Caves everywhere...

We're back...

Right now I'm too tired to even consider blogging about the profundities of our trip to the Holy Land. It was awesome. Charlene and I saw so many things, they are a blur in our minds, and we haven't digested them at all.

But here's an interesting (at least to me) historical note. I have always tended to disregard the story that the stable where Jesus was born was a cave. It sounded a bit improbable. A cave?.

Actually, it would be improbable for it not to have been a cave. Judea is mostly limestone, which forms caves very easily. You see caves everywhere! And the pale limestone makes for very clean and pleasant cavities----not at all dirty or gloomy. People in Judea still build houses in front of, or over, caves. You can see them dotted in strata along the hillsides. Or you see caves with fences across the front, for livestock.

Ancient Bethlehem was just a little place, about the size of a football field, with one or two-room houses built over caves. There would not have been an inn; you would stay in someone's home. with your relatives presumably. And the cave/stable would be a reasonable retreat to gain a bit of privacy for a birth.

This is a picture of an excavated cave, in the Church of the Nativity complex. It's just a few steps from where Jesus was born. (Those columns have been added to ensure support of the roof.)

Also strange and intriguing to me was how small and close-together things in Israel are. Nothing is remote, in our sense of the word. You could drive from Jerusalem to Bethlehem in 5 minutes, if it were not for the security checkpoints. Or to the Dead Sea in half an hour. And it's very common to be able to stand on a high place and point out a dozen famous historical sites.

Extraordinary delegation of authority....

Here's a cool piece on how WalMart (and other big-box retailers) performed prodigies of disaster-relief during Katrina...while Federal (and in Democrat areas, local) government did poorly. The secret was pushing authority into the hands of those on the scene.

President Bush missed a big fat opportunity, when things were being changed after 9/11, to strengthen local emergency-response agencies, instead of adding more federal bureaucracy.( I think he was rendered short-sighted from spending too much time in government, despite his successes in the private sector.)

Shortly before Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the U.S. Gulf Coast on the morning of Aug. 29, 2005, the chief executive officer of Wal-Mart, Lee Scott, gathered his subordinates and ordered a memorandum sent to every single regional and store manager in the imperiled area. His words were not especially exalted, but they ought to be mounted and framed on the wall of every chain retailer -- and remembered as American business's answer to the pre-battle oratory of George S. Patton or Henry V.

"A lot of you are going to have to make decisions above your level," was Scott's message to his people. "Make the best decision that you can with the information that's available to you at the time, and above all, do the right thing."

This extraordinary delegation of authority -- essentially promising unlimited support for the decision-making of employees who were earning, in many cases, less than $100,000 a year -- saved countless lives in the ensuing chaos. ...

[....]

...This benevolent improvisation contradicts everything we have been taught about Wal-Mart by labour unions and the "small-is-beautiful" left. We are told that the company thinks of its store management as a collection of cheap, brainwash-able replacement parts; that its homogenizing culture makes it incapable of serving local communities; that a sparrow cannot fall in Wal-Mart parking lot without orders from Arkansas; that the chain puts profits over people. The actual view of the company, verifiable from its disaster-response procedures, is that you can't make profits without people living in healthy communities. And it's not alone: As Horwitz points out, other big-box companies such as Home Depot and Lowe's set aside the short-term balance sheet when Katrina hit and acted to save homes and lives, handing out millions of dollars' worth of inventory for free.

No one who is familiar with economic thought since the Second World War will be surprised at this. Scholars such as F. A. von Hayek, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock have taught us that it is really nothing more than a terminological error to label governments "public" and corporations "private" when it is the latter that often have the strongest incentives to respond to social needs. A company that alienates a community will soon be forced to retreat from it, but the government is always there. Companies must, to survive, create economic value one way or another; government employees can increase their budgets and their personal power by destroying or wasting wealth, and most may do little else. Companies have price signals to guide their productive efforts; governments obfuscate those signals.

Aside from the public vs. private issue, Horwitz suggests, decentralized disaster relief is likely to be more timely and appropriate than the centralized kind, which explains why the U.S. Coast Guard performed so much better during the disaster than FEMA. The Coast Guard, like all marine forces, necessarily leaves a great deal of authority in the hands of individual commanders, and like Wal-Mart, it benefited during and after the hurricane from having plenty of personnel who were familiar with the Gulf Coast geography and economy.

There is no substitute for local knowledge -- an ancient lesson of which Katrina merely provided the latest reminder....

Reporters no more?

From an interesting piece in PJ Media on whether reporters are an endangered species...

...This middleman function, with reporters serving as mere links in a news supply chain, was never needed until fairly recently. Before the printing press was invented, we were all receivers and transmitters of news, spreading it by word-of-mouth. Soon after its invention, multitudes of mostly one-man print-shops, as a sideline, printed newspapers to supplement this word-of-mouth process. These printers wrote their own articles blending facts with opinion, much like bloggers do today. Others also contributed, often without receiving compensation or attribution — citizens, gossips, letter-writing “correspondents” from other towns, and similarly-operating foreign and domestic newspapers whose stories were simply lifted.

Since this is what news looked like at the time of the Founding Fathers, they gave no particular mandate to reporters, a function that did not even exist at the time. The “freedom of the press” they cited in the First Amendment was not about “the press,” but about everyone’s right to freely use a printing press to express their views without government interference, supplementing the free speech clause that allowed everyone to express their views orally.

The first full-time reporter in America did not appear until the 1820’s, after steam engines were integrated into printing presses. Suddenly, newspapers had to be run like businesses to achieve consistently high circulation levels to pay for equipment and keep newsstand prices low. Reporters provided the needed constant flow of consistently well-written articles....

The term "reporter" usually means a generalist. His job is, for the most part, to find the person who has specific knowledge, and pass that knowledge on to the public. He's a middleman. If he is covering a fire, he will talk to witnesses and firefighters, and boil down their knowledge into a story. And he is a generalist, because the next day he may be covering a royal wedding or a prize fight.

The Internet tends to destroy middlemen. (Or actually it's a more general trend of the Information Age. When I was young, maybe in the late 50's or early 60's, my father was transitioning his nursery business from selling plants to wholesalers, to selling direct to retail nurseries and flower shops. This was probably a matter of easier flows of information. Freeways and better phone service meant that salesmen could cover more ground, and work directly with a lot of small businesses. So goodbye local wholesaler.)

If there is a big fire, the witnesses can now put information directly into the hands of consumers, say by posting it in a blog. So who needs reporters?

But a reporter can also be himself the person who has specific knowledge. If he covers a special beat, then he may have understanding that most people don't. So he is more than a middleman, he is able to create valuable information on his own. Which doesn't necessarily mean he will be able to sell it in an age that has torrents of free information "deflating the currency."
(Thanks to Rand)

The last WWI vet...

Bush thanks WWI veteran for 'love for America'

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush met the last known surviving veteran of the first world war on Thursday, thanking the 107-year-old for his service and his "love for America."

Bush called Frank Buckles "the last living doughboy from World War I" and said the centenarian still has a crisp memory.

"Mr. Buckles has a vivid recollection of historic times, and one way for me to honor the service of those who wear the uniform in the past and those who wear it today is to herald you, sir, and to thank you very much for your patriotism and your love for America," the president said, seated with Buckles in the Oval Office.

"We're glad you're here."

Buckles, who turned 107 last month, lied about his age to join the U.S. Army at the age of 16...

This seems so poignant and strange to me. When I was young, the gray-haired distinguished men who ran things were of the WWI Generation. Harry Truman, Ike, the presidents of big corporations. And the handsome young men who were just starting to get on in the world were the WWII generation. Now the men of the AEF are all gone. nd the men and women of WWII are pretty much out of public life. (Except one guy, named Josef Ratzinger!)

There was an old-timer who worked for my dad who fought in WWI. Well, actually, he told me that on his first day in France he got in a knife fight with another southern boy, and that was the end of his war! He chewed tobacco--that was a fascinating thing to a boy. And not snuff; he bit pieces off a chaw. And chewed, and then spit. A bit of history I'm glad to have seen, but don't miss....

Germans are good at following orders...

From Al-Qaeda Is Losing the War of Minds , By Peter Wehner,

On the way various influential clerics are turning against Jihadism. Such as Sayyid Imam al-Sharif ("Dr Fadl"), a former mentor to Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Sheikh Abd Al-‘Aziz bin Abdallah Aal Al-Sheikh, the "highest religious authority in Saudi Arabia." (The poor terrorist boobies will soon be reduced to using the Archbishop of Canterbury for religious leadership.)

...Not surprisingly, al-Qaeda’s stock is falling in much of the Arab and Islamic world. A recent survey found that in January less than a quarter of Pakistanis approved of Mr. bin Laden, compared with 46 per cent last August, while backing for al-Qaeda fell from 33 per cent to 18 per cent.

According to a July 2007 report from the Pew Global Attitudes Project, "large and growing numbers of Muslims in the Middle East and elsewhere [are] rejecting Islamic extremism". The percentage of Muslims saying suicide bombing is justified in the defence of Islam has declined in seven of the eight Arab countries where trend data are available. In Lebanon, for example, 34 per cent of Muslims say such suicide bombings are often or sometimes justified; in 2002, 74 per cent expressed this view. We are also seeing large drops in support for Mr. bin Laden. These have occurred since the Iraq war began.

Since General David Petraeus put in place his counter-insurgency strategy early last year, al-Qaeda has been dealt punishing military blows. Iraqis continue to turn against al-Qaeda and so does more of the Arab and Muslim world. In the past half-year an important new front, led by prominent Islamic clerics, has been opened. Militarily, ideologically and in terms of popular support, these are bad days for Mr. bin Laden and his jihadist jackals.

If we continue to build on these developments, the Iraq war, once thought to be a colossal failure, could turn out be a positive and even a pivotal event in our struggle against militant Islam. Having paid a high cost in blood and treasure and having embraced the wrong strategy for far too long, we stayed in the fight, proving that America was not the "weak horse" Mr. bin Laden believed it to be. Having stayed in the fight, we may prevail in it. The best way to subvert the appeal of bin Ladenism is to defeat those who take up the sword in its name...(Thanks to Orrin Judd).

Toldja so.

But wait, haven't we been in this situation before? Where we beat the stuffing out some murderous enemy, and then they suddenly discover that our ideas have merit?

I think it was in Lionel Davidson's thriller set in postwar Germany, Making Good Again, that somebody asks how a bunch of ex-Nazi's can ever form a democracy. And the answer was something like: "Germans are good at following orders. We've ordered them to become a democracy. They will obey." I always liked that. And it was true! Same thing with Japan.

And it will be true with the Islamic world too. They are good at following the "strong horse." That's us, if only we don't lose our civilizational self-confidence...

A quote for this morning...

...As a conservative who reads a lot and takes an interest in history, I tend to accord some weight to the opinions of past generations. I do not subscribe to the fashionable belief that human beings suddenly got much smarter and more moral around 1965, and that everyone who lived prior to that date was a benighted ignoramus. There are plenty of people long dead who seem to me to have been very smart indeed — much smarter than I, in many cases. It is even possible that one or two of them may have been smarter than the editorialists at the New York Times. I don't know, I don't say this necessarily was so, only that I wouldn't altogether rule it out... [link]

--John Derbyshire

Recommended destination....

I'm tagging along with Charlene to a Federalist Society conference at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley.

Awesome! I had no idea. I had vaguely imagined a library, with various historical documents and mementos in some glass cases. But it's a knock-out museum, located on a hilltop with sweeping views. (I guess there is library-like stuff somewhere, with scholars toiling over documents, but that's not evident to the visitor.) We had a great time. I recommend it highly, should you ever happen to be in the LA area.

The question is already decided, in my opinion...

This is a reply I was writing to comments by Bisaal at this post. But I'll just make it a post by itself, rough as it is, since I've already expended this morning's small reserve of time and energy on it...

Bisaal, I'm not ignoring you; your points deserve a longer reply than I have time for at the moment. Even their own post.

I don't agree with Mr Cella. I don't think there is some "thing" called "jihad" that exists. Or a thing called "Islam," so that one can say "Islam" is this or does that. The world of those who practice islam is as complex and varied as any other "world," and is made up of human beings with many motives besides those of religion.

I agree that "Mohamendanism is a Satanic perversion of Christianity," but I would say the same about all the modern revolutionary movements such as socialism and communism and fascism. And Islam is particularly nasty in the way it glorifies violence. But, people are still people.

Intelligent Musselmen (there's an old term I like) probably looked at 10th-Century Europe and saw a terrifying and evil movement called "Crusadism" that was surely unstoppable, and was beyond all reason. In fact we know now that the Crusades were a storm caused by the confluence of several different factors, which were unable to stay unified for very long. (One of them was the mix of French and Viking that became the Normans, one of the great conquering peoples of history. They embraced the Crusading movement, but also conquered England and Sicily and southern Italy at the same time. And their great military moment didn't last.)

"The war has been prosecuted on the proposition that the two are indeed incompatible: that building democracy will weaken the Jihad." --Paul Cella. Not exactly. The proposition is that the jihad is already weak, because most people are not fanatic death-ninjas ready to die for some cause. They have mixed motives, and mostly want to just get on with their lives. And IF they have a situation where they have hope of getting on with their ordinary lives, then they are going to strongly resent the brutal tyranny of groups like al Qaeda and the Taliban. Especially once they get a good stiff dose of them, as the Iraqis have.

And IF they have a strong and effective government that responds to their will, they will tend to turn against jihadists. I say we are seeing that right now in Iraq, on a huge scale.

Also, I think your idea that Iraq will become a puppet of Iran is not realistic. It is sort of like the assumption that Communist Russia and China were going to work together for "the Revolution". It looked good on paper, but never happened. They were just too different, and had different wants and needs. And both were internally much weaker and more divided than outsiders suspected. I grew up learning that communism was an international movement full of dedicated disciplined fanatics, which democracy was probably too decadent to oppose successfully. Ha!

Iran is a MESS. It has horrible internal problems, the regime is very unpopular, and is divided against itself. It is a major oil-producing country that has to ration gasoline!! A place where mothers often turn to prostitution to feed their children. Yet you assume that Iran will be the one spreading its influence. Think a minute. How about influence spreading the other way? Why is that somehow impossible?

The Iranian system is a big fat failure. The Taliban system was a failure. Al Qaeda is a failure, it can only rule places by brutal force, which is resented bitterly. Ask the people of Ramadi. All these jihadist groups can only rule people by force. That in itself says that democracy is incompatible with jihadism. In fact I'd say the question has already been decided, and Mr Cella is wrong.

Remember, President what's-his-name of Iran ran on a platform of economic reform! (And without a unified opposition.) If he had told the people his real desire was to spread the Revolution, he would not have been elected.

Update: Also, thank you Bisaal, for stimulating my thoughts! And if you ever meet my dear wife, Charlene, you two will get on well together--she thinks of Moslems the way you do. (You of course have a more pressing reason, because of where you live.)

And I do not mean to imply that democracy will make anybody good. It just tends to keep people occupied in different ways. And it is quite likely that elections may result in thugs coming to power. Especially in places where the desire of the people is for some big nationalist grievance that can over-rule the desire for ordinary good government. ie, the Palestinians. But even with them, regular elections (if they happen) will tend to result in politicians who address bread-and-butter issues.

Reads

Here are a couple of good books on Ronald Reagan. I should write a bit about them, but I'm too tired tonight--so just trust me, they're worth reading. They are on my mind because Charlene and I will be at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley next weekend for a Federalist Society conference.

   

Axis of Good...

Orrin Judd:

....President McCain will inherit the Axis of Good that W forged--with the particularly important additions being India, Indonesia, Brazil, France (at least momentarily), Canada, and Germany. It's only Bush Derangement Syndrome that prevents foreign policy experts from seeing that. Formalizing the League would be a useful but unnecessary step...

It probably doesn't matter, as far as the Global War on Terror is concerned, who gets elected. At least for the big picture. Bush is similar to Truman, whose vision crated our template for fighting the Cold War. Truman was enormously unpopular, but there was not a chance that his successors would repudiate his policy.

The Bush Doctrine will be America's doctrine now. All the current candidates appear to be pygmies compared to him, and so not have the capacity to formulate a new strategic doctrine, even if one were possible.

A page-turner, a thriller...

I give my highest recommendation to Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power and Helped Save England, by Lynne Olson

It is about the small and exceedingly motley group of MP's who rebelled against Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasement. The odds against them were far greater than I had realized. The story is utterly gripping. And every bit of it is applicable to right now.

We see the psychology of that time, the desperate wish to ignore or argue-away the growing menace, every day. As an example, I noticed that thebook's amazon.com page quotes this book review, by David Cannadine, in the WaPo. And Cannadine is obviously far less interested in the book itself than in applying it to the presidency of George W Bush, using the story, by twisted logic, as an argument in favor of appeasement!

...He gathered around him a coterie of tight-lipped conservative advisers who were as like-minded and narrow-minded as he was. He scorned his critics in the legislature, branding them foolish, ignorant and unpatriotic. He had no time for members of any party but his own, and he treated the opposition with contempt. He cowed and coerced the media, and he authorized telephone tapping on an unprecedented scale... ...George W. Bush? No, Neville Chamberlain...

As applied to Bush, these are simply lies. I could fisk all of them, and already have many times. Bush's wiretapping, for instance, is of foreign communications, which we have done, without warrants, in every big war since Lincoln massively tapped telegraph lines. But Chamberlain was wire-tapping his fellow MP's! There's no similarity at all.

...One problem (which Olson does not address) is that the opponents of appeasement had no effective alternative policy. In the 1930s, Britain's empire and military commitments were overextended, especially as regards Europe and the Far East. That meant that waging war on two continents was a nightmare prospect, to which appeasement seemed for a time the only option...

NO, it was appeasement that caused that problem--if France and Britain had confronted Germany earlier, their forces would probably have been more than adequate. And part of Chamberlain's policy was to not prepare for war, to resist all calls to build up the British military--because that would be "provocative." Which had of course, exactly the opposite effect. (Wilson got America into WWI by the exact same fallacy; that not preparing for war makes war less likely.) Then, as now, every hesitation and cringe is being watched by cold eyes, and assessed Hitler knew that Chamberlain would not defend Czechoslovakia (which was far more defensible than Poland), just as bin Laden knew that America was weak when he saw Clinton flinch in Somalia.

And Chamberlain had immense power over the press, and used it to keep his opponents from communicating with the Bristish people. (Nowadays our journalists and academics carry little Chamberlains inside, and do the same.) We see the same see-no-evil psychology all around us now, for instance in the Canadian Human Rights Commission's proceedings against Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn.

..."Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last," Olson rightly notes, "the lessons of Munich and appeasement were wrongly applied to a later international crisis [Suez]." President Bush and his fellow neocons should take note....

Bullshit. It is the lesson of Suez that is being wilfully misapplied.

One of the greats...

One of the greats, George McDonald Fraser has just died. Everyone will be talking about the famous Flashman books. I'd like to put in a word of appreciation for his collections of short stories about Lt. Dand McNeil and his impossible burden, Private McAuslan (the dirtiest soldier in the British Army) which are extremely funny and charming.

From a reader-review [By Reader "piratebean" (Bristol, RI USA)] at amazon.com:

...George MacDonald Fraser has written the stories of this regiment and its most infamous soldier, Private McAuslan, in three collections: The General Danced at Dawn, McAuslan in the Rough, and The Sheikh and the Dustbin.

Through the narration by platoon commander Dand McNeil, McAuslan comes alive as the dirtiest soldier in the world, "wan o' nature's blunders; he cannae help bein' horrible. It's a gift."

Yet McAuslan is one of the most loveable creatures in all of literature. He may be grungy, filthy, clumsy, and disreputable, but he tries to do his best. Through his many misadventures, McAuslan marches into the heart of the reader, right leg and right arm swinging in unison, of course.

McAuslan, outcast that he is, experiences some infamous moments in his career: court martial defendant, ghost-catcher, star-crossed lover, golf caddie, expert map reader, and champion of the regimental quiz game (!). His tales, and the tales of his comrades-in-arms, are poignant at times, hilarious at others. These tales are so memorable because they are based on true stories.

The reader basks in all things Scottish in the stories. The language of the soldiers is written in Scottish brogue, although Fraser says in his introduction, "Incidentally, most of this volume is, I hope, written in English." Don't fret - a glossary is provided. (Reading the glossary alone causes some serious belly laughs.

And also for his superb memoir of his service in Burma during WWII, Quartered Safe Out Here: A Recollection of the War in Burma

You don't need much more evidence of the total decadence and decline of Britain, than to just point out that there seem to be no more George McDonald Fraser's in the pipeline...

Update: (late late at night, and I'm drinking the Glenlivet.) I should point out that the cover pictured below on the The Complete McAuslan is a travesty!!! The immortal McAuslan is a scrawny malnourished wide boy from Gleska (Glasgow); not in any way fat. (So read the book, already!! You will thank me. Geez. Why do I even bother recommending things anyway?? People will just go buy some crappy movie on a DVD. Why do I even bother to keep living in a post-literate age???? I'm all alone. At least click-through my amzaon link to buy your stupid flick, so i make a profit on my wasted electrons...)

Update: I mean really, why am I doing this?? I'll never speak to a soul who's read about Lt. McNeil's platoon standing guard at Edinburgh Castle. Or Captain Einstein's stunning defense of McAuslan at the Court Martial (Shakespeare himself would have smiled.) Or Captain Errol. Ah well. Let the barbarians over-run all. Perhaps a new and better civilization will arise from the steaming rubble...

Update: One more glass. SO good. Scotland is doomed, but somebody will continue to distill the whiskey---there's too much money in it not to. SO, Mohammed--my brother--please--Scotch doesn't need to be flavored with Cardamom or Anise. Just stick with the original recipe and you will do fine. Trust me, the smokey flavor grows on you.

Update: (I have a little program that inserts these "Update" dingbats with a keystroke--it's not like I have to working hard at this.) OK, I'll go along with the Cardamom. But, by the beard of the Prophet, that's where I draw the line!@!!

       

From the Letter to the Magnesians..

~by St. Ignatius of Antioch to the Magnesians

Since I have met the persons I have just mentioned and seeing and embracing them I have seen and embraced your whole congregation, I exhort you — be zealous to do all things in harmony with God, with the bishop presiding in the place of God, and the presbyters in the place of the Council of the Apostles, and the deacons, who are most dear to me, entrusted with the service of Jesus Christ, who was from eternity with the Father and was made manifest at the end of time.

Be all in conformity with God, and respect one another, and let no man judge his neighbour according to the flesh, but in everything love one another in Jesus Christ. Let there be nothing in you which can divide you, but be united with the bishop and with those who preside over you as an example and lesson of immortality...

Ignatius was born about AD 50, and probably died in AD 107. He was sent to Rome to be killed as an example that would discourage Christians. But the result was exactly the opposite. On the way he met with many Christians, and sent out a series of letters that can still be read with profit today.

As a historical note, Antioch in Syria was then the third largest city of the Empire, and Ignatius, who was its Christian bishop for about 40 years, would have been a high-value target. High value if one assumes, like the Roman authorities, that a cult would melt away if its leaders were killed.

One should also realize that the bureaucratic efficiency with which we deal with prisoners did not exist before the Industrial Age. Prisoners in the past were almost always accessible; a small payment to the guards would get your friends in to bring you comforts and have a nice visit. It is not at all surprising that John the Baptist, while in Herod's dungeon, could send his disciples to question Jesus.

We "considered ourselves a vanquished people"

From A Revolutionary Christmas Story, By Lynne Cheney, NYT, December 21, 2004

AS 1776 was drawing to a close, Elkanah Watson, a young man in Massachusetts, expressed what many Americans feared about their war for independence. "We looked upon the contest as near its close," he wrote, "and considered ourselves a vanquished people."

There was good reason for pessimism. The British had driven Gen. George Washington and his men out of New York and across New Jersey. In early December, with the British on their heels, the Americans had commandeered every boat they could find to escape across the Delaware River into Pennsylvania. They were starving, sick and cold. The artist Charles Willson Peale, watching the landing from the Pennsylvania shore, described a soldier dressed "in an old dirty blanket jacket, his beard long and his face so full of sores that he could not clean it." So disfigured was the man, Peale wrote, that at first he did not recognize him as his brother James.

In these desperate circumstances, George Washington made a stunning decision: to go back across the Delaware and launch a surprise attack on the Hessian mercenaries occupying Trenton. On Christmas night, he led 2,400 men, many of them with their feet wrapped in rags because they had no shoes, to a crossing point nine miles upstream from Trenton. As freezing temperatures turned rain to sleet and snow, they began to cross the river.

The task was harder than any of them had imagined. Men had to break through ice to get into the boats and then fend off chunks of floating ice once they were in the river. Getting cannons across - each weighed nearly a ton - was especially difficult. Downstream, two other groups that Washington had ordered to cross the Delaware failed in their mission. But Washington and his men persevered, until finally, at 4 o'clock in the morning, they were across and ready to march to Trenton.

They had planned to approach Trenton before dawn, but the difficulty of the crossing had delayed them, and it was daylight when they encountered the first Hessians. Still, the surprise worked, and in two hours, with few losses of their own, they captured nearly 900 of the enemy. "This is a glorious day for our country," Washington declared... [There's more.]

Can one possibly imagine the elation that must have been felt by Elkanah Watson, when the news of the victory at Trenton arrived? The deep satisfaction we feel right now at the splendid turnaround in Iraq is nothing compared with how Americans must have felt then.

Thank you Lynne Cheney for this one! And we should be very grateful that, even in these last decadent days of America, we have public servants like the Cheney family...

     

Neutrality is a sham. Pacifism is a sham...

Norman Lebrech explains how there is a back-story to the latest album by soprano Anne-Sofie von Otter... [Thanks to Bookwormroom]

....Her tragic tale begins on a train, as so many war stories do. Anne-Sofie's father, Baron Göran von Otter, was a Swedish diplomat in wartime Germany, adjutant to the ambassador. On the night of 20-21 August 1942, travelling from Warsaw to Berlin, he became an involuntary witness to the Holocaust.

Standing in the corridor because he could not get a sleeper, the diplomat saw an SS officer glancing in his direction. When the train stopped at a station, both men got off for fresh air. On the pitch-dark platform, the SS man asked for a light for his cigarette. Von Otter produced a pack of matches with a Swedish crest. 'I must talk to you,' said Kurt Gerstein.

'With beads of sweat on his forehead and tears in his eyes' (as von Otter reported to his superiors), Gerstein explained that he was head of a Waffen-SS Technical Disinfection unit, responsible for supplying poisons and gas equipment. 'Yesterday,' he told von Otter, weeping uncontrollably, 'I saw something appalling.' 'Is it about the Jews?' said the diplomat.

Over the next six or eight hours in the train corridor, having examined Gerstein's papers and satisfied himself of his credentials, von Otter heard a detailed account of the mechanics of genocide, the gas chambers, the mass graves. Gerstein gave chapter and verse, the names of senior personnel, the look in a little girl's eyes as she was shoved naked to the slaughter. 'I saw more than ten thousand die today,' he wept.

He implored the Baron to inform the Swedish government, in the hope of stopping the slaughter. 'I had no doubt as to the sincerity of his humanitarian intentions,' said von Otter, who promptly wrote a report to Stockholm and heard nothing more. Not long after, he was recalled. When he looked for his own report in Foreign Ministry files, there was nothing to be found....

....Von Otter's career stalled, possibly because his 1942 report compromised Sweden's blind-eye neutrality. He rose no higher than consul-general in London, and died in 1988.....

Of course his report disappeared. There was not the slightest chance that Sweden was going to allow itself to be aware of what was going on next door. 'Cause they are better than the rest of us, and don't get involved in evil stuff like wars.

It's the same thing now, with "liberals" not wanting to know about the atrocities of Saddam's regime, or about the concentration camps of North Korea---not as long as there any chance that they will actually have to help do something about it. Especially if they might have to cooperate with President Bush. Better a million rag-heads should die, than that the latte-sipping crowd should have to support America or her elected leaders.

The Enlightenment, a Christian heresy?

A few snippets from an interesting essay by Philip Trower: (Thanks to Argent)

... To begin with then, there are two facts about the Enlightenment which I believe it is essential to grasp if we are to understand its true historical significance. The first is that, regardless of how it began, the Enlightenment became far more than just another movement in the history of ideas like the Romantic movement. What happened in the drawing-rooms, libraries, and coffeehouses of 18th-century Europe resembled in at least one crucial respect what happened in the deserts of Arabia in the seventh century A.D. A new world religion was born...

[...]

Stepping back a minute then and surveying our new world religion as a whole, we can see it as made up of two components: what I will call the humanist or humanistic project, which within limits we can all bless, onto which has been grafted a missionary atheism bent on sidelining or completely eliminating religion.

By the humanist project I mean the idea of bettering human life in this world in every possible way and developing as many of natures' potentialities as possible. Rightly understood this is not incompatible with Christian and Catholic belief. Indeed it is part of it. What is in conflict with Christian belief, as well, I believe, as with reason and common sense, is the idea that all this can be achieved without God's help and that a state of perfection — which would involve the disappearance of sin — can be overcome this side of the last day.

The second of the two facts which I said it is necessary to grasp if we are to understand the full historical significance of the Enlightenment is, namely, that in its deepest roots and many of its practical objectives, this new "world religion" is — and I hope this won't startle you too much — a Christian heresy.

Taken individually its teachings either have their origins in Christianity, like the idea of raising up of the poor and lowly, or have always had a prominent place in the Christian scheme of things, like the notion of human brotherhood. Collectively, they are the product of 2,000 years of a Christian way of looking at the world. It is impossible to imagine them occurring in the form they do in any civilization or culture so far known to history other than a Judeo-Christian one. Nor have they in fact done so. They can be accurately described as "secularized Christianity."....

[...]

....This is what makes the whole Enlightenment "package" so singularly difficult for most of us to handle. It is not something totally alien as paganism was. As a result, we tend to assume that, except about God and Christ and the Sixth and Ninth Commandments, our liberal or secularist neighbors are on the same wavelength in regard to more or less everything else.

What we often fail to notice is that, when wrenched from their Christian context and raised to the status of absolutes, notions like liberty and equality no matter how good in themselves, can receive a quite different significance and even become appallingly destructive...

...Then with the First World War, and the Russian Revolution, classical 19th-century liberalism meets its Götterdämmerung. Its cultural influence and intellectual prestige pass to collectivist theories of government and social life and collectivist political parties, which for the best part of a century have been living a largely underground life, erupting from time to time in revolutionary outbursts that are quickly suppressed. After the Russian Revolution, however, they can live openly in the daylight with Marxism rapidly occupying first place.

From the late 1920s on, the reaction of many Western liberals to this new situation and this newly empowered rival is not unlike that of moths to a flame or rabbits to a cobra. Some are attracted, others repelled. But the common roots and underlying unity of purpose linking all the offshoots of the original Enlightenment corpus of ideas produces that curious notion "No enemy to the left" — the left is always right and the right is always wrong — and that even more curious phenomenon, people who call themselves "liberals" admiring or making excuses for perhaps the longest lasting and socially and psychologically most devastating tyranny known to history....

"unable to process the fact"

I liked this look at "the big picture." By Orrin Judd, writing about the book The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics ...

...In 1980, after fifty years of liberalism regnant, America had been bequeathed a world where the USSR and communist allies controlled half the globe, where the economy was stagnating and prices were rising, and where there was such spiritual malaise that a president took to the airwaves to whine about it.

Ronald Reagan, in turn, called for a return to the values, principles and policies of earlier days and ushered in a period that has seen an unprecedented quarter century of uninterrupted economic growth, the obliteration of communism/socialism, and a resurgence of faith and faith-based policy in America. So dispositive is the victory of democracy/capitalism/protestantism that Francis Fukuyama coined the term End of History to describe it. Essentially, after two hundred years of miserable failure by a variety of isms, there simply is no challenger to the Anglo-American model any longer.

The Left is understandably upset about the abject failure of everything it believed in and a good portion of the movement has been unable to process the fact. While folks like Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Rahm Emmanuel had sense enough to throw in the towel and move their parties to the Right, many activists and intellectuals have instead become nothing more than reactionaries. This leaves them in the obviously futile position of insisting that the past three decades are a mistake and that we should return to the recipe that brought us the godawful 1970s.

The "Argument" then boils down to this: should Democrats seek to vindicate their ideals and crash and burn in McGovern/Carter/Dukakis/Gore/Kerry fashion, or should they accept the Western consensus and run as a kind of chick-friendly version of conservatism, a la Bill Clinton and George W. Bush?

Such is the nature of ideology and the eternality of the tension between Security and Freedom that just because the latter obviously have the stronger case does not mean they will prevail. When they do, we'll get stuff like the current Congress, which is indistinguishable from the Republican-dominated one that preceded it. When the former prevail, we'll get actual Republicans. Either way, it's mostly win-win for the country...

My guess is that, no matter how many times it is discredited, Leftism will always send up new shoots (with new names of course). Democracy and free markets and conservative thinking (and even the poor libertarians) and Globalization all share a tacit recognition of Original Sin. They assume that ALL human beings are flawed, and that all human enterprises will be things of failure and frustration, and therefore need feed-back mechanisms to get them back on track when they inevitably go awry.

But this means that we will never solve our problems by putting them in the hands of experts and elites—by putting them in the hands of those who are wiser and better. And it is the hunger to feel superior that drives all Leftish thinking. Left-leaning people may busy-body endlessly in helping the unfortunate, but there is always the assumption that the helper is in a position of superiority, and the helped will continue to remain helpless.

In Christian and conservative thought it is assumed that helper and helped are of equal value in the eyes of God. (Of course we often fall short of this in practice.) The conservative hopes the poor will become strong and productive citizens, and no longer need help. And the Christian hopes they will be saved, and sees in them potential saints...

To both the conservative and the Christian, the sin to avoid when helping others is Pride.

Update: i received a quite-justified rebuke from a friend for using language such as: "And it is the hunger to feel superior that drives all Leftish thinking." That's way too categorical and definite, and probably wrong about a lot of people.

Well, if I were really careful about what I wrote, I'd probably not have time to write at all! But please feel free to criticize. In many ways I just write to clarify my own thoughts. (A process I recommend---you don't really know what you are thinking until you try to express it so others will understand.)

The Leftish thought I'm referring to is that which tends to aim for what Peter Drucker called "salvation by society." Socialism is the classic example. And it is particularly difficult to do battle with because, crazy as it sounds, most leftists aren't leftists any more. Not in the sense of having some philosophy like socialism that is "bigger" than they are. (When was the last time you met a Marxist plotting armed revolution?) So it's like wrestling with a jellyfish.

I do think I'm right that the hunger to feel superior to others underlies a lot of what goes on on the Rive Gauche. Perhaps I'm sensitive to it just because I'm quite capable of the same error. But at least I'm on guard against it...

Book recommendation...

I've been reading an excellent book, The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World, by John O'Sullivan. It's about Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Karol Wojtyla, the future John Paul II, and how they cooperated in bringing about the downfall of the Soviet Progressive Empire...

...All three [in the early 1970's] were plainly at or near the peak of their careers. And those peaks were tantalizingly short of the very top.

It was not hard for any intelligent observer to explain why these three, with such high abilities, had obtained only limited success. All three were handicapped by being too sharp, clear, and definite in an age of increasingly fluid identities and sophisticated doubts. Put simply, Wojtyla was too Catholic, Thatcher too conservative, and Reagan too American.

These qualities might not have been disadvantages in times of greater confidence in Western civilization—or in moments of grave crisis such as 1940 in Britain, or 1941 in America, or in sixteenth-century Rome—when people prefer their leaders to be lions rather than foxes. But 1970 was two years after the revolutionary annus mirabilis of 1968. It was a time when historical currents seemed to be smoothly bearing mankind, including the Catholic Church, Britain, and America, in an undeniably liberal and even progressive direction....

Wojtyla, by the way is pronounced voy-TEE-wah, Kraków is KRA-koov. I always find it maddening when a book includes foreign words without giving one the pronunciation. Fortunately I have George Weigel's splendid book on John Paul II, Witness to Hope, which has a nice guide to pronouncing Polish.

"God Save our American States"

I've posted these before, but not for a few years...

From a letter by Abigail Adams to John Adams (who was in Philadelphia with the Continental Congress), July 21, 1776:

...Last Thursday after hearing a very Good Sermon I went with the multitude into King's Street to hear the proclamation for independence read and proclaimed. Some Field pieces with the Train were brought there, the troops appeared under Arms and all the inhabitants assembled there (the small pox prevented many thousands from the country). When Col. Crafts read from the Belcona [balcony] of the State House the Proclamation, great attention was paid to every word.

As soon as he ended, the cry from the Belcona, was God Save our American States and then 3 cheers which rended the air, the Bells rang, the privateers fired, the forts and Batteries, the cannon were discharged, the platoons followed and every face appeard joyful. Mr Bowdoin then gave a Sentiment, Stability and perpetuity to American independence. After dinner the kings arms were taken down from the State House and every vestige of him from every place in which it appeard and burnt in King Street. Thus ends royall Authority in this State, and all the people shall say Amen...

And also from a letter, by John...

I am well aware of the toil and blood and treasure that it will cost to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet through all the gloom I can see the rays of ravishing light and glory. I can see that the end is worth more than all the means....--John Adams

"As we rise to each new day, and again when each day is spent, let words of prayer be on our lips, invoking Thy help to our efforts."

A D-Day Prayer, broadcast by President Franklin D Roosevelt...

My Fellow Americans:

Last night, when I spoke with you about the fall of Rome, I knew at that moment that troops of the United States and our Allies were crossing the Channel in another and greater operation. It has come to pass with success thus far.

And so, in this poignant hour, I ask you to join with me in prayer:

Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.

Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.

They will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.

They will be sore tried, by night and by day, without rest -- until the victory is won. The darkness will be rent by noise and flame. Men's souls will be shaken with the violences of war.

For these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and goodwill among all Thy people. They yearn but for the end of battle, for their return to the haven of home.

Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.

And for us at home -- fathers, mothers, children, wives, sisters, and brothers of brave men overseas, whose thoughts and prayers are ever with them -- help us, Almighty God, to rededicate ourselves in renewed faith in Thee in this hour of great sacrifice.

Many people have urged that I call the nation into a single day of special prayer. But because the road is long and the desire is great, I ask that our people devote themselves in a continuance of prayer. As we rise to each new day, and again when each day is spent, let words of prayer be on our lips, invoking Thy help to our efforts.

Give us strength, too -- strength in our daily tasks, to redouble the contributions we make in the physical and the material support of our armed forces.

And let our hearts be stout, to wait out the long travail, to bear sorrows that may come, to impart our courage unto our sons wheresoever they may be.

And, O Lord, give us faith. Give us faith in Thee; faith in our sons; faith in each other; faith in our united crusade. Let not the keeness of our spirit ever be dulled. Let not the impacts of temporary events, of temporal matters of but fleeting moment -- let not these deter us in our unconquerable purpose.

With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogances. Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace -- a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men. And a peace that will let all of men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil.

Thy will be done, Almighty God.

Amen.

Franklin D. Roosevelt - June 6, 1944

"For these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and goodwill among all Thy people. They yearn but for the end of battle, for their return to the haven of home..."

So it was then, so it is now. Our soldiers are today's "Samaritans," who succor those in need, while elitists pass on the other side of the road. The difference is that then all Americans recognized the basic Christian goodness of our troops and the rightness of their mission. Now our country is divided, divided into Americans and poisonous nihilistic reptiles who miss no opportunity to slander our brave soldiers, and to suggest that their deeds are meaningless, or even evil.

"You called for war until we had it. You called for Emancipation, and I have given it to you..."

To me, one of the chief evils of our time is that most people have come to expect a world of comfort and entertainment. A world where there's no need to make difficult choices, and above all, no need to seek Truth, and fight for it. This editorial from the NY Sun is a useful corrective. It tells of an incident in our Civil War, when the editor of the Chicago Tribune, Joseph Medill, went to Washington to plead for Illinois to be spared its draft contingent...(Thanks to PowerLine)

...."The War Department's blue-uniformed sentries came rigidly to attention as the president appeared," Mr. Wendt writes. Lincoln, he says, gave them a friendly "at ease" and led his visitors through the "chattering telegraph operations room," where he knew everyone by name, to Stanton's "vast cave of maps and charts," where Stanton glowered beneath dark oil paintings of Generals Knox and Dearborn. Stanton was none too pleased to see the same Chicagoans whom he'd shooed out of his office earlier in the day return with his boss. Medill made a game effort, reading from his own newspaper about how no other congressional district had put so many men into the war.

For months, Mr. Wendt explains, the Tribune had "acknowledged to its readers that after four years of the most brutal fighting known to man, even greater sacrifices would be required. The armies were devouring men on a scale not known before in military history, as new weapons outmarched generals' old tactics." Draft riots ensued, particularly in New York. The Tribune required an entire supplemental page, Mr. Wendt notes, just to list Illinois casualties among the more than 13,000 suffered by the Union at Shiloh.

When Medill finished his plea, Stanton nodded to his provost marshal, General Fry, who "read the sanguinary statistics of four years of fighting in a loud, sonorous voice," while Lincoln listened with his head bowed. Stanton then rejected the plea, saying, as Mr. Wendt paraphrases it, that there could be no city nor section nor state asking for special favor, not even Illinois. Medill left the meeting pledging to remain silent about it until the war ended. It would be 30 years before he could bring himself to write the account that Mr. Wendt quotes at some length.

"I shall never forget," Medill said of Lincoln, "how he suddenly lifted his head and turned on us a black and frowning face. ‘Gentlemen,' he said, in a voice full of bitterness, ‘after Boston, Chicago has been the chief instrument in bringing this war on the country. The Northwest has opposed the South as New England has opposed the South. It is you who are largely responsible for making blood flow as it has. You called for war until we had it. You called for Emancipation, and I have given it to you. … Now you come here begging to be let off from the call for men which I have made to carry out the war you have demanded. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. … Go home, and raise your 6,000 extra men."

Then, in Medill's own account, Lincoln turned on the great editor. "‘And you, Medill, you are acting like a coward. You and your Tribune have had more influence than any [other] paper in the Northwest in making this war. You can influence great masses, and yet you cry to be spared at a moment when your cause is suffering. Go home and send us those men.'" Wrote Medill: "I couldn't say anything. It was the first time I ever was whipped, and I didn't have an answer. …"

New technology, without the usual battery woes...

Having just taken a four-hour flight squeezed into a middle seat, I have to say "amen" to brother Scott:

Good, nay, great news on cell-phone talkers:
Update: FCC ready to continue cell phone ban on flights

Just the thought of sitting next to some ditzy teenager with a rap song for a ringtone, or a hausfrau catching up on the coffeeklatch goings-on, or Mr. Uber-Important, over a two-hour flight makes me feel bloody. And I’m a big fan of cellphones.

Now, if they want to turn data only on, that I’m cool with, though I suspect I’d get half as bloody with the little dings and chimes and bleeps of text messages. And, of course, if the operators get their most fervent wishes, we’ll have mobile entertainment to deal with…just imagine the dipstick next to you chortling his way through whatever garbage he would normally be sucking down at home. Here’s some mobile entertainment for you: it’s light, portable, unobtrusive, serially sharable, has very low power requirements, practically no RF emissions, and is rock-solid proven technology:

This is called a “book”

Here are a couple of "books" I enjoyed...

The first book is a must-read for language or history buffs. I mention the second one, because I learned in it that "books" are very fire-resistant, which is important in space travel. They "ablate," that is, the pages burn and flake off one at a time, rather than the whole thing burning like a log. Also, it's by far the best thing I ever read about the Apollo Program.

Pictures, not so hotso...

Today we drove a little farther across Nevada (I love it) and then headed up US 93 to Twin Falls in Idaho. Then across Southern Idaho (boring) and north, past the NW corner of Yellowstone (gorgeous country) to Bozeman, Montana. (Stunning place. But it's been "discovered.") My camera failed me, however. Battery won't hold a charge more than one day. Here's a pic from yesterday, and then some cell-phone pix.

That's me driving in Nevada, and the blur in the middle is a big dust-devil—we saw lots of them. (Not much of a picture, I know)

Here are some wagon-ruts that still exist from the early pioneers. They are from where they would climb a bluff up from the Humboldt River Valley. The Humboldt crosses most of Nevada, and it's so obviously the only way across the state for the old wagons. There's not much water anywhere else. The last part, after the Humboldt dies, must have been a grim trek.

We are not looking for history by the way, just driving. But there's a lot of it lying around. In Idaho we followed the course of the Snake River. You've heard of it.

I love rivers in the desert. Intensely. But they are hard to photograph. Even with the real camera the pictures just come out grayish and drab.

I really shouldn't post this, but it will remind me of the real scene, which was intense. I walked through a forest of tall white brush—crackly-dry, but just starting to bud out. The river (the Little Salmon) was fast and cold and green. There were still patches of snow on the ground, but the black cliff-faces were starting to bake in the early sun.

Here are some of the the cliffs...

"critics by conviction and Christians by habit"

From Meriol Trevor's excellent biography of John Henry Newman, vol 1, Newman: The Pillar of the Cloud.

...Liberal Churchmen had no monopoly of the social conscience, though they were more concerned with politics than other parties in the Church. What really distinguished them was their approach to the doctrines and history of Christianity. In effect, if not always in theory, they gave the highest authority to Reason.

But Newman had just come to believe that Reason, improperly exercised to judge the data of a divine revelation, was the chief instrument of the World in the modern age — the World of which Satan was the ruler: nature, human and non-human, so far as it is in rebellion against God and in opposition to the kingdom of Christ. During 1829 and 1830 his sermons in St. Mary's expressed these ideas of the World and the Church, which were basic to his thought for the whole of his life. He published his last words on the subject when he was eighty-four and quoted some of these early sermons.

With his clear mind — Whately himself had said it was the clearest he knew — Newman foresaw the general development of the liberal idea in religion, as in fact it has come to pass. Wherever reason is made sole judge of religious truth, faith weakens and in logical minds is destroyed ; not because the Christian faith is irrational or false, but because it is something given to the human mind, not discovered by it. Reason is within the scheme, not superior to it. Perhaps Newman saw this so clearly because of his own early scepticism ; Christianity could never be to him merely an habitual frame of reference, within which the individual critical reason could be let loose without danger. But to most of the liberal Churchmen, this was just what it was ; they were critics by conviction and Christians by habit. Later generations shocked them by losing the habit. Newman was not shocked, though he was grieved, because he expected it. In fact, he began by expecting general scepticism to arrive sooner than it did.

Whately never understood the nature of Newman's opposition to Liberalism. He thought Newman abandoned the liberal cause for orthodoxy because orthodoxy was in power, that his motive was worldly ambition ; yet the truth was that Newman parted company with the liberals because he saw that their principles, though they did not realize it, would betray the Church to the World...

The Anglican (in America Episcopalian) Church has three main factions or flavors. Evangelical, Liberal, and Anglo-Catholic. A bit of history that I find quite stupefying is that two of these groups originated, in the 1830's, in the common room of Oriel College, Oxford! (The Evangelicals arose in the 18th Century. The most famous of them were John and Charles Wesley, who left to form the Methodists.)

Richard Whately, mentioned above, "...was a strong liberal, and bid fair to be the leader of the new party of progressive men in the Church...He did not look on the Church as a sacred society preserving divine doctrine, but as a kind of moral order within society..." He and other Oriel men, Hampton, Hawkins, and Arnold of Rugby, started the liberal movement in the Anglican Church that spread rapidly through Oxford and beyond. And Newman raised up an opposition, known to history as the Oxford Movement, or the Tractarian Movement. Whose most important members, Newman, Keble, Pusey, and Froud were also Oriel men. (Though some had taken "livings," that is, positions as rectors or vicars of parishes. But they remained members of their college. All Oxford and Cambridge Fellows were, in those days clergymen, usually young, who expected to take up livings as soon as possible. If for no other reason than that they could not marry as long as they remained in the university. There were no old fossil college teachers then.)

The Evangelicals are still a large part of the Anglicans. The liberals are still the liberals, culminating in a certain peculiar lady bishop now head of the Episcopalians. The Tractarian flavor became what is now known as "Anglo-Catholic," that is, those Anglicans who feel that their church is part of the "Church Catholic," though not Roman Catholic. Newman, and many since, came to the conclusion that that just wasn't true, and left to join.......The Church.

The hard work is being done by the English-speakers...

This is a snippet from a radio interview of Mark Steyn (author of America Alone) by Hugh Hewitt.

Hugh Hewitt: I began this week with a three-hour conversation with British historian Andrew Roberts, about whom you devoted a column in the Sun Times, available at www.steynonline.com. He’s now been a guest at the White House. Vice President Cheney’s reading his book as he jets around the world avoiding assassination attempts. He’s been, as he told me, met with considerable derision in academic circles in Great Britain. Are you surprised?

Mark Steyn: No, I’m not, because I think the elites in both Britain and the United States are blind to what seems obvious, if you step back. Andrew’s great thesis is that in the fullness of time, we will look at the period of dominance of the British empire, and then the American republic, as one unbroken cord of human development, as we do with the Roman republic and the Roman empire, that it will not seem like two separate eras, but as one continuous evolution. And I think that’s true, and I think it’s true not just historically, but it’s true today. You know, we hear a lot about Afghanistan, which is the good war that the left and all the Europeans and everybody else support, and it’s always presented as a NATO mission in Afghanistan, NATO’s doing all the hard work in Afghanistan. When in fact, when you look at it, the only four countries who are doing any combat duties, i.e. going out and killing the enemy are the United States, The United Kingdom, Australia and Canada. And the continental, the European members of NATO, are there in basically support roles. Norway won’t fight, the other guys don’t like to go out in the snow, because it gets their boots dirty, so they’re back at barracks manning the photocopier, or whatever they do, but the hard work of killing the enemy is being done by the four English speaking nations...

Elites, "blind to what seems obvious." Don't that sound familiar? Lefty self-styled elites. They've got a lot to be blind to, and to blind us to. The vast slow-motion train wreck that is Europe is their project. Communism and Naziism were their projects. And the mysterious way that English-speaking people around the globe have a stubborn resistance to being destroyed by leftism is their possible downfall.

England itself is toast, I think. But the tenacious infection has simply migrated elsewhere. How that must madden "progressives!" Historically speaking, it is the very success of the English and the Scots that led to a population explosion in 18th/19th Centuries, and thus the emigration that helped fill distant lands with English-speakers, who carried "The Rights of Englishmen" with them. Also, the inventive genius of the English and Scots created the railroads that opened up the great "land empires" of the US and Russia, and brought their wheat and hogs onto the world market—carried on British bottoms mostly. Which led to the devastation of British agriculture, adding to the flood of emigrants. As it still does. (Railroads also eliminated what had long been one of Britain's great advantages, the fact that no point in the island is more than 70 miles from navigable water.)

I remember being in England with my family when I was young, and my Dad talking to an English or maybe Welsh farmer in a pub. The man was frustrated and spoke of emigrating to Canada. (My father was a horticulturist, a farmer and a world traveller, and knew this stuff. He strongly advised Australia, as a place of greater opportunity.) There are so many things one wants to measure, but can't. Perhaps future researchers will pinpoint genes linked to optimism and adventurousness and self-reliance, and find them lacking in Britain, but richly present in the descendants of those who left the British Isles...

Mark writes "Norway won’t fight." Here's the link to the story about the Norwegian command refusing to let their men in Afghanistan be put where they might have to fight. Remember how Norwegians were once known for hardiness and courage? Well actually most people don't remember, don't know. They just accept things as they are, and can't see how bizarre the world has become, and how extreme the changes are. Me, I was thrilled in my youth by a certain book, about a bunch of Norwegians crossing the Pacific Ocean on a balsa-wood raft. And some of those Norwegians had been among those who made the desperate attempts to destroy the Heavy Water plant in Norway that was being used in the German nuclear bomb program. The fact that Norwegian soldiers are currently deployed to a cold mountanous place for small-unit ops, and are NOT showing everybody else how the thing should be done is a HUGE elephant of a fact in the world's living-room. That nobody seems to see it makes me just want to scream. (Aaarrrgghhhhhhhhhhh! Whew. I feel better now.)

I'm eager to read Roberts' book. Sounds good. And the book below, Heavy Water and the Wartime Race for Nuclear Energy, also sounds good. I haven't read it, so I can't comment on the slightly curious title. It wasn't nuclear energy that was being sought, it was a matter of a totalitarian socialist government seeking nuclear bombs so they could fry millions of people and conquer the world. I can't help suspecting that somebody or other wants to gloss over that fact just a wee little bit.

Much as leftyish historians also want to slide past the awkward fact that Japan also had a nuclear bomb program. One which they stopped only because it was not feasible for them, not because they were better that us horrid Americans who are supposed to flagellate ourselves endlessly for the sin of Hiroshima. (The nuclear bombing of which almost certainly saved millions of lives. Billions perhaps, if you consider the curious fact that it marked the END of the sort of large-scale warfare we refer to as "world wars." Actually, to the end of war, period. What we have now is nothing like what used to be called "war." Dr Oppenheimer and General Groves should be considered the greatest pacifists of human history. Link. Link.)

Things we should remember...

Most revisionist history is simply a matter of ignoring the past, not of inventing a new past. In America, leftists mostly control the schools and medias, so certain things get dropped down the Memory Hole. Especially, certain horrific slaughters, if they get noticed at all, just happened. There's no mention of why they happened.

One of those big facts that's been excised from memory, is the subject of a piece by Jeff Jacoby: American Leftists Were Pol Pot's Cheerleaders. Remember. Be Aware. The same creatures who want to bring us "peace" in Iraq helped to bestow the same sort of "peace" on Cambodia.

....But nowhere in the Times story was there a reminder that the Khmer Rouge was able to seize power only after the US Congress in 1975 cut off all aid to the embattled pro-American government of Lon Nol -- and that it did so despite frantic warnings of the bloodbath that would ensue. President Ford warned of "horror and tragedy'' if Cambodia was abandoned to the Khmer Rouge and pleaded with Congress to supply Lon Nol's army with the tools it needed to defend itself.

To no avail. US troops had come home two years earlier, but American antiwar activists were still intent on effecting the "liberation'' of Southeast Asia. Radicals like Jane Fonda, David Dellinger, and Tom Hayden stormed the country, denouncing anyone who opposed communist victory in Cambodia and Vietnam. On the campuses, in the media, and in Congress, it was taken on faith that a Khmer Rouge victory would bring peace and enlightened leadership to Cambodia.

"The growing hysteria of the administration's posture on Cambodia,"declared Senator George McGovern, "seems to me to reflect a determined refusal to consider what the fall of the existing government in Phnom Penh would actually mean. . . . We should be able to see that the kind of government which would succeed Lon Nol's forces would most likely be a government . . . run by some of the best-educated, most able intellectuals in Cambodia.''

Stanley Karnow, hailed nowadays as an authoritative Indochina historian, was quite sure that "the 'loss' of Cambodia would . . . be the salvation of the Cambodians. "There was no point helping the noncommunist government survive, he wrote, "since the rebels are unlikely to kill more innocent civilians than are being slaughtered by the rockets promiscuously hitting Phnom Penh."

The New Republic told its readers that the ouster of Lon Nol should be of no concern, since "the Cambodian people will finally be rescued from the horrors of a war that never really had any meaning.''

In Washington, then-Representative Christopher Dodd of Connecticut averred: "The greatest gift our country can give to the Cambodian people is peace, not guns. And the best way to accomplish that goal is by ending military aid now."... [Emphasis added. Thanks to Orrin]

There's more, of course. Notice the bit about how the war "never really had any meaning." Just think about it. Does it sound familiar?

I should add that the Khmer Rouge habit of inflicting torture and death was known. It was no secret. The advice given to those who worked in Cambodia was, "Don't be taken alive."

In the same way, the tendency to murder and torture of the terrorists and Ba'athist is known. We have heard the tales of the Taliban inflicting horrific deaths for sins like flying kites or owning a songbird. We found the torture-chambers when we re-took Falluja.

So when leftists and fake pacifists prate endlessly about abu Ghraib (a relatively minor evil that was soon corrected and punished) they are not just indulging in anti-Americanism. They are actively promoting things a thousand times worse, by directing the world's attention away from them.

Mt Darien Scenic Viewpoint, Exit One Mile...

Here's this Sunday's oddment, Houselander on the Sacrifice of the Mass...

...It's all you've got, and he gave it to you. We are like children whose father has given them a sixpence to buy a birthday present for him. The father knows the child can't bring him a present costing a pound: he can only give back what he has been given and whatever little scruffy object he produces; the father loves it, for it is his child's offering of all he can offer—and that is only his own gift back again, but back again made more lovable to him by an exchange of their love.
-- Caryll Houselander

One of the unexpected and totally cool things about becoming a Catholic has been the discovery, like stout Cortez (was he really so fat? And should we keep teasing him, poor fellow?) of a whole new ocean, of thought and books. And especially there is all this history I hardly knew about (and which may be the actually important stuff) which is just jam to an aficionado like me. I'm going back now and learning much old history all over again from a new slant. Especially English history. It's sort of like reading those alternate-history SF things, where the South won the Civil War, or some such. More and Laud and Ken and Newman and Wiseman move forward into the lighted front of the stage, and the Tudors and Cromwell and Huxley and Gladstone step back a bit...

Houselander, quoted above, was one of the oddest and most impressive Englishwomen of the 20th Century...and I'd never heard of her before last year! I found the quoted bit in Masie Ward's biography, Carryll Houselander: That Divine Eccentric. The Houselander book to read is Rocking Horse Catholic)

And, speaking of history, the name Ward is a sea in itself. WG Ward was perhaps the most brilliant of the followers of Newman in the Oxford Movement, (and perhaps the biggest pain-in-the-ass to that great man after they both entered The Church). WG's son was Wilfrid Ward, a very important English Catholic writer and thinker, who was especially important in recognizing the transition; the realization that Protestantism was exhausted, and it was time for the Church to end its siege mentality, come out of the bunker and be bold and confident once more.

And Wilfrid Ward's daughter was Maisie Ward, who, teamed with her husband Frank Sheed, founded the publishing firm Sheed and Ward, and wrote many a good Catholic book. Plus did a lot of other fascinating stuff. And their son was Wilfrid Sheed, the literary critic I used to read in the NYT Book Review. So far now I've read biographies by Wilfrid Sheed about his parents, by Masie about her parents, and by Wilfrid Ward about his father. (Who did not, as far as I know, write about his father, who was a famous cricketer, and founded Lord's.) Four generations covered. There's just something about the English; I can't think of any comparable American family...

Revisionism

Anent a recent discussion here, I recommend a piece by Seth Gitell in the NY Sun, New Thesis on Vietnam Aimed at 2008 Election. He writes:

A new thesis about the end of the Vietnam war is making the rounds in the context of the debate over Iraq. It holds that President Nixon and Henry Kissinger — not the Democratic Congress and public opinion — were chiefly culpable in America's betrayal of South Vietnam...

I think the "new thesis" is hokum, as does Gitell. Here's a small something to mull on...

...A contrast of two military offensives conducted by the People's Army of North Vietnam highlights their error. In the first offensive, in March 1972, North Vietnam hurled 14 conventional divisions, including 1,200 tanks, into South Vietnam. Nixon authorized American B-52 Stratofortresses into action to help the South Vietnamese army, the primary ground force in Vietnam at the time, fend off the invasion. The enemy sustained more than 100,000 casualties. The offensive failed. In the second offensive, three years later, North Vietnam launched the Ho Chi Minh campaign. Columns of enemy armor, unimpeded by American airpower, sped south, ultimately taking Saigon. At the end of the war, enemy missiles were pulled by tractor-trailer trucks out of the jungle, just miles from Saigon. Messrs. Rose and Perlstein fail to account for how these two similar campaigns ended with tragically different results.

Between 1972 and 1975, America's Congress passed a series of pieces of legislation that strangled the Republic of South Vietnam of resources and blocked any hope of an American air campaign. While Mr. Rose himself acknowledges that "in June 1973, Congress ordered all American military operations in Indochina to cease by the end of the summer, and in November it passed the War Powers Act," he soft-peddles the ramifications of these moves — as well as neglecting other legislative restrictions on helping South Vietnam....

Actually, I think the appearance of this "new thesis" at this moment is evidence for my thesis, that a lot of the craziness on the Left right now derives from guilt, guilt at having flushed tens-of-millions of people down the communist toilet. And it is starting to surface now because they are proposing to do something similar to tens-of-millions of Moslems.

What particularly galls me is that the leftists don't think about the consequences. Do I know this for sure? Of course not, but still, I know some of these types, I'm "embedded" in Blue State America, and I have a hunch bordering on a certainty that this is so. I feel very confident that none of the "anti-war" protesters of the 60's worried about what would happen to the South Vietnamese. And I feel a similar confidence that none of the "anti-war" crowd today is worrying either. (If I'm wrong, show me the evidence!)

If you could be a fly on the wall at one of their meetings, I bet you would not hear anyone fretting about what might happen to the Kurds if the Ba'athists got their hands on them. (Nor would you hear the least bit of rejoicing that Iraqi Kurdistan is now enjoying peace and prosperity.) Or how many more Sh'ites would end up in mass graves if al Qaeda or the Sunnis were back in power. Nor would you hear them wanting the Iraqis to be able to continue to elect their leaders. In fact, what you would hear would be all about Bush, and Cheney, and how bad America is. Nothing would indicate that the ordinary Iraqi was human to them...

Also a bitter thing to me is that those North Vietnamese invasions of South Vietnam mentioned in the article—"14 conventional divisions, including 1,200 tanks..."—I don't recall that those massive attacks garnered any criticism from our "pacifists." That kind of war is just fine for the fake-pacifist, because it's anti-American, which is their real religion...

Religion of conquest...

From a Financial Times article, Youth and War, a Deadly Duo, By Christopher Caldwell (Thanks to Orrin)

.....But the killings also defy political common sense. Ariel Sharon's wall cuts terrorists off from Israeli targets and what happens? The violence - previously justified with the cause of a Palestinian homeland - continues as if nothing had changed, merely finding its outlet in a new set of targets. This makes it appear that Palestinian violence has never really been about a "cause" at all. The violence is, in a strange way, about itself.

Gunnar Heinsohn, a social scientist and genocide researcher at the University of Bremen, has an explanation for why this might be so. Since its publication in 2003, his eccentric and eye-opening Sons and World Power (not available in English) has become something of a cult book. In Mr Heinsohn's view, when 15 to 29-year-olds make up more than 30 per cent of the population, violence tends to happen; when large percentages are under 15, violence is often imminent. The "causes" in the name of which that violence is committed can be immaterial. There are 67 countries in the world with such "youth bulges" now and 60 of them are undergoing some kind of civil war or mass killing.

Between 1988 and 2002, 900m sons were born to mothers in the developing world and a careful demographer could almost predict the trouble spots. In the decade leading up to 1993, on the eve of the Taliban takeover, the population of Afghanistan grew from 14m to 22m. By the end of this generation, Afghanistan will have as many people under 20 as France and Germany combined. Iraq had 5m people in 1950 but has 25m now, in spite of a quarter-century of wars. Since 1967, the population of the West Bank and Gaza has grown from 450,000 to 3.3m, 47 per cent of which is under 15.

If Mr Heinsohn is right, then Palestinian violence of recent months and years is not explained by Israeli occupation (which, after all, existed 30 years ago) or poverty (the most violent parts of the Muslim world are not the poorest) or humiliation. It is just violence.

Mr Heinsohn's point is not that the West is "outnumbered". Nor is it that a Malthusian battle for scarce resources is under way. In El Salvador, for instance, the explosion of political killing in the 1970s and 1980s was preceded by a 27 per cent rise in per capita income. The problem, rather, is that in a youth-bulge society there are not enough positions to provide all these young men with prestige and standing.

...If you follow this argument to its logical end point, then the religion of Islam, the focus of so much contemporary strategic discussion, is a great red herring...

I suspect that's right. If you read history with an eye to demographics, you know that this has happened before. There was a period where you could have argued that Anglicanism was a religion of violence and conquest, sending ruthless young men out to all corners of the globe to conquer countries and impose Christianity and English values on them. I'll bet it sure looked that way to Indians in the time of Clive. [I hasten to interject here that I think this was a good thing, which has obviously benefitted those places greatly. And that the spread of Islam is bad, and will be harmful to those places that adopt it.]

(This has turned into a historical digression. Read on if you are interested...)

If you read authors like Patrick O'Brian, you will have encountered the toast (which I believe is historical) "Here's to a bloody war. Many to go and few to come!" It's not as insane as it sounds if you realize that a surplus of young middle and upper-class young men were enlisting as midshipmen and lieutenants, and might be stuck in those very humble spots permanently unless combat or Yellow Fever cleared some spaces on the ladder of promotion. And promotion or plunder would perhaps open up their only chance at marriage and prosperity. (There was another traditional saying, in the British Army: Lieutenants may not marry, captains should not marry, majors may marry, Colonels must marry.) And it is not really surprising that parents would beg for one of those very dangerous midshipman's berths for their sons, if you realize that often they faced an intolerable dilemma in providing jobs for a large clutch of children, who might otherwise slip down into working-class poverty....

And the same function, of absorbing surplus males, can be seen in the civilian staffing of the British Empire. In the old days most of the fellows at Oxford and Cambridge colleges were young men hoping for livings as clergymen. And until they got one they could not marry. There were never enough livings to go around, and small parish in India would seem very attractive, despite the high possibility of death by disease. It was the same for young men joining the imperial civil service, or taking posts managing distant plantations.

I suspect that the end of the British Empire in the mid 20th Century had as much to do with Britons being no longer willing to fight for it, as it did to the various liberation movements. And even without the movements it might have ended just because more and more positions would have had to be filled by "natives." The developed world today is very strange compared to anywhere in the past, because we have lots of white-collar positions available, often more than can be filled. And shortages of good blue-collar jobs!

The most significant Christmas Eve in American history...

This is a piece by Stanley Weintraub, from the December 23, 2004 LA Times. He is the author of General Washington's Christmas Farewell: A Mount Vernon Homecoming, 1783 (Thanks, as so often, to Orrin Judd.)

We don't associate George Washington with Christmas Eve, or Christmas itself, yet the most significant Christmas Eve in American history occurred in 1783, when Gen. Washington, then 52, headed home to Mount Vernon after nine years at war — and turned his back on ruling the states like a king.

The American Revolution effectively ended at Yorktown in October 1781, but in the fall of 1783 the defeated British still held a few positions as bargaining chips for negotiating the peace. Although a treaty acknowledging American independence had been signed, ships carrying the documents were still at sea when Washington gathered up his remaining troops in November at West Point and headed for New York City, to take over as the last Redcoats embarked for Britain.

Equally important to Washington was his desire to have Christmas dinner with Martha, to bring yuletide gifts to his wife and his step-grandchildren (he had no children of his own) and to return to being "a private citizen on the banks of the Potomac … under the shadow of my own Vine and my own Fig-tree, free from the bustle of a camp and the busy scenes of public life."

That his imagery recalled the biblical book of 1 Kings is an irony he may not have recognized. He was renouncing the idea raised by his admiring countrymen — who had long lived under monarchs, the common form of rule everywhere — that George III be replaced by their own George I.

"Had he lived in days of idolatry," a colonist had written in 1777, "he would have been worshiped like a god." Abigail Adams wrote of Washington's "Majestik fabrick." To one poet he was "Our Hero, Guardian, Father, Friend!" To another he was "First of Men." And, by 1778, a Pennsylvania German almanac had referred to him as "Father of his Country."...

A brigadier general wrote to Washington, echoing sentiments in the press, that the colonies should merge as a monarchy, with him as king. Washington responded: "I must view this with abhorrence and reprehend [it] with severity."

Philadelphia artist Benjamin West, painting in London on the commission of the king, told George III that despite Washington's popularity, the general chose to return to his farm in Virginia. The king was astonished. If Washington does that, said His Majesty, he will be the greatest man in the world.

In December 1783, the general made good his word.

Crossing the Hudson from New York on Dec. 4, Washington began his journey home and away from public life. He rode through villages and towns in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland. Americans watched expectantly for his arrival, banquets and balls were planned in his honor along the way. When less formal crowds gathered, he stood atop the wagon carrying his belongings and thanked his countrymen, even those he knew had been less than loyal to the American cause, for supporting the new nation.

At Annapolis, Md., where the weak and disunited Confederation Congress was meeting, Washington planned to showcase his retreat from public duty and public life. He would return the official 1775 parchment appointing him commanding general. The occasion was to be a piece of theater to emphasize the nation's civil foundations.

The adulation along the way delayed his arrival in Annapolis to Dec. 22. There he penned his parting address for delivery the next afternoon — the only valedictory he would ever give in person. (The "Farewell Address" of 1796, written largely by Alexander Hamilton to mark the end of his second term as president, was never spoken. It was published in a newspaper.)

On the evening of the 22nd, Washington was honored once more at a banquet and ball, this one punctuated by 13 patriotic toasts and ceremonial salutes by cannon. Late that night, he returned to his lodgings and reviewed his speech. Apparently no longer sure that he would or could bar the door to further public service, he deleted two phrases suggesting finality: "an affectionate and final farewell" and "ultimate leave."

The address the next day at the Maryland State House was a solemn occassion. "The glory of your virtues will not terminate with your military command," Thomas Mifflin, president of the Confederation Congress, told Washington, "it will continue to animate [the] remotest ages. You have defended the standard of liberty in this new world."

Up and down the former colonies, newspapers would report the remarkable events. "Here we must let fall the scene," the New Hampshire Gazette closed its report. "Few tragidies ever drew more tears."

It would not be Washington's final act, as he had hoped — although with less and less assurance as he neared home. From retirement, he watched the nation drift toward disunity, and then answered the call to lead first the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and then, by unanimous vote of the first electoral college, the republic.

After serving two terms and with the nation now set on course, he would retire, this time for good, from the public stage.

But none of that was known on Dec. 24, 1783, when Washington's party crossed the Potomac to Virginia. Winter twilight came early. Up the slope from the river, Mount Vernon, with its three shuttered doors in the white west front and its many green-shuttered windows, now candlelit, beckoned.

The next day, as a heavy snowfall locked the plantation in snow and ice, Washington at long last celebrated a festive and unmilitary holiday. There he confronted, he later wrote, just one challenge: an "Attack of Christmas Pyes."

"Talmudic atavism"

Mark Steyn, reviewing a book by David Pryce-Jones, Betrayal: France, Arabs and the Jews. Steyn is worth reading, as always. The lesson of history as revealed in our time is the same lesson as of old: We cannot by our own efforts disentangle ourselves from our sins. And, as of old, the Jews are our litmus paper...

....but then spools backwards across the centuries to build a case for France's present predicament as a monument to the vanity and strategic stupidity of its diplomatic class. There is a lot of anti-Semitism on display -- not the offhand anti-Semitism of your average languid English toff of similar vintage, but something more corrosive and obsessive. There is, in that sense, a direct line between those French emissaries in Russia and Germany blaming Bolshevism and Nazism on "Talmudic atavism," and Daniel Bernard, M. Chirac's ambassador to the Court of St. James's, announcing airily at a London dinner party in 2001 that the problems of the world can be laid at the door of "that shitty little country" Israel. From "Talmudic atavism" to "shitty little country" may mark a deterioration in Gallic rhetorical élan but at least its prejudices remain inviolable.

If you had vaguely assumed that the now routine comparisons of Israelis to Nazis derived from an antipathy to Ariel Sharon or the post-1967 transformation of the Zionist Entity from plucky embattled underdog to all-conquering military behemoth, it's sobering to be reminded that the French were doing the Israelis-are-the-new-Nazis shtick within 10 minutes of the end of the Second World War. Jews, wrote the consul general René Neuville in a lengthy cable from Jerusalem in 1947, are "racist through and through . . . quite as much as their German persecutors." The dispatches of Pierre Landy, French consul in Haifa, rely heavily on "the Israeli Gestapo" and similar formulations. In public, the political class was usually more circumspect, though not always. President de Gaulle famously raged at a press conference that the Jews were "an elite people, self-assured and domineering" with "a burning ambition for conquest." In the ensuing controversy, M. le Président assured the Chief Rabbi that he'd meant it as a compliment....

"...within 10 minutes of the end of the Second World War." I wasn't aware of that, although the history of French anti-Semitism is a long and dishonorable one. The name Dreyfus springs to mind. And the French tendency to counter its European enemies by allying with the Ottomans is a very ancient one.

It is a bitter thing to reflect upon the way I grew up with the idea that anti-semitism was something from the ugly past, no longer known among enlightened folk. And now we see it everywhere. Usually in the thinly-disguised form of "anti-Zionism" or extreme sympathy with the so-called Palestinians. And many Jews are as blind today as they were in the 1930's.