Hanson said: "the whole supporting infrastructure [of Western civilization] is a product of a complex system of secularism, rationalism, tolerance, sexual equality, consensual government and free expression ... " [emphasis added]

This is the kind of stuff that is giving traditional conservatives shudders about the administration and its friends in the media. Prof. Hanson, who should know better, insists on claiming that the foundation of our civilization is essentially Jacobin.

We are attempting to defeat radical Islam with minimal damage to innocents. This is certainly the right way for a modern, compassionate deomcracy to proceed. But, in the event a nuclear weapon is exploded on US soil, all bets are off. We will destroy without mercy in that event. One Ohio-class submarine carries 180 warheads. A fraction of those warheads will destroy everything and kill nearly everyone from Tunis to Islamabad. Does anyone think that any US president could not do so and remain either alive or in office?

Bob:

Yes, that's rather a significant ace in the hole isn't it. Though the Afrikaaners failure to use that option has to be troubling to those who think Israel or we would use that ace.

The Afrikaaners knew (know) that their many talents were needed to rebuild a multiracial South Africa. No sense torching the entire forest if you're going to have to replant the trees.

"multiracial South Africa", good one...

Spengler is making two arguments, one of which is wrong but the other may be right and is ignored in the West. He's wrong about cherry picking. He may be right that the west's most dangerous enemies within Islam are among those, like bin Laden, who think they best know the west.

This is a western blind spot, as we think, somewhat incredibly, that those outsiders who know us best are bound to love us. We saw this throughout the history of the Soviet Union, when the fact that this Communist or that one loved Jazz or sports cars or baseball or spoke English without an accent was seen to be a sign that he was secretly an Ameriphile and could be trusted, so we might as well throw away those nasty nuclear missiles. This reached its ludicrous extreme when Baby Assad ascended to the throne and the west thought he must be a closet Democrat because he had been a London trained optometrist (or orthodontist or whatever the heck he was).

David:

But that doesn't make bin Laden (or Yuri Andropov) dangerous. It makes the Western liberals who believe such nonsense dangerous.

would you have a link to the London Times article he refers to in the article September 20, 2003

mal:

The Times went to subscription archives only and it's almost impossible to find anything there anymore. Sorry.

I don't understand why those words are "Jacobin"--

The problem is that those words/pharses have become loaded terms in modern discourse whose meanings have changed radically in the past few years. By "sexual equality", it seems Hanson means between men and women. He's using "sex" as a noun, not a verb. By "secularism" seems to refer to a separation between the spheres of authority of the state and the church. The "render unto Caesar" bit. "Toleration" is not the modern synonym for approval it has become, but simply not supressing heterodox ideas. And "rationalism" would be an acceptance that universe isn't ruled by capricious spirits or gods, and those who claim to speak for them.

thank you anyway

I'm too old to wait for Islam to collapse of its own weight, which it has now supported for close to 1,400 years; and unwilling to watch my children slaughtered in the meanwhile.

That Naziism was "rather easily" subdued is absurd. It very nearly wasn't subdued at all. Had German scientists found in their libraries what English scientists found in theirs -- and that they didn't was not because of their Naziism -- then we would be watching goosestepping parades in the big cities of Europe in real time right now.

Quite an assumption to believe that a racialist,nationalist,top-down socialist oriented command economy based on slave labor would have survived into modern times. The Thousand Year Reich lasted, what, 12 years? A six year war subdued them very nicely.

Raoul:

I call those words Jacobin because they resemble the sort of abstractions which the Jacobins elevated gainst human reality. Consider Russell Kirk's Six Canons of Conservatism, which OJ cites regularly:

"(1) Belief that a divine intent rules society as well as conscience, forging an eternal chain of right and duty which links great and obscure, living and dead. Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems. [Hanson favors instead "secularism"]

(2) Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of traditional life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems. [Hanson substitutes "rationalism"]

(3) Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes. The only true equality is moral equality; all other attempts at levelling lead to despair, if enforced by positive legislation. ["sexuality equality"]

(4) Persuasion that property and freedom are inseparably connected, and that economic levelling is not economic progress. Separate property from private possession and liberty is erased. [Hansom appears not to mention the free enterprise system]

(5) Faith in prescription and distrust of 'sophisters and calculators.' Man must put a control upon his will and his appetite, for conservatives know man to be governed more by emotion than by reason. Tradition and sound prejudice provide checks upon man's anarchic impulse. [Again, we get secularism and rationalism and tolerance]

(6) Recognition that change and reform are not identical, and that innovation is a devouring conflagration more often than it is a torch of progress. Society must alter, for slow change is the means of its conservation, like the human body's perpetual renewal; but Providence is the proper instrument for change, and the test of a statesman is his cognizance of the real tendency of Providential social forces."

My point is that Hanson's vision (at least as it appears to us in these words) is emphatically not a conservative one. Instead it leans on concepts traditionally associated with Conservatism's enemies, which I denoted, as Kirk often did, with the term "Jacobin."

Can we distinguish between Islam, as originally practiced, and today's Islamists who are practicing a perverted form of Islam which is informed by Wahhabism (thanks to Ibn Hanbal, Sayyid Qutb, Abu Mawdudi, Ibn Taymiyya, and the big guy himself, Ibn Wahhab) and fundamentalism?

I know it's fun and popular to quote sections of the Qu'ran in which trees shout about Jews hiding behind them but the religion itself is no enemy of the West or even Western ideals. I know this is going to come as a shock to many Christians, but medieval Christianity bore more than a superficial resemblance to today's Islam. What saved Christianity was the Enlightenment which forced a different path on the West, a path in which there was a separation of the Divine and the secular -- mostly due to Frederick II's importation of ideas from...you guessed it...the Arabic/Islamic world. They (the Islamic world) practiced the same philosophical style of government -- if not the same types -- that we do today. It's not stretching the truth to say that Western government is partly an invention of the Islamic world.

That (an Enlightenment and a Frederick II) hasn't happened yet in the Islamic world but I am convinced that it can happen. Prophesizing the end of Islam because of its current problems is going a bit far.

Is a reformation of the Islamic world a given? Of course not since we haven't seen much evidence of a growth in a different direction. But a collapse of Islam from its own weight? Sorry, I don't buy that.

I'm sorry, but not only is it absurd (and kind of disgusting) for you to say that Nazism was "rather easily" defeated, but "we" did not do the majority of the defeating, either.

What stopped Hitler was millions -- millions! -- of dead Russians, most of whom weren't "Bolsheviks," but also weren't "we."

It is true that we Anglo-Americans played an important supporting role to the main drama, providing both materiel and valor.

(Though the Soviets built the best-engineered tank of the war, the T-34.)

Steve:

The religion won't end, but it will be rendered Protestant. The 20th Century served only one useful purpose, it proved for once and for all that you can't combine the economy, government and religion under one authority and prosper. Islam had a brief period during which it was expansionist and revived Grecco-Roman learning, but during that time Christianity and modern statehood were spreading in Europe when Islam hit the wall--since it could not generate ideas and sciences of its own--the West quickly eclipsed it.

Ratio:

Exactly, Nazism was so feeble it couldn't even defeat Bolshevism.

Nonsense. Evil can be very powerful. If the US had shared a long land border with the Reich a hecatomb would have been exacted from us as well.

Thank God we did not.

Ratio:

You may have noticed we don't share one with Islam either, thereby proving the point.

Boy, we are really into some grand sweeps of history here. Orrin, you sound like a near- marxist when you argue we can all sleep well at night knowing that the bad guys will inevitably collapse from internal contradiction. So we can carry on in the meantime trading prosperously and enjoying our freedom as long as we have lotsa' nukes? "My strength is that of twenty men because my heart is pure!"

That quick little war that dispatched the Nazis so summarily killed fifty million. According to Keegan, another fifty million have died in war since (up to 1993 and counting), the overwhelming majority due to communist regimes and various so-called wars of national liberation, in large part because leftists like to involve the citizenry big time to make sure they enjoy the fight thoroughly. Both doctrines captured the imagination of huge segments of populations, who were driven, internally and externally, to unimaginable heights of sacrifice for the causes(or who were sacrificed to the causes). Let's not pretend now that they were all a bunch of clownish, bumbling bureaucrats who forgot to bring winter boots to Moscow or who were ousted because they couldn't make cars that run.

I'm with Harry. It was far too close for comfort and I have no doubt they are coming back somehow. They always do. I don't disagree that internal moral confusion and willful blindness may be the greatest threat, but what does that matter? Death and slavery are what they are, however caused. As for the elites, they are not quite so isolated or self-contained as we might like. Carter, Chretien and lots of others like them were elected, after all. Pronouncing our victory inevitable sounds like a line from a suburban UN club of earnest soccer-moms promoting an increase in foreign aid.

Steve, I presume you mean medieval Christianity did not have a well-defined limitation on its governing role, rather than that our notions of government were inspired directly by Islamic thought or example.

But as far as I can see, our victory IS inevitable. There is no way that any sort of totalitarian system can prosper.

In the long run. And that's the rub.

In the short term, millions or tens of millions of us might die.
But to quote Kipling(?:
"... we have the Maxim gun, and they have not..."

I agree with Bob-----if millions or even tens of thousands of us die at their hand, then we'll slag the entire Middle East.

Peter:

People are always killing other people, but it has rather little impact on the security of North America.

Orrin:

In part, perhaps, because Americans (and, yes, often Canadians), have a history of taking the fight to the bad guy's front door.

Peter:

Yes, thank goodness we intervened or Stalin and Mao might have killed 60 million people.

Part of Orrin's incomprehension of industrial processes, demonstrated here lately, includes an underestimate of the defensive capacity of any industrialized society.

The productiveness he likes to brag about when it happens here is just as prolific elsewhere.

Even a badly run industrial economy can stagger forward and expand for generations. E.g. France.

The first, second and fifth most powerful economies in the 1940s were just barely able to contain and defeat the fourth (or possibly sixth) most powerful.

Islam does not present the same problem. Rather the reverse of it. As long as its morale remains high -- and it is increasing daily -- it is more or less impervious to less than all-out attacks from the modern world, either military, moral or economic.

It is the same problem as the US faced in Vietnam and could not solve: If a man doesn't have a house, you cannot bomb him out of it.

During the heyday of religion, our ancestors either lived in fortresses or were regularly raped and murdered. That the rapists and murderers were unable to create an Empire of Europe did not mean much to the murderees.

The US economy, predisposed by reliance on free market principles, was once nearly destroyed by the failure of a small agricultural bank in Austria.

We tried isolationism more than once and we always suffered from it. I understand that Orrin disparages most of the lessons in the Bible, but even we atheists can find some value in Gen. 4:9.

OJ:

How many millions would Stalin and Mao killed had we not intervened?

Looking back, we can more easily see the folly of command economies.

But the only way to get to the long run is through a bunch of short runs. And a bunch of short runs ago, the failure of command economies was far from a foregone conclusion.

Hindsight has a seductive way of making people feel real smart.

Harry/Jeff

Well said, you cuddly heathens!

"Steve, I presume you mean medieval Christianity did not have a well-defined limitation on its governing role, rather than that our notions of government were inspired directly by Islamic thought or example."

Exactly. I meant to say, admittedly in a muddled fashion, was that medieval Christianity shared the same characteristic with Islam as promoted by cats like Ibn Hanbal that a ruler served as a shadow of God on Earth and that there could be no separation between religious, economic and political power. Each supported the other and were necessary for a true Godly state.

What Hanbal's thoughts eventually inspired was the form of government known as the caliphate, where government needed the blessing and legitimization of a religious authority, or the caliph. You saw that primarily in Egypt when the Mamelukes reestablished a caliphate and named a descendent of Baghdad's caliph as their own to give their dictatorship a religious stamp of approval.

Obviously Europe moved in a different direction. Frederick II imported the idea of a separation between the secular and religious but not needing the stamp of approval from the religious, probably because of his exceptionally poor relationship with Rome during his long reign. If I remember right, he was actually excommunicated so perhaps that's another reason we ended up where we did.

Harry:

"Part of Orrin's incomprehension of industrial processes, demonstrated here lately, includes an underestimate of the defensive capacity of any industrialized society."

So we should fight offensive wars rather than sit back in isolation confident that we can defeat anyone?

Jeff:

You might try reading what conservatives said at the relevant time. They weren't fooled by command economies. They had foresight, or, as you might prefer to call it: predictive hindsight.

Jeff,

Start with von Mises, 'Socialism' - Liberty Press 1981 - if you want to start with something relatively recent. First published in 1922, it outlined fairly presciently what was going to happen. Orwell and Hayek did most of their work before 1950. One might even mention Burke - nah, he couldn't have seen what was comming - did write some interesting letters though.

RDB:

Nock first:

http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/41/

> It is the same problem as the US faced in Vietnam
> and could not solve: If a man doesn't have a
> house, you cannot bomb him out of it.

Islam does have lots of precious holy sites, and we could obliterate every one of them--after forcibly evacuating the residents of course.

Orrin:

Isn't fighting offensive wars instead of holding back confidently exactly what the US has done four times in the last twelve years--successfully?

CP:

And where would that get you? Do you think the West would suffer a mortal blow if Al-Qaeda took out St.Peter's and Lourdes?

That some correctly predicted the failure of command economies does not mean the conclusion at the time was foregone, or undisputable.

There was plenty of evidence (much of it manufactured, undoubtedly) that made command economies a frightening thing to many, and the wave of the future to others.

Sitting here more than 60 years after the fact, it is difficult to put yourself in the minds of people in the late thirties who witnessed a near meteoric rise of Nazi Germany from the ashes of WWI and the Depression.

It is wonderful that certain conservative commentators concluded it would all come a cropper eventually, but a prudent person could be forgiven that eventually might well need some pushing.

Peter:

No, they've largely been needless failures.

Jeff:

The difference between conservatives and statists is precisely that conservatives know and knew no such system could ever work. It's easy to put ourselves in their shoes because there are so many around still who would run the experiment again, deluding themselves the result would be different now. Harry for example thinks that if only the New Dealers had been allowed to take more control then they'd have saved us.

Orrin:

Then why were you so apoplectic with rage at the countries that wouldn't go along?

Are you just having fun here?

Because they're morally obligated having benefited from our prior mistakes to help with these. The next time Paris is burning do you doubt they'll turn to us and Britain or that we'll get sucked in, even against our own interest?

Orrin:

As Charlie Brown would say: AArrggghhh!

Are you saying that US policy is or should be based on US interests, but because you strayed foolishly from those in the past and benefitted other countries, those countries must help you in future mistakes that are in no one's interests?

Do you really think it makes sense to ground your foreign relations in principles that defy all rules of human nature and the historical behaviour of nations?

I have a close friend who is an expatriate from a Muslim country. He is a gentle but skeptical soul, who has seen a lot of evil in the name of religion. 2 of his brothers were killed in sectarian wars, and his only sister did not marry because there weren't enough good men around. When he went to Mecca (years ago), his comment was that all the people marching around the Kabaa were like drones circling the big Borg cube.

For Christianity, location is irrelevant (Jesus even declared this to be so in John 4). But for Islam, location is everything. The Kabaa is not in Baghdad or Cairo or Istanbul (or Karachi, for that matter). I doubt it would have survived in one of those places. If it were to disappear, what would happen to the entire religion in 25 or 50 years?

Peter:

No. I'm saying that we never should have acted in the interests of France rather than in our own in the first place. We should have stayed out of WWI, WWII, and the Cold War. But we fought them and France, primarily, benefited. We then gave them money to rebuild themselves. That should, but does not necessarily as you say, impose a moral debt. France obviously feels no such debt. Yet we will rescue them when their immigrant population rises up and starts slaughtering them, won't we?

I don't care that the French are ungrateful. That is what it means to be French. I do care that the intellectual elites in this country continue to pretend that France is an ally to be respected when they are in fact an enemy.

jim:

Let's hope it doesn't come to that.

Orrin:

Damn right it imposes a moral debt, at least if the concept of "The West" means anything and I think it still does. We owe you a few too, even if you never liberated Ottawa. I think you are justified in being angry and wary (for a time, anyway--history didn't start and end in the spring of 2003), but surely not because your friends declined to help you commit blunders that weren't in anybody's self-interest. How can any country sacrifice its soldiers to that principle? The reason is because you were right.

Also, if you are speaking literally rather then artistically when you refer to France as an enemy, isn't it a waste of time to be angry with them? Maybe pompous adversary describes it better. Keeps options open for a brighter future, too.

Peter:

Yes, I mean that France is literally our enemy and has been since 1789. It's a shame that the only time we went to war against them was in WWII.

http://watch.windsofchange.net/themes_66.htm

The link to the London times article

OJ:

I doubt Harry thinks that.

And the conservatives you speak of never had their assumptions tested against reality. We have no idea how long it would have taken for Nazi Germany and the USSR to have collapsed under their own contradictions without external pressure. We have no idea what would have happened had Hitler enough time to develop nuclear weapons--Nazi Germany was years ahead of us in rocket and jet engine development. And that's in relation to a war-energized technological base.

Any bets for where our development would have been had we sat back and watched? Absent the test of combat, I do, and the conclusion isn't good.

Any bets about what we would have done had London gone up in a mushroom cloud (assuming they weren't already speaking German) in 1947?

Well, there's no way of knowing, is there?

Which is precisely why concluding the conservatives of the time were right is absolutely without foundation--there is utterly no way to test their assertions against an alternate reality that never occurred.

In this universe, anyway.

In the late 80s a British author wrote a book set in the 80s based on the premise that the Nazis had won WWII. Maybe you should read it. Maybe I should provide enough details so you could.

Fatherland by Robert Harris, though it's set in 1964, with Joe Kennedy Sr. running for re-election. in a United States that's doing just fine. Harris also wrote Enigma which involves the Allied cover-up of Katyn so that democratic citizens wouldn't realize what the USSR was really like. He's one of my favorite authors.

http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.authlist/author_id/632

CP, I have long advocated the "bonifacian" solution to Islam, which is to destroy it the way Boniface destroyed Druidism by cutting down the sacred oak.

My suggestion is to get out the Ranchhand equipment and load it up with pig blood instead of Agent Orange. Then start spraying the holy sites and daring Allah to intervene.

I predict Islam would disappear within a couple months.

As for the New Deal, since the problem was underconsumption, restricting production and enhancing disposable income would certainly have worked, and it was working until the conservatives killed it.

The exact same effect was obtained, more painfully, by sequestering income from 1942-45 and letting it out in a flood in 1946.

Your farsighted conservatives didn't predict the effect of that, did they?

Jeff:

A new comment has been posted on your blog BrothersJudd Blog, on entry
#8164 (NOT THAT TRIPE ABOUT FREEDOM AGAIN...:).
http://www.brothersjudd.com/cgi-bin/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=8164

IP Address: 198.77.110.11
Name: Harry Eagar
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Comments:

I'd buy 'would have been useful." My hero went to his grave persuaded that the same people who created the problem had sabotaged his best efforts to fix it.

Such evidence as there is suggests it would have worked. The New Deal was strangled in its cradle.

Re the New Deal - "since the problem was underconsumption"....

That is like saying the fire was put out before any damage was done by the fire department. Understandably correct, but highly misleading.

I'm quite sure people would have consumed if they could have - after all, it's what we do. But they couldn't. Not even FDR could get people to consume - he just made them feel good thinking about it. And while the nadir of the underconsumption was in 32-33, things were sliding back down again in 37-38, so please don't blame 'conservatives' for killing any nascent recoveries. And just how does one restrict production and enhance disposable income at the same time? It may work for the managerial class, but certainly not for those working the floor.

jim:

Harry believes that the Court's actions striking down elements of what would eventually have been a command economy kept the New Deal from succeeding.

Peter,

Wow, if you think that St.Peter's and Lourdes occupy a comparable place in the mental universe of the West that Mecca, Medina, or even that darned Dome of the Rock do for most Muslims, I am simply at a loss for words...