Category: War – Peace – Foreign Affairs

Patriotism and Taxes

This is the third post of a series on patriotism. (The first two posts are here and here.) I am working from the definition of patriotism given by TheFreeDictionary.com: “love of country and willingness to sacrifice for it.”

Love of America often takes the shallow form found in the familiar first verse of “America the Beautiful”, with its paean to “amber waves of grain…purple mountain majesties…[and] fruited plain.” America should be loved for its vision of liberty — and, most importantly, for its steadfast efforts to promote that vision by permitting Americans a combination of personal and economic freedom that is unparalleled in the world. America isn’t perfect and never has been. But what nation is perfect or ever was? It’s true that the regulatory-welfare state has taken deep root in America, but at least those who understand that the regulatory-welfare state denies freedom, stifles initiative, and slows economic progress are free to hack at it. And sometimes they succeed in pruning it.

The other side of the coin of patriotism is sacrifice. Most living Americans (I hope) will never have to sacrifice life or limb in the defense of liberty. The only practical form of sacrifice open to most of us is to give up some material goods — to pay taxes — for the defense of the country. And perhaps there is an emerging consensus on that score. ProfessorBainbridge.com quotes from The Economist‘s Lexington column:

Americans may disagree about whether Mr. Bush should have invaded Iraq. But most of them agree that America is engaged in a global war on terrorism. And most of them — including those furious Democrats — are willing to project American power abroad in order to win that war.

The most obvious sign of this consensus is America’s growing military muscle. Compare the last budget adopted before September 11th and that for the current fiscal year: total federal spending on defense (including both Iraq and Afghanistan, homeland security and international affairs) has risen by more than 50%, from $354 billion to about $547 billion. This huge military build-up, the biggest since the Korean war, has enjoyed support from both Democrats and Republicans. Considerable bipartisan agreement propelled the creation of the gigantic Department of Homeland Security; and now Congress (again, not the White House) is pushing through the most far-reaching reorganization of the intelligence services for 50 years.

Anyone who doubts the force of America’s gathering consensus should study the Kerry campaign, which proposes little different from Mr. Bush in terms of future action; or they should look at this summer’s surprise bestseller. The 9/11 Commission Report is a thoroughly bipartisan production, the work of five leading Democrats and five leading Republicans. And it minces no words on the need for an aggressive approach to terrorism.

The report argues that there is no room for appeasement: the terrorists are willing to use any means to spread Islamic theocracy, and the only way to deal with them is either to destroy them or to leave them utterly isolated. The report endorses lots of nicey-nicey reforms in the Middle East, but it is also comfortable with projecting American power abroad. “Terrorism against American interests ‘over there’,” reads the report, “should be regarded just as we regard terrorism against America ‘over here’.” America’s homeland is, in fact, “the planet”.

I would gladly pay higher taxes to support the war on terror. I am not a knee-jerk tax-cutter when it comes to the essential functions of government. But I do not want to pay higher taxes to support the war on terror and to subsidize corporate welfare, individual welfare, farm subsidies, the nationalization of education, myriad regulatory activities, and all other programs that transfer money and power to Washington for the benefit of the permanent government and interest groups. That is not what the Framers meant by the general welfare.

Taxes should be the price we pay for the preservation of liberty — not the price we pay for charity, graft, and our own enslavement.

September 11: A Remembrance

When my wife and I turned on our TV set that morning, the first plane had just struck the World Trade Center. A few minutes later we saw the second plane strike. In that instant what had seemed like a horrible accident became an obvious act of terror.

Then, in the awful silence that had fallen over Arlington, Virginia, we could hear the “whump” as the third plane hit the Pentagon.

Our thoughts for the next several hours were with our daughter, whom we knew was at work in the adjacent World Financial Center when the planes struck. Was her office struck by debris? Did she flee her building only to be struck by or trapped in debris? Was she smothered in the huge cloud of dust? Because telephone communications were badly disrupted, we didn’t learn for several hours that she had made it home safely.

Thousands of grandparents, parents, husbands, wives, children, grandchildren, lovers, and good friends — the survivors of the 3,000 who died that day in Manhattan, the Pentagon, and western Pennsylvania — did not share our good fortune.

Never forgive, never forget, never relent.

(Adapted from a post dated April 2, 2004.)

Right On! For Libertarian Hawks Only

REVISED AND REPOSTED

There’s a devastating critique of libertarian doves at Tech Central Station:

Flying with Libertarian Hawks

By Max Borders

Published 09/09/2004

And covenants, without the sword, are but words and of no strength to secure a man at all.

— Thomas Hobbes

Is it possible for one to be libertarian about policies at home and neo-conservative about policies abroad? After all, isn’t the principle of non-coercion incompatible with the interventionist policies of the current Administration? Simply put: is there such an animal as a libertarian hawk and if he exists, why do we so seldom hear from him?…

Most libertarians fall in line behind the superficial notion that domestic and foreign policies should be mirror images of each other, each reflecting classical liberal principles where self-defense is applied universally like some scriptural edict. Alas, were the threats of the twenty first century so simple to counter, the complexities of world so easily distilled….

I find it sad that so many otherwise bright libertarians seem so unreflective about war. Some of my favorite freedom-loving publications have steered their editorial styles into the hashish den of protest music and anti-Bush priggishness. Some of my favorite think tanks issue press releases almost daily, calling for the immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq, calling for the US to extend Constitutional privileges to enemy combatants, and claiming that it will be impossible to bring democracy and the Rule of Law to the Middle East….

[O]f course, nation-building isn’t an exact science. But I would have always preferred to hedge my bets that given enough of the appropriate initial conditions, Iraqis would find that — in the absence of a dangerous dictator — they would begin to form of the mutually beneficial relationships with one another that bring about prosperity and peace. I doubt they could’ve done this alone. I think the Coalition was right to help them towards a tipping point. And if we fail, the failure will have been a practical one, not a moral one….

I am one of those who doesn’t fancy the idea of staring down the point of a chemical warhead before I decide to act. (Even if such warheads turn out to be a chimera today, they won’t likely be tomorrow.) In the nuclear age, when the degree of certainty that you will be attacked is at fifty percent, you are as good as done for in terms of your ability to protect yourself. Thus, preventive action in a world of uncertainty is, unfortunately, the only reasonable course. In the meantime, it behooves us to try to make our enemies more like us… and then allow globalization to proceed apace. For the more like us they are, the more likely they are to enter into the tenuous human covenants that are our only means of having peace.

UPDATE:

A blog by the name of verbum ipsum demurs at length. There’s a lot of folderol about the source of rights. The key passage is this:

Borders doesn’t even address one of the chief libertarian arguments against foreign intervention, namely that it will inevitably result in the increased power, prestige, and influence of the State. Libertarian hawks want an all-powerful State that can preemptively crush its enemies abroad but will leave us in peace and freedom at home. The idea that foreign policy and domestic liberty can exist in hermetically sealed compartments seems willfully naïve given historical precedent.

I’m not sure about the historical precedent, but there’s plenty of peace and freedom abroad in the U.S. today, in spite of the present emergency. Just look at what went on in New York City during the Republican convention and what goes on daily in the media and across the internet. The crushing of dissent is confined almost exclusively to liberal-run academia. Moreover, Lee, the perpetrator of the post at verbum ipsum chooses to overlook completely the strategic advantage of foreign intervention, which is to take the fight to the enemy and, in combination with other (clandestine) means, to distract him, to disrupt his plans, and to deny his access to resources. Perhaps Lee would rather fight it out in his living room.

Jeffrey Tucker at Mises Blog quotes F.A. Harper, the founder of the Institute for Human Studies, of which Max Borders is program director. Here’s some of what Harper had to say in 1951:

The theme of this analysis has been that liberty and peace are to each other as cause and effect; that war is an evil; that good cannot be attained by evil means; that war is the cancerous growth of minor conflicts, which would remain small if dealt with as issues between the individual persons concerned but which grow into the larger conflict of war as a consequence of amassing forces by means of involuntary servitude; that a person has the right to protect his person and his property from aggression and trespass and to help others if asked and he wishes to do so; that liberty is lost under guise of its defense in “emergencies”; that in emergencies, of all times, the strength and vitality of liberty is needed; that concentrating power in wartime is as dangerous as at any other time; and that power corrupts those who acquire it.

Perhaps these are the reasons why war always seems to demoralize those who adopt its use; why human reason seems to go on furlough for the duration of serious conflict, and in many instances thereafter; why liberty seems always to come out the loser on both sides of war. Bentham’s definition of war as “mischief on the largest scale” then comes to have a deeper meaning.

Harper was naïve in the extreme if he believed that “war is the cancerous growth of minor conflicts, which would remain small if dealt with as issues between the individual persons concerned….” Where was he when Chamberlain gave the Sudetenland to Germany in an effort to avert Hitler’s aggressive aims by resolving a particular issue? Harper died before implacable Islamofascists came on the scene, though he might have recognized them as the spiritual heirs of Hitler and Stalin.

As for the notion that “liberty comes out the loser” — tell it to the slaves who were freed in the aftermath of the Civil War, tell it to the women who gained the right to vote after World War I, and tell it to black Americans whose contributions to victory in World War II helped pave the way for their full enfranchisement and equality under the law in the decades after the war. America has become increasingly more free with respect to civil liberties, in spite of a succession of wars. To the extent that America has become less free economically, the blame can be placed largely on the Progressive era of the early 1900s and the New Deal of the 1930s, both of which were instigated in peacetime. In sum, Harper was a deluded fool, which says something about those who quote him.

Why Is This Considered News?

Yahoo! News has been playing this as a top story all day:

Bin Laden Deputy: U.S. Losing Afghanistan

By SARAH EL DEEB, Associated Press Writer

CAIRO, Egypt – In a videotape made public ahead of the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, Osama bin Laden’s chief deputy claimed Thursday the United States was on the brink of defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

With an assault rifle leaning on the wall behind him, Ayman al-Zawahri said, “The defeat of America in Iraq and Afghanistan has become a matter of time, with God’s help….The Americans in both countries are between two fires, if they continue they bleed to death and if they withdrew they loose [sic] everything.”

The videotape was broadcast by Al-Jazeera television, which said it received the tape exclusively. It was not immediately clear how Al-Jazeera got the video….

But we can guess can’t we? This is like CBS News doing an impartial story about President Bush. No, it’s like Axis Sally telling American troops that Hitler is winning the war.

Ayman al-Zawahri — isn’t he the guy who’s on the run from U.S. and Pakistani forces? Talk about “loosers”.

An Orwellian Perspective on Pacificism

This speaks for itself:

The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States…

George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism,” 1945

(Thanks to my son for finding this.)

No, Dummy, That’s Not What He’s Saying

Ventriloquist and blogger Joe Gandelman’s nose for offensive politicking is getting a tad too sensitive. Now he suggests that this quote from a news story:

Vice President Dick Cheney on Tuesday warned Americans about voting for Democratic Sen. John Kerry, saying that if the nation makes the wrong choice on Election Day it faces the threat of another terrorist attack.

Means this:

[I]f voters don’t vote for this administration — even if they support it on terrorism and Iraq but have other serious disgreements that cause them to vote for someone else — they’re risking the destruction of the U.S?

No. It means that if Kerry is elected, for whatever reason, his lackadaisical attitudes about war and terrorism will invite terrorists to attack us. Remember why bin Laden thought he could get away with 9/11, Joe? He thought we lacked resolve. Clearly, Kerry lacks resolve. He can’t decide whether he’s for the war in Iraq or against it. He can’t decide whether he’s for pre-emptive war or against it — though he seems to be against it more than he’s for it. Get the picture, Joe?

Actually, Joe got the picture, because he said:

[Cheney] was suggesting a vote against the GOP or for John Kerry means exposing the U.S. to a terrorist attack and massive bloodshed.

Joe somehow finds that offensive. I find it compellingly logical.

But What About Kerry’s Voting Record?

Jimmy Carter, in a letter to Zell Miller, dances around the core of Miller’s speech before the Republican convention, which was Kerry’s record on defense issues:

You seem to have forgotten that loyal Democrats elected you as mayor and as state senator. Loyal Democrats, including members of my family and me, elected you as lieutenant governor and as governor. It was a loyal Democrat, Lester Maddox, who assigned you to high positions in the state government when you were out of office. It was a loyal Democrat, Roy Barnes, who appointed you as U.S. Senator when you were out of office. By your historically unprecedented disloyalty, you have betrayed our trust.

Great Georgia Democrats who served in the past, including Walter George, Richard Russell, Herman Talmadge, and Sam Nunn disagreed strongly with the policies of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and me, but they remained loyal to the party in which they gained their public office. Other Democrats, because of philosophical differences or the race issue, like Bo Callaway and Strom Thurmond, at least had the decency to become Republicans.

Everyone knows that you were chosen to speak at the Republican Convention because of your being a “Democrat,” and it’s quite possible that your rabid and mean-spirited speech damaged our party and paid the Republicans some transient dividends.

Perhaps more troublesome of all is seeing you adopt an established and very effective Republican campaign technique of destroying the character of opponents by wild and false allegations. The Bush campaign’s personal attacks on the character of John McCain in South Carolina in 2000 was a vivid example. The claim that war hero Max Cleland was a disloyal American and an ally of Osama bin Laden should have given you pause, but you have joined in this ploy by your bizarre claims that another war hero, John Kerry, would not defend the security of our nation except with spitballs. (This is the same man whom you described previously as “one of this nation’s authentic heroes, one of this party’s best-known and greatest leaders — and a good friend.”)

I, myself, never claimed to have been a war hero, but I served in the navy from 1942 to 1953, and, as president, greatly strengthened our military forces and protected our nation and its interests in every way. I don’t believe this warrants your referring to me as a pacificist.

Zell, I have known you for forty-two years and have, in the past, respected you as a trustworthy political leader and a personal friend. But now, there are many of us loyal Democrats who feel uncomfortable in seeing that you have chosen the rich over the poor, unilateral preemptive war over a strong nation united with others for peace, lies and obfuscation over the truth, and the political technique of personal character assassination as a way to win elections or to garner a few moments of applause. These are not the characteristics of great Democrats whose legacy you and I have inherited. [From Talking Points Memo]

No further comment is necessary.

Looking Ahead

Assume that President Bush wins re-election, with a clear majority of the popular vote. Assume that Republicans gain seats in the House and Senate. In what major ways will the world and the United States change in the next four years? Here are 10 predictions:

1. International terrorism will be disrupted significantly through the combined efforts of the U.S., UK, Israel, and Russia — with increasingly enthusiastic support from France, Germany, China, and Japan.

2. The Middle East will become more stable, as Syria and Iran are brought to heel by the threat of massive military action by the U.S.

3. North Korea will be brought to heel by the same method.

4. China and Russia will more quickly accept the virtues of representative democracy and free-market capitalism. Russia will strive to ensure the success of its venture by more rigorously imposing the rule of law.

5. France and Germany, as beneficiaries of Pax Americana, will rediscover the virtues of American leadership in world affairs.

6. The global economy and the U.S. economy will make great strides, practically eliminating serious support for protectionism and anti-globalism.

7. The U.S. will take the first steps toward privatization of Social Security.

8. A healthy U.S. economy will quell demands for universal health insurance and greater government interference in health care.

9. Bush will nominate — and the Senate will confirm — judges who are committed to the enforcement of legislative meaning and who do make law for the sake of attaining particular social goals. Those judges will be “activist judges” in that they will overturn previous, unconstitutional decisions.

10. A clear majority vote for Bush will soften — though not eliminate — the tone of extreme partisanship that has dominated American politics since 1992, when Clinton beat Bush Senior by virtue of Perot’s candidacy. The next four years will be more like Reagan’s second term than like Clinton’s second term.

The U.S. and Russia, Allies in the War on Terror?

Earlier, I used news of the grievous tragedy in Baslan, Russia, in making a point about civil-liberties extremists and their willingness to leave us exposed to terrorism. I did so because I am deeply affected by what happened in Baslan. It enrages me, just as the terrorist attacks of 9/11/01 in the U.S., the terrorist attacks of 3/11/04 in Spain, the continuing wave of terrorist attacks in Iraq, and seemingly countless other terrorist attacks enrage me.

President Bush has said he will never relent in the war on terror. Now Russia’s President Putin — unlike Spain’s socialist prime minister — has declared a Russian war on terror:

“What happened was a terrorist act that was inhuman and unprecedented in its cruelty,” Putin said in his televised speech later. “It is a challenge not to the president, the parliament and the government but a challenge to all of Russia, to all of our people. It is an attack on our nation.”…

He said Russians could no longer live “carefree” and must all confront terrorism.

He called for Russians to mobilize against what he said was the “common danger” of terrorism. Measures would be taken, Putin promised, to overhaul the law enforcement organs, which he acknowledged had been infected by corruption, and tighten borders.

“We are obliged to create a much more effective security system and to demand action from our law enforcement organs that would be adequate to the level and scale of the new threats,” he said.

Whatever Putin and the Russians actually do about terror, we should take to heart Putin’s diagnosis of what led to Baslan: “We showed weakness, and weak people are beaten.”

Imagine the strength of a true alliance between the U.S. and Russia aimed at encircling and destroying terrorists. Imagine the strength of a true anti-terrorist alliance among all major nations. Let us hope that it doesn’t take more 9/11s, 3/11s, and Baslans to make it happen.

How Are Your Civil Liberties Today?

How do you feel about government data-mining efforts? For example, do you think that your library records should be beyond the prying eyes of the FBI? If you do, you have already forgotten 9/11 and its proximate cause: We were unable to find the murderers in our midst because cooperation between the FBI and CIA was thwarted by an artificial line between domestic and international security. Perhaps this well help you remember what happens when we lose track of the murderers in our midst:

Women take the body of their relative killed in a school seizure, in a makeshift morgue in Vladikavkaz, North Ossetia, Saturday, Sept. 4, 2004. The bodies were brought to Vladikavkaz for identification. More than 340 people were killed in a southern Russian school that had been seized by militants, a prosecutor said Saturday. (AP Photo/Sergey Ponomarev)

Where are their civil liberties today?

Now, how do you feel about your reading list? If you think it’s more important than catching terrorists before they kill you or your loved ones, you are hopelessly self-indulgent.

The FBI isn’t going to haul you off to jail for reading Das Kapital or Joy of Sex. Hell, you won’t be hauled off to jail for reading the Quran. The point isn’t to censor or question your reading, it’s to look for patterns of activity that might point to terrorists.

If you value your privacy so much that your reading list is sacrosanct, you must not have a driver’s license, a credit card, or a phone number. You must be paid in cash and pay in cash. You must never fly, because you won’t stand for the invasion of privacy that’s involved in airport searches and baggage screening.

Now tell me, again, how do you feel about your civil liberties today?

Hellfire and Brimstone from Zell Miller

From Zell Miller’s speech to the Republican National Convention, quoted without comment:

In the summer of 1940, I was an eight-year-old boy living in a remote little Appalachian valley.

Our country was not yet at war but even we children knew that there were some crazy men across the ocean who would kill us if they could.

President Roosevelt, in his speech that summer, told America “all private plans, all private lives, have been in a sense repealed by an overriding public danger.”

In 1940 Wendell Wilkie was the Republican nominee.

And there is no better example of someone repealing their “private plans” than this good man.

He gave Roosevelt the critical support he needed for a peacetime draft, an unpopular idea at the time.

And he made it clear that he would rather lose the election than make national security a partisan campaign issue.

Shortly before Wilkie died he told a friend, that if he could write his own epitaph and had to choose between “here lies a president” or “here lies one who contributed to saving freedom”, he would prefer the latter.

Where are such statesmen today?

Where is the bi-partisanship in this country when we need it most?

Now, while young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the Democrat’s manic obsession to bring down our Commander-in- Chief.

What has happened to the party I’ve spent my life working in?

I can remember when Democrats believed that it was the duty of America to fight for freedom over tyranny.

It was Democratic President Harry Truman who pushed the Red Army out of Iran, who came to the aid of Greece when Communists threatened to overthrow it, who stared down the Soviet blockade of West Berlin by flying in supplies and saving the city.

Time after time in our history, in the face of great danger, Democrats and Republicans worked together to ensure that freedom would not falter. But not today.

Motivated more by partisan politics than by national security, today’s Democratic leaders see America as an occupier, not a liberator.

And nothing makes this Marine madder than someone calling American troops occupiers rather than liberators.

Tell that to the one-half of Europe that was freed because Franklin Roosevelt led an army of liberators, not occupiers.

Tell that to the lower half of the Korean Peninsula that is free because Dwight Eisenhower commanded an army of liberators, not occupiers.

Tell that to the half a billion men, women and children who are free today from the Baltics to the Crimea, from Poland to Siberia, because Ronald Reagan rebuilt a military of liberators, not occupiers.

Never in the history of the world has any soldier sacrificed more for the freedom and liberty of total strangers than the American soldier. And, our soldiers don’t just give freedom abroad, they preserve it for us here at home.

For it has been said so truthfully that it is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us the freedom of the press.

It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech. It is the soldier, not the agitator, who has given us the freedom to protest.

It is the soldier who salutes the flag, serves beneath the flag, whose coffin is draped by the flag who gives that protester the freedom to abuse and burn that flag.

No one should dare to even think about being the Commander in Chief of this country if he doesn’t believe with all his heart that our soldiers are liberators abroad and defenders of freedom at home.

But don’t waste your breath telling that to the leaders of my party today. In their warped way of thinking America is the problem, not the solution.

They don’t believe there is any real danger in the world except that which America brings upon itself through our clumsy and misguided foreign policy.

It is not their patriotism – it is their judgment that has been so sorely lacking. They claimed Carter’s pacifism would lead to peace.

They were wrong.

They claimed Reagan’s defense buildup would lead to war.

They were wrong.

And, no pair has been more wrong, more loudly, more often than the two Senators from Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy and John Kerry.

Together, Kennedy/Kerry have opposed the very weapons system that won the Cold War and that is now winning the War on Terror.

Listing all the weapon systems that Senator Kerry tried his best to shut down sounds like an auctioneer selling off our national security but Americans need to know the facts….

This is the man who wants to be the Commander in Chief of our U.S. Armed Forces?

U.S. forces armed with what? Spitballs?

Twenty years of votes can tell you much more about a man than twenty weeks of campaign rhetoric.

Campaign talk tells people who you want them to think you are. How you vote tells people who you really are deep inside.

Senator Kerry has made it clear that he would use military force only if approved by the United Nations.

Kerry would let Paris decide when America needs defending. I want Bush to decide.

John Kerry, who says he doesn’t like outsourcing, wants to outsource our national security.

That’s the most dangerous outsourcing of all. This politician wants to be leader of the free world.

Free for how long?

For more than twenty years, on every one of the great issues of freedom and security, John Kerry has been more wrong, more weak and more wobbly than any other national figure. As a war protestor, Kerry blamed our military.

As a Senator, he voted to weaken our military. And nothing shows that more sadly and more clearly than his vote this year to deny protective armor for our troops in harms way, far-away.

George Bush understands that we need new strategies to meet new threats.

John Kerry wants to re-fight yesterday’s war. George Bush believes we have to fight today’s war and be ready for tomorrow’s challenges. George Bush is committed to providing the kind of forces it takes to root out terrorists.

No matter what spider hole they may hide in or what rock they crawl under.

George Bush wants to grab terrorists by the throat and not let them go to get a better grip.

From John Kerry, they get a “yes-no-maybe” bowl of mush that can only encourage our enemies and confuse our friends….

This election will change forever the course of history, and that’s not any history. It’s our family’s history.

The only question is how. The answer lies with each of us. And, like many generations before us, we’ve got some hard choosing to do.

Right now the world just cannot afford an indecisive America. Fainthearted, self-indulgence will put at risk all we care about in this world.

In this hour of danger our President has had the courage to stand up. And this Democrat is proud to stand up with him….

Iran, Praying to Allah for a Kerry Win?

“Watchdog: Iran Plans to Process Uranium.” Dumb, dumb, dumb. The only question is who bombs first, Israel or U.S.

Psychoanalyzing Peace Protesters

NYTimes.com headline: “Hundreds Are Arrested as Protests Escalate”

Scene: A psychiatrist’s office in Manhattan

Patient: Please tell me, Dr. Spielvogel, why do I become so violent when I protest for peace?

Shrink: Vy not? Unlike zose against whom you protest, you haff no responsibility for defending ze nation. You are venting your feelings of powerlessness.

Patient: But vy — why — do I become violent when I vent?

Shrink: Vell, ven you vere an adolescent, and you rebelled against your parents, you had to do it by nonviolent means because you depended on zem for your bed and board.

Patient: So, you think I’m really acting out my adolescent rebellion against my parents?

Shrink: Vell, zince you are only capable of shouting mindless slogans — ven you aren’t doing zomesing violent — it is clear to me zat you haven’t advanced beyond adolescence. In fact, I sink you have regressed into childhood.

Patient: I’m not going to take this lying down.

Shrink: Lying down, zitting up, makes no difference to me. Zat will be $200. And no protesting or I’ll cut off your prescription of Thorazine. Next patient…

Al Franken — leftwing nutjob, alleged comedian, and front man for Error America — sharing his wit and wisdom with a political opponent, at the Republican National Convention.

Where the French Went Wrong

A review of Gertrude Himmelfarb’s The Roads to Modernity says it well:

…Now comes distinguished historian Gertrude Himmelfarb (married to Irving Kristol, widely regarded as the godfather of the neoconservative movement) to add some intellectual heft to the right’s Francophobia.

Himmelfarb’s basic contention, one she supports with great passion and wide-ranging scholarship, is that the great 18th century French Enlightenment has been vastly overrated and that the British and American Enlightenments have been comparatively underrated. Her goal in writing this book is to “reclaim the Enlightenment…from the French who have dominated and usurped it” and restore it to the British and Americans.

So who stole the Enlightenment and gave credit for it to the French? Himmelfarb never says so directly, but one can venture a guess: liberals in academia. Her critique of the French Enlightenment is twofold: First, the French philosophes, from Rousseau to Voltaire to Diderot and the rest, were anti-religious, and second, they were elitists who scorned the common people. The French so worshiped reason that they denied the value of faith, thus cutting themselves off from the multitudes.

The great Voltaire, Himmelfarb points out, opposed education for the children of farmers on the grounds that they were mired in religious superstition and thus largely unredeemable. This kind of elitist thinking, Himmelfarb tells us repeatedly, pervaded the French Enlightenment. So did totalitarian impulses, impulses embodied in the French Revolution and “the Terror.” Himmelfarb spends much space describing Rousseau’s concept of the “general will” and how it influenced Robespierre and hence “the Terror.”…

Exactly. Rousseau, the godfather of communism, believed that individuals had surrendered their will to the state by entering into an imaginary social contract (somewhat like John Rawls’s imaginary “veil of ignorance”). And it was all downhill from there. Now we have Rousseau’s descendants — modern-day Democrats — who want to regulate our lives for our own good. That includes, of course, denying a good education to poor children in the name of “public” education.

Some Lessons from War

Peace Pledge Union Online has a slightly out-of-date (09/06/03) catalog of major wars and armed conflicts around the world. As of a year ago, the wars and armed conflicts listed below were in progress (country, year of onset, characterization of conflict). My interpretation follows the list.

Africa

Algeria 1992 civil war and civilian unrest

Burundi 1988 ethnic conflict continuing despite peace process

Congo-Brazzaville 1997 ethnic violence and aftermath

Congo-DR 1998 civil war, some moves towards peace

Kenya 1990 ethnic violence

Liberia 2000 rebel insurgency and cross-border conflicts

Nigeria 1997 recurrent ethnic, religious and political conflict

Somalia 1988 civil war and factional struggles

Sudan 1984 civil war

Uganda 1990 rebel/ethnic violence

America (i.e., the American continents)

Colombia 1986 civil war

Peru 1983 civil war declining

Asia

South Asia

Afghanistan 1978 civil war; recurrent international involvement

India 1947 recurrent territorial dispute in Kashmir

Kashmir 1947 recurrent territorial dispute

Pakistan 1947 recurrent territorial dispute in Kashmir

Sri Lanka 1984 civil war

Southeast Asia

Burma 1948 political and ethnic struggle

Indonesia (West Papua) 1969 independence struggle

Philippines 1971 civil/sectarian war

Europe

Russia 1999 renewed separatist war

Yugoslavia/Kosovo 1999 ethnic/separatist violence/NATO war aftermath

Middle East

Iraq 1990 interstate war; ethnic conflict

Israel 1982 interstate war; political/ethnic violence

A few of the conflicts may have abated in the last year, but several have intensified, and there are some new ones. But those changes don’t affect the moral I draw when I think about the list in the context of history:

1. Most wars and armed conflicts have nothing to do with the United States. The U.S. is not now — nor has it ever been — the leading cause of violence in the world. The U.S. didn’t start World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the War in Vietnam, or the Gulf War of 1990-91. Nor did the U.S. start the present war in Iraq — but that’s another discussion.

2. American might has, since 1945, sheltered the world from a massive war.

3. Armed conflict becomes less likely when representative government prevails, because it promotes the rule of law, which permits free markets to flourish (even allowing for the inevitable degree of regulation that attends representative government). The resulting prospect of stability and prosperity makes religious, tribal, and sectional rivalries less important in the scheme of life. Even the notable exception of Israel vs. Palestine proves the rule, for it is as much as anything else a war waged by a poor, despotic entity (Palestine) against a free and relatively prosperous one (Israel).

I do not mean to say that all conflict can be averted by the spread of representative government, the rule of law, and free markets. There are zealots in the world, and they will remain zealots regardless of democracy and prosperity — sometimes out of spite. The war on terror is a war against implacable zealots who care not for democracy, and we must fight those zealots by all means. But the spread of representative government, the rule of law, and prosperity eventually will diminish the zealots’ ability to elicit financial support and enlist suicide-fodder.

I am not calling for a “crusade” to bring representative government and free markets to all corners of the Earth. But — in addition to doing what we must do militarily to clean out the nest of vipers in the Middle East — we should use peaceful influence to promote the rule of law and the development of free markets whenever and wherever we can. To the extent that we can do those things, the world will be a more peaceful and prosperous place — for Americans as well as others.

Patriotism in Song

As I posted a few days ago, patriotism is defined as “love of country and willingness to sacrifice for it,” according to TheFreeDictionary.com. I accept that definition as a starting point, but I want to take a harder look at patriotism. Why should an American, to be precise, love his or her country? And why and how might an American sacrifice for the sake of America?

The most familiar verses of America’s popular anthems express love of country in a variety of ways. There’s the hippy-dippy sentiment of “This Land Is Your Land”:

This land is your land, this land is my land

From California, to the New York island

From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters

This land was made for you and me

Nothing there, unless you’re a welfare-state liberal who likes scenery.

Let’s try the first verse of “America the Beautiful”:

O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain

For purple mountain majesties above thy fruited plain!

America, America, god shed his grace on thee

And crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea

It’s “This Land Is Your Land” without the socialism.

“God Bless America” — composed in the years before World War II — begins to get it right:

While the storm clouds gather far across the

Sea, let us swear allegiance to a land that’s free.

Let us all be grateful for a land so fair, as we

Raise our voices in a solemn prayer.

God bless America, land that I love

Stand beside her and guide her

Thru the night with a light from above.

From the mountains to the prairies,

To the oceans white with foam.

God bless America, my home sweet home.

God bless America, my home sweet home.

Now we have “the land that’s free” as well as beautiful.

The first verse of “America” gets to the heart of the matter by focusing on liberty and its deep roots in America:

My country ‘tis of thee,

Sweet land of liberty,

Of thee I sing;

Land where my fathers died,

Land of the Pilgrims’ pride,

From ev’ry mountain side,

Let freedom ring.

And the “Star Spangled Banner” reminds us that war is sometimes the price of liberty:

Oh, say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light,

What so proudly we hail’d at the twilight’s last gleaming?

Whose broad stripes and bright stars, thro’ the perilous fight,

O’er the ramparts we watch’d, were so gallantly streaming?

And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,

Gave proof thro’ the night that our flag was still there.

O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave

O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

It’s hard to sing, and it lacks the lyrical beauty of its competitors, but the “Star Spangled Banner” still says it best: America is the beacon of liberty, and Americans so cherish liberty that millions of them have been willing to go to war for its sake.

In my next post on this subject I’ll look at sacrifice for liberty’s sake. It won’t be all about going to war.

A Victory Blog

Here.

Why Kerry’s War Record Means So Much to Democrats

Democrats are mostly against all wars and have been since the venture in Vietnam went sour (here in America, not there in Vietnam). Democrats flocked to Kerry when it seemed that his war record — coupled with his sort-of, sometimes opposition to the war in Iraq — would legitimate their knee-jerk antiwar stance.

When you live by a candidate’s war record, you die by the candidate’s war record. Kerry’s candidacy is beginning to die the death of a thousand swift cuts.

Kerry and Vietnam

He was for it before he was against it before he was for it.

The Meaning of Patriotism: An Introduction

It’s “love of country and willingness to sacrifice for it,” according to TheFreeDictionary.com. Before I looked up the definition, I was going to define patriotism merely as “love of country.” The part about “willingness to sacrifice for it” raises the stakes; it suggests that love of country must be backed by deeds, not just mouthed in words.

Far better than the dictionary definition of patriotism is a NYT op-ed by a U.S. Marine serving in Iraq. Key excerpts:

Now we are on the verge of victory or defeat in Iraq. Success depends not only on battlefield superiority, but also on the trust and confidence of the American people. I’ve read some articles recently that call for cutting back our military presence in Iraq and moving our troops to the peripheries of most cities. Such advice is well-intentioned but wrong – it would soon lead to a total withdrawal. Our goal needs to be a safe Iraq, free of militias and terrorists; if we simply pull back and run, then the region will pose an even greater threat than it did before the invasion. I also fear if we do not win this battle here and now, my 7-year-old son might find himself here in 10 or 11 years, fighting the same enemies and their sons.

When critics of the war say their advocacy is on behalf of those of us risking our lives here, it’s a type of false patriotism. I believe that when Americans say they “support our troops,” it should include supporting our mission, not just sending us care packages. They don’t have to believe in the cause as I do; but they should not denigrate it. That only aids the enemy in defeating us strategically.

Michael Moore recently asked Bill O’Reilly if he would sacrifice his son for Falluja. A clever rhetorical device, but it’s the wrong question: this war is about Des Moines, not Falluja. This country is breeding and attracting militants who are all eager to grab box cutters, dirty bombs, suicide vests or biological weapons, and then come fight us in Chicago, Santa Monica or Long Island. Falluja, in fact, was very close to becoming a city our forces could have controlled, and then given new schools and sewers and hospitals, before we pulled back in the spring. Now, essentially ignored, it has become a Taliban-like state of Islamic extremism, a terrorist safe haven. We must not let the same fate befall Najaf or Ramadi or the rest of Iraq.

No, I would not sacrifice myself, my parents would not sacrifice me, and President Bush would not sacrifice a single marine or soldier simply for Falluja. Rather, that symbolic city is but one step toward a free and democratic Iraq, which is one step closer to a more safe and secure America.

I miss my family, my friends and my country, but right now there is nowhere else I’d rather be. I am a United States Marine.

Glen G. Butler is a major in the Marines.