A group of Manhattan public high-school students and a history teacher with a soft spot for Cuba flouted federal travel restrictions by taking a spring-break field trip to the communist nation – and now face up to $65,000 apiece in fines, The Post has learned. ~The New York Post

A few points: the teacher was foolish to organise such a trip, knowing full well as she must that they would be in violation of federal law.  The parents who must have consented to their children going on such a trip are even more foolish.  The principal who had to have authorised the trip and has since started denying all knowledge is still more foolish.  The laws restricting travel to Cuba are the most foolish thing in this story, since there is actually no good reason why these restrictions remain in place today.  Why should it be illegal for these students to go to Cuba?     

This urge to see the victim class as virtuous and the oppressor class as villainous leads people in countries like the United States and Britain to sympathize more with our enemies than our defenders. This is not new.

“England is, I believe, the only country in which, during a great war, eminent men write and speak publicly as if they belonged to the enemy,” said Lord Salisbury a century ago. Now you can add America to the list. ~Michael Barone

It takes a certain kind of boldness to try to conflate the miscarriage of justice committed against the Duke lacrosse players (who were nonetheless, it must be said, not exactly living as virtuously as they might have done!) with opposition to the Iraq war.  That would align Mr. Bush and his supporters with the wrongfully accused lacrosse players, and make the antiwar opposition into a collective Nifong, which works nicely at first as a way of taking a cheap shot at the integrity of war opponents but otherwise comes off sounding completely cracked. 

It takes a certain stunning indifference to justice to borrow a line allegedly from the (otherwise quite admirable) Prime Minister who presided over the nakedly imperialist and aggressive South African War and then think that you have somehow proved something important (i.e., that opponents of the Iraq war “sympathize” with the enemy) by using it.  It has struck me as something of a credit to Britain that there was at least some real opposition to the entirely unjustified attack on the Afrikaner republics.  It meant that, in spite of Gladstone-style imperialism and the rhetoric of liberal “uplift,” there were some British people who were able to recognise something terribly wrong when they saw it and were willing to say something about it.  Opponents of the South African War, like Anti-Imperialists on our side of the ocean at the very same time, could be proud that they took the side of right rather than that of might and domination.  If Mr. Barone wants to align us with opponents of past aggression and imperialism, he is most welcome. 

But this has absolutely nothing to do with imputing virtue to America’s enemies, nor does it have anything to do with sympathy for such enemies.  There is no such sympathy, at least not among antiwar conservatives (and not really among virtually all opponents of the war).  If there is any sympathy for non-Americans, it is for those civilians who have suffered on account of the war. 

Opposing bad government policy, in this case an invasion of another country, has everything to do with applying standards of right to our own behaviour.  This is done in an attempt to actually encourage the just and, perhaps, even slightly virtuous conduct of national affairs insofar as this is possible with something as inherently corrupting as state power.  Perhaps, just perhaps, if Mr. Barone would like to see fewer reflexive attacks on “villainous oppressors,” he might stop supporting policies that could be reasonably described as unjust and oppressive.  That doesn’t mean that false attacks, such as we saw in the case of the accused lacrosse players, will cease, but that Mr. Barone and company will have a bit more credibility in complaining about miscarriages of justice at home when they are not supporting a war that cannot be reconciled with the requirements of justice. 

Like our ongoing war of aggression, the South African War left Britain badly isolated and despised by her many rivals as well as by the great neutral, the United States, where pro-Boer sentiment was widespread and very public.  Back then, condemning wars of aggression and rejecting imperialism were the normal American responses.  Now this is considered something of an exotic and fringe phenomenon.  So much for the idea of progress.  This isolation and international hostility led Joseph Chamberlain, Ulster England’s contribution to the history of debased militaristic-cum-socialistic “conservatism,” to spin the extremely negative consequences of the imperialist adventure as Britain’s “splendid isolation.”     

This quote from Lord Salisbury (a figure of civilised aristocratic Toryism to whom most modern conservatives in either country would normally not pay any attention) has been making the rounds during the past couple months on the blog right and in the conservative commentariat because of Andrew Roberts, Mr. Bush’s approved court historian, who has written A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900.  The quote comes from this book.  You have undoubtedly heard about Mr. Roberts’ work in one way or another in recent weeks, especially after it became public that Mr. Bush favours this historian.  I have not read the book (and I am not really in any hurry to), so I will not pass judgement on whether it is the rather tiresome rah-rah justification for various Anglo-American war crimes of the last hundred years that its critics say it is or whether it is the magnificent contribution to modern historiography that its admirers believe it to be.  What does seem clear, however, is that pro-war writers have decided to latch on to this one quote as a shorthand for expressing their contempt for opponents of the war, as if they are somehow demonstrating their moral superiority by tying themselves to a chain of unjustified Anglo-American invasions of different countries (e.g., Boer war, Suez, Vietnam, etc.).  It makes some sense that war opponents would liken supporters of the invasion to Suez or Vietnam hawks, but it will never cease to amaze me that the supporters are only too happy to accept these comparisons (even after they have strenuously denied that the Iraq war bears any resemblance to these other wars–which is what they would have to say, since at least two of them failed).

Without endorsing every last bit of this Guardian piece (for instance, I don’t think the Lancet estimates of Iraqi dead are at all reliable), it has an amazing example of what passed for commentary on the pro-war side at the beginning of the Iraq invasion (from William Shawcross in The Wall Street Journal):

April 9 – Liberation Day! What a wonderful, magnificent, emotional occasion – one that will live in legend like the fall of the Bastille, V-E Day or the fall of the Berlin Wall. Watching the tearing down of Saddam Hussein’s towering statue in Baghdad was a true Ozymandias moment. All those smart Europeans who ridiculed George Bush and denigrated his idea that there was actually a better future for the Iraqi people – they will now have to think again. 

A day that will “live in legend”?  Like V-E Day?  Did people really talk like that back then?  Yes, unfortunately, we all know that some people did, and yet most of those who spoke in such rapturous tones about the invasion go merrily about their business today without giving any hint that they think they went horribly wrong somewhere along the way.   

Hat tip to Antiwar

President Bush’s top national security adviser said Thursday that there is an urgent need to name a high-powered White House official to oversee the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“It’s something I would like to have done yesterday and if yesterday wasn’t available, the day before,” National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley told reporters during a briefing at the White House. A day earlier, the White House had said the idea for a so-called war czar was still in its infancy. ~MSNBC

This continued preoccupation with finding the war ‘czar'(which I will insist on spelling tsar in all cases from now on) is hard to understand.  What, exactly, will the tsar be doing that the old War President himself is actually unable to do?  Of course, this would normally be the time for remarks about someone’s incompetence, intelligence (or lack thereof) and often willful resistance to acknowledging changing circumstances, but let’s step away from the usual Bush-mocking for a moment and think about this in another way. 

Structurally, the war tsar would be doing what the President theoretically already does.  The war tsar would oversee both theatres, Iraq and Afghanistan, and would somehow “break through” the bureaucratic barriers and entrenched policy positions that are supposedly hamstrining both efforts, right?  In terms of government structure, the President is the only person in the modern executive branch who has the authority and resources to even attempt to do this.  Hiring some flunkey, whose main function will be to serve as a P.R. man and eventual fall guy when things get worse, will not make that flunkey into a substitute President, were such a thing even desirable.  

The National Security Advisor, again theoretically, is supposed to be the President’s point man in helping him to manage the bureaucrats and make sure that policy is carried out effectively.  Since NSAs of the Rice-Hadley school seem incapable of performing even their most basic functions, we might want to start thinking about whether there needs to be some reorganisation of the National Security Council to remedy what appears to be a real weakness in the system: its reliance on appointing reasonably competent people to the position of NSA.  We cannot expect that future Presidents will not choose underqualified loyalists for key positions–in fact, we have to assume that this will happen–so there would need to be some stronger institutional safeguards to make sure that the execution of foreign and military policies does not hinge on whether the NSA actually knows how to do his job.  (Better still, we might dismantle large portions of the national security state and the empire and make the NSA job a good deal more manageable even for the Rices and Hadleys of the world.) 

Come to think of it, where are the presidential cultists and unitary executive theorists now?  Shouldn’t they be the ones most disgusted and horrified at the thought of Mr. Bush delegating all those supposedly “inherent powers” that he allegedly possesses as “Commander-in-Chief”?  Does the war tsar participate in the “inherent powers” of the Commander-in-Chief through some kind of Neoplatonic experience of emanation and return through the various hierarchies of bureaucratic being, or will the President alone retain the mystical power to annul the Constitution on a whim?  Besides, we don’t want to fight a war by committee, do we?

One basic reason why a war tsar is an unwelcome addition to this sorry administration is a simple one of accountability.  Mr. Bush has managed to use his subordinates as shields to absorb much of the criticism that ought to be aimed mainly at him.  He does not deserve to have yet another shield to protect what remains of his reputation.

The story concludes:

Michele Flournoy, a former Pentagon defense strategist, expressed skepticism about the new post, saying it sounded like a “bureaucratic fix” to a larger problem. “I think a war czar is a desperate attempt to inject new energy into what is a vacuum of leadership,” she said in a conference call with reporters.

Quite.

We cannot “shorthand” this issue with concepts such as the “democratization of the region” or the constant refrain by a small but powerful group that we are going to “win,” even as “victory” is not defined or is frequently redefined. ~Gen. John Sheehan (USMC, Ret.)

But there are other differences between Mr Yanukovich’s backers and the western and central Ukrainians who mostly support his opponents. The east suffered in the Stalinist famine of the 1930s and inherited a political culture that combines narrow paternalistic expectations with profound cynicism. Easterners despised Mr Yushchenko in 2004 because, to them, his promises of a new sort of government were so much cant. ~The Economist

But his promises of a new sort of government were so much cant.  Why is this so hard to believe, or why does anyone find it in the least strange that someone would think this?  When a politician speaks in airy and meaningless platitudes, that is usually a good sign that he either has a) nothing interesting to say or b) an agenda he doesn’t want to talk about.  These eastern Ukrainians assumed Yushchenko was out to swindle someone with his empty rhetoric, because that is what politicians do.  They were right.  The question we should ask is: are Americans cynical enough to see through Obama’s equally meaningless appeal?

BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan’s capital, has seen it all before. Ever since the “tulip revolution”, when Askar Akaev, the authoritarian former president, was chased out of office by street protesters two years ago, the country has been in permanent political tumult. Anti-government demonstrations follow the same pattern: tents are erected in front of the president’s office, the White House; the organisers bus in protesters from their home regions and feed and water them; some, the so-called “rental pickets”, are also paid for their time—causing quite a few old-guard Kyrgyzstanis to observe sourly that, since the tulip revolution, too many of their compatriots have forgotten the real meaning of a day’s work.

The protesters—more than 10,000 of them—who gathered in the centre of Bishkek on April 11th, however, seem to have been genuine. They were there to lend weight to the call by Kyrgyzstan’s opposition parties for Kurmanbek Bakiev, the president, who was swept into power in March 2005, to step down, hold early presidential elections and amend the constitution. The leading light behind this week’s rally was Mr Bakiev’s former ally and prime minister until last December, Felix Kulov. In February Mr Kulov set up a new opposition movement, with a splendidly inclusive name: the United Front for a Worthy Future for Kyrgyzstan. He and his supporters want to return to a short-lived constitution adopted only last November after a week of street protest. It curtailed the president’s extensive powers in favour of parliament. But Mr Bakiev managed to undo most of the changes a month later. In the process, Mr Kulov lost his job

Mr Bakiev has failed to fulfil his promises of democratic reform. Instead, he has replaced rule by his predecessor’s family with rule by his own. ~The Economist

So the phoney “Tulip Revolution,” which had more to do with two-faced oligarchs than tulips, has yielded bitter fruit.  This would be the part where democrats around the world scratch their heads and ask, “What went wrong?”  They are, of course, asking the wrong question.  The right question might be: “Who was naive enough to think that Kyrgyzstan was experiencing a democratic revolution?”  The evidence that the revolution was a sham was available pretty early on.

At the time, some of us were very skeptical of the democratic nature of the change of power.  This was not exactly an episode of the oppressed Kyrgyz people yearning to breathe free.  It seemed to be a regional and tribal feud that wore the mask of “people power,” a mere jockeying of old rivals, albeit one spurred on by meddlers from outside and accompanied by violence, looting and destruction of property. 

Many democrats around the world swallowed the propaganda whole without giving it much thought.  In most parts of the world, democracy really does just mean “to the victor the spoils,” because that will very frequently be the result of a change of power from one region or tribe to another.  The Ukrainian “revolution” of 2004 was much the same (that “revolution” has also experienced the disappointment of not being the glorious reform movement it was cracked up to be and now clings weakly to power), as was its dubious successor in Lebanon.  The politics and constitutions of these countries will always baffle outside observers who approach them with simple dictatorship/democracy binary schemes, because there is no country for which such a scheme makes any sense.

Of Mr. Bakiyev, I wrote last April:

For those who actually found Mr. Akayev’s rule so terrible, his replacement by Mr. Bakiyev will be as meaningful for the domestic reform of Kyrgyzstan as the succession of Andropov after Brezhnev was for the internal politics of the USSR.

This is turning out to be the case.  What else could we have expected from internecine fights among political figures raised up in the old Soviet system to one degree or other?  A Bishkek Spring?  Hardly.

This is the post where I partially grant that Jonah Goldberg has a good point about something, and then point out that it is fairly inconsistent with certain things he has said in the past. 

My former EM colleague and a future co-blogger, Steve Burton, discussed the recent lefty blog attack on Goldberg’s post related to differences between American and European health care systems in which Goldberg said, more or less, “Culture matters.”  That is, the political traditions of different countries and their relationship to the state in the past will affect how well-suited this or that people will be for different policies.  That seems quite reasonable, and it sounds an awful lot like the sort of thing that antiwar conservatives were saying against the universality of democracy prior to the invasion of Iraq.   

Mr. Burton is correct that the blog left has tended to respond reflexively and mistakenly to what Goldberg said.  Subsequently, there was some engagement in the latest bloggingheads episode with Ezra Klein and Julian Sanchez with the idea that culture was an important factor in considering the viability of European-style socialised health care in this country.

Mr. Burton said that he made this point about culture in his “jokey” style, but I would guess that the Canadians and western Europeans being indicted as the heirs of “throne-kissing swine” and those “with a long history of sucking up to the state and throne” respectively would not get the joke, especially since it was historically the least overtly royalist and conservative elements in these countries that pressed for socialistic policies.  There was and is a kind of conservative and Christian democratic pro-labour socialism, but in most cases those most well-known for their “throne-kissing” were less likely to be in favour of the sort of centralised socialist systems promoted by European social democrats and Canadian labour activists.  (To the extent that some European conservatives embraced parts of the socialist agenda early, it was at least partly to undermine and weaken the appeal of socialist parties.)  The goal of corporatism, both Catholic and non-Catholic, was to find some alternative path that did not unduly privilege the interests of capital or labour, but sought (however clumsily in some cases) to coordinate and balance these interests. 

Nonetheless, the basic point that very homogeneous European societies with some greater tradition of state interventions in economic life would be more amenable to socialised health care makes a lot of sense, especially since European liberalism (or what we would call right or classical liberalism) ceased to be a politically viable alternative in most parts of the Continent over a hundred years ago.  It does seem to be making one of its better comebacks in a place such as Belgium with the Vlaams Belang.  Belgium, of course, has long had a tremendously weak sense of national solidarity and identity, and this is now aggravated by the influx of Muslim immigrants who are politically identifying themselves more and more with the Socialists.  Beyond the traditional religious and ethnic cleavages in Belgium that tend to make “nationwide” social solidarity less attractive to many Belgians, especially the Flemings who wind up footing much of the bill, there is an added division in the society created by mass immigration.  This relates tangentially to some pro-immigration conservative claims that immigration would be less of a burning issue in this country were it not for the welfare state, and it also points to a reason why the progressive left in America might want to try to take restriction of immigration and assimilation more seriously as one of their winning issues (in addition to conservationist, income equality and pro-labour concerns). 

A recent history of Denmark (land of at least some of my ancestors and, apparently, royalist toadies) by Knud Jespersen has made the link between Danish homogeneity and the creation of Danish social democracy very clear and convincing.  It is perhaps not entirely a coincidence that the Danish liberal party, Venstre, under Anders Fogh Rasmussen has done fairly well following the influx of Muslim immigrants into Denmark.  Yet, somewhat ironically, to stave off the challenge of the more specially anti-immigration nationalist party, Dansk Folkeparti, it has adopted some restrictionist legislation.   

Now we come to Goldberg’s older article in which he objected to Maistre-style paleoconservative “junk” “identity politics.”  In his most recent post, he said:

Liberals constantly invoke Sweden as a governmental model without paying much heed to the fact that Sweden’s government succeeds as much as it does because it governs Swedes.

But back in ’02, when writing about where “Pat Buchanan Meets Al Sharpton” (because that’s a respectful way to talk about other conservatives), Goldberg wrote:

More relevant, he [Maistre] thought constitutional democracy was for suckers — in part because it’s based on the idea that humanity is universal.

“Now, there is no such thing as ‘man’ in this world,” de Maistre famously wrote. “I have seen in my life French men, Italian men, Russian men… But as for ‘man,’ I declare that I have never met one in my life; if he exists, it is entirely without my knowledge.”For de Maistre, you couldn’t be just a “man.” You had to be a man of Italy, a man of France, a man of Persia, etc. The new American republic was so much folly, in de Maistre’s eyes, because its Constitution was blind to this unchanging fact of life.  The Declaration’s bold proposition, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” ran completely counter to everything de Maistre believed.

It should go without saying that the Left subscribes precisely to this point of view. Along with nationality, they also emphasize ethnicity, race, and various other identity-politics categories, but the principle is the same. They believe there is an epistemological firewall separating blacks from whites, women from men, Latinas from non-Latinas, etc., etc. De Maistre would have no problem saying “people of color,” because that is largely how he saw the world.

What doesn’t go without saying is that there’s still a sizable segment of the Right that preaches very similar junk: paleoconservatives.

I had first noticed this article when Goldberg had said something to the effect that Maistre would have endorsed the concept of “white logic” (i.e., that there is a system of logic appropriate to white people, and other, entirely different systems appropriate to others).  That is, if you believe that ethnicity and nationality are real and significant, you must be essentialist about it, and you must impute radical difference between all ethnicities.  That this does not follow logically (not even when using “white logic”) should be clear to everyone. 

In support of his bizarre claim, he linked to the article with the Maistre quote above.  In short, he seemed to be saying, if you don’t believe in abstract, ahistorical Man and all that this entails, you inevitably must accept that different groups of people have irreducibly different epistemological frameworks.  I suppose you can take that position (it’s the sort of caricature of Enlightenment rationalism that defenders of the Enlightenment find appalling), but I continue to be perplexed at how someone can take that position and a) call himself a conservative or b) invoke cultural difference as a significant factor in discussing problems of policy.  But never let it be said that I haven’t given Goldberg at least a little credit when he has managed to get something right.

Prof. Knippenberg at No Left Turns has taken up for Jonah Goldberg on account of the recent…strong disagreement that I have had with the latter over his treatment of several of his interlocutors over the last year.  In objecting to shoddy debating tactics and what would seem to be an unwillingness to engage the ideas of others, I have sometimes become quite angry, since I generally find this kind of debating offensive and unfortunately quite typical of the way certain conservatives attempt to set the limits and define the terms of the debate in such a way that only they will prevail.  It is a kind of rhetorical sleight of hand that should not go uncriticised. 

Each of the controversies I have cited previously fit this pattern of someone raising objections to some kind of prevailing idea or conventional wisdom or stigma and Goldberg slapping them down with at least as much disrespect as there has been in anything I have written.  In Prof. Knippenberg’s view, that shabby behaviour gets a pass, but when I call Goldberg on this tactic in the strongest terms and then draw some unflattering conclusions about what it means it is hateful, perhaps because I don’t cloak my ridicule in a supposedly “amusing” or “jokey” style, a style that, as it happens, isn’t even funny.  So I have criticised this tactic of tarring interlocutors with what are intended to be very nasty associations and focused on one of its more egregious users.  This has led some people to consider me hateful, which I think is the wrong characterisation inasmuch as they mean that I actually feel hatred for the people I am criticising.  I don’t believe that’s the case.   I will allow that I can and have been swept up by what probably is undue anger, but I firmly reject the idea that people should not be outraged and get genuinely angry when they encounter someone who uses his position of influence to belittle and insult those whose ideas he doesn’t understand and furthermore doesn’t seem to want to understand.  If a teacher did this to colleagues on a regular basis, he would reasonably be regarded poorly and would be viewed as a much less serious person who cannot let his evidence do the talking, but must run down those with whom he disagrees because he knows his argument isn’t really very good or interesting to start with. 

If I have harmed or set back this critique because of some flaw or excess on my part, I do regret that.  I would find it obnoxious if errors on my part were allowed to obscure the main point.   

Prof. Knippenberg remarks (without providing links) that I have criticised him a couple times in the past, which is true.  He once wrote against Fukuyama when Fukuyama was engaged in his public break with neoconservatism, and I countered what I thought to be the mistakes in his response.  I wasn’t bowing and prostrating myself as I made these statements, of course, but neither was I really rude or, as he claims, disrespectful.  The other comes in the context of my dispute with Claremont last year, where the followers of Harry Jaffa made it their business to belittle, mock and insult Claes Ryn and his understanding of historicism as much as they possibly could.  I don’t remember Prof. Knippenberg taking any of them to task for referring to Prof. Ryn’s conservatism as a “cartoon” or taking any number of other disrespectful pot shots at him, but perhaps I missed the stern lecture that he gave them back then. 

Prof. Knippenberg jumped in with what struck me at the time, and still strikes me, as a flawed statement about Ryn’s idea of synthesis (which he then clarified and thus revealed that he didn’t actually disagree with Ryn about very much at all, making his earlier attack seem all the more odd).  I was intentionally copying the tone that Prof. Knippenberg used in his post, and in my remarks I said nothing that was more disrespectful than his attack on Prof. Ryn when he said:

Argh, I can’t help myself! I have a preliminary thought, subject to much revision. Ryn makes much of incarnation and synthesis, and, apparently, of the Incarnation as an example of synthesis. Which comes first for him, synthesis or Incarnation? If the former, then he strikes me as, ultimately, a polytheist opposed both to Judaism and Christianity, on the one hand, and to philosophy as Strauss understood it, on the other.

Now theological labeling games can be quite harmless, but it seemed clear to me that initially accusing Ryn of some kind of polytheism was intended quite plainly to discredit him as somehow being an apostate from the main of Western religious tradition.  If that’s what was going on, that is a pretty harsh and lousy thing to say based on little more than an impression, but let’s remember that I am the disrespectful one and Prof. Knippenberg is in the position to set the rules of conduct.  I probably did respond a little impatiently in my response, because I had been up to my ears in Claremont chatter from any number of people who didn’t seem to know much theology (or history).  As part of that argument, Prof. Knippenberg’s intervention seemed to be just one more flawed attack on Prof. Ryn. 

I invite readers and critics to investigate this claim that I have been disrespectful to Prof. Knippenberg.  I believe you will find that it is not an accurate claim.  If Prof. Knippenberg still feels as if I was attacking him unfairly or disrespectfully, I would like to say now that I apologise for any offense that I have given.

His interpretation of my recent blast against Mr. Henninger seems, however, to be mistaken in at least a couple places.  Prof. Knippenberg wrote:

He offers two justifications here for his tone. First, the objects of his scorn deserve it. Second, if he, and others like him, can’t do this in print, they’ll explode in other, less pleasant ways.

I stand by the first idea.  Obviously, if I didn’t think the targets of my criticism deserved withering scorn, I wouldn’t heap it on them.  What I was referring to with this second idea, which was probably not stated as well as it could have been, was that the stifling, homogenising effects of ever more unaccountable media and government will end up creating some kind of backlash in our society.  Opening up political discourse through media such as blogging and allowing bloggers to be relatively unconstrained in what they say are necessary to channel the very natural opposition to this concentration of power into some rather more constructive activities.  Naturally, Prof. Knippenberg makes this remark to be mostly about me and my state of mind, which is, I’m sorry to say, not a very serious response.   

It seems evident to me that the reason why those in the institutional media of newspapers, cable news, etc., such as Messrs. Henninger and O’Reilly, would want a “blogger code of conduct” is less because they want to raise the tone of debate (which their own institutions have done their fair share of coarsening as well!) and more because they want to try to impose rules on the media they and those of like mind with them currently do not control.  I took a particularly sharp tone with Mr. Henninger himself because his newspaper’s op-ed pages and their online journal, particularly the work of the awful James Taranto, are only too happy to treat their targets on left and right with disdain and disrespect.  Perhaps Prof. Knippenberg acknowledges this, which is why he made most of his post about me and not about the things I was saying against the WSJ history of smearing political opponents.  My point was partly that people at the Journal have to be pretty cheeky to claim some high ground against the “hyper-aggressive language of bloggers,” since their op-ed page is much more influential and prominent and they nonetheless use it even more pointedly to smear or insult, for instance, immigration restrictionists, opponents of the war and all those opposed to policies that favour concentrated wealth and power.  Do those who do these things deserve respect?  Maybe a little, but not very much. 

Such is the way of things that these far more harmful and stifling enforcers of the narrow political consensus in this country are considered the responsible and respectable voices in our discourse.   

Update: Thanks to Rod for this.

Watching the magnificently bad Indian nationalist movie-parading-as-message-of-peace, Dil Pardesi Ho Gayaa, which stars the stunning Salloni Aswani, I happened to notice the mention of the chinar tree, which is to be found in Kashmir and is apparently extremely important in Kashmiri culture and it is considered “the King/Queen of all the trees.”  It would seem that the name “originated from the Persian word “Chihnaarst” meaning fiery red color.”

As Sayat Nova fans will know, the ashugh often will compare the lithe figures of women to the chinar tree, as he does in Ashkharooms akh chim kashi:

Mechkt salboo-chinari pes, rangt frangi atlas e.

Your waist is like the cypress and chinar, your colour is that of French silk.

Update: Aur ha, there is another shared borrowing in Armenian poetry and colloquial Hindi.  Sayat Nova has a poem called Eshkhemet hivandatsil im (I have become sick from your love), where eshkh is the Armenian rendering of ishq, which I assume must be originally taken from Arabic.  Language bleg: does anyone know for certain what language ishq comes from?