Category Archives: History

Education, History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society, War Commentary

Ancient Warfare

39 Comments

…in northern Europe.

I’m always amused by things like this:

Before the 1990s, “for a long time we didn’t really believe in war in prehistory,” DAI’s Hansen says. The grave goods were explained as prestige objects or symbols of power rather than actual weapons. “Most people thought ancient society was peaceful, and that Bronze Age males were concerned with trading and so on,” says Helle Vandkilde, an archaeologist at Aarhus University in Denmark. “Very few talked about warfare.”

Because they bought into Rousseau’s “noble savage” BS.

I suspect there’s still a lot more that we don’t know about human history than we do.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

Molenbeek: A Culture Of Denial

9 Comments

An analysis from a cultural anthropologist who lived there:

It is nearly impossible to explain to an outsider, but Belgium is a country of six governments, Brussels a city with 19 mayors. These many administrative posts are not filled with competent people. Security services are fragmented and tend to compete with one another. The lack of a strong, central authority may be one of the many quirks of this sometimes charmingly dysfunctional country, but just as it resulted in many botched trials — notably of the Brabant Killers, or “Nijvel Gang” who committed a series of violent raids between 1982 and 1985, and the Dutroux scandal in 1995, to name just two — it also creates the perfect breeding ground for potential terrorists.

But the most important factor is Belgium’s culture of denial. The country’s political debate has been dominated by a complacent progressive elite that firmly believes society can be designed and planned. Observers who point to unpleasant truths such as the high incidence of crime among Moroccan youth and violent tendencies in radical Islam are accused of being propagandists of the extreme-right, and are subsequently ignored and ostracized.

The debate is paralyzed by a paternalistic discourse in which radical Muslim youths are seen, above all, as victims of social and economic exclusion. They in turn internalize this frame of reference, of course, because it arouses sympathy and frees them from taking responsibility for their actions. The former Socialist mayor Philippe Moureax, who governed Molenbeek from 1992 to 2012 as his private fiefdom, perfected this culture of denial and is to a large extent responsible for the current state of affairs in the neighborhood.

I think that Belgium has outlived whatever usefulness it may have ever had. Time to give just it back to Holland and France.

[Saturday-morning update]

It’s not just Molenbeek. “Belgium, my country, is in denial.”

[Bumped]

Business, Economics, History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Is Barack Obama A Socialist, Or A Fascist?

14 Comments

Yes:

One of the reasons why both pro-Obama and anti-Obama observers may be reluctant to see him as fascist is that both tend to accept the prevailing notion that fascism is on the political right, while it is obvious that Obama is on the political left.

Back in the 1920s, however, when fascism was a new political development, it was widely — and correctly — regarded as being on the political left. Jonah Goldberg’s great book “Liberal Fascism” cites overwhelming evidence of the fascists’ consistent pursuit of the goals of the left, and of the left’s embrace of the fascists as one of their own during the 1920s.
Mussolini, the originator of fascism, was lionized by the left, both in Europe and in America, during the 1920s. Even Hitler, who adopted fascist ideas in the 1920s, was seen by some, including W.E.B. Du Bois, as a man of the left.

It was in the 1930s, when ugly internal and international actions by Hitler and Mussolini repelled the world, that the left distanced themselves from fascism and its Nazi offshoot — and verbally transferred these totalitarian dictatorships to the right, saddling their opponents with these pariahs.

The real act that broke the Left from Hitler was when he betrayed Stalin.

[Update a while later]

Obama: “No difference between communism and capitalism.” Well, if you ignore the tens millions of citizens murdered by their governments, sure.

[Sunday-morning update]

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Jihad Everywhere

100 Comments

It’s not just terror bombings:

In the aftermath of 9/11, Americans were treated to a parade of “experts” who assured a worried public that jihadists were perverting the meaning of the term, that the term really and truly only referred to a peaceful, internal struggle — the quest for goodness and holiness. We’ve learned to laugh at this nonsense, but in so doing I fear that we’ve wrongly narrowed the term. To us, jihad is a bomb. It’s a beheading.

No, jihad is an eternal, all-encompassing unholy war against the unbeliever. It is waged in the mind of the believer, to fortify his or her own courage and faith. It is waged online and in the pages of books and magazines, to simultaneously cultivate the hatred and contempt of the committed for the kafir — the unbeliever — while also currying favor, appeasement, and advantage from the gullible West. Jihad is the teaching in the mosque. It is the prayer in the morning, the social-media post in the afternoon, and the donation to an Islamic “charity” in the evening.

There is jihad in predatory, coordinated sexual assault, there is jihad when Western camera crews are chased from Muslim neighborhoods, and there is jihad when Muslim apologists invariably crawl from the sewers of Western intelligentsia, blaming Europeans for the imperfections in their life-saving hospitality. So don’t make the mistake of believing that Europe or America only “periodically” or “rarely” deal with jihad. We confront it every day, just as the world has confronted it — to greater or lesser degrees — ever since Muslim armies first emerged from the Arabian peninsula. While not all Muslims are jihadists, jihad is so deeply imprinted in the DNA of Islam that the world will confront it as long as Islam lives.

While millions, most Muslims are peaceful, Islam itself is an infection that has haunted the world for over a millennium. There have been long periods of dormancy, but it occasionally flares up when given an opportunity. I don’t know how this will end, but I’ve been saying for years that the end will not be pretty.

Related: A Muslim explains how he discovered that the Quran encourages violence.

Andy McCarthy analyzes the timing of the latest attacks, and Theodore Dalrymple wonders what to do with the terrorist camps in the heart of Europe.

History, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Powers And Duties

25 Comments

Does the president have a “duty” to put forth a nominee? Does the Senate have a “duty” to consider him or her? No.

I’ve been meaning to write about this but, as noted there, “shall” does not necessary mean that it is a mandatory act, and there is no time limit on it. The president has the power to nominate, and the Senate has the power to advise and consent, but it is not incumbent upon either to do so. The Framers intent was not to insure that appointees were appointed, but that it not be done unilaterally by a single branch. In their desire to limit government powers, they made appointments, as with much else, difficult, and I doubt they’d be displeased by either the “Biden rule” or the current Republican stance.

The only real duties that either branch has are to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence [sic], promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” It is ultimately up to the people to decide if they are doing so, and to rectify the situation if not.

If the president chooses not to nominate, he will be judged in the next election. If the Senate advises and consents by advising the president that they will not consent, they too will be judged in the next election, or at least a third of them will be (as it happens, the Republicans have 24 seats at risk in the fall). But the Senate is doing nothing unconstitutional in deciding to let the people decide.

[Update a while later]

Welp, Kasich said today that he might nominate Garland. So we have that going for us. #RINO

History, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Merrick Garland

27 Comments

It’s too late for the administration to appeal to Constitutional norms:

the Obama administration, with its aggressive assertions of executive power, is in a poor position to appeal to constitutional norms. The administration showed a severe lack of respect for constitutional norms when, for example, contrary to decades of precedent that the Justice Department will defend any federal law with a plausible defense, it refused to defend the Defense of Marriage Act; when the administration forced Common Core standards on local education without anything resembling explicit congressional approval or even debate, based on an aggressive reading of vague existing law; when the administration unilaterally changed immigration policy via executive order, after Congress failed to pass legislation that would have accomplished similar ends; when the president has simply refused to enforce provisions of Obamacare that proved politically problematic; and, for that matter, when the president advocated for and signed perhaps the only major piece of American social legislation (Obamacare) that not only failed to win widespread bipartisan support, but also attracted not a single vote in either house of Congress from the other party. More generally, President Obama has repeatedly promised to try to circumvent Congress using any arguably legal means available, on the rather extra-constitutional grounds, contrary to the norms attendant to the separation of powers, that “we can’t wait” for Congress to pass legislation that the president favors.

Beyond that, it’s not as “moderate” a pick as some are claiming. For instance, he opposed Heller and the 2nd Amendment, and would have disarmed residents of DC.

[Update a few minutes later]

And now for something completely different: Wolf Blitzer actually calls out Debbie Wasserman Schultz for hypocrisy.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

“Burn It All Down”

51 Comments

Why this isn’t something a conservative would, or should say:

If you’re ready to burn down the world, you’re part of what’s wrong with the world. There are plenty of places on this planet where “burning it down” has been tried — Syria, Somalia, the Balkans, Afghanistan, the territories of Boko Haram — and the results are never anything short of catastrophic. It’s easy to forget, but even in the toughest of times, Americans are incredibly blessed compared to those living everywhere else. Our wealth, our spirit, our untapped potential, and our capacity for renewal are mind-boggling. And yet some significant portion of the population relishes the thought of sending it all up in flames.

You dare not call yourself conservative if you belong to this arson-minded mass. Conservatives are here to preserve, create, and build, not to ignite and destroy. Insofar as the torch is an American political tradition, it’s not a conservative one — it’s the recourse of our country’s worst radicals, from the Klan to the Weather Underground to the Black Panthers to Timothy McVeigh.

Victor Davis Hanson calls what we’re witnessing “Republican nihilism,” a dangerous strain of the historical perspective that there is nothing to approve of in the current social order. It’s a self-evidently ludicrous perspective when applied to our country as it stands today.

If you think that Trump will be a conservative, in any way, you’re deluding yourself.