We Should Live - Ben Bateman

My college-aged daughter recently remarked that I should change my blog to something like DOOM.blogspot.com, to properly reflect its relentless gloom. It’s a fair point, so today let’s consider how things should be, instead of how they shouldn’t.

Let’s start with the premise that a society built by and for intellectuals has a very limited future. I say that regretfully, as an intellectual, but I see no way to deny it. You could view most of the problems with Communism and its offshoots from this perspective: They all start with intellectuals saying to each other, “Hey, wouldn’t it be great if WE ran the world?”

The problem with intellectuals running the world is that most of the challenges inherent to self-perpetuation are not intellectual challenges. They are more often challenges of courage, strength, endurance, or faith. We intellectuals can chatter at each other and read all the books we want, but that isn’t what maintains a civilization. To survive, a civilization’s women must steadfastly endure the risks and hardships of pregnancy, birth and infancy. And its men must be willing to fight and perhaps die on the battlefield in defense of their women and beliefs. Intellectuals aren’t very good at either task. It has long been observed that highly educated women have fewer children than the rest, and it hardly seems a stretch to say that the men who daily face sniper fire and IEDs in Iraq probably aren’t spending their leisure time reading Shakespeare or pondering the fate of Western Civilization.

And that’s not to say that the women who bear the children and the men who fight the wars aren’t intelligent. Intelligence doesn’t make one an intellectual, and many intellectuals aren’t all that intelligent. It’s more a question of where your interests lie. Non-intellectuals spend a large proportion of their thoughts on the here and now, on the details of their everyday lives. Intellectuals spend more time on abstractions and the future. Regardless of his intelligence level, a soldier on patrol in Iraq needs to focus on where the next attack may come from—not on the conflict’s grand meaning. (more…)

Wars are won by destroying the enemy’s will to fight. A nation is never really beaten until it sells its women.

That’s how Spengler begins his most recent article, which offers an unusual perspective on Iran. Apparently large numbers of Iranian women have turned to prostitution, both at home and abroad:

The European Commission’s most comprehensive surveys of human trafficking found that Iranian women made up 10-15% of the prostitutes working in Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy. “Fatima” from Persia has become as familiar as “Natasha” from Belarus. Iranian whores long have been a scandal in the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, which periodically round up and expel them.

It is hard to obtain reliable data on prostitution inside Iran itself, but anecdotal evidence suggests that it has increased since Ahmadinejad became president last year. Anti-regime sociologists claim that at least 300,000 women are whoring in Tehran alone.

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Imagine that you wake tomorrow to learn that London is gone. A few of Britain’s thousands of homegrown Islamic terrorists have smuggled some nuclear bombs into the country undetected—as Britain’s Security Service has assured us is practically inevitable—and set them off around downtown London during the middle of the day. Big parts of the city are simply gone, while radiation will render the rest of it uninhabitable for decades.

This wouldn’t be Britain’s September 11. It would be something much, much worse. Not thousands dead this time, but hundreds of thousands dead, and millions likely to die soon from radiation sickness. Over our morning coffee we see some grainy home movies of the blast as seen from the suburbs, alternated with heart wrenching shots of maimed evacuees.

Then what? How does America respond?

Initially with charity of course, the kind of charity for which the world routinely kicks us in the teeth. And with draconian security measures. The world economy will take a serious hit as borders tightened and countries decide that each cargo container must be inspected.

But what about the culture? 9/11 moved our country culturally, and the first terrorist nuclear attack would surely move us further. But where would it move us? That’s the tricky part.

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Investor’s Business Daily quotes Carl Levin, the incoming chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee:

“We cannot save the Iraqis from themselves,” Levin opined Wednesday at a Capitol Hill press conference. “The only way for Iraqi leaders to squarely face that reality is for President Bush to tell them that the United States will begin a phased redeployment of our forces within four to six months.”

“We cannot be their security blanket,” he added.

Then the article makes a trenchant point:

Yes, we should demand more of the Iraqis. But those who ask whether we can or should stop Iraqis from killing themselves forget that we’re in this to stop others from killing us and using Iraq as a base camp from which to do it.

We’ve been Europe’s security blanket for six decades. We are Japan’s security blanket. We are South Korea’s. It’s been said that were it not for us, the French would be speaking German and the Germans would be speaking Russian. In 1938, the West decided it couldn’t be Czechoslovakia’s security blanket and sold out that country in Munich, Germany. The rest, as they say, is history.

Instapundit chimes in:

Yes, I’d like to see a timetable for getting troops out of Europe. It’s time they took responsibility for their own security and stopped their childlike dependence upon / resentment of America. They need to work on more responsible democratic institutions, too. The Iraqis I’ll give a bit longer.

For some, I suppose that this is shocking news:

Al-Qaida plotting nuclear attack on UK, officials warn

When we wake up some morning and learn that Liverpool or downtown London just doesn’t exist any more, I’ll feel very sad about it.  But not surprised.  Then I’ll feel glad that it wasn’t an American city.  Then mildly guilty for feeling glad.

What else do they expect Iran to do with its nukes, once it finishes building them?

This article by Mark Steyn is too good to pass without comment. He hooks together three monuments:

• Trafalgar Square is one of the best-known places in Britain. It has fountains, a tower, and three statues of great leaders in British history: two generals and a king. There’s a fourth plinth, or pedestal for a statue, but it has been empty since 1841—until just over a year ago, when London’s Mayor “Red Ken” Livingstone unveiled a new statue on it. Alongside the generals and other symbols of Britain’s glorious history, they now have a statue of an armless naked pregnant woman of no particular distinction (beyond her disability) named Alison Lapper. Says Ms. Lapper on her rarely updated web site: “It makes a powerful statement about where we are trying to go in the 21st century – a future with truly equal opportunities for all.” Sadly for Britain, she’s probably right, at least until they get Sharia. She probably does represent Britain’s future.
• In Arizona the state has built an official 9/11 memorial in which are inscribed various statements, many of which are pacifistic or anti-American.
• And in Paris the French government has commemorated the event that sparked the ferocious riots just over a year ago: Two boys running from police decided to hide in an electrical sub-station and were electrocuted. Now they have a monument, too.

You should read the whole thing, but if you absolutely don’t have time, here’s the close:

America, Britain and France are not peripheral members of the developed world but its heart. They’re the west’s three permanent representatives on the Security Council, the three nuclear powers. But if these monuments truly represent the spirit of each nation as those monuments to Nelson and Napier did in their day then you would have to be an unusually optimistic sort to bet on the long-term prospects of all three countries. The poseur diversity of Trafalgar Square slips easily into the self-loathing of Arizona, and from there it’s but a short step to the open appeasement in Clichy-sous-Bois. If you seek our monument, look around: We cannot state who we are, what we believe, why we fight.

I sometimes wonder if the future of Iraq and Western Civilization is as bad as I make it out to be, or whether I’m just projecting my naturally gloomy personality onto it. James Lileks provides some comfort in that area. Readers of his daily Bleat know that while he is eccentric in his tastes, he is also fundamentally gentle and levelheaded. His web site has old matchbooks, a podcast in the style of old radio shows, and scans of old postcards, ads, WWII posters, and comic strips. His superlative skill with words draws the reader’s interest into sharing his passion for the strangest and dryest of subjects. But an instinctive humility keeps his passions in check. He never forgets that he is but one man in a vast country, and he rarely claims much expertise. But underneath it all, he doesn’t really care whether you or I will share his fascination with historic Minneapolis. His mind is his own, as are his tastes and opinions. And that’s what makes his opinions so valuable.

It still strikes me as strange to see Lileks write on politics, but he has been at it for a few years now. (Archive here.) His articles seem more like humor than political commentary, loaded as they are with his trademark gentle touch and brilliant turn of phrase. But the points underneath those clever phrases are quite serious, and lately seem to be getting more so. His older writing took care to throw every jab in both directions, such as:

Mutual distrust has never been greater. The left believes the right would build Heathen Conversion Processing Centers in every state if it could. The right believes the left wants to declare the Boy Scouts a hate group if they don’t offer a merit badge for presiding over a gay marriage.

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Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, posted some thoughts and questions on his blog about intelligence. Scott’s blog is a lot of fun, but you have to know how to read it. He says provocative and stupid things for the main purpose of stirring up lively comments. His questions are often very interesting, though his answers and positions are usually ridiculous.

Today’s post on intelligence was no exception. Scott claims to be baffled as to why his readers object to his proposal that only intelligent people should be allowed to vote. So he attempts to better understand the other side by arguing in its favor. He relates a tale from his youth in which he joined MENSA and attended some of its meetings:

It turns out that the people who join Mensa and attend meetings are, on average, not successful titans of industry. They are instead – and I say this with great affection – huge losers. I was making $735 per month and I was like frickin’ Goldfinger in this crowd. We had a guy who was some sort of poet who hoped to one day start “writing some of them down.” We had people who were literally too smart to hold a job. The rest of the group dressed too much like street people to ever get past security for a job interview. And everyone was always available for meetings on weekend nights.

His best conclusion for the other side is “Is it possible that good ol’ common sense and traditional values are a better foundation for important life decisions, including politics?” It’s progress, but still far short of the mark.

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Via Power Line, via Townhall.com:

(Let me know if it’s hitting the sidebar.)

Hugh Hewitt linked to and quoted a speech by Eliza Manningham-Buller, Director-General of Britain’s Security Service aka MI5. I hate to abridge such an important document, but if you simply haven’t time to read the whole thing, here are the best bits.

After setting out her credentials as an intelligence officer, she describes some early terror plotting and concludes:

Let there be no doubt about this: the international terrorist threat to this country is not new. It began before Iraq, before Afghanistan, and before 9/11.

The Security Service foiled several terrorist plots after that, but:

This run of domestic success was interrupted tragically in London in July 2005. Since then, the combined efforts of my Service, the police, SIS and GCHQ have thwarted a further five major conspiracies in the UK, saving many hundreds (possibly even thousands) of lives.

So now that we’ve caught some bad guys, can’t we go back to the important business of expanding the welfare state? The Director-General points to some higher priorities:

[M]y officers and the police are working to contend with some 200 groupings or networks, totalling over 1600 identified individuals (and there will be many we don’t know) who are actively engaged in plotting, or facilitating, terrorist acts here and overseas. . . . What we see at the extreme end of the spectrum are resilient networks, some directed from Al-Qaida in Pakistan, some more loosely inspired by it, planning attacks including mass casualty suicide attacks in the UK. Today we see the use of home-made improvised explosive devices; tomorrow’s threat may include the use of chemicals, bacteriological agents, radioactive materials and even nuclear technology.

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Hugh Hewitt’s analysis of the election results makes more sense than anything else I’ve read:

The post-mortems are accumulating, but I think the obvious has to be stated: John McCain and his colleagues in the Gang of 14 cost the GOP its Senate majority while the conduct of a handful of corrupt House members gave that body’s leadership the Democrats.

And the scary part is the McCain is likely to run hard for President in 2008. I think he’s hopelessly unreliable, and Hewitt reminded me why. First he betrayed his party on judges:

On April 15, 2005 –less than three months after President Bush had begun a second term won in part because of his pledge to fight for sound judges– Senator McCain appeared on Hardball and announced he would not support the “constitutional option” to end Democratic filibusters. Then, stunned by the furious reaction, the senator from Arizona cobbled together the Gang of 14 “compromise” that in fact destroyed the ability of the Republican Party to campaign on Democratic obstructionism while throwing many fine nominees under the bus.

Then war-hero McCain went squishy on Iraq to seize what he perceived as a political opportunity:

A few months later there came a debate in the Senate over the Democrats’ demand for a timetable for withdrawal for Iraq led to another half-measure: A Frist-Warner alternative that demanded quarterly reports on the war’s progress, a move widely and correctly interpreted as a blow to the Administration’s Iraq policy. Fourteen Republicans voted against the Frist-Warner proposal –including Senator McCain– and the press immediately understood that the half-measure was an early indicator of erosion in support for a policy of victory.

Hewitt then points out the near-total lack of congressional response to the New York Times publishing state secrets useful to terrorists. And that’s a fine point. The NYT deserves the highest level of scorn, but the lack of Republican response is horrifying as well. It provides a fine example of why the conservative base wasn’t very enthusiastic about supporting the Republicans.

He also mentions in passing the immigration fiasco, in which the Republicans wasted precious time and energy trying to cram through a bill that its based hated. I think he lets them off too lightly. For me, that was the clearest illustration of how estranged the Republicans had become from their base. Not only did they not seem to know what the voters wanted, but they didn’t seem to care once they found out.

It’s a tragedy that the voters chose self-destruction over self-perpetuation. Next year we will almost certainly have a massive amnesty for illegal aliens, which will make the problem much larger as millions more pour in illegally to wait for the next amnesty. Iran’s leaders are already cheering the Democrats’ victory, as are Hugo Chavez and the rest of America’s enemies around the globe.

But amid the wreckage there’s still some hope:

• The Democrats’ majority is thin, which will restrict their ability to act on anything other than immigration.
• Most of the new Democrats in Congress are more conservative than the leadership. This means that the Democratic party may be drifting slowly toward the center, which is good for the country.
• The Republicans might decide to listen to their base and follow conservative principles.
• The Democrats don’t actually have an agenda, so their lack of internal cohesion will probably limit what they can accomplish in two years.
• Two years of Democratic control could set up a Republican (or even conservative) comeback in 2008.

Michael Williams linked to a story about the humdrum agonies of nationalized healthcare, and asked: “The government can barely handle national defense, why would anyone trust them to care for our health?”  My response on his blog was too cryptic (sorry, I’ve been to distracted and lazy lately to be clear, which is most of why I haven’t posted much here.)  So I’ll expand a bit here.

The urge to enslave is built into the human genome.  In any human population, you will find a standard distribution of primary sources of pleasure.  Some people will focus on the sensory.  They will primarily enjoy good food, sex, and luxury in general.  Some will primarily enjoy social contact and the acceptance of other people.  Some will primarily enjoy success in imposing their will on the physical world.  These men focus on building or destroying, and the women focus on their homes.  Others turn inward for their primary pleasure, seeking spiritual or philosophical enlightenment, higher learning, or artistic achievement.

Then there’s one more group: the people who want power for its own sake.  For these people, there’s nothing so satifsfying as forcing others to do what you want rather than what they want.  Some of these people justify their inclination by claiming superior intelligence and insisting that everyone is happier when the smart people run the world.  Others don’t bother with justification, and simply impose their will on others because they can.

As Thomas Sowell put it: “If you have ever seen a four-year-old trying to lord it over a two-year-old, then you know what the basic problem of human nature is—and why government keeps growing larger and ever more intrusive.”  That basic problem of human nature doesn’t exist in every person, but I believe that it will always exist in a certain percentage of people.  And, as Sowell implies, it is the central problem with politics.

If you aren’t one of those power-oriented people, ask yourself: Why would anyone want to be a politician?  It certainly isn’t for the money.  When William Jefferson (D, LA) was caught on videotape taking a bribe, I was struck by the relatively paltry sum of money involved.  It only costs $90,000 to buy a Representative?  I had no idea that politicans were so cheap.  (Maybe Senators are more expensive.)  Once I’m wealthy, I’ll have to buy a few.

And the salaries paid to politicians are certainly no inducement to public service.  Anyone qualified for the job will have to take a pay cut, almost by definition.  I wouldn’t want someone in office who was so incompetent that they couldn’t earn more than their public salary in the private sector.

So why would anyone do it?  There are noble motives, to be sure.  Some are ideologues, though they rarely last very long.  Many enjoy the prestige and sense of importance.  Some feel a sense of duty to their family or to the public.  But I believe that a large percentage experience this intense craving for power, and politics is one of the best ways to satisfy it.

It’s not necessarily destructive for these power-hungry people to hold high office.  A carefully constructed system can channel those urges in useful directions.  But the tendency toward destruction is always there.

Michael asks why anyone would support nationalized healthcare, when it produces such awful results.  I say that it’s a matter of perspective.  From my perspective and his the results are awful, because innocent people must suffer and die while waiting in endless lines and struggling to follow impenetrable regulations.  But from the perspective of the power-hungry, this is a wonderful result.  This is how the world should be.

Ayn Rand expressed this impulse beautifully in the character of Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead.  Just before Toohey gives the speech that is the book’s climax (Pt 5, ch 13), Peter Keating asks him why he wants to kill the hero, Howard Roark.  Toohey answers:

I don’t want to kill him.  I want him in jail.  You understand?  In jail.  In a cell.  Behind bars.  Locked, stopped, strapped—and alive.  He’ll get up when they tell him to.  He’ll eat what they give him.  He’ll move when he’s told to move and stop when he’s told.  He’ll walk to the jute mill, when he’s told, and he’ll work as he’s told.  They’ll push him, if he doesn’t move fast enough, and they’ll slap his face when they feel like it, and they’ll beat him with a rubber hose if he doesn’t obey.  And he’ll obey.  He’ll take orders.  He’ll take orders!

That’s my explanation for the Left’s passion for such an obviously terrible idea as nationalized healthcare.  Yes, it would provide inferior healthcare.  Yes, it would produce unnecessary suffering and death.  Yes, it would force people into queues like cattle, and subject them to impenetrable regulations and the whims of capricious bureaucrats.  Yes, it would take away your freedom.  And that’s the point!

The point of nationalized healthcare isn’t to provide healthcare.  It’s to find something that people desperately need, then take it away from them, then make them crawl and beg to get it back.  In the minds of many people, that result is a good in itself, and the consequent suffering and death are acceptable costs for obtain it.

So we can see why the leaders support it.  But why would anyone vote for it?  Mostly it’s because this small group of people is completely fixated on and devoted to their goal, much the way that pedophiles will go to great lengths to satisfy their peculiar desires.  The Tooheys of this world will use whatever tools they have at hand: fear, jealousy, and greed are always popular.  It’s always wise not to present the issue too clearly.  Their main strength is that their opposition is sporatic and poorly organized.  The push toward slavery is instinctual and ceaseless, but the push toward freedom requires intellect and an act of will.

These people sometimes can strike fast and hard to achieve total victory, as they did in Russia, China, Cuba, and Cambodia.  But when that route isn’t available, they are committed enough to work slowly through the law and bureaucracy to inch forward slowly toward their goal, year after year.  And it doesn’t seem to matter to each power-hungry individual whether he will be the one to wield the whip.  For those in the rank and file, it’s OK that they won’t be the masters.  It’s enough for them to be in the ruling group, as long as everyone else becomes a slave.

This post on Done With Mirrors looks into the past and future, and sees yet another American betrayal of foreigners struggling to be free. It recounts a story I hadn’t heard before, the origin of the “halls of Tripoli” line in the US Marine Corp hymn. Background details are here and here.

When our country was young, we had serious problems with the pirates who ruled North Africa. When we won our independence, we also lost the protection that our ships had enjoyed under the British flag. Our ships were fair game, and the young country saw itself as having no choice but to pay substantial tribute to the pirates to secure our sailors’ safety.

Thomas Jefferson hated this tribute, and argued that it should end. He was able to put his views into practice when he became president in 1801. He refused a demand for $225,000 from the Pasha of Tripoli, and the Pasha retaliated by effectively declaring war on us. Jefferson thought that our developing navy was up to the task of protecting our ships.

But the USS Philadelphia ran aground near Tripoli, and the Pasha captured and enslaved 300 of our sailors. Jefferson responded both diplomatically and militarily. While the diplomats dithered, American agent William Eaton located a claimant to the throne of Tripoli, and assembled an army to put him back into power. His force of 500 men marched 600 miles in 50 days from Egypt to the port city of Derne, which they captured and then held against a counterattack.

Then the sad part: Jefferson hadn’t intended Eaton to actually succeed in his mission. While Eaton held Derne, American diplomats agreed to pay ransom for the sailors, and set a ransom rate going forward, thereby encouraging future piracy. Eaton’s heroics had been for naught.

Eaton didn’t accomplish this feat on his own. Most of his force was local, and many people in and around Derna had helped him. And when he received the order to withdraw from Derne, he knew that everyone who had helped him—effectively every supporter of America in the region—would be slaughtered for the crime of having helped us. Eaton wrote:

You would weep, Sir, were you on the spot, to witness the unfounded confidence placed in the American character here, and to reflect that this confidence must shortly sink into contempt and immortal hatred; … but if no further aid comes to our assistance and we are compelled to leave the place under its actual circumstances, humanity itself must weep: The whole city of Derne, together with numerous families of Arabs who attached themselves to Hamet Bashaw and who resisted Yussef’s troops in expectation of succour from us, must be abandoned to their fate — havoc & slaughter will be the inevitable consequence — not a soul of them can escape the savage vengeance of the enemy.

This was perhaps the first such incident in our history, though hardly the last. We did it to the Kurds in the first Iraq war, and we did it on a grand scale to the South Vietnamese.

And we’re going to do it again.

It’s infuriating to think that our government will now be run by cowards eager to abandon thousands of innocent foreigners to be slaughtered by thugs. And it makes me sick to hear the cowards’ proposals for mass murder smothered in self-righteous moral preening.

For these cowards, nothing is impossible—as long as it expands the nanny state. And no burden is too heavy to bear—as long as it’s a tax burden. But freeing several million souls from terror and oppression? Discouraging the suicide hijacking of airplanes or the nuclear destruction of our cities? Only then is the task too difficult and the cost too high.