be fundamentalist Islamic? I do not think the United States wants to have U.S. military forces accept casualties and accept the responsibility of trying to govern Iraq. I think it makes no sense at all.
LA replies:
I can understand that something that seemed a bad idea in 1991, the occupation of Iraq, had become in 2002-03 a regrettable necessity, because of (the believed existence of) WMDs. In my mind, the issue does not go to the decision to invade per se, but to the absence of any discussion of the extremely formidable problems presented by a post-invasion Iraq that Cheney ably summarized in ‘91. That’s what’s amazing. He saw the problems very clearly in ‘91, and saw these would be possibly insoluble problems. In 2003 he evidently decided that freedom would solve all these possibly insoluble problems, and so barely planned for post-invasion Iraq. This is what is so hard to understand. It seems a crystal clear instance of neocon ideology overtaking Cheney’s former grasp of reality.
Mark A. writes:
How can we, as true Conservatives, take much of anything at NRO seriously? Kathryn Jean Lopez revealed her true self when she asserted that our representatives would be better qualified if they were women. This is a Leftist attitude. Yet she writes at NRO.
Then there is Derbyshire. He is interesting. He is intelligent…. It’s not that I don’t think Derbyshire doesn’t have interesting things to say, but why the heck is he saying them for National Review? What is Conservative about him? He was a working class socialist in his youth. He supports abortion. He thinks Christianity is a farce. He is also a borderline sociopath who argued for bombing Iraq as a “punitive measure” after 9/11. I’m not one to be soft on Islam. I’m a hardliner. But moral Conservatives in the West shouldn’t be writing about actions that resemble the SS Einsatzgruppen going on punitive raids to “cleanse” Poland in the early 1940s. Again: what the heck is he doing writing for a “conservative” publication?
How can we believe anything at NRO when it is written by the likes of Lopez, et al? NR now appears to be verbal Prozac for the socially liberal country club Republican.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 15, 2006 08:13 PM | Send