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| Who Was Betty Friedan? | The Cultural Colonialism of the Left |
Torino: Europe's Last Hurrah?
by Christopher Chantrill
February 12, 2006 at 9:54 pm
ON FRIDAY NIGHT in Torino Luciano Pavarotti, close to the last gasp of his career, sang the last gasp of grand opera, Puccini’s glorious “Nessun Dorma.” You have to wonder: Will this Winter Olympics prove to be the last gasp of Europe, the big blowout before the Islamic hordes engulf it?
It seems impossible to believe that the cheerful young Euro-Olympians who passed before the cameras are really intent upon demographic suicide the pundits predict. They all seemed so alive, so optimistic, so vigorous, so free. And yet if they go on like their parents and don’t make more babies...
But let us not forget Stein’s Law: “If it can’t go on forever, it will stop.”
It is right to be concerned about the challenge of the Islamists and their fascist threat.
But we should be careful about using the Nazi comparison. When Hitler came to power the Germans had just finished reinventing philosophy and physics. They had discovered the Otto and Diesel cycles, and they led the world in the military arts. With these advantages the expansionist Nazis could adopt a seize-and-hold strategy and dominate the whole of Europeâ€â€for a while.
Compare the Nazis with the Islamists. The London Spectator has a cover this week showing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a superpower scorpion scuttling across the Persian Gulf with a rocket in his tail. It’s a great artist’s concept, but think about the reality. Is this scorpion thinking about an amphibious assault across the Persian Gulf, in the face of the US base on Qatar and the Seventh Fleet cruising just below the horizon? Or is it planning a right hook through southern Iraq and expecting the British squaddies there to salute as they drive by?
No such luck. The Iranian president’s strategy is only a raiding strategy, fomenting civil war or national demoralization by killing civilians with roadside bombs and suicide bombers. The best the Islamists can do is to seed Europe with seething young men organized into criminal gangs and hope that they will rise up in a generation or two and take over. They are reduced to this strategy because they do not have the power to do anything else.
Essayist Theodore Dalrymple has been thinking about the Islamists, and has realized that they have a culture just like the alienated underclass youths in Britain in his Life at the Bottom. In National Review, he wrote that the Muslim extremists in Europe and the Middle East in the front lines of the Cartoon Wars:
are like the inhabitants of our ghettoes who demand something that they call “respect,” and which they extort by fear for lack of any other means by which to earn it.
We Americans know about this too. It is the problem we have had with every new wave of immigrants since the Irish started tumbling out of the coffin ships onto the docks of Boston and Manhattan around 1850. Each wave frightened the daylights out of the propertied classes with its criminal, threatening behavior. But each immigrant tsunami, up to now, has ended up thoroughly Americanized and suburbanized, reduced to Starbucks foam by chickens in every pot, cars in every garage, jobs jobs jobs, and, of course, freedom and self-government.
The Iranians are hoping that their Islamic gangs in Europe will not succumb to the Great Satan. They are betting that the rational Euro-experts and their beloved Social Model will continue to bungle things forever, in violation of Stein’s Law.
Unfortunately for the Axis of Evil the west has a secret weapon. It was incautiously revealed a few weeks ago in a World Bank report “Where is the Wealth of Nations?” The bank came up with a wealth estimate for each nation using the magic of compound interest, computing the present value of each nation’s annual consumption expenditures. But when you subtract capital in natural resources and in businesses and factories from the national wealth you are left with a residual: Intangible Capital. The residual turns out to be the precipitate of efficient justice, secure property rights, freedom, and self-government.
How big do you think the value of this residual would be? Let us line up the numbers from the report’s Appendix 2 for a few representative countries.
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So that’s why those angry US immigrants aren’t angry any more, and why those Euro-Olympians in Torino are so happy. They are all heirs to a vast hoard of intangible loot: efficient justice, secure property rights, education, and tons of “global best practice” employers.
Anyone can think up scenarios in which the Europeans just go on as they are, throw away their birthright, and submit themselves to a bunch of excitable oil-meter readers from the Middle East. But really, could anyone be that stupid?
Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.
Buy his Road to the Middle Class.
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Responsibility
Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050
Living the Virtues
When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue
Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture
These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
US Life in 1842
Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
Society and State
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008
Faith and Politics
As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable...
[1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006
Never Trust Experts
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”
Conservatism's Holy Grail
What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph
Class War
In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”
Government Expenditure
The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Conservatism
Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity
Postmodernism
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy