RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271937/theyre-not-waving-eu-flags-bruce-bawer

I’ve always enjoyed being in German-speaking cities, even though my German isn’t what it used to be (and wasn’t even much back then), and even though it’s hard not to be reminded, now and then, of, well, you know. In Germany, to be sure, they go out of their way to remind you of that unpleasant interval from 1939 to 1945, filling their cities with hideous examples of what you might call the architecture of atonement – brutalist eyesores that we’re supposed to perceive as heartfelt proclamations of sincere Holocaust remorse. At the same time, however, paradoxical though it may sound, they’re determined to put their past behind them.

And behind you, too. In Berlin, that once gray but increasingly shiny city, you get the distinct impression that the inhabitants desperately want to pretend that the world was reborn anew after World War II and that a dynamic, hyper-contemporary Deutschland, its sins washed entirely clean by all those flagrant public gestures of apology for Auschwitz, is leading us all into a post-national, post-historical utopia, hoisting the EU banner aloft and singing Beethoven’s Ode to Joy in joyful chorus. Yes, if you’re visiting Berlin, by all means do your duty by wandering around that dreary landscape of stone near the Brandenburg Gate that purportedly memorializes the dead of the Shoah – but then get your ass out of there, head down the Eberstraße, and start shopping like crazy at the high-end boutiques of ultra-glitzy Potsdamerplatz.

Vienna, where I am right now, is of course a German-speaking city, but it’s different in key ways from Berlin – or, for that matter, from any burg I know in Germany. Like Rome (also a Catholic capital), Vienna has a feel of being utterly at ease with its history, its cultural heritage, and its national identity. Around the corner from where I’m staying is a shop crammed with immense early nineteenth-century portraits of Austrian aristocrats. In the front window of a nearby chocolatier is a big poster of a court painting of the same period. And a local taproom is decorated with framed photographs of Franz Josef-era military officers. All over town, national, but not EU, flags abound – the opposite of Germany.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-modernizing-dictator-is-no-myth-1542153977

The murder of Jamal Khashoggi has led to justified misgivings about Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s declared effort to modernize Saudi society. Critics argue that the killing disproves what Robert Kagan calls “the myth of the modernizing dictator”: the notion that repressive strongmen sometimes pave the way for socioeconomic development, which eventually may also lead to democratization.

Curiously, the most spectacular modernizers since World War II—South Korean, Taiwan and Singapore—have been absent from the debunking. South Korea alternated between authoritarian elected presidents and sheer dictatorships until 1987. Taiwan was under martial law until the 1990s. Under such regimes, both countries went from being among the world’s poorest to the most advanced within a generation, while laying the ground for subsequent democratization. In Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew led a similarly meteoric process of modernization in a semiauthoritarian system he created.

The main secrets of success in all these cases were market-friendly policies and a concerted investment in modern education. Less spectacular examples, such as Francisco Franco’s Spain and Augusto Pinochet’s Chile—abhorrent as both regimes were—also enabled economic modernization and eventual democratization.

It is historically rare for a country to become a fully liberal democracy before modernizing—the U.S. and now India are prominent exceptions. The first modernizer, Britain, became democratic—rather than merely parliamentary and increasingly liberal—only around 1900, after it had industrialized. Its modernization had involved uprooting the peasants, the vast majority of the population, from the countryside and turning them into an urban proletariat. Their hardship was immense and the long-term benefits to their children and grandchildren were far from obvious. They wouldn’t have consented if they had the vote. Similar problems plague modernization attempts in today’s developing societies.

To be sure, many dictators in developing societies fail to modernize: some because they adopt the wrong policies, some because of intractable cultural obstacles. That may turn out to be the case for Crown Prince Mohammed. But democracies in such countries also face daunting obstacles to modernization—and are highly susceptible to collapse. Moreover, the main hazard in such countries isn’t modernizing dictatorships but regressive populist regimes, reactionary dictatorships and authoritarian socialism. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.wsj.com/articles/macrons-faux-pas-on-nationalism-1542066344

Can the trans-Atlantic relationship be saved? That’s the question the world faces 100 years after the end of World War I.

The signs from the centennial commemorations in Paris were not good. French President Emmanuel Macron publicly condemned nationalism as “the opposite of patriotism” as self-proclaimed nationalist Donald Trump looked on stonily. The relationship between the U.S. and its three principal European allies—Germany, Britain and France—is arguably cooler than at any time since the Truman administration.

Paradoxically, the chill has occurred just as the security, economic and even ideological interests of the leading Western states have grown increasingly aligned. Russia and China both seek a weaker European Union, a divided Western alliance, and a decline in American power. China’s aggressively mercantilist economic plans target the capital-goods and automotive industries at the core of the German economy. In a world with better leadership, the major European states and the U.S. would deepen their partnership to prepare for a challenging new era in world politics. In our world, however, bitterness and resentment fester on both sides of the ocean, and the alliance weakens as the need for it grows.

The oracles of conventional wisdom naturally blame Mr. Trump—and they’re not all wrong. His negotiating style with Germany and France has been abrasive. From Iran to trade to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty to the environment, he assaults what most Europeans see as their interests even as his “America First” rhetoric grates on their sensibilities.

But if Mr. Trump is wrong about many things, on one big issue he is right. However tangled its history, nationalism is an important force in global affairs that world leaders should respect. Mr. Macron’s disdainful remarks made for good headlines, but his inability to appreciate the role of nationalism in world politics exemplifies the failure of imagination at the root of many of Europe’s troubles.

The instinctive antinationalism of leaders like Mr. Macron is rooted in the belief that Western Europe is the real Europe and that its history is a universal history with lessons equally compelling for the rest of the world. These egotistical beliefs are so deeply held among elites in Western Europe that they are often unconscious.

https://www.firstthings.com/

Soon after Sir Roger Scruton was appointed to advise the UK’s Ministry of Housing as chair of the new Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, certain Labour MPs accused him of being an anti-Semite. But there is more than a modicum of chutzpah in this charge.

The Labour Party itself stands credibly accused of anti-Semitism. The distinguished former Chief Rabbi of Britain, Lord Jonathan Sacks, has denounced Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as an “anti-Semite” who “has given support to racists, terrorists, and dealers of hate who want to kill Jews and remove Israel from the map.” Corbyn openly associates with terrorists who murder Jews. He has publicly described Hamas and Hezbollah as his “friends.” The Iranian regime paid him to appear on a government television channel. And in 2016 he was photographed laying a wreath at the graves of members of the Black September terrorist organization that conducted the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre. In the photograph, Corbyn stood next to the chief of the terrorist organization PFLP.

Corbyn’s Jew-hatred is a running sore in British politics and has caused deep divisions in his own party. Earlier this month London’s Metropolitan Police made public a criminal investigation into Labour Party anti-Semitism. It is reasonable to suppose that the putative discovery of a mote in Scruton’s eye serves to detract attention from the beam in Jeremy Corbyn’s.

A 2014 speech Scruton gave in Budapest is the sole exhibit for the Labour party’s prosecution. During this speech, Scruton noted in passing that some Jewish intellectuals took a dim view of nationalism after the hideous experience of World War II, and that some moved in the orbit of George Soros, the preeminent adversary of the new Hungarian nationalism as exemplified by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

In response, an outpouring of support from the conservative camp has defended Scruton as “Britain’s greatest living philosopher,” “one of the great intellects of our age,” and “Britain’s most famous living philosopher.” I should like to add my voice to Sir Roger’s defense, first as a Jew, and second as a harsh critic of his work (see, for example, my First Things review of his recent book on Wagner). I have no prior reason to defend Scruton, but I am revolted by the Labour party’s spurious charges of anti-Semitism that trivialize a matter of urgent importance.

The distinguished British journalist Melanie Phillips, who has written frequently and fiercely on the matter of Jew-hatred, skewered the problem deftly:

Sir Roger said in a speech: “Many of the Budapest intelligentsia are Jewish, and form part of the extensive networks around the Soros Empire.” Cue claims of antisemitism. But here’s the whole passage from which those words have been taken:

“Many of the Budapest intelligentsia are Jewish, and form part of the extensive networks around the Soros Empire. People in these networks include many who are rightly suspicious of nationalism, regard nationalism as the major cause of the tragedy of Central Europe in the 20th century, and do not distinguish nationalism from the kind of national loyalty that I have defended in this talk. Moreover, as the world knows, indigenous antisemitism still plays a part in Hungarian society and politics, and presents an obstacle to the emergence of a shared national loyalty among ethnic Hungarians and Jews.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271899/mullah-terror-europe-joseph-puder

The Trump administration has been urging its European allies to adopt a tougher stance on Iran, emphasizing in particular the Islamic Republic’s terrorism on European soil. To corroborate the administration’s point, on October 30, 2018, the Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET) announced that a Norwegian nationalized citizen of Iranian decent was arrested on suspicion of attempting the assassination of Iranian Arab separatists.

Lest we forget, the Iranian regime has masterminded and carried out the destruction of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina’s capital, on March 17, 1992, as well as the Jewish Community Center called Asociacion Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) on July 18, 1994, in the same city. The embassy bombing took the lives of 29 people and injured 250, including Israeli diplomats, children and clergy from a nearby church. The AMIA bombing killed 87 people and over 100 were injured. In 1998, an intercepted call from the Iranian embassy in Buenos Aires proved conclusively that Iran was involved in the bombing. In 2006, Argentinian prosecutor Alberto Nisman accused top Iranian officials of orchestrating the bombings in Argentina’s capital. Nisman, an Argentinian Jew, was murdered on January 15, 2015. It is more than likely that the Iranian regime had a hand in it.

While Iranian terror is worldwide, Tehran’s operations in Europe at a time when the Ayatollah regime seeks European help in thwarting U.S. sanctions is most revealing. Weakened by internal dissent, it has resorted to assassinations which reveals the murderous nature of the regime. The target this time for the Iranian regime was the exiled leader of the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahvaz (ASMLA). According to Israeli media reports, the Mossad (Israel’s Intelligence agency) provided information to Denmark’s PET on the plot that helped prevent the assassination attempt.

Denmark, however, was not the only target for Iran’s murderous regime. The BBC News headline on October 2, 2018, proclaimed “France Blames Iran for Foiled Paris Bomb Plot.” According to the BBC, “On June 30th, Iranian opposition supporters gathered in Paris for a meeting of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI). Guests included U.S. politicians Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House, and Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s lawyer. The NCRI is considered to be the political arm of dissident group Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), which Iran has designated as a terrorist organization. It later emerged that two Belgian nationals of Iranian origin – a husband and wife known as Amir A. and Nasimeh N. – had been arrested by Belgian police in possession of half a kilogram (1.1lb) of explosives and a detonator.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/11/europe_opting_for_submission_to_islam.html

Two seemingly unrelated events in Europe over the past 20 days point to what cannot be described other than as the slow suicide of European civilization. On November 9, Chancellor Merkel gave a speech in Berlin commemorating the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht (lately renamed Pogromnacht). This 1938 event, which led to the willful destruction of 1400 synagogues, thousands of Jewish stores and the deportation of more than 30,000 Jews to the concentration camps, is widely considered the beginning of the Holocaust. For those familiar with Nazi history, though, the writing had been on the wall long before that.

What Hitler had in mind for the Jews is described in detail in his Mein Kampf and put in practice at the latest by the Nuremberg Laws of September 1935, which excluded Jews from German society, prohibited them from holding public office and marrying Germans and made them, in effect, stateless outcasts in their own country. As if to make sure that modern Holocaust doubters and anti-Semites, like labor leader Jeremy Corbin of the UK, have no place to hide, Hitler explained in detail his plans to annihilate the Jews to his military commanders in his Obersalzberg speech of August 22, 1939. “Who, after all,” said he, “speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians.”

The gist of Merkel’s speech was less about the commemoration of a dreadful historical event than a warning of the new wave of virulent anti-Semitism washing across Western Europe and assuming pandemic proportions in Muslim diaspora communities. For this, she should be congratulated, though she was less than candid in forgetting to mention that a good part of this explosion of anti-Semitism was caused by her in letting in two million mostly Muslim migrants, who get their anti-Semitism with their mothers milk. Nor did she mention that she had done her level best to perpetuate her awful policies by trying to force Eastern Europe to take migrants who have proven unwilling to integrate. Though Merkel is on her way out, it won’t be long before synagogues and Jewish businesses in Germany will have to be guarded by soldiers, as they already are in France.

https://www.steynonline.com/8990/a-tale-of-two-migrantshttps://www.steynonline.com/8990/a-tale-of-two-migrants

There was a terrorist attack in Melbourne on Friday. I believe it’s the fifth, publicly speaking, but I gather there’s also a sixth one that’s sub judice. An excitable fellow blew up his Holden Rodeo ute (that’s “SUV” in American) on busy, crowded Bourke Street, a couple of blocks from Victoria’s parliament. It unfortunately didn’t cause quite the mass slaughter he’d been looking forward to when he loaded it up with gas bottles. So he staggered from the flaming vehicle, and a pedestrian, assuming the car detonation had been an accident, went to the driver’s aid. And thus two migrants to the Lucky Country briefly came face to face:

‘Melbourne is mourning one of the founders of the city’s famous coffee culture after the murder of Sisto Malaspina in Bourke Street’s terror attack yesterday…

‘It is believed Mr Malaspina had gone to the aid of the attacker after his car blew up.’

And as Tim Blair adds:

Of course he did. And of course the jihadi stabbed him to death for it.

Of course. Because, as London’s mayor Sadiq Khan, has assured us, this is just part and parcel of what it means to live in a big vibrant metropolis in the early twenty-first century. On the one hand, you get a hardworking gregarious immigrant who creates an iconic coffee bar that becomes part of the fabric of city life – and, on the other, you get a different type of immigrant who kills the first guy. Tim Blair again:

Sisto Malaspina arrived in Australia from Italy, and for more than 40 years ran Melbourne’s wonderful Pellegrini’s restaurant. Hassan Khalif Shire Ali arrived from Somalia, and did rather less with his life.

Pellegrini’s had the first espresso machine in Melbourne, and my recollection is that Mr Malaspina’s staff know how to use it to far greater effect than, say, the lads at Starbucks do theirs. By contrast, Hassan Khalif Sire Ali’s talents lay elsewhere: He was linked via “social media” to his “fellow Australian” and serial decapitator Khaled Sharrouf. He had his passport canceled when he attempted to leave the country to fight for Isis in 2015. Because the Australian Government’s policy is to keep all the jihadists at home so the only infidels they can kill are the locals.

Many Aussie readers have written to me about Friday’s events and, “of course”, the dishonesty and evasions of the media. The fact that Sisto Malaspina was the proprietor of a Melbourne institution has enabled the press to talk about how beloved he was and how his granddaughter had been born just six days earlier – instead of how he didn’t deserve to die, and his week-old granddaughter doesn’t deserve to grow up without a grandfather, and her parents don’t deserve to have the joy of her birth tainted and bloodied by his murder, because of lunatic government policies that insist everybody on the planet is entirely the same and that to attempt to distinguish between any of the seven billion potential immigrants to your country is totally racist.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/12/clueless-alert-macron-says-needs-army-defend-france-united-states/
The idea that Europe needs an army to defend itself against the United States demonstrates a hitherto unknown level of hostility by an ‘allied’ leader.

Displaying a dazzling lack of connection with reality and utter contempt for the United States, last week French President Emmanuel Macron called for creating an independent European army.

“We have to protect ourselves with respect to China, Russia, and even the United States of America,” he said. Such a thought is not new in France. However, the idea that Europe needs an army to defend itself against the United States demonstrates a hitherto unknown level of hostility by an “allied” leader.

The timing of Macron’s remarks is also baffling. He said this just days before the centennial commemoration of the end of the First World War. One hundred years ago, the United States of America deployed 2.1 million men to Europe to expel the German Imperial Army from France, Belgium, and Luxembourg. The war was nearly lost to the Germans in 1917 after the French army mutinied and Czarist Russia quit the war as a result of the Bolshevik (Communist) Revolution.
Thousands of Americans Died to Save France

After the bloody losses of Verdun and the blunders at the Somme in 1916, there was no way the Allies could win the war without the might and power of the United States. One of America’s largest and bloodiest campaigns in its history was the Meuse Argonne Offensive, which began on September 26, 1918 and lasted until the Germans signed an armistice to end the war on November 11, 1918.

The American Expeditionary Forces, under the command of Gen. John “Blackjack” Pershing, were asked to attack the most heavily fortified and thickly defended part of the Western Front between the Meuse River and the ancient Argonne Forest. This would threaten German supply lines and thereby draw off their strategic reserve divisions.

The Americans attacked and paid dearly in blood, suffering 20,000 casualties a week so that the British and French armies further to the north could break through. What Macron conveniently forgets is that without the United States giving so generously of its sons and treasure, Paris would have been captured by Imperial Germany and the war lost. Today, more than 30,000 American men rest in six military cemeteries as silent witnesses to the sacrifice the United States paid to deliver France from Germany in 1918.

https://www.steynonline.com/8981/the-war-that-made-the-world-we-live-in

This is no ordinary Remembrance Day in the Commonwealth and much of Europe, and Veterans Day in the United States. Today we mark the one hundredth anniversary of the Armistice that brought to an end the most terrible war in history. Exactly a century ago – on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month – the guns fell silent on Europe’s battlefields. The belligerents had agreed the terms of the peace at 5am that November morning, and the news was relayed to the commanders in the field shortly thereafter that hostilities would cease at eleven o’clock. And then they all went back to firing at each other for a final six hours. On that last day, British imperial forces lost some 2,400 men, the French 1,170, the Germans 4,120, the Americans about 3,000. The dead in those last hours of the Great War outnumbered the toll of D Day twenty-six years later, the difference being that those who died in 1944 were fighting to win a war whose outcome they did not know. On November 11th 1918 over eleven thousand men fell in a conflict whose victors and vanquished had already been settled and agreed.

It was that kind of war. Four years earlier – at dusk on August 3rd 1914 – Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, stood at the window of his office in the summer dusk watching the lamplighters go about their daily business in the Whitehall gloaming. And then he made a remark that endured across the decades:

The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.

Grey died in 1933, a couple of months after Hitler outlawed all German political parties other than his own. But you could have lived a lot longer than Sir Edward, and still recognized the truth of his words – in France until 1945, in Hungary until 1989, and in the Middle East today, where we’re still dealing with the unfinished business of the Great War.

Edward Grey was Britain’s longest-serving Foreign Secretary, although, in contrast to contemporary foreign ministers, he had a modest appetite for foreigners: For his first eight years in the job, he never set foot abroad, and then only did so because he was obliged to accompany King George V on a State Visit to Paris in 1914. He served a prime minister, Asquith, who had little interest in foreign affairs and was unengaged by distant events in faraway places until late July of 1914 – by which time it was too late, and the great unraveling of world order had begun. Five years later, the German, Russian, Austrian and Turkish empires lay shattered, and in their ruins incubated Communism, Fascism and a hardcore post-Ottoman Islam. And in a more oblique sense the horrors of the trenches caused the ruling classes of the Great Powers to lose their civilizational confidence – and across a century they have never recovered it.