In a genuinely unexpected outcome, the single most common characteristic of these particular political conversion stories was precisely: radicalization rightward in reaction to an overwhelmingly left-biased humanities faculty on one elite campus after another. ~Mary Eberstadt

The same process is probably at work today, but as every level of education has been more and more permeated by anti-Western and anti-Christian attitudes (particularly in history) I bet the reactions against overreaching indoctrination begin earlier.  That was certainly what happened in my case.  It certainly didn’t hurt that I grew up in a home where my parents espoused a very strong conservatism (had I been inclined to read them as a teenager, Bradford and Kirk’s complete works were sitting on our shelves), so there was a strong countervailing influence against the politicised junk they threw at me at school, but an overwhelming part of my early education at secular, private schools was so consistently biased to the left and so openly uninterested in most of the Western tradition generally and Christianity specifically that I was something of a cultural idiot by the time I entered high school.  Growing up entirely secular ensured that, as far as religion was concerned, there would be no strong counterbalance to the anti-Christian elements in our education.  

The virtually total neglect of studying any religion backfired, however, since my curiosity about the subject caused me to go out and start learning something, even if it was initially heavily focused on South Asian religions.  The multiculti propaganda, even as much as I disliked it all along, had had some effect, and this was to discourage interest in Christianity (which I assume is at least half of the purpose of all multiculturalism).  It also had the effect of inspiring in me both a zealous syncretism and a lot of undue respect for Islam (after all, “everyone” knew that Islam was a religion of tolerance and learning, not like those mean, old Christians).  Fortunately, rapid disillusionment with Islam followed, and the departure away from my ignorance of Christianity and away from my childish, conventional neocon-like foreign and libertarian domestic politics came next.  (I guess there doesn’t have to be any connection between sympathy for the “good” Islam, desire for confrontation with China and a belief that global free trade is good for the American worker, but in their sheer irrationality they do seem to coexist comfortably in the minds of more than a few people.)  The multicultis are good at keeping people ignorant, but once the veil is lifted multiculturalism is so shallow and worthless that it cannot long keep anyone in its thrall.  From the perspective of my classmates, I was already on “the right,” perhaps even the far right in some respects, but as I look back on it I was escaping from a host of liberal delusions–belief in “rights,” confidence in democracy, etc.–the last of which I think I finally shed about five years ago (just in time!).    

Gradually, the wisdom of Chronicles, which I started reading more often in my college years when I was back home, broke through the near-impenetrable haze of youthful stupidity.  Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s books drilled in just how pernicious and undesirable democracy was.  Chronicles’ hammering away on the Western injustices done in Yugoslavia finally sank in, and I became aware of the folly of meddling in Kosovo by early 1998 (just about when the first threats related to Kosovo were being made by the administration).  Had Chronicles not existed, there would have been hardly any resources to provide any sort of perspective on the Balkans that was not dripping with the standard historically illiterate, Christophobic, anti-Slavic view of most Western media outlets.  Providing the decent, learned and Christian perspective is the service Chronicles has provided on numerous matters of policy and culture.     

As I have related before, the bombing of Kosovo was a turning point in that the injustice of that war and the insipid nature of the internationalist consensus behind the bombing campaign pushed me irrevocably into the anti-interventionist camp.   It cannot be a coincidence that I was much more likely to be persuaded by the neocon/WSJ party line on meddling in Yugoslavia, backing Israel to the hilt and vilifying Russia when I was in my teens, since this was the time when I was still stunningly ignorant of the history of a lot of Christian civilisation.  It usually requires such appalling ignorance to buy into a lot of the rhetoric used in justifying U.S. policies or in defining “the West” in ways that include Mexico, Israel and Turkey but exclude half of Europe.  As soon as I started learning anything about our civilisation’s history, and particularly once I started to become familiar with Orthodox Christianity (though I would not convert for several more years after this), the folly and villainy of a lot of conventional interventionist policies started to become apparent to me, partly because I started to perceive in them the works of people who were hostile to the cultural and religious inheritance of our civilisation and partly because the policies themselves seemed designed to target and harm Christians around the world (or at least to support the enemies of Christians around the world, which amounts to something very similar).  Iraq and Lebanon have hardly disabused me of this notion.

Behold, the Bridegroom is coming at midnight. * Blessed is the servant He shall find awake. * But the one He shall find neglectful will not be worthy of Him. * Beware, therefore, O my soul! Do not fall into a deep slumber,* lest you be delivered to death and the door of the Kingdom be closed to you. * Watch instead, and cry out: * Holy, Holy, Holy art Thou, O God. * Through the intercession of the Theotokos, have mercy on us!

If only these older-but-supposedly-wiser geniuses would spare us the dubious benefit of their hard-won “wisdom,” we might find a solution to global warming – just think how much noxious gas would no longer be polluting the atmosphere. ~Justin Raimondo

Mr. Raimondo is skewering Tyler Cowen, Brink Lindsey and the other collaborationists advocates of a new “libertarianism,” who are busily trying to find a modus vivendi with implacable statist forces of one kind or another.  If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, right?  Raimondo’s impatience with such people, who have suddenly learned to stop worrying and love “positive liberty” (translation into English: trading your birthright for a mess a pottage), mirrors my irritation with such “conservative” luminaries as Sullivan, Brooks and Sager, who are all busily diagnosing where conservatism has gone awry and proceed to tell us that conservatism can only be saved by chucking or repudiating some huge part of what political conservatism has involved for decades.  These new “insights” usually appear right around the time the wise men have books to sell.  Incidentally, this new vogue of libertarians selling out to Leviathan is a strange thing to behold, since it usually means that I, arch anti-libertarian, find myself holding far more libertarian-like positions than many of the perfumed professionals at Cato.  Then again, I support Ron Paul, while these folks probably wouldn’t dream of “wasting” their votes on him.  I don’t know who the candidate of “positive liberty” would be, since I am not fluent in Newspeak and wouldn’t be able to tell you what people mean when they say “positive liberty” anyway.

In Sullivan’s case, there is a lot of whining about abusive, big government, but in the end he can’t actually think of anything on a major policy level that the government should stop doing (and he thinks it should start doing a few other things that it isn’t doing); he also doesn’t like traditional Christians and their dread influence.  Sager joins him in pinning big-government excesses on the Christians, thus making his “libertarian” project and the repudiation of social conservatism the supposed electoral panacea of the GOP (which, besides being exactly the opposite of political reality in this country, doesn’t seem to involve doing anything to reduce the size and scope of government in any way).  Brooks, who has never been on record as wanting to reduce the size of government, at least has a certain honesty in consistently and straightforwardly defending bad positions.  

Mr. Raimondo also notes the bizarre fixation on one element of domestic policy reform as the guiding star of libertarian fortunes in America, namely partial privatisation of Social Security:

These guys are perhaps to be forgiven for overemphasizing the importance of what was, after all, the Cato Institute’s major policy initiative – the partial privatization of Social Security – but was this failure really the major setback for the cause of liberty in the beginning of the new millennium? Doherty, too, seems to fall for this hooey. He opens his book with the news of this supposedly world-historic defeat, a tic he shares with his reviewers, perhaps because all of them at one time or another have worked for Cato. Yet this is more than just institutional bias. It represents a failure to understand both libertarianism and the current crisis of our nation.

This is not really all that surprising, since the collaborationists advocates of a new libertarianism, especially Brink Lindsey, are known to be Iraq war hawks (the Iraq war perhaps being another example of “positive liberty” being wrought on a grateful people).  They would be unwilling to see their embrace of hegemonism as being in any way in conflict with their libertarianism.  Perhaps they subscribe to the Zorg philosophy of life:

[Liberty], which you so nobly serve, comes from destruction, disorder and chaos!

Bizarrely, many libertarians, whose greatest political asset today should be the traditional libertarian principled opposition to aggression, war and activist foreign policy, have become so intimidated by the pro-war sentiment on the right (or have bought into it themselves) that they have turned most of their attention to domestic policy questions…and consequently discovered that their solutions on domestic policy are horribly unpopular.  Meanwhile, the peace and non-interventionist position that ought to be the universal libertarian foreign policy position would probably be wildly popular with the left and center that some of them are trying to make a deal with, but they actively ignore it and pretend that it isn’t even relevant to the discussion.

War, in short, is good for business in Arizona. And yet, Saint John McCain’s strident militarism never gets discussed on these terms — is never seen as something on a par with how Carl Levin loves cars and Joe Biden loves credits cards. ~Matt Yglesias

This is right.  The reason why McCain’s militarism doesn’t get discussed in these terms is that there is a reigning idea out there today that only corrupt and venal people (you know, French, Chinese and Russian people with their filthy interests in oil of all things) would ever oppose high-minded and noble efforts to kill a great many other people.  You see, no one opposes these interventions for good reasons, but just because they are either treacherous or bought off.  It certainly couldn’t be that anyone supports interventions out of naked political interest or the desire for power (and it definitely never has anything to do with oil interests or powerful lobbies of any kind)–you’d have to be some kind of conspiracy nut to think that! 

That’s why the jingoes are especially fond of Lieberman: unlike McCain, he apparently favours these efforts out of pure devotion to state violence, rather than out of any of the morally compromising influence of money and powerful constituencies in his home state.  Besides, the idea that someone might support something as admirable and decent as organised killing because of graft and influence is too shocking for the tender feelings of the members of the hegemonist consensus.  You shouldn’t have to be cajoled into supporting aggressive war–the enthusiasm and desire should be spontaneous. 

Besides, if it appeared that McCain were acting out of political calculation, that would undermine his personal narrative of being a true-believing warmongering fanatic, which would destroy his last attractive feature for Republican primary voters.  Suggesting that he was acting out of loyalty to constituencies in his state would hint that his positions were remotely explicable and therefore potentially rational, which would ruin his image.

If you’re ever feeling blue and need a good laugh, the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal do the trick.  Who knows what absolute howlers you’ll find?  Maybe it will be those enterprising apologists for illegality, Casey and Rivkin, laying out the legal argument for sinking Cuba to the bottom of the Caribbean (“if we take a more nuanced view of international law, we will find that island nations really belong to the international community at large and can be disposed of as and when necessary”) or the odd Henninger column in which he explains that cancer would be cured if the Republicans became more competitive in New England.  If those sound too reasonable for their respective authors, that’s because those pieces were never written. 

This one, however, is a very real Dorothy Rabinowitz piece in which she tells us that the case against the two AIPAC lobbyists charged with espionage undermines the First Amendment.  No, really.  Why didn’t Pollard and Hanssen think of that one?

Meanwhile, on the other side, Bill Richardson just hauled in $6 million and still has $5 million on hand, which is pretty good for someone virtually no one in the media is taking seriously as a contender for the nomination.

So says Tommy Thompson (hadn’t he already announced once before?), whose candidacy initially provoked my derision, but who seems to be making his mark in Iowa and filling the gap that the Republicans need to fill: the competent administrator (sans friends with mob ties!) from a purple state who has a record of reform achievements and a history of effective collaboration with both parties.  In other words, the exact opposite of Bush.  If he manages to become a truly competitive candidate, I will be glad to eat my earlier words.  This isn’t because I have any great interest in Tommy Thompson becoming the nominee (I suspect he is more Ross and Reihan’s kind of candidate), but I would prefer to not see one of the Terrible Trio in that position, and right now he appears to be the more plausible, non-Brownback alternative.   

He does have a position on Iraq that would make him a very good general election candidate:

Thompson said he would have a “completely different” strategy in Iraq, promising to remove all U.S. troops if Iraq asks the United States to leave.

“If the government duly elected . . . says, ‘We want the American troops, the American government out,’ we should leave,” Thompson said.

On the other hand, the GOP primaries will require him to say things about Iraq that make no sense:

But he said he would have voted against the Democratic-led effort in Congress to establish a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq, saying that to set a timeline would “really just target to the enemies that we are not there for the long haul, we’re not there to defend our troops.”

Um, but we’re not thereto defend our troops–our troops are allegedly there to defend the Iraqi government against [fill in the blank with latest enemy], and quite a few Americans no longer see the point.

Although the presidential election is 19 months away, the Republican Party has a real and growing problem in Ohio that could cost it the White House in 2008.

Simply put, the GOP brand is in trouble in Ohio, more so than it is nationally. That matters because in 2004 Ohio was the key to an Electoral College majority, and could well be the same in 2008. ~Peter Brown

Wasn’t Ohio the purplish-blue state where Sherrod Brown won the Senate race on an explicitly economic populist platform?  That might make some people think that some sort of political appeal aimed at middle class voters (some might even call it “lower-middle reformism”) would be in order for the Republicans if they want to have a chance in competing in a crucial swing state and so have a fighting chance at winning the next presidential election.  You might even say that if they didn’t develop this sort of appeal, their defeat would be basically guaranteed, since they would otherwise be fairly sure to lose Ohio, and they cannot afford to lose Ohio.  What would Goldbergsay to all that?

This is not a post where I intend to get intensely pro-Palestinian, since I believe it should be a basic maxim of our foreign policy that the squabbling of other peoples over small patches of land in small, relatively unimportant Mediterranean countries should properly have nothing to do with the United States (we are not deeply exercised by the continued occupation of northern Cyprus, nor are we much troubled by disputes over Ceuta), but this report almost makes me want to start talking about al-Naqba and playing “Ya Quds” by Nawal al-Zoghbi:

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in interviews published Friday that Israel would not allow a single Palestinian refugee to return to what is now Israel, and that the country bore no responsibility [bold mine-DL] for the refugees because their plight resulted from an attack by Arab nations on Israel when it was a fledgling state.

This is, of course, the standard story of the 1948 war, which every good American has learned by heart (along with the justifiability of the “pre-emptive” 1967 war, in which there was also no attempt to sink the USS Liberty).  However, I am earnestly trying to think of another example where a modern government that engaged in deliberate and conscious ethnic cleansing has been allowed to tell the story in such a way that it can claim that it not only will not take back any of the people it forced out (which might simply be a political reality) but that it also bears no responsibility for the plight of those refugees because the state was under foreign attack. 

This would be like the government of Croatia, after having expelled the Serbs of the Krajina, declaring that they bore no responsibility for this act because they had been attacked by federal Yugoslav forces.  The Croatian government probably has made this claim (indeed, I have to assume that it has at some point), but I doubt that a lot of non-Croatians are tempted to believe this self-serving propaganda (except to the extent that Washington was also culpable in the expulsion of the Krajinan Serbs and so also has a vested interest in confirming this distorted view).  It is, in fact, the logic of the Turkish position on the Armenian genocide: we were under attack, “stuff happens” in war and that’s too bad, but we are not responsible for anything that may or may not have happened.  (For the record, in case this last comparison gets on anyone’s nerves, I am not saying that the Palestinians are victims of an attempted genocide.)  The Turkish government can advance this view all it likes–virtually no one else believes it, much less does anyone consider it a legitimate, defensible position. 

This statement by Olmert may be nothing more than a negotiating posture, but even for something related to politics it stinks to high heaven.

The newest lefty spin on the USA “scandal” is that the “improper” political firings of the eight USAs now jeopardises…the prosecution of one of the corrupt Democrats whose alleged criminal activities David Iglesias was slow or inept in leading.  That means that the thing that got Iglesias fired was probably related to his ineptitude in handling big corruption cases, demonstrated so clearly in his very near failure in getting a Vigil conviction.  In other words, after what was almost a completely botched case against Robert Vigil, Iglesias’ tardy and uninspiring pursuit of Manny Aragon’s corruption probably convinced anyone interested in combating corruption back home in New Mexico that Iglesias wasn’t really cut out for the job.  Maybe there were inappropriate phone calls from members of Congress that shouldn’t have been made, but the Aragon indictment ought to make everyone think about this “scandal” a bit more. 

Now that the U.S. Attorney’s office is finally indicting Aragon, he of Wackenhut connections fame and any number of other scams against the New Mexican people, we’re supposed to be simultaneously convinced that the administration was using the USAs to target poor, innocent Democrats while also screwing up the prosecutions of Democrats who are probably guilty of everything their opponents say they are because the USAs were being used as political tools.  Of course, if Democrats, with ample help from morons in the administration, had not made this episode into a “scandal,” no one would have any reason to think that the prosecution of Manny Aragon was politically motivated or in the least improper, which makes the entire spectacle seem to be one generated for the advantage of their fellow partisans who are under suspicion of corruption or other lawbreaking for good reason. 

This is, after all, Manny Aragon we’re talking about, and anyone who has lived more than a few years in New Mexico knows that this is probably the only illegal thing that the government thought it could actually prove that he had done.  It’s about time that they have him cornered.  Personally, after watching the Vigil case almost implode thanks to Iglesias’ bumbling, I am relieved to know that he will have nothing to do with future corruption prosecutions in New Mexico.  For this I am supposed to be upset at the Bush administration?