:: Wednesday, May 14, 2008 ::
Four Great American Paintings (Part 1)
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Posted by Nicholas Provenzo at 3:41 PM
The American painter Norman Rockwell ranks among my favorite artists. Often derided as being mawkish and never taken seriously by the art establishment, Rockwell is nevertheless one of the few artists to dedicate his talent to capturing the American spirit in action. This first installment discusses one of four paintings that I consider to be among Rockwell's greatest achievements.
The Scoutmaster (1956)
This panting depicts the central figure of a man standing sentinel over the glowing embers of a nighttime fire as boys peacefully slumber in their tents. The starry blue of the night sky and dry rocky soil suggest a remote and secluded location. The man, muscular and taught, stands uniformed but he is not militaristic, a policeman or a hunter; he carries no weapon upon his person or badge of office. No threats are presented, yet the man stands watch nonetheless, his modestly ringed hand resting upon his hip, his stick racking the coals as a gentle wisp of smoke flutters in the nighttime air. The man's face is directed off-canvas, we know not at what, yet his expression reveals no tension; his gaze seems more inward than outward. By the different color hair of the boys, we see that they are not his, yet he watches over them as if they were his own. A small tripod stands over the fire, lashed together with line whose bitter ends hang out; these are knots seemingly tied by the hands of a novice. An aluminum pot hangs off the tripod, a coffee pot rests nearby and rocks and small stumps ring the faint fire; hunger or want is of no concern in this scene. Instead, Rockwell presents an image of quite calm; of a man standing silently as the entrusted leader of future men.
I admire this painting for its technical mastery; the contrapposto pose of the man feels effortless, the natural drapery of the man's uniform and gentle billowing of his neckerchief reveals an artist who fully understands how body, cloth, and atmosphere interact with one another. I also admire this panting for its thematic presentation; even if we know nothing about the mission and history of the Boy Scouts, we can immediately see that Rockwell is depicting a man dedicated to the boys in his care and that this man is the product of specific values and achievements.
For example, set this scene in the middle ages, and one easily imagines a different scene where the man is a knight and the boys are his youthful attendants, yet here the man is depicted as serving the youth. Rockwell presents an expedition whose purpose is not to forage for food or wage war, but to instruct boys in the arts of self-reliance and personal independence--and that is why I see this painting reflecting a quintessential American theme. America is a land of plenty. The thing to be conquered, the challenge we would prepare our youth to face is not privation or other men; it is the mastery of their own nature as free and independent beings.
In my view, Rockwell captures the essence of those dedicated to such instruction and he captures it in a way that will resonate as long as images of this work continue to exist.
Next installment: a veteran's homecoming.
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:: Tuesday, May 13, 2008 ::
The Grave Robbers
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Posted by Edward Cline at 11:17 AM
"The game will continue, and the bandwagon-riders will destroy James Bond, as they have destroyed Mike Hammer, as they have destroyed Eliot Ness, then look for another victim to 'parody'..." 1 Next fall the twenty-second "official" James Bond movie, "Quantum of Solace," will be released, first in Britain, then around the world, starring Daniel Craig as Bond in his second appearance in the role. This number does not include two "unofficial" Bond movies, "Casino Royale" (1967), which was a spoof of the novel, and "Never Say Never Again" (1983), which starred Sean Connery.
And on May 28, the 100th anniversary of Ian Fleming's birth, the twenty-second bogus James Bond novel, Devil May Care, will be published, written by British novelist Sebastian Faulks.
Fleming wrote only twelve full-length Bond novels, aside from a collection of short stories, For Your Eyes Only, from which the title of the new Bond movie was taken. In addition, he wrote what are actually two very short novelettes, Octopussy and his posthumously-published The Living Daylights; the latter two have been published under one cover, Octopussy, and include another short story, "The Property of a Lady."
So the output of bogus Bond novels exceeds what Fleming himself wrote. I call the non-Fleming Bond novels "bogus" because, in fact, in terms of quality, plot, character, and intent, they have as little to do with James Bond as Fleming conceived him, which is as a hero, as a Disney movie has to do with Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris or with any other classic. Beginning with the movie version of From Russia with Love, the destruction by second-handers of Bond as a hero has continued without let-up since Fleming's death in 1964.
Fleming died about a year after Dr. No, the first Bond movie, was released. The shot script is more or less faithful to the novel, although some pointless gratuities were taken with the original story. For example, in the novel, the villain is buried in a mountain of guano; in the movie, he is broiled alive in a vat of radioactive water. One can only speculate whether or not Fleming would have approved or sanctioned the subsequent gutting of his novels for the big screen.
After all the novels had been filmed (each of them used a Fleming title but little or nothing of the story), Hollywood began inventing Bond stories. Sean Connery, the original and most credible Bond, even appeared in one, "Never Say Never Again." Then Hollywood, ever the congenital literary and esthetic shoplifter, shot one short story from the collection, "From a View to a Kill," and now has turned to another, "Quantum of Solace." Neither has anything to do with the Fleming stories, which, if they were actually and competently produced, would make interesting hour-long television specials.
In addition, there is even a series of "young" James Bond novels. The hacks have left no stone unturned in their quest to cash in on the Bond-Fleming name.
It has been a long, tedious, macabre parade of bandwagons. Their riders, as Rand put it in "Bootleg Romanticism," are "a group of previously undistinguished persons" getting "their chance at distinction and at piles of money." Like price, when it comes to exploiting Fleming's creation and reaping unearned distinction and piles of money, esthetics, story integrity and honesty are no object.
Research for this commentary uncovered a bewildering number of websites and "fanzines" devoted to James Bond, which either pant or drool over the prospect of new Bond novels or movies. Like CommanderBond.net, they are all markedly oblivious to any wider issues concerning Fleming's creation. Several non-Fleming "graphic" (or illustrated) Bond novels have also been published and list not only their authors' and illustrators' names, but Fleming's, as well. That is likely at the insistence of Ian Fleming Publications Ltd., which controls and owns the rights to the Bond character for the trustees and heirs of the Fleming estate, in addition to all the novels and movies, Fleming and non-Fleming. There are many forms of prostitution. Apparently, one of them is leasing out literary rights to a fictional character to any chance, indiscriminate hack, and calling it a "franchise."
But, why the fascination? One can almost excuse the fans' almost ghoulish obsession with Bond and their hankering for more of him. What other recent fictional hero in popular literature has represented manly efficacy, glamour, and excitement all rolled into one? But that unfastidious obsession simply encourages the literary parasites to exploit the character, and the novelists who undertake to "recreate" James Bond in the manner of Fleming, in the looting, nihilistic spirit of our age, will not allow him to remain efficacious, glamorous and exciting. Like the architect Gus Webb in Rand's The Fountainhead, who is assigned to "redo" one of Howard Roark's creations, they want to express their "individuality," too. But their "individuality" and "creativity," providing they even exist, are not worth contemplating.
When the second bogus Bond novel, License Renewed, by John Gardner (the first, Colonel Sun, by Kingsley Amis, appeared in 1968), was published, I wrote a Wall Street Journal review of it (June 4 1981), "A New James Bond Novel by Fleming's Successor," and said that Bond
"...is so appealing a hero, so amply endowed with those values and virtues we ought to want to see in any character, real or imaginary, that he has become the special target of those whose 'creativity' is limited to smears, parodies and innumerable pasticcios. James Bond was killed long ago - by movie producers, directors, ham actors, scriptwriters, stuntmen, gadget masters, tongues in many cheeks and, last but not least, by the artistic 'license' to kill." Ironically, The Wall Street Journal twenty-seven years later ran this story on May 8, "Doubleday, Penguin Try to Revive Bond Series with New Author." It recounts the trials and tribulations of the bogus Bond novels and the overall diminished interest in Bond as a hero. There have been five "new authors" of Fleming's character, not including Samantha Weinberg, who published three "diaries" by M's secretary, Miss Moneypenney, and not including the "graphic" novels. Faulks is the fifth to try his hand.
Why has interest in Bond fallen? One thing the marketers of the bogus Bond novels have not thought of is how Bond, in the hands of his hacks, has undergone changes for the worse, usually to update him to bring him in line with politically correct "virtues" and the panacea of the moment. In both the novels and the movies, he gave up smoking, drove more environmentally acceptable cars, felt anxiety about killing his enemies, and grew glib, facetious, and unserious. (In the movies, he was merely a two-dimensional puppet in the hands of special effects crews in the action scenes.) In short, he became a boorish, fatuous stereotype that became more and more unbelievable. In Daniel Craig's movie version of the character, Bond is just a well-dressed brute.
The May 8 WSJ article reports that the publisher has taken a stab at trying to rectify the problem of Bond's unpopularity.
"Partners, a unit of WPP Group PLC that specializes in corporate branding, took two months to come up with a cover [for Devil May Care] that satisfied Penguin....One challenge: portraying sex and violence without being too graphic for teenagers, a target audience. 'We're trying to appeal to older Bond readers and bring along a new audience,' Mr. Renwick says." A Daily Telegraph (London) article of May 11, "It's hell being a superhero," comes closer to an explanation. Many recent "superhero" movies are based on comic books. In remarking about the "Golden Age" of comics, the article says,
"This was the period between 1938, when Superman was invented, and the post-War late-Forties, when the public had an understandably voracious appetite for the exploits of strong, decent, super-endowed men and women triumphing over evil.
"But then came a backlash, in which superheroes fell out of favor, accused of everything from fostering juvenile delinquency to promoting deviant sex....The adoption in response by the comics industry of a stringent new Comics Code resulted in story lines so blandly inoffensive that no one wanted to read them.
"What the disillusioned Seventies crowd wanted were more socially conscious types like the Green Arrow...and antiheroes like the savage Wolverine and dark and tormented The Punisher....Today, audiences are far too sophisticated to take at face value the plain, honest, good-versus-evil simplicity of the Golden Age superheroes." The DT article elaborates on that "sophisticated" taste. Commenting on a 1986 graphic novel, Watchmen, that helped to pioneer the "humanized" superhero, the article goes on to say
"This portrayed superheroes not as magnificent, selfless, crime-fighting role models, but as warped, sexually confused sociopaths whose powers had brought them little but misery and psychological damage."
One might think: Isn't this the reverse of cultural "trickle down"? Shouldn't comic books simplify and pictorialize standard, full-length literature, which came first and has existed for decades, even centuries? One would be right. The comics merely emulated the literature of the times, chiefly Naturalism, but souped up their stories with superheroes burdened with personal problems.
"Today's audiences," reports the DT article, "like their superheroes to be flawed: the more messed up the better."
"Hence the popularity of the increasingly dark Batman movies, based not on the original caped crusader but on the much edgier, more angst-ridden and morally compromised figure in Frank Miller's 1980s Dark Knight graphic novels." The assumption in the WSJ and DT articles that contemporary readers have grown as corrupted and malevolent as the culture is properly the subject of separate commentary. But the CommanderBond.net site, in its coverage of "Quantum of Solace," features an interview with Daniel Craig, and what he says is in sync with the effort to "humanize" Bond.
"The way we finished up in 'Casino Royale' [Craig's first Bond film] was with a man who'd lost something that was taken away from him. The woman that he loved killed herself because he thought she was guilty because she was double-crossing him. And he never had the chance to go: 'Why?' said Daniel Craig during a roundtable interview. 'That's where we start the story and he's looking for that quantum of solace. He's looking for that little bit, but he can't be open about it because it's a sign of weakness.'" The actor who plays the chief villain in "Quantum of Solace" dwelt on the "intricate mix of reality and fantasy that make up the film."
"If it was realistic the evil would win because that's what would happen today. That's why I think it's called Quantum of Solace. It's quite ironic. It's as if Bond was saying, 'Please, can I stop running? Maybe if the evil wins I can have some peace and go home and just sleep.'" Obviously, this actor has never read the original story; I doubt if a single member of the cast has read any of the original novels or stories. Rand, in "Bootleg Romanticism," discusses the epistemological disintegration of intellectuals who approve of the reverse-bowdlerization of good literature. This actor had no epistemology that could disintegrate.
It is doubtful that Sebastian Faulks will do a better job in Devil May Care than his predecessors in writing an "official" bogus Bond novel and revive the corpse they helped to bury. Known better in Britain than in the U.S., he is the successful author of eight other novels. I have not read any of them and, based on his acceptance of the task of producing a bogus Bond novel, I do not plan to read any of them. Whether or not they are any good, however, is irrelevant. What I wrote for the Wall Street Journal in 1981 applies as well in 1881 as in 2008:
"'License Renewed' points up the futility of faithful imitation. No matter how well a writer - or any artist, for that matter - manages to capture the style or content of an original idea or work of art, something will always be missing: originality." Writers should not be so hungry for distinction, fame and fortune that they would treat resorting to robbing the graves of their betters as a "realistic," pragmatic option, and to hell with originality and the chance to create something of which they could say: This is mine. (Consequently, the authors of bogus Bond novels are paragons of selflessness, as are the authors of bogus Sherlock Holmes and Philip Marlowe novels.) And readers should not be so hungry for any kind of "hero" that they reward them. Their lack of discrimination in what they seek and accept earns them what they deserve: literary cadavers.
1. Ayn Rand, "Bootleg Romanticism" (1965), in The Romantic Manifesto (1971, revised 1975) (New York: Signet), p. 140
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:: Monday, May 05, 2008 ::
Pray-in gas station asks God to lower prices
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Posted by Nicholas Provenzo at 8:08 AM
Add this to the horror file:
Rocky Twyman has a radical solution for surging gasoline prices: prayer.
Twyman - a community organizer, church choir director and public relations consultant from the Washington, D.C., suburbs - staged a pray-in at a San Francisco Chevron station on Friday, asking God for cheaper gas. He did the same thing in the nation's Capitol on Wednesday, with volunteers from a soup kitchen joining in. Today he will lead members of an Oakland church in prayer.
Yes, it's come to that.
"God is the only one we can turn to at this point," said Twyman, 59. "Our leaders don't seem to be able to do anything about it. The prices keep soaring and soaring." [David R. Baker, San Francisco Chronicle] And if that story astounds you, just wait until you read this (hat tip: Noodlefood):
Jim Porter, chief technical analyst for one of the UK's largest banks . . . uses heliocentric magi astrology to predict the direction of the international financial markets. Millions of pounds worth of commodities, shares and currencies are traded on his command. His decisions may affect the value of your pension, your home, and perhaps decide whether or not you have a job tomorrow.
When I spoke to him late last year, he told me that the position of the planets indicated a 3.2 percent fall in the American markets. The following week they duly fell 3.5 percent.
"My attitude is that if you can test it, and it works, then it's just another tool that you can use to predict the direction of the markets," he says.
"I have tested it and astrology works. Used with other techniques it can give you confidence, and the more confidence you have, the bigger the risks you can take." [Danny Penman - www.newsmonster.co.uk] Wow. If I had my money in a UK bank, I'd be searching high and low to make sure it wasn't in this guy's bank.
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:: Wednesday, April 30, 2008 ::
DC Area Event: Andrew Bernstein on Selfishness in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead
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Posted by Nicholas Provenzo at 4:49 PM
What: Andrew Bernstein on Selfishness in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead
When: Thursday, May 1st, 8pm
Where: University of Maryland, College Park, ASY (Art-Sociology) room 2309
In her novel The Fountainhead, novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand fully dramatizes the moral theory of rational egoism - the theory which holds that it is each person's responsibility to choose his goals and values by use of his independent reasoning mind; and that it is his right to pursue these goals in quest of his own selfish, personal happiness. Dr. Andrew Bernstein explores how the plot and conflict of The Fountainhead convey this theme, including a detailed, in-depth analysis of the five major characters in the story.
The talk is sponsored by the Terrapin Objectivists and admission is free to the general public.
Campus Map: http://transportation.umd.edu/visitor/campusmap.html
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:: Tuesday, April 29, 2008 ::
State Department Goodthink
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Posted by Edward Cline at 12:03 PM
The Associated Press on April 24, under the headline, "'Jihadist' booted from government lexicon," announced that,
"The Bush administration has launched a new front in the war on terrorism, this time targeting language.
"Federal agencies, including the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the National Counter Terrorism Center, are telling their people not to describe Islamic extremists as 'jihadists' or 'mujahedeen,' according to documents obtained by [or "leaked" to] The Associated Press. Lingo like 'Islamofascism' is out, too." So, here is another damning legacy being bequeathed to us by President Bush. He has claimed from the beginning that Islamic terrorism is perpetrated by people who have "hijacked" a "great religion." But he himself has now hijacked and sabotaged language.
The "new front" is in reality a craven retreat from the old one, which is a costly, futile hit-or-miss campaign to capture or kill individuals responsible for terrorism, and not a campaign against states that sponsor terrorism. In this new development, the State Department, certainly with the sanction of the Bush Administration, will allow the Islamists or Islamofascists to advance and take more ground in their campaign to subjugate the West, and in particular, America.
The AP article claims that one document, "originally prepared in March by the Extremist Messaging Branch of the National Counter Terrorism Center [called "Words that Work and Words that Don't: A Guide for Counterterrorism Communication"], was approved for diplomatic use this week by the State Department, which plans to distribute a version to all U.S. embassies, officials said."
What is the rationale for adopting a policy of surrender by expunging "offensive" terms from the nuance-sensitive pragmatist's Newspeak lexicon? According to Matthew Lee, author of the AP article,
"Such words may actually boost support for radicals among Arab and Muslim audiences by giving them a veneer of religious credibility or by causing offense to moderates.
"For example, while Americans may understand 'jihad' to mean 'holy war,' it is in fact a broader concept of the struggle to do good, says the guidance prepared for diplomats and other officials tasked with explaining the war on terror to the public. Similarly, 'mujahedeen,' which means those engaged in jihad, must be seen in its broader context.'" A Homeland Security report, called "Terminology to Define the Terrorists: Recommendations from American Muslims," claims that
"U.S. officials may be 'unintentionally portraying terrorists, who lack moral and religious legitimacy, as brave fighters, legitimate soldiers or spokesmen for ordinary Muslims.'"
Let us parse some of these statements in the memo and examine the terms they employ. I cannot determine from Matthew Lee's report whether or not he is sympathetic to the report, so any criticisms here are meant for the report's language and not his account of it.
"Such words may actually boost support for radicals among Arab and Muslim audiences by giving them a veneer of religious credibility or by causing offense to moderates." Islam is radical. It means submission, specifically, to Allah's will. It is a 24/7, 365-days-a-year creed, with no allowance for slackers or sabbaticals from it. Every Muslim is either a passive, rank-and-file adherent, or an active one engaged in applying Islam's tenets in one of two ways: in Arab societies or in insinuating Sharia in Western or non-Muslim societies - or by bomb. The radical activists already have a veneer of moral and religious credibility, which is based on the religion itself. They possess such credibility in the eyes and minds of all Muslims.
There are no moderates in Islam. One accepts the creed in toto, or one abandons or rejects it; there is no halfway agreement or technical dissension within Islam. Its clerics and scholars do not allow it, nor does the Koran condone it. Anyone who attempts to "reform" Islam risks being chopped by its most consistent practitioners.
Conclusion: One federal agency and one cabinet-level bureaucracy propose to "protect" the U.S. by blanking out reality and not identifying our enemies.
"It's not what you say," the AP article quotes from the memorandum, "but what they hear." In other words, reality is what is in other people's minds, not in what you might inadvertently be referring to out there in reality. A "jihadist" is merely someone who is "struggling" to "do good" and to "be good" in Allah's eyes, and not an "extremist" who really isn't practicing his beliefs, but who is "hijacking" a religion and giving it bad name.
The memo urges officials not to "take the bait" by actually saying, "A is A" when Osama bin Laden or al-Qada "affiliates" speak. Never mind that half the world's 1.4 billion Muslims cheered when the Twin Towers were destroyed on 9/11 and bin Laden took credit for it, while the other half silently approved.
"We should offer only minimal, if any, response to their messages. When we respond loudly, we raise their prestige in the Muslim world." Which means that instead of expressing moral condemnation of terrorists and their murderous acts, we should whimper quietly in a corner, perhaps in the company of a grief counselor. The enhanced "prestige" of the jihadists and Islamofascists is guaranteed if that is to be our "response" to terrorist acts.
The Associated Press goes on to note that Homeland Security's Orwellian Newspeak report treats definitions and meanings as irrelevant.
"Regarding 'jihad,' even if it is accurate to reference the term, it may not be strategic because it glamorizes terrorism, imbues terrorists with religious authority they do not have and damages relations with Muslims around the world."
Which means that accuracy is optional but basically undesirable and potentially embarrassing. Feelings might be hurt. The most astounding imputation is that using the terms "jihad" and "jihadist" (or any other possibly "offensive" defining term) glamorizes terrorism. The author (or authors, the report is very likely the product of a committee) of that document is someone who believes that "glamorizing" Bonnie and Clyde or Al Capone or Adolf Hitler or Yasir Arafat is wrong, not because these killers were evil and undeserving of any suggestion of good, but because it is impractical. After all, we want other bank robbers, gang leaders, dictators and terrorists to like us, or at least not hate us, and calling these killers killers would damage our relations with all the fools who admire them and who would emulate them if they could. What has morality to do with it?
Steven Emerson, commenting on the Homeland Security report on his Investigative Project on Terrorism site on April 25, noted that
"Apparently the report does not say which American Muslims offered the recommendations. But it is virtually identical to a long campaign by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and other Islamist groups....So the U.S. government is taking its cues from a group that emanated from a secret Muslim Brotherhood operation in America, one with a stated goal of being 'a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and "sabotaging" its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions.'" "'Don't compromise our credibility,'" quotes the AP article from the Counter Terrorism Center memo, "by using words and phrases that may ascribe benign motives to terrorists."
Given the gelatin principles and marshmallow ethics that govern the fantasy world of the White House, State Department and our foreign policy, what credibility is left to compromise? And who on earth ever ascribed benign motives to al-Qada, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Taliban, or Ahmadinejad's Iran? These are not branches of Rotary International.
The Counter Terrorism Center memo, reports the AP, contains these pointers:
"Never use the terms 'jihadist' or 'mujahedeen' in conversation to describe the terrorists...Calling our enemies 'jihadis' and their movement a global 'jihad' unintentionally legitimizes their actions....Use the terms 'violent extremist' or 'terrorist.' Both are widely understood terms that define our enemies appropriately and simultaneously deny them any level of legitimacy." [Note that the term 'violent extremist" implicitly concedes that Islamic terrorists are acting in the name of Islam, in its most "extreme" interpretation. Apparently the term is widely understood by everyone but the State Department and Homeland Security.]
So, our concern is not with defeating our enemies, but with denying them any "legitimacy" in the eyes of their passive co-religionists, not with destroying those who would destroy us, but with mentally segregating them from Islam. No such thing as a global jihad exists; it's just a lot of bad guys with guns and bombs who claim they are obeying the will of Allah, but we don't need to believe that. Not to worry.
One consequence of adopting this evasive anti-language policy is that it will enable our policymakers to dodge the issue of state-sponsored terrorism. It will permit them to negotiate with Islamic regimes that call for our destruction, not eradicate them. What it will not do is change reality.
One unsung hero who summed up the cause and consequence of that policy is Major Steven Coughlin, U.S. Army Reserve, Military Intelligence, author of a paper, "To Our Great Detriment: Ignoring What Extremists Say About Jihad," submitted in July 2007 to the National Defense Intelligence College. In it, he establishes the crucial links:
"Accepting assurances from moderate Muslims that Islam had nothing to do with the events of 11 September 2001, President Bush made policy statements holding Islam harmless for the actions done by 'extremists.'...As it turns out, the jihadis are able to find a doctrinal basis for their notions of jihad in Islamic law....This legal definition of jihad remains consistent through the 1,400 year span that incorporates the contributions of the authorities relied on in the thesis....Because of our inability to understand the enemy stems from a decision not to know him, this thesis recommends the return to a threat analysis process as the methodology to analyze the enemy's stated doctrine...." [Italics mine, to underscore the epistemological corruption of our policymakers] One thing that will be learned if that doctrine is ever analyzed is that Islam is a pernicious, evil ideology that cannot be "reformed" without rendering it something other than Islam. Another thing that will be learned is that it must be defeated root and branch, militarily with retaliatory force, and philosophically, through reason.
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:: Friday, April 25, 2008 ::
The New Pyramid Builders II
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Posted by Edward Cline at 11:40 AM
If you thought the cosmology of the Koran was absurdly irrational and a kind of parody of the Bible's, a meeting of Muslim scientists and clerics recently claimed that the Koran contains scientific proofs, among them that Mecca is the center of the earth. As a consequence, reported BBC News on April 21, they "have called for the adoption of Mecca time to replace GMT."
"Mecca is the direction all Muslims face when they perform their daily prayers. The call was issued at a conference held in the Gulf state of Qatar under the title: Mecca, the Center of the Earth, Theory and Practice. One geologist argued that unlike other longitudes, Mecca's was in perfect alignment to magnetic north. He said the English had imposed GMT on the rest of the world by force when Britain was a big colonial power, and it was about time that changed.
"The underlying belief is that scientific truths were also revealed in the Muslim holy book, and it is the work of scholars to unearth and publicize the textual evidence." Just as their fundamentalist Christian opposite numbers are "unearthing" and publicizing Biblical explanations for everything, from the true age of the universe to the fate of the dinosaurs to the squirms of bacteria. Actually, Greenwich Mean Time was adopted by international agreement and refined in the 1920s by astronomical scientists from around the world. Force had nothing to do with it. But perhaps the most bizarre news from Qatar is the announcement of a special Muslim watch.
"The meeting also reviewed what has been described as a Mecca watch, the brainchild of a French Muslim. The watch is said to rotate anti-clockwise and is supposed to help Muslims determine the direction of Mecca from any point on Earth." This must earn a special reward for sheer irrationality. But, the "scientific" conference of Muslims is evidence of the hubris Islamists are experiencing as they throttle and subjugate the West. Christians are not the only mystics who wish to make science the servant of religion.
Moving from backward-running Muslim watches and the Koran as the foundation of the Periodic Table of Elements to another species of bizarre but real behavior, Walter Williams of George Mason University, in an April 16th Townhall column, "Foreign Trade Angst," wrote
"The United States is the world's largest recipient of foreign direct investment. According to the Economic Report of the President, in 2004, foreigners owned $5.5 trillion in U.S. assets and had $2.3 trillion in sales. They produced $515 billion of goods and services....According to the Congressional Research Service, in 2006 alone, foreign investors spent $184 billion investing in U.S. businesses and real estate, the highest amount foreign investors have spent since 2000...." Williams can be forgiven for not noting it - his focus was on the anti-free trade sentiment in the U.S. - but many of those "foreign investors" are Mideast potentates of the Persian Gulf who control what are called "sovereign wealth funds" (SWFs), which total over $1 trillion. An April 12th article on the MoneyNews site, "Mideast Wealth Funds Rescue Developers," notes that
"Flush with cash and looking for better-than-modest returns, several Middle East sovereign wealth funds are putting money into carefully selected U.S. real estate ventures.
"The funds, controlled by their governments of origin, have already pumped billions of investment dollars into U.S. companies and enterprises, but cash allocations to real estate ventures is a relatively new phenomenon." (Italics mine.) Note that the term "sovereign" means "government" - and the term includes the so-called "personal wealth" of about 50,000 royal family members spread between Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, their particular family heads being the government. As for the real meaning of the term "wealth," in the context of OPEC and Arab medievalists, it means "loot." The "loot" is the revenue generated by private Western oil properties which Western governments, particularly those of the U.S., Britain, and France, should never have allowed the Arabs to nationalize or otherwise expropriate from the oil companies. The oil companies, for their part, seeing that their properties were not going to be protected by their respective governments, pragmatically entered into "partnerships" with the tribalist ruling cliques in that region, over the decades expanding and improving the properties and cementing their survival on those partnerships.
Apparently, no Ellis Wyatts or Francisco d'Anconias were in charge in the 1950's to destroy those seized properties.
Someone might object: All those billions being invested in this country represent money, which, although extorted from us, is being put to legitimately productive use. It's unfortunate that it went to sustain tyrannical and religious regimes, but it is coming back.
However, it is irrelevant that the medievalists are assuming the role of risk takers. The money the medievalists are putting into U.S. companies is money that hypothetically should have gone directly to them without being first diverted to the Mideast. That money would have gone to reward risk-taking stockholders and not to the medievalists to allow them to erect their new pyramids.
The concept of "risk" cannot apply to the medievalists for as long as they have a stranglehold on the West. Regardless of the losses they may experience in their portfolios of government instruments, Treasury notes, private stocks, bonds, and the like, and regardless of the failure or poor performance of companies they may have controlling interests in, their fabulous oil revenues will always be guaranteed - provided the West's economy does not first collapse.
On March 18, WorldNetDaily carried an article by Jerome R. Corsi, "U.S. Treasury fears Islamic strings on investments."
"The U.S. Treasury is struggling with how to handle any political or Islamic ramifications as Persian Gulf sovereign wealth funds look to make substantial investments in capital-poor American banks and securities firms.
"WND previously reported sovereign wealth funds in six Persian Gulf countries, including Kuwait, the U.A.E. and Qatar, have now amassed $1.7 trillion, positioning them for attempts to control major banks and securities firms in the U.S.
"Since the beginning of the year, Dubai and Abu Dhabi, two of the largest U.A.E. states, have been in discussions with the U.S. Treasury, offering reassurances that their investments in U.S. bank and security firms would not impose restrictions usually dictated by Islamic law, commonly known as Sharia." SWF investments in the genuinely productive Western economies are tantamount to our own federal government buying controlling or minimal interests in private corporations, which technically would be fascism. What does the infusion of SWFs in private corporations portend?
The redirection and/or redistribution of private wealth through taxation. In this instance, the "tax" is the artificially high price of oil charged by OPEC (aside from actual federal and state taxes), which has a near monopoly on oil production as a result of Western-sanctioned expropriations and Western environmental policies. This should be obvious from the news reports that OPEC has refused to increase oil production. The Arabs know they have the West cornered.
It perpetuates the medievalists' wealth-consuming welfare state, which exists only because of irrational, pragmatic Western policies.
It perpetuates Western dependency on the medievalists' whims.
It facilitates the incursion of Islamic jihad, both the "soft" kind through financial and political manipulation, and the "hard" kind of Islamofascist violence, which is funded by especially Mideast money from all the Persian Gulf states. (Therefore, we are subsidizing our own decline and ultimate destruction. What did Ayn Rand have to say about the "sanction of the victim?" The principle applies to civilizations as well as to individuals.)
SWFs will not be invested in Exxon's or in any of the other major Western oil companies' exploration and drilling projects in Alaska, the Gulf of Mexico, or on the West Coast, provided they are ever approved by Washington, not unless they can buy controlling interests in such projects, the better to control oil production.
Do not forget that "trade" with the medievalists is not trade in the normal sense, in which values are exchanged to no party's loss. SWFs are loot, and the looting has lasted as long as it has because of especially American energy and foreign policies. One might speculate on the number of congressmen who are in thrall to the medievalists and who block any proposal to allow oil exploration and drilling in areas that are now environmentally "off limits." It is certain that the sheiks, princes and emirs of the Mideast chuckle or gloat over every victory of the environmentalists in Congress and the White House. They must have danced in the streets when ethanol was mandated by the government, and cheered heartily over the biofuel and "clean energy" programs.
Thus, the looters are encouraged by the West's irrational policies. They, like any other criminals or gangs, are counting on the absence of reason and self-assertion in their victims. This is not to say, however, that the medievalists are aware of these concepts in any explicit form; nor is it to claim that the victims are conscious of the crucial, necessary role they play in their survival. The evidence, based on the pragmatic, short-range policies of Western governments, suggests that they are either ignorant or disdainful of such concepts. They are unable or unwilling to learn that, given the bind in which they have placed their countries, the "practical" is inevitably and inarguably impractical.
Overlooked in virtually every discussion of the phenomenon is the political leverage the medievalists can acquire in the West by the redirection of their "wealth." As the Treasury Department article above indicates, even American officials see the potential threat of especially Saudi influence on the character and course of American foreign policy and are meekly asking for assurances from the medievalists that they will not, for example, arm-twist the U.S. into abandoning Israel, or recognize Hamas as a legitimate political party, impose censorship on critics of Islam, or even replace Greenwich Mean Time with Mecca Mean Time.
(Notwithstanding our arms sales to it, the U.S. is not much of an ally of Israel since our current policy is to compel Israel to compromise with its mortal enemies and to "cooperate" and help negotiate the formation of a hostile Palestinian state. The U.S. arms deal with the Saudis is bigger by many more billions of dollars. For the nature of the Saudi threat to the U.S., see my commentary of December 13, 2006, "Our Saudi Foes.")
It is interesting to learn that after 9/11, according to an article on the Saudi-American Forum site in September 2003, "The United States Must Not Neglect Saudi Arabian Investment," between that infamous date and the spring of 2002, some $200 billion of Saudi SWFs fled the U.S. In 2003, when the Saudis and other Persian Gulf medievalists saw that the U.S. was not only fighting the wrong enemies, Iraq and Afghanistan, but was going out of its way to assure them that they were not perceived as the true enemies, SWFs began to flow back into the country.
Peppered throughout the article, however, are complaints about "discriminatory" actions taken by Americans objecting to Arab investments, together with cautious warnings and admonitions to the U.S. that unless America does something about individuals and organizations that implicate the Saudis with 9/11 and terrorism in general, not to mention Saudi-funded political activism through front organizations such as CAIR, then the Saudis will withdraw their investments and place them elsewhere.
The author of the article writes that
"...Recently thwarted FDI [foreign direct investment] projects in the United States reveal that organized interest groups have sought to target and derail Saudi investments. Locals who objected to Saudi Arabian investment into their community have made a comparison of legitimate Saudi investments to suspect illegal organizations. One project failed as a small group of activists launched a media campaign accusing [sic, alleging?] terrorist ties.
"Many Saudi investors are also concerned about becoming victims of lawsuits. Saudi and other foreign investors with no complicity whatsoever with 9/11 or links to terrorism nevertheless perceive the aggressive efforts of an army of U.S. lawyers and entrenched interest groups to 'link and accuse' foreigners in a broad net of litigation. The threat of becoming ensnared in such lawsuits has been reason enough to avoid long-term investments in U.S. markets. If plaintiff efforts to freeze and tie up investments in advance of any evidence of guilt succeed, foreign faith in U.S. financial markets will suffer." [Italics mine to underscore one of the veiled threats.] The author, Tanya C. Hsu, protesteth too much, very likely under the instructions of her Saudi employers. Note that the Saudis group themselves with other "foreigners," as though they were in the same class with private British, French, or other non-governmental foreign risk takers who have invested money in American companies. Note also that the Saudis pose as "victims" of actions taken by Americans who fear an economic takeover of the U.S. by powers hostile to its republican character, without mentioning proven Saudi complicity in funding terrorism, or Saudi-funded political activist groups such as CAIR, or Saudi "libel tourists" who sue authors and publishers to suppress publication of books that demonstrate the links between Saudi money and terrorist activities.
Gag your citizens, demand the Saudis, scrap the First Amendment, forget 9/11, or we will see to it that you suffer your just desserts.
A Washington Post article of February 11, 2002, "Enormous Wealth Spilled Into American Coffers," briefly touches on the political connections between Saudi money and government officials.
"One American financial institution that has attracted Saudi investments is the Washington-based Carlyle Group, whose principal officers include several members of the Saudis' favorite American government of modern times, the first Bush administration. Its principals, who have made millions of dollars from the firm, include former Office of Management and Budget director Richard Darman, former secretary of state [and now defense secretary] James A. Baker III. Former president George H.W. Bush is also a well-paid advisor to Carlyle. Bush has traveled to Saudi Arabia on Carlyle's behalf." [Carlyle, incidentally, failed at the same time as Bear Sterns in the government-caused sub-prime mortgage debacle.] No doubt Bush Senior has often visited Saudi Arabia with his $100 million buddy, Bill Clinton, whose presidential library in Arkansas received $10 million in donations from the Saudis and untold millions from other Persian Gulf billionaires. Clinton's own Arab connections are probably greater than what has filtered through the media sieve.
However, The New York Sun, in a November 22, 2004 article, "Saudis, Arabs Funneled Millions to President Clinton's Library," provides some details, but not the whole picture, of the Clinton-Arab connection.
"President Clinton's new $165 million library was funded in part by gifts of $1 million or more each from the Saudi royal family and three Saudi businessmen. The governments of Dubai, Kuwait, and Qatar and the deputy prime minister of Lebanon all also appear to have donated $1 million or more for the archive and museum that opened last week." In exchange for what? For practicing grand scale political chicanery to enfeeble America and deliver it in a state of dhimmitude to its destroyers.
The Sun article also mentions that George H. W. Bush's presidential library received significant Saudi donations, as well. When his son, George W. Bush, begins planning his own presidential library, doubtless it will receive generous Saudi and Persian Gulf donations, especially given his "special" handholding relationship with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. But, being bought off by the medievalists is not an exclusively Republican venality, as the Democrats like to claim.
How can the medievalists exercise political power over the U.S.? By having politicians like the Bushes and the Clintons in their pockets, in the White House and outside of it.
What will be the end, the dreadful climax? We can put ourselves in Dagny Taggart's place in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, as she listens to another set of looters express their own ambitions, and imagine the same thing with the appropriate substitutions:
"Then she saw the answer; she saw the secret premise behind their words. With all of their noisy devotion to the age of science, their hysterically technological jargon, their cyclotrons, their sound rays, these men were moved forward, not by the image of an industrial skyline, but by the vision of that form of existence which the industrialists had swept away - the vision of a fat, unhygienic rajah of India, with vacant eyes staring in indolent stupor out of stagnant layers of flesh, with nothing to do but run precious gems through his fingers and, once in a while, stick a knife into the body of a starved, toil-dazed, germ-eaten creature, as a claim to a few grains of the creature's rice, then claim it from hundreds of millions of such creatures and thus let the rice grains gather into gems." (p. 948, hardcover) Or into pyramids in the Mideast deserts. Are Americans willing to starve and toil as environmentally acceptable germ-eaten creatures to help the Islamic rajahs of the Persian Gulf build them? For that is the secret means and end of the wielders of SWFs. It remains to be seen.
But Americans are getting no guidance on the matter from the presidential candidates, none of whom dares raise the subject. The depth of their moral depravity is as great as Jimmy Carter's, who recently laid a wreath of roses on the grave of Yasir Arafat.
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:: Tuesday, April 22, 2008 ::
The Earth Day Alternative
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Posted by Nicholas Provenzo at 10:16 AM
I wrote this op-ed for the Atlanta Journal Constitution for Earth Day 2002. The message applies equally today. NP
The Earth is Mankind's Garden
If the welfare of human life was the standard by which we judged industry and technology, there would be no reason to have a day like "Earth Day." Rather than the environmentalists parading their assault on anything and everything that is a mark of human existence on the planet, we would instead celebrate industry and technology as the very means by which mankind has moved into an era of happiness, health and prosperity.
Looking at a figure as basic as life expectancy, it is obvious that people today live a lot longer than they did in the pre-industrialized world of 200 years ago. Today we enjoy such an abundance of foods, medicines and a whole host of labor-saving technologies that if a person from 200 years ago could see us now, he would be amazed that it is even possible that so many human beings can live together for so long and in such splendor.
Yet, the environmentalists tell us the sky is falling. Turning the popular trail mantra "leave no footprint" against all of humanity, the environmentalists say our farms threaten the ecosystem, our cars are destroying the atmosphere and "sprawl" will consume the wilderness. On Earth Day, every aspect of human life and human consumption represents a threat to the Earth.
Notice, for example, that there is not an existing, practical method of energy production that the environmentalists support. Environmentalists oppose gas, coal, nuclear and hydro power. If the environmentalists were honest, they should love nuclear power, for it clearly has the least ecological impact of all the practical means of generating power.
Yet it is nuclear power that the environmentalists despise the most. Consider the argument that the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in the 1970's is proof that man cannot properly harvest the power of the atom. In fact, the accident showed just the opposite. Three Mile Island showed that man could build a reactor that could survive a near total failure, including a hydrogen gas explosion within the reactor core and still have no impact on the surrounding environment. While Three Mile Island was still a costly accident, it showed the strength of our science and technology, not its shortcomings.
Yet the environmentalists still cry "foul." Why? Because the real premise behind Earth Day is that mankind is an unnatural despoiler and a threat to the earth. Of all the creatures that live on the planet, it is rational, tool-making, resource exploiting man that doesn't quite fit.
There is an alternative to the environmentalist argument. It is one that says the Earth is man's garden and that man's mind as fully competent to meet the challenges of living in his garden, whatever those challenges may be. It is an argument that recognizes that the ultimate resource is not oil, coal, caribou or even the energy of the atom. It is an argument that recognizes that the ultimate resource is a free, unfettered human mind.
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:: Thursday, April 17, 2008 ::
'Liberation' Ideology II
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Posted by Edward Cline at 9:48 AM
While searching the Internet for what else presidential candidates Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain were up to in the Senate, I came upon what Obama had to say in the Senate on March 15, 2007, about the riots, killings and repression in Zimbabwe over a year ago. His statement was obviously intended for the record and not as a point of vigorous debate. It is an interesting trail mix of truths, gaffes, and glosses.
The occasion was Robert Mugabe's reaction to protests by the chief opposition to him during a prayer meeting, during which participants were beaten and jailed. Morgan Tsvangiral, head of the Movement for Democratic Change and a presidential contender, was severely beaten, and scores of followers imprisoned. One protester was shot and killed.
Of course, Obama expresses his plastic outrage over the events - as plastic as Hillary's smile and McCain's grin - and urged the United States, the United Nations and the European Union to more stringently oppose Mugabe's government.
"Mr. President, the United States must continue to stand strongly against the Mugabe government's abuses of power in Zimbabwe. We must join with our European allies, the United Nations, and - most importantly - the countries and institutions of the region to press for positive change in Zimbabwe. That means a peaceful democratic transition in 2008, and support for economic growth and opportunity - including the lifting of sanctions - once the dark cloud of Mugabe's rule is lifted, and Zimbabweans are able again to reach for the new horizon they deserve.
"I call on President Mugabe to immediately release all political detainees and repeal the ban on political rallies, to end the use of violence and torture in the jails, permit a free media and abide by the rule of law...." This was transparently a statement meant for press and public consumption. But if it were a sincere statement, did Obama really expect a murderous dictator to heed the urgings of a junior senator from Illinois? Does the statement reflect a genuine understanding of the true nature of collectivism, of tyranny, of power held for the sake of power? Does it reflect even a milligram of comprehension that Mugabe is a thug who has no "good side" to appeal to, that he is beyond reason? No, to all questions. But, then, Obama wants to negotiate with Iran, another dictatorship, a regime that wants to destroy this country.
One thing Obama glossed over was the character of the "sanctions" imposed by the U.N. and the European Union. These were against any and all financial dealings with members of the government, designed to prevent Mugabe and his minions from profiting from any foreign aid or subsidies and moving the lucre to safer havens abroad. They were not directed against the country's economy. If Zimbabwe's economy is in so dire a condition that it is practically nonexistent, it is a consequence of Mugabe's policy of looting, skimming, and redistributing the chaff and the scraps to hangers-on and the "public." That's Marxism in practice, sanctions or no sanctions. A cursory study of the Soviet Union, Red China, or Cuba ought to have driven that lesson home for Obama - provided his collectivist sympathies permitted him to search for the truth.
Obama also demonstrated his ignorance of history. In his Senate statement, he claimed that
"When Robert Mugabe became president over a quarter century ago, there was great hope. {There's that "hope" again.] Zimbabwe had emerged from British rule, claiming its freedom and its future for itself." Well, no. Zimbabwe did not emerge from "British rule." It emerged from Rhodesian rule. Ian Smith declared Rhodesia independent in 1965 and withdrew it from the British Commonwealth. What followed was a brutal guerilla war led by Marxist nationalists Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo, a war which Smith might have won had his government not been pressured to negotiate with Mugabe and his allies by Britain and the United States for the sake of "black majority rule."
Smith himself advocated white supremacist rule in Rhodesia, and while there can be no legitimate argument for that policy, either, it is likely that blacks would have fared far better under Smith's rule - Rhodesia prospered under greater economic sanctions in this period than Zimbabwe has under far milder restrictions - than they have under the total racist collectivism of Mugabe.
Obama does not mention or even allude to in his Senate statement the plight and fate of the whites in Zimbabwe under Mugabe. They are invisible to him. Presumably, under Reverend Jeremiah Wright's tutelage, he thinks that they got what they deserved. Nor does he mention or allude to the fact that Mugabe is a killer whose political "career" began as a butcher of defenseless whites and blacks during the struggle for "liberation." In Obama's universe of moral equivalence, one man's killer is another man's "freedom fighter."
The question is: Does Obama believe that a "freedom fighter" is one who fights, not against tyranny and oppression, but against freedom? Listen to his campaign rhetoric, and judge for yourself.
For the full transcript of Obama's Senate speech, click here.
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:: Monday, April 14, 2008 ::
'Liberation' Ideology in Practice
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Posted by Edward Cline at 9:10 AM
Scant news coverage has been devoted to the continuing chaos and brutality in Zimbabwe, once the "breadbasket" of Africa when it was known as Rhodesia (and for a few years after its "liberation" from white rule). It is now a destitute, starving nation whose citizens choose flight to neighboring states in search of food and employment. Nearly a third of the country's 12 million population has fled.
The life expectancy of males has dropped from 60 years to 37, and for women, to 34 years. Unemployment stands at over 80 percent. In 2005, the government decided to embark on a program of "urban renewal," and demolished the shantytowns and black markets that had sprung up around Harare (formerly Salisbury) and other towns and cities as a consequence of the systematic impoverishment of farm workers and city dwellers by the government. New housing was promised but never built.
Private schools were marked for extinction through the regulation of tuition, and government-run schools, when they are open, are worse than even the worst American public schools. Over more than a generation, since Zimbabwe's independence in 1980, adult literacy has fallen from 90 percent to about 40 percent.
Occasionally one will see brief reports on the morning or evening news of the arrest and beatings of opposition leaders, of journalists, of long queues of people waiting to buy scarce commodities from the bare shelves of stores. Inflation is currently measured at 150,000 percent and climbing (after the issue of new paper currency, it is a "mere" 1,700 percent, but that does not disguise the true inflation rate); it takes a wheelbarrow of paper money to buy a small bag of flour, when it is available.
President Robert Mugabe's Marxist government has banned foreign journalists, and the few who have ventured into the country have broadcast their reports with hidden cellphones. BBC News, Sky News, and CNN have been banned from the country. Independent newspapers were bombed and not permitted to reopen. The government controls the television and radio stations and its remaining newspaper is state-run.
It is interesting to note that Mugabe's party, Zanu-PF, originated decades ago as a solely Marxist rival to other "black power" guerilla factions. After a short flirtation with "free trade" when it came to power, the party returned to its founding ideology, one of whose goals was to redistribute white-owned farmland to the black poor. This campaign began in violent earnest in 2000, when mobs of squatters and "war veterans" (who purportedly fought in the guerilla war against Ian Smith's Rhodesia) invaded white-owned farms. Whites were murdered, raped, beaten, driven from their homes. Paramilitary patrols of whites attempted to protect lives and property rights and to ensure the safety of the farms. But a Marxist government determined to impose racial "justice" (or any kind of collectivist "justice") is inherently lawless and renders such efforts hopelessly doomed to fail.
The production and export of the chief crops of tobacco, soya, and maize plummeted dramatically after the farms were expropriated by government-supported squatters and cronies of Mugabe's.
The economy followed suit. Once second only to South Africa as the most prosperous economy in Africa, Mugabe has reduced Zimbabwe to a condition only a slightly better than the Darfur region of the Sudan.
A presidential election was held on March 29, and in spite of the best efforts of Mugabe's party to rig another "unanimous reelection," all indications are that he lost it, just as he did in 2000. Several Western newspapers prematurely wondered how he would make his exit after this defeat, where he would settle, and how much he would take with him. The Zimbabwean court, doubtless under pressure from Mugabe, has postponed revealing the election results.
Several election officials were arrested and charged, reported the Daily Telegraph of April 8, with "under-counting votes cast for Mr. Mugabe." An election run-off is scheduled for April 19. Whether or not it will occur is a matter of speculation. Voters suspected of casting ballots for Mugabe's political opponents - whose solutions for turning the country around are not much better than the policies that are destroying it - have been accosted by soldiers and youth gangs and beaten up, or have been threatened with death if they vote against Mugabe in the run-off.
To distract attention from his apparent loss, Mugabe, reports the Daily Telegraph, in an attempt to extend his 28-year rule, has dispatched new gangs to invade and expropriate the country's remaining 200 white-owned farms. Once there were 1,500 of them. He also blames "British imperialism" (Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are imperialists? British imperialism is dead, and Britain itself is under siege by the European Union), United Nations sanctions, foreign bankers and other external factors for the country's state.
The original plan was to buy the farms with foreign aid under a "willing buyer-willing seller" land reform program, the "willing buyer" being the government. But when the money never materialized to buy the farms, or when farmers were not willing to sell, Mugabe's solution was simply to resort to force.
Recall the government's staged riot to justify the "nationalization" of Readen Steel in Atlas Shrugged, or its expropriation of Ellis Wyatt's oil property in Colorado. It is as though Mugabe and his government were following a playbook of the novel with the express purpose of destroying the country. That, however, would be giving Mugabe and his cronies too much credit. In the face of the destruction of the country with policies that do not "work," they still "believe" in the efficacy and justice of collectivism.
So do the Western critics of Mugabe, who believe that the idea is noble and feasible, but that he was the wrong man to apply the idea. This is the same rationalization that many Western communist and socialist intellectuals made when they saw the consequences and horrors of collectivism in Soviet Russia, Red China, and other communist regimes.
Western and African politicians have little to say about what is happening in Zimbabwe. "Zimbabwe situation 'embarrassing' - AU [African Union] chief," reads a Reuters headline from March 14. They are more or less mute. What is "embarrassing" is that their collectivist dreams are being exposed for what they are: prescriptions for destruction, collapse, death and near civil war.
However, it is not as though Mugabe were looking for answers to why the country is in a state of economic, political and social free-fall. He is a psychopathic tyrant; reality is his enemy, and his answer to it is force. "Liberation,' in any political sense, is basically theft, by legerdemain or by naked force.
The chief subject here is the racist nature of this brand of collectivism. Before being "colonized" by mostly British whites (under the aegis of Cecil Rhodes in the 19th century), the region was just another African backwater populated by people who had no drive, reason or imagination to exploit the region's potential. Their cultural glory, such as it was, lay centuries in the past. It is not as though blacks there were inherently unable to generate Western ideas and reason and profit by them. The historical fact is that those values originated and thrived in the West. Conversely, whites are not inherently susceptible to those values; Nazi Germany and other disastrous and costly European collectivist movements explode that myth, as well. Reason and rational, pro-life values are a matter of choice, of volition. Race is not a determinant of anyone's character or the contents of his mind.
Mugabe's own "liberation" ideology is fundamentally the same as that of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's spiritual guide and mentor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, which is to make whites "pay" for "exploiting" blacks. It is surprising that Wright has not made a pilgrimage to Zimbabwe to see his malicious ideology in action. He might observe that it is chiefly blacks who are suffering, starving, and dying under Mugabe's regime. Perhaps if he did travel there, his mind would be shaken and he would emulate Eldridge Cleaver, who, as a fugitive, lived in a few "third world" countries, but returned to America a changed man.
But, having watched Wright's performance as a rabble-rousing, emotionalist preacher, I doubt that his fundamental malignancy could undergo an epiphany. I believe his mind is so poisonously venomous that he is beyond correction. He consciously appeals to looters, thugs, and killers. He appeals to a desire for the unearned. He appeals to racism.
Kyle-Anne Shiver, in an article in American Thinker, "Obama's Politics of Collective Redemption" on February 11, observed that
"Little has been made in the mainstream press of the brand of black liberation theology preached by Obama's pastor and spiritual mentor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr., who holds a master's degree on world religions with a focus on Islam, and who has traveled to Middle East countries in the company of Louis Farrakhan. Rev. Wright created and presides over the Center for African Biblical Studies, whose mission is African-centered Bible studies: "We are an African people, and we remain true to our native land, the mother continent, the cradle of civilization." In short, Wright contends that blacks are born with certain uncorrectable attitudes and dispositions and should remain loyal to them. Blacks who reject racism, who wish to act as individuals and to be treated as individuals, are the equivalent of Muslim apostates, to be despised, reviled and ostracized. Note how prominent pro-reason, "conservative" black intellectuals, thinkers, teachers and columnists are shut out of any kind of 'discourse' about race, how they are treated as non-persons by the liberal/left black establishment. Reason, rationality and self-respect as individuals in blacks are deemed corrupting instruments of "black exploitation" in a "white" culture.
Do Obama's undefined notions of "change" and "hope" and "bitterness" differ in essence from any from Hitler's notions of them? Hitler's chief siren song was how the "pride" of Germans and Germany was injured by the Versailles Treaty, how Germans, as a race, were "victimized" by a conspiracy of international bankers and financiers, all controlled by the Jews, to keep Germany poor and dependent.
Wright, for his part, is as much a racist as was Hitler. The hysterical shrillness of his speaking style is reminiscent of the Fuhrer's. Obama, as a member of Wright's church, must have witnessed this vociferous brand of religious/political demagoguery countless times, and read the racist propaganda that appeared in the church publication.
Barack Obama is a much more soft-spoken and articulate public speaker. His smooth sophistry has charmed and inspired the unwary and the unthinking; it is no less calculated than is Wright's to appeal to emotions, not minds. If he wins the White House in November, soon after his swearing in - but not before that -- we should expect to hear again calls for "black reparations." Never mind the fact that the blacks who lived in slavery are long dead, as well as their enslavers; never mind the fact that no American black has lived in slavery for generations, and that, logically, living blacks today cannot be "owed" anything by any living white (nor by Americans of Asian, Latinos, or European descent). Reason is not his oracle, not his guide, not on the issue of racism nor on any of his other policy positions.
Fact-based logic is the enemy of racial or collectivist "logic." As the sins of white ancestors are "inherited" by living whites, regardless of whether or not they are descendents of slave owners, the suffering and injustices endured by black ancestors are likewise inexplicably transmitted to or "inherited" by living blacks, regardless of whether or not they are descendents of slaves. Ergo, they must be "compensated." That is a form of Hitler's demand for lebensraum, that is a yearning for liberation from reality.
For this reason alone - aside from whatever other irrationality he is the symbol of - because Obama has not publicly and without qualification repudiated that brand of ideology, but merely papered it over with sentimental, excuse-laden apologies, he cannot be absolved of complicity in its advocacy by the likes of Jeremiah Wright, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan - and Robert Mugabe.
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