RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/the-great-resenter/

THE GREAT RESENTER

Patricia O’Toole’s The Moralist is yet another hagiographic account of the mission and martyrdom of Woodrow Wilson, the patron saint of American internationalists. With minor variations, O’Toole sticks to the Received Account as told by John Milton Cooper in Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (2009) and by A. Scott Berg in Wilson (2013). In this view, the 28th president came close to ushering in the millennium after World War I, but his prickly self-righteousness lost the great moment. Under the diabolic influence of Republican Henry Cabot Lodge, the story goes, the Senate refused to ratify the League of Nations treaty that Wilson had brought back from the Versailles Peace Conference. Wilson then destroyed his health in a desperate effort to persuade the American public about the League, and the world plunged back into a dark age of atavistic nationalism. O’Toole, whose previous books include biographies of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Adams, thinks of Wilson as a moralist rather than a politician, and attributes his failure to a combination of excessive high-mindedness and an inadequate blood flow to the brain that ultimately led to his incapacitating stroke in October 1919. She deduces the latter from the translucence of the president’s ears upon his return from Versailles.

It is quite wrong to speak, as this book’s subtitle does, of the world that Woodrow Wilson made, for he made no world at all; he merely signed the Versailles Treaty by which Britain’s David Lloyd George and France’s Georges Clemenceau turned the Great War into the opening salvo of a new Thirty Years’ War. So utterly utopian was Wilson’s vision that it is unfair to characterize the internationalism of Bill Clinton or George W. Bush as “Wilsonian.” Clinton and Bush threw America’s weight around after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but they did not propose—as Wilson did—to replace America’s sovereign decision-making with a global council. Wilson’s League of Nations was closer to the conspiracy theorists’ notion of the United Nations. The commonplace belief that minor concessions on his part would have won ratification of the League of Nations treaty is untenable.

* * *

Wilson was a latecomer to the matter of collective security. William Howard Taft, whom he defeated in the 1912 presidential election, formed the League to Enforce Peace in 1915, which proposed a collective security agreement that pledged members to arbitration and to wield economic and military force against aggressors. Wilson’s nemesis of 1919, Henry Cabot Lodge, endorsed Taft’s League the following year, remarking that “[p]robably it will be impossible to stop all wars, but it certainly will be possible to stop some wars and thus diminish their number.” Wilson at that time still was reluctant to enter World War I, to the frustration of hawks like Theodore Roosevelt.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/becoming-review-the-sound-of-striving-1542066271?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=4&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

Like all VIP memoirs, “Becoming,” Michelle Robinson Obama’s foreordained best seller, has many subtexts. Record-straightening, reputation-cleansing, friend-thanking and foe-bashing: It’s all there and already warming the hearts of the former first lady’s millions of devotees, among them the international press. But “Becoming” has considerable value for more skeptical readers, not so much for its depictions of familiar headline events but for its narrative vividness and its insight, some of it unwitting, into recent racial and cultural history.

Mrs. Obama was raised on the South Side of Chicago in the mid-1960s into a bygone world of black, working-class aspiration. “I spent much of my childhood listening to the sound of striving,” she begins, referring to the struggling piano students taught by her exacting great aunt in the apartment below the one occupied by her father (a boiler attendant at a water-treatment plant), her homemaker mother, her older brother and her small self. The family, descended from South Carolina slaves, had come to Chicago as part of the Great Migration in the 1930s, though political and union leaders continued to deny black men entry to the city’s well-paid industrial jobs. Her aging great uncle, a former Pullman porter, insisted on his dignity, wearing suspenders, dress shirts and a fedora even when mowing the lawn.

A feisty child, as she readily confesses, Michelle learned to discipline her energies through the gentle nudges of her orderly and watchful parents. “My family was my world, the center of everything,” she explains. Holiday meals took place at her grandfather’s house two blocks away; there were family board games and trips to the drive-in as well as summer vacations at Dukes Happy Holiday Resort in western Michigan. “Leave It to Beaver” is what her Hawaiian-born, peripatetic future husband would call her childhood.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

“As the sun slanted toward the west, the cries of plovers and curlews echoed off the hills

and the breeze carried a tang of burning peat from the hearth of a far-off cottage.”

Robert Harris

The Thirty-one Kings

Richard Hannay was the creation of John Buchan, Lord Tweedsmuir as he became known. Buchan was born in Scotland in 1875. He was a product of a time when chivalry was a powerful force, when war was viewed heroically, before the slaughter at the Somme, Verdun, Passchendaele and Meuse Argonne. Buchan was a novelist, historian and politician who was serving as Governor General of Canada at the time of his death in 1940. Hannay, his character, is a Scotsman who bears the traits of a Victorian gentleman. During the Great War, Mr. Buchan wrote three novels in which Richard Hannay appeared:The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), Greenmantle(1916), and Mr. Standfast(1918). Two more Hannay novels were published after the War:The Three Hostages(1924) and The Island of Sheep(1936). In a posthumously published novel, Sick Heart River (1941),Buchan predicted that Hannay and his friends would be going back into action, as clouds of war descended over Europe. Mr. Harris has provided that opportunity. Readers of a certain age will recall those novels, along with the Alfred Hitchcock 1935 movie, “The Thirty-Nine Steps”starring Robert Donat. The book has never been out of print.

Robert Harris was asked by Polygon, which currently publishes Buchan’s books, to create a new series. The Thirty-one Kingsis the first. Like Buchan, Harris is a Scotsman, a graduate of St. Andrews, a classicist, historian, popular author and designer of the fantasy board and digital game “Talisman.” The rubric at the top of the page indicates how closely he mimics John Buchan.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/11/armistice-day-spitfire-pilot-remembers/

Geoffrey Wellum’s memoir does not glorify war. On the contrary it demonstrates its folly, cruelty and tragedy. On this day, November 11, it also serves as a reminder of all who bent their will to persist with something they hated in the name of a noble cause.

I have only just discovered First Light by Geoffrey Wellum. Published in 2002, it is an account of the author’s experiences as an RAF fighter pilot in 1940-43. It is based on notes he kept at the time, but which lay dormant for nearly forty years before he was able to confront and write about his memories of that time.

It is one of the most authentic books I have read about the Battle of Britain and the early war years as seen through the eyes of a young Spitfire pilot. It is not a gung-ho “Biggles” adventure, quite the reverse. Rather it provides an unfolding tragedy as a young man with a passion for aircraft and flying is caught up in the horrors of war. Pain and sadness soon replace excitement and exhilaration.

Wellum left school aged 17 in 1938 and in early 1939 was accepted as a trainee pilot by the RAF. After a brief period of instruction, first flying a Tiger Moth biplane and then graduating to the lumbering American-built Harvard, his training was suddenly cut short and he found himself posted to an operational fighter squadron. It was the time of the Dunkirk evacuation. As Churchill put it, the Battle of France was over and the Battle of Britain was about to begin. The RAF’s fighter squadrons had been losing pilots all through the Battle of France (especially those flying early model Hurricanes against the latest Messchersmitt 109s), and Wellum and his colleagues at the training schools were drafted into the real world up to a year before they would normally have been considered ready.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/peace-at-last-review-remembering-flanders-fields-1541968562

Of all the British traditions, the observance of Remembrance Day, which marks the end of World War I on Nov. 11, 1918, is surely the most poignant and deep-rooted. Every year, millions gather in churches or public squares—or take part in somber parades—to commemorate not merely the 900,000 or so British and Empire men who died in 1914-18 but also the British war dead since. For the two weeks or so leading up to the day, an imitation poppy—the flower of Flanders, where most of the British losses in the Great War were suffered—is widely worn. It is a sober, moving day, a fixture in the national calendar.

The original Armistice Day, as Guy Cuthbertson shows in “Peace at Last,” was very different from the current Remembrance Day. It was characterized by striking contrasts. On the Western Front, the morning started as usual, with continued small-arms and artillery fire as the Allies made their final “push.” The last British soldier to be killed in action was George Edwin Ellison, a middle-aged man with the Royal Irish Lancers who fell at Mons, in Belgium, near where he had been involved in some of the first fighting at the start of the war in August 1914. His death, like those of the other men who were killed on the war’s last couple of days, has often been described as futile, because the combatant countries had by then agreed on a precise timetable for the cessation of fighting. In fact, hostilities continued up to the last hour to ensure that the Germans did not wriggle out of their armistice obligations, which were effectively terms of surrender.

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Hemingways-Jewish-bullfighter-571011

Nostrils flare dripping with venomous anger, the eyes are big, onyx and lifeless; crimson blood pours from its back consecrating the arena; the front hooves beat the ground relentlessly as dust, sweat and rage hang heavy in the afternoon sun; it snorts and roars with contempt; the head, crowned with piercing horns, is lowered; and the pent-up energy is unleashed with a furious charge at the taunting matador who turns on his axis elegantly to enshroud the incensed bull in his blood red cape as man and beast engage in a choreographed macabre dance of death.

It was at the Pamplona Fiesta in Spain in the 1920s that Hemingway fell in love with the metaphysics of bullfighting, which became a metaphor for his search for meaning and the essence of life and death. The result of this quasi-religious experience was his masterpiece Death in the Afternoon.

Not surprisingly, Hemingway intensely admired Sidney Franklin, a sublime bullfighter, who was born in Brooklyn, New York to Orthodox Jewish parents. Writing in Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway said, “Franklin is brave with a cold, serene and intelligent valor, but instead of being awkward and ignorant, he is one of the most skillful, graceful and slow manipulators of a cape fighting today. His repertoire with the cape is enormous, but he does not attempt by a varied repertoire to escape from the performance of the veronica as the base of his cape work and his veronicas are classical, very emotional, and beautifully timed and executed. You will find no Spaniard who ever saw him fight who will deny his artistry and excellence with the cape.” Hemingway adds, “He is a better, more scientific, more intelligent, and more finished matador than all but about six of the full matadors in Spain today and the bullfighters know it and have the utmost respect for him.”

In his book Double-Edged Sword: The Many Lives of Hemingway’s Friend, the American Matador Sidney Franklin, Paul Bart observes that Death in the Afternoon describes Franklin as having the “ability in languages, the cold courage and the ability to command of the typical soldier of fortune.”

“Yet Franklin wasn’t any kind of soldier,” writes Bart, “resembling instead the womanly Europa in the classical Greek myth where Zeus disguises himself as a bull to rape Europa.” Benjamin Ivry expands on the theme of rape when he writes that Franklin’s bullfighting career was punctuated by genuine violations of his body. In a particularly horrific 1930 episode requiring multiple surgeries, a dying bull’s horn “caught Sidney at the base of his tailbone, plunging into his abdominal cavity through the rectum, piercing the sphincter muscle and large intestine.” Franklin repeatedly risked similar gory disasters long after this 1930 catastrophe.

https://www.city-journal.org/winston-churchill-biography

Churchill: Walking with Destiny, by Andrew Roberts (Penguin, 1,152 pp., $40)

Greatness is terrifying. The ancients understood this, but nowadays, we forget. Even after Alexander the Great’s death, the mere sight of a statue of him frightened one of his generals. When a tribune of the plebs tried to stop Caesar from breaking into Rome’s public treasury, Caesar threatened to kill him, adding, “You surely know, young man, that it is more unpleasant for me to say this than to do it.”

Plutarch, who reports this story, had no illusions about the interplay of sunshine and shadow in the lives of the noble Greeks and Romans. Now, like a modern Plutarch, Andrew Roberts gives us a biography in the round of Winston Churchill, one of the last century’s leading men. Roberts’s brilliant new book is not only learned and sagacious but also thrilling and fun. An award-winning historian and biographer, an expert on statecraft, leadership, and the Second World War, Roberts writes with authority and confidence. Enriched by such previously unseen material as King George VI’s wartime diaries, Walking with Destiny should stand as the definitive one-volume Churchill biography.

An infinitely more genial character than Alexander or Caesar, and much more respectful of constitutional limitations, Churchill nonetheless could be every bit as unreasonable. And, as Roberts points out, his pugnacity wasn’t always in the service of a good cause. He remained a convinced imperialist, for example, long after the inhabitants of Britain’s colonies sought independence. He opposed women’s suffrage. He underestimated Japanese military ability in 1942, largely because of his bigotry. His numerous military misjudgments spanned two world wars, and included sticking with the Gallipoli Campaign after its sell-by date in March 1915 and describing the rugged Italian Peninsula in 1943 as a soft underbelly. Yet Churchill got it right when it most mattered, on the three biggest threats to democracy: Prussian militarism, Nazism, and Soviet Communism.

https://quillette.com/2018/11/02/an-

A review of An Imaginary Racism: Islamophobia and Guilt by Pascal Bruckner. Polity (November 2018), 204 pages.

It is embarrassingly easy to write about the collapse of the Left in the twenty-first century. The explosion in identity politics that has led to the automatic use of “white” as an ethnic insult in condemnations such as “white privilege” and “white, straight men” has made race as defining a factor in left-wing politics as it is in extreme right-wing politics. Meanwhile, the willingness to excuse antisemitsm, misogyny, tyranny, and obscurantism, as long as the antisemitic, misogynistic, tyrannical obscurantists are anti-Western, has called into question whether leftists—or at least the noisiest voices on the Left—have lost all connection to their better values.

I have said as much many times, and in his new book the French political theorist Pascal Bruckner says it again. Bruckner once struck me as the best the French intelligentsia had to offer. In 2007, he provoked an intellectual scandal with the “Racism of the Anti-Racists”, an essay for Sign and Sight, in which he excoriated liberals who denied Ayaan Hirsi Ali and other Muslim dissidents the rights they took for granted. Meanwhile, I admired his Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism enough to call it “a brilliant defence of liberalism and a deservedly contemptuous assault on all those intellectuals who have betrayed its best values.”

The title of Bruckner’s new polemic ought to have warned me that betrayal is not an exclusively left-wing vice. Far from being a principled defence of liberal and secular values, An Imaginary Racism: Islamophobia and Guilt is an unconscious illustration of how easily those who profess to hold enlightened ideals can slip into the ethnic favouritism and intellectual double-standards of the counter-Enlightenment.

Most liberal Muslims and ex-Muslims recoil from the word “Islamophobia.” TellMama, the main monitoring centre for violence and abuse against British Muslims, fought a doomed campaign to enshrine the use of “anti-Muslim hatred” instead. Hard won experience had taught its activists that “Islamophobia” was a weapon in the arsenal of the Islamist Right. Opposing bigotry with the language of bigots, who sought to re-define criticism of religion as racism, struck them as self-defeating to put it mildly.

TellMama keeps its office address secret. Its workers receive threats, not only from white racists, but also from Islamists. (They have taken advice from Jews who monitor antisemitic violence in Britain, and gay rights campaigners who monitor homophobia, and are thus damned in the eyes of the fanatical.) If all Bruckner wanted to do was to criticise the use of the term “Islamophobia” to incite violence against freethinkers and feminists who challenge clerical power, he would be performing a useful service—albeit one that has been performed many times before. But his book is representative of our debased times because it’s far from clear that Bruckner can extend his opposition to Islamism to cover the purveyors of anti-Muslim bigotry.