Assorted Links: September 9, 2006

The New Criterion at 25

Much cause for rejoicing, as the second greatest cultural publication in the English speaking world celebrates its silver anniversary with a special double edition.

With this issue, The New Criterion embarks on its twenty-fifth anniversary season. Twenty-five years—a quarter century: yes, it is a long time, but how quickly the years have passed! A lot has changed since September 1982. Back then, there was still something called the Soviet Union, a minatory, intractable behemoth which, for most observers, seemed destined to lumber on indefinitely. In August of that year, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dipped to 776—that’s seven hundred and seventy-six—and many were the bulletins alerting us to the impending “Death of Equities.”

By 1982, we’d suffered through the disgusting spectacle of the Ayatollah Khomeini and the brazen economic blackmail of OPEC—how many of our current political woes were engendered by our inadequate response to those assaults!—but al Qaeda was not yet a twinkling in the mullahs’ eyes. No one (near enough) had heard of email, cell phones, or the internet, and the words “multiculturalism” and “political correctness” had yet to be enlisted to register the burgeoning pathologies they named. The university, then as now, was essentially a one-party state, its reflexive, hermetic leftism still untroubled by such broadsides as Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind.

To those victims of modern public education wondering what the greatest cultural publication in the English speaking world is, you can find it here.  To think it's owned by the same man who owns Fox!  In full honesty, however, page per page the New Criterion is probably best.

Hitler Lectures at Oxford

Even the Britain of Neville Chamberlain never sank quite so low as this.

This Sunday, on the eve of the fifth anniversary of Sept. 11, Iran’s former president, Mohammed Khatami, will speak before Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and give a talk titled “Ethics of Tolerance in the Age of Violence.” This is outrageous.

Iran is the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism. Khatami’s government jailed Iranian students who spoke out against the theocratic regime, and his intelligence service murdered leaders of an Iranian opposition party. For him to lecture Americans on ethics and non-violence is as obscene as a child molester instructing his victims on the importance of respecting individual rights.

Harvard defended Khatami’s visit, claiming we must have an “open dialogue” with Iran and allow for a “free exchange of ideas.” But there can be no “free exchange of ideas” between a killer and those he seeks to kill--or between a brutal dictatorship and the free nation it seeks to annihilate.

Let’s stop appeasing Iran and make it clear that those who threaten the United States will not receive an “open dialogue,” but swift destruction.

TED KENNEDY’S CAR HAS KILLED MORE PEOPLE THAN MY GUN

Gimme Shelter, asks the NRO's Bernadette Malone, and finds it on Long Island.

Just as homosexuals living in the Bible Belt might face difficulties finding nearby gay-friendly vacation spots (or so I glean from travel sites on the web), New York’s embattled minority — conservatives — are similarly in a pickle.  Where to summer, free from protest, persecution and ridicule?

Where can a style-seeking but otherwise right-thinking New Yorker enjoy the sand and surf on weekends, and not have to suffer the Left’s mindless Bush-bashing and anti-war foment?

Where can she rest assured she won’t encounter the Clintons and their smarmy entourage? Certainly not Martha’s Vineyard.

The Hamptons would be an option, were it not for the presence of Alec Baldwin, Puff Daddy, and the rest of the “Page Six” Pantheon.

The answer, fellow conservatives, may be little-known Shelter Island, where the Vast-Right-Wing Drinking Society (that is, me and my friends) pooled our modest resources to rent a summer home, two and one-half hours away from tediously liberal Manhattan.

Mr. Blair and the Ghost of Mrs T.

The British political classes had flashbacks to the fall of 1990 this week, with an assassination attempt on the British PM's political life.  Those with long memories will recall that the overthrow of the Iron Lady, by her Wet enemies, fatally weakened the Conservatives.  While the lamentable John Major did narrowly win the 1992, with no small thanks to the Sun's famous election eve attack on Neil Kinnock's Labour, over the longer term the party was destroyed.  Thatcher, like Blair, was a modernizer who greatly antagonized the Old Guard.  In Mrs T's case everything rankled.  She was a woman from the lower-middle classes, who had fought tenaciously for nearly a decade to enter Parliament.  Her style was abrasive, her conduct of party and government affairs business like, even her voice, high pitched and headmistress-like, grated the Tory patricians.  The cosy life of the Tory Wets, the gentle glide from Eton, Harrow or Winchester to Oxbridge and to the Commons, or even for the humbler born men like John Major, was very rudely interrupted by the Thatcher Revolution. 

Old Labour was similarly disturbed by the New Labour Revolution.  Blair did not invent New Labour, credit for that goes to the late John Smith who, in a twist worthy of Victorian politics, or a BBC mini-series, died suddenly, bringing his lieutenant to the leadership.  The youngish Blair brought a brashness of style to his conduct of party affairs matched with a smarmy Clitonesque public image.  The Old Labour mandarins, both the TUC leaders brought low by Thatcherism and the pipe-smoking intellectuals who backed Michael Foot, were not amused.  Neither Major nor Brown were representatives of the Old Guard, but they benefited from an accumulated hatred of the their predecessors.  The post-1990 divisions have left the Tories an ideologically empty hulk, any shift to the right or left likely to re-salt the unhealed wounds.  Don't expect anything different from a Brownite Labour Party.

Harperization

More done in ten months than Chretien in ten years.  We have the beginnings of not merely something different and desperately needed, but perhaps even something great.  What impresses one most about the Prime Minister is that he is taking the risks no Conservative leader before him would have dared to take.  He has been cautious, on economic reforms and social policy in particular, but on Afghanistan, on the Senate, on the CBC (see this week's Western Standard, now on newstands but not the web) and on the Wheat Board he has talked and acted.  He looks like he's for real.  Change at a moderate pace, but real change.  Senate reform is tricky yet the dream of an elected Senate is at hand.

The federal government will introduce a bill this fall that would allow Canadian voters to directly elect senators, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Thursday.

Harper made the comments as he became the first prime minister to ever appear before a Senate committee.

He came to the committee  to push for passage of another Senate-related bill, which would set term limits for senators.

That bill, which was introduced last spring, would set eight-year term limits for senators, who are currently appointed by the government of the day, and can serve until they are 75 years old.

"The government isn't looking for another report. We are seeking action," Harper said.

"The Senate must change and we intend to make it happen."

Harper said he's flexible on details of the bill, saying the term limits could range from six to nine years.

However, he added that his Conservative government is seeking limits that are not based on the "antiquated criteria of age."

From Each According to His Needs.....

.....To Each According to his Ability to Loot.  Deroy Murdock on the Unholy Unions.

Just as transparency rules now obligate corporations to pry open their books, the Bush Administration insists that unions more thoroughly disclose their expenditures.

This spending mainly comes from dues forcibly collected from rank-and-file members. The $197,033,161 that the United Auto Workers (UAW) squeezed out of its members last year, for instance, represents 64.2 percent of its $306,747,724 in revenues. The National Educations Association (NEA)’s equivalent figure is 86.4 percent. Union members make. Union pooh-bahs take.

During the 2004 elections, the Center for Responsive Politics reports, unions spent at least $61,484,080 in political contributions—87 percent to Democrats, 13 percent to Republicans. That year, according to a CNN exit poll of 13,660 respondents, 61 percent of union members voted for Democrat John Kerry, while 38 percent supported Republican George W. Bush.

One hundred top union executives made at least $280,000 annually, not counting benefits. And among them, 93 percent are male. NEA president Reg Weaver made $438,920, plus benefits. At his headquarters, 335 officers and employees scored $100,000 or more, averaging $140,977, before benefits. The typical teacher makes $47,808, NEA calculates. “You are better off representing teachers than being one,” one labor analyst laments.

Taliban Jack

Courtesy of Also Canadian

Just A One Line Samba

Mao falls down the memory hole.

HIGH SCHOOL students in Shanghai are learning from a new standard world history text that drops wars, dynasties and communist revolutions in favour of colourful tutorials on economics, technology, social customs and globalization.

Socialism has been reduced to a single, short chapter in the senior high school history course. Chinese communism before the economic reform that began in 1979 is covered in one sentence. The text mentions Mao Zedong only once - in a chapter on etiquette.

Almost overnight the country's most prosperous schools have shelved the Marxist template that had dominated standard history texts since the 1950s.

Supporters say the overhaul enlivens mandatory history courses for junior and senior high school students and better prepares them for life in the real world. Critics say the textbooks trade one political agenda for another. They do not so much rewrite history as diminish it.

JPMorgan, Bill Gates, the New York Stock Exchange, the space shuttle and Japan's bullet train are all highlighted. Mao's Long March, colonial oppression of China and the Rape of Nanjing are taught only in a compressed history curriculum in junior high.

Still in Trudeaupia

Whatever success Stephen Harper may bring let there be no doubt we are still very deep inside Trudeaupia.

A majority of Canadians believe U.S. foreign policy was one of the root causes that led to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, and Quebecers are quicker to criticize the U.S. administration for its international actions than other Canadians, a recent poll suggests.

Those conclusions are found in a newly released poll conducted by Léger Marketing for the Association for Canadian Studies.

The poll suggests that 77 per cent of Quebecers polled primarily blame American foreign policy for the Sept. 11 attacks. The results suggest 57 per cent in Ontario hold a similar view.

When participants were given the option of choosing more than one cause for the attacks, two-thirds blamed Islamic fundamentalists and their anti-Western views, while a third pointed the finger at Israel and its position in the Middle East.

Canadian opinions have hardened against the United States and its role on the world stage, said Jack Jedwab, executive director of the Association for Canadian Studies. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have contributed to a change of heart among people, he said.

While no poet, I was inspired to write the below after the reading the above:

Ode to the Noble Victim

Ode to the noble victim,

Taking it every which way. 

Never a thought of fight, never a cry of despair. 

His cheeks, he turns again and again, oh how blue and battered they have become! 

Hail to the noble victim!  Let us weep together!   

Let us share our anguish!  Let us share our tears! 

Better to suffer.  Better to die. 

To fight like a man?  How vulgar, how vile.

Feel your tormentors pain as your own.

Sympathize always, never disdain.

Pain is noble, vengeance a sin.

Defense mere aggression, strength a weakness within.

Let us bow, let us cow-tow, let us pray we never grow angry or vain.

Hail to be noble victim!  Hail noble Canadian!

Party Like It's 1945

Progressive never seemed so out of date.

Left up to the NDP grassroots, to paraphrase, what a wonderful world it would be.

Closer to home, the state would immediately expropriate all of the Canadian assets of all of the oil companies -- without compensation -- and turn them over to the lucky petroleum workers otherwise left behind by the fall of communism.

But let's not stop there. In the land of socialist dreams, the NDP "is committed to implementing social ownership" (read nationalization) of just about every major economic sector including banking, health care, insurance, manufacturing and (gulp) mass media.

First and foremost, Canada would immediately withdraw from Afghanistan. (But before that, a bunch of Dippers were yesterday forced to withdraw wording in a resolution that referred to Canadian troops propping up "a U.S. puppet government of human-rights abusers, drug traffickers and warlords ... and ... acting like terrorists, destroying communities, killing and maiming innocent people.")

Failing a voluntary cut-and-run, the NDP will "seek redress in the appropriate court to have our illegal occupation of Afghanistan cease."

In future, forget about Canadian peacekeeping missions anywhere -- the NDP "rejects the use of military intervention as a tool for peace."

While the image of Jack Layton smoking an opium peace pipe with Taliban insurgents is irresistible, it would be, as many bloggers have noted, short lived.  The interesting bit here is its sheer unreality.  Do they really believe that Jack!, or any other metrosexual Western politician, would last more than a few minutes in Afghanistan without an armed escort.  The important thing to understand about the modern Left is its essential presumption.  They believe in the re-distribution of wealth, without bothering to understand how it's created.  They believe in peace and negotiation, ignoring the cultural and intellectual principles needed to sustain both.  You can't negotiate with totalitarians because what they want is total control.  Any "deal" is impermanent because demands for re-negotiation will always come, regardless of how generous and understanding the agreement. 

My contention that the Left is a religion is only somewhat hyper-bold.  It lacks the trappings of religion and of course is either agnostic or atheistical.  This probably includes that great, but now fading, auxiliary of the Canadian Left; the United Church of Canada.  The Left is a rationalistic religion.  It takes an arbitrary point, say peace or poverty, and regards these as first principles.  It is never asked why poverty or peace or racism are good or bad, it is merely stated that they are good or bad.  Taking poverty as an essential, and declaring it a bad, the Leftists then goes off to campaign against poverty.  Where does poverty come from?  What is it?  Why are some people stricken poor and others escape this mysterious force? Explanations are needed, if only for polemical purposes, and are vague and unconnected.  It's capitalism. It's racism.  It's the education system.  It's government cutbacks.  It's the rich hording all the wealth.  None of these arguments stands by itself or is related to any other, except as rather imaginative conspiracy theories, found on certain websites and in many university lecture halls. 

Try it yourself.  Ask a Leftist how capitalism causes poverty and watch the blather fly.  There is no causal connection, just a crude syllogism.  Capitalism is bad, poverty is bad, therefore the first bad created the second. In this sense it is very much like a religion.  It is unlike a religion as most religions come with a sophisticated cultural baggage that informs their arbitrary assertions.  The current Pope, when denouncing some aspect of modern culture - not always the right aspects and not always the right way, alas - can draw upon two millennia of theological argument and tradition, of which he has an impressive grasp.  Aside from a few half remembered bromides, from his days as a York Poly Sci prof, Jack Layton is pretty much running on Marxist gas fumes.  This is also, incidentally, why it's much more fun, and important, to read and criticize what comes out of the Vatican than what comes out of NDP headquarters.  Socialism is a flash in pan and Jack's watered down version even more so.  When you're dealing with B16 you're with the real deal, fully participating in what Mortimer Adler called the "Great Conversation."  B 16 knows this.  Most of the better conservatives know it too.  The debate that started with Plato and his rebel pupil Aristotle in that Attican grove is still going on.  Strangely Jack Layton, a professional Academic and intellectual, grasps this far less than Kate McMillian, who has a commercial arts diploma.  A knock against our academics and praise for our what Ayn Rand called the uncommon common man of North America.

Marching As To War

The National Review edges toward the inevitable, open war with Iran.

Stopping the bomb will require us instead to hasten the diplomacy to its inglorious denouement and think very seriously about our military options. A preemptive air strike is a nasty thing to contemplate. The mullahs could retaliate against us in Iraq (either by attacking our forces or by increasing their support for the Shiite militias). They could sabotage tanker shipments in the Persian Gulf, causing a spike in crude-oil prices. They could back terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. But the alternative — a nuclear Iran — is vastly worse. Even if the mullahs never used their arsenal, its simple existence would deal a catastrophic blow to U.S. interests. It would effectively give Tehran a veto over U.S. military action in the region. Since the nuclear facilities are protected by the Revolutionary Guard — rabid ideologues who operate with a high degree of autonomy — a weapon could conceivably be transferred to terrorists without the central government’s okay. And an Iranian bomb would likely produce a regional arms race and multiply the number of Middle Eastern nuclear powers. This too would raise the likelihood that a weapon of mass destruction will fall into terrorist hands; and by making it harder to determine where a detonated bomb had originated and retaliate against the guilty party, it would give the jihad that much more incentive to push the button.

Bush has made forfending that possibility his presidency’s raison d’être. We believe he means it. But we wonder how much longer he will wait before abandoning “solutions” that are anything but.

Happy and Glorious

The monarch still reigns in Australia; and will for sometime to come.

Today’s 20-somethings show a growing disinterest in the idea of an Australian republic.

A new poll reveals a significant drop in support for an Australian republic among 18 to 30-year-olds in WA over the past two years. A similar study in 2004 found 53 per cent supported the notion of a republic — a figure which has now dropped to 38 per cent; it’s in free fall.

If a referendum on any republican model were to be held now, support among young voters would be likely to sink to a point well below the 38% recorded.

There is no reason why these results would be much different across the nation

This is consistent with trends elsewhere in Canada and New Zealand. Republicans will have to rethink the theory that the monarchists who spoilt their republic idea back in 1999 will eventually die out. Clearly that is not going to be the case.

In the same poll, 73 per cent of respondents wanted to retain the Australia flag. Just one in five would like it changed.