Climategate: THE DOG ATE MY RAW DATA

Well, maybe it wasn't the dog. Maybe it was some graduate student, before Phil Jones was put in charge of the global warming data at CRU. These scientists have out-done themselves in destroying their own credibility. Captain Ed:

When would scientists expecting the world to take them seriously throw out the raw data on which their conclusions are based? Probably at the same time that they e-mail each other to launch professional vendettas against skeptics and conspire to hide contradictory data. The University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit — already in a deep scandal over the e-mails released by either a hacker or a whistleblower that shows highly unscientific behavior behind the scenes — now admits they threw out the raw data on which much of their theories on anthropogenic global warming are based. . . . .

The bullying atmosphere in Academia on AGW has ruined the credibility of the effort — and not just at the University of East Anglia. Any PhD student in the field would have known on which side the bread would be buttered, and would be unlikely to commit career suicide by producing contradictory data. The actions of the IPCC authors created an atmosphere of groupthink, paranoia, and toadyism, not science or truth. Any results coming from this arena have to be entirely suspect.

The AGW movement has been exposed as a religious belief and a political cash cow, not science.

Read the whole thing. Along with this piece by Wretchard about what happened to two scientists who didn't go along with the "narrative" in 2003. After watching the outstanding video by the late Michael Crichton at the end, about turning environmentalism into a religion, you might want to scan through Wretchard's comments, like this one, reminding us that a BBC reporter had sat on the leaked documents for 6 weeks before the leaker went directly to the public.

Wretchard links two more excellent videos by Crichton here.

You might want to follow some of the links in Ed Driscoll' roundup. Quoting Thomas Sowell from 2004:

There’s something Eric Hoffer said: “Intellectuals cannot operate at room temperature.” There always has to be a crisis–some terrible reason why their superior wisdom and virtue must be imposed on the unthinking masses. It doesn’t matter what the crisis is. A hundred years ago it was eugenics. At the time of the first Earth Day a generation ago, the big scare was global cooling, a big ice age. They go from one to the other. It meets their psychological needs and gives them a reason for exercising their power.

He also has links on Big Media's role in "supporting the narrative":

. . . Editor & Publisher called for an end to objectivity in regards to “Climate Change” back in 2007. But Sissy writes that NBC’s Andrea Mitchell spilled the beans on it happening in the media almost 20 years ago . . .

Interesting information.

Peer Review and the 'Climategate' scandal

There's been a lot of interesting background on the leaked e-mails and data from Britain's Climate Research Unit. Below, some important aspects of the scandal to keep in mind: The excessive reliance on compromised peer review, psychological pressure to conform with the "scientific consensus", and from Shannon Love, insightful comments about weaknesses in scientific software.

Mark Steyn points out the key methods for discrediting those who don't fall in line, and the chief reason for the focus among prominent scientists on supporting the "climate change catastrophe" theme. Read the whole thing:

. . . Look for the peer-reviewed label! And then just believe whatever it is they tell you!

The trouble with outsourcing your marbles to the peer-reviewed set is that, if you take away one single thing from the leaked documents, it's that the global warm-mongers have wholly corrupted the "peer-review" process. When it comes to promoting the impending ecopalypse, the Climate Research Unit is the nerve-center of the operation. The "science" of the CRU dominates the "science" behind the United Nations IPCC, which dominates the "science" behind the Congressional cap-and-trade boondoggle, the upcoming Copenhagen shakindownen of the developed world, and the now-routine phenomenon of leaders of advanced, prosperous societies talking like gibbering madmen escaped from the padded cell, whether it's President Barack Obama promising to end the rise of the oceans or the Prince of Wales saying we only have 96 months left to save the planet.

But don't worry, it's all "peer-reviewed". . . .

The e-mails of "Andy" (as his CRU chums fondly know him) are especially pitiful. Confronted by serious questions from Stephen McIntyre, the dogged Ontario retiree whose "Climate Audit" Web site exposed the fraud of Dr. Mann's global-warming "hockey stick" graph, "Andy" writes to Dr. Mann to say not to worry, he's going to "cover" the story from a more oblique angle:

"I'm going to blog on this as it relates to the value of the peer review process and not on the merits of the mcintyre et al attacks". . . .

Looking forward to Copenhagen, Herman Van Rumpoy, the new president of the European Union and an eager proponent of the ecopalypse, says 2009 is "the first year of global governance." Global government, huh? I wonder where you go to vote them out of office. Hey, but don't worry, it'll all be "peer-reviewed."

David Foster on the power of the in-group:

It now seems clear that many climate scientists have shown a most unscientific lack of interest in following the data wherever that data may lead, coupled with an unwholesome eagerness to disregard and to disrespect the opinions of anyone outside of a closed circle of “experts.”

In comments on a NYT blog (excerpted at Instapundit), someone comments:

“It is possible that some areas of climate science has become sclerotic. It is possible that climate science has become too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science.”

This kind of tribalism is by no means limited to “primitive cultures,” rather, it is dismayingly common in societies of all types. The phenomenon was astutely analyzed by C S Lewis in his writing on what he called the Inner Ring.

The desire to belong to an in-group, Lewis argues, “of all earthly powers is strongest to make men do very bad things before they are yet, individually, very bad men.”

To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours. . . .

. . . And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. . . . It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude; it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel.

Shannon Love pointed out additional, excellent reasons not to trust peer review of climate studies (before we even knew that the raw data had been thrown away): 1. Scientists are not software engineers. Interesting reading. And 2. no one peer-reviews scientific software.

Maybe not in climate science. But when I was in the pharmaceutical industry, the software had to be fully validated before the statisticians started plugging in the data. The statisticians were also subject to grilling concerning their treatment of the data, similar to that which Love described at the link as part of standard software development - from their peers and from people knowledgeable in related fields. I've been in the room to see it happen a few times. Often tense. Apparently, climate science is different:

Most climatology papers submitted for peer review rely on large, complex and custom-written computer programs to produce their findings. The code for these programs is never provided to peer reviewers and even if it was, the peer climatologists doing the reviewing lack the time, resources and expertise to verify that the software works as its creators claim.

Even if the peer reviewers in climatology are as honest and objective as humanly possible, they cannot honestly say that they have actually performed a peer review to the standards of other fields like chemistry or physics which use well-understood scientific hardware. (Other fields that rely on heavily on custom-written software have the same problem.)

Too often these days when people want to use a scientific study to bolster a political position, they utter the phrase, “It was peer reviewed” like a magical spell to shut off any criticism of a paper’s findings.

Worse, the concept of “peer review” is increasingly being treated in the popular discourse as synonymous with “the findings were reproduced and proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.”

This is never what peer review was intended to accomplish. Peer review functions largely to catch trivial mistakes and to filter out the loons. It does not confirm or refute a paper’s findings. Indeed, many scientific frauds have passed easily through peer review because the scammers knew what information the reviewers needed to see.

Shannon Love again with a Thought for the day:

Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. Those who can’t, and can’t teach, create a fake ecological disaster so that they can get grant money.

The Pilgrims, Religious Intentions and the Rejection of Feudalism

Further to this post, some interesting bits of history about the Pilgrims:

From (Jewish) Michael Medved, some thoughts on the Pilgrims and the religious nature of America:

Most children learn that the Mayflower settlers came to the New World to escape persecution and to establish religious freedom. But the early colonists actually pursued purity, not tolerance, and sought to build fervent, faith-based utopias, not secular regimes that consigned religion to a secondary role. The distinctive circumstances that allowed these fiery believers of varied denominations to cooperate in the founding of a new nation help to explain America's contradictory religious traditions — as simultaneously the most devoutly Christian society in the Western world, and the country most accommodating to every shade of exotic belief and practice.

The communal system to which the Pilgrims had agreed before they left for the New World was likely framed in terms of Christian fellowship and sharing, but the particulars of their contract also reflected feudal thinking.

William Bradford's abandonment of communalism in the face of famine, which went against the contract he had signed, was a sort of intellectual breakthrough - an abandonment of European feudalism.

July 1620

The Pilgrims' contract with their financial backers, the London Merchant Adventurers Company, included conditions of seven years of joint stock and partnership and communal property, followed by a division and release from obligations . . . . A version of feudalism dominated for the first seven years.

Britain and continental Europe groaned under feudalism's remnants and its communal farming. The Lord of the Manor controlled his peasants -- told them where, when, and what they could do, and how they could do it. (Does that sound like some people we know in 2009?)

From old-world feudalism came the seeds of famine.

September 1621

The autumn harvest and hunt. The First Thanksgiving. Grand. Glorious. A product of the friendship and peace treaty with the impressive Wampanoag Sachem (chief) Massasoit and his people. A welcome respite from the hardship of that first winter, when half the Mayflower passengers died. And yes, there was turkey. Bradford wrote, "... there was great store of wild turkeys ..."

Were they now on easy street? Hardly. Communal farming brought discouragement and strife the next year.

A Meager Harvest, 1622
Now the welcome time of harvest approached, in which all had their hungry bellies filled. But it arose to a little, in comparison of a full years supply ...

"That they might not still thus languish in misery," 1623

Bradford wrote of the colony's distress at continuing famine:

All this while no supply was heard of, neither knew they when they might expect any. So they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery.

The governor faced a choice. The colony would fail under seven years of communal farming, and the investors in London would not be repaid. The Pilgrims would become just another failed English colony, all memory of them to vanish.

Or -- find a better way, grow food, survive, pay their contractual debts. Bradford found that better way: He assigned each family a parcel of land to farm on their own.

Transformational, this paradigm shift. While the old world lay shackled by feudal communal farming, the new world broke free from feudalism's constraints.

Read the whole thing.

Because of the isolated circumstances of the Pilgrims, the negative effects of feudalism were seen in a rapid and stark manner. In long-established civilizations, it may take longer for the negative effects of excessive control over people's lives by government to lead to grave danger.

Feudalism was first established, in part, in order to provide protection from attack by marauders by "the Lord of the Manor" to the people living on his lands - theoretically, at least. There was a legitimate desire for security on the part of the people, and a desire on the part of the aristocracy to maintain power and wealth through the promise of protection.

The bargain typically went bad for the peasantry long before it went bad for the aristocracy. Yet the desire among "common people" to establish systems similar in some ways to feudalism persists, even when the powerful "aristocracy" is a governing class in a relatively free society. People want security. It's natural. It's important to keep in mind, however, that increasing our security nearly always means limiting our liberty. And then, sometimes, our security diminishes, too.

We need to think about how we balance these two values in various facets of life: Many people, for example, willingly give up a lot of personal freedom to provide security for small children. Little kids can really tie you down. But in other facets of life, liberty and flexibility may be more important in the long run than security.

Ironically, when people (adults) feel too secure about the larger society's ability to protect and care for them and/or about the larger society's ability to cover for their shortcomings, things start to fall apart.

Economics of the First Thanksgiving.

Happy Thanksgiving. It's fortunate for us that William Bradford figured out quickly why his socialist experiment didn't work. From Professor Paul Rahe:

We have much to learn from the history of the Plymouth Plantation. For, in their first year in the New World, the Pilgrims conducted an experiment in social engineering akin to what is now contemplated; and, after an abortive attempt at cultivating the land in common, their leaders reflected on the results in a manner that Americans today should find instructive. . . .

The moral is perfectly clear. Self-interest cannot be expunged. Where there is private property and its possession and acquisition are protected and treated with respect, self-interest and jealousy can be deployed against laziness and the desire for that which is not one's own, and there tends to be plenty as a consequence.

But where one takes from those who join talent with industry to provide for those lacking either or both, where the fruits of one man's labor are appropriated to benefit another who is less productive, self-interest reinforces laziness, jealousy engenders covetousness, and these combine in a bitter stew to produce both conflict and dearth.

Follow the link for details of what happened when the Pilgrims tried, then abandoned, their socialist experiment. The desire for fairness seems to be implanted in us. But imposing economic fairness typically seems to lead to less generosity and less to share.

Interestingly enough, the kinds of religious communities which have been more effective at communal living than the Pilgrims were - monasteries, etc. - were special targets for destruction by the Soviet empire which, theoretically, wanted everyone to follow similar communal practices. Was this because the religious communities were voluntary and independent?

I wonder if our government will come down on the Amish soon for their religious position that insurance is non-scriptural? Some Democrats are already at war with the American Catholic Bishops over the proposed Health Care Reforms. Democrats might be willing to see Catholic hospitals shut down for unwillingness to perform elective abortions and other procedures which are morally repugnant to them. But I think the image of a bunch of Amish farmers in "Pelosi Prisons" for refusal to buy health insurance would be a bit much for them.

The "politically correct" can sometimes tolerate a marginal group, like the Amish, thinking differently from them, but they cannot abide a mainstream group, like Catholic Bishops, which do not accept their politically-correct priorities.

Despite all this political turmoil, we still have much to be grateful for.

Will Obamacare kill medical innovation worldwide?

Interesting points here.

There's no way to argue that new drugs are not horrendously expensive. One reason is that government regulations have changed the way new drugs are priced, pushing the prices up even higher than they would have been in the "old days", by requiring drug companies to recoup their investment costs over a shorter time period, and discouraging them from charging a little more for old drugs to even out costs of the new ones. All those 4 dollar monthly prescriptions of generics from Walmart keep innovators from charging $8.00 for the drug they developed earlier, allowing them to charge less for the new ones.

And since Obamacare would control remuneration to drug and device companies and health care professionals, why not first institute wage controls for attorneys? There's a better constitutional case for providing equality in legal representation than for equality in medical care.

What would the world be like if people were only allowed to make "real money" on things that people don't really need - like, say, entertainment? Would Al Gore still be poised to make billions on the investments he has made in "green technology"?

Vampires and Girls

The current vampire craze seems to be a girl thing.

Ann Rice has male readers?

Check out the cover of this novel. It's a classic romance novel cover: young woman running away from a creepy mansion (the Jungian archetype for an evil, all-consuming mother figure). Even though it's a tongue-in-cheek re-telling of the original Bram Stoker classic, this time from Dracula's point of view, the book is aimed at a female audience.

Both the Bram Stoker-style vampire of old horror movies and the fresh look at Dracula linked above are different from the current crop of popular "sensitive vampires".

Something to think about: Will the massive popularity of "the sensitive vampire" among girls, contrasted with the massive popularity of hard-core porn among boys, increase our collective confusion about the time-honored cultural traditions set up to help young men and young women bridge the difficult differences between the sexes in a civilized and lasting manner? Will widening differences in expectations about the nature of the opposite sex lessen the stability of future families?

Just as America's young men are being given deeply erroneous ideas about sex by what they watch on the Web, so, too, are America's young women receiving troubling misinformation about the male of the species from Twilight. These women are going to be shocked when the sensitive, emotionally available, poetry-writing boys of their dreams expect a bit more from a sleepover than dew-eyed gazes and chaste hugs. The young man, having been schooled in love online, will be expecting extreme bondage and a lesbian three-way.

The bigger problem here is that we're breeding sexually incompatible human beings, and vampires are to blame.

Or, did the porn come first? Is the massive popularity of 'the sensitive vampire' the natural emotional reaction of young teen girls to the pervasiveness of pornography which idealizes casual, impersonal, and sometimes competitive sex? Might it be a reaction to music videos which suggest that sex is the beginning point of a relationship? Could "sensitive vampire" fantasies be an escape from the openly expressed, crass expectations of today's young teen boys, whose ideas about the emotional nature of girls were shaped by porn sites and other pervasive sexual imagery in the media?

"Sensitive Vampire" stories may be a way for young girls to start exploring the potentially dangerous nature of male/female relationships in a less-threatening manner than dealing with the actual boys in the neighborhood.

From substitute teaching in middle school and from talking with girls, I have developed the impression that young teen girls already already have a fairly good sense (at least on a superficial level) of the porn-influenced sexual expectations, or at least the fantasies, of the typical young teen boy. Though girls may sometimes remain fairly clueless about how to deal with these cultural expectations, and also about how to influence the feelings and behavior of boys through their mannerisms, banter, expectations, mode of dress, etc.

I remember how easy it was (in high school, for me) to feel attracted to the "bad boys" in class. But that was a time when even the bad boys, at least the ones who seemed intriguing, had some sense of restraint when in mixed company. I wonder how the typical 14-year-old girl these days reacts to the crass talk and behavior of many real boys, especially the traditionally-attractive "bad boys" they encounter at school? There may be some good reasons why the dangerous, but sensitive, vampires of today's popular culture -- restrained by the realization that the needs and desires of their love interests are different from their own in fundamental ways -- may seem more attractive to middle-school girls than the real-life dangerous boys.

Do you think boys understand with any depth why "sensitive vampires" are attractive to young girls? The assumption that dangerous boys have a tender heart somewhere down deep -- a heart that only needs a little love in order to change a dangerous boy into a devoted partner -- is very common among girls. Dangerous boys are terrible risks for young women in real life, even if they really do have a tender heart somewhere down deep. Even sensitive vampires in books are pretty risky as love interests. Best left to fantasy relationships. The desire for "conquerable danger" in interpersonal relationships tends to fade for most girls over time. One argument against early dating.

Happy Birthday Johnny Mercer, Happy Anniversary Rogers & Hammerstein

Powerline celebrates the 100th birthday of Johnny Mercer, with an appreciation of his place in the Great American Songbook, with lots of links and a video of Midnight Sun,

"It's as if the lyric itself is a midnight sun, a last blaze of an Alley style extinguishing itself..."

Mark Steyn is telling stories about Mercer in his music column all month.

We’re after the same rainbow’s end
Waiting round the bend
My huckleberry friend
Moon River and me…

Where is Moon River? Everywhere and nowhere. But, if you had to pin it down, you’d find it meandering at least metaphorically somewhere in the neighborhood of Savannah, Georgia. At one point, the town’s most celebrated musical emissary was Hard-Hearted Hannah, the Vamp of Savannah. But then the American Songbook’s huckleberry friend showed up: John Herndon Mercer, born in Savannah one hundred years ago, November 18th 1909. The family home, the Mercer House, is the setting for the most famous book written about Savannah, Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil. . .

He's writing about songs like Goody, Goody and Blues in the Night and Hooray for Hollywood. More on Midnight Sun and later songs. Mercer didn't exactly get stuck in a rut as far as musical styles go.

But it was also the 50 anniversary of The Sound of Music hitting broadway a couple of days ago.

Good stuff. Great American Songbook, indeed.

Terrorists "Created or Saved"

Claudia Rosett got to thinking about the Obama Administration's impossible-to-pin-down formulation for jobs "created or saved" by the stimulus package, with its non-existent congressional districts and all. She thought that maybe the "created or saved" phrase might be more appropriate in other contexts:

Every time it seems he’s said much, much more than enough, Jimmy Carter is back in the news — this time defending his handling 30 years ago of the Iran hostage crisis. . . .

And from those beginnings on Carter’s watch came an emboldened Islamic Republic of Iran, a terror-based regime which for 30 years has been brutalizing its own people, setting up global networks of terrorist finance, weaponry and murder, and is now closing on the nuclear bomb. How many lives has this cost already? How many more will this cost in times ahead? There may be no way to assign a precise number, but the answer is definitely “many” — including Iranians themselves, among them the five now sentenced to death for their roles in the June pro-democracy demonstrations. As Iran continues to export its message and tactics of terror, possibly soon to be turbo-charged with a nuclear arsenal, the odds keep climbing of devastating tolls to come. . . .

How many terrorists were “saved or created” by the kind of policies Jimmy Carter is defending? How many will be “saved or created” by the current policy of trying to diplomatically coddle Iran out of the nuclear bomb program — and ensuing clout — that its rulers are clearly bent on pursuing? How many terrorists will be “saved or created” by the project of putting (alleged) Sept. 11 self-described mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on trial in lower Manhattan — thus providing him a world stage?

If that sounds macabre, it is nothing compared to the real results of policies which signal that America and its citizens and allies can be threatened, bullied, attacked, held hostage or murdered with relative impunity. . .

Worth thinking about.

Jobs "Created or Saved" in California

Good news from Recovery.gov* about the 110,185 jobs "created or saved" in California by the stimulus spending bill. It's about time, given that previous reports estimated that the state had lost 732,700 jobs over the same period of time. What a turn-around. Read the whole thing. Follow the links.

Our higher-numbered districts (and the unenumerated one) aren’t doing well by the stimulus policy, alas. California congressional districts that do not actually exist created or saved a scant 24.2 jobs. . . Worse, they sucked up $5,740,757 to create or save those 24 jobs (sorry, 24.2 jobs), which works out to $237,221.36 per job per seven months (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 was passed in February, and the recovery.gov figures are from September) — or $406,665.19 per job per year.

Even assuming that 67% of the cost per job is overhead — federal building maintenance costs, salaries for government employees, payoffs to ACORN and the SEIU, etc. — that means each job must offer an average compensation package of $134,199.51. Wow — where do I sign up to be created or saved?

With the new transparency, it’s easy to see exactly how the administration is able to report such stellar economic improvement so quickly. All I can say is hip hip, chin chin for the One!

Wait a minute. I thought this "stimulus transparency" deal was supposed to be Joe Biden's responsibility. Not the President's. But maybe the Vice President is too busy working on a new pull-out strategy for Afghanistan. You have to also make allowance for the Executive Branch, given the messy bill which was passed by the Pelosi/Reid Congress before anyone could read it, filled with dusty old programs and Democratic "wish lists" from the last couple of decades or so.

Update: in Hollywood alone, 23 million dollars in stimulus money created 21 jobs, according to Recovery.gov.

Other states are reporting similar evidence of deep concern for the people and careful stewardship over their tax dollars by the Administration and Congress:

. . . Over in Minnesota's 27th congressional district, however, it appears to be a bleaker picture for those hoping for a turnaround. The federal government's statistics indicate only 2.5 jobs have been created or saved despite the listed expenditure of $3,159,657 of taxpayer dollars.

Then there's the 13th congressional district which outperformed them all. Hard to believe, but the hard working folks in the 13th congressional district generated five jobs from just $42,109 in stimulus spending.

That would certainly come as news to most Minnesotans, since the 14th, 27th and 57th congressional districts in Minnesota do not exist, except on the Obama Administration's website. Nor does the 00 congressional district listed as spending $404,340 and creating zero jobs.

* " Recovery.gov is the U.S. government’s official website providing easy access to data related to Recovery Act spending and allows for the reporting of potential fraud, waste, and abuse." I guess reporting the fantasy numbers on the site itself could be considered the first report of fraud, waste and abuse. To be fair, however, how much accuracy can you expect from a program which only cost 84 million dollars? Is it really fair to start a satirical campaign to fill congressional seats for all 440 new congressional districts created or make up by Recovery.gov? Note that reporting rules may require states to distort data to make the stimulus numbers look better.

Remember, this is the government which thinks it can do a much better job of running health care than anyone else possibly could.

Books about America's Early Years

Recommendations here.

Afghan Mythologies, Code Pink and President Obama

The often-dramatic anti-war group Code Pink has modified their position on pulling troops out of Afghanistan after visiting with women and with officials in Afghanistan. Members of the group were reportedly disappointed that people in Afghanistan had a somewhat different view of the American Imperialists than they did:

. . . . We have been feeling a sense of fear of the people of the return of the Taliban. So many people are saying that, ‘If the US troops left, the country would collapse. We’d go into civil war.’ A palpable sense of fear that is making us start to reconsider that.”

A bit of snark:

If the rumors are true about Biden spearheading a movement inside the administration to scale back in Afghanistan, then we’ve actually reached the point where Code Pink is more hawkish than the Vice President of the United States. . . .

These are the same people who had to be dragged out of Petraeus’ hearing before Congress in 2006 for screaming about the “lies” he was telling about counterinsurgency. . . .

Not to suggest that Code Pink is consistent in their current message of caution concerning withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Victor Davis Hanson brings some perspective to the over-hyped myths concerning the difficulty of waging war in Afghanistan. Even in light of these myths, Obama faces little domestic opposition to taking necessary actions in Afghanistan to defeat the Taliban.

What, then, prevents President Obama from sending more troops to secure the country?

Mostly problems of presidential indecision and confusion. Candidate Obama ran on the theme of Afghanistan as the necessary war, Iraq the optional one. But he assumed the then-quiet front in Afghanistan would stay that way, while Americans would withdraw from what he deemed a hopeless effort in Iraq.

Just the opposite ensued. The surge worked. But Afghanistan heated up. So now the president finds himself increasingly trapped by his campaign rhetoric. He is on record as committed to defeating the Taliban and winning the "necessary" war. But the president is now also a Noble Peace Laureate who apparently does not want what has become a messy conflict with Islamists on his watch.

We have experienced soldiers and military leadership, a just cause and Western unity. In other words, we have everything we need to defeat the Taliban — except a commander-in-chief as confident about fighting and winning as he once was as a candidate.

Truman, Carter and Obama

Victor Davis Hanson writes about how Harry Truman had to be a quick study when it came to foreign policy, upon the sudden death of Roosevelt. He described how Truman learned from his early mistakes and gradually developed a non-Wilsonian doctrine for foreign affairs. Some interesting history.

Truman's no-nonsense Secretary of State Dean Acheson summed up the president's doctrines: "Released from the acceptance of a dogma that builders and wreckers of a new world order could and should work happily and successfully together, he was free to combine our power and coordinate our action with those who did have a common purpose."

Ever since, most Democrats have embraced Truman's "common purpose." That means containing rival anti-Western ideologies, establishing alliances of similarly-minded democratic allies, and periodically standing up to regional thugs.

But not Jimmy Carter. Hanson describes some of the similarities between Carter's foreign policy actions and those, so far, of President Obama.

Will an inexperienced Barack Obama, in the fashion of Harry Truman, learn quickly that the world is chaotic and unstable — best dealt with through strength and unabashed confidence in America's historic role galvanizing democratic allies to confront illiberal aggressors?

Or will a sermonizing Mr. Obama follow the aberrant Democratic path of the sanctimonious Jimmy Carter: finger-wagging at allies, appeasing enemies, publicly faulting his less than perfect predecessors, and hectoring the American people to evolve beyond their supposed prejudices?

America awaits the president's choice. The world's safety hinges upon it.

Are Democrats Stuck in the Past?

I hadn't read a print copy of the WSJ since they added color to the paper. A man across the aisle from us on the plane gave me his back issue after he finished with it. This piece by Daniel Henninger caught my eye.

We define the past 25 years in terms of entrepreneurs and visionaries in places like Silicon Valley who took a small idea and ran with it. Congress does the opposite. It take something already big . . . and make it bigger.

We've got Medicare for the elderly, with spending claims out to Mars, so let's create Medicare for All! One of the least noticed parts of the health-care legislation is its intention to make Medicaid even bigger, when Medicaid's cost is arguably the main thing destroying California.

There was a time when contributing to the common good meant joining something relatively small like the Peace Corps or Teach for America. Now it means being willing to just fall into line behind some huge piece of legislation.

Read Mr. Obama's speech last week at MIT on climate change: "The folks who pretend that this is not an issue, they are being marginalized." This, ironically, sounds a lot like the 2007 antiHillary "Big Brother" TV commercial. Its message was that Hillary represented something big and ominously coercive. Boot up that ad now and put Obama's face where Hillary's is.

Read the whole thing.

Ayn Rand was a nut?

Maybe so. At the very least, she was very single-minded and dogmatic. And it is true that her philosophy does not accurately reflect the values of most conservatives, which is one thing that conservative need to make clear. Even if they respect and agree with part of what she taught.

Pej, who has a libertarian bent, puts the nuttiness of Rand in perspective:

–Peter Wehner. Having read Rand, I would say that she doesn’t even qualify as being a good novelist.

That having been written, I will take Rand over Marx anyday.

Even as a teenager, I didn't think The Fountainhead's story line, particularly the part about Howard Roark not even needing parents, was particularly realistic. But it offered some interesting insights into how the world works. I've never read Atlas Shrugged, but we are getting some business people withdrawing from business activity at this time because of a hostile regulatory environment, sort of like John Galt in the novel.

My theory is that Ayn Rand's rather obsessive and single-minded focus on individual liberty and related values was largely a result of her family's searing experience with Marxists. Having no religion to refer to for a more complete set of moral values, she went toward the opposite of Marxism in her philosophy. She thought that voluntary exchange of goods and services was more moral than police force in economic matters.

Which brings us, sort of, to the image many Progressives hold in their minds about Conservatives:

Our [Democrat] moral values, in contradiction to the Republicans’, is we don’t think kids ought to go to bed hungry at night. ~~ Howard Dean 5/22/2005

That one, sincerely offered and wholely indecent quote pretty much sums up the mindset of Progressives. Disagree with them, you can’t be mistaken, you are evil. What else can be concluded from the erstwhile chairman of the Democratic Party, who actually believes Republicans want children to starve?

It certainly is the basis of the arguments of those who want the nationalization of American Medicine . . . .

Is the Failure to Plan "The Plan"?

Gerard Vanderleun has some disturbing observations about President Obama's recent decision not to decide about Afghanistan. Worth reading, even if the piece makes you uncomfortable.

There are other sensible explanations for Obama's actions, but some of Vanderleun's observations fit Obama's pattern of behavior in office concerning other issues, such as letting Congress take responsibility for Stimulus and Healthcare. [Obama also expects Congress to take the heat for these decisions. He even likens the upcoming sacrifice of elected office for many congressional Democrats (to be rewarded with cushy Washington appointments) to sacrifices made by members of the military. Because Americans will still be angry about the recent government power-grabs at election time. But sacrifice is necessary in order to sign into law the statutes and rule-making powers which will allow bureaucrats to enforce "fairness", according to the Democrat's model, from Washington.]

From where I sit I see many people underestimating President Obama because they cannot get their heads around who and what this man actually is and what he portends. Instead, historical or metaphoric analysis prevails making Obama like “Lincoln” or “Stalin,” like an "angel" or a "devil." Regardless of the comparisons evoked they all fail because Obama is none of these. He is "None of the above." He is not "That what came before." He is all of "What shall come after." (emphasis mine)

Politically and personally, Obama is a genetic sport, a Chimera; a now not-so-mythical being composed of multiple parts but functioning as a whole. Neither America nor the world has seen his like before. Attempts to analyze him that appeal to history fail because there is no historical precedent. That was, you will recall, part of his mystic allure. As a result many ascribe motives to the president that cannot be accurate; motives that run counter to the blunt evidence of the senses, to the maxim: “Watch what he does, not what he says.” . .

There are two benefits to Obama’s decision not to decide in Afghanistan:

1) It increases the instability of Pakistan and makes the likelihood of a radical Muslim coup in that country greater. This would, in one day, bring the control of nuclear weapons into radical Muslim hands. No waiting for Iran to get its act together. It also means that a vast sector of the world, from India to England falls under the spectre of a nuclear holocaust on a hair trigger. If you believe that great creation arises from great destruction, this is to your benefit.

2) It lowers the morale and effectiveness of the US military from the Joint Chiefs of Staff down to Private Grunt on patrol in Kandahar. Since the ultimate check to a politician’s power is always found in the military, anything that decreases that element is always to the politician’s benefit. If you can reduce the budget for the military at the same time you increase its responsibilities, so much the better.

None of this makes much sense if your goal is the improvement of the nation you are sworn to protect and defend. If, however, your goal is to enter history at the level of an Alexander or a Caesar, deciding not to decide is a decision you will implement for as long as possible.

Not that Alexander the Great did his empire-building through indecision. Different strategies for different situations. But Obama did promise to be a transformative president. He wants to lessen America's status as a "superpower" and to increase the power of international governing bodies. And he grew up around and studied with people who really believed in creative destruction. Is indecision one of his techniques for encouraging creative destruction of the status quo?

It may be worthwhile to remember that, though he started out with some good ideas for building an empire, Alexander's empire fell apart very rapidly. He didn't have the executive aptitude or skills to transition from conqueror to administrator, and he also became distracted by the "fun part" of being an emperor.

There was practically no examiniation of Obama's executive skills before he became the President. He is a masterful campaigner, which fact was put forward as proof of his executive abilities. His only known executive experience outside of political campaigns (with the Woods Foundation) was not a success. We will need to watch carefully to see what he does, not just what he says. It is important to determine how much he believes in the necessity of creative destruction and/or if he has the ability to create something better from the wreckage of the things his current policies are likely, or in some cases certain, to destroy.

Vanderleun links this poem by Robert Frost:

Fire and Ice
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

President Obama's Decision Not to Decide about Afghanistan

In "The Battle of the Irishmen" (see address for the link), Wretchard discusses differences in opinion about the decision of President Obama to reject all four plans presented to him for resolving the situation in Afghanistan. Andrew Sullivan is thrilled. Some other analysts are not. Read the whole thing and follow the links for some education on this issue. Wretchard reminds us:

. . . Barack Obama is reviewing his own policy. In March 2009 the long time critic of the White House during the Bush administration drew on his insights and an extensive policy review which he commissioned to announce his own Afghan Policy, which can viewed verbatim here.

, , , The spectacle of the Obama taking months to understand what is wrong with his own painstakingly crafted handiwork himself might appear “Presidential” to Andrew Sullivan, but it does raise the question of why after taking months to get it wrong we should have any confidence that Barack Obama should do any better now. . . . Sullivan's conclusion that Obama’s application of “relentless empiricism” has broadened his mind and led even him to think that “the troop question is rather like the public option question” makes you wonder whether there isn’t some fundamental problem of context that is being missed.

Just kidding.

Wretchard also links a critical piece by Dutch-born Gerard Vanderleun. This piece may make you wince, but it's worth reading. One quote reminds us that there is nothing new about Obama's approach in Afghanistan:

Veterans of dysfunctional corporations will recognize the Obama style as the one in which upper management is fond of giving middle management “All the responsibility, none of the authority, and zero resources.” It’s a time-tested recipe for failure and demoralization while maintaining an aloof, “concerned,” and above the fray posture on the part of the CEO. It is what is being done to the US military, day in and day out, in Afghanistan and, as such, works to Obama’s favor as long as it can be done slowly and without alarm.

You might also want to skim through Wretchard's comment thread for thoughts like those in Comment #7:

. . . I saw so much of this when I was at the Pentagon. Present the options and they don’t like any of them. And that’s your fault for not coming up with better options. I call this SFOS – “Search for the Optimum Solution” – and it is both endless and paralyzing. They want something that is perfect, satisfies all the special interests, can’t fail in a manner that is traceable to them, and does not cost any money. Notice how well our space launch development efforts have gone for the past 40 years? SFOS at work! . . .

Mickey Kaus brings up another possibility related to domestic politics. Tigerhawk thinks this approach reflects the presence of lots of lawyers in the White House.

Update: Now he really owns the war in Afghanistan.

Fort Hood, War and Indecision

Daniel Henninger. Read the whole thing.

The most-heard reason for the possible failure is political correctness. No doubt. But Sen. Lieberman's committee should avoid making this its main line of inquiry, because that is a problem without a policy fix. It minimizes the real problem.

The problem is confusion. The combatants at each end of the spectrum in the war over the war on terror know exactly what they think about surveilling suspected terrorists. But if you are an intel officer or FBI agent tasked with providing the protection, what are you supposed to make of all this bitter public argument? What you make of it is that when you get a judgment call, like Maj. Hasan, you hesitate. You blink.

Now everyone thinks the call was obvious. But it wasn't so obvious before the tragedy. Not if for years you have watched a country and its political class in rancorous confusion about the enemy, the legal standing of the enemy, or the legal status and scope of the methods it wants to use to fight the enemy.

In war, uncertainty gets you killed. It just did. . . .

Everyone has seen the pictures of inconsolable grief amid the coffins of Fort Hood. Only one person can resolve the confusion that let this happen: the president.

So, it appears to me that Henninger sees political correctness and political in-fighting as leading to indecision, confusion, silence or buck-passing when people encountered danger signs. People felt personally imperiled by the prospect of reporting highly disturbing behavior by an army psychiatrist, because he was a Muslim.

Victor Davis Hanson:

Something has gone terribly wrong in the entire reaction to the Ft. Hood massacres, as evidenced by the media, the administration, the military authorities, and perhaps the public at large. There seems almost a dreamy disconnect from the terrible fate of the slain—as if we are innately impotent to stop such mayhem, or are above the fray and so like Platonic Guardians must remain deep in contemplation about how in theory we can persuade the Hasans to cease and desist—as if our therapeutic stance in the first place did not encourage and embolden such monsters to act. . . .

How about some passion, or at least promises of a gargantuan hearing, a federal inquiry, Tailhook- or 9/11-style, to investigate how this extremist passed all sorts of red lines—starting with the promotion process and ending with questions of firearm security and use on bases, touching on immigration policy from the Middle East, FBI policies, and political correctness?

Read the whole thing. Comment #1:

Try to imagine the response of the “elites” if Hasan were a blue eyed, blond haired, fervently committed member of the Ku Klux Klan.

Deeper Thinking about Political Correctness, Diversity and Fort Hood

We should not forget the immediate responses by the media and by our government officials to the shooting at Fort Hood, now that even they are being forced to admit that the shooter may have been influenced by radical Islam. Those responses give us some insight into how the tragedy occurred. The pieces by Mark Steyn and Richard Fernandez (I still think of him as Wretchard) linked below seemed important to me. But some other smart people with related thoughts are linked below, too. Some of the pieces are quite provocative. But if we don't think about the philosophies affecting our government's policies and practices and the assumptions of the elite, these kinds of attacks will be more frequent.

Read some of the background concerning the ways the Fort Hood killer had been excused from scrutiny during his army career, and the excuses made for him immediately after the shootings. Charles Krauthammer:

Time's Joe Klein decried "odious attempts by Jewish extremists ... to argue that the massacre perpetrated by Nidal Hasan was somehow a direct consequence of his Islamic beliefs." While none could match Klein's peculiar cherchez-le-juif motif, the popular story line was of an Army psychiatrist driven over the edge by terrible stories he had heard from soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Once you have a sense of the responses to Hasan's behavior before details about his terrorist ties started to be revealed in public, you will appreciate more fully the following excerpts from a post by Mark Steyn:

For the purposes of argument, let's accept the media's insistence that Major Hasan is a lone crazy.

So who's nuttier?

The guy who gives a lecture to other military doctors in which he says non-Muslims should be beheaded and have boiling oil poured down their throats?

Or the guys who say "Hey, let's have this fellow counsel our traumatized veterans and then promote him to major and put him on a Homeland Security panel?

Or the Army Chief of Staff who thinks the priority should be to celebrate diversity, even unto death?

Or the Secretary of Homeland Security who warns that the principal threat we face now is an outbreak of islamophobia?

Or the president who says we cannot "fully know" why Major Hasan did what he did, so why trouble ourselves any further?

Or the columnist who, when a man hands out copies of the Koran before gunning down his victims while yelling "Allahu akbar," says you're racist if you bring up his religion?

Or his media colleagues who put Americans in the same position as East Germans twenty years ago of having to get hold of a foreign newspaper to find out what's going on?

General Casey has a point: An army that lets you check either the "home team" or "enemy" box according to taste is certainly diverse. But the logic in the remarks of Secretary Napolitano and others is that the real problem is that most Americans are knuckledragging bigots just waiting to go bananas. . . .

In a nutshell:

The real enemy — in the sense of the most important enemy — isn’t a bunch of flea-bitten jihadis sitting in a cave somewhere. It’s Western civilization’s craziness. We are setting our hair on fire and putting it out with a hammer.

Getting Philosophical: When the facts about the shootings were still quite preliminary, Wretchard posted an unsettling. generalized piece asking questions about various boundaries between religion and politics. Read it if you dare. Some thoughts from the comment thread on Wretchard's post are discussed in a piece exploring Political Correctness in the West as a cult of human sacrifice. A must-read. Also, (former lefty radical) Roger L. Simon's piece, "Political Correctness as a Murder Weapon".

As a reminder, political correctness is derived from the more intellectually respectable doctrine of cultural relativism (it’s sort of CR’s public “happy face”). In essence, cultural relativism holds that an individual’s beliefs and activities should only be understood in terms of his or her own culture. It’s the ultimate version of “who are we to be the judge?” If Ayatollah Khomeini wishes to oppress all the women and homosexuals in Iran, it’s their way. If Mao seeks to knock off seventy million of his countrymen, so be it. Let the Chinese decide. We shouldn’t impose our values.

On our increasingly tiny globe, this theory – when spelled out – is nothing short of preposterous. It fairly invites a return to the mass murdering ideologies of the Twentieth Century – Nazism, communism, etc – and opens the door wide for Islamism. . . .

Liberal arts professors have a lot to answer for.

Wretchard also wrote a more practical post concerning actions concerning the lack of a rational response to Hasan's actions at Walter Reed. Just one example of the pernicious effects of political correctness in this sad story. We have not, as a nation, thought through the ramifications of political correctness in practice.

What happened at Walter Reed? Did Hasan have an influential patron? If Hasan had exhibited certain disturbing tendencies, and if he was in fact being scrutinized by law enforcement, then what was achieved by moving him to Fort Hood, except putting distance between Hasan and whatever was in Washington DC? What hypothesis could cover so many disparate facts? Many questions remain unanswered. There’s not enough data yet to conclude anything. . . .

This investigation can go anywhere. There’s a great incentive to make sure that whatever the truth happens to be that those in officialdom who have the most to lose should not be the last to know.

When Political Correctness Kills

Dorothy Rabinowitz on the Fort Hood killer: "His terrorist motive is obvious to everyone but the press and the Army brass."

It can by now come as no surprise that the Fort Hood massacre yielded an instant flow of exculpatory media meditations on the stresses that must have weighed on the killer who mowed down 13 Americans and wounded 29 others. Still, the intense drive to wrap this clear case in a fog of mystery is eminently worthy of notice. . . .

. . . To those not terrorized by fear of offending Muslim sensitivities, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan's motive was instantly clear: It was an act of terrorism by a man with a record of expressing virulent, anti-American, pro-jihadist sentiments. All were conspicuous signs of danger his Army superiors chose to ignore.

What is hard to ignore, now, is the growing derangement on all matters involving terrorism and Muslim sensitivities. Its chief symptoms: a palpitating fear of discomfiting facts and a willingness to discard those facts and embrace the richest possible variety of ludicrous theories as to the motives behind an act of Islamic terrorism. All this we have seen before but never in such naked form. The days following the Fort Hood rampage have told us more than we want to know, perhaps, about the depth and reach of this epidemic.

One of the first outbreaks of these fevers, the night of the shootings, featured television's star psychologist, Dr. Phil, who was outraged when fellow panelist and former JAG officer Tom Kenniff observed that he had been listening to a lot of psychobabble and evasions about Maj. Hasan's motives.

A shocked Dr. Phil, appalled that the guest had publicly mentioned Maj. Hasan's Islamic identity, went on to present what was, in essence, the case for Maj. Hasan as victim. Victim of deployment, of the Army, of the stresses of a new kind of terrible war unlike any other we have known. Unlike, can he have meant, the kind endured by those lucky Americans who fought and died at Iwo Jima, say, or the Ardennes? . . .

The quality and thrust of this argument was best captured by the impassioned Dr. Phil, who asked us to consider, "how far out of touch with reality do you have to be to kill your fellow Americans . . . this is not a well act." And how far out of touch with reality is such a question, one asks in return—not only of Dr. Phil, but of the legions of commentators like him immersed in the labyrinths of motive hunting even as the details of Maj. Hasan's proclivities became ever clearer and more ominous.

To kill your fellow Americans—as many as possible, unarmed and in the most helpless of circumstances, while shouting "Allahu Akbar" (God is great), requires, of course, only murderous hatred—the sort of mindset that regularly eludes the Dr. Phils of our world as the motive for mass murder of this kind.

Read the whole thing for a discussion of the diverse ways the obvious was ignored. Ans this is one of the main reasons why the obvious was so studiously ignored:

"This terrible event," Gen. Casey noted, "would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty."

To hear this, and numerous other such pronouncements of recent days, was to be reminded of all those witnesses to the suspicious behavior of the 9/11 hijackers who held their tongues for fear of being charged with discrimination. It has taken Maj. Hasan, and the fantastic efforts to explain away his act of bloody hatred, to bring home how much less capable we are of recognizing the dangers confronting us than we were even before September 11.

Charles Krauthammer:

I think the real moral scandal is the attempt over the weekend to medicalize mass murder. All of a sudden we hear that he [Nidal Hasan] heard these terrible stories from soldiers who had suffered and he snapped. . . .

I was a psychiatrist. I can't remember a single instance of a psychiatrist who went around shooting people. Maybe I missed the epidemic.

But all of a sudden if the shooter is called Nidal Hasan, all of a sudden everybody invents this secondary post-traumatic stress syndrome which had never existed until yesterday.

It is an example of political correctness. And all the warnings that people had had in advance and not reported is an example of how political correctness isn't only a moral abomination, it's also a danger.

Jonah Goldberg comparing the woman who said nothing when threatened by Mohammed Atta before 9/11 vs. the failure of anyone to "connect the dots" concerning Hassan:

When my wife was up for a job at the Justice Department, her background-checker grilled her relentlessly over the fact she once had a reduction in her rent by $100 a month. It was as if this proved she had a gambling problem, or credit issues, or was a sleeper agent for the Bulgarian KGB or something.

Apparently, the FBI’s investigation of Hasan was not that thorough. When the FBI “investigated,” it seems they went looking for a reason not to investigate — and they found it.

Much more in the article.

Bill Bennett on the investigations concerning Fort Hood vs. Tailhook:

More and more information continues to come out about Nidal Hasan and the Ft. Hood massacre. As I surmised, memos will be released and institutions or institutional officers will not look good. Already some of this is coming out. This needs to be bigger than the 1991 Tailhook incident which dominated the news for a year, I fear that it will not be. You may recall the Tailhook scandal involved a party of Navy personnel where tens of women and men complained of sexual harassment by fellow servicemen and women. Nobody, however, was killed. 4,000 male military attendees were interviewed several times, many as much as five times or more, and heads rolled. I want the same thing here — I fear the story ends in a month.

The Aftermath of Communism

A few excerpts from a piece by Marian L. Tuby:

Twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall came down and with it communist rule in Central Europe. . . . Communism, to use (with an appropriate sense of irony) Leon Trotsky’s words, ended up in “the dustbin of history.”

In spite of its monumental failure to bring social peace and material abundance, socialism is enjoying something of a renaissance. From Venezuela to Bolivia to South Africa, government ministers espouse the supposed virtues of socialism. Even in the West, some policies are taking government intervention in the economy to levels unseen in decades. Given the renewed interest in alternatives to capitalism, it is perhaps appropriate to recall the last time that socialism was tried with real gusto.

Few recall communist rule in Eastern Europe in the 1950s—the height of its glory. The fog of time shrouds painful memories of firing squads and forced labor camps. However, I am old enough to remember communism on its last leg—communism that no longer had the confidence to pull the trigger, but still had the strength to lock the door of a prison cell. . . .

Shortages, some Americans will recall from the 1984 Robin Williams movie “Moscow on the Hudson,” were an everyday reality in the Soviet bloc. . . . .

Of course, shops can be filled with goods, roads can be rebuilt, and houses renovated. The psychological scars of communism take much longer to heal. . . .

As the Austrian philosopher Friedrich von Hayek explained in his 1944 classic, The Road to Serfdom, central planning leads to massive inefficiencies and long queues outside empty shops. . . As there can be no agreement on a single plan in a free society, the centralization of economic decision-making has to be accompanied by centralization of political power in the hands of a small elite. When, in the end, the failure of central planning becomes undeniable, totalitarian regimes tend to silence the dissenters—sometimes through mass murder.

Some 100 million people have died in the pursuit of a communist utopia. Eliminating profit and private property was meant to end social ills, such as inequality, racism, and sexism. But the closer a society got to Marxism — whether it was half-hearted attempt as in Hungary or a whole-hearted attempt as in Cambodia—the bloodier the result. Survival in a communist society necessitated lies, theft, and betrayal. Thus, as the former Czech President Vaclav Havel wrote, most people in the former Soviet bloc grew up without a moral compass. These morally compromised survivors of communism find it difficult to reflect on the past and to come to terms with it. . .

Important things to think about.

Remembering the Victims of Communism

Instapundit links Gateway Pundit: "Berlin Wall Freedom Memorial shut down by Washington University." From the comments: “So basically, the university got into the spirit of the thing and helped make it more real.”

No "speaking truth to power" allowed on campus these days when the lefty professors and administrators are the "power". Some of them might feel bad if reminded that they ignored the suffering of people in the gulags. (Pretty much anything goes if you're on the Left yourself, however).

Reason TV is not under the heel of university officials, and produces a 4-minute video about the victims of Communism and plans for a memorial building.

After claiming approximately 100 million victims in the 20th century, communism was dismissed to the ash heap of history. But those who suffered under its boot heel have largely been confined to the history books when not forgotten altogether.

One reason is that the communists didn't allow TV cameras to record what they were doing. How can you have news with no pictures?

Update: Another problems was suppression of news about the actions of Communist governments against their people. Walter Duranty famously earned a Pulitzer Prize for a NYT series of articled which covered up Soviet repression. Ukrainians remembered Stalin's genocidal starvation campaign this weekend. And FINALLY, a Western reporter who told the truth about the starvation is being recognized.

More on the Fall of the Wall

Interesting history: The fall of the wall was neither impossible nor inevitable.

An American who was in Germany in 1989 remembers his personal experiences on the day the wall fell:

I had lived in Germany in the late 1970’s working both as a technician and with a side job. The job took me all over Europe, which I loved. I would occasionally have to go into East Germany or Czechoslovakia, and saw what communism was all about. It wasn’t pretty and it was evil and huge armies stood on each side of the German border waiting for Armageddon and sometimes the Cold War wasn’t so cold. There is a small army of anonymous dead on both sides. . .

Since I had spent time in the East, the protests in Leipzig and Dresden that began in early Fall were stunning. The GDR simply did not allow freedom of expression. But Poland had already seen a loss of control by the state as President Reagan, the Pope and Margaret Thatcher had both overtly and covertly supported Solidarity, and then Gorbachev enacted Glasnost. The Poles were never the best of communists, and nationalism was strong but suppressed in the East Bloc. They were the first to fall away, even before Glasnost.

East Germany was more communist than Stalin, they used to say. The Stasi were everywhere and the country was Orwellian in its dedication to communism with a German face. So when the demonstrations broke out and nothing happened there was some slight hope for greater freedom there as well. What happened next stunned the world. . . .

The pressure within East Germany had risen, but no one expected the protests. First a few thousand and then more. Honecker was losing control. In mid October, Gorbachev visited Honecker who had issued shoot to kill orders, which were never carried out. Gorbachev actually had to pressure Honecker into allowing some reform. The old Cold Warrior wouldn’t change though, and was replaced by Egon Krenz, nothing more than an apparatchik in the right place at the right time.

3 Weeks before November 9th, he took over. The protests kept on growing and there was a sense of change, but even then no hint of what would happen. . . .

It was probably 10:00 or so when I dialed in Westdeutsche Rundfunk or another channel and heard an announcement that Krenz was speaking to the Politburo. I had a feeling it was very important, as did the radio network obviously. It wasn’t an especially long speech, maybe 15 minutes, but I had to pull over because I began to cry for a moment. . . . To someone who had seen the Cold War up close and knew the implications of a hot war in Germany, I was simply stunned. I realized, “It’s over and we’re still alive”. There were times when it was close. The Army kept the ammunition close at hand and the trip wire units were always ready to go. The Air Force planes that you saw on the rare clear day were sometimes armed and there were planes sitting on runways across Europe armed and crewed and ready. One phone call could set it all off. Large numbers of civilians and military would die very quickly and in the worst possible manners. And it was over.

Read the whole thing.

The first break in the Iron Curtain came between Austria and Hungary in the summer of 1989, the "Year of Miracles".

. . . . Secret communications between Hungary and Austria culminated in a public ceremony held on the Austro-Hungarian frontier on May 2, 1989, where, documented by television cameras, the electric fence running the length of the border was declared an “anachronism” and a hole was ceremoniously cut in it.

“What are those Hungarians up to?” bellowed East German premier Erich Honecker at an East German Politburo meeting the next day. The answer was obvious. Soon throngs of East German citizens, traveling to a fellow Eastern Bloc country on tourist visas, simply moved across the Hungarian border into Austria from where they could continue on to West Germany to be reunited at long last with relatives and friends. . . .

In hindsight, it’s easy to recognize the important role Mikhail Gorbachev played in the events of 1989. . . .

But the most credit must go to the government leaders of Hungary and Austria. It was these essentially unsung heroes who took the biggest risks from the very beginning, bravely plotting their moves in the face of potentially severe political and military repercussions. (After all, memories of the ill-fated Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the subsequent refugee flight across the Austrian border weren’t all that distant.)

In a sense, history came full circle in 1989. At the beginning of the century, Germany had been dragged into World War I because of problems faced by its Habsburg neighbor, Austria-Hungary. So many of the major political challenges in 20th Century – communism, fascism, the Cold War, even the Middle Eastern conflict – stemmed from that struggle. And none of these were more searing for Germany than World War II and the subsequent division of the country between East and West.

Once, Austria and Hungary had created problems for Germany. Seventy-five years later, they helped solve them. Not a bad result in the end!

The 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall

Ross Douthat, the New York Times' latest designated conservative columnist, has an intriguing piece today, "Life after the End of History":

For most of the last century, the West faced real enemies: totalitarian, aggressive, armed to the teeth. Between 1918 and 1989, it was possible to believe that liberal democracy was a parenthesis in history, destined to be undone by revolution, ground under by jackboots, or burned like chaff in the fire of the atom bomb.

Twenty years ago today, this threat disappeared. . . . .

There will be speeches and celebrations to mark this anniversary, but not as many as the day deserves. (Barack Obama couldn’t even fit a visit to Berlin into his schedule.) By rights, the Ninth of November should be a holiday across the Western world, celebrated with the kind of pomp and spectacle reserved for our own Independence Day.

Never has liberation come to so many people all at once . . .

So why isn't this day celebrated more fervently? Read the whole thing for some intriguing speculations. Glenn Reynolds thinks he knows why, after twenty years, "we still haven't come to terms with the scope of our deliverance". And Tigerhawk has another observation:

Douthat loses me when he goes on to argue that our civilization needs a threat -- I blame politicians, activists, and media organizations who would lose their relevance if people actually concluded that there were no really, really scary threats -- but his basic point is absolutely right: Be it the jihad, Iran, carbon dioxide or "globalization," no threat today rivals the danger of intercontinental thermonuclear war. The small wars of the last eight years notwithstanding, we live in frivolous, happy-go-lucky times compared to virtually the entire period between 1914 and 1989.

That is a scary thing only if you want to be "a great president" (we all remember the disappointment of Bill Clinton that he served in such boring times), change the world, or increase the audience of your media product. We do not savor the victory on this anniversary because it is not in the interests of the chattering classes so to do.

A commenter notes:

On this side of the Atlantic . . . to really feel it I think you had to have come into political awareness in time for the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was in the fifth grade and remember clearly how we were going to escape injury from H-Bombs by diving under our desks. I knew there was a threat of death, sudden and unnatural. I knew that people were plotting for the advantage to do that and get away with it. . .

From Steven F. Hayward, a more comprehensive view of the history behind the fall of the Berlin Wall. Worth your time. A couple of excerpts and some comments below:

"Here we come face to face with the fundamental reason for the collapse of European Communism. For all of the sophisticated “structural” and “materialist” analyses of the Communist world, it comes down to the simple fact that the European Communist rulers—most of them anyway—lost the will to shoot their own people in large numbers. (Not so the Chinese.) This might seem an inevitable consequence of the loss of belief in the Marxist ideology of class struggle, but the will to power of rulers has never been dependent on ideology, and it might have turned out differently. As Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin puts it his concise book Armageddon Averted, the Soviet Union “was lethargically stable, and could have continued muddling on for quite some time.” Moreover, Kotkin argues,

although it had been destabilized by romantic idealism, the Soviet system still commanded a larger and more powerful military and repressive apparatus than any state in history. It had more than enough nuclear weapons to destroy or blackmail the world, and a vast storehouse of chemical and biological weapons, with all requisite delivery systems. . . [W]ith the horrid example of much smaller Yugoslavia’s catastrophic break-up right next door, one shudders to think of the manipulative wars, indeed the nuclear, chemical, or biological Armageddon, that could have accompanied the Soviet collapse.

Kotkin concludes: 'The greatest surprise of the Soviet collapse was not that it happened—though that was shocking enough—but the absence of an all-consuming conflagration.' "

What did this event mean for the West? George H.W. Bush was taken by surprise. Our foreign intelligence has not been particularly good for quite some time. The fall of the USSR also had a dramatic affect on the intellectual world in the West, but secular utopianism still survives:

. . . . it was the end of more than a 20th-century story. Some of the East German protestors in the streets of Leipzig in early November carried banners that read, “1789-1989.” The storming of the Bastille in 1789 could be said to have marked the beginning of utopian revolutionary politics; now the storming of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked its end. As Timothy Garton Ash observed, “Nineteen eighty-nine also caused, throughout the world, a profound crisis of identity on what had been known since the French revolution of 1789 as ‘the left.’” The deep unpopularity of the Communist regimes revealed by the peoples of Eastern Europe in 1989 was an embarrassment to moderate liberals and value-free social scientists who regarded these nations as stable and legitimate forms of governance, and it was a source of faith-shaking crisis for the far Left that openly sympathized with these regimes. On the intellectual level the death of revolutionary socialism has found a successor in “postmodern” philosophy that preserves some aspects of decayed Marxism. But its obscurity limits its power to convince, and as such is unlikely to advance beyond the barricades of academic English departments. Those artificial intellectual walls will take longer to come down.

I have long thought it remarkable how many of the worst tyrants of the 20th century spent time in Paris before starting their careers in tyranny.

As far as "postmodern" philosophy and other remnants of 20th century "leftism" are concerned, I think their danger for the USA lies mainly in their influence over the elite who are often prominent in our public and private institutions.

The ideology of the Right's favorite militantly atheist Marxist, Christopher Hitchens, was influenced by Lenin, Trotsky and others, but he doesn't like Stalin or the Stalinist systems which developed in the USSR and its satellites. Hitchens notes that the leaders of Eastern Europe had pretty much abandoned the "historical wisdom" of Lenin and Engels long before 1989. He points out:

This 20th anniversary has seen yet another crop of boring articles about how so many people, especially in former East Germany, are supposedly "nostalgic" for the security of the old Stalinist system. . . . [but because of economic decay and debt] . . the wall came down just before the hermetic state that it enclosed would have imploded. I doubt that there would have been much "nostalgia" for that.

Andrew Klavan (again): "Free people can treat each other justly, but they can't make life fair. To get rid of the unfairness among individuals, you have to exercise power over them. The more fairness you want, the more power you need. Thus, all dreams of fairness become dreams of tyranny in the end."

Right organizes against its leadership, Left not so much

Wretchard writes about the successful challenge from the Right to the official Republican candidate for the 23rd congressional district in New York, Dede Scozzafava. This embarrassed a lot of people in Republican leadership. This also led to some very emotive, scurrilous language about the Right from NYT columnist Frank Rich. Wretchard points out an interesting question from Mr. Rich:

Where are the Tea Parties of the Left?

Wretchard has more concerning how and why much of the Left's potential revolutionary energy is being channeled into a top-down organization.

There is also some appreciation in this piece of the moderate style of the much-discussed Saul Alinsky, relative to many activists on the Left.

Surprising insights from Saul Alinsky via the Blue Collar Professor:

Let us in the name of radical pragmatism not forget that in our system with all its repressions we can still speak out and denounce the administration, attack its policies, work to build an opposition political base. True, there is government harassment, but there still is that relative freedom to fight. I can attack my government, try to organize to change it. That’s more than I can do in Moscow, Peking, or Havana. Remember the reaction of the Red Guard to the “cultural revolution” and the fate of the Chinese college students. Just a few of the violent episodes of bombings or a courtroom shootout that we have experienced here would have resulted in a sweeping purge and mass executions in Russia, China, or Cuba. Let’s keep some perspective.

The Professor's take on Alinsky's statement above:

Again, what is remarkable about this passage is his recognition that the Communist regimes that are the model for his ideology are also brutally suppressive governments. Conversely, the government he is trying to overthrow is democratic and tolerant of dissent: this is called false consciousness. He cannot recognize that his own values inevitably lead not to liberation but to suppression. Paradoxically, he shares the values of his enemy (capitalists) and deplores the values of his associates (communists). Why?

I think the answer lies in the deluded Leftist belief that things must be "fixed." Yet, they do not attempt to fix the murderous regimes employing their own philosophy; they try to fix those governments which are functioning. Again, why? I can't answer that yet. . .

The Professor has more on the partial adoption of Alinsky's methods and philosophy by President Obama.

One can also see where President Obama acquired the style of pragmatism and soft-speaking to mask subversive action. Yet, young people on the Left wear Che shirts, our filmmakers make Che movies, and everything old is new again. . . . "

Read both of the pieces linked above for some interesting insights into our current political situation. Whether you agree or disagree with the authors.