Buckley on the War on Drugs

January 22, 1996

Leading Conservative Voice Endorses Legalizing Narcotics

By CHRISTOPHER S. WREN

The war on illicit drugs has yet to gain prominence in this campaign year, although public concern about drug abuse is unabated.

Indeed, a recent Gallup poll reported that 94 percent of the 1,020 adults surveyed last September viewed drug abuse as a crisis or serious problem for the United States, more so than health care, welfare or the Federal budget deficit.

Positioning the Republicans to seize the issue, Senator Bob Dole, the majority leader, and Speaker Newt Gingrich last month announced the formation of a task force of 18 Congressional Republicans, a group intended to fill what Republicans labeled “the leadership void” on drug policy left by the White House.

Now the evangelist of libertarian Republicanism, William F. Buckley Jr., has taken to his pulpit hoping to force a debate about drugs. In what would seem uncharacteristic for a conservative political weekly, Mr. Buckley’s National Review asserts that it is time to make narcotics legal.

“The War on Drugs Is Lost,” announces the cover of the new issue of National Review, and for 15 pages Mr. Buckley and a half dozen other proponents make their arguments for dropping the criminality of marijuana and even harder drugs, like cocaine and heroin.

Far from endorsing drugs, National Review’s editors insist in an editorial that “we deplore their use; we urge the stiffest feasible sentences against anyone convicted of selling a drug to a minor.”

“But having said that,” the editorial continues, “it is our judgment that the war on drugs has failed, that it is diverting intelligent energy away from how to deal with the problem of addiction, that it is wasting our resources, and that it is encouraging civil, judicial and penal procedures associated with police states.”

Robert W. Sweet, a Federal judge in New York who contributed one of the essays in National Review, noted that proposed Government spending on the drug war would exceed $17 billion this year, with more than $1 billion going to Federal prisons, while overall drug use remained constant. “Our present prohibitive policy has failed, flatly and without serious question,” he wrote.

In a telephone interview from Florida, Mr. Buckley said that National Review’s endorsement of legalization is “a dangerous one, in view of the association of drugs with evil.” He expressed the hope that “the thinking community will now begin to face the issue.”

Mr. Buckley, who plans to follow up with three televised debates on his PBS program, “Firing Line,” has advocated legalization before. So to varying degrees have the other contributors. Besides Judge Sweet, they are Steven B. Duke, a law professor at Yale University; Joseph D. McNamara, a former police chief in Kansas City, Mo., and San Jose, Calif.; Ethan A. Nadelmann, director of the Lindesmith Center, a research institute in New York; Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke of Baltimore and Thomas Szasz, a psychiatrist at Syracuse University.

They generally support Mr. Buckley’s thesis that “the cost of the drug war is many times more painful, in all its manifestations, than would be the licensing of drugs combined with intensive education of nonusers and intensive education designed to warn those who experiment with drugs.”

His view was not shared by prominent Republicans like Senator Dole, who said yesterday, “Legalizing drugs is a terrible idea that would only raise the white flag of surrender.”

The prospect also angers law-enforcement officials and narcotics experts whose views were absent from National Review’s colloquium.

“I think it would be a disaster,” said Thomas A. Constantine, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration in Washington. “As a citizen, I’m appalled at adding one more social ill to a country that already has AIDS and murders.”

Legalizing drugs, he said, would encourage more people to experiment, increasing addiction and creating a substantial black market for those not old enough to buy drugs legally. For the socially and financially well off to propose legalization is elitist, Mr. Constantine said, because “the hard-core drug problem exists in the most vulnerable part of our society,” including among poor or jobless minority groups.

Taking the libertarian view, Mr. Buckley wrote that “those who suffer from the abuse of drugs have themselves to blame for it.” He argued that their plight should be subordinated to that of nonusers whose life, liberty and property were threatened by the climate that illegal drugs have created.

Opponents of legalization include the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, which released a study last September on the consequences of legalizing narcotics. By making drugs as easy for young people to get as cigarettes and liquor are now, it concluded, “legalization of drugs such as heroin, cocaine and marijuana would threaten a pediatric pandemic in the United States.”

“Drugs like heroine and cocaine are not dangerous because they are illegal,” the report said, “they are illegal because they are dangerous.”

Dr. Herbert Kleber, the center’s medical director, said there were about 15 million alcoholics and 2 million cocaine addicts in the United States. “Cocaine is much more addicting than alcohol,” he said in an interview. “There is every reason to believe if you make cocaine as freely available, the number of addicts will rise” and even exceed the number of alcoholics.

Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, a co-chairman of the new Republican task force, reported: “There’s absolutely no sentiment on Capitol Hill for drug legalization. In fact, drug legalization would be an invitation to the Mad Hatter’s tea party.”

At the White House, Rahm Emanuel, a special assistant to President Clinton, rejected the notion that the President had ignored the drug problem. He also criticized Mr. Buckley’s stance.

“The National Review may want to throw in the towel, but we’re not,” said Mr. Emanuel, who advises the President on narcotics matters. Legalization, he said, “is wrong because it sends the wrong signal to children and because it’s defeatist.”

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9806E7DF1F39F931A15752C0A960958260

Frum vs. Conservatives

Unpatriotic Conservatives A war against America. EDITOR’S NOTE: This piece appears in the April 7, 2003, issue of National Review.

“I respect and admire the French, who have been a far greater nation than we shall ever be, that is, if greatness means anything loftier than money and bombs.”
— THOMAS FLEMING, “HARD RIGHT,” MARCH 13, 2003

rom the very beginning of the War on Terror, there has been dissent, and as the war has proceeded to Iraq, the dissent has grown more radical and more vociferous. Perhaps that was to be expected. But here is what never could have been: Some of the leading figures in this antiwar movement call themselves “conservatives.”

These conservatives are relatively few in number, but their ambitions are large. They aspire to reinvent conservative ideology: to junk the 50-year-old conservative commitment to defend American interests and values throughout the world — the commitment that inspired the founding of this magazine — in favor of a fearful policy of ignoring threats and appeasing enemies.

And they are exerting influence. When Richard Perle appeared on Meet the Press on February 23 of this year, Tim Russert asked him, “Can you assure American viewers . . . that we’re in this situation against Saddam Hussein and his removal for American security interests? And what would be the link in terms of Israel?” Perle rebutted the allegation. But what a grand victory for the antiwar conservatives that Russert felt he had to air it.

You may know the names of these antiwar conservatives. Some are famous: Patrick Buchanan and Robert Novak. Others are not: Llewellyn Rockwell, Samuel Francis, Thomas Fleming, Scott McConnell, Justin Raimondo, Joe Sobran, Charley Reese, Jude Wanniski, Eric Margolis, and Taki Theodoracopulos.

The antiwar conservatives aren’t satisfied merely to question the wisdom of an Iraq war. Questions are perfectly reasonable, indeed valuable. There is more than one way to wage the war on terror, and thoughtful people will naturally disagree about how best to do it, whether to focus on terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda and Hezbollah or on states like Iraq and Iran; and if states, then which state first?

But the antiwar conservatives have gone far, far beyond the advocacy of alternative strategies. They have made common cause with the left-wing and Islamist antiwar movements in this country and in Europe. They deny and excuse terror. They espouse a potentially self-fulfilling defeatism. They publicize wild conspiracy theories. And some of them explicitly yearn for the victory of their nation’s enemies.

Common cause: The websites of the antiwar conservatives approvingly cite and link to the writings of John Pilger, Robert Fisk, Noam Chomsky, Ted Rall, Gore Vidal, Alexander Cockburn, and other anti-Americans of the far Left.

Terror denial: In his column of December 26, 2002, Robert Novak attacked Condoleezza Rice for citing Hezbollah, instead of al-Qaeda, as the world’s most dangerous terrorist organization: “In truth, Hezbollah is the world’s most dangerous terrorist organization from Israel’s standpoint. While viciously anti-American in rhetoric, the Lebanon-based Hezbollah is focused on the destruction of Israel. ‘Outside this fight [against Israel], we have done nothing,’ Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the organization’s secretary-general, said in a recent New York Times interview.” The sheik did not say, and Novak did not bother to add, that Hezbollah twice bombed the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, murdering more than 60 people, and drove a suicide bomb into a Marine barracks in October 1983, killing 241 servicemen.

Espousing defeatism: Here is Robert Novak again, this time on September 17, 2001, predicting that any campaign in Afghanistan would be a futile slaughter: “The CIA, in its present state, is viewed by its Capitol Hill overseers as incapable of targeting bin Laden. That leads to an irresistible impulse to satisfy Americans by pulverizing Afghanistan.” And here is Patrick Buchanan that same day gloomily asserting that the United States would be as baffled by Osama bin Laden as the British Empire was by George Washington: “We remain unrivaled in material wealth and military dominance, but these are no longer the components of might. . . . Our instinct is the strongman’s impulse: hit back, harder. But like British Lobsterbacks dropped in a colonial wilderness, we don’t know this battle, and the weapons within our reach are blunt.”

Excuse-making: On September 30, 2002, Pat Buchanan offered this explanation of 9/11 during a debate on Chris Matthews’s Hardball: “9/11 was a direct consequence of the United States meddling in an area of the world where we do not belong and where we are not wanted. We were attacked because we were on Saudi sacred soil and we are so-called repressing the Iraqis and we’re supporting Israel and all the rest of it.”

Conspiracy-theorizing: Justin Raimondo, an Internet journalist who delivered Pat Buchanan’s nominating speech at the Reform party convention in 2000, alleged in December 2001 that Israel was implicated in the terror attacks of 9/11: “Whether Israeli intelligence was watching, overseeing, collaborating with or combating the bin Ladenites is an open question. . . . That the Israelis had some significant foreknowledge and involvement in the events preceding 9/11 seems beyond dispute.” Raimondo has also repeatedly dropped broad hints that he believes the October 2001 anthrax attacks were the work of an American Jewish scientist bent on stampeding the U.S. into war.

Yearning for defeat: On January 30, 2002, Eric Margolis, the American-born foreign editor of the Toronto Sun, appealed to the leaders of the Arab world to unite in battle against the U.S. “What could Arabs do to prevent a war of aggression against Iraq that increasingly resembles a medieval crusade? Form a united diplomatic front that demands U.N. inspections continue. Stage an oil boycott of the U.S. if Iraq is attacked. Send 250,000 civilians from across the Arab World to form human shields around Baghdad and other Iraqi cities. Boycott Britain, Turkey, Kuwait, and the Gulf states that join or abet the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Withdraw all funds on deposit in U.S. and British banks. Accept payment for oil only in Euros, not dollars. Send Arab League troops to Iraq, so that an attack on Iraq is an attack on the entire League. Cancel billions worth of arms contracts with the U.S. and Britain. At least make a token show of male hormones and national pride.”

Raimondo was more explicit still on March 12, 2003. Speaking of the negative consequences he foresaw of even a successful American campaign in Iraq, he wrote: “It is a high price to pay for ‘victory’ — so high that patriots might almost be forgiven if they pine for defeat.”

The writers I quote call themselves “paleoconservatives,” implying that they are somehow the inheritors of an older, purer conservatism than that upheld by their impostor rivals. But even Robert Taft and Charles Lindbergh ceased accommodating Axis aggression after Pearl Harbor. Since 9/11, by contrast, the paleoconservatives have collapsed into a mood of despairing surrender unparalleled since the Vichy republic went out of business. James Burnham famously defined liberalism as “the ideology of Western suicide.” What are we to make of self-described conservatives who see it as their role to make excuses for suicide bombers?

“While paleos sometimes like to characterize their beliefs as merely the continuation of the conservative thought of the 1950s and ’60s, and while in fact many of them do have their personal and intellectual roots in the conservatism of that era, the truth is that what is now called paleoconservatism is at least as new as the neoconservatism at which many paleos like to sniff as a newcomer.”
— SAMUEL FRANCIS, IN THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE, DECEMBER 16, 2002

I HAPPEN to have been in the room when “paleoconservatism” first declared itself as a self-conscious political movement. It was in the spring of 1986, at a meeting of the Philadelphia Society, and Professor Stephen Tonsor of the University of Michigan read the birth announcement.

The Philadelphia Society is a forum where the various conservative factions met (and meet) to thrash out their differences: libertarians who believed that parks should be sold to private industry, traditionalists who regretted the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy, and — most recently — neoconservatives who had cast their first Republican ballot in 1980. At first, the neoconservatives were warmly welcomed by the veteran members. But the warmth did not last long, and at a panel discussion that day, Tonsor startled the room by anathematizing the neocons and their works.

True conservatives, Tonsor said, were Roman Catholic at root, or at a minimum Anglo-Catholic. They studied literature, not the social sciences. And while he was very glad to see that some non-religious social scientists were now arriving at conservative conclusions, they should understand that their role in the conservative movement must be a subordinate one. “We are all delighted,” he said (I am quoting from memory), “to see the town whore come to church — even to sing in the choir — but not to lead the service.”

I wish I could say that Tonsor’s outburst was motivated by a deep disagreement over important principles. Certainly principles had their place. But as the paleos themselves tell the story, the quarrel that erupted into view that day in 1986 began as a squabble over jobs and perks in the Reagan administration — from the perception that, as Francis later put it, neoconservatives had arranged matters so that “their team should get the rewards of office and of patronage and that the other team of the older Right receive virtually nothing.”

A quick reality check here: It is not in fact true that the ambitions of the paleos fell victim to neocon plots. Paleo Grievance Number 1 is the case of Mel Bradford, a gifted professor at the University of Dallas, now dead. Bradford had hoped to be appointed chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1981, but lost out to William Bennett. Unfortunately for him, Bradford came to the government hiring window with certain disadvantages: He had worked on the George Wallace campaign in 1968, and he had published an essay that could plausibly be read to liken Abraham Lincoln to Hitler. In the spring of 1981, Ronald Reagan was trying to persuade a balky Congress simultaneously to enact a giant tax cut and to authorize a huge defense buildup; to slow inflation, end fuel shortages, and halt Soviet aggression, from Afghanistan to Angola. It was not, in other words, a good moment to refight the Civil War.

Bradford could never accept that it was his own writings that had doomed him. As Oscar Wilde observed, “Misfortunes one can endure: They come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one’s own faults — ah! There is the sting of life.” Easier and less painful to blame others and pity oneself. And so Bradford’s friends and partisans did. When this one was passed over for a promotion at his newspaper or that one failed to be hired at a more prestigious university, they detected the hand of the hated neoconservatives.

Perhaps the most relentlessly solipsistic of the disgruntled paleos is Paul Gottfried, a professor at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania who has published an endless series of articles about his professional rebuffs. Gottfried teaches at Elizabethtown because, as he repeatedly complains, “in what is literally a footnote to conservative history . . . I was denied a graduate professorship at Catholic University of America by neo-conservative lobbying.” Nor did the neocons stop there. When a routine outside professional evaluation of the Elizabethtown faculty reported in 2002 that Gottfried often arrived in class “unprepared or with little thought as to what he would say” and that his students found his classes “unfocused, with often rambling discussions,” he responded by posting an article on the LewRockwell.com website complaining that he had been the victim of, yes, a “neocon attack.”

“[Clarence] Thomas calls the segregation of the Old South, where he grew up, ‘totalitarian.’ But that’s liberal nonsense. Whatever its faults, and it certainly had them, that system was far more localized, decent, and humane than the really totalitarian social engineering now wrecking the country.”
— LLEWELLYN H. ROCKWELL

FRUSTRATED ambition is not a propitious foundation for an intellectual movement. “Jobs for the lads” may be an effective slogan for a trade union, but the paleos needed to develop a more idealistic explanation for their resentments, if they were to have any hope of influencing the main body of the conservative movement. They needed an ideology of their own.

Developing such an ideology was not going to be an easy task. There was no shortage of disaffected right-wingers; but what did Samuel Francis (who had spent the early 1980s investigating subversives for Senator John East) have in common with the economist Murray Rothbard (who had cheered when the Communists captured Saigon)? What connection could there be between the devoutly Catholic Thomas Molnar and the exuberantly pagan Justin Raimondo? It didn’t help that people attracted to the paleoconservative label tended to be the most fractious and quarrelsome folk in the conservative universe.

Yet the job had to be done — and thanks to a lucky accident, there was a place to do it. In the 1970s, Leopold Tyrmand, an émigré Polish Jew who had survived the death camps, scraped together some money to found a magazine he hoped would serve as a conservative alternative to The New York Review of Books. He called it Chronicles of Culture, and based it (for Tyrmand was not a man to do things in the obvious way) in the rusting industrial city of Rockford, Ill. Tyrmand died suddenly in 1985. His successor, Thomas Fleming, shortened the magazine’s name to Chronicles and redirected its attention from cultural critique to ideological war.

Fleming was in at least one way a poor choice for the role of paleoconservative ideologist-in-chief. He is the very opposite of a systematic, deliberate thinker: a jumpy, wrathful man so prone to abrupt intellectual reversals that even some of his friends and supporters question his equilibrium. But Fleming proved himself a nervy and imaginative editor. He recruited Samuel Francis as a columnist and collaborator, and Francis was a man nobody could accuse of inconsistency.

Francis advocated a politics of uninhibited racial nationalism — a politics devoted to the protection of the interests of what he called the “Euro-American cultural core” of the American nation. He argued that the time had come for conservatives to jettison their old commitment to limited government: A “nationalist ethic,” he wrote in 1991, “may often require government action.”

So, Chronicles advocated protectionism for American industry and restrictions on nonwhite immigration. It defended minimum-wage laws and attacked corporations that moved operations off-shore. And it championed the Southern Confederacy of the 1860s and the anti-civil rights resistance of the 1960s.

The decisive year for both the magazine and paleoconservatism was 1989. Until then, Chronicles had managed to coexist with most of the rest of the conservative community. This coexistence was symbolized by the Rockford Institute, which sponsored not only Chronicles but also the Center for Religion and Society in New York, headed by Richard John Neuhaus, a Lutheran minister who had been involved in both the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam protests.

Neuhaus’s experiences as a pastor in the New York slums and his passionate opposition to abortion had led him rightward in the 1980s. But he was disturbed by the racial politics of Chronicles, and also by what he termed its “insensitiv[ity] to the classical language of anti-Semitism.” Neuhaus contemplated severing the connection between his institute and Rockford. Word of his dissatisfaction filtered back to Illinois, and, one day in May, Rockford struck back. An executive from the institute jetted out to New York, fired Neuhaus and his entire staff, ordered them literally out onto the streets, and changed the office locks. The paleos at Rockford exploded in dumbfounded rage when the foundations that had been supporting Neuhaus’s work refused to switch the money over to them instead.

The shuttering of Neuhaus’s offices brought the emerging paleoconservative movement to national attention. The incident was covered by the New York Times and commented upon by the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. It was, however, events across the Atlantic that gave the shuttering a larger importance.

At the same time that Fleming was sacking Neuhaus, the people of Leopold Tyrmand’s native Poland were engaged in their country’s first free elections since World War II. Solidarity won all but one open seat in the lower house of parliament and 92 of 100 seats in the Polish senate. Over the next six months, the Communist governments of central Europe would collapse.

The conservative movement had come to life in the 1950s to goad the governments of the West to wage the Cold War more energetically and skillfully. When NATIONAL REVIEW declared in its founding editorial that it would stand “athwart history, yelling Stop” the history it had in mind was Marx’s “History” — the “History” with a capital H that was supposed to run inevitably toward Communism. By November 1989, that History had indeed stopped — was rapidly running backward — and the great question for conservatives was, “What now?”

“How horrible to realize, ten years after the Cold War, that the real evil empire is not some foreign regime, but the U.S. military state. It bombs buses, bridges, factories, churches, and schools, expresses ‘regret,’ and then continues to do the same. A host of innocents have died from U.S. attacks — a fact which should make every patriot wince. The propaganda should also make us wonder to what extent the old Communist Threat was trumped up to plunder the American taxpayer.”
— LLEWELLYN H. ROCKWELL, “THE END OF BUCKLEYISM,” IN SPINTECH, JUNE 12, 1999

IN August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded and annexed Kuwait. Iraq plus Kuwait and prospectively Saudi Arabia would possess the world’s biggest reservoir of oil. With this vast new oil wealth, Saddam could at last acquire the nuclear weapons he coveted — and thus dominate the entire Middle East. President George H. W. Bush quickly decided that the conquest of Kuwait “will not stand” and assembled a global coalition against Saddam. The paleoconservative repudiation of the Gulf War would be their first major independent ideological adventure.

Three weeks after the invasion, Pat Buchanan declared his opposition to war in one of his regular appearances on The McLaughlin Group: “There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East — the Israeli defense ministry and its amen corner in the United States.”

It would be hard to come up with a more improbable idea than that of George H. W. Bush of Kennebunkport as warmaking servant of the interests of International Jewry. Yet over the next six months, Buchanan and the Chronicles writers would repeatedly argue that America was being dragged to war in the Gulf by a neoconservative coterie indifferent to true American interests: the “neoconservatives,” as Buchanan said, “the ex-liberals, socialists, and Trotskyists who signed on in the name of anti-Communism and now control our foundations and set the limits of permissible dissent.”

Early in 1990, Buchanan published an article in The National Interest (a journal founded, ironically enough, by Irving Kristol, who sometimes seemed to be the only person in America willing to accept the “neoconservative” label), in which Buchanan called for a new foreign policy of “America First.” And “America First” would be the slogan of Buchanan’s presidential run in 1992: more irony, because by 1992 the paleos were frankly disgusted, not merely with the rest of the conservative movement and the Republican party, but with much of America. “Last month,” Buchanan wrote in 1991, “during a week at CNN in New York, I rode nightly up Eighth Avenue in a cab. It was like passing through a different world. We are two countries; and many Americans in the first country are getting weary of subsidizing and explaining away the deepening failure of the second, and want only to get clear of it.”

Fed up as they were with the Second America, however, the paleos felt sure that they spoke for the First America with an integrity the traditional conservatives, let alone the neos, never had. Francis in particular scolded NATIONAL REVIEW’s conservatives for their isolation from America’s “grassroots.” He chose an interesting means of illustrating his point: “Of the twenty-five conservative intellectuals whose photographs appeared on the dust jacket of George H. Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, published in 1976, four are Roman Catholic, seven are Jewish, another seven (including three Jews) are foreign-born, two are southern or western in origin, and only five are in any respect representative of the historically dominant Anglo-Saxon (or at least Anglo-Celtic) Protestant strain in American history and culture (three of the five later converted to Roman Catholicism).” No wonder then that these fringe characters were able to achieve nothing more impressive than the election of Ronald Reagan and victory in the Cold War.

Now Francis had the helm of an ideological movement of his own. “[A] new American Right,” he wrote in 1991, “must recognize that its values and goals lie outside and against the establishment and that its natural allies are not in Manhattan, Yale, and Washington but in the increasingly alienated and threatened strata of Middle America. . . . A new Right, positioning itself in opposition to the elite and the elite’s underclass ally, can assert its leadership of Middle Americans and mobilize them in radical opposition to the regime.”

Buchanan, inconveniently, was himself a Roman Catholic. But his skills were manifest, and the writers at Chronicles convinced themselves that his 37 percent showing in the 1992 New Hampshire Republican primary was the long-awaited breakthrough for their Middle American Revolution. It was a false hope. Bill Clinton won the presidential election of 1992. And Newt Gingrich, impeccably Anglo-Celtic though he was, soon proved himself just another neocon: He even helped Clinton enact NAFTA in 1993. With this final betrayal, the Chronicles crowd’s last faint hope for political triumph through Middle America died.

“It is clear that neither laws nor any sense of fair play will stop this rampant U.S. arrogance. The time may soon come when we will have to call for the return of the spirit of the man who terrified the United States like no one else ever has. Come back Stalin — (almost) all is forgiven.”
— GEORGE SZAMUELY, IN “TAKI’S TOP DRAWER,” NEW YORK PRESS, JULY 11, 2001

HUMAN beings yearn to identify with something bigger than themselves. That’s why patriotism sways the heart. When patriotism falters, something else takes its place. For a good many of the paleoconservatives, that something was, for a spell, Serbian nationalism.

The Yugoslav civil wars divided conservatives. Some — William F. Buckley Jr., Richard Perle, John O’Sullivan, and Republican political leaders like Bob Dole — advocated an early and decisive intervention against Slobodan Milosevic. Others — Charles Krauthammer, Henry Kissinger, and (to drop a few rungs down the ladder) I — argued against.

Pat Buchanan, one can say, permitted a dual loyalty to influence him. Although he had denied any vital American interest in either Kuwait’s oilfields or Iraq’s oilfields or its aggression, in l991 he urged that the Sixth Fleet be sent to Dubrovnik to shield the Catholics of Croatia from Serbian attack. “Croatia is not some faraway desert emirate,” he explained. “It is a ‘piece of the continent, a part of the main,’ a Western republic that belonged to the Habsburg empire and was for centuries the first line of defense of Christian Europe. For their ceaseless resistance to the Ottoman Turks, Croatia was proclaimed by Pope Leo X to be the ‘Antemurale Christianitatis,’ the bulwark of Christianity.”

Chronicles, though, along with most of its writers, followed Thomas Fleming into a passionate defense of the Serbian cause. Even if all the war crimes alleged against the Serbs proved true, Fleming argued in 1997, “they are trivial in comparison with anything done not just by the Germans, but by Americans in recent years.” When the U.S. and NATO finally went to war against Serbia, Fleming identified himself with the enemy side: “[W]e have to be as faithful as the Serbs in preserving our heritage,” he said in a June 1999 speech, “as brave as the Serbs in fighting our enemies.”

To an uncharitable eye, Fleming and his magazine appeared to have succumbed to what George Washington might have condemned as a “passionate attachment” to a foreign country. The origins of this attachment are mysterious to me — and they clearly baffled Chronicles readers as well. At the time that Milosevic launched his wars, Chronicles had nearly 20,000 paid subscribers. By the time the Kosovo war ended in 1999, the magazine’s circulation had plunged to about 5,000. One guesses that the readers of Chronicles were not so much affronted by Fleming’s Serb advocacy as they were simply bored by it. Yet for the Chronicles writers, opposing their government in time of war seems to have been a liberating experience. In 1991 Pat Buchanan had accused the neoconservatives of enforcing the “limits of permissible dissent.” The paleocons were now defying those limits with ever-increasing gusto and boldness.

“The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people.” — SAMUEL FRANCIS, SPEECH AT THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE CONFERENCE, MAY 1994

OF all the limits against which the paleoconservatives chafed, the single most irksome was the limit placed by civilized opinion upon overtly racialist speech. Francis’s speech at the 1994 conference of the white-supremacist American Renaissance organization, for example, ultimately cost him his job as a staff columnist at the Washington Times. Today he earns his living as editor-in-chief of the Citizens’ Informer, the newspaper of the Council of Conservative Citizens, the successor group to the White Citizens’ Councils of the segregated South; he moonlights as an editor of The Occidental Quarterly, a pseudo-scholarly “journal of Western thought and opinion.”

Conservatives have had a vexed history with the topic of race. In the 1950s and early 1960s, many conservatives, including the editors of this magazine, questioned and opposed the civil rights movement, sometimes for high-minded constitutional reasons, sometimes not. Race, though, was not in those days central to conservative thinking, if only because, as Francis himself noted, the early conservative movement was so urban and northern. For the paleos, however, race and ethnicity were from the start essential and defining issues — and so they remain to this day.

Now, in one respect, the paleos have a point: Race and ethnicity are huge and unavoidable issues in modern life, and the liberal orthodoxies on the matter tend to be doctrinaire and hypocritical. But the paleoconservatives took a step beyond debunking when they advanced orthodoxies of their own. Buchanan, for example, gave an impressive speech on immigration at the Nixon Library in California in January 2000: “The last twenty years of immigration have brought about a redistribution of wealth in America, from less-skilled workers and toward employers. [Harvard economist George] Borjas estimates that one-half of the relative fall in the wages of high-school graduates since the 1980s can be traced directly to mass immigration. . . . Americans today who do poorly in high school are increasingly condemned to a low-wage existence; and mass immigration is a major reason why.” His words were persuasive, even moving, but they would have been far more convincing if they had not been spoken by the same man who had written nine years earlier that he wished only to “get clear” of those high-school graduates who had been born with dark skins.

For some of the paleos, the difficulties of non-white America provoke amused condescension. For others, this America inspires only horror. The United States, Thomas Fleming predicted in 1989, would soon be “a nation no longer stratified by class, but by race as well. Europeans and Orientals will compete, as groups, for the top positions, while the other groups will nurse their resentments on the weekly welfare checks they receive from the other half.” Some of the paleos’ racial animus is expressed via their obsessive — and even obscene — denunciations of Martin Luther King. “King bedded other men’s wives, other wives’ men, underaged girls, and young boys,” raged a columnist in the newsletter Rockwell ran before he started his website. “[M]y guess is that even holes in the ground had to watch out.”

Racial passions run strong among the paleos. And yet, having read many hundreds of thousands of their words in print and on the screen, I come away with a strong impression that while their anti-black and anti-Hispanic feelings are indeed intense, another antipathy is far more intellectually important to them.

White racialists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries have to resolve a puzzling paradox. On one hand, they believe in the incorrigible inferiority of darker-skinned people. On the other hand, they perceive darker-skinned people to be gaining the advantage over whites. How to resolve the contradiction? One solution is to posit the existence of a third force, a group that is cunning and capable but, for reasons of its own, implacably hostile to America’s white majority.

“Jewish intellectuals initiated and advanced a number of important intellectual and political movements during the 20th century. I argue that these movements are attempts to alter Western societies . . . to weaken the power of their [the Jews'] perceived competitors — the European peoples who early in the 20th century had assumed a dominant position not only in their traditional homelands in Europe, but also in the United States, Canada, and Australia.”

The author of those words, Kevin MacDonald of the California State University at Long Beach, does not quite belong to the paleoconservative club, although he does publish in The Occidental Quarterly. Yet MacDonald’s name and ideas do keep turning up in paleo conversation. On March 17, 2003, for example, VDare.com prominently posted on its homepage an anonymous letter celebrating MacDonald’s work and quoting his allegation that the Iraq war “is being fomented by Jewish neo-conservative activists based in the Bush administration, congressional lobbying organizations, and the media.” More generally, MacDonald said — and VDare.com repeated — “the most important Jewish contributions to culture were facilitated not only by high IQ but by closely cooperating, mutually reinforcing groups of Jews who were centered around charismatic leaders and excluded dissenters.”

Erstwhile NATIONAL REVIEW editor Joseph Sobran also seems to have been greatly influenced by MacDonald’s writings. After the defeat of his friend Buchanan’s second presidential campaign, Sobran wrote: “The full story is impossible to tell as long as it’s taboo to discuss Jewish interests as freely as we discuss those of the Christian Right. Talking about American politics without mentioning the Jews is a little like talking about the NBA without mentioning the Chicago Bulls.” Sobran was following MacDonald’s advice: “It is time to be frank about Jews.”

“The Bush administration should not only ignore the advice of such characters as Mr. Ledeen and Mr. Podhoretz but consider placing them under surveillance as possible agents of a foreign power.” — SAMUEL FRANCIS, IN CHRONICLES, DECEMBER 2002

WHO was the first paleo to blame Israel for 9/11? It’s a close call, but Robert Novak seems to have won the race. His column of September 13, 2001, written the very day after the terrorist attack, charged that “the hatred toward the United States today by the terrorists is an extension of [their] hatred of Israel.” Novak lamented that, because of terror, “the United States and Israel are brought ever closer in a way that cannot improve long-term U.S. policy objectives.”

The next day, Scott McConnell quoted Malcolm X on Justin Raimondo’s website: “The chickens have come home to roost.” Raimondo himself soon began work on a book that alleged that 9/11 was in the broadest sense an Israeli plot.

“Whose war is this?” Buchanan demanded to know on September 26, 2001: “Powell’s war — or Perle’s?” “Judging from President Bush’s State of the Union message,” Sobran lamented on January 31, 2002, “what began as the War on Terrorism will now be broadened to become a War to Crush Israel’s Enemies.”

“In private conversation with Hagel and many other members of Congress,” Robert Novak wrote on December 26, 2002, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon “leaves no doubt that the greatest U.S. assistance to Israel would be to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime. That view is widely shared inside the Bush administration, and is a major reason U.S. forces today are assembling for war.”

The accusations culminated in a March 2003 article by Buchanan in The American Conservative that fixed responsibility for the entire Iraq war on a “cabal” of neoconservative office-holders and writers: “We charge that a cabal of polemicists and public officials seeks to ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interests. We charge them with colluding with Israel to ignite those wars and destroy the Oslo Accords. We charge them with deliberately damaging U.S. relations with every state in the Arab world that defies Israel or supports the Palestinian people’s right to a homeland of their own. We charge that they have alienated friends and allies all over the Islamic and Western world through their arrogance, hubris, and bellicosity.”

Who were these war-mongering “neoconservatives”? At a June 2002 conference sponsored by the Institute for Historical Review, the leading Holocaust-denial group, Joe Sobran defined “neoconservatism” as “kosher conservatism.” And in his March cover story, Buchanan seasoned Sobran’s definition with his own flavorful malice. “Cui Bono? For whose benefit these endless wars in a region that holds nothing vital to America save oil, which the Arabs must sell us to survive? Who would benefit from a war of civilizations between the West and Islam? Answer: one nation, one leader, one party. Israel, Sharon, Likud.”

The echo in that previous paragraph of the Nazi slogan “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” is unlikely to have been unintentional. Yes, it was indeed time to “be frank about Jews.”

Having quickly decided that the War on Terror was a Jewish war, the paleos equally swiftly concluded that they wanted no part of it. It’s odd: 9/11 actually vindicated some of the things that the paleos had been arguing, particularly about immigration and national cohesion. But the paleos were in no mood to press their case. Instead, they plunged into apologetics for the enemy and wishful defeatism.

On September 16, 2001, Samuel Francis suggested that America deserved what it got on 9/11: “Some day it might actually dawn on someone in this country that the grown-up but unwelcome answer is that the terrorists attacked us because they were paying us back for what we had started. Let us hear no more about how the ‘terrorists’ have ‘declared war on America.’ Any nation that allows a criminal chief executive to use its military power to slaughter civilians in unprovoked and legally unauthorized attacks for his own personal political purposes” — Francis is referring here both to Operation Desert Fox in 1998 and to the Kosovo war — “can expect whatever the ‘terrorists’ dish out to it.”

It seems incredible, but there is actually more. “If, as President Bush told us this week, we should make no distinction between those who harbor terrorists and those who commit terrorist acts, neither can any distinction be made between those who tolerate the murderous policies of a criminal in power and the criminal himself.”

The 9/11 attacks sent Patrick Buchanan plunging into handwringing and pessimism. He wrote on September 28, 2001: “We are told the first target of America’s wrath will be the Taliban. But if we rain fire and death on the Afghan nation, a proud, brave people we helped liberate from Soviet bondage, we too will slaughter hundreds of innocents. And as they count their dead, the Afghans too will unite in moral outrage; and, as they cannot fight cruise missiles or Stealth bombers, they will attack our diplomats, businessmen, tourists.”

The week after the fall of Kabul, Raimondo acknowledged that though the Afghan war seemed to have succeeded, disaster lurked around the corner: “The real quagmire awaits us. . . . When the history books are written, Operation Enduring Freedom will be hailed as a great success — provided it doesn’t endure much more than a few weeks longer.” Llewellyn Rockwell would not tolerate a war that lasted even so long as that. By October 2002, he was calling for immediate and unconditional surrender — by the United States. The right approach to the War on Terror, he wrote, “as to all government programs, is to end it immediately. . . . The War on Terror is impossible, not in the sense that it cannot cause immense amounts of bloodshed and destruction and loss of liberty, but in the sense that it cannot finally achieve what it is suppose[d] to achieve.”

“The U.S. government has probably killed more people outside its own borders than any other. Or am I overlooking something?”
— JOSEPH SOBRAN, SPEECH TO THE JOHN RANDOLPH SOCIETY, HERNDON, VA., JANUARY 1992

And now it is time to be very frank about the paleos. During the Clinton years, many conservatives succumbed to a kind of gloom. With Bill Bennett, they mourned the “death of outrage.” America now has non-metaphorical deaths to mourn. There is no shortage of outrage — and the cultural pessimism of the 1990s has been dispelled. The nation responded to the terrorist attacks with a surge of patriotism and pride, along with a much-needed dose of charity. Suddenly, many conservatives found they could look past the rancor of the Clinton years, past the psychobabble of the New Age gurus, past the politically correct professors, to see an America that remained, in every important way, the America of 1941 and 1917 and 1861 and 1776. As Tennyson could have said: “What we were, we are.”

America has social problems; the American family is genuinely troubled. The conservatism of the future must be a social as well as an economic conservatism. But after the heroism and patriotism of 9/11 it must also be an optimistic conservatism.
There is, however, a fringe attached to the conservative world that cannot overcome its despair and alienation. The resentments are too intense, the bitterness too unappeasable. Only the boldest of them as yet explicitly acknowledge their wish to see the United States defeated in the War on Terror. But they are thinking about defeat, and wishing for it, and they will take pleasure in it if it should happen.

They began by hating the neoconservatives. They came to hate their party and this president. They have finished by hating their country.

War is a great clarifier. It forces people to take sides. The paleoconservatives have chosen — and the rest of us must choose too. In a time of danger, they have turned their backs on their country. Now we turn our backs on them.

http://www.nationalreview.com/frum/frum031903.asp

Michael Flaherty on C.S. Lewis, Narnia, and more

Flaherty Will Get You to The Box Office

From Walden Pond to Narnia and back home to NRO.

An NRO Q&A

One of Micheal Flaherty’s first job’s was at National Review, as it happens. The way he tells it, he would have been making me coffee. Now he’s making movies.

(You wish you left a tip for the Starbucks dude this morning, don’t you?)

Flaherty is president of Walden Media, which partnered with Disney to produce The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which opens this weekend.

I talked to Mike earlier this week about the movie, Lewis, and more. —KJL

Kathryn Jean Lopez: It’s opening weekend. Are you beaming with pride or worried sick?

Micheal Flaherty: Well, C. S. Lewis said in Mere Christianity that pride is one of the greatest sins, so since pride beaming is forbidden I guess I am just worried sick.

Lopez: In terms of numbers, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is probably going to have a not-too-bad weekend. Don’t tell me: If it meets your expectations you’re going to Disney World? Actually…What are your expectations?

Flaherty: We are not supposed to jinx things by predicting an actual number, so we are hoping for a strong opening weekend and then we hope to show some legs and have the movie play right through the New Year. I have seen the movie multiple times now and I truly enjoy it more every time. I think people will see the movie multiple times, and box-office pundits will be surprised both by its opening weekend as well as its longevity.

Lopez: Is working with the Disney company a boy’s dream or did you get a lot of grief from conservative friends? Aren’t we supposed to be suspicious of Disney? I forgot to pick up my Vast-Right Wing talking points today, so I’m not sure.

Flaherty: You can accuse me of being easily seduced, but going to the Disney lot never gets boring. There is a real excitement there, and even the squirrels are friendly. I keep telling Matthew Scully he needs to visit it with me just to check out the squirrels—it is like they leaped right out of one of their movies and they walk right up to you. Scully would be in heaven.

But even better than that, Disney has been great in understanding the importance of a faithful adaptation. And they have done a great job in keeping their cool in light of some of the controversies bored journalists tried to manufacture about this film, many of which have been covered in NRO.

They have been great partners.

Lopez: Did Walden still get to make big decisions once Disney stepped in? Did you become a tag-along? How hands-on could you be?

Flaherty: It was a full partnership in every sense of the word, but Walden did have final say on all creative matters with the film. Because of the shared vision, though, this never became an issue.

Lopez: Did you read a lot of Lewis long before you ever planned to do this movie?

Flaherty: Yup. Lewis is easily my favorite author. I was a fan of Narnia growing up but actually a much bigger fan of the apologetics. Mere C and Screwtape Letters are two of my favorite books. I remember my mother buying me Till We Had Faces for Valentine’s Day one year and then the Four Loves the following year. I had almost completely forgotten about Narnia until I volunteered to teach with a great group named Narnia in NYC that some NR friends introduced me to. It was then I started to dream about seeing a movie based on them.

Lopez: Do you have a favorite Narnia character?

Flaherty: Hands down my favorite character is Reepicheep. He is the uncommonly brave and heroic mouse in Voyage of the Dawn Treader who is a foot and a half of pure courage.

Lopez: What’s your favorite non-Narnia book by C. S. Lewis?

Flaherty: Screwtape.

Lopez: Could it be a movie?

Flaherty: I hope—there are some challenges in adapting it to the screen, but I would love to see it get made.

Lopez: There’s been a lot of attention on Philip Anschutz, your Mr. Moneybags. Tell me the truth. He’s really Karl Rove, isn’t he? You can reveal it here.

Flaherty: Never before has more attention been paid to somebody who could not be less interested in publicity. Hopefully some day a smart journalism professor will look over all of the ink that has been spilled in profiling Phil to show how lazy journalists have become. He never gives interviews, so for the past 20 years people keep recycyling and rehashing all of the same anecdotes and publishing it even though they have nothing new to say. It is easy to see what people find interesting in him though. He has amazing vision and he can see around corners.

Lopez: Seriously though. Are you part of some kind of cultural conspiracy? What’s Walden’s meaning in life?

Flaherty: We are an open book and our mission is completely transparent. We are a company named after Henry David Thoreau that wants to use media to get kids to ask the big questions so they can be independent thinkers and march to the beat of a different drummer. We get all of our project ideas from classroom teachers and librarians and we do our best to make first class productions accompanied by first class educational materials. We think that great stories have a power and ability not just to entertain, but also to educate, uplift, inspire —even transform. For this, some paranoid journalists like to impute an agenda on Walden and spin conspiracy theories about us and our sinister teacher and librarian friends.

Lopez: Is The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe a conservative movie? Is it for a religious audience? I notice there are guides to the movies circulating for religious audiences. Is that Walden’s intention?

Flaherty: The movie, like the book, is clearly for all audiences. And this is what galls some journalists. They like to neatly divide the country into two opposing sides that cannot agree on anything—especially entertainment. They have this Manichean view of the world where if people of faith enjoy something that somehow means that it cannot be enjoyed by everybody. Yet countless examples prove this wrong—musicals like Les Miserables and bands like U2 are enjoyed by people from all types of different backgrounds, interests, and philosophies, yet they both have magical and soul-stirring elements that are appreciated by people of faith.

Lopez: Is there any real sensible reason for this film to be at all controversial?

Flaherty: Nope.

Lopez: If C. S. Lewis had shown up at the premiere of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, what would you say to him?

Flaherty: Oh, K-Lo, hitting me with the college-application essay question. Hmmmm. I guess I would quickly walk him over to see his stepson Douglas, whose affection for Jack has been a real honor to his memory. It would be fun to see that reunion.

Lopez: Not that this all is not enough, but what’s coming up next for you?

Flaherty: We are in London right now filming a movie called Amazing Grace, that tells the story of William Wilberforce, John Newton, Thomas Clarkson, Equiano, and all of the great people who abolished slavery 200 ago in Britain. We are going to release the movie in 2007 to coincide with the bicentenary of the abolition in the U.K. It is our hope that the film will remind people in this cynical age that great men and women can change the face of history, no matter how insurmountable the odds.

In addition to that, we have a number of literary adaptations that are nearing completion. The first is Hoot, the next is How to Eat Fried Worms, and next Christmas we are releasing a live-action version of Charlotte’s Web. I am downright giddy about that one. Soon we will start filming Bridge to Teribithea, another personal favorite. All of our projects are on our website at www.walden.com.

Lopez: If you’re going to do more Narnia movies, do you have to film them real fast while the child actors are still young?

Flaherty: Yup. I think Skandar—who plays Edmund—has grown almost a foot in the last year. So we are racing against the clock.

Lopez: Speaking of upcoming films: When does filming on “The Corner” movie start and who are you signing up to play me?

Flaherty: We see this as the next great political drama—lots of action and intrigue. It is going to begin with all of the faulty exit polls coming in on the last Election Day and the ensuing panic. I am actually casting the Jack Fowler role first, and we are out to a rising star of a Mexican telenovela to play the part of K-Lo.

Lopez: If the movie has a big opening weekend, how much of the credit will belong to National Review for promoting it on the cover?

Flaherty: An NR cover is money in the bank for opening weekend, but when the article is penned by John Miller you start to talk about an exponential increase.

http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=NWVhZjBmZThhMzYyMjAxOTkzYTFlYWUyYzNiMWJiOGE=

Aslan as Christ

Xmas in Narnia

Have Yourself a Merry Little Aslanmas?

By John J. Miller

If ever there were a case for taking Christ out of Christmas, it’s arguably in Narnia.

There is no Christ in Narnia—there is only Aslan, the lion who dies for the sins of others and returns in glorious triumph. So instead of Christmas, shouldn’t the Narnians celebrate Aslanmas? And shouldn’t Lewis have left Father Christmas out of his books entirely?

This is more than just a rose-by-any-other-name semantic dispute, because it goes to the heart of a fundamental criticism that many people level at The Chronicles of Narnia: The books are full of maddening inconsistencies.

When we first encounter Narnia in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, for example, we learn that a permanent winter has descended upon the land. This creates a problem later in the story, as Leland Ryken and Marjorie Lamp Mead describe in their new book, A Reader’s Guide Through the Wardrobe:

Another friend [of Lewis's], poet Ruth Pitter, recalled with pleasure her good-natured “win” over Lewis, when she caught him in a textual error in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: where did the beavers obtain certain foodstuffs (e.g., potatoes, flour, sugar, oranges, milk) for the dinner they provided for the Pevensie children, given that it was winter and (by Lewis’s own setup of the story) no foreign trade was allowed? According to Pitter’s memory of the conversation, Lewis had no answer and was “stumped.”

Maybe the food was smuggled into Narnia from Calormen, a country to the south. But that’s pure speculation. And even if this were the case, it is a flaw on the part of Lewis: A good story doesn’t create puzzles for readers; it answers questions before they’re even asked. Lewis is perhaps under a special obligation to explain the food, given that the feast with the beavers is one of the most sensual passages in the book. Where did those big rodents get their chow?

The beavers create other problems as well. “There’s never been any of your race here before,” says Mr. Beaver to the Pevensie kids. As we learn later in the series, however, this isn’t true. Perhaps this can be chalked up to Mr. Beaver not knowing any better. Yet his statement is actually the result of Lewis not knowing any better. When he started writing The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, he did not plan to compose six sequels. Later books suffer from some near-sightedness that found its way into the first one.

Gee, Toto, I Don’t Think We’re in Middle Earth

Narnia simply wasn’t prepared with the meticulous attention to detail that J. R. R. Tolkien lavished upon to Middle Earth. And Tolkien famously criticized Narnia as an awkward mishmash of a world. It must have pained him to do so: He and Lewis were not only colleagues at Oxford, but also personal friends. Tolkien played a key role in Lewis’s decision to become a Christian, in what is probably one of the most significant conversions of the 20th century. The author of The Lord of the Rings might not have finished his own masterpiece but for Lewis’s unflagging enthusiasm and encouragement. So he probably would have liked to return the favor and cheer on Lewis in the writing of Narnia. Yet Tolkien was a relentlessly honest man and he could not hide his antipathy for the Narnian project: “I hear you’ve been reading Jack’s children’s story,” he told a mutual friend. “It really won’t do, you know!” (To his buddies, Lewis was known as “Jack.”)

Perhaps Tolkien was jealous that Lewis could whip out seven books in seven years—the man wrote at a delirious speed, and Tolkien couldn’t have kept pace even if he had tried. Yet his critique of Narnia contains both substance and merit. Tolkien believed that Lewis veered too close to Christian allegory. Lewis denied this, calling his tales suppositions: “Let us suppose that there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as He became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, and then imagine what would have happened.”

Maybe you have to be an English major to care about the difference between an allegory and a supposition. Tolkien’s primary objection to Narnia, however, raised another issue entirely. He thought that The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was an irritating blend of different cultural traditions: centaurs and fauns from the Greeks, dwarves from the Norse, and so on. And that’s even before we get to this strange business about Jesus, Aslan, and Father Christmas.

Lewis was a great borrower, and it drove Tolkien bonkers. In Perelandra, a science-fiction book published in 1943, Lewis makes a reference to “Numinor.” This was meant as a kind of tribute to Tolkien, who wrote of the “Numenor,” which was a kingdom of Middle Earth. Note the slightly different spelling, which may be the result of Lewis being sloppy or thinking the word’s root was “numinous.” Whatever the case, it was not in keeping with Tolkien the philologist’s carefully crafted linguistics. It was a dabbler’s error, the sort of dumb blunder that Tolkien strove to banish from Middle Earth.

The Numenor-Numinor controversy is of course an exceedingly small thing for casual readers of Tolkien and Lewis. The introduction of Father Christmas into The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, on the other hand, is obvious and jarring, even if you don’t compose elaborate letters from Father Christmas every year (as Tolkien did). Shouldn’t St. Nick just stay on our side of the wardrobe?

Kids!

Perhaps. But he does play an important role in Narnia. Lewis has a wonderful line early in the book about how the White Witch has made it “always winter but never Christmas.” If we cross out the Christmas half of it, the line doesn’t carry nearly half the punch: the witch doesn’t seem nearly so terrible, nor does the plight of the Narnians seem quite so grave. That’s especially true for children, for whom Christmas is a time of magical importance. And the arrival of Father Christmas presents the first clear evidence that the tables have turned against the witch. “I’ve come at last,” he says to the Pevensie kids. “She has kept me out for a long time, but I have got in at last. Aslan is on the move. The witch’s magic is weakening.” With that, the spell over Narnia begins to break.

It is of course possible that Lewis might have accomplished the same trick, from a narrative standpoint, without importing Father Christmas. It is also perfectly legitimate to stand with Tolkien and declare that Father Christmas has absolutely no business sledding around a fantasy world in which there is an Aslan but not a Christ. But perhaps this misses the point. The Chronicles of Narnia, after all, are written for children. My own kids love the Father Christmas scene, and I suspect that on some level they grasp its real meaning. To say that it doesn’t belong in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is to argue against the actual experience of countless readers who also have enjoyed it and grasped it. In the end, it may in fact be a very grown-up kind of critique—sober and logical, but blind to the imaginative sensibilities of kids. Can you picture an 8-year-old who would care about the spelling of Numenor/Numinor? That’s a discussion for adults—and even then, only for adults of a very certain type. Narnia, by contrast, is a great big fantasy playground—and as Lewis makes clear throughout the Chronicles, grown ups can’t go there. So maybe Father Christmas is a kid thing, and you just wouldn’t understand.

So is it Christmas or Aslanmas in Narnia? Maybe we should just leave it a mystery, like the beaver’s food. Or we could call it Xmas, using “X” in the algebraic sense of “solve for X.” But let’s remember that most kids don’t like algebra either.

If you’ve made it this far, it probably means that you haven’t yet suffered from Narnia fatigue. Here are three other pieces I’ve written for NRO on C.S. Lewis and Narnia: a general appreciation, an argument on the order in which the Narnian books ought to be read, and first impressions of the new movie.

—John J. Miller is national political reporter for National Review and the author, most recently, of A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America..

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YmQ1NDBlMjUwOTUzODk1NWFiODZkNDIyNjNiZmQ4OTY=

Who’s Afraid of C.S. Lewis?

Who’s Afraid of C. S. Lewis?

Narnia critics should relax.

By Rich Lowry

A few months ago, it seemed unlikely that the movie The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe could achieve anything like the commercial liftoff of that other film embraced by Christians, The Passion of the Christ. Controversy sells, and The Passion had about it an alleged whiff of anti-Semitism. “Narnia,” based on the beloved children’s books, has no such thing, but it turns out that the movie’s whiff of Christianity alone has been enough to stoke a roiling prerelease debate.

C.S. Lewis, the late Christian apologist and Oxford don who is the author of the seven-book Narnia series, has been the subject of critical, even contemptuous, pieces in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. The press coverage of the movie has emphasized how a (tiny) proportion of its marketing budget has been directed at—gasp!—Christians. The British author Philip Pullman has said the Narnia books are based on “reactionary prejudice,” and the British paper the Guardian attacked the stories for representing “everything that is most hateful about religion.”

For anyone who has been enchanted by the stories (100 million copies sold), this reaction must be bizarre. Who is afraid of C. S. Lewis, and why?

His frank Christianity has a lot to do with it. To put it in terms of the current war over season’s greetings, the Narnia books aren’t “happy holidays” kinds of stories, but instead verily shout “Merry Christmas!” (Father Christmas is a character in them.) Lewis’s friend J. R. R. Tolkien, also a believer, thought Lewis laid on the Christian allegory too thick. But it is also Lewis’s sensibility that irks the elite guardians of a culture that so treasures skepticism and irony. In the Narnia stories, Lewis is making the case for the opposite, for a child’s openness to what might seem impossible to the narrow “adult” mind.

In the story, four children enter through a wardrobe into a parallel winter world, Narnia, where Aslan the lion, who is the Christ-figure, and the White Witch do battle. The most important influence on Lewis’s work was his concept of “joy,” the sense of longing for a world beyond and more marvelous than our own. He always found that literature and myth best captured this sense, and the key moment in his conversion was when Tolkien convinced him that Christianity was “true myth.”

Lewis and Tolkien wanted to reinvigorate the powers of the imagination so it would be primed to detect the hints of a higher and deeper reality—“further up, further in,” as Lewis put it. A theme of the Narnia books is that the children instinctively know the right thing to do because, as Lewis scholar Jonathan Rogers explains, “they have read the right imaginative stories.” Lewis and Tolkien undertook their project against the grain in a mid-20th century that was an age of desiccated rationality.

We have gotten more desiccated since. Now everything tends to be viewed through the postmodern trinity of race, gender and sex. British fantasist Philip Pullman has said the Narnia stories are racist since the villains are dark-skinned. What does he make, then, of the aptly named White Witch, who represents Satan? Then, there’s the charge of misogyny and a sexually repressive Puritanism.

The New York Times Magazine essayist regrets that Susan, one of the children, is denied salvation at the end of the series “merely because of her fondness for nylons and lipstick,” because in other words, “she has reached puberty [and] become sexualized.” That’s not it at all. The point is that, as one character says, Susan “always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up.” For Lewis this meant losing the capacity to be childlike, with its guileless receptivity to wonderment and joy.

The Christian signposts will be lost on many viewers of the movie, who will simply relish a good yarn and its accompanying wonderment and joy. Lewis critics should relax and experience some of it themselves.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YjFlZGQ3NGI2NWMxYTY4MjMzZTc4YTNhZTI4Y2ZjMDQ=

Much Has Changed in Narnia

Much Has Changed in Narnia
Too little Lion, too much Witch, no Wardrobe.

By Thomas S. Hibbs

A wonderful scene in the second half of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian — the second film in the Narnia series, based on C. S. Lewis’s beloved books — highlights the importance of cultivating a memory of the past in the face of strong cultural and political tendencies toward decay and decline. Returning to Narnia after a one-year absence (1,300 years in Narnia time), the Pevensie children — Peter (William Moseley), Susan (Anna Popplewell), Edmund (Skandar Keynes) and Lucy (Georgie Henley) — find themselves in a cave whose walls are covered with ancient drawings. The drawings are memorials to them and their heroic feats in Narnia; it turns out that they have entered a sort of crypt built around the stone tablet on which Aslan was murdered and from which he rose to defeat the White Witch.

The sense of the remote past, as both almost lost and yet recoverable, permeates Lewis’s book. Yet, apart from the scene in the cave, the film neglects this theme in favor of grand battles and a budding romance between Caspian (in a rather lackluster performance by Ben Barnes) and Susan. Indeed, devoted readers of Lewis’s books will likely take umbrage at the many changes the filmmakers have introduced. The unsettling question they ought to be asking themselves is whether the film transforms what, following Chesterton, we might call a great romance of orthodoxy into a Hollywood bubble-gum romance.

Having issued that harsh charge, I hasten to add two qualifications. On its own terms, the film version of Prince Caspian has much to offer. It is a solid piece of entertainment, with rousing battle scenes and many moments of humor. (The CG character Reepicheep, the honorable and hilarious mouse, steals every scene in which he appears.) But Caspian is more: it contains moving portrayals of the seductive power of temptation, and profound reflections on heroism — including a lesson on how the inordinate use of violence harms the perpetrator as well as the victim. Perhaps most impressive, particularly for those who have seen the first film, is the transformation of Edmund, who remains repentant for having disbelieved Lucy and for having treacherously served the White Witch. In a splendid performance, Skandar Keynes makes Edmund’s moral development credible and palpable; he is now wiser, more faithful, and more resolute.

The other thing that needs saying about the film is that the book from which it is drawn presents greater challenges to the filmmaker than does The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. Director Andrew Adamson, who directed the first Narnia film after achieving fame for his work on the Shrek movies, takes more liberties with Lewis’s book than he did in the first film, of necessity. In the first half of Lewis’s book, he brings the Pevensie children (and his readers) up to date on the 1,300 years of Narnian history since the events related in the first book.

Lewis is doing more here than giving us a prolix prelude to a final battle. He is attempting to captivate his audience with the art of storytelling and with the superiority of real history over what passes for knowledge of the past in contemporary culture or in an ordinary academic setting. Lewis is also telling us something about the eponymous Caspian, a royal son, raised by his scheming uncle Miraz — who, it turns out, murdered Caspian’s father, and whose opportunistic desire to care for Caspian dissolves once his own wife gives birth to a son. We also learn that Caspian is from his youth a “lover of the Old Things,” in contrast to his uncle, who actively seeks to suppress the ancient and heroic history of Narnia.

Now, it makes sense to streamline Lewis’s historical narration, but, apart from the scene in the cave, the film fails to find a way to inject its version of the story with Lewis’s sense of devotion to the “Old Things.” Stressing Caspian’s longing to revive a lost way of life would have given his character greater gravity, something needed in the film to counterbalance the boyish good looks of Ben Barnes. His pretty appearance, the lack of character depth, and the filmmakers decision to focus on his innocuous flirtations with Susan render him a less than persuasive embodiment of Lewis’s main character.

That is not to say that all the changes are ill-conceived. One addition that works effectively is a longish battle scene in which Peter leads a surprise attack on Miraz’s castle, from which his army has to retreat in humiliation and sorrow, leaving behind many dead comrades.

Another addition concerns the reappearance of the White Witch, whose return is mentioned in the book as a possibility, but which never comes to pass. In the film, she returns — and who can blame them for bringing back Tilda Swinton’s chilling menace? — paralyzed in ice, which is a marvelously fitting image that recalls both her commitment to making Narnia always winter and never Christmas, and Dante’s vision of Satan as paralyzed in ice. This time, she is a powerful temptation not to Edmund, but to Peter.

The real problem with the film, I’m saddened to report, has to do with Aslan. This is due in part to the book’s relegation of him to a more marginal role than he had in the first book. On screen, he seems almost like one of the other animals — more powerful, certainly, but not all that mysterious. Except for when he roars, he is more cuddly than fearful. His admonitions to Lucy about the importance of fidelity to him come off as formulaic. A sign of the extent to which Aslan has been diminished in the film is evident in the penultimate scene, in which the children depart Narnia. In the book, they say goodbye to everyone else and then, last, “wonderfully and terribly,” as Lewis puts it, “it was farewell to Aslan himself.”

By contrast, in the film, the parting culminates with Susan’s sorrow over leaving Caspian. The scene is sweet and innocent enough, but it cultivates in the audience the mundane sense of unrealized romantic possibility, rather than the grand appreciation, both terrible and wonderful, of a cosmic romance of redemption.

— Thomas S. Hibbs is distinguished professor of ethics and culture at Baylor University and author of Arts of Darkness.

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Crowning Prince Caspian

Crowning Prince Caspian
Behind the movie.

By Rebecca Cusey

Douglas Gresham, co-producer of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, is the stepson of the author of the Narnia series, C. S. Lewis. A child when Lewis married his mother, Joy Davidman, Gresham and his brother grew up in Lewis’s household and inherited Lewis’s estate. Much of Gresham’s life has been spent safeguarding his stepfather’s legacy, and pursuing the dream of properly adapting the series into film. In a phone conversation, I asked him about life on the set and behind the scenes of the movie, which hits theaters this weekend.

What is the essential thing that they absolutely have to get right in this movie?

The underlying messages of the story are so important, and so vital in fact, to the story; [they] are the return to faith, truth, justice, honesty, honor, glory, personal commitment, personal responsibility. All those things come out so strongly in the movie and were very important to me. Also the message is of vital importance, No matter how far away we stray, there’s always just one way back.

Do you think they got Aslan right?

Oh, yes. Far better than last time even. Aslan, in this movie, has all those characteristics which were so difficult to attempt last time. We’ve taken the technology that we’ve pioneered in some respects, but we’ve pushed out again. So, [with] this huge Aslan, you get this great character who is not only a great lion and beautiful to look at, but he’s warm and he’s welcoming, and just a tad bit forbidding, all at the same time. He’s not a tame lion. It’s all there now.

This film, even more than the other, seems to embody the idea of Muscular Christianity — fighting for what is right against desperate odds — that is apparent in C. S. Lewis’s writings. Would you agree that it is there in this film?

I think it is certainly there in this film to a certain degree. What you have to bear in mind is that the Narnian side tried everything they could, even to the extent of single combat with Peter, to avoid a bloodbath; it was the evil side in the end that brought it about. And that is of course, exactly what happens in our world. At the time that they were being written, Chamberlain [made an] effort to make peace with Hitler, right up until Hitler had betrayed everything they had agreed on. And of course we see it in our world today, where we are trying, Western society is trying — desperately almost — to the mistake of rolling over and playing dead, to pander to everyone else who is attacking it, one way or another. Eventually, of course, what will happen is people will dig their heels in, just as in Narnia, and the thing will be forced upon them. I think there are causes which are important to fight for, and I think that comes out in Prince Caspian.

It resonates throughout the whole of our society. We have to become more and more conscious of that fact, by the way. Most of us go about our little lives hoping that these things will go away and just leave us alone. Well, they won’t. The forces of evil are always going to be there. We’re always going to have to fight them. As Tolkien himself said, “All wars are lost. THE war goes on.”

Did you meet Tolkien?

Yes I did. Fine man, I liked him enormously.

Can we talk a little bit about Susan and Lucy’s more active role in the movie? How do you think Lewis would have responded to that?

Well, I’ve been persuaded by Andrew Adamson, that Lewis’s attitude toward women changed to some extent after he married my mother. Now there was a wonderful occasion that epitomized this to some extent. We’d had a problem in the wood with trespassers coming into the wood, local youths breaking down the trees, carving their initials into the trees, throwing rubbish into the lake, including each other and so forth. Mother said, “Jack we’ll just build a barbed wire fence to keep them out.” Jack said, “It’s no good my dear, they’ll just cut the wire and steal it.”

So, my mother, being from the Bronx, said, “If they do that, I’ll buy a shotgun.” They did steal the wire. Well, she bought one. Small gun. Threw a few pellets, never hurt anybody. She used to blast into the leaves of the trees whenever she saw a trespassers and they all chickened out and went somewhere else.

One day, Jack and my mother were walking up the hill ahead of me. Suddenly, out from the shrubbery, leapt a young man with a longbow and a quiver of arrows, casting himself in the part of a latter day Robin Hood, perhaps. Jack said, “Excuse me, but this is private land and you really shouldn’t be here. Would you mind leaving?” The man’s answer was to put an arrow to the string and draw the bow and point it at them. Immediately, Jack stepped in front of my mother to shield her from the arrow. He stood there for a moment, a very chivalrous thing to do, until he heard my mother in tones of chilled steel behind him saying “Goddamn it, Jack, get out of my line of fire.” He stepped sideways very smartly. That whole kind of experience of my mother’s determination and personality, I think changed Jack’s ideas toward women. In the first book he said “battles are ugly when women fight,” and he was right. But in the second, he did from there on, give them an active role for fighting for truth and justice and what was real.

I’m not entirely comfortable with it, because I do believe battles are ugly when women fight. I think they’re pretty ugly to start with, more so when women get involved. I believe what George MacDonald said was very true, which is that it’s every man’s responsibility to protect every woman, first of all from himself.

So what is the role of chivalry in a world where women take part in battles?

That becomes a very difficult thing to define. I don’t really think women should be involved in active combat. I don’t think it’s fair for the men who are fighting beside them, or the men who are fighting against them. And it’s not fair for the women themselves. I think the idea that women have to become men in our current society is a very bad one.

How do you think passionate fans of C. S. Lewis will receive this movie?

I think passionate purist fans of Jack’s works are going to have some interesting surprises when they see this movie. There is no more purist, more passionate fan of Narnia than myself. After all, I grew up there. I think the people who think about changing the book to a movie will see it was absolutely essential to do what we’ve done.

How involved were you?

Well above my neck, you might say. They call me a co-producer, but so much is under my umbrella of responsibility, there isn’t really a credit for what I do. I’m involved in the development of the screenplay, involved in just about every facet of the film and everything related to it. Video games, merchandise. And of course, we’re working on the next one as well.

How often were you on set?

I spent a lot of time on set. We had some interesting experiences. We were in a valley, way in the mountains, deep in the bush of New Zealand. It rained so savagely. There was a ford to get across the little stream to get into the place. Of course the river rose. No body could get in. It was just myself and about four others were the only people left in the whole base camp. For four days nobody could get in or out. I was on set as much as my other responsibilities to the movie would allow.

What do you do when you’re not making movies?

That depends. A lot of my life is spent overseeing everything that is being done in the publishing department of Lewis’s work. My spare time is largely filled, at the moment, with chopping down a forest of prickly pears in a field I’ve just bought. My life is pretty full.

You have children and grandchildren?

We have five children and we have nine, about to be ten, grandchildren. The keenest thing about having kids is grandkids, believe me. It’s wonderful when they hand you grandbabies and you spoil them rotten and when they turn an interesting green color, you hand them back.

— Rebecca Cusey writes from Washington, D.C.

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Edmunde Burke and Ireland

Number 12, Arran Quay

Edmund Burke and Ireland

By Joseph Morrison Skelly

“Walk beside the Liffey in Dublin, a little way East of the dome of the Four Courts, and you come to an old doorway … of an eighteenth-century house … Number 12, Arran Quay.”

For advocates of ordered freedom, Number 12, Arran Quay is an important address. Why? This is where Edmund Burke was born in 1729 and lived until he was 20, when, after graduating from Trinity College Dublin, he moved to London to study law, enter politics, and shape the course of history. Burke’s career as a Whig member of the British parliament, however, has tended to overshadow his birthplace in the popular imagination. It did not go unnoticed by Russell Kirk, who opens his classic study, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, with the literary signpost quoted above.

Kirk understood that Burke’s Irish heritage had an influence on his worldview. So, too, have other scholars, including Sean Patrick Donlan, a lecturer in law at the University of Limerick and the editor of a new, compelling collection of essays entitled Edmund Burke’s Irish Identities. In his introduction, Donlan states that the volume’s purpose is “to invite discussion of Burke’s relationship to Ireland,” which is an appropriate conversation on Saint Patrick’s Day. Exploring Burke’s Irish background, in combination with some of the other more famous episodes in his career, will enhance our understanding of one of the most significant historical figures of the North Atlantic world. We will also see that Burke has much to teach his trans-Atlantic political heirs today, including reform-minded conservatives in the United States, their patriotic counterparts in the United Kingdom, and democratic citizens everywhere dedicated to winning the War on Islamic Terror.

The Great Melody
While Burke is most famous for his sustained opposition to Jacobin tyranny in Paris, which is encapsulated in his landmark treatise of 1790, Reflections on the Revolution in France, we can learn much from his preceding years as a Whig reformer, which began in the late 1750s and, for American readers, are best expressed in his famous speech in 1775, “On Conciliation with America.” Both stages of his public life, as we shall see, are more consistent than is commonly understood. At the outset of the first phase, according to Kirk, “Much in the Whig program could attract the imagination of a young man like Burke: freedom under law, the balancing of orders in the commonwealth, a considerable degree of religious toleration, the intellectual legacy of 1688.”

Where did this reformist impulse originate? Some scholars trace it, in part, to Ireland, where Burke witnessed first-hand the tenuous situation of Catholics, whose prospects were circumscribed by the self-aggrandizing habits of Anglo-Irish landlords and the residual effects of the Penal Laws (watered-down since their passage in the late 17th century, they still prevented many Catholics from joining certain professions, acquiring property, voting, or holding elective office). All of this would have cut close to the bone for Burke. He was a Protestant and a member of the Established Church, like his father, Richard (who, incidentally, may have converted in order to become a lawyer), but his mother, Mary Nagle, was a Catholic from the Blackwater Valley in Cork, where he spent time as a youth and would have encountered a Gaelic culture straining to maintain its customs, its religion and its land. In 1761 he observed these conditions again when he returned to Ireland as private secretary to William Gerard Hamilton, a member of Parliament who had been appointed chief secretary for Ireland, the second-ranking official at Dublin Castle, the seat of the British administration in the country. Spending part of each year in his native land, he grew more agitated by the corrupt Anglo-Irish Ascendancy and the enduring restrictions on Catholics. During this time, he penned one of his early political pamphlets, entitled Tract Relative to the Laws Against Popery in Ireland, which was an attack against the Penal Laws.

Burke’s official stint in Dublin, combined with his family background, may cast light on some of the public campaigns he waged. In his book Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered, Russell Kirk writes: “Detesting the arbitrary exercise of political power, Burke was led into the four great struggles of his life — his effort to obtain conciliation with the American colonies, his participation in the Rockingham Whigs’ contest against the domestic power of George III, his prosecution of Warren Hastings [the governor-general of Bengal], and his impassioned resistance against Jacobinism, the ‘armed doctrine.’ In America, in England, in India, and in France, the denial of justice roused Burke to greatness; for his Dublin Castle years had shown him how order and freedom must be kept in a tolerable balance or tension, that all may be safe together. Irish affairs became the microcosm of his politics.”

In his poem “The Seven Sages,” William Butler Yeats lends a musical air to Burke’s opposition to “the arbitrary exercise of political power.” Replacing Kirk’s England with Ireland (which Burke worked tirelessly to improve), he intones:

American Colonies, Ireland, France and India
Harried, and Burke’s great melody against it.

The Irish statesman and scholar Conor Cruise O’Brien utilizes this Yeatsian motif for the title and central organizing principle of his magisterial biography of Burke, The Great Melody. In his preface he asks, referring to the last word of Yeats’ couplet, “What was it?” His reply: “the abuse of power.” Furthermore, O’Brien asserts, “Yeats was right about the main point. That is, he correctly identified, and isolated for attention, the main areas on which Burke’s creative energies were concentrated throughout the long and overlapping periods of his career.” There were therefore benefits to Burke’s Irish legacy. It opened a window onto other regions of the British Empire suffering from misrule, like America and India; it hard-wired him with an inner early warning system receptive to rebellious sentiments; it highlighted the need for social, political and religious reforms, both for their own sake and to stave off revolution.

In retrospect, Burke’s resistance to unbridled power and his rejection of political vice are important reminders for contemporary conservatives that reform is wholly compatible with their political philosophy. A Burkean approach expands and improves upon our conception of modern conservatism: it is both a defender and a restorer of liberty. Burke represents a starting point for likeminded American citizens wedded to national renewal in accord with the timeless principles of liberal democracy.

Irish, English, British
The epitome of conservative reform in our own era is Margaret Thatcher. During her pathbreaking tenure as prime minister, she revitalized the sclerotic British economy and reinvigorated personal responsibility at home, while abroad she confronted tyranny and helped Ronald Reagan win the Cold War. Today, the United Kingdom remains a natural wellspring of conservatism, despite the Labor party’s long hold on power; the Tory party, in fact, is gaining traction in opinion polls and may be set for a return to government. Still, if the country is to remain a platform for conservative renewal it must overcome threats to its national integrity from without and within. The European Union, which is the antithesis of the Burkean constitutional model, is centralizing power in a labyrinthine bureaucracy in Brussels. Centrifugal forces in Scotland, the home of Edmund Burke’s friend Adam Smith, and similar, albeit paler, sentiments in Wales, jeopardize the unity of the United Kingdom. Imagine its unraveling. Such an outcome might have long-term consequences for political conservatism, not to mention international security. In Britain it would mark the end of three centuries of stability inaugurated with the Act of Union in 1707, the internal constitutional settlement that accelerated the nation’s rise — a point made often by Andrew Roberts, the author of The History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900. It might also undermine the U.K.’s role in the Anglo-American security alliance, the partnership that underpins NATO and the War on Islamic Terrorism.

Edmund Burke may offer a historical counterweight to the processes underway in Brussels and in Edinburgh if we reconsider his national identity. He was born in Ireland, but did that mean he was Irish? In a review of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s The Great Melody, Paul Johnson calls Burke “the greatest Irishman who ever lived.” This is accurate in terms of his stature, but we are then confronted with another query: what was the nature of his Irishness — was he a Gaelic patriot, a Jacobite enthusiast, a member of the hidden Catholic gentry, or a pillar of the Protestant Ascendancy? There is ample room for discussion. Indeed, the scholars in Edmund Burke’s Irish Identities participate in an engaging, intellectually rigorous debate about this topic.

In one provocative essay, Katherine O’Donnell suggests that Burke may have harbored Jacobite sympathies. Lingering esteem for the legacy of King James II, the Catholic Duke of York who ascended to the English throne after the death of his brother Charles II in 1685 only to be deposed three years later, was still common among Irish Catholics throughout the eighteenth century, decades after he lost to the Protestant King William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, which sealed the Glorious Revolution of 1688. O’Donnell argues that the “result of reading Burke as a ‘crypto-Catholic’ Irishman and reading his Reflections [on the Revolution in France] within the context of the Irish literary tradition is that he no longer is an ‘ungainly,’ strange, confusing or confused British statesman,” but rather “a brilliant and unique eighteenth-century Irish orator, a product of his Gaelic Jacobite upbringing and his patriotic Irish education at Trinity College Dublin.” To support this interpretation, which is compelling but perhaps overstated, O’Donnell draws on Burke’s “social origins” in Ireland, especially his maternal links to the Nagle family of the Blackwater Valley.

Whatever their exact nature, Burke’s Irish sensibilities did not sidetrack his career in England, for he rose to become a leading member of the Whig Party and a defender of an enlightened British Empire. They may have induced a spell of diplopia, however, which Nathan Wallace diagnoses in his essay, “Edmund Burke’s Anglo-Irish Double Vision in Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontent.” In an intriguing case of ophthalmological analysis applied to one of Burke’s earliest political tracts, which bemoans King George III’s encroachment on Parliamentary authority by ruling through quasi-ministers and outlines the functions of a responsible political party, Wallace’s core argument is that

the two most famous features of the Thoughts — the Double Cabinet conspiracy narrative and the defense of party politics — operate on public and private levels. On the public level the pamphlet operates as a Rockingham Whig Party manifesto, and on the private level it operates as a justification of, and guide to, what I call Burke’s own assimilation, as a new Irish man, to the English imperial system.

Wallace wisely reminds his readers that “Recovering Burke’s Irishness does not mean denying the Englishness he so frequently claimed for himself. This self-identification is crucial to understanding Burke’s political identity, and it is therefore no less crucial that we understand the dynamics of this gesture. By identifying his Englishness as an adoption, Burke signals the doubleness of his identity.”

A convincing argument is articulated by Michael Brown in his chapter, “The National Identity of Edmund Burke.” He asks the rhetorical question, “Was Burke Irish?” His answer: “Yes, but only in a limited and highly specific sense.” More to the point, and here Brown is on solid ground, “Burke’s national identity was multiple, polyphonic and integrative.” What does this mean? “In Burke’s case there was clearly a layering of identities onto each other. Burke’s Irish birth and education placed him within that nation … However, his career also supplied him with an English political identity and a British political identity, which both complicated and problematized his Irishness. Burke was, after all, an English landlord, an MP in the parliament at Westminster and a proponent of reform of the British Empire. The first two of these elements … supplied him with a set of commitments to the English nation. The third element, Britishness — which spanned not only the British Isles but evolved into a world-wide identity — both comprehended the other two facets of his political identity and articulated the relationship between them.”

Burke himself would probably agree. Without exaggerating the case, we may thus consider him British, or, more accurately, proto-British. He was proud of his Irish background, but knew where his ultimate loyalties resided. He explained as much in a Parliamentary speech refuting spurious allegations concerning his national allegiance (fueled, no doubt, by caricatures depicting him as a Jesuit and a closet Papist). Burke asserted that “he was a native of Ireland, it was true; and he conceived that much was due by every man to the place of his nativity, but this duty ought not to absorb every other; when another country was generous enough to receive a man into her bosom, and raise him from nothing, as this great country had raised him, to stations of the greatest honor and trust, and conferred on him the power of doing good to millions — such a country had claims upon him not inferior to those of that which had given him birth; it was the duty of such a man to reconcile, if possible, the two duties; however, should they unfortunately point in different ways, it was his bounden duty, either to return the trust reposed to him by the adopting country, or else consider its interests as paramount to every other upon Earth.”

Irish, English, British — this formula best describes Edmund Burke. His national identity provides an important example today. When multiplied by the countless other men and women from Ireland, Scotland, Ulster, and Wales who, like Burke, have thrived while living and working in Great Britain, it offers an alternative to those centralizing and separatist tendencies on the continent and in the country that imperil the liberty that a unified United Kingdom preserves.

“Never Succumb to the Enemy”
Burke’s commitment to the interests of his adopted land, his dedication to reform throughout the British Empire, and his defense of sound constitutional principles all set the stage for the pinnacle of his career, his implacable opposition to the French Revolution, a policy articulated in several works published from 1790 to 1797, including Reflections on the Revolution in France, An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, Letter to a Noble Lord, and Letters on a Regicide Peace. As Kirk observes, he was a “foe of arbitrary power, in Britain, in America, in India. But with consistency, he set his face against the [French] Revolution in particular and against revolution in general.” How is the latter example consonant with the first three? The year 1789 did not mark the outbreak of a limited rebellion as in 1688 or in 1776, but signaled a radical departure from tradition inflamed by the theories of philosophes like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and resulted in the concentration of authority in the hands of sanguinary fanatics like Maximilien Robespierre and Louis de Saint-Just. Burke was right, in his day, “to stand athwart history yelling Stop!” During his entire life, Kirk reminds us,

Burke’s chief concern had been for justice and liberty, which must stand or fall together — liberty under law, a definite liberty, the limits of which were determined by prescription. He had defended the liberties of Englishmen against their king, and the liberties of Americans against king and parliament, and the liberties of Hindus against Europeans. He had defended those liberties not because they were innovations, discovered in the Age of Reason, but because they were ancient prerogatives, guaranteed by immemorial usage.

What is more, “Burke was liberal,” in the noble, traditional sense of the word, “because he was conservative.”

Conor Cruise O’Brien continues this line of analysis when he writes that Rousseau’s disciples in Britain and the United States “saw the French Revolution as continuous with the English and American ones. Burke’s far more powerful mind registered both the immensity and the terrible originality of the French Revolution.” O’Brien then connects him to the ideological struggles of the twentieth century. “From today’s perspective, we can best see Burke’s writings against the French Revolution as the first great act of intellectual resistance to the first great experiment in totalitarian innovation.” Others since have sought to imitate the Jacobins.

“The first and most durable emulators have been the Marxists. Marx and Engels, and later Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, had all the qualities that Burke abominated in the French Revolutionaries: radical repudiation of all existing institutions and arrangements; absolute confidence in their own competence to build a new and far better society; willingness to kill their contemporaries in great numbers, for the supposed benefit of posterity; contemptuous hostility to all religion, and a program for its enforced elimination from the world.”

The question arises: how would this defender of ordered freedom respond to one of its greatest enemies today, namely, militant Islam? To be sure, there are fundamental differences, and we must avoid reflexive comparisons. The Jacobins promoted a political religion, while al-Qaeda adheres to a fanatical theocratic politics. The former sought to eradicate religion from society, the latter seeks to impose sharia law. In foreign affairs, Burke often counseled caution. Kirk is clear on this point: “a statesman’s chief virtue, according to Plato and Burke, is prudence.” In this spirit, some of today’s leading conservatives legitimately question the wisdom of foreign entanglements.

Yet when all is said and done, extremist Islam poses the same threat to our established way of life as the French radicals did in Burke’s day. He would espy in al-Qaeda the same evil he discerned in the Committee on Public Safety. In his masterful Letters on a Regicide Peace, he exhorted his countrymen to fight a “long war” against their enemies, and he would most likely advise the same today. In one of his last letters before his death in 1797, he urged his friends in Britain: “Never succumb to the enemy; it is a struggle for your existence as a nation; and if you must die, die with the sword in your hand.” These words could be Edmund Burke’s epitaph. They may also be our motto, on Saint Patrick’s Day, and until the “long war” is won.

— Joseph Morrison Skelly, a college history professor in New York City, is co-editor of Ideas Matter: Essays in Honour of Conor Cruise O’Brien and has served in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

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Teaching America

Teaching America
Do you know our heroes?

By William J. Bennett

These are tough times for, and in, America. We are at war, and we find that war highly controversial. Many of our political leaders have record-low approval ratings and too many are held in ignominy. Washington — our nation’s capital — is held in contempt, as a laugh line by comedians. But perhaps a greater tragedy than all of this is that we seem to no longer have any kind of reference point. For indeed, we are not living in the toughest of times, we are not living in the worst of times, nor are we fighting the toughest of wars. But try telling that to our nation’s young people; too many of them absorb too much of the negativism taught by our culture to know this.

The truth is, we’ve been in far worse shape in terms of what we’ve had to endure in this country — but we may not have been in far worse shape in terms of what we know about our country. Too many of our high-school students do not graduate high school, and of those who do, too many do not know the basic facts of their own country’s history.

This year’s National Assessment of Education Progress (our “Nation’s Report Card”) revealed that over 50-percent of our nation’s high-school students — our population reaching voting age — are functionally illiterate in their knowledge of U.S. History. Tragically, students do not begin their education careers in ignorance: if you track education progress in the 4th, 8th, and 12th grades with the Nation’s Report Card, you will see students know more in the 4th grade, less in the 8th grade, and are failing by the time they are high-school seniors. Relative to what they should know at their grade level, the longer they live and grow up in America, the less they know about it. How did this happen? Why is knowledge of and about the greatest political story ever told so dim?

Too many of our nation’s adults have taken too dark a view of their country and have not seen fit to transmit her story down to the next generation. Too many in our culture would rather point out our nation’s failings than its successes. And in our schools, too many textbooks on American history are politically one-sided (turning off those with opposing political views). Worse, and more often, many of them are just plain boring.

Yet we know the study of our history can be bestseller material when presented with the glory and romance that resides in it. This is why historians such as David McCullough and Michael Beschloss, and networks like the History Channel, remain so popular. They capture our great triumphs and tragic failures with all the greatness of those triumphs and all the tragedy of those failures intact — they don’t redact, they don’t gloss over, and they don’t dull down.

But that is not the history we give to our students. One education expert recently wrote, “students in our high schools are rarely expected to read a complete history book.” That’s a history book of any sort: a biography, a 1776, a Bruce Catton Civil War book. And, a recent national survey found that a majority of public high-school students are never assigned as much as 12-page history paper.

This is doubly tragic when we stop to consider we are not talking about just any country’s history here, we are talking about our country’s history — the country Abraham Lincoln called the “last best hope of earth.” We are, after all, a country that has prevented epidemics, improved the conditions of mankind, and saved other countries. We have fought wars for those who could not defend themselves, we have liberated the immiserated, and we are a city of refuge for foreigners as well.

With all that has gone wrong in our war and in our economy dare I repeat our merits and take a positive view? Of course I do. In the midst of a previous war’s dark days that had cost many lives and would cost many more — hundreds of thousands more — President Franklin D. Roosevelt could still say “we are a great nation” even as we fought for what he called “total victory” against an enemy that hewed to a “pirate philosophy” of fascism, even as we had just come out of the Great Depression. And, I remind that Lincoln could call us the “last best hope” only three months after Antietam, still the bloodiest day in American history.

But, America is not just the story of presidents. It is not just the study of great leaders, but, rather, of the undertaking of a great people — the study of great citizens who wisely choose how to save themselves and others, how to correct wrongs, and how to preserve what is still the greatest nation in the history of the world.

While we have our Washingtons, our Lincolns, our Roosevelts, our Trumans, our Reagans, we also have so many others — heroes in every walk of life, in every city in America. If we take on the complete study of our country again — the good, the bad, and the sometimes ugly — we will realize that for every anti-hero that we can be criticized for, there are hundreds of heroes; for every dark moment, there are thousands of rays of light to be seen through the passing clouds

Those who watched the recent Medal of Honor service for Lieutenant Michael Murphy were awestruck by the presentation to this young man’s family — by hearing of how Lt. Murphy’s “powerful sense of right and wrong,” guided him his whole life, and how he embraced from an early age the importance of “defend[ing] those who could not defend themselves.” “Murph,” as he was known by his friends, was our nation’s 3,445th Medal of Honor recipient, the highest honor our nation bestows.

Why don’t our schools take next week, as Veteran’s Day is celebrated, to start a program where they learn about “Murph” and the other Medal of Honor winners throughout their elementary- and secondary-school careers? Why not invite a veteran in to school next week? Such study would help teach our children history with real-life heroes and, at the same time, it would help repay the debt to those heroes by transmitting their stories unto the next generations. I cannot think of a greater way for young children and young adults to learn history than through the stories that make our history — and these stories deserve to be told and retold.

A time of war is a terrible thing, but it brings opportunities for teachable moments, and it is about the best time there can be to make our heroes and their cause teachable and estimable again. If we rededicate ourselves to studying our history and our people rightly, if we take the time to look at the entirety of our firmament, we will see what our Founders saw we could be, what foreigners who came here saw all along, and what we ourselves can — even today — see once again: that we have something precious here. That something is called America, where young men and women sign up to protect her each and every day in the uniform of our armed services. And it is worth the time of every young man and every young woman in our nation’s classrooms to study why.

—William J. Bennett is the author of Volumes I & II of America: The Last Best Hope — a new box set of American history (including a special audio tribute to Ronald Reagan). Bennett is the Washington fellow of the Claremont Institute .

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MGU0MTA5NDIyZDI0M2ViNDdkYWQ4NDIzYzE5OWQzMzQ=

Miracle of Plenty

Miracle of Plenty

We have a lot to be thankful for.

By Rich Lowry

To what do we owe our 20-pound Butterball turkeys, our high-definition TVs, our spacious and warm homes this Thanksgiving? Something that won’t be high on anyone’s list of things to be grateful for, but undergirds our way of life — a centuries-old economic revolution that changed the very terms of human existence.

In his eye-opening new book, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, Gregory Clark produces a chart tracking income per person throughout history. By Clark’s account, it is essentially flat from 1000 B.C. to A.D. 1800, reflecting the crushing burden of providing for our material wants in an environment of economic stasis. Then, income per person explodes upward around 1800, coinciding with the Industrial Revolution that first arrived in England. Without it, most of us would still be living poor, nasty, brutish and short lives.

How poor? “The average person in the world of 1800 was no better off than the average person of 100,000 B.C.,” Clark argues. “Life expectancy was no higher in 1800 than for hunter-gatherers: 30 to 35 years. Stature, a measure both of the quality of diet and of children’s exposure to disease, was higher in the Stone Age than in 1800. And while foragers satisfy their material wants with small amounts of work, the modest comforts of the English in 1800 were purchased only through a life of unrelenting drudgery.”

Throughout most of history, Clark argues, humankind was caught in a “Malthusian trap”: Small economic advances were outpaced by resulting population growth that made it impossible for living standards to increase. The massive productivity gains of the Industrial Revolution — driven essentially by expanding knowledge — broke the trap and created modern life as we know it.

“The richest modern economies are now 10 to 20 times wealthier than the 1800 average,” Clark writes. In these economies, it is the unskilled who have benefited most. “Unskilled male wages in England have risen more since the Industrial Revolution than skilled wages,” Clark writes, “and this result holds for all advanced economies.” There have always been very rich people. What’s changed in the past 200 years is the growth of wealth and its spread.

It all started in England, and there’s a roiling academic debate about why. Clark attributes it partly to the slow but sure spread of middle-class values in England: Literacy and numeracy increased, hours worked rose, and interpersonal violence declined.

In his new book “God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World,” Walter Russell Mead picks up the story from a geopolitical perspective. England embarked on its capitalist revolution at exactly the time when “the country that mastered this new system would gather rewards that far outstripped all the treasures of any empire in the past.” With that came world power. England reaped the benefits first, then its successor as a superpower, the United States.

The formulas for the two countries’ success have been the same: “An open, dynamic and capitalist society generated innovations in finance, technology, marketing and communications. Those innovations offered the open society enormous advantages in world trade. The wealth gained in this way provided the basis for military power that could withstand the largest and mightiest rival empires of the day.” The effect was to empower two liberal societies that had the wherewithal to beat back dictatorial challenges from continental Europe — from Napoleon’s France to Hitler’s Germany to Stalin’s Russia.

And so the miracle that started 200 years ago marches on. “Currently, industrial societies appear to be doubling their rate of technological progress every 10 years,” Mead writes. “If this continues, and there is every reason to suppose that it will, the 21st century will experience the equivalent of 20,000 years of ‘normal’ human progress.”

So long as it remains an open and dynamic economy, the United States is positioned to stay at the heart of this progress. Thank goodness for that, and pass the drumstick.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZGZmOTg4ODI3MjQ4YWIwMTViZmE5NDdiMTQ1ZDM1MGE=

Thanksgiving: American Treasure

American Treasure

Giving thanks.

By Mark Steyn

Speaking as a misfit unassimilated foreigner, I think of Thanksgiving as the most American of holidays. Christmas is celebrated elsewhere, even if there are significant local variations: in continental Europe, naughty children get left rods to be flayed with and lumps of coal; in Britain, Christmas lasts from December 22nd to mid-January and celebrates the ancient cultural traditions of massive alcohol intake and watching the telly till you pass out in a pool of your own vomit. All part of the rich diversity of our world. But Thanksgiving (excepting the premature and somewhat undernourished Canadian version) is unique to America. “What’s it about?” an Irish visitor asked me a couple of years back. “Everyone sits around giving thanks all day? Thanks for what? George bloody Bush?”

Well, Americans have a lot to be thankful for. Europeans think of this country as “the New World” in part because it has an eternal newness which is noisy and distracting. Who would ever have thought you could have ready-to-eat pizza faxed directly to your iPod? And just when you think you’re on top of the general trend of novelty, it veers off in an entirely different direction: Continentals who grew up on Hollywood movies where the guy tells the waitress “Gimme a cuppa joe” and slides over a nickel return to New York a year or two later and find the coffee now costs $5.75, takes 25 minutes and requires an agonizing choice between the cinnamon-gingerbread-persimmon latte with coxcomb sprinkles and the decaf venti pepperoni-Eurasian-milfoil macchiato. Who would have foreseen that the nation that inflicted fast food and drive-thru restaurants on the planet would then take the fastest menu item of all and turn it into a kabuki-paced performance art? What mad genius!

But Americans aren’t novelty junkies on the important things. “The New World” is one of the oldest settled constitutional democracies on earth, to a degree “the Old World” can barely comprehend. Where it counts, Americans are traditionalists. We know Eastern Europe was a totalitarian prison until the Nineties, but we forget that Mediterranean Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal) has democratic roots going all the way back until, oh, the mid-Seventies; France and Germany’s constitutions date back barely half a century, Italy’s only to the 1940s, and Belgium’s goes back about 20 minutes, and currently it’s not clear whether even that latest rewrite remains operative. The U.S. Constitution is not only older than France’s, Germany’s, Italy’s or Spain’s constitution, it’s older than all of them put together. Americans think of Europe as Goethe and Mozart and 12th century castles and 6th century churches, but the Continent’s governing mechanisms are no more ancient than the Partridge Family. Aside from the Anglophone democracies, most of “the west’”s nation states have been conspicuous failures at sustaining peaceful political evolution from one generation to the next, which is why they’re so susceptible to the siren song of Big Ideas — Communism, Fascism, European Union. If you’re going to be novelty-crazed, better the zebra-mussel cappuccino than the Third Reich.

Even in a supposedly 50/50 nation, you’re struck by the assumed stability underpinning even fundamental disputes. If you go into a bookstore, the display shelves offer a smorgasbord of leftist anti-Bush tracts claiming that he and Cheney have trashed, mangled, gutted, raped and tortured, sliced’n’diced the Constitution, put it in a cement overcoat and lowered it into the East River. Yet even this argument presupposes a shared veneration for tradition unknown to most Western political cultures: When Tony Blair wanted to abolish in effect the upper house of the national legislature, he just got on and did it. I don’t believe the U.S. Constitution includes a right to abortion or gay marriage or a zillion other things the Left claims to detect emanating from the penumbra, but I find it sweetly touching that in America even political radicalism has to be framed as an appeal to constitutional tradition from the powdered-wig era. In Europe, by contrast, one reason why there’s no politically significant pro-life movement is because, in a world where constitutions have the life expectancy of an Oldsmobile, great questions are just seen as part of the general tide, the way things are going, no sense trying to fight it. And, by the time you realize you have to, the tide’s usually up to your neck.

So Americans should be thankful they have one of the last functioning nation states. Because they’ve been so inept at exercising it, Europeans no longer believe in national sovereignty, whereas it would never occur to Americans not to. This profoundly different attitude to the nation state underpins in turn Euro-American attitudes to transnational institutions such as the U.N. But on this Thanksgiving the rest of the world ought to give thanks to American national sovereignty, too. When something terrible and destructive happens — a tsunami hits Indonesia, an earthquake devastates Pakistan — the U.S. can project itself anywhere on the planet within hours and start saving lives, setting up hospitals and restoring the water supply. Aside from Britain and France, the Europeans cannot project power in any meaningful way anywhere. When they sign on to an enterprise they claim to believe in — shoring up Afghanistan’s fledgling post-Taliban democracy — most of them send token forces under constrained rules of engagement that prevent them doing anything more than manning the photocopier back at the base. If America were to follow the Europeans and maintain only shriveled attenuated residual military capacity, the world would very quickly be nastier and bloodier, and far more unstable. It’s not just Americans and Iraqis and Afghans who owe a debt of thanks to the U.S. soldier but all the Europeans grown plump and prosperous in a globalized economy guaranteed by the most benign hegemon in history.

That said, Thanksgiving isn’t about the big geopolitical picture, but about the blessings closer to home. Last week, the state of Oklahoma celebrated its centennial, accompanied by rousing performances of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s eponymous anthem:

We know we belong to the land
And the land we belong to is grand!

Which isn’t a bad theme song for the first Thanksgiving, either. Three hundred and eighty-six years ago, the pilgrims thanked God because there was a place for them in this land, and it was indeed grand. The land is grander today, and that too is remarkable: France has lurched from Second Empires to Fifth Republics struggling to devise a lasting constitutional settlement for the same smallish chunk of real estate, but the principles that united a baker’s dozen of East Coast colonies were resilient enough to expand across a continent and halfway around the globe to Hawaii. Americans should, as always, be thankful this Thanksgiving, but they should also understand just how rare in human history their blessings are.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OGQwZTI2NDE0OTg4YWQ5NzZjOWRjNjg5NThjOGEyM2Q=

Human Rights in China: Sujiatun

A Place Called Sujiatun

Are they killing Falun Gong, for their organs?
by Jay Nordlinger

There is a horrifying story going around the world: In the northeast of China, thousands of prisoners are being held, so that they can be killed for their organs. The prisoners are practitioners of Falun Gong, the meditation-and-exercise system. The facility at which they are being held — called a “concentration camp” or a “death camp” — is at Sujiatun. Chinese human-rights activists believe that this name should cause the same shudders as Treblinka and the others.

I cannot say whether this story is true; I can say that one ought to pay attention.

Of course, “organ-harvesting” is a very familiar story: The PRC has been doing it, with prisoners, for many years. In 2001, the U.S. Congress held hearings on the matter, which caused a sensation. But the sensation died down, as sensations tend to do. Organ-harvesting has gone on, with no negative consequences for the Chinese government.

Organ-selling is a huge business for the Chinese. You can obtain organs in China as you can nowhere else: any type, and very speedily.

The subject of organ-harvesting has been revived by the discovery of Sujiatun. I will not attempt to do justice to this story in this space (as though justice could be done). I will mainly direct you to the website of the Epoch Times, and specifically to its archive on Sujiatun: here. The Epoch Times is an international newspaper whose reason for being is to tell the truth about China. Media in China itself, of course, are government-owned or -controlled.

I also wish to direct you to an article by the tireless Bill Gertz of the Washington Times: here.

How do we know about Sujiatun? Mainly through two witnesses, indescribably brave. One is a woman whose husband was a doctor who took part in the organ-harvesting; the other is a Chinese journalist, long based in Japan, who investigated the matter. Both are now in the United States, in hiding, in fear of their lives. I talked to the journalist, by phone, on Monday morning.

First, a further word about the woman: You can read an Epoch Times interview with her here, and a follow-up story here. They will give you all the details a human mind can take, and probably more. In brief, her husband became deranged by his work, unable to go on. The wife did not intend to step forward as a witness, but concluded that she had no choice.

I will indulge in just a few details. The woman’s husband said to her, “You don’t understand my suffering. Those Falun Gong practitioners were alive. It might be easier for me if they were dead, but they were alive.”

The woman also said this, to the Epoch Times: “Some poor farmers from nearby places were hired to work in the boiler room. [This served as the crematory.] They were penniless when they first came. . . . But they could scrape up some watches, finger rings, necklaces, and so on. The amount is not small.”

Finally, she said, “I would like to expose this to the international community, so those who are not yet killed can be saved. Also, I would like to expose this as an atonement for my family.”

Now to the Chinese journalist: His name is Jin Zhong — or so he calls himself for the purpose of media reports. I spoke to him when I was meeting with some Falun Gong activists in a New York conference room. One of them, Charles Lee, was recently released from a Chinese prison after three years’ confinement. He was tortured, and I will be writing about him in the next issue of National Review. Dr. Lee is a U.S. citizen, by the way.

And, in a strange twist, he bore witness to organ-harvesting, while a young medical researcher in China, years ago. Prisoners would be shot in the back of the head, and their bodies would be hustled to a waiting van. There, doctors would extract their organs; Charles Lee served as an assistant, holding the instruments. Sometimes, the prisoners seemed not quite dead, he says.

Before Dr. Lee and I talked, I was able to interview Jin Zhong by phone, using an associate of Dr. Lee’s as a translator.

For an extended report on Mr. Jin, please see this Epoch Times article. I will say simply that he found out about Sujiatun when he was investigating SARS, and the extent of the Chinese government’s cover-up of that problem. Some local officials let slip information about the Falun Gong camp, and its purpose. He could not believe what he was hearing: It was too horrific, too inhuman. But he pursued the story, and confirmed that what he had heard was true.

I ask Mr. Jin whether the officials felt guilty about this murder and organ-harvesting. He says, “Not at all.”

Mr. Jin soon attracted the attention of the police, and was twice detained. He says he was tortured, while in detention. He managed to return to Japan, and then come to the United States. His family remains in Japan, and he says they have received death threats. Obviously, he fears for his own life here in America. PRC agents have never been respecters of national territory.

For those who care, Mr. Jin is not himself a Falun Gong practitioner. (Neither is the woman whose husband performed organ-harvesting.) “I’m not even interested,” says Mr. Jin. But he is interested in humanity, and in justice. He says, “I trust that the CCP [the Chinese Communist Party] will try to kill me,” for telling about Sujiatun. His life would have been far easier if he had kept quiet, but his conscience would not allow it.

I compliment him on his bravery. He says, “You’re a journalist. You wouldn’t have done any differently, in my position.” I reply, “I can only hope that that is so.”

Is the U.S. government aware of Sujiatun? Mr. Jin says he has informed interested congressmen and their aides. And friends of human rights in the media are weighing in. Peter Worthington concluded a piece in the Toronto Sun this way: “China’s use of prisoners as guinea pigs, or as a supply to meet world demand, makes Nazi medical experimentation seem almost benign by comparison.”

No one should bet that Sujiatun will penetrate the world’s consciousness. Governments everywhere are keen on smooth relations with the PRC; media, even in free countries, seem to want to help them. The reluctance of major newspapers and TV networks to report on atrocities in China is a sad subject.

And I recall what Robert Conquest, the great analyst of totalitarianism, once told me: The world has seldom wanted to believe witnesses. Ten, 20, or 30 years later, maybe, but rarely sooner.

Testimony out of the early Soviet Union was scoffed at; these were “rumors in Riga.” Tales of the Holocaust were Jewish whining. When escapees from Mao spilled into Hong Kong, they were “embittered warlords.” When Cubans landed in Florida, they were “Batista stooges.” And so on.

There is an extra incentive to look away from persecution when the victims are Falun Gong. Many people are suspicious of these meditators and slow-motion exercisers, with their strange philosophy. And massive Communist propaganda against them has not been without an effect. Western business leaders see Falun Gong standing in their way, or at least irritating them.

I have no idea what will happen to Jin Zhong, or to the wife of the doctor, or to the prisoners who remain in Sujiatun. It may well be that, with some international attention, the Chinese government will Potemkinize the place. They have done as much before, as have many governments like them. And it could be that people will simply not care about Sujiatun, no matter what is proven.

My main hope, at the moment, is that readers will glance at the reports I have mentioned, especially those in the Epoch Times. Because, sometimes, the unthinkable needs to be thought about, just a bit.

http://www.nationalreview.com/nordlinger/nordlinger200603300722.asp

“Birkenstocked Burkeans,” “Crunchy Conservatives,” and “Granola Conservatives”

Birkenstocked Burkeans

Confessions of a granola conservative.

By Rod Dreher

Talking with a conservative friend the other day, I mentioned that my wife and I were having a friend over to dinner, and were going to serve him all kinds of delicious vegetables from the organic food co-op to which we belong.”Ewgh, That sounds so lefty,” she said. And she’s right. We’re probably the only Republicans who subscribe to this service, which delivers fresh vegetables once weekly to our neighborhood from farms out on Long Island, and at a good price. But so what? Are lefties the only ones allowed to consume quality produce? We made fun of our liberal friends who did this stuff last summer, until we actually tasted the vegetables they got from the farm. We’re converts now, and since you asked, I don’t remember being told when I signed up for the GOP that henceforth, I was required to refuse broccoli that tastes like broccoli because rustic socialist composters think eating it is a good idea.Then again, Julie and I are probably the crunchiest — as in granola — conservatives we know (hey, my bride even makes her own granola). In some respects, the life we live and the values we share have more in common with left-wing counterculturalists than with many garden-variety conservatives. What we share is a disdain for, or at least a healthy suspicion of, mass culture. It makes for interesting bedfellows.

Boston College professor Peter Kreeft discovered this phenomenon a few years ago. Kreeft said he and three friends fit John Courtney Murray’s four American political types: radical, liberal, traditionalist, and conservative. One day, Kreeft, a traditional Catholic, discovered a close affinity with the Marxist atheist in the group. What did it was driving around Cambridge and judging everyone’s reaction to a new housing development the conservative Republican had moved into. It was clean, well lighted, green, and spacious, with attractive amenities.

Kreeft and his friend Dick, the radical, thought it was an abomination, because it was ugly and therefore inhuman. The conservative said the fact that they cared about how the place looked marked them as “artsy-fartsy,” but the traditionalist and the radical argued that beauty was one of the most important things there is.

Soon, Kreeft and his radical friend found out that despite the gulf that separated them on politics, they shared a number of areas of agreement (suburbs bad; nature good; big business and big government bad; small business and small government good). Kreeft determined from this that “beneath the current political left-right alignments there are fault lines embedded in the crust of human nature that will inevitably open up some day and produce earthquakes that will change the current map of the political landscape.”

Well, maybe. All I can tell you is that the crunchy-granola lefties are often right about little things that make life richer. Take food, for example. After we married, Julie and I had to teach ourselves how to cook. We quickly discovered how much better food tastes if it hasn’t been processed. We’d go to farmers’ markets in the city to buy produce, and before we knew it, we were making and canning our own apple butter. Not only did the stuff taste dramatically better than what was on offer in the supermarket, but there was a real sense of pride in knowing how to do these things for ourselves, like our grandmothers did. We realized one day that pretty much the only young to middle-aged people we knew who cared about these things were … lefties.

We were also startled to discover how large the homeschooling movement is here in New York City, and that it’s primarily a phenomenon of the left-wing counterculture. Given our backgrounds in Texas and Louisiana, we assumed religious conservatives were the only folks interested in homeschooling. I did some reporting on homeschoolers in Manhattan, and learned that most of them did it for the same reasons we plan to: an unwillingness to trust the state schools here with something as important as our children’s education.

All sorts of things started to occur to us. The music we like — jazz, hard country, bluegrass, Cuban son — is something you can only hear on, umm, public radio or see on public television. When we began talking about buying a house, we realized we wanted something old and funky, in the sort of neighborhood that your average Republican would disdain. We found that though the Shiite environmentalists drive us nuts, there was also something off-putting about the way many conservatives speak with caustic derision about environmental conservation. Two weeks ago, some conservative friends were driving me down the Pacific Coast Highway, and I was overwhelmed by the beauty, as they are. “I’m afraid we have to tip our hats to the tree-huggers,” said one. “If it weren’t for them, much of what you see would be covered with tract houses and malls.”

Here’s something else I’ve noticed: The Granola Conservatives I know tend not to be wealthy, but labor in the creative and intellectual vineyards as writers, professors, and artists. They also tend to be religious. It’s foolish to go too far in metaphysicalizing questions of taste, but a big part of it, at least for those of us who are part of older Christian traditions, comes from learning to see the world sacramentally. In the sacramental vision, which is shared by Catholics and the Orthodox, the spirit world is mediated through the material world, which is another way of saying we experience God in creation. To someone imbued with a sacramental vision, qualities inherent in things — from the food we eat to the buildings we live in — matter in profoundly spiritual ways.

Admittedly, this is very close to what David Brooks identified as classic bourgeois Bohemian (“Bobo”) behavior. “Marx once wrote that the bourgeois takes all that is sacred and makes it profane. The Bobos take everything that is profane and make it sacred,” he writes in Bobos in Paradise, his highly entertaining foray into pop sociology. “We take the quintessential bourgeois activity, shopping, and turn it into quintessential bohemian activities: art, philosophy, social action.”

In Brooks’s view, the Bobo will spend lots of money on things he believes (though not consciously) possess the power to transfer spiritual or moral qualities to its owner. This debased form of sacramentalism is an ersatz, consumerist version of the real thing, which doesn’t fetishize objects themselves, but which is really a way of thinking about the importance of aesthetics to the good life. This may be a distinction without a discernible difference; Brooks told me that conservative writers just have to live with the fact that we share certain tastes with the predominantly liberal intellectual class. But if there’s nothing to it, and the consumer choices people make are purely a function of social determinism, then it leaves no room for the person who purchases certain products simply because the products look good, taste good or offer superior value, despite costing more. It means accepting bad beer, lousy coffee, Top-40 radio, strip malls, and all popular manifestations of cheapness and ugliness as proof that One Is Not an Effete Liberal. And that’s just as phony as anything the Bobos stand for.

Curious about the possible spiritual aspect of this phenomenon, I wrote to my crunchy-right friends Julianne Loesch Wiley (a Catholic) and Frederica Mathewes-Green (Orthodox), both of whom have long been active in the pro-life movement, to ask them how they reconciled their conservatism with their countercultural tastes. Frederica responded first, saying that she embraced her “mother-earth hippie aesthetic” in her liberal youth, and has stuck with it even though she’s now firmly in the religious conservative camp.

“What hooked me then, and continues to hold me, and what is the underlying theme of the contemporary liberal side of this aesthetic, is authenticity,” she said. “I read a piece in American Demographics a few years ago about this, that the hook for progressives is this concept of ‘authenticity,’ the distrust of mass-produced sentiment or materials.”

She thinks secular leftists, having emptied the world of God, hunger for something to anchor their lives, and seek it out in various manifestations of Boboism. As a believing Christian and a religious conservative, though, Frederica still feels a kinship with this longing, “because I find in the presence of the old and funky furniture and things I live with a reminder of the goodness of the material world God made, and visited, and fills.”

“Every single thing that comes into my house, down to the salt shakers, have to first pass a test of being persuasive, winsome, original, odd — ‘authentic.’ I think that this is a cousin to what you and Julie are doing with food and other tastes. You’re looking for true quality and refusing to be satisfied with Purina People Chow. You have your antennas up for what is real, original, worthy. And to many conservatives, that sounds stuck-up and suspiciously lefty.”

Catholic Julianne says she absorbed a lot of her “natural” ideas through her anti-abortion activism. Awe over the miracle of birth led her to study natural-childbirth practices, which hooked her up with herb-savvy Earth Mother types in Birkenstocks — “and before you know it, I was eating nutritional yeast on my baked potatoes. Eeuh! Liberal!”

Teaching her kids to read early made Julianne think that maybe the intellectually deadening public school wasn’t the best thing for them, and she became a homeschooler without quite realizing what was happening. “That’s supposed to be right-wing,” she wrote. “But I was first introduced to homeschooling by John Holt, who was left-wing. How do I know? There were certain telltale phrases he used. He didn’t trust the Establishment. He didn’t trust the government schools. But that’s right wing now. Funny how I went straight from left wing to right wing without ever once passing through a phase where I trusted the government.”

That’s an amusing line, but it also points out how so many of us depend on labels to frame our experiences so as not to be disturbed by the idea that somebody on the other side might be on to something good, beautiful or true. Somebody’s got to pioneer these things. My wife gets a kick out of the fact that she’s the only housewife in the neighborhood who carries home her organic vegetables in a National Review Online tote bag. Who knows, one of these days, maybe one of the liberal housewives doling out the Swiss chard on delivery day will ask her about the flat tax. Dare to dream, you Birkenstocked Burkeans, and pass the hippie carrots.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZTFmYmUzNGZiMGFjN2EwMDlhODk1MDg0N2UzOTlkYWE=

Martini as Metaphor

Decline of the Dry Martini
And other tales of a stumbling Western World.

By Charles Bork

Consider, if you will, the existential plea: “Waiter. Two dry martinis — up, with a twist — please.”

No. Wait. Consider this: “Five dry martinis symbolizing the decline of the West — up with twist.”

I recently had the opportunity to reprise the decline of the West using the history of the dry martini as a proxy for Western civilization. This was accomplished with the aid of a barmaid who poured five simultaneous-but-historically-diverse martinis — each with a gin-to-vermouth ratio considered daringly dry in its day. Liquid representatives of The Gilded Age, The Jazz Age, The Greatest Generation, The Worst Generation and The Postmodern Age were arranged on the bar in chronological order for this tour of the decline of the Western martini.

To standardize test conditions, each cocktail was ordered “up with twist” and “stirred not shaken.” As a group these cocktails represent the death march of a great culture: first to achievement, then to excess.

For the purpose of this experiment vodka martinis were eliminated from consideration — a decision that sparked derision in some circles, but none we care about.

Here are the recipes used:

“The Gilded Age” (c. 1895-1920) • 3 parts dry gin • 1 part dry vermouth

“The Jazz Age” (c. 1920-1940) • 5 parts dry gin • 1 part dry vermouth

“The Greatest Generation” (c. 1940-1965) • 7 parts dry gin • 1 part dry vermouth

“The Worst Generation” (c. 1965-1985) • 15 parts dry gin • 1 part dry vermouth

“The Postmodern Age” (c. 1985-present) • 3 ounces of gin • whisper the word “vermouth” over the shaker

What We Learned
We learned that America’s rise to supremacy over Western civilization — like the decline in the vermouth content of the martini over the same span of years — led first to exhilaration and power, then to depravity and despair. And we learned that 7 parts gin to 1 part vermouth is probably about right.

Western civilization can be understood as a ballet in two acts: the European todtentanz that preceded the discovery of the martini and the American shim-sham-shimmy that followed. The pivotal moment occurred in 1895 when a visually challenged bartender in Sandusky, Ohio, accidentally poured gin and vermouth into an obstructed funnel and served the resulting aperitif to an unsuspecting Amish farmer who had ordered a champagne cocktail.

Contemporaneous accounts do not speak to the gin-vermouth ratio of the Sandusky martini. And the later recollections of witnesses differ widely. The patron who consumed the seminal martini wrote in his memoirs that he had no memory of the evening at all. The unknown fraction is a subject of bitter discord to this day. Although many have tried, orthodoxy has never been successfully imposed on the martini class.

Why the Martini?
The martini glass can be seen as an evolutionary (if you believe in that sort of thing) signpost marking the human transition to a higher life form from the lower strata of animal life (and perhaps of vegetable life). Indeed the desire for a good, dry martini has the potential to span the political divide if only it weren’t for Harry Reid. It is what sets humans apart from the apes and the dolphins.

When I was young I was taught that the trait that made Man unique was the ability to make and use tools. This was a handy definition and one well liked by Man as it tended to make him look good. But the resulting sense of self-worth was revealed to be a house of cards. This came crashing down when scientists made an amazing discovery: certain highly advanced monkeys were in the habit of stripping unwanted appendages from twigs. These “tools” were inserted into ant holes and quickly removed. The resultant ants were then licked off by the genius monkeys. It was considered a delicacy. This discovery (in combination with the feminist movement) threw male self-esteem into a nosedive from which it will not soon recover. Our tax dollars are spent primarily to promote scientific discoveries such as this one.

Yet this “science” founders on the fact that Man is the only known member of the animal kingdom with the documented ability to make and consume a martini.

The Driest Martini: A Rope of Sand
All of the above can lead to but one sad conclusion: the supremacy of the dry martini is under attack. Not only by those who would substitute vodka for gin. Or chocolate syrup for vermouth. (Much could be said about those perversions but that will have to wait for another day.) No, the deconstruction of the martini by moral relativists goes well beyond even a recipe change, and flies in the face of a literal reading of the word “cocktail.”

The earliest attempts to codify the martini formula were less than ambitious. A late Victorian martini text stated:

Martini

Medium: 2 parts dry gin to 1 part dry vermouth

Dry: 3 parts dry gin to 1 part dry vermouth

3 to 1 [emphasis added]. A ratio against which freethinking men, and newly emancipated women, were bound to rebel. The seeds of discontent were sown.

The Living Martini

In the early years — prior to the Great War — champions of a strict constructionist interpretation of the martini withstood the winds of change that howled around them, clinging to the mantle of legitimacy and stifling a nascent movement of iconoclasts. But practitioners of originalism could not withstand the Jazz Age — and the undeniable fact that the 6-to-1 martini was actually a vast improvement over the 3-to-1. As Plato pointed out, “only a fool could disagree.”

The American century would also be the martini century. A century dominated by a martini not bound by a precise written formula. The tablets had been broken. The temple lay in ruins. The genie declined to return to its bottle.

And, as with the corrosive force of abstraction in 20th-century art, the march toward dry extremism could not be resisted. If 6-to-1 was good, would not 7-to-1 be better? (It was.) Just as 6 begat 7, 7 begat 8. And how could those who once advocated 8 then attempt to stand in the way of 9 without being branded hypocrites? So in 1967, when 9 gave way to 10, not a single eyebrow was raised. And in short order an alliance between the moral relativists and the logical extremists (the same coalition that produced the counterculture) led to ratios of 15-to-1 and higher.

The Joke

The final assault on the dry martini came from within. The virus was homegrown.

The joke went something like this: I would like a martini so dry that the bartender need merely whisper the word “vermouth” over the shaker.

The joke was meant to be self-deprecating: “I am such a lush that I drink straight gin.” Apparently martini drinkers used to find this funny. But even after the Thin Man movies had left the theaters, the joke remained. And by the Eisenhower administration the joke was not just a joke. It had crossed the line that separates humorous exaggeration from cocktail dogma. This dogma is the true author of the chemical formula for the modern dry martini. The slippery slope had been slipped upon. The emperor had no clothes. The dominoes had fallen.

By the time I began ordering martinis in the late seventies, some bartenders were metering the degree of martini dryness with eyedroppers and perfume atomizers. The impending void was inevitable.

When is a Martini Not a Martini?

Studies now show that the contemporary American martini has a greater likelihood of a 1-to-0 ratio of gin to vermouth than any other proportion. If you do the math, that works out to be a glass of straight gin. The mind boggles. Prior to recent history the voluntary consumption of straight gin was strictly confined to the uncouth. It was, in fact, the very definition of gauche. The slums of 18th-century London famously demonstrated this point. But in the lost and dying world of today the martini class has been taught that straight gin — far from being the preferred beverage of the loutish — is the embodiment of sophistication. The modern martini drinker is either too ignorant to know better or too fashion conscious to speak the truth — that the martini of our time is God-awful.

Each American generation has felt the need to drink a dryer martini than did the generation that came before. It is this twisted mockery of the American dream that has led to the present state of affairs. A glass of straight gin can now be served without warning as a martini.

The deconstruction of the dry martini is now complete. Even in the best case one’s martini ambitions cannot be realized absent meticulous instruction to the bartender. Harder cases may necessitate a Platonic dialogue. And, when best efforts are greeted with blank stares, cultural reeducation may be the only solution. So I call on the martini tastemakers and cognoscenti to spread the word: no gratuity should be given for martinis without vermouth. It’s not too late to prove the fatalists wrong. The alternative is mixing your own drinks.

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