The American Conservative

In Cairo in 1943, when the tide had turned in the war on Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, who had embraced Joseph Stalin as an ally and acceded to his every demand, had a premonition.

Conversing with Harold Macmillan, Churchill blurted:

“Cromwell was a great man, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, sir, a very great man,” Macmillan replied.

“Ah, but he made one terrible mistake,” Churchill continued. “Obsessed in his youth by fear of the power of Spain, he failed to observe the rise of France. Will that be said of me?”

Yes, history will say that of Churchill, who in 1946 delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Mo., to decry Stalin’s persecution of that half of Europe into which Churchill had welcomed the monster.

Of George W. Bush, it will be said that, after 9/11, he led his country on a utopian crusade for democracy in the Muslim world — and all but ignored the rise of a rival with a potential that Stalin never had to surpass and eclipse the United States as first power on earth.

Ten years after, what has 9/11 wrought? Read More…

In the early morning hours of Sept. 1, 1939, 72 years ago, the German army crossed the Polish frontier.

On Sept. 3, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, having received no reply to his ultimatum demanding a German withdrawal, declared that a state of war now existed between Great Britain and Germany.

The empire followed the mother country in. The second world war was on. It would last six years, carry off scores of millions and end with Germany in ruins, half of Europe under Josef Stalin’s rule and the British Empire on the way to collapse.

Though it may prove to be the mortal wound that brings about the death of the West, most today accept World War II as inevitable, indeed as “the good war.”

For it is said and believed that Adolf Hitler was not only the incarnation of evil but also out to conquer, first Poland and then Europe and then the world.

To stop such a monster, one must risk everything.

Which makes these two sentences in the final chapter of British historian Richard Overy’s new book, “1939: Countdown to War,” riveting:

Few historians now accept that Hitler had any plan or blueprint for world conquest. … (R)ecent research has suggested that there were almost no plans for what to do with a conquered Poland and that the vision of a new German empire … had to be improvised almost from scratch.

But if Hitler had no “plan or blueprint for world conquest,” this raises perhaps the great question of the 20th century.

What was Britain’s stake in a Polish-German territorial quarrel to justify a war from which the British nation and empire might never recover?

How the war came about is the subject of Overy’s book. Read More…

You need only mention outmoded concepts like “original sin,” to get folks really riled up.

Over at the Daily Dish, Chris Bodenner posts anonymous reader feedback on my recent account of a sesquicentennial civil war reenactment. The reader was apparently involved in reenactments as a teenager, but after a few years had a conversion and quit the reenactor scene:

Mine is just a single perspective, but man, do I disagree with Lewis McCrary’s argument that “for the reenactors” the hobby is a reminder of “original sin”; that even “the more provincial reenactors intuitively understand … that war is a result of the fallen human condition.” I suppose that McCrary’s perspective may hold for a few reenactors, but these were certainly not the people I knew. …

Perhaps the hobby is different nowadays. I haven’t donned my gray kepi and butternut shell since 1988, when I participated in the 125th anniversary reenactment of the Battle of Gettysburg as a member of the 12th Alabama Volunteer Infantry. I can tell you, though, that we in the 12th understood only a handful of concepts intuitively, among them “farb,” as in someone who is not appropriately authentic; “hard-core,” as in someone who is intimidatingly authentic; and “motherf*&@ing hot,” as in what it felt like to march around in July wearing layers and layers of wool.

Rather than worry about original sin, we worried about whether the buttons on our jacket were too farby. …

Read More…

America’s custodian of the virtues, William J. Bennett, is as prolific as ever. The former secretary of education and drug czar will soon release another chapter of his magisterial history of the United States, the multi-volume series entitled America: The Last Best Hope. Used as a textbook by right-leaning schools and homeschooling families across the country, the third and forthcoming volume is subtitled “From the Collapse of Communism to the Rise of Radical Islam.” The promotional materials for the book remind us that America was a very different country in 1991–but one that doesn’t sound half bad:

Twenty years ago, John McCain was serving his second year in the Senate, and Colin Powell had just been promoted to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. There was no Fox News Channel, no American Idol. Saddam Hussein and the Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeni ruled Iraq and Iran, respectively. George W. Bush was the fairly unnoticeable son of the then-president. If you asked someone to “email me,” you would have received a blank stare, and “Amazon” was a forest in South America. Finally, 20 years ago a young man named Barack Obama was elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. The two decades from 1988 to 2008 have proved to be some of the most pivotal in America’s history. Based on a lifetime of experience in government and education, William J. Bennett defines the events that shaped American history during the final years of the century.

No Fox News? No reality television? Foreign policy realists at the helm? George W. Bush running a baseball franchise? Maybe those “interwar” years were the good old days.

I have a new article in Reason where I review two books on the great empires of history and explain that imperialism does not make the conquering nations any richer or safer. Moreover, decentralized societies are safer than consolidated empires because would-be conquerors cannot take existing administrative systems and technologies and use them for their own ends. Somewhat paradoxically, the stronger we make our own state, the more vulnerable we become to outside conquest because the apparatus can easily be turned against us. If you want to make your society safe from outside invasion, make your own government as weak as possible.

I also interviewed one of the authors, Timothy Parsons, who is a professor at Washington University in Saint Louis and happened to be my history adviser when I studied there as an undergraduate. During our discussion, Parsons describes how the only winners in empires are special interest groups, how empire can corrupt the politics of the metropole (Edmund Burke gets a mention here as an anti-imperialist), and how the conquerors often become the conquered. Parsons argues that empires are no longer feasible because of the rise of national over local identity. Nation-states have largely put an end to empire as it was traditionally known, but nation-states themselves are inherently imperial. According to Parsons, the major difference is that nations seek to turn people into citizens while empires only seek subjects.

Today marks Marshall McLuhan’s 100th birthday. While the Canadian-born media theorist wasn’t honored with a temporary electronic totem pole at the center of cyberspace — a Google Doodle — he perhaps should have been; McLuhan coined the very information-age phrase “the global village” in the early ’60s, a time when plans for an “intergalactic computer network” were only musings of bureaucrats at the Department of Defense.

The spring issue of The New Atlantis carries an excellent reflection on McLuhan by Alan Jacobs, who gets beyond the slogans — “the medium is the message” — that made McLuhan the Clay Shirky of his time. He is both overhyped and underappreciated, contends Jacobs, for McLuhan “never made arguments, only assertions … those assertions are usually wrong, and when they are not wrong, they are highly debatable.” At the same time, “McLuhan’s determination to bring the vast resources of humanistic scholarship to bear upon the analysis of new media is an astonishingly fruitful one, and an example to be followed.” It was an example that inspired the trenchant critic of television Neil Postman, who in Jacobs’ estimation does the job better than McLuhan — leading Jacobs to suggest that “once one has absorbed [McLuhan's] example there is no need to read anything that McLuhan ever wrote.”

Jacobs points out that McLuhan’s writing style — frustrating to those trying to wring out an argument — may have been ahead of its time, resembling the assertion-based, quote-heavy, quick riffs that characterize much internet-based writing. In The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), McLuhan shows familiarity with a wide literature, including many books that Jacobs contends later “transformed their disciplines.” Read More…

Will the East dominate the West by the end of this century? Absolutely, says Stanford professor of classics and history Ian Morris; and there is little the West can hope to do about it.

In a talk hosted by the New America Foundation and the Atlantic Council in Washington – “Will the East dominate the West in the 21st Century?” – Professor Morris elaborated on his recent book, Why the West Rules – For Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future. With his background in the archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean, Morris introduces a long view to the currently fashionable topic of the fate of civilizations, also tackled by Niall Ferguson in latest bestseller Civilization: the West and the Rest. As the subtitle of Morris’ book belies, these works of history find their niche through addressing popular concerns about the future. Ferguson confirmed this appeal in a congratulatory review of Why the Rest Rules: “one really scholarly book about the past is worth a hundred fanciful works of futurology.”

While Ferguson identifies a series of transferable “killer applications” for civilizational ascendancy, such as science, democracy and medicine, capable of being “downloaded” by any aspiring power, Morris puts forward the accidents of geography – and the adaptive responses it demands from “lazy, greedy, frightened people looking for easier, more profitable ways of doing things” – rather than civilizational genius as the primary motor of historical change. This sets the deterministic tone of the grand predictions that follow. Read More…

With all the recent media attention over efforts by some southern Californians to break off from their northern neighbors and create the 51st state, one might think that the idea of states splitting up—or actually seceding from the union outright—is something that hasn’t been discussed since the Civil War.

But that’s not the case at all. As TAC contributor Bill Kauffman pointed out in this piece from 2005, there are “at least 28 U.S. secessionist movements active everywhere from those dubious Cold War states of Alaska and Hawaii to New York City—site of Norman Mailer’s prophetically pro-secession 1969 mayoralty campaign—to the states of the Confederacy, with their League of the South, and up to the felicitously named State of Jefferson in northern California and southern Oregon. America has gone fission.”

Make that 29, now that the Riverside County Board has approved a proposal that would look into the idea of splitting off from California.

Meanwhile, a secessionist group in Texas has begun printing its own currency. And let’s not forget Texas Governor Rick Perry’s comments in 2009 about how Texas had the right to secede from the union.

Talk of secession—whether it’s from other states or the nation as a whole—might not be very popular, but it’s certainly not uncommon.

Back in March, I sat down with my friend and Independent Institute Research Editor Anthony Gregory to discuss Barack Obama’s foreign policy, the renegades of American history, and his research on the origins of habeas corpus, and you can download or listen to that conversation here. This is the first podcast that I produced every aspect of, so I’d like to know if you have any technical issues with it.

Anthony and I both wrote reviews of  Thaddeus Russell’s recent book, A Renegade History of the United States–mine for this very publication–and we spend the bulk of the podcast exploring some of our favorite parts of that extremely entertaining and informative work. We also talk about Anthony’s forthcoming book on habeas corpus, which Anthony argues is something of a double-edged sword. Although habeas corpus often protects individuals from unlawful detention by the state, Anthony describes how it has also been used by people in power to restrict freedom, such as when slaveholders used it to retrieve escaped slaves. The interview is a relatively brief 16 minutes, but I believe you will find each one highly informative.

Sometimes an article comes along that is so blindingly stupid and misinformed that the mind reels in a vain attempt to understand how such a thing could be published by any semi-reputable organization. In my personal experience, these articles often discuss the history of the libertarian movement or libertarian ideas. I’m certainly not contending that this is the only subject that attracts wildly inaccurate commentary like a picnic attracts ants, but it’s the one where I can spot these stories most easily.

Today’s entry is this deeply confused article on the supposedly baleful influence of philosopher Robert Nozick and his 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia. The only proper response to a piece this nonsensical is something like this: Read More…