Fjordman argues that the left’s swooning capitulation to Islamic demands for suppression of free speech constitutes the greatest erosion of democratic practice in the world’s advanced democracies since WW2.

The less control the authorities have with Muslims, the more control they want to exercise over non-Muslims. As problems in Europe get worse, which they will, the EU will move in an increasingly repressive direction until it either becomes a true, totalitarian entity or falls apart. This strange mix of powerful censorship of public debate, yet little control over public law and order, has by some been labelled anarcho-tyranny.

While Islamic groups in Britain openly brag about how they are going to subdue the country by violent means or call for beheading those insulting Islam, Bryan Cork, 49, of Carlisle, Cumbria, in the Lake District, was sentenced to six months in jail for standing outside a mosque shouting, “Proud to be British,” and “Go back to where you came from.” One British court ruled that even use of the word “immigrant” as an insult could amount to proof of racial hostility.

In Belgium, a Turkish-born Catholic priest, Père Samuel, has been prosecuted for “incitement to racist hatred” by the Belgian Centre for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism (CEOOR), because of a remark he made in a 2002 television interview…

Writer Oriana Fallaci has been indicted by a judge in her native Italy for “vilification” of Islam, because of a book she wrote called The Force of Reason.

The Financial Times reports

the White House on Tuesday confirmed that Gordon England, deputy defence secretary, sent a memorandum to senior defence officials and military officers last week, telling them that Common article III of the Geneva Convention — which prohibits inhumane treatment of prisoners and requires certain basic legal rights at trial — would apply to all detainees held in US military custody.

The Administration is knuckling under to the Supreme Court’s preposterous application of Geneva Convention status in Hamdan.

The sanctimonious do-gooder element is burbling with joy. Dave Hoffman aptly compared Hamdan with Brown, and he’s perfectly correct.

As in Brown, the Hamdan decision takes a leap of faith in the legitimacy of particular justices’ self-righteous moral intuitions as a basis for overruling objective law, counting on the sentimentality of the general public to affirm politically over time the Court’s decision.

There is a difference, though. The Brown decision was made at a time when state segregation represented a strange anachronism, when the laws under scrutiny were nearly universally despised, when the legal fruit was already overripe and ready to drop off the vine of its own accord.

The principle of reciprocity in the laws and usages of war has considerably greater vitality and reason behind it than Jim Crow ever did. The entire point of the Geneva Convention is to encourage humane treatment of prisoners of war on the basis of reciprocity. Signing the Convention is a promise that, if you do not abuse our soldiers who fall into your hands, we will also spare yours.

Justice Stevens’ generosity in the awarding of honorable status, rights, and protections to illegal combatants really represents a fraudulent check written at the expense of American fighting men.

When Justice Stevens effeminately promises that illegal combatants, terrorists, murderers, and brigands will all be treated as honorable adversaries, attempting to preclude the American fighting man, exposed to the hazard of falling alive into the hands of a merciless and barbarous enemy, from punishing violations of the customs and usages of war, he goes far beyond his own legitimate perogative. The decision to spare this enemy’s life, or that, belongs to the man who bested him, not to some theorist and scribbler sitting in a marble building in the District of Columbia.

In WWII, my father served in the USMC on Guadalcanal. He told me that the Japanese had people able to speak English, and in the long tropical nights, the Japanese forces would amuse themselves by imitating the pleas for assistance of a wounded American lying helpless between the fighting lines. Naive young Marines often had to be restrained physically from climbing out their foxholes and dashing off into the night to the rescue of their miserable and suffering fellow Marine. Every now and then, an individual hero would break free, and go out there. They always found him the next day, crucified with Japanese bayonets to a palm tree, his reproductive organs cut off and stuffed insultingly in his mouth. The Marines on Guadalcanal consequently took no Japanese prisoners, except for the purpose of short and forcible interrogation.

In today’s absurd world, bourgeois lawyers, safe in the United States and far from the fighting (who know nothing of war) would interpose their own opinions and emotions between the just revenge of American fighting men and a cowardly and dishonorable enemy.

The answer to Justice Stevens is simple. US forces will need to be certain to take no illegal combatants alive.

For some inexplicable reason, this new advertisement by Sony announcing the availability of a white version of Sony’s Playstation Portable has provoked controversy.

This is the sort of thing which will one day amuse historians, who will chuckle over anecdotes demonstrating our era’s characteristic cringe over racial matters, in precisely the same way we are amused at the idea of prudish Victorians placing skirts on the legs of tables and pianos.

(Amazon-US is using the wrong book picture. This correct one is from Amazon-UK.)

Former Monty Python comedy troop member Terry Jones has developed a latter-day career producing popularizing history programs for British television. Jones is trying to offer an original and witty version of history, but the result (being representative of the contemporary leftwing demotic culture of which Jones himself is a product) inevitably proves fragmentary, misleading, and vulgar.

His latest (a sequel to an earlier series on the Middle Ages) focuses on the Roman Empire. Jones proposes to tell the story of Roman history as seen by the Britons, Gauls, Germans, Hellenes, Persians and Africans. His approach consists of serving up selected anecdotal details (typically obtained from recent academic papers) designed to support arguments for barbarian cultural equality, and moral superiority, to Roman Civilization.

A Times press release associated with the impending book pubication provides the central Jones thesis:

The Romans kept the Barbarians at bay for as long as they could, but finally they were engulfed and the savage hordes overran the empire, destroying the cultural achievements of centuries. The light of reason and civilisation was almost snuffed out by the Barbarians, who annihilated everything that the Romans had put in place, sacking Rome itself and consigning Europe to the Dark Ages. The Barbarians brought only chaos and ignorance, until the renaissance rekindled the fires of Roman learning and art.

It is a familiar story, and it’s codswallop.

The unique feature of Rome was not its arts or its science or its philosophical culture, not its attachment to law. The unique feature of Rome was that it had the world’s first professional army. Normal societies consisted of farmers, hunters, craftsmen and traders. When they needed to fight they relied not on training or on standardised weapons, but on psyching themselves up to acts of individual heroism.

Seen through the eyes of people who possessed trained soldiers to fight for them, they were easily portrayed as simple savages. But that was far from the truth.

The fact that we still think of the Celts, the Huns, the Vandals, the Goths and so on as “barbarians” means that we have all fallen hook, line and sinker for Roman propaganda. We actually owe far more to the so-called “barbarians” than we do to the men in togas.

In the past 30 years, however, the story has begun to change.

There you have it. Rome did not triumph over the barbarians by virtue of superior civilization. It was just that same evil Western militarism, overcoming peaceful (morally superior) agrarian societies. Why, the Britons, Jones contends, had better shield, helmets, and chariots than the Romans, built roads (alas, with wooden, not stone foundations, old boy), and (assuming somebody’s interpretation of a bas relief is correct) may have developed some sort of wooden harvesting contraption.

Jones overarching thesis rests on his ability to persuade his audience that the existence of some vestigial technology, in the Celtic case, establishes the equality of illiterate wooden-road-building Celtic barbarism to the Classical Civilization which read Homer and Virgil and built in marble and concrete.

Such is contemporary trans-Atlantic culture. A state-funded national television network provides a platform for an utterly unqualified celebrity to dispense competently-assembled, but factually dubious “histories” arriving at politically correct conclusions.

Newsmax, anticipating the democrat capture of the House in November, is warning that John Conyers will become Judiciary Committtee Chairman, and John Conyers is proposing a bill leading to the payment of reparations for pre-1865 Slavery to persons of Afro-American descent.

I agree with Rupert Birkin:

If,’ said Hermione at last, `we could only realise, that in the spirit we are all one, all equal in the spirit, all brothers there — the rest wouldn’t matter, there would be no more of this carping and envy and this struggle for power, which destroys, only destroys.’

This speech was received in silence, and almost immediately the party rose from the table. But when the others had gone, Birkin turned round in bitter declamation, saying:

`It is just the opposite, just the contrary, Hermione. We are all different and unequal in spirit — it is only the social differences that are based on accidental material conditions. We are all abstractly or mathematically equal, if you like. Every man has hunger and thirst, two eyes, one nose and two legs. We’re all the same in point of number. But spiritually, there is pure difference and neither equality nor inequality counts. It is upon these two bits of knowledge that you must found a state. Your democracy is an absolute lie — your brotherhood of man is a pure falsity, if you apply it further than the mathematical abstraction. We all drank milk first, we all eat bread and meat, we all want to ride in motor-cars — therein lies the beginning and the end of the brotherhood of man. But no equality.

`But I, myself, who am myself, what have I to do with equality with any other man or woman? In the spirit, I am as separate as one star is from another, as different in quality and quantity. Establish a state on that. One man isn’t any better than another, not because they are equal, but because they are intrinsically other, that there is no term of comparison. The minute you begin to compare, one man is seen to be far better than another, all the inequality you can imagine is there by nature. I want every man to have his share in the world’s goods, so that I am rid of his importunity, so that I can tell him: “Now you’ve got what you want — you’ve got your fair share of the world’s gear. Now, you one-mouthed fool, mind yourself and don’t obstruct me.’

–D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love, Chapter 8:16-17.

Why not take Birkin’s suggestion?

Pay Slavery reparations. Whatever they want. $100,000 per person. $500,000 per person. But, along with it, we abolish welfare, repeal the Civil Rights Bill of 1964, and end Affirmative Action. Everyone is equal. No one any longer has anything to complain about. And everyone has full use of his property, the choice of whom to serve or not serve, hire or not hire, rent to or not rent to. Complete freedom of association, and the right of private persons to discriminate, is restored. The Civil Rights Era, the Cuture of Complaint, is over and done with forever.

Shelby Steele wonders why we just don’t win.

There is something rather odd in the way America has come to fight its wars since World War II.

For one thing, it is now unimaginable that we would use anything approaching the full measure of our military power (the nuclear option aside) in the wars we fight. And this seems only reasonable given the relative weakness of our Third World enemies in Vietnam and in the Middle East. But the fact is that we lost in Vietnam, and today, despite our vast power, we are only slogging along–if admirably–in Iraq against a hit-and-run insurgency that cannot stop us even as we seem unable to stop it. Yet no one–including, very likely, the insurgents themselves–believes that America lacks the raw power to defeat this insurgency if it wants to. So clearly it is America that determines the scale of this war. It is America, in fact, that fights so as to make a little room for an insurgency.

Certainly since Vietnam, America has increasingly practiced a policy of minimalism and restraint in war. And now this unacknowledged policy, which always makes a space for the enemy, has us in another long and rather passionless war against a weak enemy.

Steele identifies white guilt as the reason for post-WWII America’s inclination to approach wars half-heartedly and our willingness to accept substitutes for victory, right up to, and including, defeat. The ascendancy of ressentiment certainly plays some significant part in all of this. But I think Steele is overlooked the significance of the estrangement of the American haute bourgeois from participation in the military; and the rise, in the era of endlessly expanding prosperity and security which followed the victory in 1945, of a sense of invulnerability, particularly on the part of American elites.

Americans born post-WWII are commonly rather spoiled, never really having experienced hardship, never confronting the necessity of sacrifice. That’s precisely why so many Americans today are completely irresponsible and frivolous with respect to patriotism, why they don’t believe there is any real obligation to support elected governments in time of war.

They think America is so rich, so powerful, so secure, that war is just a game. “We destroy the credibility of the Administration. We undermine domestic support for the war, and compel Bush to withdraw US forces by helicopter from Baghdad. Then we’ll write triumphant editorials in the Times, and elect a democrat in 2008. Everything will be wonderful.”

They don’t believe the US can really lose anything that matters. They don’t believe that a US defeat has any consequences affecting them. “US withdrawal will just put those Red State warmongers in their place, and get us back in the saddle where we belong,” they think. It has not occurred to them that they just might be very wrong. That this time American defeat might have real consequences.

Today’s award for Leftism-which-Astounds goes to Keith Uhlich, who reviews films non-commercially (meaning nobody pays him) on several web-sites, including Slant Magazine. Uhlich did not like Universal Studios’ new 9/11 film United 93.

First of all, he didn’t like the film’s emotional direction.

It’s pornography, really, a kind of somber sub-Bruckheimer sideshow that stokes our anger instead of stroking our libidos, all building to an inexorable and anticlimactic cum shot—a sound-deprived descent into black—that does nothing more than empty us of any kind of constructive emotion. We’re constantly told to “never forget,” but on the evidence of United 93 I have to ask what it is, exactly, we’re being asked to remember beyond a Pavlovian sort of rage that constantly and deceptively folds back on itself?

But, worse:

while the stench of death and dread permeates every frame of United 93, it is nowhere near as strong as the stink of synergy. Certainly this isn’t the first Hollywood production done in by the competing corporate and personal interests that funded it (consider the unspoken implications—both commercial and propagandistic—of the film’s last-minute title change from Flight 93 to United 93), but it is the only one I’ve come across where the families of those onboard gave it their full-on approval. Not all the families, of course. All evidence suggests that the terrorists’ relatives were left entirely out of the creative process, an action which goes a way toward revealing the film’s hagiographic bias (how easy it then becomes to turn victims into heroes and adversaries into monsters) and points up the general ridiculousness of involving the families in the first place (too many cooks spoiling an already rancid broth).

What could be worse than a film which provokes emotions of sympathy for your own murdered countrymen, and indignation at the actions of fanatical mass murders? Films ought to be instructing the audience to identify with the viewpoint of the enemy, and blaming American corporations and the US Government. NYU obviously succeeded in training Mr. Uhlich to believe that the only proper response to enemy attack is treason.

——————-
Hat tip to LGF.

Fjordman has an interesting. must-read essay in Gates of Vienna, reflecting on the film V is for Vendetta, and the assimilation by pop culture of the Western elite’s accessorizing of Treason as an essential fashion statement. Fjordman refers to the views

of French philosopher and cultural critic Alain Finkielkraut, who thinks that “Europe does not love itself.” Finkielkraut says that it’s not forces from outside that are threatening Europe as much as the voluntary renunciation of European identity, its wish of freeing itself from itself, its own history and its traditions, only replaced by human rights. The European Union thus isn’t just post-national, but post-European. What characterizes Europe today is the will to define itself, not from an ideology, but by dismissing any sense of identity. Europe is now built upon an oath: Never again. Never again extermination, never again war, but also never again nationalism. Europe prides itself in being nothing. According to Finkielkraut, Auschwitz has become part of the foundation of the EU, a culture based on guilt. But this is a vague ideology saying that “We have to oppose everything the Nazis were for.” Consequently, nationalism or any kind of attachment to your own country, including what some would say is healthy, non-aggressive patriotism, is frowned upon. To remember is to regret. Europe rejects its past. “European identity” is the de-identification of Europe. Of the past, we are only to remember crimes. This didn’t just happen in Germany, but in all of Europe. “I can understand the feeling of remorse that is leading Europe to this definition, but this remorse goes too far. It is too great a gift to present Hitler to reject everything that led to him.” This is said by the Jewish son of an Auschwitz prisoner.

Robert Irwin discusses the reasons for the decline of Arabic and Islamic studies at British universities. At a time featuring a conspicuous need for this specific cultural and linguistic expertise, a suitable candidate to occupy the Sir Thomas Adams Professorship in Arabic, established at Cambridge in 1632, is not in evidence. Irwin attributes the decline in Arabic studies partly to the politically correct disrepute of the field brought about by the influence of Columbia University’s late professor Edward Said:

As far as large sections of the British intelligentsia are concerned, orientalism is thought of as an historical evil, something to be ashamed of and linked, however vaguely, to such wickednesses as crusading, racism, the slave trade, colonialism and Zionism. Orientalism, by the Palestinian literary critic Edward Said, published in 1978, pioneered this paranoid approach to an essentially benign academic discipline. In his immensely influential book, Said presented a somewhat confusing survey of the way Europeans and Americans have written and thought about the orient and, more precisely, about the Arab world. Said argued that orientalism was a sinister discourse that constrained the ways westerners could think and write about the orient. He suggested that there was a malign tradition of disparaging and stereotyping orientals in various ways that went back to Homer, a tradition that was continued by such grand writers as Aeschylus, Dante, Flaubert and Camus. However, Said argued, in recent centuries academics in Islamic and middle eastern studies had been instrumental in framing a mindset that facilitated and justified imperial dominance over the Arab lands. According to Said (who died in 2003), the west possesses a monopoly over how the orient may be represented.

But the contemporary School of Resentment was only partially responsible, Irwin maintains.

Broader intellectual trends have had a role—a flight from difficulty, a suspicion of old-fashioned, fact-bound scholarship and a taste for deconstructive readings of classic works.

David Schmidtz at Cato discusses which forms of inequality matter, i.e., which deserve intervention and redress. Replies from Peter Singer, Tom G. Palmer, and Jacob Hacker will be forthcoming. The essay is excerpted from his new book, The Elements of Justice.

The key philosophical point: that there is a prior moral question about which inequalities are ours (i.e., society’s) to arrange, lies outside the specific scope of this essay’s focus.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

The streets of the United States may not be paved with gold, but the America culture of complaint can be awfully lucrative.

Two Salvadoran illegal immigrants found themselves confronted in 2003, upon making their way informally into the United States, by pistol-wielding Casey Nethercott, a member of Ranch Rescue, a right-wing volunteer group trying to protect private property along the Southwestern US border from incursions by illegal aliens.

Fatima del Socorro Leiva Medina and Edwin Alfredo Mancia Gonzales accused Nethercott of pistol-whipping them, and he was acquitted of the charge, but (thanks to the intervention of the Southern Poverty Law Center) the lucky Salvadorans get to stay in the United States as “crime victims,” and they are also now property owners.

A Cochise County judge awarded the pair ownership of Mr. Nethercott’s 70 acre ranch near Bisbee, Arizona, when Nethercott, now serving a five year term in Texas for illegal possession of that pistol (having had some sort of previous conviction), failed to contest their lawsuit asking for $500,000 in damages. It appears that no legal do-gooding organization was assisting Mr. Nethercott.

AP — KLTV

Kenji Yoshino, Deputy Dean for Intellectual Life (which very title provokes sarcasm) and Professor at Yale Law School, has made a staggering new breakthrough in the ever-burgeoning Academic industry of the study of victimization’s infinite forms. Writing in a New York Times Magazine feature article (promoting a new book on the same subject), Yoshino recalls his own unhappy experiences:

When I began teaching at Yale Law School in 1998, a friend spoke to me frankly. “You’ll have a better chance at tenure,” he said, “if you’re a homosexual professional than if you’re a professional homosexual.”

It wasn’t long before I found myself resisting the demand to conform. What bothered me was not that I had to engage in straight-acting behavior, much of which felt natural to me. What bothered me was the felt need to mute my passion for gay subjects, people, culture.

It may strike many readers as an enviable enough fate to be a tenured Professor at Yale Law School, not to mention, Deputy Dean for Intellectual Life, but what real satisfaction can a chap derive from such trifles, when the reactionary prejudices of a cruel society will not grant him the right to allow his inner screaming queen to emerge and swish proudly in public in full daylight?

Long after I came out, I still experienced the need to assimilate to straight norms. But I didn’t have a word for this demand to tone down my known gayness.

Then I found my word, in the sociologist Erving Goffman’s book “Stigma.” Written in 1963, the book describes how various groups – including the disabled, the elderly and the obese – manage their “spoiled” identities. After discussing passing, Goffman observes that “persons who are ready to admit possession of a stigma. . .may nonetheless make a great effort to keep the stigma from looming large.” He calls this behavior covering. He distinguishes passing from covering by noting that passing pertains to the visibility of a characteristic, while covering pertains to its obtrusiveness. He relates how F.D.R. stationed himself behind a desk before his advisers came in for meetings. Roosevelt was not passing, since everyone knew he used a wheelchair. He was covering, playing down his disability so people would focus on his more conventionally presidential qualities.

As is often the case when you learn a new idea, I began to perceive covering everywhere. Leafing through a magazine, I read that Helen Keller replaced her natural eyes (one of which protruded) with brilliant blue glass ones. On the radio, I heard that Margaret Thatcher went to a voice coach to lower the pitch of her voice. Friends began to send me e-mail. Did I know that Martin Sheen was Ramon Estevez on his birth certificate, that Ben Kingsley was Krishna Bhanji, that Kirk Douglas was Issur Danielovitch Demsky and that Jon Stewart was Jonathan Leibowitz?…

The new civil rights begins with the observation that everyone covers.

One might expect serious resistance to a startlingly dramatic new notion of Civil Rights, to a new progressive demand for something far beyond mere tolerance of the forms of minority status which are innate or unchosen, which persons cannot ( or are believed, at least, to be unable to) do anything about, but Yoshino has considered this, and believes he has the answer.

When I lecture on covering, I often encounter what I think of as the “angry straight white man” reaction. A member of the audience, almost invariably a white man, almost invariably angry, denies that covering is a civil rights issue. Why shouldn’t racial minorities or women or gays have to cover? These groups should receive legal protection against discrimination for things they cannot help. But why should they receive protection for behaviors within their control – wearing cornrows, acting “feminine” or flaunting their sexuality? After all, the questioner says, I have to cover all the time. I have to mute my depression, or my obesity, or my alcoholism, or my shyness, or my working-class background or my nameless anomie. I, too, am one of the mass of men leading lives of quiet desperation. Why should legally protected groups have a right to self-expression I do not? Why should my struggle for an authentic self matter less?

I surprise these individuals when I agree. Contemporary civil rights has erred in focusing solely on traditional civil rights groups – racial minorities, women, gays, religious minorities and people with disabilities. This assumes those in the so-called mainstream – those straight white men – do not also cover. They are understood only as obstacles, as people who prevent others from expressing themselves, rather than as individuals who are themselves struggling for self-definition. No wonder they often respond to civil rights advocates with hostility. They experience us as asking for an entitlement they themselves have been refused – an expression of their full humanity.

Civil rights must rise into a new, more inclusive register.

In the end, the School of Ressentiment proves universally inclusive. The answer to each and every individual id’s discontents with Civilization’s restraints is Universal Revolution. Everyone just needs to let his freak flag fly. For the Old Adam and the New Caliban alike, from the crudity of the lower classes to the depravity of the elite, all norms and standards must be swept aside, and any negative judgment of the self in any form or kind prohibited by the ideology of the new Enlightenment. A new liberated mankind will march forward into an idyllic future of self-realization and universal equality, just by each individual human being “being himself.” Koombayah!