Memory Hole

2006-01-01T00:01:00.000-08:00

Who controls the past controls the future

Who controls the present controls the past

2005-12-31T18:59:00.000-08:00

My Other Blog:

http://kenny1957.blogspot.com

2005-05-06T07:54:00.000-07:00

Eight Easy Steps

How to stay paralyzed by fear of abandonment
How to defer to men in solveable predicaments
How to control someone to be a carbon copy of you
How to have that not work and have them run away from you

How to keep people at arms length and never get too close
How to mistrust the ones you supposedly love the most
How to pretend you're fine and don't need help from anyone
How to feel worthless unless you're serving or helping someone

[Chorus:]
I'll teach you all this in 8 easy steps
A course of a lifetime you'll never forget
I'll show you how to in 8 easy steps
I'll show you how leadership looks when taught by the best

How to hate women when you're supposed to be a feminist
How to play all pious when you're really a hypocrite
How to hate god when you're a player and a spiritualist
How to sabotage your fantasies by fears of success

[Chorus]

I've been doing research for years
I've been practicing my ass off
I've been training my whole life for this moment I swear to you
Culminating just to be this well-versed leader before you

[Chorus]

How to lie to yourself and thereby to everyone else
How to keep smiling when you're thinking of killing yourself
How to numb a la 'holic to avoid going within
How to stay stuck in blue by blaming them for everything

[Chorus]

(By Alanis Morisette)

2005-05-06T05:25:00.000-07:00

Would?

Know me broken by my master
teach thee on child of love hereafter

Into the flood again
same old trip it was back then
so I made a big mistake
try to see it once my way

Drifting body it's sole desertion
flying not yet quite the notion

Into the flood again
same old trip it was back then
so I made a big mistake
try to see it once my way

Into the flood again
same old trip it was back then
so I made a big mistake
try to see it once my way

Am I wrong?
have I run too far to get home

Have I gone?
and left you here alone

Am I wrong?
have I run too far to get home, yeah

Have I gone?
and left you here alone

If I would, could you?

(Alice In Chains, 1992)

2005-05-02T12:19:00.000-07:00

Liberalism

(The following excerpt comes from the Introduction of The Politics of Bad Faith: The Radical Assault on America’s Future, by David Horowitz (1998).

During the French Revolution the Left created the socialist and communist movements, which proposed to “complete” the transformation the revolution had begun. The efforts of these radicals culminated in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, whose leaders saw themselves as the direct heirs of Robespierre and the Jacobins, and whose goal was an egalitarian state. But now the empires that socialists built have crashed ingloriously to earth. The catastrophe of the Soviet system has ended for all but the most obdurate the idea that a social plan can replace the market and produce abundance, or that government can abolish private property without also abolishing political freedom.

One might conclude from these facts that the Left is now no more than a historical curiosity, and the intellectual tradition that sustained it for two hundred years is at an end. But if history were a rational process, mankind would have learned these lessons long ago, and long ago rejected the socialist fallacies that have caused such epic grief.

It could also be argued that there has never been a true Right in America, a party committed to monarchy, with religious attachments to “blood and soil.” Indeed, as a frontier nation, America has been so future-oriented that, until recently, an American conservatism seemed a contradiction in terms. The contemporary conservative movement only emerged in the 1950s, launching its first presidential bid with the candidacy of Barry Goldwater in 1964. Yet, barely twenty-five years later, the end of Communism had already put the future of this movement in question. Many argued that American conservatism was so much a coalition of convenience -- the marriage of disparate philosophies united only by anti-Communist passion -- that it would not outlive its ideological adversary.

But the Right has survived its triumphs, even as the Left has outlived its defeats. A few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a leader of intellectual conservatism observed: “There is no ‘after the Cold War’ for me. So far from having ended, my cold war has increased in intensity, as sector after sector of American life has been ruthlessly corrupted by the liberal ethos. It is an ethos that aims simultaneously at political and social collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other.”[1] What Irving Kristol refers to in this passage as the “liberal ethos” is really not liberal, but the radical enterprise that now dresses itself up in “liberal” colors. Group collectivism, racial preferences, “substantive equality” and moral relativism are the rallying themes of contemporary liberals. But these have little in common with the liberalism of the pre-Sixties era, or with its classical antecedents. In fact, they make up a radical creed.

Even so, many will contend that today no significant Left exists in America, outside the liberal arts faculties of universities or among the leadership of government unions. They will further claim that the “liberal ethos,” to which Kristol refers, is indeed liberal in its agendas, that it aims at no more than a tempering of free market individualism with social concerns. In this view, the domestic “cold war” is a political chimera, created by the Right to keep its (anti-Communist) faith alive.

It is the argument of this book, that such conclusions are misguided. They confuse a momentary equilibrium in the political balance with the deeper forces that shape an epoch. It is true that the Left is rhetorically in retreat and has adopted more moderate self-descriptions for the moment. But that is hardly the same as surrendering its agendas or vacating the field of battle. It is more like adopting a political camouflage on entering a hostile terrain. In the era when Stalin was conquering Eastern Europe, American Communists were calling themselves “progressives” to avoid the taint that Stalinism had inflicted on them. But this was only a protective coloration. It did not involve the slightest change in their real commitments as Marxist radicals, or in their ultimate goals of overthrowing the American government and subverting its Constitution. Far from signaling the end of an anti-American radicalism, as the movements of the Sixties showed, this metamorphosis of Communists into progressives was just the beginning.

It is also true that many liberals who, despite sharing a common political front with the Left, are not committed to radical agendas. They are pragmatic enough to tack in a conservative direction should the political wind shift. But by the same token they are not anchored to any conservative principles that would hold them on course when the same wind shifts again.

Those who question the existence of a Left are influenced, in large part, by an optical illusion created by a culture that is instinctively protective of the Left and that reflects the long-standing dominion of socialist ideas. In the present post-Communist moment, radicalism is so tainted by its complicity in recent crimes that merely to identify someone as a partisan of the Left would be a damaging accusation. Political bystanders, who may be vaguely sympathetic to leftist ideas or even neutral in the historical debate, will recoil instinctively from the left-wing label as from the stigma of an inquisition. No one wants to be perceived as a “McCarthyist.” As a result, even self-avowed Communists like Angela Davis, are ritually identified as “liberals” unless they themselves choose otherwise. The very idiom “to red bait” shows how ingrained this universal reflex is. There is no comparable term to describe the hostile exposure of loyalties on the Right.

The same protective impulse is manifest in the standards used in public opinion surveys, which are calibrated on scales that range from “liberal” to “conservative” and “ultra-conservative,” but lack the balance of a “Left.” Was the Clinton Administration’s attempt to nationalize one-sixth of the economy inspired by socialist illusions? The question may or may not have an affirmative answer. But in the contemporary American culture it is ill-mannered to ask.

A recent report by Americans for Democratic Action shows that 47 Democratic House members in the 104th Congress voted to the left of Representative Bernie Sanders, who (alone among them) describes himself as a socialist. Even more politicians who identify themselves as liberal, despite the demise of the socialist bloc, seem to think it unjust that some people earn more than others, a presumption that is the core of leftist belief.

As a result of the prevailing cultural gravity, media arbiters regularly mis-apply political labels to both sides of the spectrum. Noam Chomsky, the America-loathing, MIT socialist is routinely described in the press as a “liberal,” while political adversaries like sociologist Charles Murray, who is a libertarian, is normally referred to as “conservative.” In the current cultural lexicon, a liberal is thus no longer one who ascribes to the principles of Madison or Locke, or to the institutions of private property and free markets, but to almost anyone who is not labeled a “conservative.”

In Europe, by contrast, parties described as “liberal” still reflect the classical origins of the term itself and are associated with economic individualism and free markets. One reason is that in Europe there is a standing socialist tradition that goes back more than a hundred years. It would be inconvenient for radical parties with long socialist histories to suddenly adopt the term “liberal” in order to make a cosmetic adjustment to post-Communist reality. In the United States, however, where the entrance of radicals into the political mainstream has been as recent as the 1970s, such a cosmetic re-make is effortless.

For some radicals the term “liberal” is still so distasteful that only the alternatives “progressive” and “populist” are acceptable masks for their real agendas. In 1995, The Nation magazine printed a manifesto titled “Real Populists Please Stand Up,” which read in part:

We are ruled by Big Business and Big Government as its paid hirelings, and we know it...The big corporations and the centi-millionaires and billionaires have taken daily control of our work, our pay, our housing, our health, our pension funds, our bank and savings deposits, our public lands, our airwaves, our elections and our very government....The divine right of kings has been replaced by the divine right of CEOs.[2]

This “populist” vision of America and its ruling class does not differ in any particular from the vision inscribed in the Stalinist tracts published in the 1930s, when the Nation was a promoter of the Soviet dictatorship and a proud participant in its “Popular Front.”

The changes in labeling that have blurred distinctions on the political landscape and obscured the existence of a Left, can be traced to the end of the Sixties and the failure of its radical apocalypse. Twenty years earlier, radicals had marched out of the Democratic Party to protest its anti-Communist foreign policy and formed the Progressive Party to advance their pro-Soviet agendas behind the presidential candidacy of Henry Wallace. Once having stepped outside the Democratic fold, they shed their liberal masks and, in the Sixties, emerged as New Left radicals condemning both parties as shills for the corporate “ruling class.” It was not until the 1972 presidential campaign of former Progressive Party activist George McGovern, that the Left returned to its Democratic base.

In making the transition back to the Democratic fold, radical activists sought to create a fire-wall between themselves and their recent careers as political revolutionaries. Without abandoning their old agendas, they sought to escape the taint their leftism had acquired through its resort to violence and its easy embrace of totalitarian causes. They accomplished this, as they had during the Popular Front of the 1930s, by modifying their rhetoric and enveloping themselves in the less threatening mantles of “liberal,” “progressive” and “populist.”

To acquire even more protective coloration from the political center, socialist radicals coined the term “neo-conservative” to describe those adversaries, who were genuine liberals opposed to an alliance with the Left. Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol and other neo-conservative spokesmen have written at length of their efforts to retain the term “liberal” for themselves, and preserve the integrity of the political language. But, despite the indisputable logic of their position, they were unable to withstand the dominant influence of the Left in the culture, and the “neo-conservative” label stuck.

An ironic result of the Left’s success in transforming the lexicon of American politics was that university speech codes and other forms of censorship, in the 1980s, were imposed by people the press identified as “liberals.” The authors of these codes were actually the radicals who had entered the academy following the failure of their revolutionary projects in the 1960s. Nor were their opponents, who rejected the idea of “political correctness,” really the conservative actors in these campus dramas. By the 1980s, the status quo order at American universities was almost everywhere controlled by the Left. The determined reformers of the censoring regimes were their political opponents on the Right.

A key architect of academic speech codes was radical law professor Catharine MacKinnon whose theoretical presumptions were laid out in a crude Marxist text, Towards A Feminist Theory of the State, and amplified in a tract equating pornography with rape, published by Harvard University Press. In her defense of censorship, Professor MacKinnon revealed how campus commissars were self-consciously carrying on a radical tradition that went back to Marx. “The law of equality and the law of freedom of speech are on a collision course in this country,” she announced, expressing the traditional radical disdain for individual rights (free speech) as against group rights (equality). Before the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, she continued, “the Constitution contained no equality guarantee.” As a result, “the constitutional doctrine of free speech has developed without taking equality seriously -- either the problem of social inequality or the mandate of substantive legal equality...[entrenched] in the Fourteenth Amendment.”[3] According to MacKinnon, the task of legal radicals like herself was to make sure that “substantive” equality was enacted into law, and to embed the principle of equal outcomes in the American constitutional framework.

But neither the doctrine of social equality nor MacKinnon’s imaginary “mandate of substantive legal equality” is, in fact, compatible with Madisonian liberalism or with the written Constitution or with the principle of liberty as understood by the American founders. On the contrary, the “law” of freedom and the “law” of equality, were understood by the framers to be fundamentally in conflict with each other -- a conflict that the socialist experiments of the last century have demonstrated with such tragic effect. Whenever a state seeks to enforce “substantive equality” in society, the principles of free speech, property, and individual freedom, inevitably raise insurmountable obstacles to the totalitarian project and are invariably suppressed.

The crypto-Marxist doctrine of “substantive equality,” however, is now not limited to radical feminists posturing as liberal academics. What might be called “Fourteenth Amendment Marxism” is a powerful and growing school of jurisprudence on American law faculties,[4] and has profoundly influenced the direction of liberal legal theory in general. In The Irony of Free Speech, Owen Fiss, a prominent legal scholar at Yale, advocates the soft version of the MacKinnon doctrine and identifies it with “liberal” jurisprudence as such: “Whereas the liberalism of the Nineteenth Century was defined by the claims of individual liberty and resulted in an unequivocal demand for limited government, the liberalism of today embraces the value of equality as well as liberty.” And further: “Today, equality has another place altogether [than it had previously in the American constitutional framework] -- it is one of the center beams of the legal order. It is architectonic.” By this Fiss means that “a truly democratic politics will not be achieved until conditions of equality have been fully satisfied.”[5] This is the classic Marxist view -- the “rights of man” will only be realized in a socialist state. In a typical academic muddle, Fiss proposes to combine the conradictory values, political liberty and equality of condition, ignoring the founders’ explicit recognition of their irresolvable conflict.[6]

More ominous for America’s constitutional future is that the doctrine of Fourteenth Amendment Marxism has become the basic charter of the so-called “civil rights” movement. The presence of the radical agenda in the American mainstream is nowhere more clearly seen than in the battle over the system of racial preferences called “affirmative action.” No other issue goes so directly to the heart of America’s social contract, to the survival of its pluralist enterprise, or to the shape of its political future.

In November 1997, voters in the largest state in the union overwhelmingly passed the “California Civil Rights Initiative,” outlawing government preferences and discrimination by race and gender. Known as Proposition 209, the California Civil Rights Initiative was designed to conform to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibiting racial segregation. The words of the Initiative are straightforward and simple:

The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.

The opposition to this measure was led by the organizations traditionally identified with civil rights, that had become radicalized in the preceding decades. The American Civil Liberties Union, the Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP, the AFL-CIO and other opponents of the California Civil Rights Initiative formed a roster of organizations that virtually defined the word “liberalism.” When the Initiative passed by a 54% to 45% margin, this liberal coalition appealed to a federal judge for an injunction that would stop its implementation. The Initiative, they maintained, was “unconstitutional.” The chief litigator for the ACLU called it “the most radical restructuring of the political process to the detriment of minorities in the history of this country”[7] -- an indication of just how deep was the division over an understanding of the most basic principle of American pluralism

In their opposition to the California Civil Rights Initiative, the ACLU-NAACP plaintiffs invoked the Fourteenth Amendment. Drawing on the radical law theories of the academic Left, they argued that it violated the Equal Protection Clause of the amendment. If the courts let the initiative stand, they maintained, it would “impose a special burden on minorities.” After hearing the argument, Judge Thelton Henderson granted the injunction. (Henderson had been specifically sought out by the plaintiffs to hear the case because he himself was a former left-wing activist and board member of the ACLU.) In the ACLU-NAACP complaint, and in Henderson’s decision, the radical outlook of the new liberalism could not have been more clearly or more paradoxically expressed: A law banning racial preferences was held to violate the Equal Protection Clause, and was therefore regarded as unconstitutional.

The conservative backers of the California Civil Rights Initiative were also veterans of the 1960s civil rights movement, and they appealed Henderson’s opinion to the Ninth Circuit Court, where a three-member panel reversed his ruling and lifted the injunction. In re-instating the Initiative, the Ninth Circuit found the position of its opponents not only wrong, but incoherent. One could not invoke equal protection of the laws to oppose a law banning racial preferences unless one was in profound disagreement with the constitutional framework itself:

Proposition 209 amends the California Constitution simply to prohibit state discrimination against or preferential treatment to any person on account of race or gender. Plaintiffs charge that this ban on unequal treatment denies members of certain races and one gender equal protection of the laws. If merely stating this alleged equal protection violation does not suffice to refute it, the central tenet of the Equal Protection Clause teeters on the brink of incoherence.[8]

Not daunted even by this harsh judgment, opponents of the California Civil Rights Initiative announced they would appeal the decision and dig in for a long war. In their appeal, they were joined by the U.S. Department of Justice and the president of the United States.[9] The determination to press the disagreement as a matter of constitutional principle emphasized the radical break that had occurred in the American social contract. A principle that had once been a common foundation for nationhood -- equal treatment by the law -- had become a ground of fundamental conflict.

The dispute also reflected the distorted terms of political discourse. A law against racial preferences, drafted to conform to the historic civil rights measures of the 1960s, was now “conservative;” opposition to an anti-discrimination law was now “liberal.”

The heart of the dispute between liberals and conservatives lay in their opposing views of the Fourteenth Amendment. Did the Equal Protection Clause require government to make its citizens substantively equal (the view of the Left), or did it require government to treat its citizens as equals before the law (the view of the Right). This dispute, of course, engages the entire 150-year history of conflict between Marxist movements, disdainful of “bourgeois rights” and the capitalist democracies of the West. Only, the Marxist position is now argued by “liberals.”

In the debate over the Civil Rights Initiative, the “liberal” side had invoked the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment as the grounds for striking down the anti-discrimination statute. The Ninth Circuit called this argument “paradoxical,” as surely it was. The Fourteenth Amendment had been adopted as a protection for Negroes in the post-slavery south who were being stripped by government of their invidividual civil rights under the infamous “Black Codes.” The Fourteenth Amendment was most emphatically not designed, as Catharine MacKinnon and the ACLU-NAACP radicals maintained, to guarantee equality for groups, whether through government-sponsored affirmative action policies or government programs to redistribute wealth. The Fourteenth Amendment was intended to prevent government from discriminating against individuals, especially on the basis of race. To underscore this point, the Ninth Circuit, citing a previous Supreme Court decision, observed:

After all, the ‘goal’ of the Fourteenth Amendment, ‘to which the Nation continues to aspire,’ is ‘a political system in which race no longer matters.’

Of course, not everyone opposing the California Civil Rights Initiative was radical in their perspective. Nor is every supporter of affirmative action inspired by the idea of group rights based on race, gender or class. But the principle of group rights is integral to every claim for affirmative action preferences, and is antithetic to the most fundamental principles of the American founding. It is the very unConstitutional idea of “social justice” between groups that has always been at the heart of the radical project, and that now drives much of the political agenda currently described as “liberal.” It is this idea that lies behind the attack on America’s constitutional framework mounted by “multi-culturalists,” “critical legal theorists,” “critical race advocates,” and activist judges who refer to the authority of a “living constitution” unanchored in any written text. The combination of these forces and their pervasive influence in the institutions of American culture and politics, backed by the American presidency, makes the current radical assault on the American founding both formidable and disturbing.

In establishing the proper terms of this conflict, there remains one final introductory issue, namely, whether the bi-polar distinction Left versus Right is still usefully descriptive. Does this dichotomy accommodate the complexity of views in the contemporary political spectrum? Does the term “Left” really embrace both radicals and liberals, and are libertarians properly associated with the Right?

The answers to these questions, inevitably, are both yes and no. While the terms may not be entirely satisfactory in describing complex individual commitments, they remain indispensable. Left and Right represent distinct and conflicting attitudes towards property, liberty and social equality, which are the axes of contemporary political battles, and define their historical possibilities.

On the Right, it is true, the conflicts between libertarians and conservatives remain in many areas fundamental -- for example, in those cases where conservatives look to the state to defend the institutions of moral order. But the two parties share a common belief in property as the foundation of human liberty, and a common understanding of the inherent conflict between liberty and equality. These inevitability join them in opposition to the Left.

On the Left, the conflicts between radicals and liberals are less fundamental, concerning means rather than ends. Radicals and liberals share a structure of belief that creates a permanent alliance between them. In Destructive Generation, Peter Collier and I attempted to summarize the nature of this alliance in the following formulation: “If the bloodstained reality of the Left is indefensible within the framework provided by liberal principle, its ideals nonetheless seem [to liberals] beyond challenge.” We referred to the passage in Lionel Trilling’s classic novel The Middle of the Journey, where the author makes the same observation:

Certain things were clear between Laskell and Maxim [Trilling’s representative liberal and radical]. It was established that Laskell accepted Maxim’s extreme commitment to the future. It was understood between them that Laskell did not accept all of Maxim’s ideas. At the same time, Laskell did not oppose Maxim’s ideas. One could not oppose them without being illiberal, even reactionary. One would have to have something better to offer and Laskell had nothing better. He could not even imagine what the better ideas would be.[10]

Trilling was referring to ideas like “equality” and “social justice,” which define the aspirations of the Left and set their parameters. While not actually supporting Communism, liberals like Laskell were convinced that “one was morally compromised, turned toward evil and away from good, if one was against it.” In the conviction that radical goals are noble, however problematic the radical means, lie the seeds of liberalism’s historic alliance with -- and protection of -- the anti-liberal Left.

The continuing resonance of this protective attitude can be seen in the durable loyalties inspired by the Alger Hiss-Whittaker Chambers trial in mid-century, an episode that divided the political culture during the early Cold War. The Roosevelt Administration -- the fount of modern American liberalism -- had protected Alger Hiss and -- wittingly or unwittingly -- made it possible for him to function as a Soviet agent and spy. Even after Hiss was proven a traitor, the liberal culture continued to view him as a victim, never the villain of the piece. This attitude of forbearance was extended to the traitor Hiss until the end of his life, after the fall of the Soviet empire, when he was eulogized by liberals -- including news anchors for the major networks -- as a man who suffered at the hands of dark forces, while gamely maintaining his innocence to the end. His antagonist, on the other hand, the disparaged and long forgotten Chambers (Trilling’s model for the character of Gifford Maxim) was never embraced by liberals as the patriot he was, nor viewed as the hero his service merited. This remained so even after his ideas and actions were vindicated by the fall of Communism and the universal acknowledgment of its terrible crimes.

The alliance between liberals and radicals is reflected throughout a culture that in its deep structures supports the world-view of the Left. This influence is so profound as to have entered the language itself, and thus become a habit of mind that is no longer noticed. We speak reflexively of leftists as “progressives,” even though their doctrines are rooted in Nineteenth Century prejudice, and have been refuted by a historical record of unprecedented bloodshed and oppression.

In similar fashion, we casually speak of the “haves” and “have nots,” terms which presume the “social injustice” the Left proposes to redress, while at the same time inflaming the passions of social resentment. Yet, as Friedrich Hayek and others have long pointed out, there is no social entity that divides up society’s wealth or can be said to distribute it unjustly. The very term “social justice” describes a prejudice and incitement of the Left, but only this.[11] In a society of liberal politics and economic markets, it would be more appropriate to speak of the “do’s” and the “do nots,” the “cans” and the “can nots,” the “wills” and the “will nots” -- terms that reflect the undeniable fact of American social mobility -- that individuals can and do make their own destinies, even in circumstances they may not control. Yet, no matter how conservative we may be, we could hardly use these accurate descriptive terms without being simultaneously assaulted by the suspicion that the very usage reflects a mean-spirited attitude on our part which “blames the victim.” Such is the power of the political language. To recognize linguistic gravities like these is another way of recognizing the cultural hegemony of the Left.

It is a hegemony with vast social consequences, some of which will be explored in the observations that follow. But our first task is to understand the nature of the radical project, and why it cannot succeed; and thus the reasons that its challenge to democratic order is so dangerous and destructive.

* * *

The essays in this book explore the trajectory of the radical idea from its origins in the socialist Left to its present incarnation as a movement that calls itself “liberal” and “progressive,” but whose ideological agendas are racial and totalitarian. They also necessarily address the interjection of religious ideas into the political arena, a concern normally directed to the “religious Right.” Observers as disparate as Berdyaev, Niebuhr, Voegelin, Kolakowski and Talmon long ago, however, recognized and explored the religious dimension of the socialism. The ability of the intellectual Left to survive the catastrophe of its Communist enchantments derives from its essentially religious nature, and reminds us that it is this very attitude, impervious to historical experience and resistant to reason, that remains the durable obstacle to political and social progress.

This book is, finally, about what it means to be a conservative in America, to be “Right” in a context where conserving the constitutional foundations means defending a fundamentally liberal framework. It seeks to provide a philosophical underpinning for the contemporary conservative coalition that would be broader and more stable than the one that now exists.

The essays were written during and after the fall of the Marxist empire. Three chapters --“Unnecessary Losses,” “The Road to Nowhere,” and “The Religious Roots of Radicalism” -- are discussed in my autobiography, Radical Son[12], and are intellectual threads of the odyssey it describes. Although the essays are discrete and self-sufficient, they make up a coherent whole, and are intended to be read in the sequence in which they are presented.

THE LEFT AFTER COMMUNISM

Workers of the world…forgive me.

Karl Marx

Graffiti on a statue, Moscow 1991

The monuments have fallen now and the faces are changed. In the graveyards the martyrs have been rehabilitated and everywhere the names have been restored. The Soviet Union, once hailed by progressives everywhere as “one-sixth of mankind on the road to the future,” no longer exists. Leningrad is St. Petersburg again. The radical project to change the world has left behind a world in ruin. In a revolutionary eye-blink, a bloody lifetime has passed into history. Only vacancies memorialize a catastrophe whose human sum can never be reckoned.

In the climactic hours of the Communist fall, someone --- Boris Yeltsin perhaps --- remarked that it was a pity Marxists had not triumphed in a smaller country because “we would not have had to kill so many people to demonstrate that utopia does not work.” What more is there to say? If Communism’s final hour had truly spelled the end of the utopian fantasies that have blighted the modern era, nothing at all. If mankind were really capable of closing the book on this long, sorry episode of human folly and evil, then its painful memory could finally be laid to rest. Only historians would need to trouble their thoughts over its destructive illusions and appalling achievements. But, in fact, these millennial dreams of a brave new world are with us still, and it is increasingly obvious that the most crucial lessons of this history have not been learned. This observation applies most of all to those whose complicity in its calamities were most profound -- the progressive intelligentsia of the democratic West.

An emblem of this failure was the appearance in 1995 of Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes, a history of the epoch from the outbreak of the First World War to the end of the Communist empire, which the author refers to as the “short Twentieth Century.”[13] The Age of Extremes is actually the conclusion to a tetralogy of studies that one American reviewer has called a “summa historiae of the modern age,”[14] and which others have showered with copious accolades since its first volume appeared decades ago. This final installment was awarded Canada’s most coveted literary prize and appeared to reviews in America which characterized its author’s perspective as canonical for the time. The jacket blurb by a Rockefeller Foundation executive typically proclaims: “Hobsbawm’s magisterial treatment of the short Twentieth Century, will be the definitive fin-de-siecle work.” A review in the New York Times by Harvard professor Stanley Hoffmann repeats the judgment of the work as “magisterial,”[15] while liberal foreign policy analyst Walter Russell Mead calls it “a magnificent achievement of a very rare and remarkable kind.”[16] The economist Robert Heilbroner could not agree more: “I know of no other account that sheds as much light on what is now behind us, and thereby casts so much illumination on our possible futures.” Hardly less impressed is the historian Eugene Genovese, who reviewed Hobsbawm’s book for The New Republic:

We shall soon be flooded with books that seek to explain this blood-drenched century, but I doubt that we shall get a more penetrating and politically valuable one than Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes.[17]

These unrestrained encomiums reveal just how deeply embedded in the liberal culture the Marxist paradigm remains, even after the catastrophes it has produced.

For Eric Hobsbawm is himself an emblem. A member of the British Communist Party during the heyday of Stalinism and for many years after, Hobsbawm is today one of the most honored figures in the academic pantheon. He is so -- make no mistake -- not despite, but because of his deplorable past; because he continues to be an unrepentant (if somewhat chastened) Marxist; because he is a passionate reviler of democratic capitalism, a believer still in thrall to the radical myth. For all Hobsbawm’s attention to the details of industrial, scientific and cultural developments in his text, The Age of Extremes is little more than an ideological tract in behalf of the continuing viability of the socialist faith.

Hobsbawm’s argument goes like this: Even if “progressives” were wrong, they were right. The practical disasters of socialism should not be taken as a refutation of the socialist idea and its utopian premise.[18] The tragedies produced by socialist revolutionaries are not reasons to abandon the quest for “social justice,” or a society based on equality of outcomes and some kind of social plan.

Extravagantly praised by progressive intellectuals for its historical insight, The Age of Extremes is, in fact, a 600-page apologia for the discredited Left, an advocate’s brief for the very project that produced the world of misery under review.

Even more depressing in the way that it reflects our current cultural condition, Hobsbawm’s defense of the socialist idea -- against all the evidence of its bloodstained reality -- is not even original, but repeats an argument first developed by Leon Trotsky during his years of exile, after his fall from grace. According to Trotsky’s thesis, Marxism was a design for industrial countries and failed only because its agendas were inserted into a hostile environment for which they were never intended. The cultural and economic backwardness of Russian society thwarted the best laid plans of the socialist dreamers, and produced the distorted result. This is the source of all subsequent arguments from the left that the “actually existing” socialist societies did not represent “true socialism.” Following Trotsky’s reasoning (but without acknowledging the source), Hobsbawm portrays the Soviet revolution as a forced experiment under unfavorable conditions and thus no test of the ideas that inspired it, or that guided its unhappy results.

In his review of Hobsbawm’s book, Professor Hoffmann actually endorses this tired and faulty Communist logic: “Marx was right....socialism could only work in developed countries...” But, of course, Marx was wrong. Otherwise, why would socialism have failed in East Germany, which was the industrial heart of the German Reich until Marxist planners seized its state, destroyed its work ethic and its economic incentives, and ruined its productive base? Neither Hoffmann nor Hobsbawm even attempt to explain this inconvenient historical fact.[19] Their easy presumption that “Marx was right” about developed countries is unintentionally revealing, since no developed country has ever instituted a successful Marxist “solution.”

During the final years of the Soviet empire, socialist economists like John Kenneth Galbraith touted the “success” of Marxist economies and their alleged “convergence” with those of the West. Now that the dismal failure of these societies has been incontrovertibly established, these intellectuals want to forget ever suggesting that the two might be competitive in the first place. Attempting to retrieve a situation shared by sophisticated spokesmen for the Left, Hobsbawm argues that the very idea of a Soviet competition with the West was only an afterthought. It acquired plausibility and became a weapon in the hands of its enemies, because of capitalism’s weakness during the Great Depression of the inter-war era. In constructing this evasion, Hobsbawm fails to acknowledge the role that Soviet propagandists and Party intellectuals like himself played in fostering this very illusion.

During the Cold War, which Hobsbawm refers to as a “Golden Age” of capitalist development, western economies defied Marxist predictions about ever increasing economic misery and deepening social crisis for reasons Hobsbawm admits he is unable to explain. It was during this expansive era, that the industrial democracies of the West were able to permanently surpass the weaker Soviet system, which failed to overcome its economic underdevelopment. Characteristically, it never occurs to Hobsbawm that Marxism itself might be responsible for this failure.

Like other radicals, Hobsbawm writes as though the real world failures of socialist systems have no implications for socialist critiques of capitalism itself. This denial of the obvious is the intellectual basis for the current survival of the socialist faith, and the revival of radical critiques of the West by the political Left. The practice of radical “criticism” -- which is a total rejection of the social foundations -- is the really destructive dimension of Hobsbawm’s work and of the radical culture his ideas reflect. Like his fellow leftists, Hobsbawm’s new agenda is to suspend disbelief in the socialist future, while extending the socialist indictment of liberal society in the present. In other words: to continue the very assault with which he began his political career seventy years ago, and which led to the monstrous criminalities that followed.

One clear indication of the radical passion that inspires Hobsbawm’s book is the way it portrays the era of Marxist decline. The eighteen-year period from detente to the Soviet collapse (1973-1991) is described in a section of Hobsbawm’s volume called “The Landslide,” as though the collapse was caused by a force of nature. Even more revealingly, the term “Landslide” is one that Hobsbawm applies to both Cold War camps and social systems, as though it described a global phenomenon, encompassing East and West. In reality, the period in question witnessed the destruction of the largest and most oppressive empire in recorded history and the spread of democratic governments and market economies around the globe. Yet, through Hobsbawm’s Marxist lens, the historic victory of freedom appears as no victory at all, but a general social disintegration on both sides of the ideological divide. The final section of The Age of Extremes opens with the following summary judgment: “The history of the twenty years after 1973 is that of a world which lost its bearings and slid into instability and crisis.”[20]

Though in his own life Hobsbawm is one of its privileged beneficiaries, the triumph of western freedom that resulted from this landslide offers him little satisfaction or relief. In the spacious opening created by the Soviet collapse, the socialist historian sees only “a renaissance of barbarism” -- and not just in the post-Communist East, mind you, but in the zone of democracy as well. Socialism has failed but rather than freedom, it is barbarism that has won.

The view that socialism’s collapse should be followed by a resurgence of barbarism is less an observation, however, than an ideological tic. It reprises the famous call issued by the German Marxist Rosa Luxemburg to European leftists in the last days of World War I. At that time, Luxemburg summoned activists to risk everything in the battle to overthrow the democracies of the West, because the choice before them was “socialism or barbarism.” The slogan has been a battle cry for radicals ever since.

If the choice is socialism or barbarism, of course, socialism can still seem attractive to progressives like Hobsbawm. Apocalyptic choice, on the other hand, is endemic to the revolutionary equation because it precludes coming to terms with the existing order or entertaining the possibility of piecemeal adjustments and reforms. The elimination of the middle ground justifies in advance the crimes that revolutionaries intend to commit. Before and afterwards, it excuses them from drawing a balance sheet of the real world consequences of their acts.

Eric Hobsbawm is still a prisoner of his reactionary faith. Capitalism remains, in this perversely unshaken ideological perspective, a doomed system, unable to solve its fundamental “crises” except through a revolutionary triumph of the will. As a result, in Hobsbawm’s narrative, “capitalism” is depicted as a force of evil -- the diablo ex machina of all its tragic turns. In this Manichaean vision, it is democratic America -- not its totalitarian adversary -- that appears responsible for the fifty years’ Cold War. Even the conclusion of that conflict -- the Soviet collapse and the Red Army’s withdrawal from Eastern Europe -- is seen not as a victory for the capitalist West (“We need not take this crusaders’ version of the 1980s seriously,”[21] Hobsbawm dismissively writes) but as a victory made possible by the totalitarian enemy himself.

Thus, along with other leftists, Hobsbawm attributes the end of the Cold War to the sagacious policies of the Kremlin’s last Communist dictator, who “recognized the sinister absurdity of the nuclear arms race” and approached his antagonists with a proposal to end it: “That is why the world owes so enormous a debt to Mikhail Gorbachev, who not only took this initiative but succeeded, single-handed, in convincing the US government and others in the West that he meant what he said.”[22] Gorbachev was able to achieve this near miraculous resolution of the Cold War, according to Hobsbawm, only because the White House -- normally a center of war-mongering paranoia -- was occupied by a simpleton who remained immune from its most malignant influences:

However, let us not underestimate the contribution of President Reagan whose simple-minded idealism broke through the unusually dense screen of ideologists, fanatics, careerists, desperadoes and professional warriors around him to let himself be convinced.[23]

This is a left-wing cartoon of American government that only other intellectuals could credit. What a world of difference between Hobsbawm’s account and the actual gratitude for America’s cold warriors and above all for their leader, Ronald Reagan, that were expressed by the people they liberated from the Soviet yoke. In the aftermath of the Cold War, the multitudes behind the former Iron Curtain regarded Ronald Reagan as their champion, while Hobsbawm’s hero, Gorbachev, became a man forgotten and without a following even in his own country.

Throughout his narrative of the Cold War’s denouement, Hobsbawm remains oblivious to a factor of momentous consequence underlying both the Soviet collapse and the triumph of the West. This factor was the power of private markets to unleash new technologies and to transform the economic world, while socialist planners were unable to do the same. In a 400-page volume that devotes entire chapters to scientific and industrial developments, Hobsbawm mentions the digital computer only in passing and then only in a single isolated sentence. There is not a single reference to Seymour Cray, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Jim Clark, Michael Milken or any of the other Rockefellers and Fords behind the new industrial revolution or -- except negatively -- to the economic and social implications of this epoch-making event.

Hobsbawm first ignores and then denies the liberating potential of the computer-driven revolution, as he does the greatest peacetime expansion in history -- the Reagan boom of the Eighties -- which helped to launch it. Instead, his portrait of America’s economy in the prospering Eighties is one of unrelieved foreboding and social gloom. Like a modern day Luddite, who has learned nothing from two hundred years of industrial innovation, Hobsbawm receives the news of technological progress as a social threat. In Hobsbawm’s doom-ridden scenario, technological progress means only the prospect that jobs will be eliminated -- forever:

The Crisis Decades [1973 to the present] began to shed labor at a spectacular rate, even in plainly expanding industries....The number of workers diminished, relatively, absolutely and, in any case, rapidly. The rising unemployment of these decades was not merely cyclical but structural. The jobs lost in bad times would not come back when times improved: they would never come back.[24]

As this Marxist reactionary returns to the myths of his radical youth, he imagines the capitalist past conjured in those myths to be recurring eternally in the capitalist present: “In the 1980s and early 1990s the capitalist world found itself once again staggering under the burdens of the inter-war years, which the Golden Age appeared to have removed: mass unemployment, severe cyclical slumps, the ever-more spectacular confrontation of homeless beggars and luxurious plenty,...” To this structural dislocation Hobsbawm attributes a “growing culture of hate” and a general social breakdown (including an alleged epidemic of “mass murders”) which cloud the American future.[25] In other words, Marx’s predictions of increasing misery, increasing polarization of rich and poor, increasing crisis -- were right.

But only in the fantasies of an unreconstructed believer in the radical faith. In reality, during the decades of Cold War, the engines of capitalist progress were revolutionizing the lives of ordinary working people on a scale previously inconceivable. Hobsbawm’s “landslide” in the West coincided with economic developments that ushered in the greatest social transformation in human history -- the first time in five thousand years that more than a tiny percentage of the population of any society were able to attain a degree of material well-being. It was, in fact, this dazzling prospect of American progress in the era that stretched from Eisenhower to Reagan that lay at the heart of the demoralization and collapse of socialism’s empire, whose own populations had been condemned to permanent grinding poverty by Marx’s impossible economic schemes. Over the course of Hobsbawm’s somber decades, the consumption of goods and services by the average American family had actually doubled. While less than 10 percent of Americans went to college in 1950, almost 60 percent had done so by 1996. By that time, the poorest fifth of the population was consuming more than the middle fifth in 1955.[26] None of this uplifting reality -- a liberation of the dispossessed that no socialist state ever accomplished -- is allowed to penetrate Hobsbawm’s unrelenting negative vision.

The Age of Extremes -- so readily embraced by the liberal culture -- is little more than an elaborate (and pathetic) defense of the two destructive illusions in whose name the Left has caused so much suffering in the 20th Century: the inherent evil of capitalist society and the humanitarian promise of the socialist future. In the wake of the Soviet disaster, of course, the hope of this socialist future is only tenuously put forward by sophisticated radicals like Hobsbawm. It is the negative assault on democratic capitalism that inspires their unrestrained commitment and that leads their public agenda. In the permanent war of the Left against liberal economy and democratic order, it is understood by the radicals that offense is always the best defense.

But the two sides of the radical argument cannot really be separated. The nihilistic rejection of the present order is necessarily predicated on the dream of a redemptive solution. Otherwise, the argument for rejection is meaningless. Inevitably, in the closing passage of Hobsbawm’s text, the two ideas finally are linked. And they are linked in a manner that is as intellectually extreme as any manifesto by Rosa Luxemburg or Karl Marx:

The forces generated by the techno-scientific economy are now great enough to destroy the human environment, that is to say, the material foundations of human life....We have reached a point of historic crisis....If humanity is to have a recognizable future, it cannot be by prolonging the past or the present. If we try to build the third millennium on that basis we shall fail. And the price of failure, that is to say the alternative to a changed society is darkness.

Capitalist darkness or revolutionary light. Socialism or barbarism. Like the Bourbons of the 19th Century, the reactionaries of the contemporary Left have learned nothing from this history, and they have forgotten nothing either.

The radical idea has not been buried with its hapless victims, nor the fantasy of a world redeemed. Yet, it is this very hope that provides the impetus for atrocity, the golden omelet for which it has seemed reasonable to progressive minds to break so many eggs.

In the aftermath of the Nazi Holocaust, no intellectual calling himself progressive would have ignored the link between the racist idea and the “final solution.” But no progressive intellectual today will recognize the parallel nexus between the socialist idea and the gulags it produced.[27] To the progressive mind, the idea remains innocent and the Soviet tragedy only a temporary detour from the path of socialist progress. In this view, “actually existing socialism” bears no relation to the socialist promise. The failure of Marxism can be dismissed as the result of an intellectual error that progressives have already corrected.

There is a sense, of course, in which even non-socialists might view this entire episode of a failed utopia as an epic mistake. Few intellectual doctrines have been so systematically refuted -- over so many generations -- as the socialist vision of Karl Marx. None has been the cause of so much human misery and suffering. Yet false doctrines of this proportion are not sustained by ignorance alone. Throughout the history of the Marxist faith, there has never been a lack of first-rate intellectuals to validate its “truths,” or to lend reputation and talent to its most malignant agendas: To lie when it was necessary to lie; to believe when it should not have been possible to believe; to justify murder and defend the indefensible.

It will always be a mark of moral and intellectual dishonor for the West that in this historic and protracted encounter with the adversaries of freedom and democracy so many of our most gifted writers, artists, scientists, and intellectuals were more energetically engaged in opposing our own political institutions and the ideas essential to their survival than in questioning either the lethal political doctrines that were designed to destroy them or the elaborate edifice of cultural mendacity that was spawned by the Communist movement for the express purpose of bringing down the democratic societies of the West.^”[28]

The socialist experiments of the 20^th Century ruined the economies of whole continents and destroyed the lives of hundreds of millions, all with the acquiescence and support of intellectuals who thought of themselves as progressive. When the experiments were over, these progressives were faced with an existential choice. On the one hand, they could confront their complicity in socialist crimes and give up the illusion that made them inevitable. In short, they could abandon the Left. Or, like Eric Hobsbawm, they could renew the illusion and get on with their war against the democracies of the West.

In the years following the Communist collapse, the vast majority of progressive intellectuals chose the second course. Perhaps it was too difficult to admit lifelong error and acknowledge the rectitude of one’s hated opponents. Perhaps it meant traumas to the soul for which they were not prepared. In any case, it was easier to avoid than to face unpleasant truth. But this avoidance was possible only through an act of historical denial -- psychologically speaking, a progressive bad faith.

Two principal strategies were employed in the pursuit of this denial. The first was that adopted by Communist die-hards in the former Soviet states, who viewed the collapse of Communism as a failure of those attempting its reform. In their eyes, Communism was not vanquished by a superior system; it was surrendered by its own leaders who lost their revolutionary nerve. A variation of the theme argues that Gorbachev’s reforms were unwisely implemented. The destabilizing political reforms of glasnost should have been attempted only after the economic reforms of perestroika were put in place. This would have left the Communists in control, as in China.

The second, more prevalent, strategy of denial is dependent on a “post-modernist” attitude that accepts the fact of Communist failure while avoiding its implications. This strategy acknowledges the failure of existing socialism, while denying its connection to the radical project. In the words of one Marxist academic: “The nightmare is over, the dream lives on.”[29] As though the nightmare was not also the dream. This form of denial is the path taken by most of the intellectuals who have remained faithful to the progressive idea.

It is easy to see why this should be the strategy of choice. Once the post-modern ellipsis is achieved -- once the connection with history is lost -- the epistemological problem of a progressive faith disappears. One no longer has to trouble oneself about the actual reasons for the Soviet collapse. Or about whether the socialist idea is to blame. To free oneself from the moral consequences of the socialist fate, one has only to suspend belief in the socialist idea. Then one can proceed to the revolt against capitalist society as though nothing of consequence had occurred. As though the Cold War had ended in defeat but no victory. This is the preferred perspective of Hobsbawm’s text and of the post-Communist Left.

It is a posture that was on full display at a June 1990 forum held by the Organization of American Historians (one of innumerable academic associations now controlled by the Left). The topic of the forum was “Who Won the Cold War?” During the discussion, the social critic Christopher Lasch raised the need for second thoughts: “We ought to admit the truth...that the West won the Cold War, even if it does go against the grain, against our political inclinations.” Lasch’s candid admission was dismissed by the leftist academics with outrage and scorn. Observing the proceedings, E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post reported that those in attendance “were firm in their view that the revolutions in Eastern Europe had done nothing to vindicate [the West].” Lasch was attacked for justifying a “heroic view of America’s world role.”[30]

The refusal to confront the past meant that leftists could resume their attacks on America and the West without examining the movements and regimes they had supported, and thus without proposing any practical alternative to the societies they continued to reject. The intellectual foundations of this destructive attitude had already been created, in the preceeding decades, in a development that Allan Bloom described as the “Nietzscheanization of the Left”[31] -- the transformation of the progressive faith into a nihilistic creed.

Nihilistic humors have always been present in the radical character. The revolutionary will, by its very nature, involves a passion for destruction alongside its hope of redemption. While the hope is vaguely imagined, however, the agenda of destruction is elaborate and concrete. It was Marx who originally defended this vagueness, claiming that any “blueprint” of the socialist future would be merely “utopian,” and therefore should be avoided. The attitude of the post-Marxist Left is no different. Since the fall of Communism, radical intellectuals have continued their destructive attacks on capitalism, as though the catastrophes they had recently promoted posed no insurmountable problem to such an agenda. “I continue to believe,” wrote a radical academic after the Soviet collapse, “that what you call ‘the socialist fantasy’ can usefully inform a critique of post-modern capitalism without encouraging its fantasists and dreamers to suppose that a brave new order is imminent or even feasible.”[32]

But how could a responsible intellect ignore the destructive implications of such critiques? The socialist critique, after all, is total. It is aimed at the roots of the existing order. To maintain agnosticism about the futures that might replace the reality you intend to destroy may be intellectually convenient, but it is also morally corrupt.

“Critical theory” -- the coy self-description of the ideological Left -- self-consciously defines itself by the totality of its rejection of the existing social order, in the identical fashion of old-style Marxists (Marx himself was a “critical” theorist). The explicit agenda of critical theory is to undermine the credibility and authority of the values and institutions of the status quo in order to prepare its annihilation. The task of undermining communal assumptions and stabilizing faiths is not incidental to the radical critique, but is its corrosive essence. It is what the theory intends. Yet, like the Marxist-Leninists of the past, critical theorists never confront the moral issue posed by their destructive agendas: What can be the rationale for weakening and ultimately destroying a system as liberal as the existing one, if no better has been devised?

Without its adherents noticing, the theoretical argument of the Left has been emptied of meaning by the failures of socialism. For what is the practical meaning of a socialist critique in the absence of a workable socialist model? In fact, there is none. By adopting an impossible standard, it is easy to find fault with any institution or social system under scrutiny. The ideal of socialist equality, for example, may or may not be admirable. But if social equality cannot be realized in practice, or if the attempt to realize it necessarily creates a totalitarian state, then the idea of such equality can have no significance except as an incitement to destructive agendas and acts.

To raise the socialist ideal as a critical standard imposes a burden of responsibility on its proponents that critical theorists refuse to shoulder. If one sets out to destroy a lifeboat because it fails to meet the standards of a luxury yacht, the act of criticism may be perfectly “just,” but the passengers will drown all the same. Similarly, if socialist principles can only be realized in a socialist gulag, even the presumed inequities of the capitalist market are worth the price. If socialist poverty and socialist police states are the practical alternative to capitalist inequality, what justice can there be in destroying capitalist freedoms and the benefits we already enjoy? Without a practical alternative to offer, radical idealism is radical nihilism -- a war of destruction with no objective other than war itself.

While confronting the catastrophe of the radical vision requires moral effort, the nihilistic pose that evades the issue requires no exertion at all. “Post-modern” leftism -- the theoretical expression of this agnostic nihilism -- makes it possible for progressives to keep the radical faith without undertaking a painful inventory of the radical achievement. That is why, for the contemporary Left, it has become the ideology of choice: The post-modern attitude relieves progressives of any obligation to acknowledge their complicity in radical crimes. It makes it possible to preserve one’s political identity, while maintaining the semblance of one’s self-respect. This is what makes nihilism the preferred perspective for Hobsbawm and other intellectuals who want to be faithful to the bankrupt traditions of the Left, while earning moral credit for acknowledging “mistakes.” The post-Communist Left is too shrewd to defend a future that has so comprehensively failed. But it seeks to retrieve its catastrophes by pretending that the failure doesn’t matter.

To the contemporary Left, those who did fail, who actually committed socialist crimes have no relationship to them. The response of the Left to the disasters that its political ideas have produced is the response of nihilism and bad faith.

This bad faith is rationalized by a new generation of academic intellectuals who have opened a Pandora’s box of radical theories that are derivative of Marxism while pretending to transcend it. The edifice of the new “critical” theories is supported by an intellectual posture that pretends to be skeptical and/or relativist about everything except itself (an analytic self-deception that it shares with traditional Marxism).

By the time the progressive gulag collapsed in Russia, the very truth that Stalin and his commissars had worked so hard to suppress by re-writing history and silencing its witnesses had virtually vanished as a concept among progressive intellectuals. French “deconstructionist” ideas about the “aporia” of discourse and the indeterminacy of language, “post-structuralist” and “post-modernist” assaults on the idea of the historical subject, and “anti-foundationalist” and Foucauldian critiques of the objectivity of knowledge -- all of them reducing truth to communal prejudice and convenience of power -- have made the evasions of an entire radical generation seem hardly devious or even hypocritical. More like a convenient wisdom. This intellectual bait-and-switch operation was accomplished largely by grafting Nietzsche onto Marx and turning the “materialist science of history” into a hollow and corrosive cynicism. Eventually it became difficult -- in the smug summation of one left-wing philosopher -- to find “a real live metaphysical prig” on the faculties of American universities; that is, someone who believed in “reality” and “truth.”[33]

Was it mere accident that relativism and its twin, nihilism, should become outlooks of the Left at the precise moment that its ideas were being refuted by historical events? Or was this, rather, the most efficient way to avoid the painful but necessary meanings of its past -- the truth of progressives’ complicity in the most terrible crimes of the century? In retrospect, the deconstructionist “turn” and its doctrinal bedfellows, formed a necessary answer to the radical dilemma: How to avoid the truth of a history that had punctured its utopian illusion, while continuing on with its radical adventure. How to maintain the destructive passions of the radical idea in the face of the failure of its radical project. By dis-establishing the integrity of any and every historical narrative, progressive intellectuals provided themselves with an ingenious (dis)solution.

Utopianism and nihilism, of course, are but two sides of the same intellectual coin. Revolution, as conceived by the secular messianists of the modern Left, is really the vision of a new creation. But the creative work of every revolution begins as a work of destruction, and its creed is the cry of Goethe’s Mephistopheles: “All that exists deserves to perish.”[34] The revolutionary imperative follows: To sever the past from the future, to annihilate what has been for what will be—Aufhebung—to deconstruct, de-structure, de-mystify, dis-solve, demolish, defame, debase, deny; to create out of something, nothing. Nowhere.

And what is the world that is to be denied and destroyed by the contemporary Left, with its deconstructionist agendas, but (once again) the democratic societies of the capitalist West. Is it an accident that the seminal thinkers of the post-modern Left are the 20^th Century’s destructive utopians, namely, Communists and Nazis: Heidegger, deMan, Gramsci, Lukacs, Althusser, Benjamin and Foucault? Or that their 19^th Century intellectual godfathers are Nietzsche and Marx? “Every anti-liberal argument influential today,” as the political philosopher Stephen Holmes has written, “was vigorously advanced in the writings of European fascists,” including the critique of “its atomistic individualism, its myth of the pre-social individual, its scanting of the organic, its indifference to community,..its belief in the primacy of rights, its flight from ‘the political,’ its decision to give abstract procedures and rules priority over substantive values and commitments, and its hypocritical reliance on the sham of judicial neutrality.”[35]

Or, to cite another authority: “Cultural determinism, the reduction of all social relationships to issues of sheer power; the idea that one’s identity is centered in one’s ethnicity or race; the rejection of the concept of the individual --...all of these ideas are direct echoes of the fascist theorists of the 1930s.”[36] Of course, only the Left could get away with resurrecting the theories of European fascism, while labeling itself “progressive” in the process.

Is it surprising that discredited Marxism still provides the paradigm for every current radical ideology from feminism to queer theory? Or that the totalitarian attitudes endemic to Marxism are also everywhere in evidence in the academic discourse of the tenured Left? The literary critic Harold Bloom describes in horror the current political trends in the university as “Stalinism without Stalin” (“All of the traits of the Stalinists in the 1930s and 1940s are being repeated ... in the universities in the 1990s.”[37])

These ironies are reflected in the required texts of Columbia’s Contemporary Civilization course, the nation’s oldest, relatively undeconstructed, liberal-arts curriculum. Columbia’s new canon is an attempt to establish an orthodoxy out of the very intellectual tradition that history has refuted. Only two 19th Century thinkers are represented in the course who are not socialists -- Max Weber and Charles Darwin. For the arbiters of the new canon, it is as if the intellectual tradition of free-market liberalism had ended in the 18th Century with Madison, Smith and Locke. When the Columbia course enters the 20th Century, no dissent at all is tolerated. The required texts are exclusively by left-wing intellectuals including Jurgen Habermas and John Rawls, the Communists Antonio Gramsci and Lenin, the Stalinist camp-follower Simone Beauvoir, and the violent racialists Franz Fanon and Malcolm X. The required curriculum is filled out by two vulgar ideologues, Catharine MacKinnon and Cornel West.[38] Even the course’s lone authority on totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, a distinguished intellectual with a social-democratic bent, was a disciple of Heidegger’s.[39] As far as the contemporary academy is concerned, the intellectual tradition that informed the American founding and whose disciples in the 20th Century led the battle against totalitarian ideology and socialist economics -- Mises, Hayek, Aron, Popper, Berlin, Bloom, Friedman, Strauss -- provides unworthy models for the America’s future elites. The contemporary academy prefers the paradigms, the avatars, and the fellow-travelers of the discredited Left instead.

This transformation of the curriculum did not happen by accident but was the calculated result of a political assault on the intellectual academy. These attacks ranged from armed intimidation at Cornell in the Sixties, to ugly demonstrations at Stanford in the Eighties. Their common purpose was to politicize the curriculum and infuse it with leftwing agendas. At Stanford, the demonstrators were led by the Reverend Jesse Jackson in a protest against the course in Western Civilization required of all undergradutes, and modeled on Columbia’s core curriculum. Jackson led the demonstrators in a summary chant: “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go!”

In the wake of these protests, Western Civ -- a course designed to introduce students to the works of Aristotle, Plato, St. Augustine, Dante, Shakespeare and other great figures of Western Culture -- did go. It was replaced by a new curriculum called simply “CIV.” Defenders of the new curriculum attempted to disarm critics by disingenuously claiming that the changes did not mean that Western Civilization would no longer be taught (many original texts in fact remained) but only that previously excluded cultures and readings would now be included. But the claim was disingenuous because the mission of the university had already changed and along with it the way in which even the old canon was taught.

Instead of a course devoted to the great shaping moral and intellectual traditions of the West, the values that have made its culture the fount of modern technology and science, of market economics and democratic politics, the new course was designed to indoctrinate students into the peculiar Marxoid world-view that had come to characterize the academic Left. (One typical new title, for example, was the autobiography of a Maoist spokeswoman for Guatemalan guerrillas, written under the guidance of a Parisian leftist, called I Rigoberta Menchu.[40]) The catalogue description of the CIV course made it clear that its purpose would no longer be to introduce students to the crowning achievements of Western culture, but would inculcate a specific ideological viewpoint. The would teach:

-- the ways in which class and gender shape human life;

-- construction of group identities

--the conflict between freedom and equality. [41]

Instead of being instilled with the values and ideas that have made the West the cradle of global modernity, the students would be drilled in the primary structures of the Left’s discredited worldview. If class and gender “shape human life” (as the course presumes), and if group identities are socially “constructed” (as Marxists maintain) the conflict between freedom and equality can only be resolved by totalitarian and Marxist solutions.[42]

And this is, in fact, the way the CIV course is taught at Stanford. The official course outline for Professor Renato Rosaldo’s “Europe and the Americas” track in the 1988 CIV sequence, for example, reads as follows:

First quarter: The Spanish debate over indigenous rights raises issues around race as well as religion; readings on european enlightenment include Wollstonecraft on question of gender, and Flora Tristan on question of class. Race, gender and class are all thematized in Chungara de Barrios’ autobiography and Anzaldua’s poetic essays. Second quarter: Race is a central focus of materials on the Haitian revolution, and materials from the twentieth century negritude movement which developed in the post-emancipation context of modern ‘scientific’ racism.’ Gender is a central issue in Jamaica Kincaid’s novel ‘Annie John,’ a mother-daughter story. Roumain’s ‘Masters of the Dew’ plays out a class drama around the conflict between traditionalist peasant culture and modern proletarian consciousness. Third quarter: Marx and Weber are essential sources on class; Franz Fanon on race; gender, ethnicity and class are central themes in Rulfo, Menchu, Chavez and Anzaldua.[43]

Clearly this is no longer an introduction to the great enriching themes of Western culture, but a course in the way Marxist categories can be used to define social realities, and construct revolutionary agendas.

Of all the influences on contemporary academic radicals, Martin Heidegger’s may be the most revealing. Heidegger’s influence derives partly from his importance to academic theory generally, but also from the fact that he has directly influenced seminal leftists like Derrida, Foucault and Sartre. As a Nazi, Heidegger’s socialist utopia was national in character, but his response to its implementation in the Third Reich is strikingly reminiscent of Marxist responses to the revealed horrors of the Soviet state. In Heidegger’s postwar refusal to recant his Nazi commitments, he anticipated the denials later employed by American leftists refusing to discard their parallel faith.

The first and most important of these was to reject the possibility that the fate of the actually existing Nazi state reflected in any way on the ideas that created it. In a postwar correspondence with Herbert Marcuse, Heidegger wrote: “Your letter just shows how difficult a dialogue is with people...who evaluate the beginning of the National Socialist movement from the perspective of its end.” Thus did Heidegger seek to sever historical practice from its intellectual foundations, to distance himself from actually existing Nazism, while preserving his fealty to the Nazi ideal. Even after the Holocaust, Heidegger continued to defend this ideal, much as the socialist ideal is still defended by the western Left. In these postures, Heidegger appeared as a kind of German Trotsky, complaining that the Nazi rulers had betrayed “the inner truth and grandeur of National Socialism,”[44] as though that truth were not implicated in the deeds of those who lived by it.

To the believer, the practice that fails is necessarily a “betrayal” of the utopian intentions; it is never a reflection of the idea itself. Thus Samuel Bowles, a Marxist professor at the University of Massachusetts, responded to the news of the Soviet collapse with a bald evasion typical of his radical peers: “Like many other leftist academics, I am frequently asked these days ‘How are you coping with the dethroning of Marxism and the demise of Communism in Eastern Europe?’ I am not alone in responding: ‘It’s the end of a nightmare, not the death of a dream’...” As though the one were not contained in the other.

The second mode of denial favored by western Marxists and Nazis like Heidegger is the doctrine of moral equivalence, which is simply a form of nihilism. This is an attitude that refuses to distinguish between actually existing totalitarian socialisms and the liberal realities of capitalist states. The source of this otherwise inexplicable lacuna is the utopian illusion. For the socialist believer, the defects of socialism are dwarfed by its potential to blossom into human freedom, while the defects of capitalism are magnified by the perception that it stands in the way of the socialist dream.

Because the revolutionary project requires the total condemnation of the present order, extreme or isolated examples of capitalist evils are ritually invoked by radicals as typifying its reality. In an attempt to rationalize his Nazi illusions to Herbert Marcuse, for example, Heidegger made the following appeal:

To the severe and justified reproach that you express “over a regime that has exterminated millions of Jews, that has made terror a norm and that transformed everything connected to the concepts of spirit, freedom, and truth into its opposite,” I can only add that instead of the “Jews” one should put the “East Germans,” and that is even the case for one of the Allied Powers, with the difference that everything that happened since 1945 is known to all the world, while the bloody terror of the Nazis in reality was kept secret from the German people.

In Heidegger’s equation the crime of the Holocaust is morally canceled by the mistreatment of East Germans during the liberation of Europe. In similar fashion, leftists in America regularly invoke and conflate the dropping of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima, the lynching of 3,000 Negroes over a hundred year period in the segregationist south, and atrocities committed during the Vietnam War, in order to equate liberal America with totalitarian and racist states. In rationalizing his political loyalty to the Third Reich (despite its “betrayal” of the Nazi ideal), Heidegger anticipated most of the rationalizations the Left would use in defending its sympathies for the Communist bloc. “Russia and America,” he claimed in the 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics, “are both...the same; the same wretched mad rush of unbridled technology and the same unbounded organization of the average human being.” A similar equation came to function as a Cold War formula of the western Left. It was epitomized in the fatuous remark of sometime Maoist, Michel Foucault: “What could politics mean when it was a question of choosing between Stalin’s USSR and Truman’s America?”[45] What indeed!

Where rationalization fails the believer, silence -- the refusal to confront the actual consequences of belief -- is the refuge of last resort. Heidegger’s silence was maintained for the last 40 years of his life. He never attempted to trace the progress of the ideal in its practice, to connect the ideas of national socialism with their actual results. This subterfuge is reprised in the history of the post-Communist Left. No left-wing theorist has seriously confronted the origins of Stalinism in Lenin and Marx, or come to terms with the fact that every successful Marxism resulted in a totalitarian state.

By these intellectual maneuvers radicals have been able to resurrect the utopian vision and the destructive enterprise it engenders. The perfect future is once again invoked to condemn the imperfect present. As Nietzsche said: “idealism kills.” Without the noble utopian idea, the evil practice would not exist.

At the moment of Communist collapse, the bankrupt vision of a Marxist utopia was defended by Sam Bowles with the argument that “Marx wrote almost nothing about socialism or communism.” According to Bowles, the collapse of socialism indicated the need for a lot of “rethinking about socialist economies but little about capitalist economies.”[46] Bowles’ posture became the common attitude of radical intellectuals defending their position. But no critique exists independently of the standard that informs it. Bowles’ defense merely rehashes Heidegger’s contention that Nazism should not be judged from the perspective of its result. The statement manifests a profound ignorance of the nature of Marxism and the intellectual foundations of its anti-capitalist critique: Far from ending with the hypothesis of a socialist solution, Marxism begins with it.[47] The entire edifice of Marx’s indictment of class society depends on the possibility of transcending class society, of replacing capitalism with a planned economy -- the very idea that has now been refuted by historical events.

This is made clear in the opening section of Capital titled the “Fetishism of Commodities,” which contains the most influential statement of Marx’s critique. It provides the conceptual basis not only for Marx’s economic argument, but for all Marxist cultural theories, which are little more than a series of footnotes to the discussion of reification in these pages. “Cultural studies,” the recently created academic field for the exfoliation of Marxist ideas centered in this passage, is now perhaps the last flourishing socialist industry.

In this seminal argument Marx defines capitalism as a “commodity producing society” and asks: “Whence...arises the enigmatical character of labor’s product, so soon as it assumes the form of commodities?” For Marx, the answer is found in private property and the economic market.[48] The commodity form creates the conditions in which labor’s “own social action takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them.” It is this fetishism of the object, produced by capital, that allegedly robs mankind of its powers and alienates the producer from the product of his labor. Commodities thus produce the characteristic form of oppression of capitalist societies. How does Marx propose to overcome the servitude caused by the fact that the producers are alienated from their own power? The answer is: by a social plan.

The life-process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan.[49]

An association of the producers to plan the economic life of society is Marx’s solution to the riddle of human history. It is also precisely what the vast carnage and human waste of the “Soviet experiment” has proved impossible. The very idea of the Left is bankrupt along with the socialist state.

* * *

But the actual Left refuses to die. Even though the collapse of Communism has produced a momentary caesura in the radical promotion of the socialist faith, there has been no retreat from left-wing theory and -- more importantly still -- no abatement in left-wing attacks on the democracies of the West. In the very month the Berlin Wall was being torn down, American radicals were being urged by the editors of the Nation not to be paralyzed by doubts about the socialist future, but “to get on with job... [The Left] must attack the very foundation of our own system.”[50] To get on with the “job.” In other words to get on with the task of destruction. This is what the radical project is really about.

From the redoubts of its academic stronghold, the Left has been getting on with the task of destruction for nearly three decades. It has systematically winnowed conservative scholars and theories from the academic environment and institutionalized views of America’s history, traditions and political ideals that are as unrelenting in their hostility to American purpose, and their condemnation of American achievement, as any article in The New Masses or Pravda or in the collected tomes of the Little Lenin Library once were.

Consider a representative outburst in a legal text by Robin West, one of the foremost academic feminists, and a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown. In this passage, Professor West expresses her feelings about the Constitution she has been entrusted to teach, as well as the history of the nation it created:

The political history of the United States that culminated and is reflected in the constitutional text is in large measure a history of almost unthinkable brutality toward slaves, genocidal hatred of Native Americans, racist devaluation of nonwhites and nonwhite cultures, sexist devaluation of women, and a less than admirable attitude of submissiveness to the authority of unworthy leaders in all spheres of government and public life. Why should we bind or constrain our political argument, to say nothing of our political choices, by texts produced by this history of ruthlessness; of brutality; and of mindless, infantile, and at times psychotic, numbing wrath?[51]

It is a sober thought that the author of these ludicrous sentiments is representative of a major school of “progressive” jurisprudence in the nation’s elite law faculties.[52]

Through “multicultural” assaults on Western culture, and on the political communities dominated by “white males” which created America’s institutions, the radical work of deconstructing the very idea of American nationality is well advanced. Through the parallel assaults on American society and institutions by academic Marxists, critical race theorists, and radical feminists, the work of replacing the narrative of freedom, which used to inform the national memory, with a saga of cold-blooded conquest and oppression is nearly accomplished. The new American heritage constructed by academic radicals can hardly nourish that “reverence for the sources of our being,” that Santayana once identified with patriotism. Quite the opposite. But, then, this is the very aim of the radical agenda -- to sever those loyalties which would tie America’s emerging elites to their country. Such alienation, which includes the will to abrogate and then rewrite the Constitution, is the essential element without which the agenda of revolution is not possible.

The great majority of those who inhabit the progressive culture would undoubtedly shrink from such baldly expressed anti-American agendas. Yet, these intellectual fellow-travelers are also the willing accomplices of the radicals who advance them. Consider the case of Richard Rorty, one of the nation’s most prominent academic philosophers. The son of a leading American Trotskyist, Rorty describes himself as a “democratic socialist” with a soft spot for the virtues of existing bourgeois rights. As a voice of moderation in the academic Left, Rorty provides an instructive example of the way the totalitarian temptation survives in the heart of the culture, even after Communism’s collapse. Though one of the nation’s leading philosophic skeptic, Rorty is still hooked on the utopian illusion with all its destructive implications.

Shortly after the Soviet debacle, Rorty was attacked in the academic journal Transition for his deviant appreciation of bourgeois virtues. The attack was launched by his own disciple, Harvard professor and self-styled “prophetic thinker,” Cornel West, who expressed his dissatisfaction with Rorty’s “fervent vigilance to preserve the prevailing bourgeois way of life in North Atlantic societies,...”[53]

Instead of defending this liberal commitment, and drawing a sharp line against a radical enemy, Rorty responded with a weak and half-hearted apology: “This fervent vigilance is largely a matter of urging that we hang on to constitutional democracy -- the only institutional aspect of the ‘prevailing bourgeois way of life’ about which I get fervent -- while patriotically striving to keep social protest alive.”[54] For Rorty, America’s constitutional order is only an “aspect” of its existence, without organic relation to (and apparently separable from) its free markets, the institution of private property and the moral framework of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Consequently, the radical assault on the foundations of bourgeois society is seen by Rorty as a form of benign surgery.

Note the extravagant self-deception involved in this trope. As a leftist analyzing capitalist societies, Rorty would never think of viewing political institutions as discrete from economic or social conditions. It is only as a revolutionary contemplating the socialist future that he allows himself to disregard these links. In fact, it is only by severing the connection between property and freedom, that Rorty can think of himself as a “liberal” and at the same time sympathize with an anti-American radical whose agenda is the destruction of liberal society.

Rorty’s posture is that of the classic fellow-traveler who wills the ends of revolution but not the means. Starting from a premise of universal skepticism, Rorty concludes by hoping for the victory of believers in a radical faith. He explains his own pragmatism as “a repudiation of the quest for certainty and foundations, which [Cornel] West has described as ‘the evasion of philosophy,’” but adds: “This evasion is socially useful only if teamed up with prophecies -- fairly concrete prophecies of a utopian social future.”[55] In other words, in the real world, the pragmatic Richard Rorty is willing to surrender his epistemological skepticism to the left-wing zealotry of a Cornel West. The “concrete prophecies” Rorty refers to, of course, are the familiar radical utopias -- the egalitarian futures of Rousseau and Marx: “Suppose that somewhere, someday, the newly-elected government of a large industrialized society decreed that everybody would get the same income, regardless of occupation or disability....That country would become an irresistible example,...Sooner or later the world would be changed.”[56] Indeed it would, as the example of all the Marxist gulags attest.

Rorty’s wish to be “socially useful” is thus a form of the religious desire that the modern temper denies, and that radical messianism exists to satisfy. It is the desire that creates a popular front between Jacobins and liberals in search of the egalitarian Eden. Nothing could demonstrate more clearly how the abiding root of the revolutionary impulse lies not in the frailty of the human intellect, but in the weakness of the human heart.

For radicals, it is not socialism, but only the language of socialism that is finally dead. To be reborn the Left had only to rename itself in terms that did not carry the memories of insurmountable defeat, to appropriate a past that could still be victorious. This task is already well under way. In the wake of the Communist collapse, radicals have sought to distance themselves from their support for foreign utopias that failed and to revive the Marxist chimera as an American dream: “The grand social narrative of American life,” two leftists argued in the Los Angeles Times, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall “is what we might call the Drama of Democracy: a messianic, at times apocalyptic, struggle to secure a world where all people will be free, equal, independent and without want.”[57] In this way the utopian fantasy that has filled the world with so much suffering and unhappiness in our time is revived as a patriotic, “populist” vision. “The dramatic tension [in America’s social narrative],” these radicals write, “arises from the struggle to make this ‘American Dream’ available to everyone.”

But just how the dream is to be made available makes all the difference in the world. If it is by removing the barriers to opportunity, so that individuals can rise as a result of their own efforts, then there will be continuity with the freedoms Americans have enjoyed from the founding to the present. But if the dream is to be delivered by political power, by class-, race-, and gender-warfare, and by the forced redistribution of resources between contending social groups, then the outcome can only be another grim experiment in totalitarian futures. The dramatic tension of the American narrative remains, in fact, what it has always been: a tension between democracy understood as limits to government, the liberal polity of a diverse citizenry, and democracy understood as radicals understand it, the righteousness of a guardian state.

[1] Irving Kristol, Neo-Conservatism, NY 1995 p.486 For a survey of this ethos, Cf. Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline, NY 1996

[2] Quoted in “Texas Observer No More” (a profile of Ronnie Dugger) Los Angeles Times, May 18, 1997

[3] Catharine MacKinnon, Only Words, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1993 p.71

[4] For example, see Robin West, Progressive Constitutionalism, Duke University Press 1994; Minda, Post-Modern Legal Movements, NY 1995 pp. 169 et seq; Kimberle Crenshaw, et al, Critical Race Theory, NY 1995; and Daniel A. Farber and Suzanna Sherry, Beyond All Reason: The Radical Assault on Truth and Law, Oxford 1997

[5] Owen Fiss, The Irony of Free Speech, Harvard 1996, pp. 9, 12 “I am troubled by the attempt by Professor MacKinnon and others to work their way out of this conflict in ultimate values by defining liberty (in the form of free speech) out of the equation.”

[6] See discussion below, pp. 174 et seq

[7] Los Angeles Times, December 17, 1996

[8] Opinion, US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Nos. 97-1530, 9715031; DC No. CV-96-4024-TEH, Filed April 8, 1997. At one point in the conflict, Judith Winston, the Education Department’s general counsel, made the following Orwellian remark to the Los Angeles Times: “Particular race-neutral criteria [such as tests] can have a discriminatory effect.” According to the Times’ reporter, she was referring to the fact that “minority students as a group tend to score lower on standardized exams.” Even this was incorrect, unless the minority was meant to exclude Asians and other minorities (Jews, etc.) who scored very well. Los Angeles Times, July 26, 1997

[9] Subsequently, the Ninth Circuit refused to review the issue en banc, and it was taken to the U.S. Supreme Court where the plaintiffs were joined by liberal Harvard law professors Laurence Tribe and Kathleen Sullivan. The Supreme Court also refused to review the case.

[10] Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Destructive Generation, 2^nd ed. NY 1996, p. 362; Cf. also the comment of veteran leftist Stanley Aronowitz: “As the old Jules Feiffer cartoon goes, since liberals borrow their ideas from the left, when the left has no ideas neither do the liberals.” Stanley Aronowitz, “Are They The Only Ones With New Ideas?: Why We Need A New Progressive Politics,” Social Policy Vol. 27, No. 1, Fall 1996 Allowing for its arrogance, the statement can be said to reflect a consensus that extends across the political spectrum.

[11] See Friedrich Hayek, The Mirage of Social Justice, and discussion below, Chapter 6.

[12] “Unnecessary Losses” was originally titled “Letter to A Political Friend,” and is a chapter in Destructive Generation. “The Road to Nowhere” was printed in a modified and shortened version in Commentary, December 1990, under the title “Socialism: Guilty As Charged.” “The Religious Roots of Radicalism” was first delivered in 1990 as a talk to the Pacific Jewish Center in Santa Monica under the title “The Fate of the Jews and the Radical Left.”

[13] Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, NY 1995

[14] Joseph F. Keppler, Seattle Times, April 16,1995

[15] The New York Times, February 19, 1955

[16] The Los Angeles Times, February 26, 1955

[17] Eugene D. Genovese, “The Squandered Century, The New Republic, April 17, 1995

[18] E.g., “The failure of Soviet socialism does not reflect on the possibility of other kinds of socialism.” Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, p. 498

[19] Similarly, North Korea was the industrial base of Korea until the advent of its marxist regime. Yet South Korea, starting from an economic base lower than pre-socialist Cuba’s, but thriving under capitalist incentives became in four decades a first world industrial power, surpassing the Soviet Union itself.

[20] Hobsbawm, op. cit., p.403

[21] Hobsbawm, op. cit., p.249

[22] Ibid.

[23] Hobsbawm, op. cit., p. 250

[24] Hobsbawm, op. cit., p. 413

[25] Hobsbawm, op. cit., p. 416

[26] Cf. The review essay by Fareed Zakaria in The New Republic, January 22, 1996.

[27] “We are still left with that (now) unforgivable fact that some of the most socially concerned, hopeful-for-the-future, dedicated souls connived at the crimes in the Communist world, by refusing to recognise them and, then, by refusing to acknowledge them openly. Not ten, or a hundred, or a thousand, but many thousands, millions, all over the world. And this attitude -- reluctance to criticise the Soviet Union, the great alma mater – goes on now and is shown by the way Hitler is put in the position of chief criminal of our times, whereas Stalin, a thousand times worse – and Hitler admired Stalin, quite properly seeing himself as a mere infant in crime compared to his great exemplar – is still handled gently in the imaginations of people on the left.” Doris Lessing, Walking in the Shade, NY 1997, p. 262

[28] Hilton Kramer, “The Counter-Revolution Abroad, The Cultural Revolution at Home,” The New Criterion, September 1991

[29] University of Massachusetts Professor Sam Bowles, quoted in The Wall Street Journal, November 25, 1991

[30] E. J. Dionne, “‘Who Won the Cold War?’ New left Historians Debate the Cold War,” The Washington Post, June 12, 1990

[31] The Closing of the American Mind, NY 19??

[32] Private communication from Robert Boyers, editor of Salmagundi, November 18, 1991. Boyers was explaining his reasons for rejecting “The Road to Nowhere” (included in this volume) for his publication.

[33] Richard Rorty, cited in Gertrude Himmelfarb, “Tradition and Creativity in the Writing of History,” First Things, November 1992.

[34] Cited by Marx in The Eighteenth Brummaire. Marx & Engels, Selected Writings, Vol. I, Moscow 1962, p.252

[35] Stephen Holmes, “The Permanent Structure of Antiliberal Thought,” in Liberalism and the Moral Life, Ed. Nancy L. Rosenblum, Harvard 1989: “[Fascist theorists] excoriated liberalism for its atomistic individualism, its myth of the presocial individual, its scanting of the organic, its indifference to community, its denial that man belongs to a larger whole, its belief in the primacy of rights, its flight from ‘the political,’ its uncritical embrace of economic categories,...” Ibid.

[36] Gene Veith, Modern Fascism, Concordia, St. Louis 1993, p. 12

[37] Harold Bloom, “Authority and Originality” in Mark Edmundson, ed. Wild Orchids and Trotsky, NY Penguin 1993 p.213 Or cf. Catharine MacKinnon’s description of her own intellectual process as an exercise in applying Marxism to gender issues, in Towards A Feminist Theory of the State.

[38] David Denby, Great Books, NY 1996 p. 24

[39] This is not to deny that the intellectual tradition of the Left has generated many critics of totalitarianism, like Arendt and Habermas on the above list. But they are not critics of the intellectual tradition whose paradigms produced these totalitarian results. One has only to compare On the Origins of Totalitarianism with Hayek’s Road to Serfdom to appreciate the difference.

[40] For examples of such claims, see Gerald Graff, Beyond the Culture Wars and Lawrence Levine, The Opening of the American Mind

[41] Stanford University catalogue, 1997. The catalogue includes two other categories “cross-cultural encounters” and “the impact of technology.”

[42] Cf. David Sacks and Peter Thiel, The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford, Oakland 1995. Sacks and Thiel were Stanford students who took this required course.

[43] Ibid. p. 20n.20

[44] Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism, Phila. 1989, p. 191. Cf. also pp. 4-5, 220, 227, 253, 298.

[45] Cited in Roger Kimball, The New Criterion

[46] Samuel Bowles, The Wall Street Journal, November 25, 1991

[47] Cf. Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, Vol. I, p. :

[48] “The character of having value, when once impressed upon products, obtains fixity only by reason of their acting and re-acting upon each other as quantities of value. These quantities vary continually, independently of the will, foresight and action of the producers.” Capital, Vol. I. Moscow, 1961 p. 75

[49] Ibid. p. 80

[50] The Nation, December 11, 1989

[51] Robin West, Progressive Constitutionalism: Reconstructing the Fourteenth Amendment, Duke University Press 1994, pp. 17-18 West is a professor at the University of Georgetown Law Center. Cf. Farber and Sherry, op. cit.

[52] By her own account this would include critical legal studies, feminist legal studies, critical race studies and Marxist legal studies.

[53] Quoted in Richard Rorty, “The Professor and the Prophet,” Transition # 52, 1991

[54] Ibid.

[55] Ibid.

[56]Richard Rorty, “Unger, Castoriadis, and the Romance of a National Future” (1988), cited in Richard Posner, Problems of Jurisprudence, 1991, pp. 384-5

[57] “American Dream At A Turning Point,” LosAngeles Times 9/15/91 Jeffrey C. Alexander, chairman of the sociology department at UCLA, and Stephen Jay Sherwood.

The trend is ominous...

2005-04-18T08:51:00.000-07:00

The Next Holocaust
One spark could set off a hellish conflagration
By Aaron Zelman
Executive Director
Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership

The acts may be large or small. But the trend is ominous...
http://www.jpfo.org/nextholocaust.htm

2005-04-16T07:24:00.000-07:00

O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't! (The Tempest, 5.1)

MIT students pull prank on conference

Computer-generated gibberish submitted, accepted

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (Reuters) -- In a victory for pranksters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a bunch of computer-generated gibberish masquerading as an academic paper has been accepted at a scientific conference.
Jeremy Stribling said Thursday that he and two fellow MIT graduate students questioned the standards of some academic conferences, so they wrote a computer program to generate research papers complete with "context-free grammar," charts and diagrams.
The trio submitted two of the randomly assembled papers to the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI), scheduled to be held July 10-13 in Orlando, Florida.
To their surprise, one of the papers -- "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy" -- was accepted for presentation.
The prank recalled a 1996 hoax in which New York University physicist Alan Sokal succeeded in getting an entire paper with a mix of truths, falsehoods, non sequiturs and otherwise meaningless mumbo-jumbo published in the quarterly journal Social Text, published by Duke University Press.
Stribling said he and his colleagues only learned about the Social Text affair after submitting their paper.
"Rooter" features such mind-bending gems as: "the model for our heuristic consists of four independent components: simulated annealing, active networks, flexible modalities, and the study of reinforcement learning" and "We implemented our scatter/gather I/O server in Simula-67, augmented with opportunistically pipelined extensions."
Stribling said the trio targeted WMSCI because it is notorious within the field of computer science for sending copious e-mails that solicit admissions to the conference.
The idea of a fake submission was to counter "fake conferences...which exist only to make money," explained Stribling and his cohorts' website, "SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator."
"Our aim is to maximize amusement, rather than coherence," it said. The website allows users to "Generate a Random Paper" themselves, with fields for inserting "optional author names."
"Contrarily, the lookaside buffer might not be the panacea..."
Nagib Callaos, a conference organizer, said the paper was one of a small number accepted on a "non-reviewed" basis -- meaning that reviewers had not yet given their feedback by the acceptance deadline.
"We thought that it might be unfair to refuse a paper that was not refused by any of its three selected reviewers," Callaos wrote in an e-mail. "The author of a non-reviewed paper has complete responsibility of the content of their paper."
However, Callaos said conference organizers were reviewing their acceptance procedures in light of the hoax.
Asked whether he would disinvite the MIT students, Callos replied, "Bogus papers should not be included in the conference program."
Stribling said conference organizers had not yet formally rescinded their invitation to present the paper.The students were soliciting cash donations so they could attend the conference and give what Stribling billed as a "completely randomly-generated talk, delivered entirely with a straight face".

They exceeded their goal, with $2,311.09 cents from 165 donors.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/science/04/14/mit.prank.reut/index.html

2005-04-16T06:20:00.000-07:00

Progressives, Moderates, Neocons: Notes Before the Conclave

On one side, Ratzinger, Ruini, Bergoglio, Scola with their proposal for a new “Papal Revolution.” On the other side, the list of their opponents, with Tettamanzi as the man for all seasons

by Sandro Magister

ROMA, April 14, 2005 – On Tuesday, April 19, the first full day of the conclave which will elect the new pope, the feast in the calendar of the Roman Church is that of Saint Leo IX. He was pope between 1049 and 1054. He was a standard bearer of the great “Papal Revolution” which, at the beginning of the second millennium, between the 11th and 12th centuries, refashioned the Church and the West. He was German.
And the indisputable front runner in this conclave at the beginning of the third millennium is also German – but above all, he is “Roman.” He is Joseph Ratzinger, and he will turn 78 on April 16. The morning of Monday the 18th, he will be the one presiding over the “missa pro eligendo romano pontifice” at Saint Peter’s. And during the first secret ballot on Monday afternoon, he is expected to receive numerous votes of consensus and esteem, certainly several dozen at least. The quorum necessary to be elected, with 115 cardinals present, is 77 votes. At the tally, Ratzinger and the other cardinals will be watching and judging. They will be standing beneath the terrible gaze of a Judge infinitely higher than they are, the Christ painted by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel.
But the proposal that Ratzinger and his party have presented to the cardinal electors is also fearsome and demanding. They want “a Church that is not folded in upon itself, not timid, not lacking in trust, a Church burning with the love of Christ for the salvation of all men,” as Cardinal Camillo Ruini said in a homily at a Saint Peter’s basilica overflowing with crowds, two days after the funeral for John Paul II.
During the last few months Ruini has been, together with Ratzinger, the most active and explicit in defining the scenario of the new pontificate. And many leading cardinals have taken their side, some of them likely candidates for the papacy themselves. In the curia there is German cardinal Walter Kasper, one of Ratzinger and Ruini’s scholarly colleagues since the three were simple theology professors. In Latin America, there are the Argentine of Italian origin Jorge Mario Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires, and the Chilean Francisco Javier Errázuriz Ossa, archbishop of Santiago. In the United States, there is Francis E. George, archbishop of Chicago. In Canada, there is Marc Ouellet, archbishop of Québec. In Australia, there is George Pell, archbishop of Sydney. In Eastern Europe there is Józef Glemp, archbishop of Warsaw. In Italy, there are Angelo Scola, patriarch of Venice, and Giacomo Biffi, archbishop emeritus of Bologna. This is the framework for the neoconservative party whose beacon is Ratzinger. Another group of cardinals that has recently drawn closer to this party is the circle of cardinals who are friends of Opus Dei, led by the two who are members of Opus: in the Vatican, Julián Herranz, the leading authority on canon law in the curia, and in Latin America, Juan Luis Cipriani Thorne, archbishop of Lima.
The power of the neoconservatives essentially consists in their program. They want a resumption of the active management of the Church’s ordinary governance, its cleansing from “filthiness,” a reinforcement of the doctrinal and moral formation of the clergy, a renewal of basic evangelization and the teaching of the catechism, a qualitative improvement in the celebration of the liturgy, a new missionary campaign.
But it is above all from the perspective of the Church “ad extra” that their program distinguishes itself. The most fearsome conflict of the next decades, Ratzinger and Ruini have both said on numerous occasions, will not be that between the Church and Islam, but rather the cultural conflict between the Church and “the radical emancipation of man from God and from the roots of life,” which characterizes contemporary Western culture and which “leads in the end to the destruction of freedom.” For the neoconservative cardinals, the Church’s commitment to this clash centered in the West must be given absolute priority in the next pontificate.
Their scenario has three other corollaries. The first that the Church will not fight alone in this epochal conflict, but will look for and find allies even in secularist currents of thought far removed from Catholicism; for example, in those represented by Francis Fukuyama and Jürgen Habermas, the two authors cited most frequently by Ratzinger and Ruini of late.
The second corollary concerns the visibility of the Church. In the wake of John Paul II, the neoconservatives do not want the Church simply to speak privately to consciences, but to act as a guiding social force at the center of the public arena.
The third regards the very essence of the Church. In his last conference before the death of pope Karol Wojtyla, which he gave on April 1 in Subiaco, Cardinal Ratzinger harshly criticized those who “reduce the core of Jesus’s message, the kingdom of God, to the buzzwords of political moralism.” Because in this way, “God is forgotten, and in his place there are only words that are easily turned to any sort of misuse.”
No one in the college of cardinals has presented a complete alternative project alongside the neoconservatives’ program. But there is no lack of serious objections and resistance, and at the beginning of the conclave this will be turned into votes in favor of other candidates.
http://www.chiesa.espressonline.it/dettaglio.jsp?id=28458&eng=y

2005-04-12T13:48:00.000-07:00

Quantus tremor est futurus
Quando judex est venturus
Cuncta stricte discussurus

2005-04-11T17:15:00.000-07:00

"Call it the fault of civilization. God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice.

Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness. That's why I have to keep these books locked up in the safe. They're smut"
-Mustapha Mond, in Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)

The Hate Spews...

2005-04-06T16:41:00.000-07:00

Notes by Karonds and Elnaar

Future of the Past

By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, April 6, 2005; Page A19

At first glance, ("At first glance"...that phrase is the first refuge of intellectual scoundrels) it looked to be a triumph of the human spirit. There, at a joint news conference last week in Jerusalem, stood the patriarchs of the rival faiths of the Middle East -- Israel's chief rabbis, the deputy mufti of Jerusalem, leaders of the Catholic and Armenian churches -- Jews, Muslims and Christians, together at last (but...)

And the cause that had united them? A gay pride festival scheduled for August in Jerusalem (Gee...imagine that! Religious leaders who dare to be against overt, public displays of homosexuality). The leaders of religious orthodoxy had come together to help ban the festival. Interreligious harmony reigned as historic enmities gave way to a common loathing of homosexuals.

We have seen the future of the past (To the Left, orthodoxy of any kind is regressive). The photograph of the clerics that ran in the newspapers may some day be viewed as an artifact of the founding of the Orthodox International. Globalization is bringing modernization and the demand for equality to the doorsteps of the most traditionalist societies and enclaves. Orthodox faiths are not accustomed to interreligious cooperation -- there is no God but their own, after all (sounds like Secular Humanism, no?) -- but in the threat of secularism, they find themselves with a common enemy and a range of common hatreds (So...opposition to public expression of sexuality is hatred!).

If Orthodox International had a founding father, it was John Paul II, who spent much of his papacy endeavoring to reconcile the various orthodox Christian faiths. When such churches threatened to forsake orthodoxy for the siren call of human equality, he did not hesitate to intervene in their deliberations -- warning the Anglicans, for instance, not to ordain gay priests (So, the Catholic Church has forsaken the "siren call of human equality"? That's an interesting statement; in the Bible St. Paul says, "...there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcised nor uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave nor free, but Christ is all and in all." [Colossians 3:11]--but I guess that's irrelevant if the Church doesn't support Gay marriage).

John Paul's orthodoxy, I fear, will quite overwhelm the humanistic aspects of his legacy. In Africa, John Paul's church is a tribune for economic justice -- for debt forgiveness, for a global economic order that seeks to enhance, not destroy, workers' rights. It is also a vehement opponent of birth control and condom distribution, even as an AIDS epidemic ravages the continent. That such a church could call itself "pro-life" is sophistry of the highest order (Welcome to Wonderland!!! The Papacy, anti-death penalty, and anti-abortion is not "pro-life"...solely because they are against artificial means of birth control).

The church that John Paul took over in the late '70s was home to many priests, theologians, bishops and even cardinals who were seeking the common ground between church traditions and modern egalitarianism. The church that John Paul made and leaves is home to no such discussion. The vibrant intellectualism of the Vatican II era has been driven outside the church walls (Meyerson forgets that this "vibrant intellectualism" of the Vatican II era continued the Roman Catholic Church's stand against artificial birth control, and affirmed the dogma of Priestly celibacy, women excluded from administering the Eucharist, etc.). Where once the Catholic Church had such engaged and vigorous leaders as Chicago's Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, today it is suffused with John Paul's party-line hacks (Like who? Name names before spewing libel!).

The effects of such hackery are already apparent. A veteran union organizer I know, who has worked over the years with any number of bishops and priests on behalf of low-wage workers all the way back to the farm workers' grape boycott, tells me that he's now encountering Catholic clerics who are withholding their support from such struggles. The problem, it seems, is that the organizer's union backed the pro-union but pro-choice John Kerry for president. Though John Paul is identified with the cause of workers' justice, the church he built is increasingly willing to discard such concerns when they run counter to the strictures of orthodoxy (What is so wrong with the Pope upholding orthodoxy?).

Political scientist Samuel P. Huntington has argued that we are now engaged in a clash of civilizations that pits the liberalism of the West against the orthodoxy of Islam. Huntington's on to something, but I think he has located his fault line in the wrong place. The opposition to liberalism -- Jeffersonian liberalism, with its belief in science and, correspondingly, human equality (What?) -- extends well beyond the backwaters of Islam. It includes the church that the pope bequeaths us, the Protestant Christian Right, the Orthodox rabbis of Israel (Meyerson proves once and for all that he treats all religions equally--with contempt).

The blue state-red state division in the United States is increasingly a global reality as well, and just as it sunders nations (Huh!?), it can also at least partially erase some preexisting borders. In the Middle East, it's not just onetime orthodox rivals who look increasingly alike. My friend Jo-Ann Mort, one of the keenest observers of Israeli society (and a member of the editorial board of Dissent magazine--i.e., an extreme Leftist, thus hardly a reliable non-partisan source for Meyerson to quote), has noted the similarities between the young, nightclubbing, pro-democracy demonstrators in Beirut and the young, nightclubbing, pro-peace demonstrators in Tel Aviv. The real Green Line in Israel and Palestine may one day separate the red and the blue (Idiotic statement...).

A specter is haunting modernity (Paraphrase of Karl Marx--how appropriate). Powered by tradition, by a misogyny and homophobia for which a future pope will one day apologize as surely as John Paul did for the church's anti-Semitism (except for the fact that the Church truly was anti-semitic, as surely as it is not homophobic and misogynistic), the Orthodox International (Is this phrase an echo of the the Left's beloved Commintern [Communist International]?) marches forth to do battle against liberalism, invoking ancient beliefs against the claims of a common humanity (Oh, I see--the Church will mount an atavistic Crusade, a "battle against liberalism", "invoking ancient beliefs").
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28417-2005Apr5.html

Free Speech on Campus...

2005-04-04T13:39:00.000-07:00

Professor with link to pro-Nazi group dismissed from FDU

Associated Press, April 02, 2005
TEANECK, N.J. - An adjunct history professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University who hosts a Web cast program called "White Viewpoint" has been officially dismissed for missing too many days of class, school officials said.Jacques Pluss, 51, who acknowledges he is a member of the National Socialist Movement, a pro-Nazi group, has hired an attorney and is considering a lawsuit.
University officials said Pluss was dismissed for missing too many days of his "History of Western Civilization II" class, but he told The Star-Ledger of Newark that each of his three absences were for illnesses excused with a doctor's note.
"What I suspect is somebody on campus discovered I crossed the line of political correctness," Pluss told the newspaper for Saturday's editions.
John Snyder, dean of Fairleigh Dickinson's University College said that Pluss was replaced because he had missed four or five days this semester. However, he told The Record of Bergen County that Pluss would not be allowed to return.
"It's not politics, it's hate mongering," Snyder told the newspaper. "It's just hatred directed at the very students he taught."
Pluss will be paid for the remainder of his contract through the end of the school year, Snyder said.
Pluss, who has taught at the university since 2002, said he joined the National Socialist Movement in February but was careful to keep his views a secret on campus.
"I never mentioned my political affiliations to anyone on campus, either students or faculty," told The Star-Ledger. "I was trained one should bring as much objectivity to any class one teaches."
He was previously a tenured professor at William Paterson University in Wayne from 1984 to 2000.
Natalia Galbetti, a Fairleigh Dickinson freshman from Brazil, said the anti-foreigner comments Pluss made on his Internet show were not consistent with the way he treated his students.
"He was always so nice to me," she told The Record. "He knew that I was a foreigner. He definitely kept it out of the classroom."
http://www.philly.com/mld/philly/news/local/11296109.htm

SanFran ThinkPol

2005-04-04T13:21:00.000-07:00

San Francisco May Regulate Blogging

By Michael Bassik, 03/31/2005 - 3:15pm

Just when you thought the Federal Election Commission had it out for the blogosphere, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors took it up a notch and announced yesterday that it will soon vote on a city ordinance that would require local bloggers to register with the city Ethics Commission and report all blog-related costs that exceed $1,000 in the aggregate...
http://www.personaldemocracy.com/node/501

Sexuelles Traumland des Dritten Reiches

2005-04-02T14:44:00.000-08:00

Portrait of the Fuhrer as a dreamer with a complex about his sexuality

By Jonathan Brown 01 April 2005

Adolf Hitler had a feminine side: a romantic dreamer who loved painting ruined castles, he saw himself as the hero and author of his own great epic story. He was also deeply confused about his sexuality.
A previously unseen psychological profile, compiled as the Third Reich approached collapse in 1943, has concluded that the Führer's loathing of his own perceived weaknesses was to blame for his murderous megalomania.
The report, which emerged this month at the Cornell University Law Library, has sent a wave of excitement through scholars of the Nazi period. It coincides with the release today in British cinemas of the powerful new film Downfall that details Hitler's desperate final days in his Berlin bunker.
Written by Henry Murray, a prominent personality specialist at Harvard University in the middle of the past century, it seeks to explain, through the use of existing texts, the motivation for Hitler's behaviour.
Among the conclusions, based partly on the use of metaphors in his book Mein Kampf, other writings and biographies, is that Hitler was unable to come to terms with his complex sexuality. According to Mr Murray, being caught in a sexual encounter with a girl of 12 left the future dictator with syphilophobia - a morbid fear of contaminating the blood through contact with a woman. He was also deeply scarred from seeing his three-times married, highly promiscuous and illegitimate father having sex with his mother.
Confusing sexuality, which he considered "exceedingly filthy", with the act of excretion, Hitler was both impotent and a "fully fledged masochist". But his inability to consummate the sex act left him with "exorbitant cravings for superiority".
To further complicate matters, the Führer may also have been homosexual as well. According to Mr Murray he found himself in awe of strong homosexual characters. His recurring nightmares were reminiscent of "homosexual panic", argues Mr Murray. While on one hand he had an "Oedipal complex", he was also beaten by his sadistic father, a man whom he both idolised and loathed.
The 1943 profile was commissioned by the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency. It had been assumed that the OSS only commissioned one study of Hitler's mind - a wartime report by Walter Langer.
Mr Murray paid particular attention to Hitler's childhood. He believed that if he could understand the make-up of the leader then he could appreciate the psyche of the German population that had fallen under his spell. He wrote: "Hitler's unprecedented appeal, the elevation of this man to the status of a demi-god, can be explained only on the hypothesis that he and his ideology have almost exactly met the needs, longings and sentiments of the German people."
Describing Hitler's early life, he wrote: "Hitler has many weaknesses. There is a large feminine component to his constitution. As a child he was frail and sickly, emotionally dependent on his mother. He never did any manual work, never engaged in athletics, was turned down as forever unfit for conscription in the Austrian army."
When he finally joined up he was "outwardly submissive and later annoyingly subservient" to senior officers. His experiences in the war left him with a severe neurosis and hysterical blindness.
But while Hitler was a "hive of secret neurotic compunctions and feminine sentimentalities" there was also a deep strain of creativeness. He loved painting temples and castles, though he preferred to depict them in ruins - symbolising his love of destruction. Unlike other politicians, he saw himself as a Romantic artist and even dreamed of retiring after he had achieved world domination to paint quietly.
Reviewers admit that Hitler's troubled personality oozes from the closely typed pages of the manuscript.
Among the final recommendations are how the Allies should handle Hitler if he were to be captured. He recommends secretly filming and recording him in his cell to convince his followers once and for all that he was insane. Among the names suggested to give him when talking to his defeated countrymen are False Prophet or False Messiah then Corporal Satan or World Criminal No 1.
Mr Murray also foresees that he will fight to the bitter end. "There is a powerful compulsion in him to sacrifice himself and all of Germany to the revengeful annihilation of Western culture, to die, dragging all of Europe with him into the abyss," Mr Murray wrote. Of the final chapter to Hitler's tragedy, one outcome he envisages is suicide - which in the end proved the preferred exit for the
defeated Führer.
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=625311

Free Speech On Campus, Part XXVIII

2005-04-01T08:19:00.000-08:00

Pat Buchanan Doused With Salad Dressing

KALAMAZOO, Mich. - Commentator and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan cut short an appearance after an opponent of his conservative views doused him with salad dressing.
"Stop the bigotry!" the demonstrator shouted as he hurled the liquid Thursday night during the program at Western Michigan University. The incident came just two days after another noted conservative, William Kristol, was struck by a pie during an appearance at a college in Indiana.
After he was hit, Buchanan cut short his question-and-answer session with the audience, saying, "Thank you all for coming, but I'm going to have to get my hair washed."
The demonstrator, identified by authorities as a 24-year-old student at Kalamazoo Valley Community College, was arrested and faces a misdemeanor charge of disturbing the peace. He was released on a $100 cash bond, pending his April 14 arraignment.
"He could have faced a felony assault charge, but Pat Buchanan decided to not press that charge," university spokesman Matt Kurz said.
Buchanan's visit had evoked controversy on campus because it fell on the birthday of the late Mexican-American labor leader Cesar Chavez. Buchanan favors tighter controls on immigration.
Kristol, editor of the influential conservative magazine The Weekly Standard and former chief of staff to Vice President Quayle, was splattered by a student during a speech Tuesday at Earlham College in Richmond, Ind.
Members of the audience at the Quaker college jeered the student, then applauded as Kristol wiped the pie from his face and said, "Just let me finish this point." Kristol then completed his speech and took questions from the audience.
The student, who was not immediately identified, was suspended and could face expulsion following a disciplinary review, Earlham Provost Len Clark said Wednesday.
Clark also issued a written apology complimenting Kristol for his "graciousness."
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050401/ap_on_re_us/buchanan_attacked

He "Spoke Falsely"; He "Lied"...What's the Difference?

2005-04-01T06:01:00.000-08:00

Notes by Elnaar Haninah

Berger Will Plead Guilty To Taking Classified Paper

By John F. Harris and Allan Lengel
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, April 1, 2005; Page A01

Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, a former White House national security adviser, plans to plead guilty to a misdemeanor [not a felony!?], and will acknowledge intentionally removing [i.e., stealing] and destroying copies of a classified document about the Clinton administration's record on terrorism.

Berger's plea agreement, which was described yesterday by his advisers and was confirmed by Justice Department officials, will have one of former president Bill Clinton's most influential advisers and one of the Democratic Party's leading foreign policy advisers in a federal court this afternoon.

The deal's terms make clear that Berger spoke falsely [i.e., lied] last summer in public claims that in 2003 he twice inadvertently walked off [i.e., stole] with copies of a classified document during visits to the National Archives, then later lost them.

He described the episode last summer as "an honest mistake." Yesterday, a Berger associate who declined to be identified by name but was speaking with Berger's permission said: "He recognizes what he did was wrong. . . . It was not inadvertent. [i.e., he had the mens rea--the state of mind--necessary to raise this act to the level of a felony]"

Under terms negotiated by Berger's attorneys and the Justice Department, he has agreed to pay a $10,000 fine [why no jail time?] and accept a three-year suspension of his national security clearance [So what! And for how long is the suspension?]. These terms must be accepted by a judge before they are final, but Berger's associates said yesterday he believes that closure is near on what has been an embarrassing episode during which he repeatedly misled people [i.e., lied] about what happened during two visits to the National Archives in September and October 2003.

Lanny Breuer, Berger's attorney, said in a statement: "Mr. Berger has cooperated fully with the Department of Justice and is pleased that a resolution appears very near. He accepts complete responsibility for his actions, and regrets the mistakes he made during his review of documents at the National Archives. [but does not admit that he lied]"

The terms of Berger's agreement required him to acknowledge to the Justice Department the circumstances of the episode. Rather than misplacing or unintentionally throwing away three of the five copies he took from the archives, as the former national security adviser earlier maintained, he shredded them with a pair of scissors late one evening at the downtown offices of his international consulting business [Huh?? I thought that he "inadvertantly" removed the documents.]

The document, written by former National Security Council terrorism expert Richard A. Clarke, was an "after-action review" prepared in early 2000 detailing the administration's actions to thwart terrorist attacks during the millennium celebration. It contained considerable discussion about the administration's awareness of the rising threat of attacks on U.S. soil.

Archives officials have said previously that Berger had copies only, and that no original documents were lost. It remains unclear whether Berger knew that, or why he destroyed three versions of a document but left two other versions intact. Officials have said the five versions were largely similar, but contained slight variations as the after-action report moved around different agencies of the executive branch.

National Archives officials almost immediately suspected that Berger had removed materials after his Oct. 2, 2003, visit. They called Bruce R. Lindsey, a former White House lawyer and Clinton's liaison to the archives to complain. Lindsey, sources said, called Berger, who soon acknowledged to archives officials that he had removed documents -- by accident, he told them -- and returned notes that he made, as well as the two documents he had not destroyed.

A criminal investigation, which eventually brought witnesses before a grand jury, was soon underway. The probe came to light last July, prompting Berger's resignation as a senior foreign policy adviser to 2004 Democratic nominee John F. Kerry [Gee--what a terrible punishment! He should be grateeful that Kerry fired him!].

Berger's archives visit occurred as he was reviewing materials as a designated representative of the Clinton administration to the national commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The question of what Clinton knew and did about the emerging al Qaeda threat before leaving office in January 2001 was acutely sensitive, as suggested by Berger's determination to spend hours poring over the Clarke report before his testimony [Pathetic Clinton legacy is at stake!].

The Berger associate authorized to speak with reporters described the chronology the former national security chief gave to the Justice Department in his negotiations with the Justice Department. On Sept. 2, 2003, the associate said, Berger put a copy of the Clarke report in his suit jacket. He did not put it in his socks or underwear, as was alleged by some Republicans last summer [Dems are indignant at alleged Republican rumors??]. On Oct. 2, 2003, he again spent hours at the archives and took four more versions of the document. Back in his office, he studied them in detail, realized they were largely identical, and took the scissors to three of the copies, the associate said [Once again--I thought that his acts were "inadvertant"].

Berger friends regarded the agreement as fair, given the circumstances, and Breuer's statement praised the "professionalism" of the lawyers [i.e., the biased hacks] he worked with at the Justice Department.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16706-2005Mar31.html

"an attack against God."

2005-03-31T09:57:00.000-08:00

Da, quaesumus Dominus, ut in hora mortis nostrae Sacramentis refecti et culpis omnibus expiati, in sinum misericordiae tuae laeti suscipi mereamur. Per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen.

Vatican Cardinal Condemns Schiavo Death
By VICTOR L. SIMPSON, Associated Press Writer

ROME - A Vatican cardinal denounced the death Thursday of Terri Schiavo, saying removing the feeding tube that was keeping her alive was "an attack against God."
Portuguese Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins, head of the Vatican's office for sainthood, told reporters that "an attack against life is an attack against God, who is the author of life."
The cardinal, speaking shortly after the brain-damaged woman died in Florida, said the ailing Pope John Paul II "teaches us not only with his suffering, but also with his teaching the great respect for life. Life is the most precious thing we have."
John Paul, 84, has been put on a feeding tube of his own as Parkinson's disease and other ailments have left him increasingly frail.
The cardinal's comments reflected other recent remarks by Vatican prelates since Schiavo's feeding tube was disconnected with a judge's approval March 18. She suffered severe brain damage after a heart attack 15 years ago.
"The prolonged interruption in her feeding ... is shaping up as an unjust death sentence to an innocent, in one of the most inhumane and cruel forms — that of death from hunger and thirst," Renato Martino, who heads the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, told Vatican Radio earlier in the day, before her death was announced.
"The dutiful and unavoidable respect for a human being should impose that ... what would practically and without euphemism be murder — to which it is impossible to stand by inert without becoming an accomplice — be avoided," he said.
Schiavo's husband said Schiavo told him she would not want to be kept alive in a vegetative state, and he insisted he was carrying out her wishes by having the tube pulled. The woman's parents said she needed treatment and another opportunity for life.
Martino had previously appealed for Schiavo to remain on life support.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050331/ap_on_re_eu/vatican_brain_damaged_woman_2

2005-03-28T18:55:00.000-08:00

It's a Brave New World after Terri Schiavo dies
March 28th, 2005

In his landmark novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley conveys the vision of a technological nightmare in which man is forced, through conditioning and eugenics, to happily serve as a cog in an utopian socialist machine. Those things which we see as important - family, close friendships, love, individualism, faith - are removed from the individual through brainwashing techniques, so as to create hollow vessels better suited to a life of consumerism and service to the State. Motherhood is abolished in favor of factory production of children, and the elderly and disabled are “taken care of.”
The euthanasia practices in Brave New World are carried out in public hospices, with children being brought in to play and enjoy themselves as part of their conditioning. Death is made an enjoyable experience for the young so that they would give it little thought or consideration.
In Huxley`s nightmare we see death as the last means of control of the individual. A person is removed from this world when he becomes tiresome, much as an old car is decommissioned and disassembled to make way for the newer model. Huxley understood the utopian socialist mind. Brave New World gave us a peek into the mind of the utopian left, and what those who would build the plastic paradise would eventually do.
The Terri Schiavo case has sparked a national debate over the quality of life vs. the sanctity of life. The QL people (I would argue that they are predominantly liberal, although many libertarians fit this description) argue that life should have a visible purpose and worth, and that if a person`s life is not worth living (in the judgment of others), he should die.
Oh, I know they don`t couch it in such blunt terms. They use phrases like “death with dignity” and “a peaceful end,” but the bottom line is they think people should die rather than burden everyone else - and themselves.
The SL crowd believes life is a precious gift from God, and that Man does not have the right to choose the time and place for death. The fact that a life is not worth living (as others judge it) does not give anyone the right to terminate that life.
Many in the SL camp have been puzzled by the determination and enthusiasm that the Quality of Life side has brought to the Schiavo case. They can`t understand the zeal with which people are trying to kill Terri Schiavo. (Peggy Noonan speculates about this ardor in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal.)
I would argue that this eagerness is a natural outgrowth of the deeper root philosophy of liberalism, and that the “culture of death” as Pope John Paul II has termed it, is fundamental to who liberals are and what they believe. Their zealotry is grounded in their self-identity, and we need to understand that if we are to understand the struggle between the pro-life and pro-death camps.
First, we need a term to better describe those who, for whatever reason, have joined the ranks of those supporting death. They are called by too many different names; Pro-choice, Pro-abortion, Pro-euthanasia, Pro-stem cell research, Physician assisted suicide advocates, etc. It becomes far too confusing with so many labels. We need a one-size-fits-all term.
Grateful Dead fans are called deadheads. Fans of Rush Limbaugh are called dittoheads, Fans of Jimmy Buffet are parrotheads, Ah, maybe that`s it! Maybe deathheads! They are fans and enthusiasts for Death, and they are the last visage many poor souls will see, if they get their way.
What is it that motivates the deathheads? Why are they so eager in their pursuit of death? The answer lies not in contemporary politics, but in the philosophical underpinnings of liberalism itself. Liberalism was born out of the Renaissance, which was a rediscovery of our Greek and Latin heritage. The Renaissance era saw a revival in interest in all things Greek and Roman; in art, literature, history, science, mathematics, and other branches of classical learning.
The Greeks and Romans had, for all their virtues, a far weaker respect for human life than their Christian successors. In fact, the Greeks and Romans saw a kind of nobility in death - especially a death for a higher cause. Liberalism has always had a fascination with the Classical period. The vision of Socrates ingesting hemlock for the good of the polis has a romantic appeal to the average liberal, and the word “hemlock” has been used by various groups advocating euthanasia and “death with dignity.” A “good death” (which is what the word euthanasia means) done nobly and well is far preferable to a slow, wasting process.
Liberalism also prides itself on championing reason, and sees the life of the individual as deriving its meaning and purpose from the service that individual can render. The Deathheads are utilitarian; when the individual can no longer contribute in a meaningful way to the betterment of the larger community, that individual no longer has any real worth and should be removed in the least painful manner possible.
We already see this principle applied at the other end of the life spectrum with abortion; the fetus is unwanted and contributes nothing to the community, and therefore can be eliminated. This is what we see in Brave New World with the sick and the elderly; they no longer serve a useful social purpose and can thus be disposed of.
The matter of human reason cannot be emphasized enough. What the liberal movement did was substitute man and reason for Jesus and God, and early on they began a war to exterminate the “superstition” of Christianity. (Remember, the French had their “cult of reason” in which a nude prostitute, representing a goddess of reason, paraded about the streets of Paris.)
The liberals have fought a three hundred year war against Christ, and if man and reason are to make suitable replacement gods, they must have certain divine powers. But what powers can a substitute god have? God is the Author of life, but man can be the author of death.
This obsession with death can be seen throughout history. Consider the butchery during the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the Nazi atrocities. Consider the careless disregard for life by all the former communist regimes. In Leftist societies, life is cheap. Abortion is a holy sacrament to the liberal. To the deathheads, human will is the final master, and death serves as an instrument of that will.
By controlling the time, place, and manner of death, the deathheads have a semblance of the powers of the divine. Possibly, that is why the death of Terri Schiavo is so important to them. They want the right to control the end of life as a means to reinforce and sanctify their own inner beliefs. They also know that the Schiavo case is going to set a memorable public precedent. If they could force the death of Terri despite the pro-life forces arrayed against them, they would establish their right to command death for the innocent. If they have the right to kill when their reason adjudges it necessary, they have established their coequality with the Creator.
That is also why we have heard so little from the fetal stem-cell research crowd during this whole debate. Granted, fairly early on Robert Herring, a stem-cell advocate, offered Michael Schiavo one million dollars to end his quest to kill his wife (which he refused). Still, few other voices from that group have been heard. A scan of the website for the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation, for example, turns up glowing accounts of the magic of embryonic stem-cell research, but fails to mention anything about Terri Schiavo. Why? If these people really believe in a miracle cure for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, why not a cure for Terri? I suspect we`ll be hearing a lot more from them after Terri dies.
Where have those who oppose the death penalty been? Where have the people from Not In Our Names gone? Just where have all the flowers gone? Their silence says more about who they are and what they believe than any amount of rhetoric.
Terri Schiavo and her parents were thrust into the strange, twilight world of fundamentalist liberalism. The rules that govern this world are different from those which govern normal society, and the dark currents which drive this world have energized an angry mob against her. The conservatives have been scratching their heads in puzzlement over the strange zeal with which the deathheads have come to kill poor Terri Schiavo. They shouldn`t be surprised. Aldous Huxley would have understood perfectly.
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=4365

Another Culture Saved by Capitalism

2005-03-28T18:48:00.000-08:00

Afghan entrepreneurs find profit in technology

By Michael Coren
CNN

CNN -- Camels and caravans once carried vast treasures into Afghanistan along the Silk Road.
Today, in the aftermath of two decades of civil war, technology is beginning to return some of that wealth to the shattered country. Although deeply divided by geography and ethnicity, a nascent technological boom in Afghanistan is spreading beyond the cities and has the potential to reshape the country.
"Two years ago, when we went into Afghanistan, there wasn't' even a working road grader in the whole country," said Harry Reid of USAID, the government aid agency. He said that most advanced technology were mine detectors
Today, this country of 29 million has more than 662,500 people using mobile phones, reports the GSM Association, a cellular trade group. Afghanistan's Internet domain, .af, was awarded in March 2003 and Web cafes are springing up around Kabul. Microsoft is even inserting phrases of Afghanistan's two dominant languages, Dari and Pashto, into its software.
That is a sea change from 2002 when only one telephone line existed for every 1,000 people, according to the Afghan government. The United States government counted only 1,000 Internet users and 15,000 people with mobile phones in the whole country, among the lowest in the world.
"I was in dire need of having a mobile phone because my brothers live abroad," says Shafiquallah Waak, an engineer in the capital of Kabul. "Having a mobile (phone) has put an end to our problems."
Afghans have long been enthusiastic entrepreneurs. Their location at the crossroads of Asia earned them a reputation as savvy traders across the region. Aid workers report that within hours of the Taliban's fall from Afghanistan's capital in 2001, vendors were hawking once-banned DVDs on the streets.
Technology offers those commercial instincts new outlets...
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/03/23/afghan.tech/index.html

Easter Sunday

2005-03-26T17:33:00.000-08:00

Gospel of John, Chapter 20

19 On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being shut where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, "Peace be with you." 20 When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord. 21 Jesus said to them again, "Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I send you." 22 And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit. 23 If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained." 24 Now Thomas, one of the twelve, called the Twin, was not with them when Jesus came. 25 So the other disciples told him, "We have seen the Lord." But he said to them, "Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe." 26 Eight days later, his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. The doors were shut, but Jesus came and stood among them, and said, "Peace be with you." 27 Then he said to Thomas, "Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side; do not be faithless, but believing." 28 Thomas answered him, "My Lord and my God!" 29 Jesus said to him, "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe." 30 Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; 31 but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name.

Good Friday

2005-03-24T19:57:00.000-08:00

Matthias Grünewald (German, c.1475-1528), The Isenheim Alterpiece, c. 1512-16, oil on wood panels (triptych)

"Then he delivered Him to them to be crucified. So they took Jesus and led Him away. And He, bearing His cross, went out to a place called the Place of a Skull, which is called in Hebrew, Golgotha, where they crucified Him, and two others with Him, one on either side, and Jesus in the center" (John19:16-18)

2005-03-24T19:34:00.000-08:00

Who are YOU? said the Caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly,
I--I hardly know, sir, just at present-- at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.

Mirror shatters in formless reflections of matter...

2005-03-24T17:52:00.000-08:00

Dark star crashes, pouring it’s light into ashes.
Reason tatters, the forces tear loose from the axis.
Searchlight casting for faults in the clouds of delusion.
Shall we go, you and I while we can
Through the transitive nightfall of diamonds?

Mirror shatters in formless reflections of matter.
Glass hand dissolving to ice petal flowers revolving.
Lady in velvet recedes in the nights of good-bye.
Shall we go, you and I while we can
Through the transitive nightfall of diamonds?

SWLABR

2005-03-24T17:41:00.000-08:00

So many fantastic colors; I feel in a wonderland.
Many fantastic colors makes me feel so good.
You've got that pure feel, such good responses.
You've got that rainbow feel...

but the rainbow has a beard.

Inevitable

2005-03-23T04:58:00.000-08:00

The inevitable result of
government-controlled national health coverage:

China plans database of HIV/AIDS victims

BEIJING, Mar. 21 -- China plans to set up a national database containing the records of its HIV/AIDS victims in a bid to get a better grip of the extent of the epidemic. The Ministry of Health had vowed to establish the database, with entries for every reported HIV/AIDS patient, the Xinhua news agency reported…
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2005-03/21/content_2723761.htm

Palm Sunday

2005-03-20T11:13:00.000-08:00

The Triumphal Entry
Gospel of Saint John, 12:12 – 15

The next day a great multitude that had come to the feast, when they heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem, took branches of palm trees and went out to meet Him, and cried out:

"Hosanna!
"Blessed is He who comes in the name of the LORD!”

The King of Israel!"

Then Jesus, when He had found a young donkey, sat on it; as it is written:

"Fear not, daughter of Zion;
Behold, your King is coming,
Sitting on a donkey's colt."

2005-03-17T13:33:00.000-08:00

I Saw Eternity the other night
Like a great Ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright,
And round beneath it, Time is hours, days, years
Driven by the spheres
Like a vast shadow mov'd, in which the world
And all her train were hurl'd;

The doting lover in his quaintest strain
Did there complain,
Near him, his lute, his fancy, and his flights,
Wit's sour delights,
With gloves, and knots the silly snares of pleasure
Yet his dear treasure
All scatter'd lay, while he his eyes did pour
Upon a flower.

--Henry Vaughn, The World (excerpt - 1652)

Faculty Still Destroying Harvard President

2005-03-16T13:33:00.000-08:00

Orwell would understand.

New York Times March 16, 2005

Professors, in Close Vote, Censure Harvard Leader
By Sara Rimer

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., March 15 - The Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard approved a resolution on Tuesday expressing a lack of confidence in the leadership of the university's president, Lawrence H. Summers, citing longstanding dissatisfaction with his management style and, to a lesser extent, his remarks in January about women in math and science.
The vote was 218 in favor and 185 opposed, with 18 abstentions.
At an intense and sober meeting, Dr. Summers's supporters accused his opponents of political correctness while his critics emphasized that their concerns had nothing to do with political correctness but were about Dr. Summers's leadership, as well as his remarks concerning a lack of women in science...

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/16/education/16harvard.
html?ex=1111640400&en=
a7262e3127d9d9e6&ei=5065&partner=MYWAY

To El Naar

2005-03-16T10:58:00.000-08:00

Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death.

Song Of Solomon, 8:6

2005-03-16T10:49:00.000-08:00

Genesis 3:19

"What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?"

--Hamlet (II, ii, 115-117)

Requiem

2005-03-14T17:41:00.000-08:00

Victim toll
By the MVD estimates carried out by the order of a special commission of the Communist Party in preparation to the 20th Party Congress, 681,692 people were executed during 1937–38 alone, and only accounting for the execution lists signed personally by Stalin from archives of NKVD. The exact total number of persons affected remains uncertain and depends on how the count is made, especially depending on the time period considered and whether deaths related to the Gulag and transportation losses are included.
One of Russia's leading human rights groups, the Memorial human rights group, has released a list of 1,345,796 names of people who fell victim to Stalin's purges...
http://www.answers.com/topic/great-purge

2005-03-14T16:48:00.000-08:00

The 91-Pound Acid Trip
The numbers touted by the government in its big LSD bust just don't add up.

By Ryan Grim
Posted Monday, March 14, 2005, at 3:10 PM PT

On Nov. 25, 2003, a federal judge sentenced Leonard Pickard and Clyde Apperson to life and 30 years, respectively, for one count each of conspiracy to manufacture and distribute more than 10 grams of LSD and one count each of possession with the intent to distribute more than 10 grams of LSD. That afternoon, the Department of Justice and Drug Enforcement Administration celebrated the sentencing with a press release describing the bust in the case as the "Largest LSD Lab Seizure in DEA History."
Almost 91 pounds of LSD had been seized in the case, the release stated. Many newspapers, including the San Francisco Chronicle, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the Reno Gazette-Journal, the Oakland Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, as well as the Associated Press repeated the poundage number verbatim. Slate published it, too, in an April 2004 article that I wrote, "Who’s Got the Acid?" DEA Administrator Karen P. Tandy repeated the 91-pound figure in congressional testimony one year ago during an appropriations hearing. (Click here for Tandy's testimony.)
How many hits of acid is that? The usual dose of LSD has fallen to about 20 micrograms in recent years, so at that dosage level, Pickard and Apperson possessed 2 billion hits of acid—enough to give every person in the Western Hemisphere two doses and still have 250 million hits left over. As I wrote in my original Slate article, 91 pounds of LSD would be worth between $2 billion and $10 billion on the street.But how real is the 91-pound number? After I quoted the figure in my Slate piece, I received a letter from Pickard, and his jail-cell note inspired me to re-interview my sources and consult the relevant court testimony to verify the government's claims. Based on my inquiries and official testimony, I've concluded that the drug operation the DEA broke up had less than a half-pound of LSD on hand, enough to make only 10 million hits of 20-microgram acid. Instead of turning on both North America and South America twice, they could have dosed only Chile and Uruguay once.
The press release derived its 91-pound estimate on the data collected during an Oct. 31, 2000, "sneak and peek" search of a suspected LSD operation in a retired missile silo near Wamego, Kan. (In a "sneak and peek" search, a judge authorizes law enforcement to conduct their search without the knowledge of the property owner.) According to court testimony and an interview with DEA Special Agent Karl Nichols, who worked on the case and was present during the search, agents found an "operable lab."
The agents obtained between 15 and 20 samples of materials during the search, says Nichols. A DEA forensic laboratory found detectable amounts of LSD or LSD-related chemicals in some of them, according to Agent Nichols and testimony given by DEA forensic chemist Timothy McKibben in the trial. The press release further states that LSD precursor chemicals sufficient to "create an additional 12.4 kilograms" or 27.28 pounds of LSD were captured.
"We found LSD, we found iso-LSD, we found all the equipment, the chemicals. Basically, we found everything," Nichols says.
A couple days after the search, agents watched from a surveillance point as Pickard dumped vast amounts of liquid material onto the ground outside the silo, according to Nichols and court testimony. The agents did not intercede or make their presence known. On Nov. 6, they finally closed in on Pickard and Apperson as the two loaded equipment from the silo into a Ryder truck and a silver Buick and drove off. They apprehended Apperson, who was driving the truck, but Pickard, piloting the Buick, took off on foot and outran several agents half his age.
"We didn't know beforehand that Pickard was a marathon runner," Agent Nichols says.
Agents seized empty containers in the vehicles and in the silo. The next day, a local farmer spotted Pickard and turned him in.
When and where did the DEA seize the 91 pounds of LSD?
The DoJ/DEA press release attributes the number to U.S. Attorney Eric Melgren, and states that he got them from "court testimony." According to Agent Nichols, the prosecution testified at trial that 41.3 kilograms (approximately 91 pounds) of a substance containing a detectable amount of LSD were found in the silo during the search.
This is a far cry from seizing 91 pounds of LSD—or even detecting 91 pounds of LSD. What the government is really saying is that its forensic chemists detected LSD in samples taken from containers during the search, and that the contents of the containers weighed an estimated 91 pounds. How much LSD did the forensic chemists find? At Pickard's Nov. 20, 2003, sentencing hearing, DEA forensic chemist McKibben testified that "The actual amount of all the exhibits containing LSD was 198.9 grams of LSD," or about 7 ounces of LSD.
Yet the government doesn't seem to have actually seized 198.9 grams of LSD in the bust. From the wording of court documents and correspondence with Agent Nichols, the 198.9 gram figure appears to be a forensic estimate based on the concentrations of LSD found in the samples taken during searches. That is, 91 pounds of LSD-positive material were sampled and, working backward from the concentrations, the DEA calculated an actual 198.9 grams of LSD in the 91-pound lot.
The office of U.S. Attorney Eric Melgren cooperated in the reporting of this story by allowing Agent Nichols to be interviewed. But when asked direct questions about the validity of Melgren's 91-pound press release claim, the office demurred. It would neither defend the number nor abandon it. A Melgrin spokesman stated, "We've given you all the information we can on this subject."
None of this is to suggest that the owners of the missile silo lab weren't in the LSD business. What is clear is that the government continues to stand by a 91-pound LSD seizure that didn't happen.
Not everybody in the government is on the same page about how much LSD was seized. On Feb. 10, 2005, "drug czar" John P. Walters, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, testified before the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources. Walters' testimony, like Tandy's, was part of a budget hearing. He said:

On LSD we certainly disrupted the supply because we took down a major distributor who had, in abandoned missile silos, had made or had material to make 25 million doses.

Only 25 million hits? Even at 50 micrograms a hit, that's only 1.25 kilograms, still about 88 pounds short of 91. Did the Department of Justice and the DEA neglect to send the drug czar a copy of their press release?
http://slate.msn.com/id/2114793/

2005-03-13T19:02:00.000-08:00

The terrible truth is that the complex symbol called the swastika--complex even in National Socialist hagiography--has become a 'special case', and in the rigid dogma of the ruling intelligensia in the United States, formed and petrified in the mid-third of the last century, it remains beyond redemption. The swastika, awash in symbolism both good and bad, has been reduced to a convenient shorthand for evil, specifically evil perpetrated against the Jews of Europe. And while it is common knowledge that over 100,000,000 persons perished under the yoke of the various communist regimes which continue to plague our world, it is the National Socialists who remain the post-modern era's satan for secularists. As the author of the article below correctly asserts, "The hammer and sickle...is a symbol whose power is, for complex historical reasons, somehow more diffuse, although it should by rights be more specific, as it was devised as an emblem for the alliance of workers and peasants."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28949-2005Mar12.html
What's in a Symbol? If Only Harry Knew

By Erica Wagner

Sunday, March 13, 2005; Page B01

LONDON

The other night, as I left the theater, I saw a woman wearing a fur hat. Some people, of course, don't like the sight of fur; I'm not one of them. But I noticed the badge on the front of her hat: a red and gold hammer and sickle. No doubt about it, she looked striking: the glittering, graphically coherent symbol set off by the soft shine of the fur. Yet it made me wonder what she had been thinking when she acquired her post-Communist trophy.

Why, I wondered, is Communist chic acceptable, when -- as Prince Harry's swastika-wearing debacle reminds us -- "Nazi chic" simply doesn't exist? It is, in fact, so taboo that there has recently been serious debate in Europe as to whether to ban the swastika throughout the European Union, a debate that risked making the symbol suddenly subversively chic.

Symbols are forms of expression but -- even more than words -- they can mean many different things. What was the meaning of that hat? Perhaps: "I am well traveled; I have been to faraway lands and returned with souvenirs." Perhaps: "I have a sense of irony. I am aware that this hammer and sickle was once a symbol of oppression; now the people behind the Iron Curtain are free and Communist finery is being bought and sold by capitalist opportunists."

But if you had been a victim of Soviet oppression, of a regime that murdered 20 million people and more, you might not view the appearance of that hat with such equanimity. It might not be merely a silent symbol; it might split your inner ear like a shriek, or strike you like a blow.

No one, of course, would consider wearing a hat adorned with a swastika on an evening out -- no one, that is, except perhaps the third in line to the throne. The atrocities of the Nazi regime and its program of directed genocide have rendered that symbol almost entirely out of bounds. In Germany and Austria, use of the swastika has been banned outside academic and educational contexts since 1949; recently, copies of Philip Roth's new novel, "The Plot Against America," which imagines an alternative America sympathetic to the Nazis during World War II -- were kept out of Germany because the cover features an American postage stamp adorned with a swastika. The publishers produced a separate edition for Germany and Austria (the "Hapsburg edition," it was dubbed), which replaced the swastika with a black X.

It was a royal gaffe -- when Prince Harry went to a fancy dress party clothed as a Nazi officer just days before the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz -- that prompted the call for the swastika to be banned throughout the European Union. "E.U. action is urgent," Franco Fratini, the European commissioner for justice, said, "and has to forbid very clearly the Nazi symbols in the European Union."

But wait. "Nazi symbols"? Certainly not exclusively. The swastika, it is worth remembering, is a venerable symbol, one co-opted less than a century ago by the nauseating ideology of Fascism. Hitler adopted it because of its links to Indian Aryan culture; the Nazis considered the early Aryans of India to be a prototypical "master race." The Nazi party formally adopted the swastika -- what they called the Hakenkreuz, or hooked cross -- in 1920. In "Mein Kampf," Adolf Hitler, who well understood the power of the visual over the power of the mere word, reflected in his writing the care put into its redesign: "I myself, meanwhile, after innumerable attempts, had laid down a final form; a flag with a red background, a white disk, and a black swastika in the middle. After long trials I also found a definite proportion between the size of the flag and the size of the white disk, as well as the shape and thickness of the swastika."

Yet after the om, the swastika is still the second most important symbol in Hindu mythology -- and Hindus understandably protested the proposed ban. The word itself is derived from two Sanskrit words, su (good) and asati (to exist); together they are taken to mean "may good prevail." In Hindu thought, the 20-sided polygon can represent the eternal nature of the Brahman, or supreme spirit of the universe, because it points in all directions. Rudyard Kipling, who was strongly influenced by Indian culture, had a swastika on the dust jackets of all his books until the rise of Nazism made this inappropriate; Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, used the symbol, too, until the 1930s. It is found in Native American cultures, particularly among the Navajo and the Hopi. A swastika is laid in the floor of Amiens Cathedral in France.

Would it be right -- or even possible -- therefore, to ban the use of the swastika? One of the dangers of any kind of ban, first of all, is that what is forbidden is always more attractive than what is permitted; a ban won't stop its use on the Internet, as graffiti, in underground presses.

And how would such a ban work? Consider the case of the Hapsburg edition of the Roth novel. So there's an X on the cover; but a reader wouldn't have to get far in the novel to understand that this X was in itself a symbol, a symbol for a swastika. Where exactly does that get us? That swastika on that particular book jacket has a very specific and significant connotation. To turn away from that connotation does little service to the novelist, to his readers -- and to history. One might well argue that a ban would hand a symbolic victory to those who so corrupted the meaning of this ancient emblem.

As with language, so with symbols: Context is all. It was not the swastika itself on Prince Harry's costume that was offensive; it was his thoughtless glamorization of Nazism that was so troubling, and particularly on the part of a young man in a position of such influence. National Socialist ideology was (and remains) powerful and terrible; yet it is the ideology that overshadows the symbol, not the other way around. The hammer and sickle on the theatergoer's hat is a symbol whose power is, for complex historical reasons, somehow more diffuse, although it should by rights be more specific, as it was devised as an emblem for the alliance of workers and peasants.

The same might be said of the Confederate flag, which is found on the Anti-Defamation League's "Hate on Display: A Visual Database of Extremist Symbols, Logos and Tattoos" alongside the swastika -- though no hammer and sickle is to be found there. (www.adl.org/hate_symbols/default.asp) There are, however, many variants of the swastika, used by neo-Nazis to avoid the ban: and so we are back to the Roth X. Look on the site and you will see that the swastika never loses its connotations, even when it takes on a slightly different shape.

In the end, the European Union leaders rejected a ban, in part because it led to a debate over which other symbols to ban -- the issue of the hammer and sickle was raised. Fortunately, a desire to allow freedom of expression won the day. To ban any form of speech, symbolic or otherwise, is dangerous. It is dangerous to forbid "Huckleberry Finn" in the classroom because it contains the word "nigger."

Knowledge, not ignorance, offers protection: It is as important to know why Mark Twain used the verbal language he did as to know why Hitler used the symbolic language that he did. It is doubtful that the swastika will ever again seem benign, at least not for many generations. A ban would not have silenced this symbol -- and might even have made it speak louder than ever.

Erica Wagner is literary editor of the Times in London. Her most recent book is "Ariel's Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Story of Birthday Letters" (Norton).

2005-03-12T06:26:00.000-08:00

Memory Hole is back online

posting will resume tonight

Break Time

2005-03-06T14:30:00.000-08:00

In George Orwell's 1984, protagonist Winston Smith describes the neologism doublethink this way:
"To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.'

This morning over coffee I read two articles in today's Washington Post. What Has Floppy Ears And a Subversive Tale? By David Montgomery (a misleading, ignorant, sarcastic (that is, ignorant and sarcastic toward Conservatives) look at a group of heroic liberals attending a local Washington, DC dissenting Presbyterian Church—dissenting because they are a Gay and Lesbian Church, with a Gay Minister and thus in administrative conflict with their denominational sect, the liberal Presbyterian Church USA—to watch the so-called ‘subversive’ PBS kids TV show about a cartoon character with a lesbian mother) and Right With God - Evangelical Conservatives Find a Spiritual Home on the Hill By Hanna Rosin (an insulting, demeaning, hateful, and sardonic look at evangelical Christians on Capitol Hill). Both “articles” – actually, they’re both leftist polemical screeds disguised as objective articles -- were so rife with doublethink that upon completing the “articles” I was overcome with a real sense of despair. I though, hoping against hope, that perhaps I was being to harsh with the writers, and that they had written such fallacy-filled, one-sided propaganda because they simply didn’t understand the subject (religion) that they are writing about. But of course they know what they are writing about, so I had to accept the fact that rather than being intellectually lazy they were being willfully ignorant and disingenuous…and that’s worse. As a former liberal, I understand the far-left anti-American agenda of the MSM and I used to appreciate it. But now my eyes are opened, and it makes me sick. The Washington Post, the New York Times, Slate, MSNBC, CNN, NBC/CBS/ABC… None of them even makes an attempt at telling the truth. But of course, the editors of these organs of the left barely believe in the concept of objectivity, if they believe in it at all. It makes me sick at heart. So, I have decided to refrain from posting anything to this blog for one week, or, indeed, from reading anything published in the MSM, until Saturday, March 12, in order to cleanse my spirit. Then, if I do feel better, I will resume this blog. Thanks for your patience.

Et datum est ei os loquens magna et blasphemiae et data est illi potestas facere menses quadraginta duo et aperuit os suum in blasphemias ad Deum blasphemare nomen eius et tabernaculum eius et eos qui in caelo habitant et datum est illi bellum facere cum sanctis et vincere illos et data est ei potestas in omnem tribum et populum et linguam et gentem (The Apocalypse Of St. John the Apostle, Chapter 13, Verses 5-7)

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

Whatever is done from love

always occurs

beyond good and evil

--Friedrich Nietzsche / Beyond Good and Evil

The Awakening of Adonis (1888) - John William Waterhouse

Thoughtcrime / Animal Welfare

2005-03-04T06:02:00.000-08:00

Director cuts dead donkey scenes

Danish director Lars Von Trier has cut scenes of a butchered donkey from his forthcoming movie, bowing to pressure from animal rights campaigners. Von Trier said that while his conscience was clear over the death of the donkey in Manderlay, he did not want the row to overshadow the film. Actor John C Reilly quit the project early on because of his concerns about animal welfare. Manderlay is the second film in a trilogy, following on from Dogville. Von Trier assured animal lovers the donkey had been put down "as compassionately as possible", using an injection. In a statement, he said he had taken the "unusual" step of cutting all the scenes showing the dead donkey after a barrage of letters...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4314579.stm

Thoughtcrime / USA

2005-03-04T04:51:00.000-08:00

Suspended DePaul professor gagged and bound at news conference

By Theresa Gutierrez
March 1, 2005 — A dispute over censorship inspired a DePaul University professor to show up at his own press conference bound and gagged. Last fall, DePaul University professor Thomas Klocek was suspended without a hearing for challenging the viewpoints of certain Muslim students on campus at a student activities fair. He is now demanding a public apology from the university president in order to avoid litigation. Klocek showed up to the news conference bound and gagged, illustrating what he believes the university did to him by censoring his views on the Middle East. Klocek says he was unfairly suspended for his views on the Muslim and Palestinian people. "The students claimed professor Klocek's arguments were racist and hurt their feelings. They went to the dean of the school and 10 days after the debate the professor was suspended without a hearing," said John Mauck, Klocek's attorney…

http://abclocal.go.com/wls/news/030105_ns_depaul_prof.html

2005-03-03T17:57:00.000-08:00

"When I hear the word 'culture',
that's when I reach for my revolver"

--Hermann Goering, 1941

Heteronormative at Harvard

2005-03-02T16:04:00.000-08:00

Pinkett Smith’s Remarks Debated
By Anna M. Friedman

After some students were offended by Jada Pinkett Smith’s comments at Saturday’s Cultural Rhythms show, the Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender, and Supporters Alliance (BGLTSA) and the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations have begun working together to increase sensitivity toward issues of sexuality at Harvard...BGLTSA Co-Chair Jordan B. Woods ’06 said that, while many BGLTSA members thought Pinkett Smith’s speech was “motivational,” some were insulted because they thought she narrowly defined the roles of men and women in relationships. “Some of the content was extremely heteronormative, and made BGLTSA members feel uncomfortable,” he said. Calling the comments heteronormative, according to Woods, means they implied that standard sexual relationships are only between males and females. “Our position is that the comments weren’t homophobic, but the content was specific to male-female relationships,” Woods said. Margaret C. D. Barusch ’06, the other BGLTSA co-chair, said the comments might have seemed insensitive in effect, if not in intent...
http://www.thecrimson.com/today/article506104.html

Thoughtcrime / Canada

2005-03-02T13:27:00.000-08:00

Holocaust denier is returned to Germany
Despised in Canada, ousted from U.S., Zundel faces arrest upon his arrival in Frankfurt
By Kirk Makin
Wednesday, March 2, 2005 Updated at 4:27 PM EST
JUSTICE REPORTER / Toronto Globe and Mail

...Yesterday, after a two-year legal fight against deportation, he was taken from a Toronto jail before daybreak and bundled onto a plane to Frankfurt, sent back to the country he left in 1958. His incredible run as one of the most reviled figures in Canadian history was at an end.
Initially, at least, Mr. Zundel's cherished Fatherland will be no promised land. The 65-year-old was "turned over to German authorities," a spokesman for Public Safety Minister Anne McLellan said yesterday, and faces arrest for denying the Holocaust, a criminal offence in Germany...
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20050302/ZUNDEL02/TPNational/Canada

2005-03-01T19:33:00.001-08:00

Shaper-Master Master-Shaper

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language,
while in fact language remains the master of man.
-- Martin Heidegger, 1951

2005-03-01T18:34:00.000-08:00

“Thousands of years ago, the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burned at the stake he had taught his brothers to light. He was considered an evildoer who had dealt with a demon mankind dreaded. But thereafter men had fire to keep them warm, to cook their food, to light their caves. He had left them a gift they had not conceived and he had lifted darkness off the earth. Centuries later, the first man invented the wheel. He was probably torn on the rack he had taught his brothers to build. He was considered a transgressor who ventured into forbidden territory. But thereafter, men could travel past any horizon. He had left them a gift they had not conceived and he had opened the roads of the world.
“That man, the unsubmissive and first, stands in the opening chapter of every legend mankind has recorded about its beginning. Prometheus was chained to a rock and torn by vultures—because he had stolen the fire of the gods. Adam was condemned to suffer—because he had eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Whatever the legend, somewhere in the shadows of its memory mankind knew that its glory began with one and that that one paid for his courage.
“Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they all had this in common: that the step was first, the road new, the vision unborrowed, and the response they received—hatred. The great creators—the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors—stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The airplane was considered impossible. The power loom was considered vicious. Anesthesia was considered sinful. But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered and they paid. But they won.
“No creator was prompted by a desire to serve his brothers, for his brothers rejected the gift he offered and that gift destroyed the slothful routine of their lives. His truth was his only motive. His own truth, and his own work to achieve it in his own way. A symphony, a book, an engine, a philosophy, an airplane or a building—that was his goal and his life. Not those who heard, read, operated, believed, flew or inhabited the thing he created. The creation, not its users. The creation, not the benefits others derived from it. The creation which gave form to his truth. He held his truth above all things and against all men.
“His vision, his strength, his courage came from his own spirit. A man’s spirit, however, is his self. That entity which is his consciousness. To think, to feel, to judge, to act are functions of the ego.
“The creators were not selfless. It is the whole secret of their power—that it was self-sufficient, self-motivated, self-generated. A first cause, a fount of energy, a life force, a Prime Mover. The creator served nothing and no one. He had lived for himself.
“And only by living for himself was he able to achieve the things which are the glory of mankind. Such is the nature of achievement.
“Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. Man has no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons, and to make weapons—a process of thought. From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man—the function of his reasoning mind.
“But the mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts. It is a secondary consequence. The primary act—the process of reason—must be performed by each man alone. We can divide a meal among many men. We cannot digest it in a collective stomach. No man can use his lungs to breathe for another man. No man can use his brain to think for another. All the functions of body and spirit are private. They cannot be shared or transferred.
“We inherit the products of the thought of other men. We inherit the wheel. We make a cart. The cart becomes an automobile. The automobile becomes an airplane. But all through the process what we receive from others is only the end product of their thinking. The moving force is the creative faculty which takes this product as material, uses it and originates the next step. This creative faculty cannot be given or received shared or borrowed. It belongs to single, individual men. That which it creates is the property of the creator. Men learn from one another. But all learning is only the exchange of material. No man can give another the capacity to think. Yet that capacity is our only means of survival.
Ayn Rand The Fountainhead: Roark's Speech

Abu Ali Case: "close enough to the president to shoot him on the street"

2005-03-01T17:26:00.000-08:00

Balancing Liberties, Security

by Daniel Pipes New York Sun
March 1, 2005
For a free people in the age of terrorism, what is the proper balance between civil liberties and national security?
This debate wracks every Western country. Looking at America, the "united we stand" solidarity that followed September 11, 2001, lasted just some months, after which a much deeper divide emerged as conservatives proved far more profoundly affected by the atrocities than did liberals. The result has been the growing political acrimony of the past three years.
Many examples illustrate this divide. For the most recent, take the argument concerning Ahmed Omar Abu Ali between the conservative Bush administration and its mostly liberal critics.
Born in America to immigrant Jordanian parents, Mr. Abu Ali, 23, was indicted last week for plotting the assassination of President Bush. The prosecution asserts he was in touch with Al Qaeda and in 2002 discussed ideas of eliminating Mr. Bush by getting "close enough to the president to shoot him on the street," or by deploying a car bomb. Mr. Abu Ali's biography indicates how he might have ended up as an Al Qaeda operative.
He attended the Islamic Saudi Academy in Alexandria, Va., graduating in 1999 as class valedictorian. As an outpost of Saudi values on American soil, the academy enjoys Saudi government funding, is chaired by the Saudi ambassador in Washington, and boasts a curriculum imported straight from Riyadh.
Thus, the first-grade teachers' guide at the Islamic Saudi Academy instructs that Christianity and Judaism are false religions. When one realizes that the curriculum is overseen by Saleh Al-Fawzan, who in 2003 endorsed the institution of slavery, this comes as less than a grand shock.
While still living in America, Mr. Abu Ali developed ties to the "paintball jihadists" of northern Virginia, nine of whom have served time in jail. In 2000, he went to study Islam at its source, at the Islamic University of Medina. In May 2003, a terrorist attack in Riyadh left 34 dead, nine of them Americans; a month later, the Saudis arrested Mr. Abu Ali for connections to this crime, incarcerating him until his recent transfer to America.
Conservatives focus on the hair-raising news that an Al Qaeda affiliate had plans to kill the president of the United States. Liberals hardly note this development, focusing instead on the question of whether, while in Saudi custody, Mr. Abu Ali was tortured (Justice Department officials call this an "utter fabrication"). Note the editorials in four northeastern newspapers:
The New York Times: This case is "another demonstration of what has gone wrong in the federal war on terror. In an undisciplined attempt to wring statements out of any conceivable suspect, American officials have worked with countries like Saudi Arabia."
The Washington Post: "the courts need to ensure that no evidence obtained by torture - with or without the connivance of the U.S. government - is used to convict people in U.S. courts."
The Baltimore Sun writes (dripping with sarcasm) that, "By unsealing a federal indictment against Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, the U.S. government garnered headlines about an alleged terrorist plot, instead of the unexplained imprisonment of an American citizen in Saudi Arabia. It portrayed Mr. Abu Ali has [sic] someone other than a victim of torture. The government may think its secret is safe. But it isn't."
Newsday's editorial is titled "Shame on Bush for rights violation."
These liberal analysts evince no concern that an American citizen trained by the Saudi government in Virginia will stand trial for plotting to assassinate the president. They decline to explore the implications of this stunning piece of news. They offer no praise to law enforcement for having broken a terrorism case. Instead, they focus exclusively on evidentiary procedures. They know only civil liberties; national security does not register. But, as Prime Minister Blair correctly writes, "there is no greater civil liberty than to live free from terrorist attack."
To strike a proper balance, Westerners must ask themselves what happens in case of error about the Islamist threat. Mistakes enhancing national security leave innocents spending time in jail. Mistakes enhancing civil liberties produce mass murder and perhaps a Taliban-like state (with its near absence of civil liberties).
Which emphasis, dear reader, do you choose?

2005-03-01T13:41:00.000-08:00

Politically Correct Speech / 1942 / 2005

The most effective way of making people accept the validity of the values they are to serve is to persuade them that they are really the same as those which they...have always held, but which were not properly understood or recognized before. And the most efficient technique to this end is to use the old words but change their meaning...

...Few traits of totalitarian regimes are at the same time so confusing to the superficial observer and yet so characteristic of the whole intellectual climate as the complete perversion of language, the change of meaning of the words by which the ideals of the new regimes are expressed.

-- F. A. Hayek

2005-03-01T13:08:00.000-08:00

It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion.
– Joseph Goebbels, 1936

New York Times February 16, 2005, Wednesday

Professors At Harvard Confront Its President
By Sara Rimer
Some of Harvard University's most influential professors confront Lawrence H Summers, university president, at faculty meeting, expressing strong dissatisfaction with his leadership and accusing him of damaging institution; emphasize that their concerns go well beyond furor that resulted from Summers's recent comments suggesting that innate sex differences could account for lack of women in science and math careers; most speakers say Summers has adopted autocratic management style that has stifled open debate; Summers takes pains to listen to faculty criticisms…

2005-02-28T18:02:00.000-08:00

The eye sees a thing more clearly in dreams

than the imagination awake.

Leonardo da Vinci

2005-02-28T17:50:00.000-08:00

How your face could open doors
By Tom Geoghegan
Published: 2004/11/25 13:22:13 GMT / BBC News Magazine
The ethical debate about identity cards has been reignited following the Queen's Speech, but its facial recognition technology is being used in other areas. Police are hailing it as a forensic breakthrough and a new "foolproof" 3D version could eventually become a routine procedure at cash machines or workplaces…A few corporations are already scanning pictures of staff for access control or to tackle swipe card fraud. And six police forces have so far recognised its use in identifying CCTV pictures of suspects - one claims it to be the biggest forensic breakthrough since DNA…As companies become more security conscious, the process of having our faces scanned is set to become more commonplace. And new technology which can produce this in a more accurate 3D form could accelerate this trend.
A firm which has developed the 3D software, Aurora, claims it is sophisticated enough to distinguish between identical twins...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4035285.stm

UK Edges Closer to Outlawing Religious 'Hate Speech'

2005-02-28T14:34:00.000-08:00

February 07, 2005 | Kevin McCandless

London (CNSNews.com) - Controversial anti-hate speech legislation moved closer to becoming law in Britain on Monday, and religious and civil groups from across the political spectrum remain bitterly divided over its potential effects.
Despite claims by the Labor government that proposals to outlaw speech inciting religious hatred will simply close existing legal loopholes, opponents from secular and religious groups claim that it will have a chilling effect on free speech.
The legislation would outlaw "words, behavior or material [that] are... likely to be heard or seen by any person in whom they are... likely to stir up racial or religious hatred."
Earlier, former Home Secretary David Blunkett dismissed concerns that making jokes about religion would be outlawed. The law would not affect professions of atheism or "genuine" religious debate, he said…
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1337798/posts

2005-02-27T17:25:00.000-08:00

I am death, shatterer of worlds,
annihilating all things

Bhagavad Gita
quoted by J. Robert Oppenheimer, Trinity, 1945

White Matter / Gray Matter

2005-02-27T16:41:00.000-08:00

Why Women Can't Read Maps

There is a reason why many women (not all! but many) have trouble reading maps. The brains of men and women function in markedly different ways, which means they really do think differently, according to researchers from the University of California, Irvine and the University of New Mexico.
The human brain is composed of two types of tissue--gray matter and white matter. While men and women have about the same amount of gray matter and white matter, men appear to use more gray matter, while women use more white matter. Before we proceed further, it's important to note that while the two genders may think differently, this does not affect their intellectual performance or overall intelligence.
The study: Using magnetic resonance imaging equipment, the researchers performed a series of brain scans on 26 female and 22 male volunteers, all of whom were in good health and had no history of brain injury. The average IQ scores of the two genders were similar. The brain scans occurred while the volunteers carried out tests designed to assess their general intelligence.
The results: The human brain--male or female--is composed of about 40 percent gray matter and 60 percent white matter. When given intelligence tests, men used 6.5 times more gray matter than women, while women used nine times as much white matter.
What is the difference between gray matter and white matter? Gray is central to processing information and plays a vital role in aiding skills such as mathematics, map-reading, and intellectual thought. White matter connects the brain's processing centers and is central to emotional thinking, use of language, and the ability to do more than one thing at once. Because women use less gray matter--critical to map-reading--they tend to have more difficulty with this skill than men.
"This may help explain why men tend to excel in tasks requiring more local processing, like mathematics and map-reading, while women tend to excel at integrating information from various brain regions, such as is required for language skills," co-study author and neuropsychologist Rex Jung of the University of New Mexico told the Daily Telegraph. "These two very different pathways and activity centers, however, result in equivalent overall performance on broad measures of cognitive ability, such as those found on intelligence tests."
This isn't the first study to assail women's map-reading skills. Previous research has also shown that women have weaker spatial awareness than men, which makes it more difficult for them to read maps. But women outshine men when it comes to vocabulary. In childhood, girls' vocabulary develops more quickly than that of boys; by adulthood, women can speak 20,000 to 25,000 words a day compared to a man's 7,000 to 10,000.
"These findings suggest that human evolution has created two different types of brains designed for equally intelligent behavior," co-author and psychology professor Richard Haier of the University of California, Irvine told MSNBC.
The study findings were published in the online edition of the journal NeuroImage.
http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/package.jsp?name=fte/womenmaps/womenmaps

MSM Hate Speech, Redux

2005-02-27T04:54:00.000-08:00

No one should be judge in his own cause -- Publilius Syrus, Maxims. The MSM would do well to remember this. Consider the following MSM headlines, concerning the apprehension of alleged serial slaughterer Dennis Rader:

Arrest Is Made in Series of Killings in Kansas
By Monica Davey, Published: February 27, 2005
…The man the police had arrested was a longtime neighbor, a leader at one of their churches, a father with a wife and two children, who had once, neighbors said, led a scouting troop for boys. http://nytimes.com/2005/02/27/national/27btk.html?hp&ex =1109566800&
amp;en =025a7bc6ff7d50eb&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Cub Scout Leader Arrested in BTK Killings
By Roxana Hegeman, Associated Press Writer
...Rader, a Cub Scout leader who was active at his Lutheran Church...
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/ap/20050227/ap_on_re_us/btk_killings

Report: Daughter of BTK suspect alerted police
59-year-old Kansan accused of killing 10
He was a one-time president of a Lutheran church, according to KAKE, and a father of two.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/02/27/btk.investigation/index.html

Wichita police: 'BTK is arrested' -- 10 killings blamed on 59-year-old suspect
The Associated Press, Updated: 3:16 a.m. ET Feb. 27, 2005
Rader, a Cub Scout leader who was active at his Lutheran church…
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6988048/

Wichita Police Arrest Suspect in BTK Serial Killings
By Peter Slevin and Lois Romano, Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, February 27, 2005; Page A01
WICHITA, Feb. 26 -- It took 31 years and countless clues delivered by the killer himself, but jubilant Wichita police on Saturday named a Lutheran church leader…as the notorious BTK strangler...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55705-2005Feb26.html

Clearing up Some Definitions, or, Who says that Only Chomsky can Do Linguistics?

2005-02-26T06:33:00.000-08:00

http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/moonbatcentral
2005/02/clearing-up-some-definitions-or-who.html

Veil the Facts: PC Extremism and Linguistic Determinism

2005-02-26T05:03:00.000-08:00

by KAronds

Occasionally words must serve to veil the facts. But this must happen in such a way that no one becomes aware of it; or, if it should be noticed, excuses must be at hand, to be produced immediately. - Nicolo Machiavelli

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. - George Orwell

The twin pillars of political correctness are willful ignorance and a steadfast refusal to face the truth - George MacDonald Fraser

Some people enjoy playing the intellectual parlor game of “How is the state of today’s society like Orwell’s 1984”? The game usually consists of presenting a litany of superficial comparisons:

1984 : Newspeak
Now : Politically Correct speech
1984 : The red sash of the Junior Anti-Sex League
Now : The red ribbon of the Anti-Aids celibacy league
1984 : Telescreens in every room. The programming runs 24 hours a day, and the proles have no way of turning their screens off.
Now : Televisions in every room. The programming runs 24 hours a day, and the proles rarely turn their screens off.
1984 : Telescreens in all public and private places, so the populace could be watched to prevent thoughtcrime.
Now : Surveillance cameras in most buildings (operated by businesses), and in some public streets (operated by police) to prevent crime. Although most of these cameras are operated by private businesses instead of our intrusive government, the end result is the same.
1984 : Helicopters silently watch over the masses to keep people from committing thoughtcrime, by planting the fear of "always being watched"
Now : Helicopters silently watch over our highways to keep people from breaking traffic laws, by planting the fear of "always being watched"
http://www.newspeakdictionary.com/xframes.html

Some journalists enjoy playing the intellectual parlor game of “How is the state of today’s Republican Party like Orwell’s 1984”? The game usually consists of presenting a litany of sarcastic quasi-analogies:

ORWELL ROLLS IN HIS GRAVE
http://www.ruthlessreviews.com/movies/o/orwellrollsinhisgrave.html
Language by Orwell (Molly Ivins)
http://www.thehollandsentinel.net/stories/013005/opi_013005046.shtml
Orwell’s 1984 a Republican Reality in 2004 -- Mental Health Deregulation, Government Control & Corporate Profits
http://www.voiceoffreedom.com/mentalhealth/mentalhealth0001series.html
Iraq and the Republicans' Orwellian spin machine
http://www.reclaimthemedia.org/stories.php?story=05/02/07/9580204

Even the leftist punditocracy is getting in on the act:

How would you rate the Bush team on convention preps? CNN analysts offer their assessments.
(Paul Begala: “…The evening themes are a bit Orwellian.”)
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/special/president/convention/rnc/press.pundits/archive/index.082704.html
It's Still Nixon's Party
(Harold Meyerson: “That may rank as the most Orwellian line of the entire [Republican] convention…”)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62544-2004Sep4.html

The game of superficial comparison that I mentioned above (“1984 : Newspeak; Now: Politically Correct speech…”) is just silly, but the liberals’ intellectually lazy name-calling game is willfully ignorant. I would remind the MSM that Orwellian is not neither a synonym for, nor even a shorthand reference to, figure of speech, or expression, or metaphor, or simile, or befog, or becloud, or obfuscation. President Bush proclaiming that the United States military has liberated Afghanistan is not an example of 1984’s Newspeak.
If any group of persons is deserving of the epithet Orwellian, it is simply not the Republicans and conservatives in the United States—it is, instead, the political left, wherein are found the inventors of, and most zealous proponents of, so-called politically correct speech.
Those leftist idealogues who decry the title Department of Defense as Orwellian because, they reason, that Office is 'not defensive of anything, and is in fact aggressive against others' either haven’t read, or fundamentally misunderstand, Orwell and 1984. To put it another way, President Bush referring to war casualties as (when appropriate) “collateral damage” rather than as “mangled, squashed corpses” is not an Orwellian turn of phrase; it is, rather, an appropriate use of euphemism and the decent thing to do.
The crux of 1984 is found in the promulgated concept of Newspeak. In fact, that is why Orwell included a long essay The Principles of Newspeak as the sole appendix to 1984. Only a handful of Newspeak words appear in the novel, so the appendix obviously serves another purpose, which is the explication of Orwell’s linguistic philosophy.
A clear link exists between the nightmarish fictional world of Newspeak and the all-to-real world of so-called political correctness. The political left uses a form of linguistic determinism (See, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_hypothesis) as a political tool to advance its agenda. But the belief that by using homophobic language one becomes homophobic (or thinks in a homophobic manner) is demonstrably false. The belief that by restraining language one can actually achieve political goals is non-scientific causal reasoning (Magical Thinking; see, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_thinking).
It’s generally accepted that politically constrained language can create new rules of social etiquette—who would dare call someone “colored” or “crippled” these days? But the question remains whether or not linguistic / vocabulary constraint or proscription can modify, or change, cultural perceptions.
It’s unclear to me if Orwell thought so. On the one hand, in 1984 the Thought Police reclaim societal dissidents like Julia and Winston for the Party not by mere proscription of language (certainly not for purposes of etiquette) but by ruthless and sadistic Pavlovian behavior modification, including the use of drugs, starvation, and physical and psychological torture.
On the other hand, Orwell proposes the linguistically deterministic concept that if Julia and Winston could not even form the idea of saying “Down with Big Brother” they cannot rebel against Big Brother. The Inner Party—society’s leaders in 1984—accomplish this through the modification (radical paring down, actually) and proscription of words (ergo, ideas) that they consider to be subversive from Newspeak, the language of the future. Goodthink replaces Crimethink.
So far, Political Correctness zealots have refrained from using extreme physical behavior modifiation to promote their nefarious agenda. But on college campuses PC true-believers use other, slightly more subtle ways to fight their battles: denial of tenure to otherwise qualified Professors who just happen to be non-Radicals, and the systematic ostracism of students who don’t share the orthodox leftist positions of the faculty stand as two common examples.
But the campus left’s ongoing manipulation of the canon proceeds unabated. By controlling the narrative, by consigning all non-PC texts, and, indeed, thoughts, “down the Memory Hole” they may win the day, and win the culture war.

Thus, it is not the political right (as the MSM would have you believe; see examples above), but rather, the political left, who battle unceasingly to wrest control of society from its traditional moorings, by altering the English language with radical forms of linguistic determinism such as PC speech. In this way these manipulators prove themselvees to be the true antecedents of Orwell’s Thinkpol.

Anagram

2005-02-26T05:01:00.000-08:00

A Boat beneath a Sunny Sky

A boat, beneath a sunny sky,
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July –

Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Pleased a simple tale to hear –

Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die:
Autumn frosts have slain July.

She still haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.

Children yet, the tale to hear,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Lovingly shall nestle near.

In Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:

Ever drifting down the stream -
Lingering in the golden gleam -
Life, what is it but a dream?

--Through the Lookng Glass, Lewis Carroll

Beslan Atrocity: They're Terrorists - Not Activists

2005-02-25T20:54:00.000-08:00

by Daniel Pipes
New York Sun September 7, 2004

"I know it when I see it" was the famous response by a U.S. Supreme Court justice to the vexed problem of defining pornography. Terrorism may be no less difficult to define, but the wanton killing of schoolchildren, of mourners at a funeral, or workers at their desks in skyscrapers surely fits the know-it-when-I-see-it definition.

The press, however, generally shies away from the word terrorist, preferring euphemisms. Take the assault that led to the deaths of some 400 people, many of them children, in Beslan, Russia, on September 3. Journalists have delved deep into their thesauruses, finding at least twenty euphemisms for terrorists:

Assailants - National Public Radio.
Attackers – the Economist.
Bombers – the Guardian.
Captors – the Associated Press.
Commandos – Agence France-Presse refers to the terrorists both as "membres du commando" and "commando."
Criminals - the Times (London).
Extremists – United Press International.
Fighters – the Washington Post.
Group – the Australian.
Guerrillas: in a New York Post editorial.
Gunmen – Reuters.
Hostage-takers - the Los Angeles Times.
Insurgents – in a New York Times headline.
Kidnappers – the Observer (London).
Militants – the Chicago Tribune.
Perpetrators – the New York Times.
Radicals – the BBC.
Rebels – in a Sydney Morning Herald headline.
Separatists – the Christian Science Monitor.

And my favorite:

Activists – the Pakistan Times.

The origins of this unwillingness to name terrorists seems to lie in the Arab-Israeli conflict, prompted by an odd combination of sympathy in the press for the Palestinian Arabs and intimidation by them. The sympathy is well known; the intimidation less so. Reuters' Nidal al-Mughrabi made the latter explicit in advice for fellow reporters in Gaza to avoid trouble on the Web site www.newssafety.com, where one tip reads: "Never use the word terrorist or terrorism in describing Palestinian gunmen and militants; people consider them heroes of the conflict."
The reluctance to call terrorists by their rightful name can reach absurd lengths of inaccuracy and apologetics. For example, National Public Radio's Morning Edition announced on April 1, 2004, that "Israeli troops have arrested 12 men they say were wanted militants." But CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, pointed out the inaccuracy here and NPR issued an on-air correction on April 26: "Israeli military officials were quoted as saying they had arrested 12 men who were ‘wanted militants.' But the actual phrase used by the Israeli military was ‘wanted terrorists.'"
(At least NPR corrected itself. When the Los Angeles Times made the same error, writing that "Israel staged a series of raids in the West Bank that the army described as hunts for wanted Palestinian militants," its editors refused CAMERA's request for a correction on the grounds that its change in terminology did not occur in a direct quotation.)
Metro, a Dutch paper, ran a picture on May 3, 2004, of two gloved hands belonging to a person taking fingerprints off a dead terrorist. The caption read: "An Israeli police officer takes fingerprints of a dead Palestinian. He is one of the victims (slachtoffers) who fell in the Gaza strip yesterday." One of the victims!
Euphemistic usage then spread from the Arab-Israeli conflict to other theaters. As terrorism picked up in Saudi Arabia such press outlets as The Times (London) and the Associated Press began routinely using militants in reference to Saudi terrorists. Reuters uses it with reference to Kashmir and Algeria.
Thus has militants become the press's default term for terrorists.
These self-imposed language limitations sometimes cause journalists to tie themselves into knots. In reporting the murder of one of its own cameraman, the BBC, which normally avoids the word terrorist, found itself using that term. In another instance, the search engine on the BBC website includes the word terrorist but the page linked to has had that word expurgated.

Politically-correct news organizations undermine their credibility with such subterfuges. How can one trust what one reads, hears, or sees when the self-evident fact of terrorism is being semi-denied?

Worse, the multiple euphemisms for terrorist obstruct a clear understanding of the violent threats confronting the civilized world. It is bad enough that only one of five articles discussing the Beslan atrocity mentions its Islamist origins; worse is the miasma of words that insulates the public from the evil of terrorism.
www.danielpipes.org/article/2066

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever"

2005-02-25T04:56:00.000-08:00

-- O'Brien to Winston Smith, 1984

Battle over the past rages on in an evolving South

2005-02-25T04:55:00.000-08:00

By Patrik Jonsson | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

RALEIGH, N.C. - Bronzed Johnny Rebs, sprinting across a Capitol lawn, charging soundlessly for the ideals of the "lost cause," have long been seen as a quaint and largely harmless part of this region's heritage. Today, doubts rise alongside pride in regard to these sculpted heroes
A school board declines to name a new high school in Cherokee County after Georgia's Civil War governor. Floridians question why Confederate soldiers adorn a water tower. Even the word "South," in some quarters, has become a slur - a convenient repository of national guilt over the exploitation of Africans in the Cotton Belt a century and a half ago.
Beyond Confederate flags coming down from statehouses, more-mundane symbols are increasingly being questioned on the local level: in town halls, college campuses, and even cemetery committees. It's part of a deepening homogenization of Southern culture that's causing anger and resentment among many in a proud region with perhaps 65 million people who consider themselves Southerners.
Some observers see a note of irony in the growing suppression of conservative Southern memorials at a time when old Confederate values like militarism, chivalry, gentility, and religiosity are gaining political prominence. It's a lesson, they say, in how a rebellious American region maintains its influence beneath pressure to rescind its mottoes and murals.
"The shooting war is over, but ... we're engaged in a cultural war for the heart and soul of the South and for America, too," says William Lathem, spokesman for the Southern Heritage PAC in Atlanta.
Indeed, beneath the ceaseless skirmishes over Southern symbols lurks a deeper debate over the potency and potential of a region shaped by Scots-Irish settlers who wanted a small, God-fearing government that stayed out of their lives.
Today's regional relations remind some historians of the War of 1812. New Englanders protested against the war, and it took Andrew Jackson to end it at New Orleans with a trouncing of the British by the Louisiana artillery. Witness the last presidential election, which revolved around the president's decision to invade Iraq and his muscular response to Islamist terrorism. The ideological "red-blue" borders almost perfectly traced the regional sentiments of the mid-19th century, with Ohio to this day in play.
"Why bother about this talk of separateness when you're arguably in a position - the South is - to dominate the Union as [Confederate unionist] Alexander Stephens envisioned it before the Civil War: the South in a political alliance with the West," says Jim Langcuster of Alabama, a moderate proponent of Southern heritage.
Still, even as Gambians and Swedes flock to cities like Raleigh and Birmingham, wizened black butlers still wait on gaggles of white golfers at certain exclusive clubs. And the disdain toward the South most often attributed (at least by Southerners) to "limousine liberals" is increasingly leading to action from the Florida interior to the hilltops of Georgia, most likely as a result of a massive in-migration of "those people," as Gen. Robert E. Lee called his foes.
Parents in Cherokee County, Ga., successfully urged their school board to refuse to name a new high school for Joseph E. Brown, the Confederate governor who, at the risk of his popularity, welcomed federal reform after the Civil War.
In Georgia, there's a tough fight brewing over bringing a bust of Confederate President Jefferson Davis from Jeff Davis County - where there are four Jeff Davis schools - to the Georgia Capitol.
And, in Charlotte, N.C., a decision was recently made to take down the battle flag - from a Confederate cemetery.
At old-line Southern colleges like the University of the South, regents are downplaying old Confederate-era rituals and even the word "South" so as not to scare away prospective students from up North.
"When people have a sense that things are unraveling, whether it's on the right or left, these questions come up again," says Ira Berlin, a Civil War historian at the University of Maryland.
But Southern heritage proponents are winning some skirmishes, too.
In Florida, the town of Brooksville decided not to change the image of Confederate soldiers on the water-tower logo after someone pointed out that an annual reenactment of the "Brooksville Raid" was a major tourist draw. In South Carolina, a bill is moving forward to allow the Sons of Confederate Veterans their own license plate. Seventy-two percent of Georgians want to see a referendum on bringing back the pre-2001 Cross of St. Andrew's flag across the Peach State. Stone Mountain with its 90-foot carved images of Lee, Davis, and Stonewall Jackson is still Georgia's biggest tourist draw. "Part of Southern culture is the recognition that there are things worth fighting for," says Jim Thompson, editorial page director of the Athens, Ga., Banner-Herald.
Southerners say the region's critics often take not only historical but biblical references and meanings out of context - the result, they say, of biased schooling.
It remains a highly charged debate, since perceptions of past are also a lens on the present. Most Southerners today agree that blacks are also original settlers and inheritors of the South, and deserve their equal place in civic affairs. But critics worry that some of the worst elements of the "old" South may be rising again - their suspicions fueled by a nationwide weakening of affirmative action and an ongoing resegregation of public schools, especially in the South.
The last time "Dixie" was whistled officially in the capital was probably during Ronald Reagan's first inauguration. But last year, Bush supporter Robert T. Hines shot a cannon at Arlington National Cemetery on Davis's birthday.
"The culture of the South is an expanding thing rather than a xenophobic and dwindling thing," says John Hurley, president of the Confederate Memorial Association in Washington.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0224/p01s05-ussc.html

2005-02-24T21:30:00.000-08:00

Free Speech for Me, Not for Thee
The limits of liberal love for freewheeling debate
by Bruce Thornton
Private Papers

The recent flap over University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, who in an essay after 9/11 called the terrorist victims "little Eichmanns," generated a drama as stylized as a Japanese Noh play. Indignant conservatives railed against leftist professors and demanded that Churchill be fired; equally indignant liberals countered with rousing defenses of the academic freedom and free speech they accused conservatives of undermining. We had seen this same drama before, in the days after 9/11 when numerous academics made equally stupid remarks with precisely the same results. The outrage had little effect then, and this time around has merely resulted in turning an academic mediocrity into a poster-boy for academic freedom, not to mention giving him a media megaphone his tediously predictable ideas could never deliver.

In the Churchill case, moreover, the liberals have it right: his dismissal on the grounds of his opinions would violate what should be the university's commitment to free-wheeling speech no matter whose ox is gored and no matter how creepy the person spouting off. After all, commitment to principle sometimes requires that we hold our noses and apply it in cases we'd rather not. And given the liberal dominance of the academy, you can rest assured that once you go down that road of firing professors because of what they say, the chances of finding a conservative in higher education would be about the same as Lot's chances of finding five righteous men in Sodom.

The better point for conservatives to make is to hammer liberals for the rank hypocrisy most of them display in their noisy defenses of free speech and open debate and challenges to orthodoxy. For of course, such a love of unfettered discussion applies only as long as the tenets of faith in the liberal church are left alone. Even scientists aren't immune to intellectual gate-keeping to protect their political or ideological prejudices: the virulent, sometimes hysterical attacks on critics of Darwin or on proponents of intelligent design surely violate science's obligation to test all theories and to entertain all criticisms of them in order to get as close to the truth as possible.

Or consider the trouble Harvard president Lawrence Summers recently got into when he speculated that innate sex differences in certain cognitive abilities might be one factor in explaining why there are fewer women in some scientific disciplines. Such a hypothesis is unexceptional among scientists studying cognitive abilities, who have documented numerous statistical differences between men and women in performing certain mental tasks, with men being better at some and women being better at others. It is not beyond the pale to consider that maybe the mental abilities necessary for some scientific disciplines are not as widely distributed among women as they are among men.

The reaction to Summers' comments, however, on the part of some faculty and media pundits was characterized not by the rational thought and intellectual curiosity we expect from our public thinkers, but by hysteria and anger that someone in Summers' position dared to say something that ran counter to politically correct prejudice. The fact is, one of the biggest orthodoxies on the academic block is the superstition that all observable differences between the sexes are due to socialization, particularly discrimination. On this article of faith are founded most of the professional activity of so-called feminist academics, not to mention the demands for institutional power and privilege (grants, research funds, faculty positions, etc.) needed to undo the baleful effects of this demonic socialization on the part of parents and schools. But once you start entertaining the notion that there are fewer women in some sciences because the pool of women with the necessary abilities is smaller than the pool of men, then the rationale for much of that power and privilege begins to look shaky.

Unfortunately, this type of ideological policing of intellectual speech is all too typical of our colleges and universities, those privileged spaces where the search for truth and the airing of ideas are supposed to be as uninhibited as possible. But consider what happened at Rhode Island College to a student who questioned his professor about what the student thought was a liberal bias in the Social Work program. The professor responded, "I revel in my biases," and added, "I think anyone who consistently holds antithetical views to those that are espoused by the profession might ask themselves whether social work is the profession for them." The ideologically slanted assignments required for a grade confirmed the professor's delight in his biases, and he punished work, no matter the quality, that ran counter to his own prejudices. Sadly, the only thing remarkable about this episode is the professor's willingness to admit that success in his course depends on passing a political litmus test (go to www.thefire.org for more on this story).

The public anger directed at those who challenge cherished orthodoxies—along with the attendant demands for dismissal, for groveling apologies on the part of the offender, or for increases in funding for the institutional caretakers of politically correct received wisdom—increases the chance that some ideas will rarely get a public hearing. Recently it was reported that a new strain of drug-resistant AIDS had appeared in a New York man who admitted to hundreds of unprotected sexual encounters fueled by crystal methamphetamine, a pattern of behavior typical of many gay men. The subsequent commentary focused on everything from the need for more outreach programs to teach the value of safe sex, to demands for gay marriage to lessen the esteem-lowering discrimination that supposedly causes such risky behavior. But no one in the mainstream media dared to speculate that gay predatory promiscuity and drug use—the same constellation of behaviors that 25 years ago fueled the AIDS crisis in the first place—perhaps bespeak a type of neurosis inherent in male homosexuality.

No one in the information elite wants even to mention the unpleasant possibility that a significant number of gay men engage in lethal compulsive sex not because of discrimination or lack of safe-sex billboards, but because homosexuality per se is a form of dysfunction, even though this is what most of the human race has thought for ages. Those presumably same-sex-loving Greeks certainly thought so, repeatedly characterizing passive homosexual activity as a type of compulsive behavior, even Plato calling it an "itch." Maybe this hypothesis is wrong, but shouldn't the idea be considered and the evidence for it be explored, given the importance of this issue? Just you try, and see how quickly the liberal love of challenging orthodoxy and engaging in freewheeling debate suddenly disappears.

It's not hard to see why. To consider homosexuality a type of dysfunction runs counter the prejudices of the liberal elite and the cheery propaganda of movies and television shows like Will and Grace, in which homosexuality is presented as a variety of normal human behavior no more exceptional than hair or eye color. And questioning this assumption opens one up to charges of insensitivity and bigotry. So the discussion is carried on, if at all, in the shadowy recesses of professional journals and publications, while the media and popular culture continue to peddle their ideologically driven view of gay identity.

As these examples show, for many right-thinking liberals (and alas for some conservatives too), free speech is a good thing—as long as certain topics are avoided and the feelings of certain constituencies are protected. And political ideology and prejudice will determine what those topics and who those constituencies are. Remember that art show in New York a few years back that displayed a picture showing the Virgin Mary festooned with elephant dung? Those who protested the show were branded oafish philistines who didn't understand the "subversive" nature of art, the way it should "challenge" our most cherished orthodoxies. Yet imagine if instead of the Virgin Mary it had been Martin Luther King defaced in that way. Suddenly the value of "subversion" and "challenges" would've disappeared and the curator and artist both compelled to engage in self-flagellating apologetics for their racial insensitivity.

The whole point of free speech is to get at the truth, a process that often requires airing all kinds of troubling, unpopular, or even offensive ideas. Limiting this process by putting some topics out of bounds means that the truth will be harder to find. Nor should the possibility of hurt feelings prohibit the expression of ideas or subvert the search for truth. We all learn as children that the truth hurts; that's why we all tell so many lies and entertain so many gratifying delusions. But in a democracy, where the citizens are called upon to make decisions on a great variety of issues, an open discussion of ideas directed towards finding the truth is essential. Once you limit that search by letting some people's feelings or sensibilities or ideologies trump the truth, you've made it much more difficult for truth to emerge, and much more likely for dangerous lies, myths, and half-truths to dominate the public discourse.

It is precisely this importance of truth for democracy that makes it necessary that we demand an accounting from all those who talk the talk of free speech but, when it comes to their own ideological prejudices, refuse to walk the walk. Pointing out this hypocrisy is a much more effective use of our time than railing against a hustler like Ward Churchill.

http://victorhanson.com/articles/thornton022305.html

How the Mainstream Media Headlines the Abu Ali Indictment

2005-02-24T20:32:00.000-08:00

From Daniel Pipes, http://www.danielpipes.org

The American government yesterday indicted Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, a raging Islamist, with plotting to kill the president of the United States. Details have emerged about his attending the Islamic Saudi Academy and the University of Medina. His fervent hatred of the United States apparently led to his joining up with Al-Qaeda. He had connections to Ismail Royer and the paintball jihadists. His mother wears a niqab. Islamist organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim American Society (MAS) jumped on his cause.

Given all this, how might mainstream media headline the story of Abu Ali's indictment? Here are three examples:

Chicago Tribune: "U.S. citizen charged with plot to kill Bush"
The Guardian: "American accused of plotting with al-Qaida to assassinate Bush"
The New York Times: "American Accused in a Plot to Assassinate Bush."

And then there is this gem:

Detroit Free Press: "Valedictorian suspect in plot on Bush's life."

Oldspeak Down the Memory Hole

2005-02-24T20:27:00.000-08:00

Excerpt from “The Origins of Political Correctness”
An Accuracy in Academia Address by Bill Lind

http://www.academia.org/lectures/lind1.html

We call it "Political Correctness."…It is the great disease of our century, the disease that has left tens of millions of people dead in Europe, in Russia, in China, indeed around the world. It is the disease of ideology…If we look at it analytically, if we look at it historically, we quickly find out exactly what it is. Political Correctness is cultural Marxism. It is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms…If we compare the basic tenets of Political Correctness with classical Marxism the parallels are very obvious. First of all, both are totalitarian ideologies. The totalitarian nature of Political Correctness is revealed nowhere more clearly than on college campuses, many of which at this point are small ivy covered North Koreas…on the basis of this philosophy (Political Correctness) certain things must be true – such as the whole of the history of our culture is the history of the oppression of women. Since reality contradicts that, reality must be forbidden. It must become forbidden to acknowledge the reality of our history. People must be forced to live a lie, and since people are naturally reluctant to live a lie, they naturally use their ears and eyes to look out and say, "Wait a minute. This isn’t true. I can see it isn’t true," the power of the state must be put behind the demand to live a lie. That is why (economic and political Marxism) invariably creates a totalitarian state. Second, the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness, like economic Marxism, has a single factor explanation of history. Economic Marxism says that all of history is determined by ownership of means of production. Cultural Marxism, or Political Correctness, says that all history is determined by power, by which groups defined in terms of race, sex, etc., have power over which other groups. Nothing else matters…Third, just as in classical economic Marxism certain groups, i.e. workers and peasants, are a priori good, and other groups, i.e., the bourgeoisie and capital owners, are evil. In the cultural Marxism of Political Correctness certain groups are good--feminist women, (only feminist women, non-feminist women are deemed not to exist) blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals…These groups are determined to be "victims," and therefore automatically good regardless of what any of them do. Similarly, (white males) are determined automatically to be evil, thereby becoming the equivalent of the bourgeoisie in economic Marxism. Fourth, both economic and cultural Marxism rely on expropriation. When the classical Marxists, the communists, took over a country like Russia, they expropriated the bourgeoisie, they took away their property. Similarly, when the cultural Marxists take over a university campus, they expropriate through things like quotas for admissions…And finally, both have a method of analysis that automatically gives the answers they want. For the classical Marxist, it’s Marxist economics. For the cultural Marxist, it’s deconstruction. Deconstruction essentially takes any text, removes all meaning from it and re-inserts any meaning desired. So we find, for example, that all of Shakespeare is about the suppression of women, or the Bible is really about race and gender. All of these texts simply become grist for the mill, which proves that "all history is about which groups have power over which other groups." So the parallels are very evident between the classical Marxism that we’re familiar with in the old Soviet Union and the cultural Marxism that we see today as Political Correctness…But the parallels are not accidents…The fact of the matter is that Political Correctness has a history, a history that is much longer than many people are aware of outside a small group of academics who have studied this…

Excerpt from ”The Principles of Newspeak”
An appendix to the novel, 1984 by George Orwell

http://www.artcontext.com/remote/newspeak.html

Newspeak was the official language of Oceania, and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. In the year 1984 there was not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of communication, either in speech or writing…It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or standard English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050. Meanwhile, it gained ground steadily, all party members tending to use Newspeak words and grammatical constructions more and more in their everyday speech...The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought -- that is, a thought diverging from the principles of IngSoc -- should be literally unthinkable, a least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever. To give a single example, the word free still existed in Newspeak, but could only be used in such statements as "The dog is free from lice" or "This field is free from weeds." It could not be used in its old sense of "politically free" or "intellectually free," since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless. Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispenses with was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum. Newspeak was founded on the English language as we now know it, though many Newspeak sentences, even when not containing newly created words, would be barely intelligible to an English-speaker of our own day...

2005-02-24T19:55:00.000-08:00

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. - Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)

BB: "Inparty must continuebe goodthink!"

2005-02-24T19:44:00.000-08:00

Thinkpol report alarmwise, unveiling doubleplusungood possibility of Inparty ideodeviates. Goldstein connects possibility uneliminated. BB declared speechwise in VicPalace Ingsoc traitors must be detected and rehabed nodelay:

"Comrades, how will Ingsoc continuelive victorywise? Ingsoc will continuelive victorywise by vaporizing decay within Inparty core. Inparty exampleserve Outparty and prolemass and must causewise continuebe goodthink. Ignorance is strength, Comrades, unforget."

http://hem.passagen.se/replikant/ingsoc_propaganda.htm

How to Read the New York Times, Part XVII

2005-02-24T19:13:00.000-08:00

Not a day goes by in the U.S. MSM in which the liberal-leftist-Democrat establishment misses an opportunity to demonstrate their paucity of new ideas (or even, for that matter, coherent ideas). The writing in NYT, LAT, WaPo, CNN, MSNBC becomes more and more similar each day, and seems to be composed of stock phrases tossed willy-nilly on paper. Consider the following editorial by hard-left writer Paul Krugman. After reciting the usual unprovable allegations against, and making the same ad hominem attacks upon, the Bush administration through the entire editorial, only in the final sentence does Krugman write, "My point is..."

New York Times
February 22, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/22/opinion/22krugman.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2fOp%2dEd%2fColumnists
Paul Krugman, OP-ED COLUMNIST

Wag-the-Dog Protection
The campaign against Social Security is going so badly that longtime critics of President Bush, accustomed to seeing their efforts to point out flaws in administration initiatives brushed aside, are pinching themselves. But they shouldn't relax: if the past is any guide, the Bush administration will soon change the subject back to national security. (The Administration is not engaged in a “campaign against Social Security”; it’s called for the reform of a damaged, bankrupt entitlement program. As for the charge that the “administration will soon change the subject back to national security”, this is nothing more than the same old boring leftist trope, i.e., Republicans are duplicitous)
The political landscape today reminds me of the spring of 2002, after the big revelations of corporate fraud. Then, as now, the administration was on the defensive, and Democrats expected to do well in midterm elections. (“Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said. “One can’t believe impossible things.” “I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for a half and hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” – Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass)
Then, suddenly, it was all Iraq, all the time, and Harken Energy and Halliburton vanished from the headlines. (The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy strikes again!)
I don't know which foreign threat the administration will start playing up this time, but Bush critics should be prepared for the shift. They must curb their natural inclination to focus almost exclusively on domestic issues, and challenge the administration on national security policy, too. (Lying Republican SOB’s will “start playing up” as yet unknown, and probably bogus, foreign policy threat)
I say this even though many critics, myself included, would prefer to stick with the domestic issues. After all, domestic issues, particularly Social Security, are very comfortable ground for moderates and liberals. The relevant facts are all in the public domain, voters clearly oppose the administration's hard-right agenda, and Mr. Bush's attack on Social Security stumbled badly out of the gate. It's understandable, then, that critiques of the administration's national security policy have faded into the background in recent months. (Only the radical left considers the current American administration to possess a “hard-right agenda”)
But a president can always change the subject to national security if he wants to - and Mr. Bush has repeatedly shown himself willing to play the terrorism card when he is losing the debate on other issues. So it's important to point out that Mr. Bush, for all his posturing, has done a very bad job of protecting the nation - and to make that point now, rather than in the heat of the next foreign crisis. (What “terrorism card”? A “very bad job of protecting the nation”? Any evidence of this? Anywhere? Hmm?)
The fact is that Mr. Bush, while willing to go to war on weak evidence, hasn't taken the task of protecting America from terrorists at all seriously. (What does Krugman think that the war against terrorism is, I wonder?)
Consider, for example, the case of chemical plants. (Huh?)
Just days after 9/11, many analysts identified sites that store toxic chemicals as a major terror risk, and called for new safety rules. But as The New York Times reported last fall, "after the oil and chemical industries met with Karl Rove ... the White House quietly blocked those efforts." (Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, Redux)
Nearly three and a half years after 9/11, those chemical plants are still unprotected. (Apparently, the fact that the U.S. military has broken the back of al-Qaida, and continues to root-out and eradicate terrorists throughout the world, means that we are “still unprotected”)
Other major risks identified within days of the attack included the possibility of terrorist attacks on major ports or nuclear plants. But in the months after 9/11, the administration flatly refused to allocate the sums that members of the House and Senate from both parties thought necessary to secure these sites. (Typical, out of date knee-jerk liberal response: Got a problem? Throw money at it)
And when the administration does spend money protecting possible terrorist targets, politics, not national security, dictates where the money goes. Remember the "first responders" program that ended up spending seven times as much protecting each resident of Wyoming as it spent protecting each resident of New York? (i.e., how dare the government protect benighted red-state yahoos at the expense of the NYC brain-trust!)
Well, it's still happening. An audit of the Homeland Security Department's (greatly inadequate) program to protect ports found that much of the money went to unlikely locations, including six sites in landlocked Arkansas, where the department's recently resigned chief of border and transportation security is reported to be considering a run for governor. (Note to Krugman: There actually are ports in “landlocked Arkansas”. Re: “the department's recently resigned chief of border and transportation security is reported to be considering a run for governor”…yeah, so what?)
Nor are Mr. Bush's national security failures limited to nonmilitary policy. The administration appears to be in a state of denial over the effects of the endless war in Iraq on U.S. military readiness, particularly the strains on the reserves and the National Guard. (So, it’s an “endless war in Iraq” – how does Krugman know that the war is “endless”? Has there ever, in world history, been an “endless war”? Also, note the disingenuous concern for “the strains on the reserves and the National Guard”, the same guys that they last year called the Abu Ghraib abusers…)
The ultimate demonstration of Mr. Bush's true priorities was his attempt to appoint Bernard Kerik as homeland security director. Either the administration didn't bother to do even the most basic background checks, or it regarded protecting the nation from terrorists as a matter of so little importance that it didn't matter who was in charge. (Red herring! Just because Kerik lied and prevaricated about his background doesn’t mean that the Administration considered the post of Homeland Security Director to be of “little importance”.)
My point is that Mr. Bush's critics are falling unnecessarily into a trap if they focus only on domestic policies and allow Mr. Bush to keep his undeserved reputation as someone who keeps Americans safe. National security policy should not be a refuge to which Mr. Bush can flee when his domestic agenda falls apart. (Finally! He states his “point” in the final (one sentence) paragraph. This just brings home the real point of Krugman’s column: President Bush, his administration, Republicans, and conservatives in general, can do no good, never, not under any circumstances).

Hollywood Mends Fences with Red-States by Inventing New Profanity

2005-02-24T19:11:00.000-08:00

Dems prove once again that they are doomed to always lose...

Name-calling in its purest form

By Richard Leiby The Washington Post
Thursday, February 24, 2005; Page C03

You're an Ashcroft! No, you're the Ashcroft! Imagine hearing that exchange in a movie -- you'd think that Hollywood had come up with a crazy new insult. Well, it turns out that some airline passengers watching the Oscar-nominated film "Sideways" on foreign flights are, in fact, hearing "Ashcroft" as a substitute for a certain seven-letter epithet commonly used to denote a human orifice. The Post's Monte Reel, based in Buenos Aires, tells us he heard the former attorney general's name substituted at least twice in "Sideways" dialogue when he watched the film earlier this week on an Aerolineas Argentinas flight to Lima, Peru. The movie was shown in English and the dubbing was done "in the actual voices of the actors," Reel reports. Star Thomas Haden Church utters the A-word. Profanity is typically cut from in-flight movies to make them suitable for general audiences, but how did the studio come up with "Ashcroft"? Hoping for enlightenment yesterday, we queried Fox Searchlight Pictures, the studio behind "Sideways." A spokeswoman initally e-mailed us to say she had "all the info" about dubbing, then failed to respond to our followup questions. Ashcroft did not return our phone message, but we're certain he was busy and not just being an . . . http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48619-2005Feb23.html

Hmmm... Looks like Dan Glickman has his work cut out for himself:

Lights! Cameras! Lobbying!
Hollywood's top gun in Washington woos the GOP
By Tamara Lipper Newsweek

Feb. 28 issue - Dan Glickman isn't exactly the Hollywood type. More comfortable in pinstripes than Prada, he's a former Clinton Agriculture secretary, Kansas congressman…The studio heads Glickman represents are pitching in, too: they're wooing Republicans with campaign cash. A group including Disney's Robert Iger plans to raise $150,000 at a Wilshire Boulevard breakfast this week with House Speaker Dennis Hastert. Glickman will be there, too—a move that could help boost his standing with skeptical Republicans…To build credibility, Glickman has hired two respected GOP aides—Stacy Carlson, a veteran of the Bush campaign, and John Feehery, longtime spokes-man for Hastert. Glickman recently invited Republicans to screen Oscar-nominated films at the MPAA's plush private theater…Glickman generally tries to avoid plunging into the culture wars, but admits that last year's Bush-bashing by Hollywood celebs made him "cringe." At the same time, he dismisses the conservative backlash against movies like "Million Dollar Baby." "An awful lot of people of people need to lighten up a bit," Glickman says. That's the kind of evenhanded Kansas style that could some day win him rave reviews… http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6999732/site/newsweek