"Right-wing extremists"

The recent Austrian elections saw gains by far-right parties. The death of one of their leaders, Jörg Haider (at four times the legal alcohol limit, author of the carnage on the right), brings to mind an important debate in the blogosphere and elsewhere about the nature of Europe's anti-immigration and anti-Islamization parties.

Europe is facing some tough choices, too long put off, about its immigration policies and how they will impact Europe's political future. Will Europe's cities become Islamicized and start sprouting "countries within countries" -- a return to the medieval practice of fragmented sovereignty and theocratic legal systems? Consider that Britain has now endorsed shari'a courts for civil and personal status cases, with the full force of of the state behind them, and you'll see that it's no hypothetical question.

Liberal journalist and historian Ian Buruma has recently written about how important it is to listen to voters' concerns about such issues. Such questions and concerns are generally ignored by Europe's elites, leaving voters frustrated and prone to vote for fringe parties as a protest.

... to see the rise of the Austrian right as a revival of Nazism would be a mistake. For one thing, neither [far-right] party is advocating violence, even if some of their rhetoric might inspire it. For another, it seems to me that voters backing these ... parties may be motivated less by ideology than by anxieties and resentments that are felt in many European countries, including ones with no Nazi tradition, such as the Netherlands and Denmark.

In Denmark, the hard-right Danish People's Party is the third-largest party in the country, with 25 parliamentary seats. Dutch populists such as Rita Verdonk, or Geert Wilders, who is driven by a paranoid fear of "Islamization," are putting the traditional political elites -- a combination of liberals, social democrats and Christian democrats -- under severe pressure.

And this is precisely the point. The biggest resentment among supporters of the right-wing parties in Europe these days is reserved not so much for immigrants as for political elites that, in the opinion of many, have been governing for too long in cozy coalitions, which appear to exist chiefly to protect vested interests. In Austria, even liberals admit that an endless succession of social democrat and Christian democrat governments has clogged the arteries of the political system. It has been difficult for smaller parties to penetrate what is seen as a bastion of political privilege. The same is true in the Netherlands, which has been governed for decades by the same middle-of-the-road parties, led by benevolent but ... paternalistic figures whose views about multiculturalism, tolerance and Europe were, until recently, rarely challenged.

And opposition to such developments hardly makes one a "fascist." The European Left has worked tirelessly to vilify anyone who questions or objects to its project of civilizational suicide. For the most part, the media slavishly parrots this line.

Actually, European parties of the democratic Right are easy to identify and distinguish from fascist parties. The distinctive historical characteristics of fascism -- a closed society and economic system; extreme forms of chauvinism, bordering on racism; contempt for democratic politics and worship of violence and violent leaders -- are less relevant today than certain other hot-button issues.

The most obvious are antisemitism and attitudes toward Israel. Even more important is the question, how do the local Jewish community and Israeli embassy feel about the party in question? Answers to such questions are strongly correlated with deeper attitudes: What is the party's attitude toward political democracy? How does it feel about Islamification, as a social phenomenon? As a political-legal phenomenon? Specific questions better illuminate the issue: for example, are they hostile to the Bosnian Muslims persecuted by the Serbs? If so, what is the nature of their hostility?

An even easier way to make the distinction is to ask, which European figures of the recent past do they admire and mimic? Does the list include conservative, democratically-oriented figures like Churchill, De Gaulle, Adenauer, Thatcher, or the last Pope? Or is the list populated with names like Mussolini, Hitler, Antonescu, Milosevic, or Le Pen?

On a very relevant, hot-button issue, the far-right, quasi-Nazi parties of Europe have been quietly shifting toward support of radical Islam, in spite of their anti-immigrant rhetoric. Austria's Freedom Party, for example, is strongly opposed to the combined American-European attempt to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons.

Asking the right questions and not fudging the answers are all that is needed to sort this issue out.

(Read this post from earlier this year about the Islamicization debate. See here and here for related posts from last year.)

The fall of the Kyoto Accord, continued

Here's one more sign of the end of the Kyoto era. No country that signed the Accord a decade-plus ago has met its carbon dioxide emissions targets.

The conventional wisdom was that Britain had come closest and showed that significant reductions in CO2 emissions were possible. But the conventional wisdom is wrong.

The respected Stockholm Environment Institute, in York, has done its own CO2 emissions audit and found that Britain's emissions have been rising along with everyone else's, at a similar pace. The official figures demonstrate how open the entire issue is to manipulation.

Does cultural property make sense?

The postwar concept of "cultural property" is increasingly intruding on museums and their ability to offer a cornucopia of the world's material culture. It sounds like a good, liberal idea: returning things to their countries of origin. The classic case is apparently the Elgin Marbles, parts of the Parthenon and other classical Greek ruins removed by Lord Elgin (the British ambassador to the Ottoman empire) in the early 19th century and placed in the British Museum. But even though Elgin was criticized at the time, it's hard to see how he did anything but good.

Like many such ideas, it's actually more politically correct than liberal. It's based on a weird inversion of liberal values -- the value of diffusing knowledge, especially to the general public that goes to and supports museums -- mixed with bogus history. Ben McIntyre of the London Times has a look over here and finds the whole movement questionable at best.

The Elgin Marbles themselves, once their full history is understood, are a perfect example. When Elgin removed the marbles from the Parthenon, there was no modern Greek state to claim them. In fact, at the time, few Greeks knew or cared about the leftovers of classical antiquity. Athens was controlled by the Ottoman Turks, and the Parthenon was a military fort. The Greeks were fighting a war of independence, heavily supported by the British, and eventually won in 1833. Elgin spent about £75,000 (about a couple million dollars today), part of it to pay the Ottoman government, the only government there at the time. And it's clear that the friezes would have been even more damaged than they are already were at the time, if they had been left on the Parthenon, exposed as it was to rifle and artillery fire. The Parthenon had already been badly damaged in previous wars.

There are many other examples of the same mix of selective and garbled history and chauvinism, like Kennewick Man. Discovered in 1990 in the Pacific Northwest, this skeleton, wrongly claimed by certain American Indian tribes as a ancestor, is of unknown origin. Fortunately, it's still open to scientific study. Only through the willful PC ignorance of history and acceptance of cultural chauvinism by whoever's anointed and designated as "oppressed," while rejecting the cultural chauvinism of "white Europeans" or whoever's the latest designated "oppressor," can bad ideas like this get a foothold. But wait! Aren't the Greeks white Europeans?

Anyway, as McIntyre argues correctly, the material culture of the past deserves to be shared more, not to be monopolized.* This is another example of our "post-liberal" culture: Enlightenment ideas (here, a shared past "owned" by no one) opposed by superficially "progressive," but in reality, parochial and narrow, agendas.
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* Meaning that the British Museum, say, should be sharing more and not itself act as a monopolist. In some cases, works could be moved permanently elsewhere, if there is a museum that can care for the objects in the same way. What's bogus are the legal and historical arguments often given and used in court cases.

The end of Europe? I

But it would seem that if despotism were to be established amongst the democratic nations of our days ... it would be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them .... [T]his same principle of equality which facilitates despotism, tempers its rigor .... I think then that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything which ever before existed in the world: our contemporaries will find no prototype of which will accurately convey ... the idea I have formed of it, but in vain; the old words "despotism" and "tyranny" are inappropriate: the thing itself is new; and since I cannot name it, I must attempt to define it ....

.... Above this race of men [would stand] an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances - what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range, and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things: it has predisposed men to endure them, and oftentimes to look on them as benefits. ... [T]he supreme power then ... covers the surface of society with a net-work of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided: men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind ... might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom; and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people. Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions; they want to be led, and they wish to remain free: ... they strive to satisfy them both at once. They devise a sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the people. They combine the principle of centralization and that of popular sovereignty; this gives them a respite; they console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians. Every man allows himself to be put in leading-strings [harness], because he sees that it is not a person or a class of persons, but the people at large that holds the end of his chain. By this system the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master, and then relapse into it again .... [T]hey think they have done enough for the protection of individual freedom when they have surrendered it to the power of the nation at large. This does not satisfy me: the nature of him I am to obey signifies less to me than the fact of extorted obedience.

- Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1838)

More than a year ago and several times since then (see here and here), Kavanna took a look at the situation in Europe and came to rather negative conclusions. But there's only so much a few blog postings can convey about this profound and many-sided topic. More comprehensive are the armful of excellent books on Europe that have appeared in the last few years: Bruce Bawer's While Europe Slept (2006), Mark Steyn's America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It (2006), and Walter Laqueur's The End of Europe: Epitaph for the Old Continent (2007). Laquer's book is a shocker, a sign that the trend is serious and no mere epiphenomenon. The author of the earlier Europe in Our Time: A History (1992) - a laudatory account of Europe's post-1945 reconstruction - Laqueur's view of Europe has obviously changed in recent years.

While all these books are important, Claire Berlinski has the distinction of kicking off serious discussion in the US with a stream of articles and her book, Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis is America's Too. Berlinski writes regularly for the Washington Post, National Review, etc., and now lives in Istanbul. She's even written a couple of well-received novels. Menace in Europe was published in late 2005. Nothing has happened since to lessen its validity and much that re-validates it.

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Before starting with Berlinski's book, we need to clear away some myths that get in the way of informed discussion of contemporary Europe. There are three major misconceptions. One is that what's happening in Europe doesn't matter to America. This myth has some currency on the center and right of American politics. Two other myths are still widespread among American liberals and leftists. These are the "Europe is more sophisticated than America" myth and that stubborn urban legend, "It's all W.'s fault, and the problem will vanish when he leaves office." None of these myths is true.

What's happening in Europe does matter - Europe is the West's "other half," and if Europe fails, the United States will need a Plan B for many things. And what happens there is paralleled, in certain ways, by what happens here. Nor is it all, or even mainly, W.'s fault. European anti-Americanism has a history stretching back to the 1920s, to the immediate aftermath of part one of Europe's civilizational suicide. It surged in the 1970s and early 80s, died down afterwards, then reappeared in the late 90s, with globalization and Europe's glaring failure in Yugoslavia. While Bush's actions and political style have aggravated the problem, anti-Americanism has also dissipated somewhat compared to a few years ago - but it will not disappear when he leaves office. Fresh events and new personalities will keep the kettle boiling. As for European sophistication, read on and judge for yourself.

Part of the problem is that older Americans have a distorted picture of Europe picked up in the immediate postwar period, when much of Europe's traditional culture was still alive; and that all Americans have misleading experiences as tourists spending time admiring an older European civilization that isn't where and how most Europeans live today.

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The most painful chapter of Menace in Europe is the one on Britain. It is, in part, an excursus on Britain's Muslims, largely of south Asian origin, and the heritage of British imperialism. But it also, by comparison, makes telling observations on Britain's non-Muslim former imperial subjects and why, upon immigration to Britain, they have so few of the problems that Muslims do.

The causes are partly socioeconomic: many, although not all, of Britain's Muslims come from villages; the other immigrant groups are overwhelmingly educated, urban, and middle class. The causes are also partly connected to the history of the Indian subcontinent, spanning the whole of British-ruled India before 1947 (encompassing modern India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh). Britain's empire in India was at first strictly economic-exploitative, run by the private East India Company, the same whose tea was dumped in Boston Harbor in a well-known incident. Later it became a political entity - an empire within an empire - created at the expense of India's minority Muslim rulers, the Mughals. The British Raj, first unwittingly, later wittingly, became a powerful force on behalf of India's Hindu majority, its non-Muslim minorities, and (after 1920 or so) its women.

This mixed Anglo-Indian heritage is visible today in India, but especially in Britain, where the south Asian Hindus, Christians, Parsees, and Sikhs do well, but the Muslims often do not. The baleful heritage of the Deobandi school of Islam, south Asia's verion of Wahhabi or Salafi Islam, sticks out clearly in this generation of anti-assimilated south Asian British Muslims and their attraction to Islamic militancy.

Berlinksi's most fun chapter is that on the French port city of Marseille. Although it might surprise some of her readers (it shouldn't), her evaluation of France, the French, and France's secular republican ideal is very positive, even as she acknowledges that that ideal has probably outlived itself and met an insuperable barrier in the form of Islam.

Affectionate yet disapproving is her other chapter on France, an extended and satirical take on antiglobalization activist José Bové, exposing the layers of Europe's mystical and apocalyptic movements that stretch back 1500 years, to the origins of modern Europe. Here we are treated to the successive reincarnations of the charismatic romantic mystic, with his striking eccentricities and strong sex appeal. Until the 18th century, they were religious revolutionaries, proclaiming the coming of heaven on earth, the abolition of wealth, rank, and distinction, and (before the Reformation) demonizing the Jews as the people of Satan. The first modern (secular) revolutionary of this type was Rousseau, the founder of leftism and creator of the "noble savage" myth - the origin of all politics of adolescent rage against modern civilization. Modern Europe's angry, mystical political movements are secularized re-creations of these older religious movements, with virtually the same themes.* The chapter is a mixed-mood piece because Berlinski herself feels disturbed by the anonymous nature of globalization and questionable nature of modern factory farming and food production, harmful to animals and sometimes to humans. The spectacular British case of "mad cow disease" just underscores the point.**

The mosht dishtuurbing chapter is that covering Germany and its famous heavy metal band, Rammstein. (They're all over the Web - see here.) Berlinski uses Rammstein as a foil to explore the return of nihilistic late Romanticism - Expressionism - as a feature of German kultur. This is a crucial theme in modern German history, Germans as the people of nihilism and the people of Faust. Important German thinkers (Goethe, Nietzsche, Thomas Mann) were themselves acutely aware of this aspect of "national personality." You can't imagine Rammstein's songs sung by anyone, say, French or Italian. British and American heavy metal bands are about personal rebellion and angst. But in Germany, where music exposes the national soul, juvenile angst is automatically political, with an unmistakable esthetic familiar from the 1930s and 40s.

While French, British, and American Romantic tendencies have usually taken the form of personal rebellion, and its political form consists of delusional searching for the noble savage somewhere else - among workers, brown and black people, or among animals - in Germany, Romanticism was xenophobic from the start: the German Romantics decided that they didn't need to look elsewhere for noble savages. Rather, they felt that the Germans themselves were the noble savages, possessing deep Germanic "culture" in opposition to the superficial and materialistic Anglo-Franco-American "civilization" or the "mere barbarism" of the Slavs. This view, increasingly important in the 19th century, became, after 1918, the sickness of much of German-speaking Europe. In exploring this history, Berlinski's personal venom is evident here, understandable given her family's history in Germany. This disapproving chapter is not at all affectionate.

Germany sadly remains a crime scene still cordoned off after all these years, with people continuing to stand around and wondering what the hell happened. Germany's civilized and semi-civilized neighbors have all peered into the gloom of the dark Teutonic forest. They squint and scratch their heads.

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Berlinski's final chapter, "To Hell with Europe," seems flippant at first sight. But she doesn't mean, to hell with France, or Britain, or Germany, etc. Her point is the "persistence of national personality." When she writes "to hell with Europe," she means just that: to hell with the false unity of the EU, the pretense that Europe's real nations have been made to go away, and that Frenchmen, Britons, Germans, etc., are now all just Europeans.

The modern West has its origins in the Dark Ages that immediately followed the collapse of the western Roman empire, which was replaced with a variety of what historians once called "petty kingdoms, dukedoms, and principalities." Europe in some ways has never left that state. The barbarian peoples - the Celts, the Germans, and later, the Slavs and others - rebuilt civilization from what was left in the Roman wreckage, including the Church. Modern Europe has rejected these sources of its civilization, leaving an immense spiritual, cultural, and political void. Into the void step what Berlinski calls "black-market religion" (Bové) and "black-market nationalist hate/nihilism" (Rammstein). No pan-European unification project since the end of the Roman Empire has succeeded - not the Catholic Church, the Holy Roman Empire, the Hapsburgs, the Bourbons, Napoleon, Hitler, or the Communists - in spite of the attractive appeal of new religions and utopias. In reminding her readers of these facts, Berlinski is passing on an essential perception of modern Europe's history, its arc from origins to finish.

Berlinski recommends some sensible changes as a necessary start to saving Europe - none of them is original, as she acknowledges: reforming its deadly economic mix of overregulation and unsustainable entitlements; dealing with Islamic extremists - both as individuals and institutions - in a more consistent and punitive way; applying Western legal and social standards equally to Muslim men and women without apology. (This is one of a number of her points of admiration for the French, whose policy towards Islamic radicalism is one of zero tolerance.) Major changes will happen soon: Europe's social democratic systems will either be reformed or collapse; its demography will change dramatically in the next generation; the political unification project will fail. Some of these changes are already starting. Other possibilities are more speculative.

Menace in Europe has a fragmentary form, which might at first make it seem like a jumble. But its thematic and stylistic unity is powerful; Berlinski grabs her readers and shakes them, saying "See?" and "See?" She has a Web site of her own, and you can listen to a podcast interview with her here.
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* I mean identical in some cases. For example, the program of the anonymous German Revolutionary of the Upper Rhine, circulating in manuscript just before the Reformation, called for the expulsion or extermination of the Rhine Valley Jews, the end of Germany's economic relations with the outside world, the independence of a unified Germany from the Papacy, and the creation of a new religion mixing Christianity and a restored pantheon of old German gods. Reading it, you get confused: is it from 1500 - or 1933?

Then there's Joachim from the Italian town of Flora: his speculative tripartite theory of history, published in manuscript around 1300, postulated a three-stage historical evolution leading to an Age of Pure Spirit, where everyone would be living equally in a barracks or a monastery. The tripartite stuff sounds a little like Hegel and a lot like Marx; the equality of the barracks and the monastery, like the pre-Marxian socialists whom Marx himself ridiculed as "utopian."

In laying bare the religious and utopian origins of the modern West's extremist political movements, Berlinski and the rest of us are profoundly indebted to the works of Norman Cohn, especially his classic In Pursuit of the Millenium (1957). Cohn's work explodes the claim that these modern movements made about themselves, that they were "scientific," "progressive," or "enlightened." There's nothing scientific or enlightened about Marxism or race theories; these movements repackaged tribal, mystical, and apocalyptic ideas in a superficially modern garb of pseudoscience. Environmentalism bears strong traces of the same.

** Consider too America's industrialized food production, with its heavy use of subsidized corn, bestowing upon us the dubious blessings of corn syrup, corn feed, and ethanol.

A guide for the perplexed II

In the last posting, I pointed to Britain as the new odd man out in the Euro-Trio. Again, what gives?

One sign is the surge of antisemitism that began in the late 1990s. Although far-left antisemitism and anti-Zionism are not new in western Europe - they first reappeared in the 1970s - they derive new power from their synergy with the Islamic radicalism now common in Britain's cities, among its second- and third-generation Muslims of south Indian extraction. The first signs appeared in popular culture (for example, Zadie Smith's novel White Teeth and Udayan Prasad's film, My Son the Fanatic). Next was the explosive growth of Afghanistan- and Pakistan-bound and trained terrorists living in or coming from Britain. Law enforcement officials in continental Europe and the US began to bitterly refer to "Londonistan" - indeed the name of Melanie Phillips' excellent book on the subject.

But there's more disturbing aspect to this sudden return of antisemitism. The phenomenon is historically most prominent and dangerous when a country or a whole civilization experiences an existential crisis of the first order. Antisemitism is a powerful outlet for an otherwise fractured society to direct its hatreds and problems outward to a ready scapegoat. Jews have unwillingly been thrust into this role before, and Europe seems unable to shake the habit. Today, the aftereffects of European imperialism (the sudden and unplanned jerking of the Islamic world into modernity; post-imperial immigration to the metropoles) and the inability of European countries to successfully integrate their Muslim populations have fractured these societies and destroyed their confidence - they're unable to live politically and culturally with Muslim immigrants, yet cannot live economically without them. Jews, both in Europe and in Israel, are again a convenient escape from reality: it's really all their fault. With Europeans unable to master their current difficulties in a workable and humane fashion, wacky conspiracy theories and irrational hatreds grow instead.

Britain also faces internal fracturing, as the central government in London negotiates with the regional Scottish and Welsh parliaments over federalism - a new and disorienting idea in Britain, one of Europe's oldest unified states. The peculiar evolution of the Western left in the face of its discrediting is also at play here. By the 1970s, classical Marxism of the old-fashioned kind was dead. The hard left mutated into new forms in the 1960s and 70s - cultural leftism, political correctness, the sorts of the things you see here in academia, Hollywood, and the news media. Outgoing Prime Minister Tony Blair's "New Labour" had the opportunity to defeat these forces for good in the 1990s and was supposed to have reoriented the party to toward the center and greater viability. He was the center-left's answer to Thatcher, much the same way Clinton was the Democrats' answer to Reagan. Blair carried it off, but the hard left didn't disappear in the UK. Instead, he and his allies were led into a compromise that has come back to haunt him and everyone else. The far left today doesn't care about the working classes - what it wants is control of the culture, so it can brainwash the next generation with its authoritarian mumbo-jumbo of political correctness and multiculturalism. Blair, not grasping their importance, gave control of cultural and educational matters to the hard left, while he took the apparently more important bits, politics and economic policy. The far left gave up class warfare and socialist economics. But while Blair was busy reforming the post-Thatcher welfare state, the far left got, in exchange, unchallenged control of Britain's official cultural life, its schools and universities, trade unions, and government-owned news media.

This is the origin of the recent attempts by Britain's unions (always farther to the left than America's) to boycott Israeli universities. These attempts were defeated, but only after a two-year effort. Of course, these are the equivalent of what we call public-employee unions - they're not your grandfather's unions and feature no sweaty proletarians. Drifting away from the Old Left, they have fully swallowed the "cultural" or "new" left identity politics and search for scapegoats for all imperial sins, real and imagined. Jews and Israel have now become, not for the first or last time, whipping boys for European extremist movements.

But Britain has a longer tradition of elite antisemitism that should not be neglected. The "new" antisemitism traces from the late 90s back to the 1973-74 oil embargo, the rise of "Palestinianism" (it won't do to call it nationalism), and the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and counterassault on the PLO. Until the late 90s, our view of this issue was shaped and perhaps warped by the Cold War. Further perspective is possible by looking farther back into the earlier twentieth century, the 1920, 30s, and 40s. Here we encounter the anti-Jewish prejudices of Britain's interwar upper classes (a phenomenon far more marginal before 1914, by the way). A figure like George Galloway, for example, cannot be understood apart from this modern tradition of elite antisemitism and strong affinity for foreign dictators and populist demagogues on the part of the educated classes and self-styled "radicals" - the same tradition that gave us Unity and Diana Mitford and Lord Haw-Haw.* Of course, people now have less shame and more incentive, given our media-driven exhibitionist culture, to let it all hang out, so to speak. In the 1930s, only those who had really gone around the bend put on such public displays. And we mustn't forget resentment over the accelerating loss of empire and displacement by the US (definitely found on the left as well, usually without the guts to admit it). The intellectual classes were hardly immune - exemplified by the once-important historian Arnold Toynbee and his antisemitism, opposition to Zionism, and extraordinary rationalizing for the Armenian genocide.

What's stunning about these developments, is how opinions and tendencies once (correctly) viewed as far-right and reactionary poison, have now become an everyday staple among the postmodern left. For more about the tangled origins of the "new" antisemitism, see here.

What's happening in Britain now is not at all like Germany in the 1930s or even Russia and Romania in the early 20th century. It's more like Austria and France in the late 19th century. Both countries had just been humiliated by Germany. While their economies boomed throughout that period, the growth was uneven in both time and in its effect on different social classes. Both countries experienced political and social turmoil. Today, the rise of the EU and the possible break-up of the United Kingdom have combined with the vicious political correctness of the far left and the radical muzzein's call to leave Britons' confidence in, not only their present institutions, but basic political principles, badly shaken. To follow the argument of English doctor Theodore Dalrymple, the "rebarbarization" of Britain is a real possibility. While the world wars and the end of empire left mid-century Britain materially damaged, middle-class decency and intellectual leadership were still solid. These apparently can no longer be counted on, although many in Britain are deeply unhappy about this.**

A few years ago, Richard Wistrich vividly spelled out the profound and accelerating shift in Britain:

None of this is to say that British culture is inherently or overwhelmingly hostile to Jews. Great Britain, which was the birthplace of liberalism in its modern political and economic senses, continues to be a liberal society today, with a healthy democracy, a free press, and an independent judiciary dedicated to protecting individual liberties. Indeed, in the last several centuries, and through World War II, Great Britain was, relative to the rest of Europe at least, a model of tolerance. Nor does it follow that the Jews of the United Kingdom are about to enter a dark era of persecution or the curtailment of basic individual rights.

What it does suggest, however, is that the widely held image of Britain as a realm uniquely hospitable to its Jewish citizens - similar in this regard to the United States, Canada, and other English-speaking countries - no longer seems accurate. In dry numbers, Great Britain has become home to a wave of anti-Semitic violence second only to France in all of Europe. Considered more substantively, anti-Semitic sentiments, motifs, symbols, and methods have gained a legitimacy in British public discourse that enjoys little parallel in the Western world.

Today the United Kingdom stands at a crossroads. Great ideological battles - over European unification, the effort to reassert elements of sovereignty in Scotland and Wales, and the future of long-standing traditions such as hunting and the monarchy - have brought about a profound erosion of the very idea of Britain. But when nations are so deeply unsure of the stability of their values and the security of their future, anti-Semitic sentiment often bubbles to the surface, as people deflect blame for a nation’s problems instead of addressing them head-on. For this reason, it is often said that the way a nation treats its Jews is a litmus test for its true character. As Britain’s subjects ponder their future among the community of nations, they would do well to keep these lessons of the past in mind.

These developments also give the lie - again! - to the absurd idea widely-held by American liberals that Europe is more sophisticated than the US or worthy of American imitation. The truth is very different. For an update on the situation, see here.

But - Europe's resurgent post-Cold War demons: that's another posting - or two, or three.

POSTSCRIPT: Some observers are struck by the fact that a significant number of the propagandists and leaders of the boycott movement are Jewish - but this should be no surprise. Pair them up with Islamic radicals, and inward-looking self-hatred meets outward-directed aggression. It's like one of those "high affinity" reactions you learned about in high school chemistry: acid-base, alkaline-halide: a violent encounter between sadism and masochism - and a strongly bound molecule emerges.

A people's vices are often related to their virtues. The rise of the self- and Jew-hating post-imperial left in Britain has been facilitated by the ingrained English sense of fair play and tolerance for eccentricity. (Something similar was at work in the 1930s appeasement era.) It is precisely because of Britain's long tradition of tolerance that far-left and radical-Islamic antisemitism have run so rampant there. But the rise of political correctness in Britain has not gone unresisted.† On the Tory side, the criticism of the Blair-era rampage of academic and media elites has been trenchant. These elites have more influence in Britain than do their opposite numbers here. But that does not mean their critics have disappeared.

Counterboycotts have been proposed, but they need to be painted with a finer brush and properly directed. General boycotts of Britain are not warranted.†† These are not, after all, government policies. In fact, instead of drawing the boundaries around countries, we can understand and fight these ideas and these people better if we draw boundaries around "the media," "academia," and "far-left activist organizations." Then all those people in Britain who are irritated by political correctness end up on the right side of that boundary. And the boundaries are international - we can see all of these same PC tendencies at work here as well - they just lack the concentrated clout they have in Britain.
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* Familiar to any student of British politics and foreign policy in the 1930s and echoed, for example, in Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Remains of the Day and the movie based on it.

** As suggested by the striking success of Conn and Hal Iggulden's anti-PC The Dangerous Book for Boys, written to counter the simultaneous dumbification and couch-potato-ization of at least half of the West's adolescents. Listen here to an interview.

† A British book published recently, Robert Irwin's Dangerous Knowledge, is a comprehensive and irrefutable critique of Edward Said and his noxious influence on Orientalism (study of the Middle East). It's the most important book on the subject in decades.

Strikingly, while Irwin is sympathetic to the Palestinians, he goes out of his way to point out the large contributions to modern Oriental studies by Jewish scholars (German, British, American, Israeli, and Ottoman/Middle Eastern). Irwin firmly rejects the attempt to annex the intellectual life of our or any society to "political correctness." However you come down on some burning current issue, the forming of meaningful opinions and of successful policies for the Middle East by outsiders is impossible without real knowledge. What "Middle East studies" needs is more - not a Edwardian ban on - free inquiry and discussion. While knowledge alone can't make our decisions for us, what's dumber than a willfully uninformed opinion?

Since Said was educated at elite Christian boarding schools and came from an Anglophile family, he was himself a personal link between the snobbish Christian and bourgeois antisemitism of the pre-war decades and the new-style anti-Zionism of the radical left - once he doctored his autobiography and reinvented himself as an oppressed noble savage.

†† Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg recently canceled appearances at a number of British schools because of the attempted boycotts. He hasn't engaged in or called for a general boycott of Britain, however.

A guide for the perplexed I

There is a great deal of ruin in any country.

- Adam Smith

The new French president, Nicholas Sarkozy, recently visited the US and gave an exceptionally fine speech to a joint session of Congress. You can find it here, translated. (Although Sarkozy can understand English, his speaking and writing are shaky. So he spoke in French.) It's certainly one of the best speeches a foreign leader has given in the US in many years. Many liberals were nonplussed by it, since it contradicts their fantasies about Europe. Conservatives were pleased, but confused - after all, he's French.

What gives? It's explained here, but I'll add something else: the critical problem with France, from the mid-1960s on, was the dominant Gaullist dispensation that did not view France as part of the West. Instead, it was supposed to constitute its own realm, with a foreign policy often divergent from Western interests vis-a-vis the Soviet Union and the Middle East. Although the Socialists brought French foreign policy back in a more sensible direction in the 1980s, the Gaullist approach dominated through the end of Chirac's presidency this year. This, in spite of the fact that since the early 1990s, France has been becoming a "normal" country, sharing more and more culturally and socially with the rest of Western Europe and - quel horreur! - the US. Its foreign and economic policies were the late in reflecting this evolution and often seemed stuck in another era. "Official" France did not view itself as being in the same boat as other Western countries, even though, in fact, it has been continuously since the industrial revolution and the rise of Germany and Russia in the late 19th century.

All of that has changed in the last few years. One reason is economic-demographic: France, like the rest of western Europe, can no longer afford its welfare state. Over a third of the country, in effect, doesn't work, while the rest support them. And it does not have enough younger workers to pay for generous retirements (starting at age 53 or so) or for students to remain in school until their mid-30s. Its labor market rigidity, however, also prevents younger French Arabs from entering, or from entering at a high enough level to contribute their full economic potential to the French economy and tax coffers. No doubt, French politicians of the last two generations thought they were being clever by buying off these "youths" (as they're often called when they riot) with welfare, instead of doing the harder but better thing of integrating them into the work force. Much of social integration is economic: when you work in a country's economy, you've taken some big steps towards integrating into that society. Of course, there's more to it than work and money, which don't capture the political and social dimensions of integration. But still, it counts for a lot. When it's missing, disaster results.

Which brings up a second reason: the French are now fully awake to the problem of unassimilated Muslim enclaves growing in their cities. This development poses the most serious threat to France's social cohesion and political sovereignty since the decline and collapse of the Third Republic before and during World War Two. What's more, it's not a matter of defeating a foreign army and pushing them out. The younger Muslims are French citizens, but they are frequently far less assimilated than their parents and grandparents, who originally immigrated to France. Western Europe's post-1945 cultural-religious-political vacuum leads these restless "youths" to look elsewhere for moral and intellectual guidance - with radical Islam being the most popular choice. The French of European culture and descent are frightened of what's grown up in their midst, and their governments until recently were reluctant to talk about the problem in public. Although France has a tough system of antiterrorist laws, courts, and police that has been successful in stopping Islamic terror attacks in the last 15 years, the reality of this problem - like so many of Europe's problems - has been carefully hidden from the public by political elites and the media. A variety of substitute hate objects - Israel and the US prominent among them - fill the void. Only in the last few years, with the problems now so serious that elites can no longer hide them, has the French public begun to wake from its welfare-state narcosis. The formerly high-handed and somewhat secretive French elite was forced to turn to the public at large and run a competitive politics for the first time in decades. The last elections featured four major parties; Sarkozy and his followers in the center-right party (the old Gaullist coalition) swept the field, in part by acknowledging realities that everyone sees but often refused to admit.

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When we look at Europe's three most important countries - Britain, France, and Germany - a curious spectacle presents itself. France, a frequent irritant to the US in the last 40 years, has swung around to a position of broad agreement with the US, in spite of conflicting views about Iraq. Germany also now has a leader of the center-right, Angela Merkel, an "Atlanticist" of the Kohl-Adenauer type, broadly similar to Sarkozy. But Germany is in a strange position. Unlike France and for obvious reasons, it has not been allowed or allowed itself to exercise an aggressive policy of national interests. While the French have done this vigorously since the 1960s, they often pursued misguided policies - but at least they pursued something. The commitment of Germany's political elites to Western democratic values is real, and they are consistent in opposition to Muslim antisemitism in ways often not true of their French or British counterparts. But such an orientation is essentially reactive and defensive, and it's unclear if that is enough to halt the spread of Islamic radicalism among Germany's growing Muslim population. A weak national government and power decentralized to the German laender (states) and cities, imposed by the Allies in 1945, is the price of a defanged Germany no longer threatening to its neighbors.

The odd man in this trio is now, strangest of all, Great Britain, once America's most dependable ally in western Europe and creator of the original Jewish National Home in Palestine. The long shadow of post-1945 American dominance of the English-speaking world, the end of the Cold War, and Britain's loss of its empire have left it politically hollowed out. While Tony Blair and his government were strongly pro-American and firm on the need to oppose Islamic radicalism, the political elites of Britain have been headed in a different direction since the early 1990s. Britain's official culture of politics and education have been overrun with particularly noxious form of political correctness. It would be reversing cause and effect to say that PC has weakened Britain's national identity. But the rapid and unchecked growth of Islamic radicalism in London and other British cities has created as serious a crisis there as in France; the difference is that Britain, unlike France and the US, lacks clearly articulated and universal liberal and democratic values. Its political culture and national identity have depended historically far more on the unwritten and even unspoken. It seems odd that this should be so; after all, Britain is the cradle of modern liberty, constitutionalism, and democratic practice. The triumph of liberal, democratic, and market-economic values in the modern world is due largely to Britain and its former colonies.

Nonetheless, the weakness of Britain's domestic culture and politics, its inability to face down Islamic radicals, and the spread of intellectual and moral corruption in the face of such challenges are unmistakable. The next posting will explore why.

Debating the clash of civilizations

I've posted before on the "clash of civilizations" (Islam vs. everyone else) theme - why it's happening and that it's happening (in the face of denial and wishful thinking). Check out this video from a recent debate in London on just that theme. Two of the participants (Douglas Murray and Daniel Pipes) are brilliant, while the other two (Ken Livingstone and Salma Yaqoob) are revealing in a very different way. Livingstone in particular shows how far the European left has gone in its Islamist sympathies.

Strange, you say - isn't the left supposed to be "progressive" and all that? No - that's so 1930s. The left today is driven by little more than hate. The growing left-Islamist alliance screams this fact loudly and clearly to anyone ready to listen and draw the obvious conclusion.
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An important related development is the self-abasement and self-abnegation of Jews on the left and the corrosive effect this has been having lately on mainstream American Jewish life. An important essay on this subject can be found here (PDF; requires registration), by Alvin Rosenfeld of the University of Indiana. For stating the obvious so simply, the article has provoked "controversy" - as reported by the Times - meaning, some people can't stand that much probing honesty. The Times article refers to leftists as "liberals" - another nice, evasive euphemism we're now so used to, we don't think about it. Leftists (motive: hate) become "progressives" (sounds: warm and fuzzy) become "liberals" (sounds: innocuous and mainstream). Such journalistic obfuscation is how leftists acquire the respectability and legitimacy they crave.

More to come on the blinders of mainstream Jewish institutions in a future posting. The phenomenon of Jewish self-hatred would take more than a posting - more like a book, or a whole library. It's already been written too, but the books are old and musty, and many are in German. It's a subject that needs a thorough reconsideration, translation, and updating. You could do worse than start with this article on George Soros, a delusional megalomaniac with his own billions, rather than some sheik's. Soros is on his way to becoming a 21st-century cross between Ross Perot and Henry Ford - except Soros is Jewish. His billions are now going towards buying out the Democratic party.
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Apropos of Jimmy Carter, check out this close examination of his post-presidential career. It seems not so much "I'm-still-president" delusions as a mixture of narcissism, bitterness, and a distinct messianic-martyr complex. He's a "good" peacemaker beset by "evil" Jews - sound familiar? It's Mel Gibson again.

Why America is not an empire

America as empire is nonsense, of course, but there you are. You hear it incessantly from the Left, with its monumental narcissism and historical ignorance. Even people who should know better use the terminology of empire, but only at the price of serious distortion.

What is an empire? An imperial relationship is when people A rules people B without any consent or input from people B. It's a political, not an economic, concept. Empires have been important in the development of civilization because, until the last few centuries, they were the only successful large-scale civilizational units. Only in recent times and certain places, has a new and more advanced type of civilization appeared, one based on common consent and self-interest, undergirded by the "social contract." (See here, here, and here for this all-important feature that makes modern societies modern.) Its characteristic political unit is not the empire, but the nation-state, because its characteristic political principles are individual citizenship and self-rule by representation, not rule by outsiders.

It's useful to be reminded of where actual empires come from and what they look like to clear the air of this pseudo-question. Historically, empires have arisen when a people develops a large advantage over neighboring peoples in organization, technology, surplus wealth, and military prowess. They are typically exporters of surplus people and (with modern empires) of surplus capital. In their mature forms, they are also exporters of political order, as they encounter neighboring peoples who lack the same skill at organization and are often either primitive or decadent. The exported political order might also include culture and religion. This feature requires an aristocracy or at least a class that can function as one.

The most important example in Western history was the Roman empire, an entity that still influences our lives to this day. (Pick out all the Latinate words in this posting.) The Roman empire had two halves, the Greek-speaking East and the (over time) Latin-speaking West. In ancient times, the former was old, wealthy, highly populated and urbanized, but by the time the Romans took over, militarily weak and politically decadent. The latter was new, poor, poorly populated, and agrarian. To the East, the Romans exported political order to a place that could no longer could generate its own. From the East, the Romans imported capital, people, and culture. To the West, the Romans exported order, capital, and high culture to places that never had it. From the West, they imported little except slaves (in the early empire). The Roman empire was, in part, a result of the breakdown of the Roman republic. Imperial institutions replaced republican ones, although the latter lingered on as vestiges. The modern West was hatched in the ruins of the western Roman empire.

The most important modern empire was the British. Unlike the Roman empire, the British was a sea empire, largely based on commerce, with a "light" military presence. Unlike the Romans, the British also (except for the American Revolution) voluntarily phased out their empire, by modifying their imperial rule over non-Britons into partial, then complete, independence. It was the world's first self-liquidating empire, a tribute to the Britons' own system of representative government at home. During the era of the British empire, this representative system grew stronger, deeper, and broader, and many British imperial possessions inherited some form of it. The self-demolition of the British empire was not totally voluntary: some Britons wanted to hold on to it. But Britain's bankruptcy after World War II forced the issue.

America's sole experience with empire came in the wake of the Spanish-American war (1898-1900),when it came to control three former Spanish colonies, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. Each one was treated differently and had different fates. Because the United States is a republic, it could not claim indefinite rule over these possessions, and it didn't. Each one was put on the road to political independence after World War I. American involvement was longest, deepest, and most successful in the Philippines, where the Filipinos were promised independence during World War II for their loyalty in fighting the Japanese (and they did fight, fiercely). They became independent in 1946. The Puerto Ricans eventually rejected independence in favor of a semi-imperial relationship, where Puerto Rico has internal self-government, and external foreign policy and military matters are taken care of by the American federal government, with significant amounts of federal money flowing in on net. The least successful was Cuba, which was prematurely cut loose from the US in 1934 and immediately turned into a dictatorship (Batista), overthrown in 1959 by the Soviet-oriented revolutionary Castro. Cuba today is a half-finished imperial project abandoned by two superpowers and ruled by a dictator who's turned the island into a tropical prison.

America is the world's dominant power and its remaining superpower. It's fair to call it a "hegemon" (a legitimate word sometimes used pejoratively). It is the linchpin of the civilized world's security and economic system. That does not make it all-powerful in some absolute sense. American foreign policy has largely focused on exporting international order, while leaving internal order within countries up to those countries, with a few exceptions (Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia). Exporting international order is much easier and well within American capabilities. Imposing internal order within countries is much harder and probably beyond anyone's power.

It follows that, while America is powerful yet not omnipotent, America needs friends and allies to help. The help is in our interests and theirs, often much more in theirs. This is the type of "hegemony" to be expected of a superpower nation-state in a world of other nation-states. It is based on the reality and legitimacy of the nation-state system, yet recognizing that some nations are much more powerful and critical to the system than others.

But American dominance has evolved in a curious and unhealthy way in Europe, the Middle East, and east Asia, where many countries have abandoned the ability to defend themselves and developed significant problems with political legitimacy. They have come to rely on the US and yet resent that dependence. The current agony we're in now is the result of other countries' backing away from military defense and foreign policy, figuring, let the US do it - and, let the US take the heat. Here is the crux of why people feel America is an "empire," even though it isn't: it's become a republic with a quasi-imperial role, an uncomfortable and unsustainable situation. Americans, both ordinary voters and foreign policy experts, were unprepared for this post-Cold War development. The US military is too small to serve as an imperial force and depends on allies able and willing to pull their own weight. But apart from a handful of exceptions, many American "allies" are actually "military welfare" cases. The US can fill this void only imperfectly and suffers, in some sense, from imperial understretch. (Yes, you read that right.)

But the solution is not to try to turn America into an empire, an impossible goal in any case. America is a middle-class, commercial republic, as well as a net importer of capital and people, three facts enough to kill the "empire" conceit. And it has no aristocratic imperial class or ethos - such things are foreign to American culture and society, fueled as they are by immigrants who all must get along within a framework of political and legal equality.

So let's hear no more of it: we're not an empire, never were, and aren't becoming one. We certainly shouldn't try. The real question is: can our relationship with our so-called allies be changed? And can they police their own corners of the globe and take control of their fates?