The American Conservative

The world as revealed to me last week:

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, by Timothy Snyder

Snyder is a Yale historian of the Holocaust and East Europe. Yesterday I saw this C-SPAN2 Book TV taping of his speech on his new book at the Ukrainian Institute of America in New York City. What an admirably organized and passionate historian! If he is as good a writer as he is a speaker–and all the reviews indicate that he is–this is a must-read book for anyone interested in the tragedy of the 20th century.

It’s hard to imagine such a relatively small area of the Earth witnessing the deliberate murder of more than 12 million civilians in a few years (that’s not counting “collateral damage” or soldiers killed in combat). A tidbit that astonished me: Germany deliberately killed more Russian prisoners of war than Jews. It is agonizing to consider the decisions millions of hapless East Europeans faced as the two dictators’ armed forces closed in: whether to flee to the East or the West–what a horrible choice to have to make. This is a book unsparing of both sides. But because Stalin had so many more apologists in the West, that is where the greatest revelations are confirmed. Fortunately for historians, says Synder, the Soviets were even more meticulous in the recording of their crimes than the Nazis. It just required the collapse of the Soviet Empire for historians to have access to those archives.

“When the historian Robert Conquest was asked to provide a subtitle for a new, post-Cold War edition of his book on Stalin’s purges, he suggested, ‘I told you so, you f—ing fools.’ The fools are now looking even more foolish, thanks to the efforts of indefatigable historians like Snyder.” — Reason

———–

Osama Bin Laden, by Michael Scheuer

From a short interview of Michael Scheuer on Book TV:

Michael Scheuer was head of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden desk for years before his retirement. His biography of bin Laden is due out in February, and it promises to be a most revealing read.

Bin Laden is not a raving maniac, says Scheuer, and we don’t do America any good by pretending that he is. He is unsparingly honest about why he is fighting America, and it has nothing to do with disgust of our freedoms and our “way of life.” Can anyone get the idiot Rudy Giuliani to read this book–and Osama bin Laden’s own explanations? Read More…

Courtesy of the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation, a classic column from the late Joseph Sobran. See Kevin Lynch’s reminiscence of Sobran here.

How do you get to first base with the ladies? It may be easy if you’re as dashing and dynamic as my old friend Taki. He is still handsome, athletic, fearless, and funny after all these years, and is married to one of the most beautiful women this side of Helen of Troy. But what about us ordinary mortals? Is there any hope for us?

Good news, guys! The encouraging answer is a resounding yes. The secrets of success with women are laid out clearly in an old play called “Richard III.”

It was originally published anonymously in 1597 and later ascribed to someone called “William Shakespeare” (not his real name).* The title page read quaintly “The Tragedy of King Richard III,” with the arresting subtitle “Containing, His treacherous Plots against his brother Clarence: the pittiefull murther of his innocent nephewes: his tyrannicall vsurpation: with the whole course of his detested life, and most deserued death.”

That gives you some idea of the plot, though I think it’s a little judgmental and apt to prejudice the reader. It also leaves out Richard’s winning ways with the fair sex.

In the second scene, Richard interrupts the funeral procession of King Henry VI to woo the mourning Lady Anne. Not only does this seem an inauspicious occasion to begin a courtship — so inauspicious that I wonder if even Taki could bring it off; but Richard himself has killed the deceased, as well as Lady Anne’s late husband. So he has several strikes against him, apart from bad timing. In addition, he is an ugly hunchback. Read More…

A longtime friend of mine, the former chairman of the political science department at the University of Illinois, Robert Weissberg, has published a devastating book on the educational industry. In Bad Students, Not Bad Schools (Transaction Publishers, 2010), Weissberg takes apart so many misconceptions about mass education that the reader’s head may be spinning by the end. What keep this work from becoming a mere policy critique are Weissberg’s spirited prose and personal anecdotes. Starting with a personal account of how he had been sent as a teenager in Manhattan to Booker T. Washington Junior High, a school then endowed with state-of-the-art technology and well-paid teachers, the author began thinking even then about the theme of this book. Many students in his junior high had no desire to be in school. They showed neither aptitude nor anything resembling a work ethic, and Weissberg couldn’t figure out why they were allowed to disrupt classes, while learning nothing of value.

This was the beginning of his lifetime reflections on education, a process that has led him to the bold conclusions that he documents with the fruits of extensive research. Among his findings are that there are critical cognitive and cultural differences among groups and individuals and that no educational innovation or expensive equipment has been able to lessen these realities significantly. Not everyone is cut out for serious high school work, let alone college. Higher education requires mental exertions that most adolescents are neither willing nor able to provide.

Egalitarians and environmental determinists have prevented Americans from recognizing these hard truths, and the problem has been worsened by the demagoguery of politicians and self-interested unions, who won’t face the facts of life. Much of what goes on in public and even private education is a mismatch between abundant resources and spotty student performance, a situation that is likely to remain as it is, given the variables that school systems can’t master. Read More…

No, there’s no secret connection between the conservative youth organization born at the Buckley home in Sharon, Connecticut 50 years ago this month and left-communitarian author of Rules for Radicals — no connection, that is, except that TAC is presently spotlighting lively new reviews about each of them, courtesy of Jesse Walker and David Franke. Walker draws out the decentralist lessons the Right can learn from Alinsky, while Franke, who was present at the creation of YAF, ponders what has happened to the conservative movement in the course half a century.

Don’t forget to check out the two new essays @ The American Conservative:

Nick Turse | Success in Afghanistan

Success is the buzzword Washington ascribes to the mission in Afghanistan, but, as Nick Turse illuminates, opaquely talking about “success” does not mean the ten-year Afghanistan experiment has benefited the United States or the Afghan people. In many respects, the average Afghan is only slightly better off under the current Kabul-regime than under Soviet rule.

Unlike victory, success turns out to be a slippery term. As the United States approaches the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan, pundits have been chewing over just what “success” in Afghanistan might mean for Washington. What success might mean for ordinary Afghans hasn’t, however, been a major topic of conversation . . .

Read more . . .

Stuart Reid | Bearing Blair

Writing from London, Stuart Reid reviews Tony Blair’s memoir A Journey. As Reid notes, the book gives readers a sometimes too candid glimpse into the mind of a man whose wildly unpopular decisions still infuriate scores of his co-patriots.

If you are not careful you can find yourself feeling sorry for the former prime minister. He wants to be taken seriously as a man, but like his pal George. W. Bush (to whom he is admirably loyal) invites only derision. For example, he now tells us that when the going got tough in Downing Street . . .

Read more . . .

Remember to follow TAC on Twitter and Facebook

Bill Kauffman’s latest column, covering Christopher Lasch, political memorabilia, and the most anti-imperialist diplomat in U.S. history, is online today. As is John Schwenkler’s double review of two recent books on higher education, Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas and Martha Nussbaum’s Not For Profit. Meanwhile, courtesy of our friends at TomDispatch.com comes Juan Cole’s take on the cataclysm in Pakistan and what it means for U.S. security.

Former New Republic editor Peter Beinart does some good work, but I remember feeling pangs of cognitive dissonance earlier this year when I started hearing about The Icarus Syndrome, his book on foreign-policy hubris. I thought I must have Beinart confused with the guy who wrote The Good Fight, a manifesto for liberal hawks, four or five years ago. In the latest National Interest, David Rieff has an excellent essay on the two Beinarts, who are really one — a smart but superficial pundit who tracks conventional center-left wisdom:

Beinart has done nothing if not follow the times. In his new book, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris, Cold War liberalism as the key to victory over totalitarianism abroad and a fairer and more humane society at home, has gone the way of Bukharin in a Stalin-era Soviet encyclopedia. It has been replaced by a new explanatory key, radically different from but no less simplistic than the one Beinart put forward in The Good Fight, which, reading his latest offering, one would barely know he had ever written.

Today’s spotlighted article at TAC is Brendan O’Neill’s review of Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves.

Also, author Eric Miller comments (scroll down) on David Brown’s review of Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch.

The great, old-school conservative commentator James Jackson Kilpatrick has passed away.

Don’t miss Paul Gottfried’s review of George H. Nash’s Reappraising the Right, newly online at TAC. Take note, too, of David Brown’s review of the new biography of Christopher Lasch (Hope in a Scattering Time), a left-wing thinker much admired by traditionalist conservatives. Also recently added is Jack Hunter’s commentary “How Partisanship Hurts Conservatism.”

If you enjoy these pieces, please make a tax-deductible contribution as our online fundraising drive enters its final weekend.