Wicked Dox

Hiatus

2007-06-09T19:13:00.000+11:00

I have for the moment put up all that I had ready for this blog but as articles that I like disappear, I will no doubt be posting more from time to time. I will always announce new postings on Wicked Thoughts.

Are You Now or Have You Ever Been a Homophobe?

2007-06-08T16:12:00.000+11:00

A Washington University physics professor who expressed the opinion that homosexuality is sinful on a personal website is under fire from students who say such opinions shouln't be allowed on university servers, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

In one of several opinion pieces hosted on his faculty web page, professor Jonathan Katz writes that homophobia is a moral judgment on acts engaged in by choice. Like incest and bestiality, he says, homosexuality is condemned by the Bible as a sin. After stating that homophobic people don't encourage violence against gays but just choose to stay away from them, he concludes, "I am a homophobe, and proud."

The site features a disclaimer reading, "These represent my personal views alone. Washington University would never take an official position which might deviate from the 'politically correct' line. I don't know how they find out what the line is each day, but they sure keep up-to-date."

Gay students have said they may feel uncomfortable taking Katz's class now that they are aware of his opinions, but Katz says politics never enters his science class and that the situation is no different from Republican students who might be uncomfortable taking a class taught by a professor that they know to be a Democrat.

(October 5, 2005 post on the old Tongue Tied blog. The new "Tongue Tied" blog is here)

The Rhyme-Master's On the Case

2007-06-07T13:30:00.001+11:00

Jesse and the Race-baiters are now complaining that use of the term "refugee" to describe victims of the hurricane in Louisiana is racist and condescending, and papers like the Baltimore Sun are lapping it up.

The paper says use of the term is another example of the bias permeating coverage of the disaster in the national media.

"The use of the term refugee doesn't benefit anybody," said Richard E. Vatz, a professor of rhetoric and communication at Towson University. "It's another way of depicting African-Americans as hierarchically low, and I understand why they wouldn't want to be associated with that."

UPDATE: Even President Bush has bought into the claptrap.

(September 6, 2005 post on the old Tongue Tied blog. The new "Tongue Tied" blog is here)

New Uses for the Race Card

2007-06-06T16:24:00.000+11:00

A black elected official who demanded at the last minute to ride in a peach festival parade in Delaware is now calling her placement at the back of the parade racist, according to The News Journal.

Members of the Middleton Historical Society say they bent over backward to accommodate Diane Clark Streett, the Register of Wills, after she signed up late and didn't have her own car to ride in.

But Streett was not happy. In a letter to the society, she professed to be "extremely disappointed" at being placed at the end of the parade.

"I was not only segregated from the other elected officials but I was placed behind a dance school, tumblers and miniature ponies," she wrote. "I should have been positioned with other [Caucasian, male] county elected officers."

Organizers said Streett was near two of the biggest crowd favorites -- Little Miss Peach and the Middletown High School Marching Band -- and in the same spot that Republican state Rep. Richard C. Cathcart, R-Middletown was given last year.

(September 14, 2005 post on the old Tongue Tied blog. The new "Tongue Tied" blog is here)

Hatchet Man

2007-06-05T17:27:00.000+11:00

So Reagan was the guy who saved conservatism? Actually, he buried it

By Matthew Yglesias

Born a few months after Reagan's inauguration, I have no personal recollection of the man, and this weekend's wall-to-wall coverage has been my first sustained exposure to his presidency. The tone of his rhetoric is striking. From his first inaugural address it seems that, initially at least, he took his role as Barry Goldwater's heir quite seriously. Government was not the solution; government was the problem. Reagan was going to get it off our backs.

Well, it didn't happen. Some budget cuts took place, to be sure, but the basic elements of the New Deal and the Great Society -- Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the Civil Rights Act, Title I education funding, etc. -- all remained intact. Bush has, in many ways, simply repeated the farce of Reaganism, driving the country deep into debt by taking on the revenue side of the welfare state while leaving expenditures intact.

The mode of presentation, however, has shifted altogether. While Reagan talked the talk of small government, George W. Bush preaches the gospel of compassion. To be sure, this compassion is mostly fraud, but talk matters. It seemed for a while in the nineties, with Bill Clinton conceding that the era of big government was over, that Reagan had permanently shifted the terms of the American debate to the right. The contrast between Bush and Reagan, however, makes it clear that Clinton was more successful in shifting it back than many liberals have given him credit for.

No longer do we have a president who claims that "a big businessman is what a small businessman would be if only the government would get out of the way and leave him alone." Instead -- at the level of presentation, at least -- the Bush administration accepts the fundamental liberal premises that the federal government has a responsibility for the health, education, and retirement security of the American public. Ostensibly, today's GOP is merely offering an alternative vision of how best to achieve those goals. Reality matters, of course, and the fact that Bush doesn't sincerely share those premises does make a difference. But appearance matters, too, and the difference between Bushian and Reaganite discourse amounts to a major Republican surrender on crucial issues of principle.

Reagan was supposed to be the man who saved conservatism, but instead he seems to have buried it. His tough talk against bureaucrats and welfare mothers served as group therapy for a nation burdened with resentment over the troubled '70s and the excesses of the New Left. With that angst wrung out of the body politic, we're left with the fact that Americans really do want the government to solve their problems, clean their air and water, educate their children, cure their sick, and keep them safe from terrorists and defective products alike. Unlike Reagan or Goldwater, Bush doesn't care to challenge this paradigm; instead, he works against it by stealth. Such tactics can do real harm, but liberal anger at the present administration shouldn't obscure the fact that we faced the real battle in the eighties -- and despite Walter Mondale's dismal performance, we won.

(From 06.09.04)

South Koreans Warned Anti-U.S. Tide Could Hurt Economy

2007-06-04T14:34:00.000+11:00

BY PAUL ECKERT

Leading voices in South Korea called Tuesday for a cooling of the anti-U.S. sentiment that has overshadowed this week's presidential election, warning of a backlash that could hurt Seoul's security and economy. Websites, the media and the street are rife with resentment at South Korea's security ally of 50 years and top trade partner, influencing candidates' stances in Thursday's poll -- a close race which may hinge on how the country's volatile youth vote.

What sparked the upsurge in anti-Americanism was the accidental deaths in June of two girls crushed by a U.S. Army vehicle on a road near the border with North Korea, and a U.S. court martial acquittal of two soldiers involved in the accident. But the anger -- vented in some 50 street rallies that recently have drawn thousands more people than the presidential candidates -- is deep and broad. A recent Pew poll showed South Koreans hold the strongest anti-American views in Asia. Some South Koreans say President Bush's pressure on North Korea over its nuclear arms schemes is more dangerous than the failing communist state itself.

Many resent the high-profile U.S. Army presence, symbolized by a huge base in the heart of Seoul which broadcasts U.S. television on local airwaves and have called for a withdrawal of U.S. troops.

A campaign that has featured flag-burning, profane anti-U.S. rock songs and a threatened boycott of the new James Bond film deemed insulting to Korea took an ugly turn last weekend when knife-wielding local men attacked a U.S. Army officer in Seoul. Lt. Col. Steven Boylan, jumped from behind by three men who had taunted him as he walked home from work, deflected the knife thrust away from his stomach and suffered only a slight cut and bruises. The army imposed a 9.00 p.m. to 5.00 am on troops after the attack.

Sunday's attack on the U.S. Army press officer showed that a "poisonous atmosphere has been spreading like a fad throughout the base of the country's society," South Korea's largest daily newspaper, the conservative Chosun Ilbo, said on Tuesday. The daily sounded a warning that unchecked anti-Americanism would cause the United States to rethink its military ties with South Korea and remove the 37,000 U.S. troops in the country -- a worry voiced by President Kim Dae-jung and business groups. "U.S. troops should continue to remain in Korea. Their necessity is being acutely felt by our armed forces," Kim told South Korean soldiers Monday. South Korea's armed forces number 690,000, the world's sixth largest standing army backed by the world's 12th largest economy.

In addition to intelligence and security provided by the U.S. forces, their removal would force South Korea to hike defense spending, Kim said, adding that: "If the U.S. troops left, foreign investments are feared to follow."

The Korean Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Federation of Korean Industries and three other groups said the anti-U.S. campaign could prompt a boycott of Korean products and endanger the country's $8.9 billion trade surplus with the United States. "Moreover, the escalation of anti-American movements on Korean streets will scare away potential foreign investors from the United States and other Western countries," the lobby groups said in a statement.

Key media and web-based outlets back the anti-U.S campaign. Last week, 100 South Korean photojournalists downed their cameras in a sit-in near the U.S. embassy. A cartoon in the Hankyoreh daily likened the road accident that killed the two girls to the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

With street protests swelling, presidential hopefuls have embraced one of the key demands of protests. They have urged revision of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) to give South Korean courts more jurisdiction in cases involving U.S. troops. Conservative opposition candidate Lee Hoi-chang, vulnerable because of his long support of close U.S. ties and of Bush's hawkish stance on North Korea, joined one of the candlelit vigils for the girls and signed a petition for SOFA change.

Ruling party candidate Roh Moo-hyun, however, stayed away from the rallies -- reflecting a different perceived liability stemming from his 1980s association with anti-U.S. movements. Roh said his decision showed "prudence and balance." "People's rightful demands must be respected but a leader must control emotions, step back a little and find a realistic and rational way to make changes," Roh said in an interview published in the Korea Times Tuesday.

Kim Hyung-joon, a politics professor at Seoul's Kook-min University, said the biggest policy difference for Washington will be how the next president deals with North Korea. "If Lee gets elected, South Korea and the U.S. will go in the same direction on North Korea, which will make U.S-South Korea relations stronger," Kim said. "If Roh is elected, some officials are concerned that ties between South Korea and the U.S. will sour, reflecting different policies on North Korea."

(From Tue, Dec. 17, 2002)

20th Century U.S. History: Civil Rights Knowledge Test

2007-06-02T16:09:00.001+11:00

There have been various versions of this quiz but the one below seems to have most points

1) The Dixiecrat party was made up of Southern
a) Democrats
b) Republicans

2) Jim Crow laws were passed by legislatures controlled by:
a) Democrats
b) Republicans

3) When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led the civil rights efforts in the South, the governing powers that opposed him were of which party?
a) Democrat
b) Republican

4) In Arkansas, the governor who stood in the door of a schoolhouse to block integration was a:
a) Democrat
b) Republican

5) The president who ordered in the National Guard to dislodge the above-mentioned governor from the above-mentioned door was a:
a) Democrat
b) Republican

6) George Wallace was a:
a) Democrat
b) Republican

7) Lester Maddox was a:
a) Democrat
b) Republican

8) Although Republican Bo Callaway won a plurality of the vote, the Georgia Legislature installed Lester Maddox as governor. The Legislature was ruled by an overwhelming majority of:
a) Democrats
b) Republicans

9) As a bonus worth 50 points, which is the only one of questions above answered correctly with "b"?

10a) The attorney general who signed off on the wire taps that J. Edgar Hoover put on Martin Luther King, Jr. was a:
a) Democrat
b) Republican

10b) The President who was responsible for the attorney general who signed off on the wire taps that J. Edgar Hoover put on Martin Luther King, Jr. was a:
a) Democrat
b) Republican

11) The Governor of Arkansas during the 80's who participated in the official state designation of "confederate day" was a (hint: his name rhymes with "Will Linton"):
a) Democrat
b) Republican

(From December 20, 2002)

PRAYING FOR SADDAM

2007-06-01T18:14:00.001+11:00

At a time when war against Iraq looms ever closer, Britain's Church Leaders are uniting to show solidarity….with Saddam. Recent weeks have brought shrill statements from the religious establishment warning against any US/UK led attempt to use force to remove Hussein's malignant dictatorship.

The leader of British Roman Catholics, Cardinal Murphy O'Connor, said "The need to avoid war is a cornerstone of Christian teaching." He said military action was only acceptable in the face of a grave and imminent threat and when "there is no other means to achieve the just end of disarming Iraq". Cardinal Murphy O'Connor called for an end to sanctions against Saddam Hussein's regime and for Iraq to be offered a "positive incentive" to comply with United Nations Security Council demands. He stopped short of suggesting Iraq be given a seat on the Security Council, but it is clear where he is coming from.

The leader of the 70 million world wide Anglican community, Archbishop of Canterbury designate Rowan Williams, has given an early sign of robust political involvement by signing a statement against war on Iraq. The Christian Declaration, with nearly 3,000 names including those of other Anglican and Roman Catholic bishops, was handed to the British government on Hiroshima Day, Aug. 6, -- the 57th anniversary of the world's first use of a nuclear weapon in an act of war.

Coinciding with reports that the United States, with possible British support, is preparing detailed war plans to remove Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, the declaration described an attack on Iraq as "immoral and illegal." It said: "It is deplorable that the world's most powerful nations continue to regard war as an acceptable instrument of foreign policy, in violation of both the United Nations and Christian teaching."

The declaration was organised by Pax Christi, the international Catholic movement for peace and was published in the weekly Roman Catholic journal, The Tablet.

Meanwhile, Scotland's senior Protestant cleric, Dr. Finlay Macdonald, moderator of the Church of Scotland, said Parliament should be recalled if there was any prospect of committing British troops to a war in Iraq. In a letter to Prime Minister Tony Blair, Mr. Macdonald said there should be "no question of the United Kingdom becoming involved in military action against Iraq that does not have the support of the United Nations."

The unspeakable moral equivocation behind these statements issued by the British religious elite helps explain why Christianity in the United Kingdom has dwindled to the point of virtual extinction. The only higher authority that this ragbag band of apostates appears to recognise is the United Nations.

They delight in a disgraceful moral equivocation which in turn is seized upon by the leftist British media as the "moral" argument against removing the beast of Baghdad. The truth is that there is little that is recognisably "moral" left in the British established Churches.

(The post above appeared on the British blog "A Tangled web" on 17TH November 2002 but is unknown to Google. The blog concerned has moved sites a couple of times so the post may be really lost. The present site for the blog is here)

"They were Right"

2007-05-31T16:59:00.000+11:00

By Mark Skousen

"Americans need to know the history of American anti-communism if they are to understand the great role they have played in ridding the world of the most murderous of the twentieth century totalitarians." -- Richard Gid Powers 1

On October 16, 1961, thousands of people packed the Hollywood Bowl. The occasion was not a rock concert or a sporting event but the biggest anticommunist rally in the country. "Hollywood's Answer to Communism" was carried on nationwide television. Actor George Murphy was the master of ceremonies and other speakers included Herb Philbrick, Congressman Walter Judd, Dr. Fred Schwarz, Senator Thomas Dodd, and my uncle, W. Cleon Skousen, a former special assistant to I Edgar Hoover and author of the bestseller The Naked Communist.

I was in my early teens when the anticommunist movement was at its zenith and remember seeing my uncle on TV I watched shows like I Led Three Lives and read books like John Stormer's None Dare Call It Treason, J Edgar Hoover's Masters of Deceit, and Whittaker Chambers's Witness.

But despite this grounds-well of concern over the threat of communism, communist sympathizers at high levels combined with media forces to ridicule and vilify patriotic conservatives. Most historians deplored the anticommunist movement of the 1950s and 1960s as "extremist," "paranoid," "right-wing" hysteria. Accordingly, there was little credence given to this alleged vast communist conspiracy; reaction went rarely beyond references to McCarthyism, red-baiting, and blacklisting. They challenged the anti-communists' claims that the Soviets had planted numerous agents in government, that Stalin had infiltrated the film industry as a means of promoting communist propaganda, that the Communist Party USA was a pawn of Moscow, and that the Soviet Union was a serious military threat.

They depicted the anticommunist era as an unwarranted "witch hunt" against liberal progressives and idealistic movie stars and a groundless attack on patriotic government officials who they say were falsely accused of espionage. They carried on a 40-year campaign to prove Alger Hiss and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg innocent. My uncle's book so angered members of the political science and history departments at Brigham Young University that Richard D. Poll, a history professor, wrote a scathing critique of his "extremist" views on Karl Marx and communism.

Mises and Socialism

In those days, the economics profession also east doubt on free-market criticisms of socialism and the Soviet economy. Half a century earlier, Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek were lone voices in charging that socialist central planning could not work. According to conventional wisdom, Mises and Hayek had lost the debate with the socialists in the 1930s, and in 1985 Paul Samuelson reported in his popular textbook that the Soviet Union had grown faster than any other industrial economy since the 1920s. As late as 1989, Samuelson claimed that "The Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive."2

But then, following the collapse of the Berlin Wall and Soviet communism in 1989-90, economist Robert Heilbroner shocked his colleagues in the socialist world by boldly declaring that the long-standing debate between capitalism and socialism was over. "Capitalism has won, " he confessed. "Socialism has been a great tragedy this century." Furthermore, Heilbroner was forced to change his mind about Mises and the debate over socialism. Following the unexpected collapse of communism, Heilbroner admitted, "It turns out, of course, that Mises was right."3 And it wasn't long before Paul Samuelson did an about-face in his textbook, labeling Soviet central planning "the failed model."

Revelations from the Soviet Archives

The fall of the Soviet Union brought about another dramatic outcome that would have far-reaching effects on modem history. The Russian government opened up thousands of secret KGB files in Moscow, revealing what one historian called "stunning revelations" about espionage and the Soviet economy under Stalin. This new information has sparked a harsh reevaluation of the anticommunist movement by historians and the media. As one reviewer put it, "It's like looking into the new edition of a book from which half the pages had previously been torn out.''4

The KGB files prove beyond doubt that Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, and numerous other Americans accused of spying for the Soviets were guilty. They confirm what J. Edgar Hoover and the House Un-American Activities Committee were saying all along: that spies reached the highest levels of the State and Treasury departments, the White House, and the Manhattan Project, and that the Communist Party USA (which had 50,000 members in World War 11) got its marching orders from Moscow.5

Stalin's Economic Disaster

Based on research at the Soviet archives, historian Sheila Fitzpatrick has written a pioneering account of everyday Russian life in the 1930s: "With the abolition of the market, shortages of food, clothing, and all kinds of consumer goods became endemic. As peasants fled the collectivized villages, major cities were soon in the grip of an acute housing crisis, with families jammed for decades in tiny single rooms in communal apartments. ... It was a world of privation, overcrowding, endless queues, and broken families, in which the regime's promises of future socialist abundance rang hollow... Government bureaucracy often turned everyday life into a nightmare."6 What a sharp contrast to Samuelson's glowing account of the Soviet economy.

After writing three books on the Soviet archives, historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr summed it up this way about the anti-communists: "They were right." And being right, they deserve our praise and gratitude.

References:

1. Richard Gid Powers, Not Without Honor. The History of American Anti-communism (New York: Free Press, 1995), p. 428.

2. Paul A. Samuelson and William D. Nordhaus, Economics, 13th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1989), p. 837.

3. Robert Heilbroner, "Reflections After Communism," The New Yorker, September 10, 1990, and "The Triumph of Capitalism," The New Yorker, January 23, 1989.

4. Joseph E. Persico, "The Kremlin Connection," review of The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America, by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, New York Times Book Review, January 3, 1999.

5. Several books have been published detailing new findings from the Russian archives, including John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr's Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999) and The Soviet World of American Communism (New Haven: Yale, 1998).

6. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Staliinism (Oxford University Press, 1999), flyleaf

At the time of the original publication, Mark Skousen was an economist at Rollins College, Department of Economics, Winter Park, FL 32789, a Forbes columnist, and editor of Forecasts & Strategies. His just-completed textbook, Economic Logic, is available from FEE.

September 1999

The Art of Fiction CXLII

2007-05-30T16:38:00.001+11:00

Patrick O'Brian interviewed by Stephen Becker

INTERVIEWER

Do you agree with Maturin that Napoleon was a tyrant, an unmitigated disaster? Buonaparte did, after all, reform French law, politics, taxes—doesn't much of his code civil endure today? He also restored French national identity after the Revolution and the Terror. Wellington and Metternich, not to mention Louis XVIII and Charles X, were unreconstructed reactionaries. Yet Maturin sees Napoleon as a kind of early Stalin.

O'BRIAN

Yes, I do agree with Maturin. I think Buonaparte did France—a country that he hated as a youth—very great harm indeed, not only because he brought about the death of vast numbers of Frenchmen, far more than even Louis XIV, but because he left the country with a curiously vulgar notion of glory, which Louis did not. I do not think he restored French national identity at all, but superimposed upon it a trashy chauvinism that is still sadly active, particularly in the army. One cannot blame him entirely for the miserable decline in music, painting, architecture and furniture-making that coincided with his altogether regrettable existence, for zeitgeist had a great deal to answer for; but there is no doubt that he was devoid of taste (he admired Ossian) and his manners were as indifferent as his French. His utterly unscrupulous rapacity in Italy, Switzerland, Malta and Spain, to say nothing of his treatment of the Pope, may not quite qualify him as a rival to Stalin, but it seems to me quite enough to justify Maturin's opinion.

As for the Code Napoleon, I am not scholar enough to know how much Buonaparte had to do with it, but from what I have seen of the system, or of what remains of it, I do not think it reflects much credit on the authors. It is shockingly authoritarian and misogynistic; and since according to its provisions all the children have equal rights in their parents' property it has a disruptive influence on both family life and the cohesion of an estate. I have often seen the miserable results of this among our friends in the remote provincial corner of France where we live and where many people still depend entirely on the land. The children soon learn—it is a matter of common knowledge—that apart from the small proportion that can be left according to the wishes of the leaver the whole of the rest is theirs as a certain, wholly dependable legacy, however badly they may behave. I will not say that the prospect of being cut off with a shilling in the traditional English way necessarily turns all born under that law into models of filial piety, but I believe it has some effect. And in passing I may observe that parricide is back-page news in this neck of the woods.

As for the rest of the code that is associated with Buonaparte's name, it is so slow, and often so harsh to the accused, that one might almost prefer the English jungle, which does at least preserve some ancient customary law: though indeed Isaiah dismisses all human systems in a line that the Vulgate renders et quasi pannum menstruate universae justitiae nostrae and the Douay Version all our justices as the rag of a menstruous woman.

(Excerpt from Paris Review, Issue 135, Summer, 1995 )

Behind the Numbers: Liberals in Public, Press More Likely to Self-identify as Moderates

2007-05-29T15:18:00.000+11:00

By: Rather Biased

Among nation-wide media outlets such as the six channels providing news programming and America's biggest daily newspapers, just seven percent of working journalists and executives identify themselves as conservatives compared to 33 percent of the general public, according to a study conducted by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press.
Five times as many national journalists (34%) call themselves liberal, which is an increase from 22 percent who identified themselves as such in a survey the group conducted in 1995.

There is a lot of interesting and compelling data in the Pew Center's poll and it is well worth reading if you have the time, but the fact that it relies upon the sample's own assessment of itself raises questions about its accuracy.
In the field of polling, self-diagnosis is widely panned as an accurate measure of ideological identification, largely because most people do not have a good understanding of the ideological spectrum. This is especially true among people who classify themselves as moderates, which is what most journalists claim to be.

Over the years, most pollsters have come to the conclusion that there are very few actual moderates and that most people who claim to be centrists are usually anything but. Research has also shown that among the general public, liberals are more likely to classify themselves as moderate than conservatives.

Although many surveys have shown this, a good example is the 2000 election: while only 20 percent of the public identifies itself as liberal, Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore earned 48 percent of the popular vote. Thus, Gore's share of the "moderate" vote had to have been bigger than Republican George Bush's who was operating from a larger base of 33 percent.

This is not to say that self-identification is never used among pollsters, but rather that it is only considered useful to gauge a sample's view of itself and then compare it with the sample's actual views (which can be readily ascertained through single-issue questioning).

When this line of reasoning is applied to the journalists surveyed in the Pew Center poll, it is apparent that the phenomenon of liberal misidentification is very much present in the American press.

Compared to nine years ago, national journalists are much more of the opinion that the press is playing it soft on President Bush. Fifty-five percent say that the press is "not critical enough" of the president; just nine percent believe the media is being "too critical." By comparison, in 1995, only two percent thought the press gave too much coverage to the achievements of President Clinton. Forty-eight percent believed the media didn't cover them enough.

On moral issues, it is evident that despite the fact that 54 percent of journalists claim to be moderate, they are considerably more liberal than the public. Fifty-eight percent of Americans believe that it is necessary to believe in God in order to be a moral person. Just six percent of surveyed journalists believe this. Asked about whether homosexuality "should be accepted by society," 88 percent of journalists agreed, compared to 51 percent of Americans. Among journalists describing themselves as moderate, 84 percent were of this opinion.

On the subject of news bias, journalists were much more sensitive to conservative bias. When asked if they could name a national news organization that struck them as "especially liberal," 62 percent could not do so. Among those who could name a liberal news organization, 20 percent cited the New York Times.

By contrast, 82 percent were able to list a news organization that they felt was "especially conservative." Among this group, the vast majority (69 percent) cited Fox News Channel as the embodiment of conservative media bias.
While this poll did not ask the general public about its opinion of bias, most polls show that the public is much more likely to perceive a liberal slant in the news. In a survey conducted last year by the Gallup Organization, 45 percent of the respondents said that the press was "too liberal" while just 15 percent felt it was "too conservative."

Rather Typical

Although he likely was not surveyed by the Pew Center, Dan Rather's attitudes toward himself and the press are strikingly similar to the national journalists who were polled. Like many of them, he insists that he is a moderate and is seemingly oblivious to the idea that the press is dominated by liberals who often inject their opinions into their stories.
Over the years, Rather has persistently denied that he is a liberal, despite his long record of favoring Democrats and liberals over Republicans and conservatives.

In 1999, when asked by CNN's Bill Press if he was a liberal, Rather rejected the idea out of hand saying that " If I were, I would say so and I would be proud of it, but I'm not."

Asked about his opinion of claims that liberals dominate the news media and as a result bias the news to fit their views, the anchor told late night talk show host Tom Snyder that such claims were groundless:

"It's one of the great political myths, about press bias. Most reporters are interested in a story. Most reporters don't know whether they're Republican or Democrat, and vote every which way. Now, a lot of politicians would like you to believe otherwise, but that's the truth of the matter. I've worked around journalism all of my life, Tom Snyder has as well, and I think he'll agree with this, that most reporters, when you get to know them, would fall in the general category of kind of common-sense moderates.

Rather even shares most national journalists' opinion of the New York Times, as former CBS correspondent Bernard Goldberg recounted in a May 24, 2001 op-ed for the Wall Street Journal:

"In 1996 after I wrote about liberal bias on this very page, Dan was furious and during a phone conversation he indicated that picking the Wall Street Journal to air my views was especially appalling given the conservative views of the paper's editorial page. 'What do you consider the New York Times?' I asked him, since he had written op-eds for that paper. 'Middle of the road,' he said.

"I couldn't believe he was serious. The Times is a newspaper that has taken the liberal side of every important social issue of our time, which is fine with me. But if you see the New York Times editorial page as middle of the road, one thing is clear: You don't have a clue."

Other takes on the Pew Center's poll of journalists:

Read the center's summary of its findings here. For its methodology, see here. See also its press release
The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz quotes study director Tom Rosenstiel: "This is something journalists should worry about," he says. "Maybe diversity in the newsroom needs to mean more than ethnic and gender diversity." See also his online chat about the survey.

John Hinderaker noticed that the number of reporters concerned about unfairness in stories declined from 12 percent in 1999 to 5 percent in 2004.

Former newspaperman Mike Gordon on why journos see things differently than the public: "Journalists live in a world dominated by government, and they reflexively see government action as the default way to approach any problem."
Editor and Publisher notes that the number of self-described liberals increased dramatically from 1995.

San Diego Union-Tribune designer Matthew Hoy argues: "Most journalists look around the newsroom and can point out the Vietnam-era protester/Marxist/Leninist and say to themselves: 'Well, that guy's more liberal than I am.' Then they watch television and they see Tom DeLay or Jesse Helms and think: 'I'm definitely not a conservative.' Therefore, the only thing left is to label oneself a moderate."

James Joyner wonders if journos think they're too easy on Bush how would a "too tough" media cover the prez?

WSJ's James Taranto: "All this suggests that journalists not only are considerably more liberal than the general public but also wish their own coverage were more liberal than it is. No wonder public confidence in the press is suffering."
Scott Wrightson believes reporters call themselves moderates to avoid giving ammunition to supporters of the liberal bias theory.

Asian wire service Press Trust of India takes a different tack on the story in a piece headlined "Journalists have very low self-esteem: Survey."

UPI's report

USA Today completely ignores Pew's findings on bias, focuses on everything but. It does find room to promote a study by liberal media watchdog group accusing NPR of conservative bias, though.

Dean Esmay: "All this tells me one thing: Blogs are more representative of the general population than the professional press is. Which should be no surprise. My guess is that an awful lot of people who lean right will tend to be people who choose careers other than journalism--but for whom blogging is a perfect outlet."

(From May 25, 2004)

The real nasty party

2007-05-27T17:50:00.000+11:00

By: Richard Littlejohn (EMAIL: richard.littlejohn@the-sun.co.uk)

THE Tories spent the week beating themselves up and wondering why people called them the Nasty Party. Their big problem is that they've allowed Labour and the fascist Left to get away with portraying them as little better than the Nazi Party. They're so frightened of their own shadows that they've put up with the most appalling slander and libel.

The fact is that the real Nasties are all to be found on the Left. Most of the spite and class hatred comes not from Conservatives but from Labour, whether in the vindictive campaign against the countryside or the war on motorists. Or by deliberately trying to prevent private school pupils from getting to the best universities, regardless of how well they did in their exams. The siting of asylum seeker camps in Tory constituencies is another example.

I can't ever remember, in 18 years of Conservative rule, the Tories ever wanting to eliminate all Labour opposition. But Labour wants to drive the Tories into the sea, just as the Arabs want to wipe the Jews off the face of the earth.

I know from my experience as a columnist that if you attack any vaguely Conservative cause, the worst you can expect is a bit of grumbling and a few angry letters. But turn against the Left on Palestinian homicide bombers, illegal immigration or fox-hunting and the hate mail and death threats have to be read to be believed.

Challenge the smug New Labour/Guardianista axis and expect a barrage of lies, smears and character assassination in return.

The Conservatives have allowed themselves to be bullied into swallowing the Left's agenda. It's not that the Tories are the Nasty Party. It's that they're the Bloody Useless Party.

From: "Sun Online", Saturday, Oct 12th, 2002

Senator Kerry talks to young democrats at Tufts

2007-05-26T13:35:00.001+11:00

MEDFORD - Massachusetts Senator John Kerry began the 2006 grassroots campaign for in-state Democrats by meeting with college Democrats yesterday in Paige Hall at Tufts University. Ninety college students from universities around Massachusetts squeezed into the small hall to hear Kerry speak about the importance of their volunteer work with the Massachusetts Democratic Party in the last presidential election. "You have no idea what a difference you made," Kerry said to the students.

Kerry began by highlighting the strong points of the presidential election in 2004 and stated a strong confidence in winning the Senate elections in 2006. "I won 10 million more votes than any Democratic presidential nominee ever," he said in regards to the 2004 presidential election versus current President George W. Bush. He was met with applause when he mentioned, "It's a sad time for our country," in reference to President Bush's policies.

Kerry believes other nations depend on the United States to make a difference and that under President Bush's control, other countries do not have that support. Kerry hopes a Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate will help the country to "make sense of the despair and frustration" the nation now has. He encouraged young Democrats to convince more of their friends to fight for the Democratic cause, and to also involve younger teenagers so that they are more aware of the issues when it comes time for them to go to the voting booths. He remained confident that there will be a Democratic majority in the Senate in 2006.

Kerry said "reality and truth are values that define us as a nation" and that the country needs truth now more than ever before. He referenced the war in Iraq as the main truth the American people need to hear. "The presence of troops in Iraq are part of the problem. Success will not depend on how long we stay, the Iraqis will say 'we're going to let them stay as long as we want," said Kerry. "I think that's wrong. It's time for Iraqis to police Iraqis, it's time for Iraqi's to stand up to Iraq."

Kerry then emphasized education, saying that "53 percent of high school students in the United States do not graduate high school." China and India are racing further ahead in education and technology fields and that this calls for a new national educational plan, he said.

Kerry says he wants to fix intelligence in the country; he wants good foreign policy and believes America needs to be less dependant on Saudi oil.

During the question and answer session, an Emerson College student asked Kerry what main party initiatives the Democratic grassroots organization should be focusing on. The five issues Kerry stated were energy, healthcare, fiscal spending, educational funding and homeland security. All of these, Kerry said, the student Democrats should be aware of and voice their awareness to other young citizens.

He also shared encouraging words to the grassroots volunteers. "I've seen the civil rights movement, the women's and environmental movements, and it was grassroots that succeeded in changing things," said Kerry. Kerry concluded by giving the students a little lesson in politics. "All politics is a reaction to felt needs. You need to get people to feel the need. Our job is to make sure the right felt need is taken into consideration."

(From November 07, 2005 )

"HAYEK’S CHALLENGE: An Intellectual Biography of F. A. Hayek" By Bruce Caldwell

2007-05-25T16:46:00.000+11:00

Reviewed by Francis Fukuyama

The intellectual distance the Western world has traversed over the past two generations in how we think about markets, the state, and economic policy is nowhere better illustrated than in the changing reputation of the Austrian economist Friedrich A. Hayek (1899–1992). In the decade after publication of Hayek’s tract The Road to Serfdom (1944), in which he argued that expansion of the European welfare state was of a piece with spreading totalitarianism, he was regarded as little more than a right-wing crank, a provocateur who dressed up his own normative preferences for markets and individual freedom in the language of science. Today, by contrast, Hayek wears a richly deserved mantle of intellectual respectability. Winner of the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974, he is rightly seen as the intellectual godfather of the pro-market revolution that swept the West with Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. He has spawned an enormous following that extends well beyond the social sciences.

And yet, even those who claim to admire Hayek rarely understand that many of his most important ideas are critical not just of state intervention and planning as practiced by the Left, but of dominant currents in contemporary neoclassical economics as championed by the Right. Bruce Caldwell’s impressive new biography pulls together these themes and shows how the second critique logically grows out of the first.

All the threads in Hayek’s thought came together in the so-called socialist calculation debate of the late 1930s, in which he and other Austrian school economists challenged the view that centralized planning would yield greater economic growth. In such works as “Economics and Knowledge” and “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” Hayek’s critique of socialism was, at its core, empirical rather than normative. He argued that human knowledge is inevitably partial: There are limits to rationality, and what any individual knows tends to be local in nature. This is particularly true in a macroeconomy, which depends on the interactions of thousands, even millions, of individual producers and consumers.

The problem with socialism, Hayek argued, is that it seeks to replace the dispersed knowledge of those myriad actors with that of a single, omniscient planner. Socialist central planning cannot work because it attempts the impossible: using a static equilibrium model to capture unfathomably complex inputs and outputs characterized by dynamic, constantly shifting equilibria. In market economies, by contrast, the price mechanism provides information about preferences and relative scarcities to thousands of agents, whose continual exchanges produce a socially beneficial if unplanned outcome.

At the time of the socialist calculation debate, the Soviet economy was growing rapidly and the capitalist West was reeling from the Great Depression, leading many to consider socialism the superior system. Empirical validation of the Hayek thesis would have to await later decades, when centrally planned economies began to display huge dysfunctions arising from precisely the kinds of informational problems he had outlined. Today, virtually no one believes that the coordinating function of the price mechanism in a free market can be replaced by central planners using even the most powerful supercomputers. And we are much more likely to accept Hayek’s broader insight that social order—not simply markets but morality, social norms, the rule of law, and the like—is often the spontaneous and unplanned consequence of the interactions of dispersed individuals with limited knowledge, not the work of a single designer.

But Hayek also offered a far more profound critique of the limits of human reason, which extended to the models that would come to underlie postwar American neoclassical economics and, thus, the economics that we teach university students to this day. Caldwell explains that a constant theme in Hayek’s writing—from his early critique of “scientism” in his “Abuse of Reason” project to his last published work, The Fatal Conceit (1988)—is a critique not just of real-world planners but of positivist social scientists who aim to turn the study of human behavior into something as empirical and predictive as the physical sciences.

Like contemporary neoclassical economists, Hayek was a “methodological individualist” who believed that the behavior of groups needs to be explained in terms of the interactions of the individuals who make up the collectivity. But his view of individual choice was far more nuanced and complex than the typical neoclassical model of economic man. He understood that individuals are neither omniscient nor fully rational and are constrained by institutions, norms, and traditions that can be understood only through a study of history.

As Caldwell notes, Hayek initially thought the dividing line between possible and impossible positivism lay in the distinction between natural sciences and social sciences, but by the 1950s he had come to understand that the issue was really one of complexity. A positivist, predictive science is possible only for phenomena, whether human or natural, that are relatively simple—particle physics, for example. One can never fully model and predict complex phenomena such as the spontaneous orders produced by the interactions of simpler agents. These orders include the human brain, whose higher functions cannot possibly be inferred from its physical substratum, as well as ecosystems and, of course, markets, cultures, and other human institutions.

Hayek, in other words, fully anticipated the rise of what we now know as the study of complex adaptive systems, or complexity science. Drawing much of its inspiration from evolutionary biology, this approach is today practiced in such places as the Santa Fe Institute, a multidisciplinary think tank that uses agent-based simulations to model the emergence of complex behaviors on the part of larger collectivities. But Hayek would doubtless disapprove of the research agenda in much of the complexity field, which seeks to use these models to produce deterministic, predictive outcomes.

One of the most interesting parts of Caldwell’s book is the epilogue, which quotes Hayek toward the end of his life as saying he regretted his failure to return to his critique of Milton Friedman’s Essays in Positive Economics (1953) as much as his failure to revisit his critique of John Maynard Keynes. Hayek’s critique had not to do, of course, with Friedman’s preference for markets and limited government, but rather with his belief that economics could be turned into a rigorously empirical and predictive science. Caldwell notes that while econometric methodology has become far more sophisticated, and game-theoretic models ever more complex, economics’ promise to cumulate knowledge about universal laws of human behavior has remained largely unfulfilled. Thus, the highly mathematical and ahistorical turn that academic economics has taken in recent years would have been, for Hayek, as much an abuse of reason as the socialist planning of earlier generations.

Hayek’s Challenge is, as its subtitle implies, a purely intellectual biography that seeks to interpret the body of Hayek’s written work. One finds virtually no details of Hayek’s personal life—why he divorced his wife, or how he reacted to being awarded the Nobel Prize alongside the leftist Gunnar Myrdal. Instead, the book begins with a lengthy and informative intellectual history of Austrian economics, touching on such issues as the debate between Carl Menger and Gustav Schmoller of the German historical school. This exposition is critical to understanding the intellectual milieu in which Hayek studied, as well as interesting in itself because it anticipates the controversies that continue to divide contemporary positivist social science from more historical and ethnographic approaches to understanding things human.

Caldwell, an economic historian at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, ends his book by plaintively noting that the un-Hayekian agenda of turning economics into a rigorous science has driven all other approaches, including the study of economic history, out of American economics departments. But the damage done by this positivist approach is, in fact, much greater. Economic methodology has colonized political science too, eliminating individuals with knowledge of real peoples, cultures, and history—for example, experts on the Middle East—from the country’s top schools. We are thus presented with a rather depressing picture of human progress. Although the particular brand of intellectual hubris that elevated central planning over markets is gone, other forms persist, and indeed have grown stronger. Hayek’s challenge remains an open one.

(From May, 2004)

State party chairmen debate "beer and girls"

2007-05-23T17:06:00.000+11:00

COLUMBIA, S. C. -- Less than a week after a phony House memo urged female pages to dress provocatively, the heads of South Carolina's two major political parties talked of beer and girls to teens attending Boys' State.

Democrat Dick Harpootlian and Republican Henry McMaster made their comments at The Citadel on June 11 to about 800 high school seniors participating in the annual leadership event, The (Columbia) State reported Saturday. Harpootlian was quoted in the Boys State newspaper, The Citizen Times, talking about how state lottery funds could give qualified high school graduates $4,500 for college. "That can buy a lot of beer and girls," he said. McMaster followed by saying "Democrats are for beer and girls. Republicans are for cold beer and hot girls," the newspaper said.

Also at the Boys State gathering, Harpootlian said the parties disagree in principles, but "agree on beer and girls." Only days earlier on June 6, a memo from the fictitious "Men's Caucus" responding to a real memo from the House Women's Caucus reminding pages about professional work attire circulated among legislators, saying women pages could get bonuses for wearing tops with less material. The fake directive also said underwear was optional and skirts should be no longer than 4 inches above the knee. No author to the fake memo has come forward.

Gov. Jim Hodges has asked the state Human Affairs Commission to investigate. The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has begun a preliminary inquiry. Rep. Vida Miller, D-Pawleys Island, asked for the House Ethics Committee to investigate the anonymous memo. House Speaker David Wilkins, R-Greenville, has pledged to find those involved. He has sent letters to all pages and their parents among other corrective actions ensuring a safe work environment.

Rep. Edie Rodgers, R-Beaufort, heads the Women's Caucus and said she was disappointed Harpootlian and McMaster would joke like that. "I'm sort of up to here with flippant comments from men at this point," Rodgers said. Harpootlian said "anyone that's perturbed at this, I'd say, 'Get a life.'"

McMaster said he used the humorous remark to grab the teen's attention before discussing issues like gun control and education. "In hindsight, I think Dick and I both got a little carried away," McMaster said. "But the stated purpose was to say, "Let's forget about all this (beer and girls) and get serious.'"

Boys' State is a leadership-development program sponsored each year by the South Carolina American Legion. Attendees elect and run their own mock government and learn about public service. Tony Papadopoulos, a 17-year-old Boys' State participant from Mount Pleasant, said he thought it was "creative how (the chairmen) captured the audience's attention."

The phony "Men's Caucus" memo earlier this month began a debate on the place of women in South Carolina politics. The state ranks 50th in women holding statewide office, says the Institute for Women's Policy Research in Washington, D. C. "Too bad the leaders of the two major political parties in the state didn't use the occasion to elevate the discourse about politics," said Laura Woliver, associate director of women's studies at the University of South Carolina. "I can't believe they said this after the 'Men's Caucus' stuff," she said. "They just don't want to change."

Boys' State director Allen Bosworth said Harpootlian and McMaster are "provocative guys." But Bosworth said the comments were probably inappropriate and he might speak to the chairmen about them. Harpootlian said this to Democratic women who may be offended: "Don't go to Boys' State. If you see I'm speaking, definitely don't go to Boys' State."

June 24, 2001

Preteen enters college as youngest student ever at California college

2007-05-21T13:15:00.000+11:00

DAVIS, California (AP) -- Nicole Tan wants to cure cancer, find a vaccine for AIDS and treat sick children in Vietnam. It might sound impossible to squeeze all that into one lifetime, but Tan has more time than the average college student. The 12-year-old started her first day at a four-year college Thursday with 14 units of physiology, chemistry and Chinese. The biology major from Byron, California, is the youngest full-time student to ever enroll at the University of California, Davis.

It runs in the family: Before Nicole, her only sibling, Andrew, was the youngest student at the college. Now 14, he is a senior. Nicole said she can't imagine what it would be like to be in a regular classroom with other 12-year-olds. "Home schooling was a big advantage because you can go at your own pace," she said. Tan's legs aren't long enough to touch the floor when she sits back in her chair. Dressed in a small UC Davis shirt featuring a surfing Snoopy, the shy preteen doesn't look intimidating, but she will likely throw off a few test curves.

Tan passed the state high school proficiency exam three years ago and has since taken enough courses at a Pittsburg, California, community college to make her a junior in college. Accelerated home schooling allowed her to skip some dreaded teen-age experiences: junior high and the SAT college entrance exams.

She declined to provide any information about her parents, who declined to be interviewed. The family has moved into an on-campus apartment. "I play with other children my age," Tan said. "I don't study a fixed amount. Sometimes I study all day and sometimes not at all."

University administrators admit they had some concerns about enrolling a 12-year-old, but say Andrew Tan's success at the university convinced them. "We love to have young scholars here," said admissions director Gary Tudor. "We are paying high attention to her well-being. But she has earned the right to be here and we are pleased to give her the opportunity of some accelerated learning."

Davis students say the young student should also try to squeeze in other college activities. "A big part of college is finding out what kind of person you are and you can't get that just by studying," freshman Lisa Robbins said. Nicole said she probably won't go to football games, but wants to hang out with her classmates. She might even help them with their homework. "If they ask, probably," she said.

From September 29, 2000

Welcome to Wetworld, land of pious activists

2007-05-20T11:51:00.000+11:00

Blame the late Judith Wright for leading Australian artists in the fight against capitalism, writes Imre Salusinszky

In breaking music news, Brisbane band Topology has created a piece called McLibel, based on Britain's longest-running civil trial. According to the composer, bassist Robert Davidson, the band was attracted to the "David and Goliath" element in the story.

The case was, indeed, a story of David and Goliath: one in which a gigantic, unaccountable, transnational monster (the international green movement) used every lie and fabrication in the book against a company (Macca's) that simply tries to provide tasty and convenient meals, employs hundreds of thousands of workers, is accountable to its investors and the market and, unlike the green movement itself, acts strictly within the laws of every country in which it operates.

But the news that we are going to enjoy an original musical composition based on the case, as well as the lurking suspicion that it will not take the view just outlined, started me wondering: at what point, exactly, did the mouthing of an approved set of political pieties become part of the job-description for Australian artists?

Step forward, the late Judith Wright. If she was not the source of the syndrome, the distinguished Australian poet was surely its most potent exemplar. If there was a fussy, daffy campaign going that tried to put a baffle in front of capitalism and progress, Wright was a walk-up start for it. The lady marched more miles than Chairman Mao.

A daughter of rich New England squatters, Wright spent most of her last 30 years combating the very economic freedoms that could potentially allow others to experience the prosperity that she had enjoyed as a birthright.

I take the unorthodox view that the Australian public has better judgment in most matters than the intelligentsia, and the public has surely learned to ignore the political bleatings of artists - which, given the mass sign-on to fascism in the 1920s and '30s, followed by the wholehearted surrender to communism in the '40s and '50s, is both wise and benign.

But Wright was never a communist, and what makes her a key transitional figure is that she was a pioneer of the retreat of the arts into what I call Wetworld.

"Do you mean that dreadful Kevin Costner film, Imre?" Incorrect, Jose. I mean a nation-within-a-nation that boasts its own religion (the Uniting Church), its own political party (the Democrats), its own think-tank (ACOSS), even its own national broadcasting network (the ABC).

At its most harmless, Wetworld is the steady-drip water-torture of a Tim Costello or a Natasha Stott Despoja; at its full-bore water-cannon worst, it is the kind of green-left fascism that we are likely to see directed against the World Economic Forum meeting in Melbourne next month.

Above all, Wetworld has provided a secure platform from which artists and intellectuals have been able to maintain their long campaign against the economic and social arrangements that underwrite their own prosperity and freedom of expression. Nowadays, even artists hostile to the Left, like Les Murray, tend to be conservative wets.

But Wright had arrived at this bad place even before Patrick White first pulled a tea-cosy down over his ears and began his own Long March up and down Oxford Street. All of Wetworld's key obsessions were bees in Wright's bonnet. For example, the idea that, with a land mass the size of the United States and fewer inhabitants than London, Australia was facing a "population crisis".

In the late '60s and '70s, Wright found little time for her poetry, as she sought instead to warn an uncaring nation about the imminence of nuclear and environmental holocausts. (Remember those holocausts, where we had to claw our way over each other's stinking dead bodies to collect scraps of food for our young? Bummer!)

By the end of her life, Wright had arrived at something like the opposite of the faith that every genuine artist clings to: "Anyone can write poetry," She declared (quite incorrectly as it happens), "but to be an activist is far more important."

Rather than turning off the tap, Wright's death in June simply opened the sluice-gates. At a memorial service in Canberra, her biographer, Sister Veronica Brady, foamed against the evils of economic growth and "insane materialism", and referred to the Prime Minister as "the horrible little man who doesn't live here" - surely the strangest thing ever said by a nun in a eulogy.

In an article about the Concorde accident last month, this newspaper published a photograph that showed a serious-looking middle-aged woman holding up a large placard, which read, "Protect Aborigines from The Boom". The photograph was captioned: "Protester at Sydney airport during a Concorde visit in 1972". Guess who.

From “The Sydney Morning Herald” of August 14, 2000

The life-giving cultural sorting of the USA

2007-05-19T15:36:00.000+11:00

by Gunnar Adler-Karlsson [adler.karlsson@capri.it]

Those who would love to see their fellowmen live and not die should bless and not condemn the United States. Why? Because it is the combination of bad US imperialism and equally bad US discrimination which leads to that cultural sorting inside Superbrains which gives us our lives.

When the United States was about to send its elite soldiers to Afghanistan president Bush gave them a “pep talk” in which he said: “We in the United States are in no way the first who have increased our power in the world. It has always been an established rule that the weaker is kept down by the stronger. We might even be worthy to have this global hegemony. We might even be a bit commended. Because even if we, too, have yielded to the instinct of human nature to rule over others, the United States has been more observant of justice than we might have been, considering our power. If others should seize our power, they would, we think, like Stalin and Hitler, exhibit the best proof that we show some moderation; but in our case the result of our very reasonableness is, perversely enough, obloquy rather than commendation.”

This quote does not come from Bush. With some small changes, it is 2.430 years older. Thucydides (Loeb 108, p. 129) let an Athenian man say so when he wanted to defend the imperial policy of Athens as an expression of “the instinct of human nature to rule over others”.

So it may be. Today you can find scientists who claim that “dominance behaviour”, like sex and hunger, belong to our most deeply founded behavior in the “reptile brain”.

Secondly, the USA is not only imperialistic. It would give much work to a Swedish “discrimination ombudsman”. In some student papers, for instance, a company for in vitro fertilization looked for egg donations from young ladies with high IQ and sexy curves. Should that really be permitted? No, said some of the members of president Bush’s new “Bioethical Council”. Well, said the chairman, then you may also want to have egg donations from women with known genetic diseases? You say no! Then, where do you want to draw the line?

We in Europe often condemn the United States for its discrimination between different people. There also intelligence testing is fully normal. Entering universities is based on IQ-tests. Companies use “IQ-consultants” who are specialists on knowing about how high an IQ-level an employee should have for a given job.

This can take place because we now know that we are not fully as equal as nice declarations of human rights tell us. Genetic research has shown us that between any two unrelated human beings there are between three and six million differences in our alleles or gene variations, affecting physical and mental capacities.

What is called discrimination may, however, often also be termed cultural sorting. That, to me, is the third step in the long history of mankind.

About four billion years ago, the first life emerged in the form of bacteria. Evolution has required such a long time in order to create us “inflated bacteria”.

Three million years ago, man and the chimpanzee had the same brain volume. They still have about 400 centilitres. We have got one litre more. That is the result of a natural selection that has made us the lords of the earth.

But what is it that during the latest 40 years has given life to equally many new human beings, three thousand millions, as we had during all of our earlier existence, some five million years? What is it the in only forty years has been equally “life giving” as five million unconscious evolution?

Answer: the conscious cultural sorting that has taken place, most consciously in the multinational Superbrains of the United States. That, at least, is my hypothesis.

Sorting of what?

It took nature three million years to increase the brain volume of a human individual by one litre of grey matter. If you unite the individual brains with 1500 centilitres each and you get them to function as one, then we have achieved an increase in the volume of the intelligence base that is three times bigger than that, given by three million years of individual growth.

Behind a verbal veil of mist of terms like “knowledge society, human capital, brain capacity, brain drain and network” what really takes place is a “cultural sorting” of the measurable and highly unequal human intelligence. With about half of the inequality biologically inherited.

Openly in the United States but, if more hidden in this mist, also in our European multinational companies, thousands and hundred thousands of highly gifted brains are united in a similar manner and stimulated to function as brain cells, neurones, inside what I, in my latest two books, have termed “co-thinking Superbrains”.

Out of these emerge most of those innovations which during the latest forty years have more than doubled the production of food on our globe and thus permitted 200,000 new children to survive each single day. It is also through the global networks of these imperialistic companies that this food could be distributed to the poor of the world. Extreme hunger today exists only in nations which are engaged in warfare or in a few remaining communist nations.

Conclusion: The sum of American imperialism and discrimination or, what is the same thing, its global power and conscious sorting of men and women with different physical and mental capacities has, in only forty years, created a global economic power which has been equally “life-giving” as that, which evolution took five million years to give to mankind.

More than anything else, it is this American creation of “cultural sorting within co-thinking Superbrains” that has given three thousand million new children after 1960 their lives.

Thus, those who would love to see their fellowmen live and not die should bless and not condemn the United States.

This article was first published in the Swedish Financial Times, “Finanstidnigen”, Febr. 5th, 2002 with the title: “USA - Our Genetic Destiny”

A HEALTHY DEBATE

2007-05-18T16:46:00.000+11:00

THE storm over whether foreign doctors should have to speak English reveals the truly frightening extent to which political correctness is distorting public policy. One would have thought that, in an area where lives are at stake, the question of whether foreigners might be offended would take second place to the effective treatment of ill people. But not a bit of it.

The row began when a survey indicated that the GMC was registering --and upholding -- a disproportionate number of complaints against foreign practitioners. Some of these complaints turned on the fact that overseas doctors were poorly qualified, others on their rudimentary grasp of English.

Faced with the evidence, the Tory health spokesman, Liam Fox, himself a former GP, came up with an eminently reasonable set of proposals aimed at raising standards. Dr Fox suggested that the background of foreign doctors should be checked (there have been horrendous cases involving physicians who had been struck off for malpractice in their home countries), and that their linguistic ability should be rigorously assessed.

One might have expected these ideas to be wholly uncontroversial. Indeed, it is astonishing that anyone should need to propose them. Yet Labour and Liberal Democrat politicians have been howling with rage, accusing Dr Fox of coded racism.

If there is racism here, it is actually Labour's. For Dr Fox's proposals would primarily have affected practitioners from the rest of the EU, who, under single market rules, are exempt from the linguistic tests that are applied to the nationals of other countries. Although Britain is required, under the European Treaties, to recognise the qualifications of European doctors, Dr Fox has pointed out that there is nothing to prevent individual employers from imposing an additional, linguistic, test on them.

Yet Labour jumped to the conclusion that any reference to foreigners must be to people who are not white. In fact, the problem is not with doctors of Commonwealth origin whose English is usually excellent, but with Europeans. It is a vivid illustration of how powerless we are before Brussels that we cannot subject EU nationals to the same tests that we impose on other foreign professionals.

So patient care must take second place, not only to conventional political correctness, but also to the new strain of Euro-correctness which is flourishing under this administration. Dr Fox has bravely refused to allow the Left to place this matter off limits. It is intolerable that a senior politician in a major democracy should be prevented from speaking out on his own 'portfolio. By breaking the taboo, Dr Fox has done us all a favour.

From The Daily Telegraph, London. 29 September, 2000

Man chops off rotting finger

2007-05-17T15:03:00.001+11:00

A New Zealand pensioner chopped off one of his rotting, gangrenous fingers with a pair of scissors because he could no longer stand the pain after waiting 20 months for surgery, it was reported. The plight of Ted Matthews, from Timaru in the South Island, made headline television news here, with gruesome footage shown of his hand with one blackened finger and thumb still dangling and two middle fingers gone.

The story drew the attention of Health Minister Annette King, who has asked health officials to brief her on the case.

Matthews is suffering from dry gangrene following cardiac surgery 20 months ago in Christchurch Hospital and his fingers are rotting and dying as a result. Two of his fingers have already rotted off and he is desperate for surgery to amputate two remaining fingers. He told Television One News he had been taking the strongest painkillers available since January last year to combat the often unbearable pain. He used a pair of kitchen scissors earlier this year in desperation to chop off one of his rotting fingers.

Christchurch Hospital general manager Jim Magee said Matthews had been scheduled for surgery in the first week of September. However, Matthews said he received a letter yesterday from the hospital telling him he would have to wait a further six months at least. Magee said Matthews had a history of severe coronary artery disease, heart disease, renal failure, diverticulitis and diabetes, and had suffered three strokes.

Staffing shortages are endemic throughout most New Zealand public hospitals which complain of underfunding. Many patients increasingly opt for private health care if they can afford it.

Matthews said he would not let even his small pet dog to suffer the way he had. "I'd shoot him rather than let him be treated the way I have," he said.

From: AFP 15 August, 2002

AND THE CHILDREN SHALL LEAD

2007-05-16T16:08:00.000+11:00

By Evan Sayet

I have long written about how adherence to the Modern Liberal philosophy requires a childish mentality. The grown up mind, forged in the real world, quickly dismisses the infantile "tooth fairy" mentality of the left where riches are bestowed to one, without labor or merit, in their sleep. Those who mature soon grow out of the Democrats' disdain for personal responsibility, seeing it as more befitting an angry teenager looking for someone to blame than grown men and women seeking to make a better life and a better world.

That Modern Liberals are little more morally and intellectually developed than children came to mind yet again in the wake of the infantile temper tantrum thrown by CNN's leftist correspondent John King. Having once more been bested by harder working journalists, King pitched a childish fit that resembled nothing if not an eight year old who had just been told "no" to a second piece of pie he feels so entitled to but did nothing to help bake.

The story begins when King, dawdling about on the beach in France, caught a harder-working journalist from another network delivering the news that President Ronald Reagan had just died. King -- and CNN -- had, yet again, been scooped.

Rather than respond as would an adult -- by gritting his teeth, tipping his hat to the better reporter, and quietly steeling his determination to get it right the next time -- King lost it. He screamed and yelled and threw things around. It goes without saying that in the accompanying diatribe he blamed everyone except himself for his latest failure.

Unfortunately for King he, like a toddler kicking and screaming at a K-Mart, was so absorbed in his self-pity that he took no notice of his surroundings and the people all around him laughing at his silliness. Worse luck for King was that he was not just surrounded by other people, but also by scores of TV cameras assembled for the sixtieth anniversary of the D-Day invasion. Soon King's childish tantrum may well be as easily available on the Internet as that of such other foolish, self-absorbed brats as Paris Hilton.

It would be easy to dismiss King's infantile outburst as just another tantrum by yet another pampered leftist media prima donna (remember Dan Rather bolting off the set because he didn't get enough face time?) except that this behavior is not limited to just far left reporters. In fact it has become the norm amongst the leftist power elite as a whole.

Today immaturity reigns in the Democratic Party -- from the Clinton frat house to the left's top authors (while conservative titles include the thoughtful "Why We Fight" and "Inside American Education" the bestsellers of the left are "Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot", New York Times writer Molly Ivin's "Shrub" -- a fifth grader's jealous play on the name of the popular new kid, Bush -- and her infantile sequel "Bushwhacked."). In fact, not only does immaturity reign, to today's Democrat it is considered a badge of honor.

This truth has not eluded Al Gore, a man who has made his career on trying to read the latest trends and adapting his persona and policies in accordance with whatever is currently politically fashionable. Few will ever forget the 2000 election in which the former Vice President paraded out a revamped wardrobe and a new policy position with the release of every new poll. Sensing today's trend, Gore's most recent incarnation has seen this dull, "centrist" reappear as a tantrum-throwing, red-faced screamer, billowing words calculated and scripted to be as angry and incoherent as any put-upon teenager's -- his mindless rants designed more to boggle the mind then engender serious consideration.

Similarly, Howard Dean, a man who recognized early on that his credentials for leadership were less than nil, figured out that power in the Democratic Party is bestowed not on the reasonable and rational but on those willing to spew the most insane slanders at the loudest volume. Dean played these two notes to near perfection and saw himself catapulted from being the failed former Governor of one of America's tiniest states to within an inch of the Democratic Party's nomination for the highest office in the land.

Sadly Joe Lieberman either never understood the new premium on childish behavior or was too decent to stoop to the level of the Gores and Deans, for, more than anything, it was Lieberman's adult take on the world and his mature presentation of facts that saw him so unceremoniously and overwhelmingly rejected by the Democratic Party.

Anyone who has raised a teenager recognizes the ridiculous hyperbole that has become the standard fare in stump speeches and personal appearances by today's Democratic Party "leaders." Policy statements one presumes are meant to be taken seriously are as ludicrous as any 13 year old who cries "you're ruining my life" over the most trivial of matters or "you're the worst mother ever" in response to being asked to help with a simple chore.

Thus the Patriot Act isn't just "flawed" but rather "designed to steal all of your human rights!!!" Those who disagree with the leftists aren't just "misguided" but rather are all "lying liars". Judges like Miguel Estrada aren't just "of a different mind" but are, as Ted Kennedy called them, "subhuman Neanderthals!!!"

In fact one cannot watch a John Kerry speech without hearing at least a handful of these foolish slanders. President Bush's policies and their consequences are never to be honestly appraised and thoughtfully challenged. Instead they are all -- every one of them -- "the worst" this or "the worst" that in "the "history of the world!!!" While parents of young children are used to such over-the-top silliness from their kids, it wasn't until very recently, when immaturity became the dominate trait of the Democratic Party, that one could expect it as a substitute for legitimate political debate from "serious" candidates for President.

This type of insane hyperbole has become the norm in the Democratic Party because, like the child, the leftist lives in a world of self-importance, where nothing is bigger than the servicing of their immediate wants. A child can believe his parent is "the worst in the history of the world" because the child knows little -- and cares even less -- about the world outside his tiny domain. The same is true of the Modern Liberal. To them little thought is given to long term consequences of their actions or the historical context of their words.

When Democrats want something (such as their own empowerment) it matters not who they hurt nor the damage they do to their neighbors, their nation or the world. When John Kerry slanders the Commander-in-Chief at a time of war, when Howard Dean tries to spread an outright lie about nine eleven, when Ted Kennedy undermines the nomination of a Mexican-American judge they don't think about the troops in the field, the victims of the terror attacks or the young Mexican-American child who might have seen Miguel Estrada as a role model. Today's Democrats, like small children, see only their own immediate gratification and the chance to advance their short-term personal wants.

Perhaps this self-centered and self-seeking nature of the leftist -- and its disastrous effects upon others -- was best exemplified in Kerry's recent rationalizations for his having viciously slandered one million fellow Americans -- people he now cynically dubs his "band of brothers" -- during the Vietnam War. Asked to explain his inexcusable lies Kerry said only "I was young, I was angry and I just wanted the war to end."

I, I, I -- the mantra of the child -- remains the mantra of the Modern Liberal. "I wanted to have sex so I kept foreign leaders waiting." (Bill Clinton). "I didn't want bad publicity so I let Mary Jo Kepechne drown." (Ted Kennedy). "I wanted to be famous so I helped fake the rape of a young black child." (Al Sharpton). And the list goes on and on.

Does John King's childish tantrum rise to this level? Of course not. All he did was embarrass his network, damage some equipment and belittle the people in his charge. But John King is only a reporter seeking a scoop. When the prize is the highest office in the free world this self-centered immaturity can and does bring devastating results. The Democratic Party's penchant for petulance is one badge that John Kerry would do well to this time actually throw away.

Copyright c 2004 Evan Sayet

Evan Sayet was a writer for Television's "Politically Incorrect", wrote and produced the Discovery Channel's "The 70's: When Decades Attack" and is active in the political community.

Evan Sayet can be contacted at ESayet2004@aol.com

The above article originally appeared at BlueStarBase forums at the following address:

http://bluestarbase.org/bsb2bb/index.php?act=ST&f=39&t=445&s=f7aca528bb1b736a1cf08389f81a0681

Postcards with an edge

2007-05-15T16:08:00.001+11:00

Almost 100 years ago, Italy's futurists adopted a jingoistic manifesto. An exhibition in London showcases the satirical art that accompanied it, writes Richard Owen

Call to war: Retrosi's The Complaining Citizen, 1914

'We shall sing the love of danger, energy and boldness!" the Futurist Manifesto shouted from the rooftops in 1909. "We declare that the world's splendour has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. There is no more beauty except in strife, no masterpiece without aggressiveness, a violent onslaught upon the unknown forces, to force them to bow to the will of man ...

"We wish to glorify war -- the only hygiene of the world -- militarism, patriotism, the destructive arm of the anarchist, the beautiful ideas that kill!"

The futurists also set out "to destroy the museums, the libraries", adding: "It is in Italy that we launch this manifesto of violence, destructive and incendiary, by which we this day found futurism, because we would deliver Italy from its canker of professors, archeologists, cicerones and antiquaries ... free her from the numberless museums which cover her like so many cemeteries."

Fortunately -- not least for the futurists themselves -- the latter part of the manifesto was never fulfilled, otherwise those detested "museums and libraries" would not be able, nearly a century on, to showcase the achievements of futurist literature and art. A case in point is Barbed Wit: Italian Satire of the Great War, at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art in London, where visitors can admire rarely seen original artwork for the bitingly satirical postcards produced in Italy during World WarI.

Postcards as an art form? Indeed, say the curators of the show -- organised jointly with the Imperial War Museum -- postcards could be "rapidly distributed to a mass public", and in the early 20th century were used to convey social and political messages.

Today most Italians are ambivalent at best about war, if not downright pacifist, as former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi found to his cost when his decision to send Italian forces to help to reconstruct Iraq after the 2003 US-led invasion gave rise to anti-war protests as reconstruction deteriorated rapidly into an occupation fighting an insurgency.

The roots of Italian pacifism lie partly in the bruising experiences of the 1930s and '40s, when Benito Mussolini led his country first into costly colonial adventures and then, after initial hesitation, into a disastrous alliance with Adolf Hitler.

But the roots go even deeper, to World War I, when at the outbreak of hostilities in 1914 Italy formed part of the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary against the Triple Entente: Britain, France and Russia.

Italy was a reluctant warmonger from the start, preferring its traditional neutrality, to the disgust of the futurists. This hesitancy to make a commitment to war is neatly satirised in Virgilio Retrosi's image of a red-faced Italian infantryman pondering whether to follow a signpost pointing to the "European Theatre". "Shall I just be an extra, or should I take a starring role?" runs the caption.

Italian vacillation is also captured in another Retrosi work, To Go or Not to Go, which shows a young woman picking petals off flowers.

Not all Italian artists were jingoistic; Giulio Gigli's postcard imitates the style of another futurist, Gino Severini, in a semi-abstract, dynamic composition that merges the national colours of France, Germany and Belgium with bullets, shrapnel and interspersed words such as "misery" and "snow".

As Nadia Marchiani, who curated an exhibition on Italian art and World War I in Florence in 2006, points out, Umberto Bocciani, one of the foremost futurists, lost much of his bravado after joining the wonderfully named Volunteer Battalion of Cyclists and Automobilists at the front. Boccioni, who once declared that "art is always above war and is not troubled by it", confided distinctly "troubled and eminently human reflections" to his diary after the battle of Dosso Casina, Marchiani says.

The Cezannesque rhythms of his later work, she notes, are in contrast to his earlier explosive experimentalism.

Retrosi also offered a grim vision in his Il Volto della Guerra (The Face of War), with a Gorgon-like head regurgitating skulls and coins. But many futurists remained wedded to the idea of war as "the only hygiene" and used the postcards to mock the prosperous Italian bourgeoisie, depicted as cynics who were happy to profit from war while shirking their patriotic duty.

In Armed Neutrality, Victor Emmanuel III is shown as a diminutive figure peeping out of an excessively armoured suit, shackled by the chains of indecision. Not until the secret Treaty of London in April 1915, when Italy (after being promised territorial gains) switched sides by joining the Triple Entente and officially declared war against Austria-Hungary, did the propagandists finally have a foreign enemy in their sights.

Raffaelo Ferro's design of 1918 admiringly refers to the exploits of the eccentric nationalist poet Gabriele d'Annunzio, who in a daring propaganda stunt flew over Vienna, scattering red, white and green postcards appealing to the Austrians to turn on their government.

Ferro, depicting both poets with laurel wreaths round their heads, uses a quotation from Dante: "Poveri versi miei gettati al vento" ("My poor verses have been scattered to the wind").

Ferro also offers a propagandistic image of the Triple Alliance, with a spiked German helmet clamped over the globe (German Global Domination), while another postcard mocks Giovanni Giolitti, the prime minister, for trying to make territorial gains without going to war. Several postcards show emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary as a decrepit villain about to be overwhelmed by Italy, the "unstoppable avalanche".

In the end, Italy suffered heavy losses and war turned out to be not so glorious after all, although Italy gained Trento, the South Tyrol, Trieste and Istria in what D'Annunzio referred to as a "mutilated victory".

Dreams of glory, military triumph and even imperialism lingered on, fuelling the rise in 1922 of Mussolini, who (like Hitler) had fought in World WarI.

If futurism remains a sensitive subject in Italy, it is because of its associations with fascism as much as its chauvinism. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the futurist movement's acknowledged leader, allied himself -- and futurism -- with Mussolini from an early stage.

Nor is this merely academic: the centre-Left Government of Romano Prodi is facing a dilemma over the centenary of the 1909 futurist declaration. Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli, asked recently by the centre-Right opposition what plans he had to mark the event, replied that futurism "was the most important movement in Italy in the first half of the 20th century", but that he hoped that polemics could be set aside.

Not much chance of that: the second biggest party in the centre-Right opposition after Berlusconi's Forza Italia is the Alleanza Nazionale, a direct, if reformed, descendant of Mussolini's Blackshirts. As so often in Italy, the past informs the present. The Times

Barbed Wit: Italian Satire of the Great War is at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London, until March 18.

Article above originally appeared January 22, 2007

The secret to happiness ... just do it

2007-05-14T16:02:00.001+11:00

By Christine Jackman

MONEY can buy happiness and the best investment advice may be as simple as the sports shoe slogan: just do it. That's the conclusion drawn by researchers who set out to identify what sort of spending made people happiest. The psychologists, from Cornell University and the University of Colorado in the US, compared ``experiential purchases'' -- things such as holidays, concerts or dining out -- with ``material purchases'' such as clothing, beauty products, stereos or personal computers.

``For many of us, deciding how to invest our resources to maximise happiness is a challenge,'' they wrote in a Journal of Personality and Social Psychology report this month. ``We wonder whether more money, more leisure or more stuff would make us happier.'' The researchers asked more than 1500 people to rate their reactions to different purchases in five separate studies.

When asked to rate one of their own recent purchases on a ``happiness scale'' of one to nine, respondents consistently rated experiences about one point higher than material purchases in terms of being ``money well spent'', ``contributing to overall happiness in life'' and providing happy memories. When they directly compared their experiential and material purchases, only 34 per cent said they were happier with material objects.

Even people on very low incomes said extra spending on holidays or concerts made them happier than buying objects for their personal use or around the house.
``Experiences make people happier because they are more open to positive reinterpretation, are a more meaningful part of one's identity, and contribute more to successful social relationships,'' the researchers concluded.

In Australia, experiential spending has fuelled a boom for companies specialising in adventure travel and ``unique experiences'' such as jet-fighter flights, swimming with sharks and race-car driving. ``These experiences have a cachet attached to them,'' said Belinda Wong, manager of adventure specialist Atomic Dog. ``There's only so much to say about your new sound system, but you can talk about jumping out of a plane at a dinner party and suddenly the whole table is impressed.''

After travelling the world for six months, Tricia Hannah was given a tandem skydiving voucher by a friend while visiting her family in Melbourne. ``That six-minute experience jumping out of a plane just ranked above everything else I've done,'' said the 33-year-old accountant, who now lives in Glasgow. ``When I met my friends the next day, the first thing I did was show them my skydiving pictures, rather than all those amazing cities I've been to overseas.''

The above story originally appeared on 12 JAN 2004

The religion of peace comes to Australia

2007-05-13T15:44:00.000+11:00

HIJACKED BY HATRED

It was meant to be a peaceful anti-war protest by students

WITH bottles and knives in their hands and hate in their hearts, a mob of violent troublemakers yesterday ambushed a student anti-war rally to lead a vicious rampage through Sydney streets. A group of young men, described by police as ``Middle Eastern males'', created havoc by throwing chairs, rocks, bottles, eggs and golf balls at police and media during several hours of chaos in the CBD. Police also seized two knives from protesters, one of which fell on to the ground in the midst of a scuffle.

The violent spectacle began at Town Hall and resulted in two police officers and a number of protesters being injured. The two officers were struck in the head, one by a bottle and another by a golf ball, as they fought to contain the crowd which surged through containment lines. At least 45 mostly teenage participants were arrested -- including a boy aged 10 -- after the rally erupted into violence about 12.30pm.

Assistant Police Commissioner Dick Adams said it was clear a large proportion of protesters had come to the rally ``for the express purpose of fighting police.'' ``We had a group of people who went to Town Hall [for] nothing other than to incite trouble,'' he said. ``A large group of Middle Eastern males started to engage and incite the police in St Andrew's Square [near Town Hall] and they started to pick up cafe furniture from the area and throw it at police.''

Clutching placards condemning Prime Minister John Howard and US President George W. Bush, a 2000-strong group of students -- many wearing their school uniforms -- gathered for the protest at midday.

Yelling profanities and defying police instructions, the mob grew increasingly brazen until a scuffle broke out between protesters and police. The fracas quickly spread to a nearby cafe, where some youths threw chairs from an outdoor seating area at police, photographers and reporters.

Students burnt an American flag before moving on to Hyde Park, where scores of protesters cavorted in the Archibald Fountain. Hundreds of police officers surrounded the exits to the park, ensuring the crowd was contained within its boundaries. After leaving the park, the marchers moved through the Pitt St Mall and Castlereagh St, before congregating outside Mr Howard's Phillip St offices. There, the protesters hurled further insults while as least 50 police, including mounted officers, tried to contain them.

Australian Arabic community leaders condemned the violent clashes but rejected police claims the perpetrators were Middle Eastern men. However, police countered that television footage clearly showed the majority of those arrested appeared to be of the same ethnic background.

(From the Sydney "Daily Telegraph" of THU 27 MAR 2003)

Another report:

STUDENT anti-war protests turned violent in cities around the nation, reflecting a new, strident mood among Australians frustrated at a federal Government ignoring their message of peace. Dozens of teenagers and other demonstrators were arrested in Sydney when a peace rally ended up in a wild riot. There were also arrests at rallies in Brisbane, while in Melbourne students clashed with police and burned US flags and effigies of the Prime Minister and US President George W. Bush. Mounted police broke up a 500-strong protest in Perth as paint, urine and tomatoes were thrown at the US consulate.

Rally organisers in Sydney claimed the day was a success and warned they would hold a similar protest next week with the aim of shutting down the entire CBD.
``We want to cause as much disruption as possible,'' organiser Jarvis Ryan said.

The Sydney rally began peacefully with about 5000 students gathering at Town Hall Square to demonstrate against war with Iraq, but ended in chaos. With bottles and knives in their hands, ``and hate in their hearts'', according to The Daily Telegraph, a mob of ``violent trouble-makers'' -- described by police as ``Middle Eastern males'' -- ambushed the student rally to lead a ``vicious rampage through Sydney's streets''. Cafe chairs, rocks, bottles, eggs and golf balls were thrown at police, two knives were seized and 33 people were arrested at the rally, some reportedly as young as 10.

The Australian reported ``a minority of protesters burned flags and chanted `Allah is great'''. The arrests occurred, according to The Sydney Morning Herald, when police declared the protest an unlawful assembly and attempted to end it.

The previous day a Newspoll published in The Australian found support for the war had jumped to 50 per cent in recent weeks, offering evidence of a nation genuinely divided.

Prime Minister John Howard -- enjoying a popularity rating more than 41 points higher than his beleaguered Labor counterpart Simon Crean -- pushed for Australia to get a seat at the table for the reconstruction of post-war Iraq, along with the US and Britain. Australia wants administration of Iraq to be transferred to the UN as soon as possible, but accepts the ``moral authority'' of the US to administer Iraq in the war's immediate aftermath.

(From 29 MAR 2003 in "The Australian")

REVIEW of THE FACES OF JANUS: MARXISM AND FASCISM IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY by A. JAMES GREGOR

2007-05-12T15:32:00.000+11:00

Review by HUNT TOOLEY of Austin College

Thoughtful persons have long compared the totalitarian systems of the twentieth century. Indeed, the application of the word "totalitarian" beyond its original Italian context has been an act of comparison. But since the emergence of Bolshevism and Italian Fascism by the early 1920s, Western scholars - and frequently totalitarian ideologues themselves-have tended to conceptualize the Marxist-Leninist system as a political opposite to Mussolini's Fascist party and regime, as well as to German National Socialism and the various other "fascist" parties in the thirties. The standard political spectrum taught yearly in thousands of college classrooms only makes sense as a product of this specific conceptualization.

On the other hand, from the 1930s onward (in a few cases one may say from the 1920s onward), classical liberals, libertarians, and paleo- conservatives have, to varying extents, rejected the standard political continuum for the very reason that it seemed to be based on inadequate criteria and even false premises. After all, a spectrum that put Communism and Nazism at diametric extremes distorted reality in significant ways. Yet, rigorous comparisons of Communism and Fascism in mainstream of Western intellectual life have, in most cases, been cut short by reverence for the great "intellectual" orthodoxy that Communism was a great and well-meaning experiment which unfortunately created some "excesses."

Both for those who have long contemplated the similarities of the supposedly antipodal "extreme right" and "extreme left," and for those who are just working their way into this fascinating subject, The Faces of Janus will be a welcome and highly illuminating work. A. James Gregor is a prolific authority on both Marxism and Fascism, and he offers us here a work of mature, careful, and extensive scholarship on the relationship between Marxism-Leninism and Fascism.

Gregor begins by pointing out some gross disjunctions in Western theories of twentieth-century revolution. Fairly consistently since the 1930s, academic, literary, and intellectual observers have identified Marxist-Leninist and fascist movements as polar opposites. Although some scholars began to apply the term Totalitarian (which came from the Italian Fascist vocabulary) to both "Right" and "Left" forms of ideologically authoritarian regimes, Western academics continued to view Fascism and Soviet Communism in terms of a strict dichotomy.

Fascism was irrational, Communism was rational, even scientific. Fascism was nationalist, Communism was internationalist. Fascism was selfish and aggressive, Communism was a well-meaning (albeit sometimes bumbling) attempt at universal sharing. Fascism was an evil design, Communism was the Great Experiment. And so forth. Gregor, on the other hand, shows that the failed Marxist-Leninist revolutions do indeed look very much like the failed Fascist revolution of Italy and the various Fascist-like revolutions (including that of the National Socialists). In fact, Gregor finds contradictions to the standard political spectrum not only in Stalin's "socialism in one country" but in Fascist thought as well.

Indeed, one of the valuable contributions of this book is Gregor's examination of the little-emphasized early career of Mussolini as a leading Italian Marxist and syndicalist theorist. By way of a note, since the book is at its core a study of Italian Fascism and Russian Communism, Gregor says little about the National Socialist regime in Germany, though he does point out more than once that Fascism was very much the pioneer, Nazism very much the follower. In fact, he discusses numerous other "fascisms," though his main comparative category is Italian Fascism, with a capital F.

The standard conception of Fascism as the opposite of Marxism-Leninism, Gregor shows, derives directly from the earliest critiques of Mussolini's Fascist movement by Mussolini's former comrades, Italian Marxists, along with Austrian, French, and German Marxists. By the mid-twenties, immediately after the Fascist seizure of power in Italy, Clara Zetkin and other Comintern members worked out the coarse outlines of a Marxist line: Fascism was simply the front for capitalists who were struggling against the working class to bolster "the terroristic dictatorship of big capital."

The Marxist critique became more sophisticated over the next decades, but the vision of Fascism as an essentially inhumane opposite to Marxism remained a staple. In the thirties, R. Palme Dutt summarized many of these elaborations in the form of a standard narrative: Marx showed that the capitalist system must reach a crisis of profitability in which the rate of profit sinks toward zero; the interests of heavy industry and high finance would no longer be able to develop the forces of production; capitalism would have performed its historic role, and the capitalists would have to resort to sheer terror to maintain their power; Fascism represented this sheer terror. According to Dutt, generic fascism was "the most complete expression of the whole tendency of modern capitalism in decay" (p. 34).

Gregor points out that even in the thirties, some Marxist intellectuals were already rejecting the mainstream Comintern theories as unworkable. Both Otto Bauer and Franz Borkenau conceived of the fascist movements as anything but simple fronts for the capitalists. Borkenau, in particular, viewed fascism as a movement whose role was that of a "mass-mobilizing developmental dictatorship under single-party auspices," a transitional form of nationalist authoritarianism which accelerated economic development to bring the economy into line with national power-essentially a "Bonapartist" process. Both Bauer and Borkenau were thinking of Stalin and his nationalization of the revolution in Russia.

After the Second World War, Marxist theories about fascism turn on the death of Stalin in 1953, his denunciation by Khrushchev in 1956, and the subsequent enmity between Russia and China. The mutual name-calling which the Sino-Soviet hostility brought about in the sixties gave ample opportunity for Soviet and Chinese Communist theorists to brand each other as fascists. Theoretically, the important point here was that Marxists were explicitly asserting that fascism could arise in a system that was not capitalist at all, and, hence, could not be a front for capitalists. Fascism was no longer a historical cate- gory but a descriptive term, and a pejorative one, to be used to describe any state monopoly system which exhibited certain features.

Indeed, much of the theory behind the waves of the Western aca- demic analysis of fascism in the 1960s and 1970s, Gregor shows, came directly from Chinese and Soviet critiques of each other. Gregor finds much that is, almost ironically, accurate in these Marxist slanging matches, since both sides did, in fact, possess the characteristics of which they accused each other. Loyal Maoists, Gregor writes, could truthfully show how to avoid the snares of the evil revisionists:

To be a true Maoist revolutionary, to thwart fascists, all one had to do was to obey the Chairman in an orgy of submission that many academicians, East and West, insisted was a defining trait of right-wing extremism.(p. 83)

Indeed, one finds in both the Chinese and Soviet systems endless "fascist" characteristics: the Fuehrerprinzip, the command economy, futuristic irrationality, and much more.

Gregor puts many of his arguments together in discussing the rise of fascist-like movements in Russia and other lands of the former Soviet Union in the 1980s and since the fall of Communism. With roots in the sixties, a strong intellectual movement emerged in the 1980s which assisted the nationalist revival. Sergei Kurginian, for example, was a devoted Communist and the author of influential writings which aimed at "national salvation" through a more powerful state. Kurginian approved of Stalin's hierarchic, inflexible, relentless regime, but he thought Stalin had made his "achievements" despite Marxism, not because of it. Gregor labels Kurginian's ideas as "proto-fascist," and shows that Kurginian's influence on Gennadi Ziuganov, one of the most important leaders in the post-Soviet Communist Party, has been substantial and direct. Others, too, have adopted variants of fascist programs in post-Soviet Russia. Almost all startd out as particularly committed Marxist-Leninists.

The backbone of Gregor's analysis is his concept of "reactive developmental nationalism," a concept which he seems to adapt in part from several of his subjects, especially from Marxist Franz Borkenau and proto-fascist Roberto Michels. Though Gregor does not treat this concept in a systematic way, his counter to the standard "opposites" theory of Marxism and Fascism seems to stem from it.

In brief, reactive developmental nationalism represents, according to Gregor, a tendency which emerges when a "nation" sees the need to forge ahead economically in order to assert its national identity and place in the sun, and when the progress toward this place in the sun seems stymied by some foreign catastrophe or national embarrassment. The result is a "reactive" authoritarianism, an attempt to develop the nation from the top down and to adopt something like the "reactionary modernism" which Jeffrey Herf has written about in the case of German National Socialism. Gregor sees both Marxism-Leninism and Fascism as the progeny of this process.

Classical liberal or libertarian thought dovetails perfectly with Gregor's demonstration of the similarities of the two systems, but many of the readers of this journal will consider his analytical framework of "reactive nationalism" as unnecessarily complicated. The centralization of power has accompanied the Leviathan state since its earliest development some five or six hundred years ago; World War I and its aftermath simply intensified that longstanding tendency. The particular forms of authoritarianism require historical, but not necessarily "theoretical," explanation.

An extension of this critique of Gregor's book is that his tendency to hold up "democracy" as the true counterpoint to both Marxism-Leninism and Fascism demonstrates the weakness of reactive developmental nationalism as an explanatory category. The twentieth century has shown that democracy has been highly creative and vigorous in developing its own patterns of centralization, Leviathanism, imperialism, collectivism, and intervention into the lives of individuals.

This criticism notwithstanding, The Faces of Janus is an outstanding work of careful scholarship which speaks directly to issues long of interest to students of liberty.

(Review originally published in the 1992 Journal of Libertarian Studies, vol. 16 (3), 99-103 and published online as a PDF here)

The Two Streams of Western Civilization

2007-05-11T16:24:00.000+11:00

Review essay by Samuel T. Karnick

Christopher Olaf Blum, ed., Critics of the Enlightenment: Readings in the French Counter-Revolutionary Tradition (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2004), 357 pp. $30

Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers: Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 530 pp. $29.95

Theodore K. Rabb, The Last Days of the Renaissance: and the March to Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 246 pp. $26.95

John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 455 pp. $95

Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (New York: Random House, 2005), 283 pp. $25.95

If anything can be given credit for holding the West together during the turbulent twentieth century, the struggle against communism probably merits the greatest recognition. Certainly the fall of the Soviet empire engendered an unexpected amount of internal turmoil and self-analysis in the West. The specter of the main external threat having been reduced to tatters, a major “culture war” broke out in the West as both sides fought over what the new definition of Western civilization should be, freed by the knowledge that whatever happened, it would be our decision and not imposed on us from outside. After a brief pause in view of the 9/11 attacks and Afghanistan war, the West's internal conflict resumed, with, if anything, even greater acrimony.

But in fact this conflict has simply been the latest clash between two powerful streams of thought that have been present throughout European history. One stream comes from Greece and Rome, and the other from Calvary. The Western world, sometimes known as Christendom, has always vacillated between the two, with one stream sometimes sweeping history in its direction, and sometimes the other being predominant. Western history is in fact the record of the intellectual turbulence created and sustained by these two currents. To understand where we are today, we have to understand the nature of these two streams and where each would lead us.

Thomas Sowell offered key insights into these two currents of thought in A Conflict of Visions (William Morrow, 1987). Sowell argued that our policy disputes and culture wars are based on two opposing views of the human condition: a “constrained” one, which sees human nature as having inherent limits, and an “unconstrained” one, which sees human beings as perfectible. The former vision, he wrote, sees humans’ immutable limits as suggesting the value of market economies and limited government, whereas the opposite view sees humanity as requiring and able to accommodate a transformation to make us fit a rational social system, devised by the wisest among us, that will solve all our problems. These two worldviews are basically a continuum, Sowell noted, with nearly all individuals falling somewhere between the two poles. Nonetheless, they do represent two underlying views that people actually hold.

Sowell's book delved into intellectual history and specifically the Enlightenment. He identified Adam Smith and the American Founders as representing the constrained vision, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau as exemplifying the unconstrained view: “When Rousseau said that man ‘is born free’ but ‘is everywhere in chains,’ he expressed the essence of the unconstrained vision, in which the fundamental problem is not nature or man but institutions.” Other authors have offered similar schemes and analyses based on “worldview” theses in recent years—such as Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man and Samuel Huntington's A Clash of Civilizations. The common theme of this discussion has been the premise that “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he” (Proverbs 23:7).

The search for the Rosetta Stone of modern ideologies in the West has brought historians and political analysts repeatedly to the Enlightenment. There are two obvious reasons for this. The first is that modernity is the fruit of the Enlightenment, and that studying the latter will help us understand the former. The other is the premise that the Enlightenment was a very good thing in that it released humankind from superstition, backwardness, and irrationality, ushering in an Age of Reason in which the goal would be to transform society and the individual so that both operated along purely rational lines.

Both of these premises are eminently questionable, however. As Gertrude Himmelfarb pointed out in The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments (Knopf, 2004), the Enlightenment was anything but a monolithic movement toward some specific destination we have since learned to call modernity. For every Rousseau, Himmelfarb notes, there was an Edmund Burke—and often more. In addition, although numerous schemes to transform individuals and society have been offered and tried, modernity has by no means been exclusively devoted to such efforts—those pesky “constrained” thinkers have continuously been around to point out the flaws in every such plan, and the hoi polloi have perpetually resisted efforts to transform them and their world.¹

As useful as Sowell's schema may be, it remains incomplete until we understand where these two worldviews come from and the basic values and assumptions that underlie them. For only then can we fully understand their implications. If we can find in the Enlightenment's turmoil the deeper currents that push us toward either of these two worldviews, we may be able to derive a greater understanding of the conflicts and problems of our own time.

In The Case for the Enlightenment, Oxford historian John Robertson seeks to “make the case for the Enlightenment as a coherent, Europe-wide intellectual movement” based on “the commitment to understanding, and hence to advancing, the causes and conditions of human betterment in this world.” He argues that the central quest of the Enlightenment was to know more about the world so as to gain greater control over nature and society. To demonstrate this, Robertson undertakes a detailed comparison of how this endeavor was manifested in Scotland and Naples, two very different milieus at opposite ends of Europe. Noting that the two kingdoms ultimately converged on a common commitment—to use “political economy as the primary intellectual discourse with which to address a wider ‘public’ among their fellow countrymen, because it held the key to understanding the conditions of betterment in this world”—Robertson argues that “out of two very different ‘national’ contexts came one Enlightenment.”

Robertson maintains that the idea that most animated Enlightenment thinking was the Greek philosophy of Epicureanism. Some advocated it, and some opposed it, but everybody had to contend with it. Robertson notes that in 1697 in his Dictionnaire historique et critique, the French philosopher Pierre Bayle “underlined the superior honesty of the Epicurean account of human nature and its compatibility with the condition of man after the Fall.” Robertson sees this as part of an interesting phenomenon in which Epicureanism was reconciled with the reigning Augustinian view of the human condition and moral thought.

Hence, Robertson concludes, the quest for improvement, despite its Greek roots, was not necessarily hostile toward the Christian religion: “a focus on betterment in this world carried no necessary implication about the existence of the next.” Yet in making the case for Epicureanism, Bayle contributed an important element to the Enlightenment: the idea that a person or society could be moral without belief in God, and that we can understand human history without seeing any role of providence in it. This seems perfectly obvious, but the importance of Bayle's argument cannot be overestimated, because it immediately led to much bigger changes in thinking which animate our current debates over everything from sexual morality to what to teach about human origins. And the fact that these debates have yet to be resolved suggests that, first, the Enlightenment mind was much more conflicted than Robertson believes, and second, that Epicureanism is less compatible with Christianity than he is willing to admit.

David Hume, for example, soon took Bayle's argument much further: “What Hume had done was critically weaken what Bayle always treated as the one secure bulwark against the Epicurean, atheist account of nature and man: the truth of Scripture as God's revelation to Man.” Whereas Giambattista Vico had answered Bayle by developing “an account of human sociability in which men's actions manifested the guiding hand of divine providence,” Hume posited “an account of morality and society as purely human creations, the outcome of a remarkable combination of human nature and artifice.” As Robertson notes, Hume believed that “our moral sentiments, natural and artificial, really accord with what we find useful and agreeable in this world. In our morals, we are—and we are the better for being—sociable atheists.” In other words, Hume rejects the notion of original sin and the idea that human governments are established to save us from ourselves and one another. Although he avoided making explicit public expression of his unbelief, Hume not only rejected Christianity as a fact, he sought to make it intellectually unnecessary to the establishment of human happiness.

This is a great difference in visions, as exemplified by the gulf between Hume and Vico, and if both visions led to an increased interest in political economy, the differences nonetheless remain overwhelmingly evident. Robertson notes, for example, that Adam Smith disagreed with Rousseau's account of the development of human sociability, and that he repeatedly invoked in his works “the idea of a natural moral order presided over by a provident deity, whose interventions are like an ‘invisible hand.”’ That is a good observation on Robertson's part, but one would like to see him draw the obvious conclusion: that Smith and Rousseau were on two entirely different tracks, and that the intellectual currents leading to and from them may likewise have been very different from each other.

Was any of this philosophizing—and in particular this conflict of visions—really unique to the Enlightenment period? In The Last Days of the Renaissance, Princeton University historian Theodore Rabb seeks “to identify a succession of fundamental shifts in historical periods from the Middle Ages to the present, with special attention to the time when the Renaissance dissolved into the Age of Revolution” (his term for the Enlightenment). Rabb makes a strong case that medieval Europe was far more unified than is commonly thought and that it was more like the Renaissance than is usually appreciated. Regarding political organization, for example, Rabb writes, “Although the pyramidal hierarchic model was always taken for granted—that is, one or a few at the top of the social order, enjoying a God-given right to rule, and then increasing numbers at each level of descent down to the mass of the people at the bottom,” it is important to remember that “localities throughout Europe also observed, during the Middle Ages, crucial rights of representation and consultation that gave Europe its unique political and legal character.”

In distinct contrast to today's secular, post-Enlightenment worldview, Rabb points out that the foremost assumption of medieval Europe was “the determination to bring religious beliefs to bear on every aspect of existence. The supernatural gave shape and meaning to all human affairs. For scholars and theologians, the task was to explain how that influence operated and how it was to be understood.” Europe was Christendom, plain and simple. The stream of thought from Greece and Rome was almost entirely dry, lost in obscure, dusty libraries or preserved, ironically, in Christian monasteries and the thinking of Christian theologians such as Thomas Aquinas.

This began to change in the fourteenth—not the eighteenth—century. The “assault on the values of the Middle Ages” followed challenges to the papacy's worldly authority by secular rulers. Rabb contends, “Ideas followed action as theorists drew sharper lines between the authority of the papacy and the power of the princes.” Marsiglio of Padua, for example, pointed out in 1324 that Jesus Christ had consented to the authority of the Roman emperor in going willingly to his crucifixion.

Rabb observes that the “widespread and effective aggressiveness of secular rulers, particularly toward the Church, was to be a dominant feature of Renaissance Europe.” By the mid-1400s, “it was unmistakable that the papacy had lost its ability to challenge the monarchs it had once cowed. A new era had been born.” The increasing unwillingness of secular rulers to bow to the papacy was accompanied by “growing dissatisfaction with religious doctrine and practice.” Rabb points out the powerful challenges to the Church's hierarchy that arose from John Wycliffe in England beginning in the 1370s and from Jan Hus in Bohemia shortly thereafter. Both were anathematized, and Hus was executed in 1415.

What is particularly interesting about these Renaissance-era religious reformers—and I use that word intentionally—was how strongly their dissents resembled those of the Reformers of the sixteenth century. Rabb strenuously advocates including the Reformation era as simply part of the Renaissance, but this appears to obscure the key distinction between the two main streams of thought in post-medieval Europe: Christianity and humanism. A central element of the Renaissance was the return to ideas and values of classical antiquity, of Greece and Rome. But where the Church embraced the Renaissance to some degree, Wycliffe and Hus can hardly be seen as part of that trend. What Wycliffe and Hus were calling for was a return to the ideas, policies, and rituals of the early Christian church. Their road led not to Rome or Athens but instead to Asia Minor. Wycliffe raised “doubts about ecclesiastical finances, formal ceremonies, and clerical behavior” and demanded “greater reliance on the Bible,” as Rabb notes, and Hus called for “a religion centered on biblical precept, individual faith, and a more egalitarian ritual.”

Those are exactly the things the Protestant Reformers sought a century later. There was a continuous line of intellectual activity, moreover, leading from Wycliffe and Hus to Luther and Calvin. The former can be seen as early Reformers, and the Renaissance as a greater bifurcation of the European mind: stronger secularism and stronger religion at the same time. Some took the road to Rome and Athens, and some took the road to Calvary. This process accelerated during the Enlightenment, and it is what has made modernity what it is.

It makes a good deal of sense, then, to include the Reformation as part of the Renaissance, but only if we make sure to appreciate the great flowering of the Christian religion in Europe during this period. The Renaissance can be seen as an increasing appreciation for the ideas of antiquity, but can be fully understood as such only if we include the return to early Christian religious values as well as the philosophical legacy of Greece and Rome. Such an appreciation also helps us make sense of the perpetual tug of war between the two mentalities in the West throughout the ensuing centuries.

Rabb emphasizes the similarities between what he calls the Age of Revolution and our present situation:

In the same way as the rationalism of the Enlightenment prompted the Romantics to call for a return to the emotions, so the growing skepticism, internationalism, and materialism of the decades after World War II have been met by a resurgence of moral and religious passion and demands for a reassertion of ‘traditional’ values and local interests. The contest between these forces, often reduced to such simple dichotomies as The Market vs. The Welfare State or Islam vs. The West or even The Culture Wars, may cause ever-widening cleavages and even fiercer battles. If the past is any guide, however, it will eventually become clear how the world wishes to move forward, and the coherence of the age will take shape anew.

What Rabb is describing here is the continued conflict between the two great streams of European thought. Indeed, much of Rabb's book is devoted to analysis of the Renaissance mind and the transformation into what he calls the Age of Revolution, as the book's title suggests, and the phenomena he describes continually demonstrate that the same two streams of thought animated both that time and the subsequent eras. The sixteenth-century artistic movement of Mannerism, for example, with its “unsettling distortions,” a “focus on agonized figures and swirling, unstable compositions,” the use of “figures given inexplicable gestures and odd postures,” and predilection for “disturbing subjects,” strikes Rabb as “symptomatic of a world in which doubts were growing and answers remained elusive.” These also sound like the same things that drove modern art in the twentieth century.

Similarly, the roots of today's relativism and multiculturalism are distinctly evident in Rabb's description of Renaissance-era skepticism: “With antagonists asserting exclusive and incompatible versions of truth, it seemed only appropriate to question the very nature of such claims.” Even the details of the arguments are familiar. Rabb quotes Michel de Montaigne after the latter's encounter with a cannibal who had been brought to France, in which the French writer calls his own society barbarous while entirely absolving the cannibal of any moral responsibility: “I find that there is nothing barbarous or savage in this nation, except that we call barbarism whatever we ourselves do not do. Indeed, we seem to have no definition of truth and reason other than the opinions and customs of the place where we live.”

Likewise, Rabb quotes the Spanish friar Bartolomé de las Casas as scathingly describing the incursion of Europeans into the New World:

God made all the peoples of [the New World], many and varied as they are, as open and innocent as can be imagined. It was upon these gentle lambs that from the very first day they clapped eyes on them the Spanish fell like ravening wolves upon the fold, or like tigers and savage lions who have not eaten meat for days. The pattern established at the outset has remained unchanged to this day, and the Spaniards still do nothing save tear the natives to shreds, murder them and inflict upon them untold misery, suffering and distress, tormenting, harrying and persecuting mercilessly.

As Rabb points out, “These voices were exceptional, but they were widely heard.” And they are widely heard today as well. In fact, the words of de las Casas are reminiscent of many such critiques of Western imperialism in recent decades.

Political liberty also has its roots in the Renaissance, Rabb observes. “Especially noteworthy was the creation of a quite distinct republican political tradition. Its roots grew in a handful of prosperous and relatively independent cities in the late Middle Ages, and it drew inspiration from the memory of Republican Rome, but it began to flower only in the fourteenth and subsequent centuries.” Venice, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Oliver Cromwell's Britain “all emphasized the ‘liberties’ of their citizens in contrast to the ‘subject’ status of those who were ruled by hereditary princes.” (It is worth noting that the places where this political philosophy hung on most tenaciously were Protestant.) The call for political liberty rose in response to the centralizing tendencies of early-Renaissance monarchs, and it clearly presaged current-day debates over subsidiarity and federalism.

The scientific method arose during the Renaissance, not the Enlightenment, and it has been a permanent part of the scene since. The similarities between current thoughts and all the other trends of the Renaissance that Rabb describes are equally clear. All of these phenomena point us toward an inescapable conclusion that Rabb does not himself bring out: what appears to have happened during the Renaissance was not a distinct, coherent line of thinking but instead an open divergence of two streams of thought that quickly began a great struggle for dominance and initiated a mutual pattern of ebb and flow that persists to this day.

In Earthly Powers, British historian Michael Burleigh extends this story from the Enlightenment to the First World War. Burleigh explores the idea of political religions—the way in which modern-era politics have consistently taken on a cast of religious fervor among those who have no religion—and how moderns base non- and even anti-Christian dogmas on Christian ideas and customs. Burleigh's book counteracts the temptation to underestimate the extent to which Christianity permeates our culture and has done so even when that influence is least evident. His book thus questions the tendency to think that the past couple of centuries have brought a thorough or irreversible secularization of the West.

Burleigh notes that after 1789, Edmund Burke's “key insight was to realize that ‘a theory concerning government may become as much a cause of fanaticism as a dogma in religion.”’² In fact, it was in making secular progress into a religion that the French Revolution was perhaps most revolutionary. Burleigh points out that “it had its creeds, liturgies and sacred texts, its own vocabulary of virtues and vices, and, last but not least, the ambition of regenerating mankind itself, even if it denied divine intervention or the afterlife. The result was a series of deified abstractions worshipped through the denatured language and liturgy of Christianity.”

Burleigh documents the myriad ways in which “the discourse of the Revolution was saturated with religious terminology: words like catechism, credo, fanatical, gospel, martyr, missionary, propaganda, sacrament, sermon, zealot, were transferred from a religious to a political context.” The attempted adoption of a new calendar and the deliberate suppression of the Catholic Church and its clergy were both part of the same process: the removal of all competing institutions and even habits of thought and behavior that might impede the creation of a new type of human being, one fit for a society incarnating the Jacobins’ “abstract vision of community, harmony and national unity.”

Although Burleigh cautions us not to forget the distinctive nature of the Jacobins, he makes the obvious connection to modern efforts to remake the world through political religions, such as Soviet and Chinese communism and German national socialism. For example, mass murders of the political opposition, or those merely caught in the crossfire, were all too common during the Terror—and the methods employed were as efficient and coldhearted as those of modern regimes. When the guillotine was not fast enough in Lyons in early 1794, “the government's soldiers used cannonfire to gun down large batches of prisoners, with swordsmen finishing off those left half dead by rounds of grapeshot.” That same year, the Jacobins used mass drownings in Nantes to kill off “enemies of the Revolution,” claiming some 1,800 victims in this gruesome way. Burleigh notes that through these and other atrocities “up to a third of the population perished, a statistic roughly equivalent to the horrors of twentieth-century Cambodia.”

As the Terror was giving way to Napoleon and his willingness to make peace with the Church as long as he could keep it under his thumb, the Romantic era brought a somewhat greater appreciation of Christianity throughout the Continent. It was “a great age of Christian faith,” as Burleigh notes, but “it was also an age of publicly aired religious doubt.” Both streams of European history were in full swell, and the result was great turbulence. In France, a strong counter-Revolutionary line of thinking arose, much of it aggressively Catholic in nature. Appreciation for the Middle Ages increased, and writers such as Joseph de Maistre and Louis de Bonald openly praised the lost medieval order.

In Critics of the Enlightenment, editor Christopher Olaf Blum presents representative works from six such thinkers. The book provides powerful evidence of the vitality of Christian thought in the nineteenth century, as exemplified by the publication of Chateaubriand's The Genius of Christianity in 1802 in France, where praising Europe's Christian past had been unthinkable just a few years earlier. Chateaubriand's book kicked off a greater respect for the Catholic Church and the Middle Ages among some French intellectuals. The writers were aggressively and unabashedly Catholic partisans. Joseph de Maistre, writing in 1798, claimed, “Europe has one great enemy. . . . It is a fatal ulcer that attaches itself to all sovereign powers and eats away at them. It is the son of pride, the father of anarchy, the universal solvent: Protestantism.”

Louis Bonald echoed those sentiments in 1815, but later writers such as Frédéric Le Play got past that and were willing to offer specific reforms to reverse some of the more damaging policies that had been implemented in the name of social progress. Some of these arguments sound very familiar to the contemporary reader. In his 1864 book Social Reform in France, for example, Le Play noted, “As with all social institutions, the family is today the subject of lively controversy, and the errors that have been published about it greatly trouble our minds.”

The struggles between church and state during the nineteenth century brought about a painful culture war, Burleigh notes. Efforts to rethink society from scratch were legion, from Auguste Comte's Positivism to the utopian socialist experiments of Robert Owen in Britain and America to the communism of Marx and Engels. What they all had in common was a denial of the Christian doctrine of original sin and a consequent belief in human perfectibility—and the requirement that humans be perfected in order to live in the transformed society. Many churches responded with a greater emphasis on social improvement, to the point that Christian Socialist movements began to form as early as 1850 in England.

As churches slipped away from their pastoral functions and took up social causes, religious observance waned. In Berlin in 1869, only 1 percent of the people in working-class parishes attended church on Sundays; by the end of the century, the German middle classes had “largely distanced themselves from the Churches, viewing them coolly as survivals from a world that had passed.” They were materialistic and in the sway of a “vulgar scientism,” Burleigh notes. The only real religion in Germany was nationalism, and the anti-Christian anti-Semitism of Paul Lagarde and his openly pagan, Teutonic-roots followers rushed in to fill the nation's spiritual void, with horrific results, once “given a massive impetus by the cataclysm of the First World War and the turmoil that followed it.”

Burleigh's book stops there, with the observation that the “Great War, the domestic and international civil wars, and economic dislocation that followed it, gave rise to mass despair, to which the solution appeared to be various forms of authoritarianism.” With the hollowing out of Christian faith in Europe, the atheist, humanist, secular tide had finally risen to its crest. It remains high there, and Christianity has gone nearly dry in Europe, even as it grows exponentially in Africa, Asia, and South America and remains about as high as usual in the United States.

In The Victory of Reason, Baylor University professor Rodney Stark makes a bold claim about where these two streams lead: “The success of the West, including the rise of science, rested entirely on religious foundations, and the people who brought it about were devout Christians.” And not just Protestants, Stark emphasizes, but the previous fifteen hundred years of Christianity as well. Christianity's devotion to theology creates a “faith in reason” which Stark says is precisely what has made Christendom great: “From very early days, Christian theologians have assumed that the application of reason can yield an increasingly accurate understanding of God's will” (emphasis in original).

Rejecting the claim that the source of modern science was Greece and Rome by way of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, Stark writes,

The rise of science was not an extension of classical learning. It was the natural outgrowth of Christian doctrine. . . . Because God is perfect, his handiwork functions in accord with immutable principles. By the full use of our God-given powers of reason and observation, it ought to be possible to discover these principles. These were the crucial ideas that explain why science arose in Christian Europe and nowhere else.

Stark states, “The so-called Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth century has been misinterpreted by those wishing to assert an inherent conflict between religion and science.” On the contrary, writes Stark, “these achievements were the culmination of many centuries of systematic progress by medieval Scholastics, sustained by that uniquely Christian twelfth-century invention, the university.” Real science, Stark notes, “arose only once: in Europe.” Other civilizations had alchemy, but “only in Europe did alchemy develop into chemistry.”

Stark surveys European history from the fall of Rome to the present and demonstrates that Christians and Christian ideas were behind all the great achievements of the West. Pointing out that Christianity's sense of human individuality, moral equality, and belief in free will were far more conducive to human creativity than Greek and Roman assumptions were, Stark thoroughly refutes the Enlightenment-era fiction that between the fall of Rome and the medieval era, Europe languished in Dark Ages (an argument Rabb likewise rejects). On the contrary, Stark writes, “Rapid intellectual and material progress began as soon as Europeans escaped from the stultifying grip of Roman repression and mistaken Greek idealism.”

Calling the Dark Ages “an era of extraordinary invention and innovation,” Stark points out the astonishing breadth and variety of progress in Europe after the fall of Rome. He documents the exponential increase in power generation from water, wind, and horses; the growth of productivity in agriculture with the innovation of the three-field system and the development of the heavy, wheeled plow; the rise of fish farming; and innovations in cloth-making. He identifies powerful innovations in land and sea transportation, in the arts and literature, and in science and education that occurred long before the Renaissance. Finally, Stark shows that the rise of capitalism began early in the ninth century—and was invented by Catholic monks.

All of these things, especially the rise of capitalism, set the stage for political progress. Stark writes, “The success of the West depended on the development of free societies able to provide secure havens for early capitalism. Here too, Christianity played the key role, providing a moral basis for democracy far beyond anything envisioned by classical philosophers.”

The current implications of all this are quite evident. Stark flatly states, “Christianity created Western Civilization. . . . The modern world arose only in Christian societies. Not in Islam. Not in Asia. Not in a ‘secular’ society—there having been none.” If there had been only the Greek and Roman stream in European thought, things would be quite different. Stark writes:

Without a theology committed to reason, progress, and moral equality, today the entire world would be about where non-European societies were in, say, 1800: A world with many astrologers and alchemists but no scientists. A world of despots, lacking universities, banks, factories, eyeglasses, chimneys, and pianos. . . a world truly living in “dark ages.”

Of course, other societies have benefited from this progress, but “all the modernization that has. . . occurred outside Christendom was imported from the West, often brought by colonizers and missionaries.” Hence, Stark argues, “It seems doubtful that an effective modern economy can be created without adopting capitalism,” and “Without secure property rights and substantial individual freedom, modern societies cannot fully emerge.” Stark cites Russia, China, and the Islamic nations as places where these conditions do not currently exist. However, he notes, Christianity is spreading rapidly around the globe—in Latin America, Africa, and China, tens of millions of people have become Christian in recent years. There may be 100 million Christians in China today, and about half of all subsaharan Africans are Christian.

Religious historian Philip Jenkins makes this point powerfully in The New Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (2002) and The New Faces of Christianity: Believing the Bible in the Global South (2006). Jenkins shows how rapidly Christianity is growing in most of the world while it recedes in Europe and Canada, emphasizing the differences between “northern” and “southern” forms of Christianity, with the latter being more like the early church. Exploring the implications of this demographic shift, Jenkins foresees possible future conflicts within the church and between surging southern Christianity and Islam.

Taking this argument further, the Catholic writer George Weigel argues that the secularization of the West has brought on a civilizational downward spiral that is particularly dire in Europe. Weigel observes, “The present eu project grew out of the work of three great Catholic statesmen: France's Robert Schuman, Italy's Alcide de Gasperi, and Germany's Konrad Adenauer. That distinguished triumvirate understood their work on Europe's economic and political integration as an expression of their commitment to revitalizing the Christian civilization of Europe after the catastrophe that was the first half of the twentieth century. It is very hard, however, to find traces of that Christian vision of Europe in today's eu.” Weigel observes a powerful antireligious bias in incidents such as the eu's 2006 decisions affirming same-sex marriage and not permitting doctors to refuse to perform abortions. He argues that such policies “confirm the suspicion that the eu bureaucracy is determined to impose lifestyle libertinism on all of Europe in the name of fundamental human rights.”³

Jenkins observes that the United States is much closer to Africa culturally than Europe is: “America is somewhere in between,” he said in an October 2005 interview. “In terms of its values, it may have as much to do with Africa as it does with Europe, which I think is a difference that explains a lot of the political divides between America and Europe. Americans take religious arguments more seriously.”⁴ This difference bodes ill for Europe, however, as Faith and Reason Institute president Robert Royal argues that modern democratic societies depend on a Christian view of the dignity of the human person and the health and survival of free institutions.⁵

Stark points out that many around the world find Christianity attractive precisely because it appeals to reason and “is so inseparably linked to the rise of Western Civilization.” To them, to be modern and rational means to be a Christian. But there is another side to this, which Stark mentions all too briefly. If his argument is correct, it strongly implies that any effort to foster democracy and market capitalism in, say, Islamic nations is doomed to fail. In addition, it suggests that Europe is in for some truly dark ages unless Christianity is necessary only to the establishment of economic and political freedom and that these can be sustained perpetually without it once they have taken hold—which seems unlikely over the long term, especially given the eu's increasing inroads against economic freedom, political pluralism, and Christian values.

If this is true, then the hostility of Islam toward the West is unlikely to recede any time soon, and the split between Europe and the United States will probably worsen in the years to come, unless Europe should undergo an unlikely religious revival. The good news is that numerous allies should arise to the south and across the Pacific over time, though they will not have much economic and strategic power for a while. All of which suggests that for the foreseeable future, the United States will continue to bear high responsibilities in the world as a sole superpower with few strong allies.

¹ An excellent analysis of how tenaciously people hold on to their core beliefs is Paul Hollander's The End of Commitment: Intellectuals, Revolutionaries, and Political Morality (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006).² Hollander's The End of Commitment provides a thorough consideration of this phenomenon as it was manifested in the twentieth century.³ George Weigel, “Europe's Two Culture Wars,” The Catholic Difference (syndicated column), Mar. 29, 2006.⁴ “Philip Jenkins: The Wittenburg Door Interview,” Wittenburg Door Online Extra, October 2005: at www.wittenburgdoor.com. ⁵ Robert Royal, The God That Did Not Fail: How Religion Built and Sustains the West (New York City: Encounter Books, 2006).

Samuel T. Karnick (karnick@heartland.org) is an associate fellow of the Sagamore Institute for Policy Research and director of publications and senior editor at the Heartland Institute.

From: Orbis: Volume 51, Issue 1, Winter 2007, Pages 174-187

Some odd facts about Mussolini

2007-05-10T16:41:00.000+11:00

By Richard Owen

BENITO Mussolini, Italy's Fascist dictator, suffered from an ulcer yet could not resist "shovelfuls" of raw garlic, according to an account of his domestic habits by his daughter-in-law. Maria Scicolone said the accepted view that Mussolini survived on chicken broth and indigestion powders because of his delicate stomach was a myth. In fact, he "munched away on garlic", which he claimed was "the elixir of life" and "good for my heart".

Ms Scicolone, 66, the younger sister of the actor Sophia Loren, married Romano Mussolini, the dictator's youngest son and a noted jazz musician. They were separated in 1970 and divorced five years later, but Ms Scicolone - whose daughter Alessandra Mussolini is a Far-Right politician and women's rights campaigner - has remained close to the family. She recently published a memoir, My House Has Many Mirrors. In her new book, A Tavola con Il Duce (At Table with the Duce), she recalls spending "long hours in the kitchen" with Donna Rachele, Mussolini's widow, who died in 1979. Donna Rachele had described grand state dinners, including a banquet given by King Victor Emmanuel III for Hitler on the Nazi dictator's visit to Rome in May 1938. "Donna Rachele said Hitler, who was a vegetarian, found all the dishes unacceptable, while Mussolini, who was clearly bored to tears, complained that the menu was in French and kept muttering that Italian regional cooking was more appetising than 'all this pretentious and indigestible French stuff'."

Ms Scicolone said Mussolini was not much of a bon viveur. Domestic rituals were important to him, and despite his government duties and assignations with mistresses, he always had lunch and dinner with his wife and children, "like any Italian man". He never drank alcohol, and instead drank "litres of herbal teas and tisanes". He also drank copious amounts of milk until a German doctor finally told him in 1945, near the end, that it was making his ulcer worse. The Duce "ate lots of fruit, but hardly ever ate cheese, salami or sausages".

The Italian newspaper Il Messaggero said the revelations about Mussolini's "human side" were part of a gradual rehabilitation of the dictator, who almost 60 years after his gruesome death is increasingly seen by Italians as having been more benign and less totalitarian than Hitler or Stalin. Last month Romano Mussolini published an affectionate memoir, entitled Il Duce, My Father, in which he said the family had "many Jewish friends" and it was his father's sense of compassion and honour that enabled him to prevent a bloodbath when he was deposed. RAI, the state television channel, is making a TV drama about the marriage of the dictator's favourite daughter, Edda, to his Foreign Minister, Count Ciano.

This article originally appeared here on October 23, 2004 and was apparently a reprint from "The Times" of London

Weirdness in Wisconsin

2007-05-09T13:59:00.001+11:00

Nude dancing, flag defiling and the `Politician Protection Plan'

By James A. Buchen, Vice President, WMC

The Wisconsin Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that the First Amendment is sacred.

For nude dancers: "The First Amendment to the United States Constitution applies universally to all communities within its borders. A violation of the First Amendment is just as chilling in a small rural community as it is in a metropolitan area," the court ruled in June 1998. In that case, the court ruled that an ordinance banning nude dancing was overly broad and "chilled" free speech.

For flag desecrators: In another June 1998 ruling, the Court said: "We are confident in our prediction that fear of prosecution under this portion of the statute is likely to dissuade the citizens of this state from expressing themselves in a constitutionally protected manner." The court struck down Wisconsin's ban on flag mutilation for violating the free speech provisions of First Amendment.

All this freedom breaking out - especially at election time -- has apparently sent a majority of the state Senate into a freedom-limiting tizzy. Not to ban nude dancing or flag burning, however.

The state Senators have voted to exempt themselves from the First Amendment. The Assembly will soon consider the bill - SB 2 - that puts a 60-day time limit on political ads that discuss the voting record of elected officials. It's the "Politician Protection Plan."

So let's all get this straight. Freedom for nude dancers. Constitutional protection for flag burners. And punishment under the "Politician Protection Plan" for people who want to publicize their local senator's voting record on taxes, regulation, environment, human rights, or economic development within 60 days of an election.

Does this make any sense? SB 2 is a naked attempt to burn the First Amendment. The Assembly should kill this unconstitutional bill. If passed, the nude dancer would have a greater right to dance naked on the bar than to run a newspaper ad criticizing the politician who wants to ban nude dancing.

The flag burner would have a greater right to burn the flag than to run a radio ad criticizing the politicians who want to ban flag burning. Again, does this make any sense?

Yes, it is troubling that the First Amendment has been extended to include acts that are not pure speech. What's even more troubling is that the politicians are attempting to ban the very political speech - words and ideas about issues and candidates - that the First Amendment was written to protect.

SB 2 is an attempt to take away our legitimate political speech rights in the name of "campaign finance reform."

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the government can only regulate our political speech if we spend money to tell each other for whom to cast a ballot. That's it. Everything else is free speech. The politicians don't like that because it holds them accountable.

We should fight back. Wisconsin residents should call 1-800-362-9472 and tell their Assembly member to oppose SB 2. Or we will live in a state where nude dancing and flag burning are sacred under the First Amendment and the politicians are sacred cows - untouchable and unaccountable.

c. Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce. All rights reserved. 501 E Washington Ave., Madison, WI 53703, (608) 258-3400

Originally published Sept. 10, 2004. Original link:

http://www.wmc.org/MediaOutlet/display.cfm?ID=153

Global Climate Change

2007-05-08T12:17:00.000+11:00

A STATS survey of current research

Everybody talks about the climate and, at long last, somebody is about to do something about it. But will they do the right thing? One of the most challenging scientific controversies of our time -- whether or not human activities are changing the Earth's climate -- is tied to one of the most important policy decisions: what steps should governments carry out today to curtail industrial emissions?

The stakes are enormous. If we guess wrong on one side, we could bake our own future in an oven that won't cool down. If we guess wrong on the other, we could disrupt the global economy by unnecessary regulation and taxation. So how good are our guesses? To understand this debate we need to answer some elementary questions such as what climate is, how we measure climate change, and whether scientists agree on the results.

When we want to know today's weather, we look out the window. When we want to know tomorrow's weather, we listen to a forecast. TV weathermen routinely predict the future several days in advance -- with their accuracy diminishing the farther their forecast extends.

Can we look ahead (or, for that matter, behind) a century or more with confidence? Some say yes -- they have seen the future and it percs. Others say no, we are gazing into a cloudy crystal ball whose images can only cloud our policy judgments. Thus, the climate debate has produced two hostile camps of scientists, true believers and iconoclastic naysayers, who impugn each other's motives as well as their models.

Daily weather changes by the hour and the vicinity. Global climate, however, is the average condition of temperature and precipitation that holds across day or night, summer or winter, or Arctic and Equatorial latitudes. And global climate changes through natural causes. The ice ages attest to this fact, as does the gradual warming of the atmosphere caused by the greenhouse effect, which traps heat in the atmosphere and makes life on Earth possible. But to much of the principal greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, could produce problems or even disaster, as the greenhouse effect accelerates towards ever higher heat.

Enter the question of human beings and their economies. Modern industrial processes pump out massive quantities of carbon dioxide and other gases into the atmosphere. No one knows whether, or how much, this human-induced (or "anthropogenic") driving of the atmosphere is significant.

How can we find out? Since scientists can't look out the window a hundred years into the future, they look instead into their computer screens. Climate scientists seek to model the world's climate by replicating its features in a computer program. This is a complex challenge, since no one really knows all the factors -- such as clouds, sea currents, atmospheric particles, ozone depletion, and solar cycles -- that contribute to the global climate.

Most critically, before we can establish what role humans play, we need to accurately estimate the natural variations in climate. Only then can we identify a human "signal" against the natural background noise.

Some think they've detected the signal. As the United Nations body assigned the task of figuring out the climate future, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in 1995, "the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence." But other climate scientists are not so sure, since the models don't accurately represent today's climate, much less the future.

Why is it so hard to get accurate temperature data?

Perhaps you've seen a chart in a news story that shows global temperatures rising throughout the 1980's. And maybe you've seen one in a different story that shows no discernible rise. Is one of these stories wrong? How is it possible that they both could be accurate?

It sounds like the simplest question in the field of climate studies: "How hot is it?" Finding an answer, however, is surprisingly complicated. First of all, why do these averages conflict? Principally because they come from two different data sets: land-based records and satellite observations.

We have a wealth of surface-based information about how hot or cold it is at any particular place on Earth. We even have a growing body of data on how hot or cold it was in the past. The only problem with the surface-based records is the locations from which they have been collected: mostly land (three quarters of the globe is covered by oceans), mostly in the Northern Hemisphere, and often near urban centers.

This last problem is the trickiest. There is a "heat island effect" near cities that must be accounted for. Notice on the local weather report how cities are warmer than surrounding rural areas. Most climatologists use an equation to factor out this urban heat, but there is considerable disagreement over what this equation should be. Global warming skeptics point out that even a slight change in the equation could account for almost all the global warming "observed" during this century.

Surface-based readings show a rise in global temperature of approximately 1 degree F this century, with a particularly warm surge in the 1980's. Satellite readings, however, don't show this at all. Why not?

Satellite readings, which show a slight cooling over the past seventeen years, have certain advantages over surface records; but they also suffer some shortcomings. They are considered to be highly accurate, and they read temperatures for the whole planet (including oceans), scanning a miles-long slice of atmosphere, rather than just the surface. Unfortunately, the satellite record only goes back to 1978.

So when you see a chart that claims to list "global temperatures," the first thing you need to know is whether they are land-based or satellite observations. This is central to the question of whether the data we plug into highly sophisticated and sensitive climate-modeling computers is accurate. Garbage in, garbage out.

The problem of modeling

Why do we think we know so much about the global climate? What allows some scientists to make highly specific predictions about future global temperatures?

They use computers. Climate change researchers have focussed their efforts on massive computer simulations of the atmosphere, known as Global Circulation Models (GCM's). Problems arise from a number of areas: the inherent complexity of the system, limitations in current computer technology (the time taken to run some of these simulations is measured in weeks rather than microseconds), and human ignorance of the relative effects of certain key variables.

Critics point to the now-acknowledged shortcomings of models that were considered authoritative as recently as three years ago. Model-based warming projections offered as "best guesses" by the Intergovernmental panel on Climate Change (IPCC) at the 1992 Rio Conference ranged between 1.50 and 4.50 C by the year 2050. But the 1995 IPCC report, based on updated models, lowered this prediction to between 0.80 and 3.50 C by the year 2100 -- about a fourfold reduction in the annual rate of warming.

How can we be sure that these models are accurate? The best test of the predictive capability of a model is its ability to "back-predict" things that we know have already happened. By this standard, global climate models still have some way to go. For instance, even advanced models, when supplied with the relevant variables for the Pleistocene era, fail to predict glaciers -- a climatic feature that anyone living at the time would probably have found newsworthy.

The models are getting better. Computer technology is advancing, and human understanding of how the atmosphere works is nudging forward. New factors, like clouds, water vapor, aerosols, and oceans are being factored in, and these are honing the models' accuracy. Interestingly, each successive refinement and improvement to the models has moved predictions in one direction: towards ever more modest estimates of an anthropogenic effect on warming.

Why is anthropogenicity the critical question?

Some people are surprised to learn that the climate is in a constant state of flux. There was no Edenic steady state before man came along. Rather, Earth has cycled through ice ages, mini-ice ages, and epochs much hotter than even the direst warming prediction. What matters for purposes of the climate change debate is the extent to which human activity is affecting the rate of any changes in the atmospheric system.

In fact, as recently as twenty years ago, "global cooling" was considered a much greater threat to man. We are currently living in a relatively warm interlude in what has been a predominantly cold era. Based on current understanding of these cycles, we have passed the most recent warm crest, and we can expect another ice age within the next one to three thousand years. The effects of an ice age anything like the last one would be as catastrophic as they would be unstoppable, erasing all traces of human existence from large swaths of North America and Eurasia.

The greenhouse effect is a natural phenomenon, without which human life would never have evolved. We tend to think of environmental issues in terms of "pollution," but this frame of reference is less helpful in the context of carbon dioxide (CO2) and climate change. CO2 is emitted into the atmosphere by a variety of natural sources including plant decay, volcanoes and the oceans. In fact, natural sources emit far more CO2 than man does.

Then-Senator Al Gore could confidently state ten years ago that "there is no longer any disagreement in the scientific community that the greenhouse effect is real and already occurring." True -- but there most certainly is debate in the scientific community over whether human activity is influencing the greenhouse effect. Remember that 10 F rise in global temperature that the land- based record showed for this century? Most of that warming occurred prior to 1940; that is, before mankind was emitting CO2 at anything approaching today's levels.

And while almost everyone agrees that CO2 in the atmosphere is a key component of the greenhouse effect, atmospheric concentrations of CO2, which have fluctuated widely throughout Earth's history, have not always correlated with warming. 440 million years ago, during the relatively cool Ordovician age, CO2 levels were ten times what they are now. Only 5000 years ago, global temperatures were higher than today's, but CO2 levels were considerably lower.

But CO2 isn't the whole problem. Methane gas has an even stronger effect on greenhouse warming, and its concentration in the atmosphere has risen dramatically this century. Methane, however, comes from quite different sources than CO2. Large quantities of methane are released into the atmosphere by swamps (that's wetlands to you and me), termites, pigs, and cows (don't ask).

With methane, the line between anthropogenic and natural sources is not always clear. Are rice paddies "natural"? Are cows? While some methane abatement strategies are fairly obvious (plugging leaks in natural gas lines), there are already good economic reasons to do so. In fact, we are already seeing strong market-driven methane reductions in the former Soviet Union, which had been an egregious methane waster/emitter. Clearly, policies aimed at methane reduction need to be crafted differently than those aimed at CO2 reduction.

You may have noticed that the term "climate change" is largely replacing the term "global warming." This is for good reason, as researchers and policy makers are gaining a broader understanding of the various feedbacks and complex interactions that make up the atmospheric system. Again, it is important to get away from the concept of "polluting gases" that "heat up" the Earth; what we are looking for is a human influence on a complex interdependent system. When we talk about greenhouse gases, we are not necessarily talking about gases that simply produce more warmth.

One of the reasons that earlier computer models consistently overstated warming projections was that they failed to account for the cooling effect of anthropogenic atmospheric pollution. Burning fossil fuels releases sulfur compounds (aerosols) into the atmosphere. These particulates create a layer of haze or smog that reflects sunlight before it reaches the Earth's surface, producing a cooling effect. In other words, many of the same processes that might lead to global warming at the same time produce its antidote. The extent of this compensatory effect is still being debated, but its inclusion in recent, more sophisticated climate models has produced results that more closely conform to the actual climate record.

Amendments to the federal Clean Air Act now mandate strong curbs on these very emissions, since they also contribute to acid rain. Ironically, then, an immediate ban on all greenhouse gas emissions in an effort to avert global warming might just lead to Another important greenhouse factor is water vapor. Increased heat evaporates more water, trapping more heat in the atmosphere. But more water vapor in the atmosphere means more clouds -- and clouds reflect sunlight. (We told you it was a complex system.)

The system may even turn out to be more complex than we need to worry about. A new line of research has yielded some startling (though still controversial) results. In 1992, two Danish researchers published a study showing a remarkable correlation between sun spot activity in this century and global temperature patterns. Solar variation (the energy emitted by the sun fluctuates over time) had already been posited as an explanation for global warming and cooling trends, but the tight fit of the sun spot observations has raised the interest of many researchers.

A current battle over whether there is a discernible anthropogenic effect on global climate is being fought over the IPCC's most recent report, "The Science of Climate Change." The IPCC report was peer reviewed by an international panel of climate experts and formally adopted by the full working group at the IPCC meeting in Madrid last November. When the report was published this summer in London, however, critics pointed to editorial changes that had been made to the "final" version previously approved by the scientists.

Here's where things turned rough. Frederick Seitz, former president of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society, claimed that he had "never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer review process than the event that led to this IPCC report." Seitz went on to charge that nearly all of the editorial changes made by the report's lead author, Benjamin Santer, "worked to remove hints of the skepticism with which many scientists regard claims that human activities are having a major impact on climate in general or global warming in particular." Others, including the independent but industry-backed Global Climate Coalition (GCC) went so far as to claim that the report had been "scientifically cleansed" in a political effort to emphasize alarm about global warming while deleting references to uncertainty.

Santer has responded that the changes he made to the original text were consistent with IPCC procedures, and that he simply clarified the text and removed redundancies. Defenders of the published version also countered that the GCC critics were funded in part by the fuel industry. Greenhouse skeptics shot back that doom-saying researchers are angling for a bigger slice of the two to three billion dollar pie the United States alone spends annually on climate studies.

Why all the heat?

Why does all this matter? If pessimistic warming scenarios are accurate, temperatures could rise quickly, turning croplands into desert, promoting the spread of infectious disease, and wiping out coastal areas and islands. If these same predictions turn out to be inaccurate, and politicians answer a false alarm, hundreds of billions of dollars stand to be sucked out of the global economy. This would mean schools that will never be built, medical breakthroughs foregone, and quality of life diminished, all for nothing.

It is difficult to say, exactly, whether human activity is having an effect on global climate. Some argue that we should apply the "precautionary principal" -- that the risk of danger is so great that we should act before knowing for certain, a sort of Pascal's wager on climate. Assistant Secretary of State Tim Wirth asserts that, "Even if the theory is wrong, we'll be doing the right thing."

Here are some things we do know: We know that the Earth has dramatic temperature shifts, and we have some idea as to what causes or at least contributes to them. We also know that just a few years ago we had no idea of some of the factors which we now consider absolutely central, and that new advances in this field are being made at an exciting pace. Our circulation models are getting better, but they are still not accurate enough to account for observed history. And we know that humans are emitting large quantities of substances whose effect on the atmosphere remains unclear.

As Penn State University professor of Geosciences Richard Alley expressed our dilemma, "We know for certain only that humans are hitting a very complex fluid-dynamic system with a big energy hammer -- with some uncertain, though potentially dramatic, future payback."

Article from July 01 1996 by Statistical Assessment Service, 2100 L St NW Suite 300 Washington DC 20037. Original link: http://www.stats.org/record.jsp?type=oped&ID=100

VIOLENT CHILDREN

2007-05-07T12:10:00.000+11:00

Could your children become criminals? Margaret O' Rourke looks at signs of violent behaviour researchers say can be identified by age two

JULIA and Peter Cooper (not their real names) used to laugh about their boys getting up to mischief. ``We just thought it was typical boy stuff. They were noisy and very active,'' Julia says. ``But looking back now I can see there were worrying signs. For instance my youngest son, Robbie, nearly burnt our house down lighting fires, and both boys had trouble at school from the start.'' The boys' risk-taking behaviour escalated, resulting in Robbie's death at the age of 17. His brother Adrian is now in his 20s and his parents know very little about his life.

It's not hard to understand why parents can be confused about what constitutes normal teenage behaviour and what is a sign of more violent tendencies. Every week television stations and newspapers run stories about young Australians being involved in car theft, break-ins, rape, fights, vandalism, drugs and prostitution.

But research released last month from the Australian Temperament Project claims that it is possible to pick up early warning signs that children may be heading for delinquency, drug-taking and criminal behaviour. Some experts claim children who go on to develop delinquent behaviour are different from their peers from as early as two years of age.

The Australian Temperament Project has followed 2443 Victorian children and their parents from infancy in 1982 to adulthood. The children involved in the study, which is run by the Australian Institute of Family Studies, are now aged between 19 and 20 years. The study has enabled researchers to track the children's temperament, behaviour, academic results, health, the parenting styles they were exposed to, along with family functioning, social and emotional adjustment and socio-economic influences.

The institute, together with Crime Prevention Victoria, has used data from the study to produce a report that analyses patterns and precursors of teenage anti-social behaviour. Diana Smart, a research fellow at the institute and one of the report's authors, says some findings of the study are not a surprise. ``For instance, a higher proportion of males than females engage in violent anti-social acts such as physical fighting (for example 52 per cent of males at 13-14 years compared to 15 per cent of females),'' Smart says. ``But one of the most interesting findings of the study is that children who go on to engage in teenage delinquency and criminal behaviour are already different from their peers by the early years of childhood, even at the age of five or six.''

The study divided the children into three groups. The first were children who displayed little or no teenage anti-social behaviour; the second group experimented with anti-social behaviour during adolescence, and the third had a persistent pattern of anti-social behaviour during their teenage years.

By the age of five those in the ``persistent'' group were already characteristically aggressive, impulsive, with poor concentration and poor self-control. By late childhood they were more likely to have teamed up with anti-social buddies, have poor relationships with parents and to display aggressive and hyperactive behaviour.

The second group were the ``experimenters''. These children were similar to the ``low/non anti-social group'' until puberty. At this time they became more like the persistent group: they were attracted to risk-taking, experienced more difficulties at school and with authority figures, were spending time with anti-social friends, and were more often involved in fighting, stealing, vandalism and substance use. By late adolescence the experimental group had generally settled down while the persistent group continued or worsened.

``This information is important because if we can identify children at risk of delinquency early, we may be able to intervene and guide them along a better path,''. Smart says. The research suggests parents, teachers and policy-makers should consider early primary school as a critical time to intervene and possibly prevent a progression to anti-social behaviour among at-risk children. ``Intervention programs, such as home visiting programs during infancy and early childhood, may also be beneficial in helping to prevent the development of problems before they even occur,'' says Smart.

Health professionals are concerned that these types of conduct disorders are not being picked up early enough to help those at risk. Conduct disorder is defined as persistent anti-social behaviour severe enough to interfere with the child's ability to form relationships and learn. It is characterised by behaviour such as disobedience, rudeness, violent outbursts, lying, stealing, vandalism and aggression. It is the most common psychiatric disorder, occurring among 5 per cent of children who live in urban areas. Children who go on to develop conduct disorder are often persistently aggressive and disobedient as toddlers. Parents often describe them as destroying household property, and having poor sleep patterns, frequent crying, speech difficulties, inability to sit still and restlessness. Sometimes the parents are not in a situation to adequately deal with the child's problems because they may have problems of their own. Conduct disorder is more common in families where the mother is depressed, where one of the parents has engaged in criminal behaviour or substance abuse and where discipline is inconsistent and harsh.

Families such as the Coopers feel that early intervention may have helped them manage their children's difficulties, and perhaps even saved Robbie's life. ``We just didn't have the skills to cope with such challenging children,'' Julia says. ``We were stable, loving parents, always there for them, but we couldn't get the help we needed to get them under control.''

By the time the boys were in late primary school it was obvious they were seriously troubled. ``We moved to Sydney from Wagga, and they immediately teamed up with other low achievers looking for trouble.''

The next 10 years were a terrifying ordeal for the Coopers. Despite parental efforts the boys were accountable to noone; they skipped school, went missing and abused drugs and alcohol. Julia and Peter felt under siege in their own house as the boys and their like-minded friends hung around, swearing and drinking. ``Things were out of our control and we had noone to turn to. The boys didn't want structure or good habits. ``They were both talented sportsmen but they hated all organised activity including sport. They acted on impulse and whatever felt good at the time. They were emotionally distant and abusive if we tried to reason with them.''

Exhausted and broken-hearted, Julia and Peter left the boys with friends to attend an overseas conference for a break and to repair the fractures that were beginning to appear in their once-strong marriage. However, their friends were unable to control the boys and they broke back into the family home. ``By the time we got home two weeks later the house was more or less destroyed. Precious things like wedding presents were broken and the condition of the house was beyond belief.''

At this stage Julia discovered Tough Love, a support group for parents struggling with challenging children. Julia says Tough Love was a great help, bolstering her flagging self-esteem and giving her a framework to cope with her children. It also introduced her to other parents who were going through similar problems. Julia realised she had a right to some rules in her own house. She stopped taking responsibility for the boys' actions and stopped trying to ``rescue'' them.

The worst fear for a parent of a child with conduct disorder is the possibility they will harm themselves while engaging in risk-taking behaviour. ``Peter and I worried about the boys constantly. We knew the risks (they were taking), but nothing prepared us for the death of our son Robbie. ``He was drunk and walking along railway tracks when he was hit by a train. He was killed instantly. Our older son Adrian didn't cope with his brother's death. They were best mates -- literally partners in crime. He disappeared for months, spiralling deeper into drug abuse. He began a relationship with Robbie's girlfriend (also a drug addict) and now they have two little boys in and out of foster care.''

The disturbing thing for Julia is that her father was an alcoholic who was abusive. ``He was really a very horrible man. He was cruel and destructive. The sad thing is that Adrian sometimes reminds me of him.''

Child psychiatrist Adair Heath, director of inpatient services at the Mater Child and Youth Mental Health Service in Brisbane, says he has seen this before in his 35 years in child psychiatry. ``Sometimes it seems that these problems can skip a generation. It is tragic when one generation manages to break the cycle of abuse and anti-social behaviour only to face it again in their own children.''

While Heath cautions against over-zealous early identification programs, he is convinced appropriate early intervention helps. ``Identifying children early as being at risk of conduct disorder can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Obviously not all naughty children will grow up to have conduct disorder. However, there are some serious warning signs that should ring alarm bells for teachers and parents,'' he says.

Two of the strongest early warning signs are fire-lighting and cruelty to animals. ``Fire-starters are at a greater risk of conduct disorder. It is a pretty good sign that intervention is needed,'' Heath says. ``Cruelty to animals is an even more disturbing sign. It is a pretty good indicator of a child that has very little ability for empathy or caring. These signs together would be of great concern.''

Parenting is also an important factor in the development of conduct disorder. ``The child's family environment is influential in the development of conduct disorder. For instance, inconsistent, harsh discipline with little or no warmth in the family dynamics is common with these kids. Often the families are suffering social and economic disadvantage and the parents may be struggling with their own problems, so they find it difficult to assist the child,'' Heath says.

Recent research supports the idea that early identification of those at risk of conduct disorder is both possible and helpful, he says. ``Multi-systemic therapy is an example of an excellent intervention. In this system a highly trained therapist works with a case load of just two to four families. The therapist is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and goes into the child's home and school to help the child and the family overcome the factors in the youth's environment that are contributing to his or her behaviour problems. This may include assisting the parents to find adequate employment, or deal with their own substance abuse or mental health issues. Other areas might pertain to the child's individual weaknesses such as poor problem-solving skills, academic difficulties, anger management and associating with deviant peers,'' says Heath.

``Perhaps with early intervention things could have turned out differently for our boys,'' says Julia Cooper. ``But I guess now we'll never know.''

LINKS: www.toughlove.org

Warning signs

SOME behaviours typical of a child with conduct disorder may include:

Truancy
Lying and stealing
Engaging in physical fights, particularly using weapons
Tendency to run away
Lighting fires
Criminal behaviours such as shoplifting
Tendency to use drugs, alcohol and cigarettes at an early age
Low self-esteem
Learning difficulties
Aggression to others, including bullying
Cruelty to animals
Tendency to hang out in gangs

SAT 22 MAR 2003

Who really killed Tasmania's aborigines?

2007-05-06T12:07:00.000+11:00

By PATRICIA COBERN

The descendants of the early settlers of Tasmania have been branded as the children of murderers who were responsible for the genocide of the Tasmanian Aborigine. Is this really true?

The Encyclopaedia Britannica Research Service says ". . . It is a reasonable assumption that had the island remained undiscovered and European settlement not attempted until the present day, the Aborigines of Tasmania would have already become extinct and their few relics mere bones of contention between differing schools of Pacific archaeology. Like the moa-hunters of New Zealand and the unknown race which erected the stone giants on Easter Island, the fate of the Tasmanians would have been just another Polynesian mystery instead of a colonial tragedy . . ."

What then was the cause of the extinction of Tasmanian Aborigines? Although the first people to settle in what was then called Van Diemen's Land were mainly convicts and soldiers there were some free settlers. These were peace-loving folks: farmers, bootmakers, shopkeepers and laborers who had been given free passage to Tasmania and land on which to settle. Only those of high moral character were given passage as settlers. They had to produce character references and be sponsored by some reputable person who had known them for many years. Few had used a gun or weapon of any kind and they knew nothing about hunting or fighting.

On the other hand, the Tasmanian Aborigines were war-like hunters. According to reports held at the Mitchell Library, Sydney, they were "fickle and unstable, and some unknown cause of offence would, in a moment, change their attitude from friendship to open hostility . ."

The reports of James Erskine Calder, who arrived in Tasmania on the Thames in November, 1829, and who remained in Tasmania for the rest of his life working as a surveyor, should he more accurate than the writings of moderns who have never lived there. (Calder said ... "the natives had much the better of the warfare . . .").

They had developed remarkable skill for surprise attacks. They would stealthily creep up on an isolated farm and surround it. After watching for hours, sometimes days, they would take the occupants by surprise, massacre them and burn their house and out-buildings. Then, they would move on to some pioneer family in another part of the island and repeat the massacre.

A trick frequently employed by the Tasmanian natives was to approach isolated settlers, apparently unarmed. They would wave their arms about in a friendly way and the naive settler, seeing no weapon, would greet them, often offering food or drink. When the natives were close enough to the house they would flick the spears from between their toes and plunge them into the hapless frontiersman and his wife and children. After that colonists learned to he wary of natives who walked through long grass, knowing that they could be dragging spears between their toes.

Naturally, after many of their neighbors had been massacred, settlers began to arm against attack but the superior fighting ability of the Aborigines was undeniable. More white people were killed in the so-called "black war" than Aborigines. The most Aborigines killed in any one melee was 41 of a force of several hundred who attacked the Royal Marines.

Reports of the number of natives living in Tasmania at the first white settlers' arrival in 1803 vary from 2000 to a mere 700. Some reports claim 700 would be the absolute maximum at the time of the first settlement and they were, even then, fast dying out.

The factors which killed the Tasmanian Aborigines become apparent after careful research. There were (1) their eating habits (2) hazards of birth (3) lack of hygiene (4) their marriage, or mating customs (5) dangerous "magic" surgery (6) exposure to the harsh climate of Tasmania.

The eating habits of the Tasmanian natives alone were enough to wipe them out. It was their custom to eat everything that was available in one sitting. George Augustus Robinson, an authority on Aborigines, described their diet as "astounding." They ate every part of the carcass of any animal they found. Not a bone nor an organ was discarded. The hunters would sit around the fire chewing the half-cooked brain, eyes, and bones as well as the flesh of animals. The women, who were treated as less important than dogs, were thrown the worst parts of hone and gristle. Only the fur or feathers were uneaten. These were singed away on the fire.

Robinson reported seeing two men eat a whole seal. On another occasion, an Aboriginal woman was seen to eat 60 large eggs followed by a double ration of bread which had been given to her by Robinson. Even the bahies consumed horrifying amounts of food. One baby of only eight months ate a whole kangaroo rat and then grabbed for more food.

Besides animals the Tasmanian natives ate mushrooms, birds' eggs, bracken, ferns, ants' eggs and shell fish of all kinds. But the eating of scaled fish was taboo to the Aborigines.

For the newly-born Tasmanian Aborigine and his/her mother life hung by a thread. When she was no longer able to keep up with the tribe the expectant woman was abandoned in the bush with a handful of food. If there was an old woman who could he spared she stayed with the mother-to-he and helped her at the delivery. Usually, however, the woman coped alone. When the child was horn she either chewed the umbilical cord or cut it with a sharp stone. The placenta was then reverently huried. The baby was cleaned with dry leaves or whatever vegetation was available and, as soon as she was able to walk, the mother slung the child over her shoulder and hurried after the tribe.

With such a primitive and undignified birth, the child often died before the mother could get up. If both mother and child survived it was fortunate but their troubles did not end with a safe delivery. It might take days or weeks for the mother and child to overtake the tribe and during that time there were many perils. Strange tribes coming upon the woman and her baby would kill and probably eat them. If she was able to avoid capture by hostiles there was still the problem of getting enough food to eat, with no hunter to provide and herself in a weakened state. More often, mother and child perished before rejoining the tribe.

Lack of hygiene was another hazard. Tasmania's climate is often cold and wet so bathing was something they never did. In spite of the rigors of the weather they went naked from birth to death, their bodies caked with mud, grease, charcoal and red ochre which was never removed.

Any cut or scratch would immediately become infected and the infection would spread. Lice and fleas multiplied. When seeing Aborigines picking fleas off their bodies and cracking them in their teeth, Europeans were horrified and Robinson and his well-meaning associates made the natives bath. This hastened the death of those in the mission as it was a great shock to bath a body that had always sheltered behind a coating of mud and grease.

The marriage customs were hardly conducive to the survival of the race because only the elders of the tribe were permitted to take wives. For this reason, the young men would try to steal wives from another tribe and many met death in this way if caught. Naturally, the old men were not so fertile as the young bloods and few children were born to their women.

Charms and superstitious practices, although not so prevalent among these primitive people as with the more advanced Aborigines of the mainland, did exist and caused many deaths. Wounds caused by ritual slashing with stones to protect the person from harm often became infected.

Exposure to the weather was a common cause of death before the coming of the white man. As these Aboriginal people built no shelters and wore no clothes they were always battered by the weather. Some scientists believe that many died because of the exposure alone but others claim it was mainly a kind of melancholy death-wish due to an absence of strong religious beliefs to keep them going when life became intolerable.

Contrary to cherished beliefs held by modern society, the white men did not introduce venereal disease. This was already making inroads on the natives of Tasmania as well as the mainland when Europeans first landed. Professor Manning Clark in his Short History of Australia says of the mainland ... "Like their predecessors in the interior, Sturt's men found the effect of syphilis amongst native tribes truly disgusting: many had lost their noses and all the glandular parts were considerably affected . ..". This sort of thing obviously existed in Tasmania also and was the cause of many deaths as well as sterility among both men and women.

So we return to our original question: Who killed the Tasmanian Ahorigines? My research has shown that the only massacres that were carried out were those on white people by the natives. The killer that stalked the Tasmanian Aborigine tribes was the traditions and customs of the race, its face was not while.

(From The Bulletin, February 23, 1982, pp. 32-34.)

Columbia Targets Heterosexual Males

2007-05-05T18:52:00.001+11:00

BY Paul Craig Roberts

If you are a heterosexual male, you are ill advised to attend Columbia University in New York City. The university has established a "sexual misconduct policy" that guarantees the conviction of any accused male, whether innocent or guilty.

Columbia's policy prohibits the accused from exercising his constitutional right to due process. In place of the legal system established by the U.S. Constitution, Columbia resurrected the Star Chamber in which the accused is tried in absentia, prohibited from cross-examining hostile witnesses, and denied representation by an attorney. And this is just for starters. If the student investigates the charges, lines up witnesses on his behalf or reveals the identity of his accuser to his parents or to an attorney, he is subject to additional punishments for violating Columbia's "rules of secrecy." These rules are designed to prevent his defense and to guarantee his conviction by accusation alone.

It is a well-established fact that women sometimes make false charges out of spite or hurt feelings or to settle scores. Sometimes women cannot deal with their own promiscuity and pass the blame to someone else with the charge of "date rape."

Recently, several sixth grade girls, angry over being disciplined by the school's sports coach, concocted a tale that the coach had fondled them in the girl's dressing room. Fortunately for the coach, the police investigated, and the girls' story fell apart. The coach was lucky. As often as not, allegations are treated as evidence, and prosecutors use uninvestigated charges to coerce plea bargains. Some experts believe that there are more innocent than guilty people incarcerated on sex abuse charges.

In Wenatchee, Washington, for example, 26 adults were framed on charges of child sex abuse so that Child Protective Services would have results to show for its budget. The testimony against the adults came primarily from two foster children of the detective who fabricated the cases. The children later testified that they had been coerced into making the false charges.

Innocent families were broken apart and parents spent years in prison until a brave local pastor, Roby Roberson, stirred up enough public stink that the University of Washington Law School's Innocence Project was able to have the cases reopened and overturned.

A false charge is a serious matter as it is likely to lead to a coerced plea bargain. As Larry Stratton and I show in our recently published book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, false conviction is now rampart in the U.S. Experts say there are 200,000 innocent Americans in prison. The number is high, because even defendants protected by due process and an attorney find the financial and emotional stress of a trial prohibitive. Usually they are advised that defending themselves at trial will anger both prosecutor and judge.

The former is concerned with achieving a high conviction rate, and the latter with a cleared court docket. A trial interferes with both goals. Consequently, a jury trial means the prosecutor throws the book at the defendant and the judge hands down the maximum sentence. In 95 percent of the cases, defendants permit their attorneys to negotiate a plea to a lesser offense in order to stay on the good side of the prosecutor and judge.

At Columbia where the accused has neither due process nor a lawyer, false conviction is certain. It is even more the case now that radical feminists have succeeded in making some women feel that they have a moral obligation to hate men with the same intensity that Nazis felt for Jews and communists for the bourgeoisie.

On American campuses today, men are scapegoated in courses in literature, history, sociology, psychology and "women's studies." The atmosphere is loaded against the heterosexual male—especially if he is white. Young women, pressured by feminists to "take a stand" against their oppressor, feel even less restraint than the sixth graders who targeted an innocent coach for destruction.

University of Pennsylvania professor Alan Charles Kors, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, wrote to Columbia's president. Kors pointed out that under Columbia's version of the Nuremberg Laws, a male on the verge of graduation, who has the misfortune to break up with his girlfriend, could be expelled on the basis of her allegation that he committed "date rape" during his freshman year.

Columbia once had a law faculty. What happened to it? Why are there no protests at the Nazification of student judicial procedures at Columbia University?

FROM: New York Post 7 ix 2000

Note: According to the Columbia site, the policies described above are still in place in May 2007

Review of “Human Natures: Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect” By Paul R. Ehrlich

2007-05-04T12:29:00.001+11:00

Reviewed by Francis Fukuyama

PAUL R. E.HRLICH, the Stanford University biologist and environmental activist, is perhaps best known for a prediction he offered in his 1968 book, The Population Bomb: namely, that by the 1980's the world would be in the throes of resource scarcity severe enough to produce riots and widespread famine. This forecast became the basis of a famous public wager with the late economist Julian Simon that Ehrlich lost hands down.

Given this track record, I had little hope, prior to opening it, that Ehrlich's new book would prove more solid. Unfortunately, my doubts were justified: Human Natures is a highly polemical attempt to deny the existence of certain core characteristics and behaviors that constitute a single "human nature." The attempt fails.

The concept of human nature, as old as the Greeks, has been intensely politicized over the past 200 years. To many people on the Left, the very idea of such a single human nature came to seem little more than a camouflage for efforts to limit human possibilities and human freedom.

By the middle of the 20th century, most social scientists had become committed to the contrary idea that human behavior was, in Emile Durkheim's phrase, "socially constructed," that is, dependent not on any biological givens but on the process of socialization. Since, moreover, human societies are almost limitless in their variety and plasticity, it follows that there are no universal standards by which one can make value judgments about different individuals or cultures.

This last view is still propounded in countless "cultural studies" programs in universities around the country. But, in one of the truly arresting shifts of intellectual history over the past five decades, the concept of human nature has undergone a remarkable resuscitation. This development has mainly occurred not in the social sciences but in the life sciences, and its sources are diverse.

From evolutionary biology has come the notion that the brain is not a tabula rasa to be shaped by society but rather an organ that has adapted over time to deal with its environment and to solve certain key problems of social competition and cooperation. From behavioral genetics have come rigorous statistical methods for teasing out the genetic from the environmental components of behavior. From cognitive neuroscience have come discoveries linking behavior to the physiology and biochemistry of the brain. And then there is molecular biology, whose decoding of the human genome has begun to open up the actual digital code governing biological development.

Paul Ehrlich's book is a reaction to these new findings. It puts forward two arguments against the existence of a single "human nature," one somewhat sophisticated and one somewhat silly. The sophisticated argument, articulated over the years by the Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin, holds that, because of the complex interactions between genes and environment, a given organism's genotype (i.e., its DNA) never fully determines its phenotype, the actual living creature that eventually develops.

For an obvious example, consider what happens in utero: if a pregnant mother is malnourished, drinks excessively, or consumes drugs, the same genes will produce a child physically and mentally different from the one that would have been born if she had taken better care of herself.

This line of reasoning is unexceptionable, but it hardly settles anything. Many phenotypical possibilities are, in fact, distributed normally in the general population -- if plotted on a chart, they would form a bell curve. It is true that, say, the average height of a population depends on diet, among other things, but there is still a range of identifiably normal heights, and there are dwarves and giants who can fairly be described in statistical terms as abnormal.

It is also true that, in some cases, a relatively simple linear relationship obtains between environment and phenotype; the better the mother's prenatal diet, the healthier the subsequent child. Once again, however, these sorts of variance no more disprove the existence of a species-typical "nature" than they suggest that being born stunted is as desirable as being born healthy.

Ehrlich's second argument, the silly one, takes aim at a straw man. Obviously annoyed at the tendency of the popular press to speak about genes that "code for" everything from fatness to intelligence to aggression, he stresses repeatedly that human beings are, at their core, cultural animals, and that their behavior is heavily influenced by what they learn from both the natural and the social environment.

There is a simpleminded point that Ehrlich is aiming at in asserting multiple "human natures" (to cite the title of his book): that peoples differ culturally from one another, and also that cultures change over time. Thus, at one juncture he notes that "citizens of long-standing democracies have different human natures from those accustomed to living under dictatorships," while at another he observes that "the natures of many Japanese people changed greatly in response to the defeat and the revelation of Japanese war crimes."

All this reminds one of the memorably sweeping phrase uttered by a character in one of Virginia Woolf's novels: "on or about December, 1910, human character changed." Admittedly, there has been a tendency on the part of the press and some popular science writers to hype the importance of genetics and to draw dubious links between complex higher-level behaviors and simple genetic causes.

But the scientists who have sought to reestablish the legitimacy of the idea of human nature are fully aware that human beings are cultural animals, and that genes and environment interact in a complex manner. Genetics, in their view, does not produce deterministic drives or instincts but rather capabilities for cultural learning whose content is filled in after birth. The acquisition of language is perhaps the clearest example of this process.

Still, what the new biology does argue is that there are species typical ways in which we humans learn, and there are also limits to what we can learn that ultimately restrict the adaptability of human behavior. Ehrlich himself provides many examples of this in his book, even as his fastidious sense of political correctness prevents him from seeing the implications of what he is saying.

Take sexual behavior -- which, as Ehrlich points out, has a strong genetic component: men and women have different chromosomes and brain structures, and they also behave differently when it comes to selecting sexual partners. (According to evolutionary psychologists, that difference is traceable to their differing degrees of investment in offspring.) Although we know of no biochemical route linking the male chromosomes to promiscuity, a tremendous amount of circumstantial evidence suggests that there is such a link, including the fact there are virtually no cultures where male promiscuity is not discernible. Indeed, in our own society, 30 years after the feminist revolution, men still remain greater consumers of pornography and frequenters of prostitutes than women, and homosexual men are far more promiscuous than homosexual women.

Yet after plowing through these and other facts, Ehrlich waffles for several pages before finally pronouncing the genetic evidence unproven. Ehrlich is similarly intent on denying that there is anything innate about the human, and particularly the male, proclivity for violence, aggression, or hierarchy. Yet once again he is disputed by the data that he himself cites, including research by Frans de Waal and Richard Wrangham documenting group warfare among chimpanzees (who share a common descent with human beings from a chimp-like ancestor), or Lawrence Keeley's comprehensive survey of archaeological evidence showing that hunter-gatherer societies engage not only in warfare but in genocide.

In short, Ehrlich does not merely commit the sin of selecting only the evidence that will support his conclusions; he arrives at his conclusions in the face of his own evidence.

If the bet Ehrlich lost to Julian Simon has evidently not taught him to be cautious, he is particularly thoughtless, in a manner characteristic of many scientists, on a question central to his book: whether human nature can tell us anything relevant about human values. His answer to that question is a blunt "no."

As a man of the Left, Ehrlich is committed to universal human equality and equal respect for the world's diverse peoples. But on what grounds is this commitment based? If the "human nature" of the Japanese changed -- from genocidal militarists before World War II to cooperative pacifists after it -- are both Japanese "natures" entitled to equal respect? Was the U.S. wrong to wage war on the former but not on the latter?

Or, again, if human natures are indeed as diverse as Ehrlich claims, why should we refrain from looking down upon peoples who as a group are less intelligent or less well organized or crueller than we are? The answer, of course, lies in the fact that we all share a common humanity that consists of something more than our crude physical natures.

For Christians as for Jews, human dignity lies in our having been created in the image of God. For a nonreligious person like (one assumes) Ehrlich, the only possible source of shared human dignity must lie in the existence not of multiple "human natures" but of a common, and single, and distinctively human nature.

Although he fails to recognize it, the entire moral and political universe in which he operates depends on this proposition. At the end of his book, Ehrlich expresses the hope that people will some day stop talking about the concept of human nature. But, thanks to developments in contemporary biology, this concept is on its way back. If he is ready to wager on whether we will still be taking it seriously in a decade or two, I would gladly accept the challenge.

Review originally published in “Commentary” on 23 Feb., 2001

Black Scholar Turns Tables on Liberals' Smug Assumptions

2007-05-03T12:25:00.001+11:00

If John H. McWhorter gets out of this life without being hung by the ears, it will be a minor miracle. The reason that this young professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley runs the risk of violent hands being put on him by other African-Americans is because of passages like this in his new book, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America (Free Press):

"the time has come for us to reconceive the black college professor who sits in the trendy new restaurant emoting about how oppressed he is between forkfuls of gourmet pasta, his free hand alternating languidly between his six-dollar glass of cabernet and his white significant other's knee under the table, and [who is] about to catch a twenty dollar shuttle to the airport the next morning to fly to a conference where he will meet dozens of African Americans just like him, most of whom got special attention on their job searches because of their color, and most of whose research has been funded by universities that bend over backwards to shower grants upon as much minority-oriented research as possible.

Okay, four years ago this professor was driving through a white neighborhood in his Honda Accord and a policeman pulled him over on a drug check. But why, if 'Success Runs in Our Veins,' if we survived centuries of slavery, if we are so wonderful, does that episode negate the victory and richness of the rest of this professor's life? What kind of oppression is this?"

Mr. McWhorter's essay is, I think, primarily directed at African-Americans who, he fears, will dismiss it out of hand without pondering the points that he makes-points which, if not addressed, may doom the majority of African-Americans to an indefinite stay in a pleasant, even plush limbo of mollycoddled mediocrity. Certain exceptions to the contrary notwithstanding, he sees millions of African- Americans prevented from attaining excellence and great distinction because of certain traits in African-American culture, traits that lead to what he calls "self sabotage."

What brought Mr. McWhorter to his thesis was firsthand experience with the inferior quality of the work done by black students he has taught at Cornell, Stanford and Berkeley. With all the breaks in the world, these students-or at least the great majority of them-still don't cut the mustard.

Mr. McWhorter's position is not a piece of idiosyncratic nonsense by an intellectual deviant crackpot. The most recent Department of Education test result figures support him. They show that an average 17-year-old African-American student reads about as well as an average 13-year-old white student. Moreover, the gap in reading achievement increased in the last 10 years. More astonishing yet, given what we've been told for so long by black leaders, politicians and educationalists, is that the reading gap between middle- class black and white students widened further than the gap between lower-class students.

Certain scholars in the last few years have published books slyly suggesting that a higher percentage of African-American students are congenitally dumber than children of other race or national-identity groups. Such appears to be the conclusion of Charles Murray, The Bell Curve guy who said it's not that there aren't a few rocket scientists to be found among African-Americans but that, for the most part, blacks cluster at the wrong end of the ability bell curve. Needless to say, academic and non-academics who hold to such views only express them in sneakily oblique ways in the present climate of intellectual intimidation. Nevertheless, not a few have such opinions, and a number of those who do can be heard on the Upper East Side, especially after a couple of drinks and a feeling that their interlocutors are socially trustworthy. Once rapport is gained, they'll lean over the San Pellegrino and tell you, "They're just not as smart as we are."

On the other end of the stick are the fuzzball liberals who believe these distressing anomalies can be explained by decrepit schools, swollen class sizes, starved education budgets and that old bromide about lower expectations of student success by unsympatico teachers.

Against this, Mr. McWhorter demonstrates that a majority of the academic poor performers not only come from middle-class, two-parent families but have never seen the inside of the inner city, have attended suburban schools and have been mall rats just like the white kids. Beyond that, he points to the academic record being carved out by black men and women from Africa itself, from Haiti, from the English-speaking Caribbean islands. They are forging ahead, he maintains, even though they began their student lives under the handicap of attending ghetto schools, with all the disadvantages that fuzzball opinion mistakenly believes all African-American children must contend with.

Rejecting both racialist explanations and factually erroneous liberal excuses for poor performance, Mr. McWhorter looks for an explanation in African-American culture, a "self-sabotaging" culture which affects the largest majority of native American black people of all classes and incomes. This culture, however rich and rewarding in some ways, has three characteristics which Mr. McWhorter believes combine to incapacitate youngsters as they set out on their school careers. He names these characteristics as victimhood, separatism and anti-intellectualism.

The premise of victimhood is that the United States is such a deeply racist society that separatism is necessary for the safety and salvation of the African American population. "[T]he Anti-intellectual strain in black culture results from a race having spent centuries in poverty and disenfranchisement, all but denied education by the dominant group," writes Mr. McWhorter. "This separation from the scholarly left the culture particularly susceptible to a rejection of school as 'other,' as Separatist ideology encouraged a focus upon what black culture already had, which unfortunately was only a marginal scholarly tradition, and a wariness of white culture, which unfortunately for us, included school." School is "white stuff," and that "sentiment, even in a small dose, has a decisive impact."

Just as Mr. McWhorter expresses the hope that black America can forsake victimhood, black politicians, for whatever reasons, are putting on a renewed campaign for reparations for slavery. In other words, there are forces strengthening the conviction that African- Americans were victims, are victims and ever will be so. Hence it seems doubtful that many of his own race are prepared to listen to Mr. McWhorter when he insists the United States isn't a racist society.

A sign of how unracist America has become is the present furor over racial profiling. First off, in a racist society, profiling would never become a public issue, with mayors and governors going out of their way to put a stop to it. But secondly, the fact that so many African-Americans are up in arms over profiling tells us how hugely the social and economic position of blacks has changed for the better.

Mr. McWhorter says America was a racist society a generation or two ago. But now, although racist acts are committed and racist thoughts are expressed, the nation as a whole has changed itself over the last 40 or 50 years so profoundly that, in this millennial year, three-quarters of black America is middle class, with the squalid ghettos of yesteryear emptying out as their inhabitants flee to the suburbs-in short, almost everywhere and in almost every way, the barriers have come down. Not completely, of course. Mr. McWhorter still sees a need for set-asides in things like government contracts to lend a helping hand to black business; but at the same time, he insists that affirmative action in colleges and universities should be abandoned, if not because it appears unjust to many non-African-Americans, then because it robs black students of the right to be treated equally with others-that is, to compete on a level playing field with students of other backgrounds.

As an African-American, Mr. McWhorter is saying things to other African-Americans that only an African-American can say. Non- African-Americans are in no position to be lecturing black people about their culture and how to change it. But white people can update their picture of what black America is. The mass media, black politicians and the entire Democratic Party continue to think of black people as downtrodden, pauperized, drug-taking, slum-dwelling, helpless, hopeless creatures lacking in self-control who either scream or shuffle, but are too incompetent to take care of themselves.

The pictures of black America offered to white America are out-of-date snapshots, and many of the policies offered by the politicians-especially the Democratic politicians, black and white- are laughably malapropos. No, white people can't be reshaping the intellectual and cultural climate of black America; but they can make a contribution by getting up to speed on what's been happening, by waking up and understanding we're not back in the time when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was leading marches and rallies. It would help everybody immeasurably if both white and black America would snap out of it and get real.

This column ran on page 4 in the 10/2/2000 edition of The New York Observer

IN THE LAND OF THE ROCOCO MARXISTS

2007-05-02T10:04:00.000+11:00

Why no one is celebrating the Second American Century

BY TOM WOLFE

Where was I? On the wrong page? The wrong channel? Outside the bandwidth? As building managers here in New York shut down the elevators at 11:30 P.M. on December 31, 1999, so that citizens would not be trapped between floors by Y2K microchip failures-and licensed pyrotechnicians launched EPA-sanctioned fireworks from cordoned-off Central Park "venues" at precisely 12:00:01 A.M., January 1, 2000, to mark the arrival of the twenty-first century and the third millennium-did a single solitary savant note that the First American Century had just come to an end and the Second American Century had begun?-and that there might well be five, six, eight more to come?-resulting in a Pax Americana lasting a thousand years? Or did I miss something?

Did a single historian mention that America now dominates the world to an extent that would have made Alexander the Great, who thought there were no more worlds to conquer, get down on all fours and beat his fists on the ground in despair because he was merely a warrior and had never heard of international mergers and acquisitions, rock and rap, fireball movies, TV, the NBA, the World Wide Web, and the "globalization" game?

Was a single bard bestirred to write a mighty anthem-along the lines of James Thomson's "Rule, Britannia! Britannia rule the waves! Britons never shall be slaves!"-for America, the nation that in the century just concluded had vanquished two barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods, the German Nazis and the Russian Communists, two hordes of methodical slave-hunting predators who made the Huns and Magyars look whimsical by comparison? Or had the double A's in my Discman died on me?

Did anybody high or low look for a Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi to create a new tribute on the order of the Statue of Liberty for the nation that in the twentieth century, even more so than in the nineteenth, opened her arms to people from all over the globe-to Vietnamese, Thais, Cambodians, Laotians, Hmong, Ethiopians, Albanians, Senegalese, Guyanese, Eritreans, Cubans, as well as everybody else-and made sure they enjoyed full civil rights, including the means to take political power in a city the size of Miami if they could muster the votes? Did anybody even wistfully envision such a monument to America the International Haven of Democracy? Or had my Flash Art subscription run out?

Did any of the America-at-century's-end network TV specials strike the exuberant note that Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee struck in 1897 - All I remember are voice-overs saying that for better or worse ... hmm, hmm ... McCarthyism, racism, Vietnam, right-wing militias, Oklahoma City, Heaven's Gate, Doctor Death ... on balance, hmm, we're not entirely sure ... for better or worse, America had won the Cold War ... hmm, hmm, hmm ...

My impression was that one American Century rolled into another with all the pomp and circumstance of a mouse pad. America's great triumph inspired all the patriotism and pride (or, if you'd rather, chauvinism), all of the yearning for glory and empire (or, if you'd rather, the spirit of Manifest Destiny), all of the martial jubilee music of a mouse click.

Such was my impression; but it was only that, my impression. So I drew upon the University of Michigan Communications Department's fabled public-opinion survey resources. They sent me the results of four studies, each approaching the matter from a different angle. Chauvinism? The spirit of Manifest Destiny? According to one survey, 73 percent of Americans don't want the United States to intervene abroad unless in cooperation with other nations, presumably so that we won't get all the blame. Excitement? Americans have no strong feelings about their country's supremacy one way or the other. They are lacking in affect, as the clinical psychologists say.

There were seers who saw this coming even at the unabashedly pompous peak (June 22) of England's 1897 Jubilee. One of them was Rudyard Kipling, the empire's de facto poet laureate, who wrote a poem for the Jubilee, "Recessional," warning: "Lo, all our pomp of yesterday/Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!" He and many others had the uneasy feeling that the foundations of European civilization were already shifting beneath their feet, a feeling indicated by the much used adjectival compound fin-de-sikle. Literally, of course, it meant nothing more than "end-of-the-century," but it connoted something modem, baffling, and troubling in Europe. Both Nietzsche and Marx did their greatest work seeking to explain the mystery. The term both used was "decadence."

But if there was decadence, what was decaying? Religious faith and moral codes that had been in place since time was, said Nietzsche, who in 1882 made the most famous statement in modern philosophy-"God is dead"-and three startlingly accurate predictions for the twentieth century. He even estimated when they would begin to come true: about 1915. (1) The faith men formerly invested in God they would now invest in barbaric "brotherhoods with the aim of the robbery and exploitation of the non-brothers." Their names turned out, in due course, to be the German Nazis and the Russian Communists. (2) There would be "wars such as have never been waged on earth." Their names turned out to be World War I and World War II. (3) There no longer would be Truth but, rather, "truth" in quotation marks, depending upon which concoction of eternal verities the modem barbarian found most useful at any given moment. The result would be universal skepticism, cynicism, irony, and contempt. The First World War began in 1914 and ended in 1918. On cue, as if Nietzsche were still alive to direct the drama, an entirely new figure, with an entirely new name, arose in Europe: that embodiment of skepticism, cynicism, irony, and contempt, the Intellectual.

The word "intellectual," used as a noun referring to the "intellectual laborer" who assumes a political stance, did not exist until Georges Clemenceau used it in 1898 during the Dreyfus case, congratulating those "intellectuals," such as Marcel Proust and Anatole France, who had joined Dreyfus's great champion, Emile Zola. Zola was an entirely new form of political eminence, a popular novelist. His famous J'accuse was published on the front page of a daily newspaper, L'Aurore ("The Dawn"), which printed 300,000 copies and hired hundreds of extra newsboys who sold virtually every last one by midafternoon.

Zola and Clemenceau provided a wholly unexpected leg up in life for the ordinary worker ants of "pure intellectual labor" (Clemenceau's term): your fiction writers, playwrights, poets, history and lit profs, that whole cottage industry of poor souls who scribble, scribble, scribble. Zola was an extraordinary reporter (or "documenter," as he called himself) who had devoured the details of the Dreyfus case to the point where he knew as much about it as any judge, prosecutor, or law clerk. But that inconvenient detail of Zola's biography was soon forgotten. The new hero, the intellectual, didn't need to burden himself with the irksome toil of reporting or research. For that matter, he needed no particular education, no scholarly training, no philosophical grounding, no conceptual frameworks, no knowledge of academic or scientific developments other than the sort of stuff you might pick up in Section 9 of the Sunday newspaper. Indignation about the powers that be and the bourgeois fools who did their bidding-that was all you needed. Bango! You were an intellectual.

From the very outset the eminence of this new creature, the intellectual, who was to play such a tremendous role in the history of the twentieth century, was inseparable from his necessary indignation. It was his indignation that elevated him to a plateau of moral superiority. Once up there, he was in a position to look down at the rest of humanity. And it hadn't cost him any effort, intellectual or otherwise. As Marshall McLuhan would put it years later: "Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity." Precisely which intellectuals of the twentieth century were or were not idiots is a debatable point, but it is hard to argue with the definition I once heard a French diplomat offer at a dinner party: "An intellectual is a person knowledgable in one field who speaks out only in others."

After the First World War, American writers and scholars had the chance to go to Europe in large numbers for the first time. They got an eyeful of the Intellectual up close. That sneer, that high-minded aloofness from the mob, those long immaculate alabaster forefingers with which they pointed down at the rubble of a botched civilization-it was irresistible. The only problem was that when our neophyte intellectuals came back to the United States to strike the pose, there was no rubble to point at. Far from being a civilization in ruins, the United States had emerged from the war as the new star occupying the center of the world stage. Far from reeking of decadence, the United States had the glow of a young giant: brave, robust, innocent and unsophisticated.

But young scribblers roaring drunk (as Nietzsche had predicted) on skepticism, cynicism, irony, and contempt were in no mood to let such ... circumstances ... stand in the way. From the very outset the attempts of this country cousin, the American intellectual, to catch up with his urbane European model was touching, as only the strivings of a colonial subject can be. Throughout the twentieth century, the picture would never change (and today, a hundred years later, the sweaty little colonial still trots along at the heels of... sahib). In the 1920s the first job was to catch up with the European intellectuals' mockery of the "bourgeoisie," which had begun a full forty years earlier. H. L. Mencken, probably the most brilliant American essayist of the twentieth century, led the way by pie-ing the American version of same with his term: "the booboisie." In fiction the solution was to pull back the covers from this apple-cheeked, mom's-cooking country of ours and say, "There! Take a good look at what's underneath! Get a whiff of the rot just below the surface!"-the way Sinclair Lewis did it in Main Street and Babbitt, for which he became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in literature, and Sherwood Anderson did it in Winesburg, Ohio. Anderson's specialty was exposing the Middle American hypocrite, such as the rigidly proper, sexually twisted Peeping Tom midwestern preacher. He created a stock character and a stock plot that others have been laboriously cranking out ever since in books, TV, and movies, from Peyton Place to American Beauty.

The Great Depression of the 1930s gave our version of this new breed, the intellectual, plenty of material to get wholesomely indignant about. For a change, America did look dreadful. But even then things weren't as blissfully vile as they were in Europe, the birthplace of the intellectual. Europe, after all, now had the Depression plus fascism. The solution was what became the specialty of our colonial intellectuals: the adjectival catch-up. Europe had real fascism? Well, we had "social fascism." And what was that? That was the name Left intellectuals gave to Roosevelt's New Deal. Roosevelt's "reforms" merely masked the fascism whose dark night would soon descend upon America.

"Fascism" was, in fact, a Marxist coinage. Marxists borrowed the name of Mussolini's Italian party, the Fascisti, and applied it to Hitler's Nazis, adroitly papering over the fact that the Nazis, like Marxism's standard-bearers, the Soviet Communists, were revolutionary socialists. In fact, "Nazi" was (most annoyingly) shorthand for the National Socialist German Workers' Party. European Marxists successfully put over the idea that Nazism was the brutal, decadent last gasp of "capitalism." Few of their colonial cousins in America became doctrinaire, catechism-drilled Marxists, but most were soon enveloped in a heavy Marxist mist. The Marxist fable of the "capitalists" and the "bourgeoisie" oppressing "the masses" - "the proletariat"-took hold even among intellectuals who were anti-Marxist. Prior to the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, the American Communist Party had great success mobilizing the colonials on behalf of "anti-fascist" causes such as the Loyalists' battle against the "fascist" Franco in the Spanish Civil War. "Anti-fascism" became a universal ray gun, good for zapping anybody, anywhere, from up here ... on the intellectuals' Everest of Indignation.

After the Second World War, this mental atmosphere led to a curious anomaly. By objective standards, the United States quickly became the most powerful, prosperous, and popular nation of all time. Militarily we developed the power to blow the entire planet to smithereens by turning a couple of keys in a missile silo, but we also accomplished history's most amazing engineering feat, breaking the bonds of Earth's gravity and flying to the moon. And there was something still more amazing. The country turned into what the Utopian socialists of the nineteenth century, the Saint-Simons and Fouriers, had dreamed about: an El Dorado where the average working man would have the political freedom, the personal freedom, the money, and the free time to fulfill his potential in any way he saw fit. It got to the point where if you couldn't reach your electrician or your air-conditioning mechanic, it was because he was off on a Royal Caribbean cruise with his third wife. And as soon as American immigration restrictions were relaxed in the 19é0s, people of every land, every color, every religion, people from Africa, Asia, South America, and the Caribbean, began pouring into the United States.

But our intellectuals dug in like terriers. just as they had after the First World War, they refused to buckle under to ... circumstances. They saw through El Dorado and produced the most inspired adjectival catch-ups of the twentieth century. Real fascism and genocide were finished after the Second World War, but the intellectuals used the Rosenberg case, the Hiss case, McCarthyism-the whole Communist Witch Hunt-and, above all, the war in Vietnam to come up with... "incipient fascism" (Herbert Marcuse, much prized as a bona-fide European "Frankfurt School" Marxist who had moved to our shores), "preventive fascism" (Marcuse again), "local fascism" (Walter Lippmann), "brink of 'fascism (Charles Reich), "informal Fascism" (Philip Green), latent fascism (Dotson Rader), not to mention the most inspired catch-up of all: "cultural genocide." Cultural genocide referred to the refusal of American universities to have open admissions policies, so that any minority applicant could enroll without regard to GPAs and SATs and other instruments of latent- incip ient-brink-of-fascist repression.

"Cultural genocide" was inspired, but in this entire opéra bouffe of fascism, racism, and fascist-racist genocide, the truly high note was hit by one Susan Sontag. In a 1967 article for Partisan Review entitled "What's Happening to America," she wrote: "The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone-its ideologies and inventions-which eradicates autonomous populations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself."

The white race is the cancer of human history? Who was this woman? Who and what? An anthropological epidemiologist? A renowned authority on the history of cultures throughout the world, a synthesizer of the magnitude of a Max Weber, a Joachim Wach, a Sir James Frazer, an Arnold Toynbee? Actually, she was just another scribbler who spent her life signing up for protest meetings and lumbering to the podium, encumbered by her prose style, which had a handicapped parking sticker valid at Partisan Review. Perhaps she was exceptionally hell-bent on illustrating McLuhan's line about indignation endowing the idiot with dignity, but other-wise she was just a typical American intellectual of the post-World War II period.

After all, having the faintest notion of what you were talking about was irrelevant. Any scholar or scientist who merely possessed profound knowledge in his or her own field did not qualify as an intellectual. The prime example was Noam Chomsky, a brilliant linguist who on his own figured out that language is a structure built into the very central nervous system of Homo sapiens, a theory that neuroscientists, lacking the instruments to do so heretofore, have only recently begun to verify. But Chomsky was not known as an intellectual until he denounced the war in Vietnam, something he knew next to nothing about-thereby qualifying for his new eminence.

American intellectuals of the Adjectival Fascism phase had a terrible year in 1989. In June, Chinese students in Beijing rebelled against the ancien Maoist r6gime, defied the tanks, and brought out into Tiananmen Square a plaster statue, the Goddess of Democracy, who, with her arm lifted to the heavens, looked suspiciously like the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. Who among the intellectuals ever would have suspected that Chinese dissidents had been looking to America as their model of freedom all along? Then on November 9 the Berlin Wall came down, and in no time the Soviet Union collapsed and its Eastern European empire disintegrated.

It was a mess, all right-no two ways about that. It made it damned hard to express your skepticism, your cynicism, your contempt, in Marxist terms. "Capitalism," "proletariat," "the masses ... .. the means of production," "infantile leftism ... .. the dark night of fascism," or even "anti-fascism"-all these things suddenly sounded, well, not so much wrong... as old.. . "Vulgar Marxism" it came to be called, vulgar in the sense of... unsophisticated.

The important thing was not to admit you were wrong in any fundamental way. You couldn't let anybody get away with the notion that just because the United States had triumphed, and just because some unfortunate things had come out after the Soviet archives were opened up-I mean, damn! it looks like Hiss and the Rosenbergs actually were Soviet agents-and even the Witch Hunt, which was one of the bedrocks of our beliefs-damn again! these books by Klehr and Haynes, in the Yale series on American Communism, and Radosh and Weinstein make it pretty clear that while Joe McCarthy was the despicable liar we always knew he was, Soviet agents really did penetrate the U.S. government. Yale!-so respectable, too!-how could they give their imprimatur to these renegade right-wing scholars who do this kind of stuff? Not to mention the Spanish Civil War-archives! Turns out the Loyalists secretly called in the Soviets at the very outset of hostitities - and if they'd won, Spain would have been the first Soviet puppet state!

And now Vietnam, our other bedrock, the holiest of all our causes - those damnable archives again! How could anybody be so perfidious as to open up secret records? They make it look like the Soviets and the Chinese, in concert with the North Vietnamese Communists, were manipulating the Vietcong all along! They make it look like America's intervention in Vietnam was some kind of idealistic crusade, fought solely to stop the onslaught of Communism's Magyar hordes in Southeast Asia!

The main thing is to make sure we don't let them use this stuff to invalidate the way we ascended the Olympian peaks of aloofness for seven decades, from November 11, 1918, the end of World War I, to November 9, 1989, the day the Wall fell. The fact that America won the Cold War does not wash away the stains America left during the Cold War, does it? We've still got the devil himself, the brute, Joe McCarthy, and Richard Nixon and the House Committee on Un-American Activities and all that crowd, who cost a lot of people in Hollywood and academia their jobs, don't we? And racism? The mere fact that the powers that be gave everybody all these so-called civil rights and voting rights doesn't mean that virulent and peculiarly American disease has been eliminated, does it? Not by any means!

This urge to expose the fallacy of "American triumphalism" has led to a poignant moment here in the year 2000. For eleven years now, ever since Tiananmen Square and the fall of the Wall, people in the former empire of the Soviet Union have been looking to the United States for the very principles of living in a condition of freedom. East European college students will startle you with their knowledge of America's own struggle for freedom two and a quarter centuries ago. In 1993, in New York, I happened to meet a Hungarian student who knew speeches by the great orator of the American Revolution, Patrick Henry, by heart, and not just his famous "Give me liberty or give me death" speech of 1775, either, but also his 1765 Stamp Act speech, the one before the colonial House of Burgesses in Williamsburg. He could recite it almost verbatim:

"'Caesar had his Brutus; Charles the First, his Cromwell; and George the Third-'

"'Treason!' cried out the Speaker of the House. 'Treason!'

may profit by their example,' said Patrick Henry. 'If this be treason, make the most of it!"'

Young people like him in Eastern Europe, where writers such as Solzhenitsyn and Vklav Havel were the very keepers of the flame of freedom, have naturally sought out American literary figures to learn of the great democratic principles of the freest nation on earth. But almost without exception, American writers are ... intellectuals. If our young Hungarian were to walk up to an American intellectual and recite Patrick Henry's Stamp Act speech, he would receive in response only (in Thomas Mann's phrase) a hollow silence.

Where else can the millions recently freed from the late Soviet tyranny turn? To America's clergy? Alas, except for the rare brave Roman Catholic padre, America's clergy have become irrelevant to public opinion, unless they yield to the temptation-and many have-to become intellectuals themselves.

That leaves our academic philosophers, our year 2000 versions of Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, and David Hume. Here we come upon one of the choicest chapters in the human comedy. Today, at any leading American university, a Kant, with all his dithering about God, freedom, and immortality, or even a Hume, wouldn't survive a year in graduate school, much less get hired as an instructor. The philosophy departments, history departments, English and comparative literature departments, and, at many universities, anthropology, sociology, and even psychology departments are now divided, in John L'Heureux's delicious terminology (The Handmaid of Desire), into the Young Turks and the Fools. Most Fools are old, mid-fifties, early sixties, but a Fool can be any age, twenty-eight as easily as fifty-eight, if he is one of that minority on the faculty who still believe in the old nineteenth century Germanic modes of so-called objective scholarship. Today the humanities faculties are hives of abstruse doctrines such as structuralism, poststructuralism, postmodernism, deconstruction, reader-response theory, commodification theory ... The names vary, but the subtext is always the same: Marxism may be dead, and the proletariat has proved to be hopeless. They're all at sea with their third wives. But we can find new proletariats whose ideological benefactors we can be-women, non-whites, put-upon white ethnics, homosexuals, transsexuals, the polymorphously perverse, pornographers, prostitutes (sex workers), hardwood trees - which we can use to express our indignation toward the powers that be and our aloofness to their bourgeois stooges, to keep the flame of skepticism, cynicism, irony, and contempt burning. This will not be Vulgar Marxism; it will be ... Rococo Marxism, elegant as a Fragonard, sly as a Watteau. We won't get too hung up on political issues, which never seem to work out right anyway. Instead, we will expose the stooges' so-called truths, which the Fools ignorantly cultivate, and deconstruct their self-deluding concoctions of eternal verities. We will show how the powers that be manipulate, with poisonous efficiency, the very language we speak in order to imprison us in an invisible panopticon, to use the late French "poststructuralist" Michel Foucault's term.

Foucault and another Frenchman, Jacques Derrida, are the great idols of Rococo Marxism in America. Could it be otherwise? Today, as throughout the twentieth century, our intellectuals remain sweaty little colonials, desperately trotting along, trying to catch up, catch up; catch up with the way the idols do it in France, which is through Theory, Theory, Theory. In this pursuit, some colonials inevitably run faster than others, and leading the pack currently are two academicians, Stanley Fish and Judith Butler. Before the Wall came down, the archetypal American intellectual was a mere scribbler who joyfully hoisted himself up to the status of intellectual. Since the Wall came down, the archetypal American intellectual is the scholar who has joyfully lowered himself to the status of mere intellectual. If Nietzsche's already fabulous powers of prophecy had been specific enough to dream up a couple of characters to dramatize the deconstruction of Truth with a capital T that he foresaw, he would have dreamed up Fish and Butler and thrust them into Thus Spake Zarathustra. Fish is a sixty-one-year-old Milton scholar with a Ph.D. from Yale. Or a lapsed Milton scholar; he achieved stardom as the Rococo head of the English Department at Duke and now has been commissioned by the University of Illinois at Chicago, for $230,000 a year plus perks (big-time stuff in academia), to assemble a stable of Rococo stars in paraproletariat studies, not excluding, he says, study of "body parts, excretory functions, the sex trade, dildos, bisexuality, transvestism, and lesbian pornography." Fish says such things with a true Swiftian gusto, relishing the inevitable alarm that ensues. As colonial rococovists go, he cuts a uniquely dashing figure, driving a green Jaguar, a long scarf furled about his neck, á la Theophile Gautier. In his rakishness and mischievous gleam, he differs markedly from the cranky deconstruction crews who follow him. He does wear sweaters with no shirt visible underneath, however, just as nearly all Young Turks, male or female, affect some sort of Generation X garb-sweatshirts, T-shirts, jeans, sneakers, all-black Young Artists outfits-in order to out-casual and out- - Young the Fools, who are still stuck back in the Tweedy Prof mode.

On the conceptual level, Fish is best known for his "reader-response theory," which holds that literary texts mean nothing in themselves, that meaning is only a mental construct concocted by the reader. It is a short step from this premise to the argument that the powers that be have had a picnic loading the language with terminology calculated to make you concoct the mental constructs they want you to concoct in order to manipulate your mind.

May I offer an arch and perhaps familiar but clear example? Recently I came across a woman at one of our top universities who taught a course in Feminist Theory and gave her students F's if they spelled the plural of the female of the species "women" on a test or in a paper. She insisted on "womyn," since the powers that be, at some point far back in the mists of history, had built male primacy in to the very language itself by making "women" 60 percent "men." How did the students react? They shrugged. They have long since learned the futility of objecting to Rococo Marxism. They just write "womyn" and go about the business of grinding out a credit in the course.

One student told me the only problem was that when she wrote her papers on her word processor and used spell check, all hell broke loose. "You get these little wavy red lines all over the screen, under 'womyn.' Spell check doesn't have 'womyn'. Then she shrugged. "Or at least mine doesn't."

The undisputed queen of feminist theory is Judith Butler, a forty-four-year old Hegel scholar with (like Fish) a Ph.D. from Yale, who is also known as the diva of Queer Studies. She is small and not very prepossessing-looking, but graduate students all over the country say "diva" at the mere mention of her name. A group of them put out a fan magazine called Judy! devoted to chronicling the way she rams home her "performativity" theory of speech and sexual behavior as forms of anarchy.

"All gender roles are an imitation for which there is no original," runs her most famous paradox. She is even more famous for her convoluted Theoryese. In 1998 the journal Philosophy and Literature named her winner of their Bad Writing Contest for a sentence that began, "The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation . . ."-and went on for fifty-nine words more. Her zine fans love the insouciant yet erudite way she dismisses such attacks. "Ponderousness," she says, referring to Hegel, "is part of the phenomenological challenge of his text."

The battle of the Fools versus the Young Turks has escalated beyond words, however. In 1987 the traditionalists formed a self-defense organization called the National Association of Scholars; 1,000 joined. In a public statement, Fish, then at Duke, branded them with the R word, the S word, and the H word , sexist, and homophobic-and sent a memo to Duke's provost recommending that no member of the tainted organization be allowed on key university committees. The provost refused. The Scholars accused Fish of trying to blacklist them. At more than one major university, Young Turks roamed about in Gen X clothes, red ballpoint pens at the ready, sniffing out deviationists ... sexists ... racists ... classists (sic) ... homophobes ... ethnophobes ... The stories of Young Turks nudging and whispering to keep graduate students away from Fool courses, to the point where some Fool ends up with zero students for the year, would make a fairly grisly chapter in a book.

In the face of such confidence and agressiveness on the part of the Young Turks and such devotion on the part of their graduate-student T.A. followers, who is left to support a student in her misgivings about "womyn" or any other manifestation of Rococo Marxism? Her other teachers? Some dean? The university's president? The most unlikely of all, believe me, is the president.

Recently I met a student who told me he was taking a cross-disciplinary course entitled Civilizations of North America. "Cross-disciplinary" is a fashionable term in academia just now, not to be confused with the old (Fool) term "interdisciplinary," which refers to the use of concepts from two or more conventional scholarly disciplines to study a particular subject, such as using the concepts of sociology and economics to write history. No, "cross-disciplinary" refers to crossing all disciplines ... much the way a 747 crosses the North Pole at 40,000 feet above an impenetrable cloud cover ... on the way to a single destination: Rococo Marxism. So the instructor informs the class that while Americans might have more money, possessions, technological advantages, and conveniences than Mexicans or Canadians, when it comes to "social cleavages"-along the lines of race, gender, class, ethnicity, and regional imbalances-Americans are the primitives. On this subject-life's fundamentals-we need to take lessons at the knees of the Mexicans and the Canadians.

The Canadians? The Mexicans? No kidding? ... Didn't the French of Quebec province get so bitter about the British majority that they almost seceded from Canada just five years ago? And just six years ago didn't the Indians in Mexico's southernmost province, Chiapas, rise up in an armed rebellion? And gender ... gosh ... isn't it an open secret that foreign corporations like to employ women on their assembly lines in Mexico because Mexican women are taught all their lives to submit to male authority? Or am I dreaming?

Shrugging: "Hey, I don't know. That's what he told us."

By now, in the year 2000, that's what anyone is apt to do ... shrug and go on about his business. For eighty-two years now, America's intellectuals, right on time, as Nietzsche predicted it, have expressed their skepticism toward American life. And, as the French say, "Skepticism soon hardens into contempt." As any Fool sociologist could tell you, there are only two objectively detectable social classes in America: people above the bachelor's-degree line-i.e., people who have graduated from four-year colleges-and people below it, who haven't. By now people above it have learned to shrug and acquiesce to "political correctness," to Rococo Marxism, because they know that to oppose it out loud is in poor taste. It is a ... breach of the etiquette you must observe to establish yourself as an educated person.

Meanwhile, in the ranks of people below that sheerly dividing line, the bachelor's degree, all those limo drivers and cable TV linesmen on the cruises, there are plenty who voice their opposition-at night, over cigarettes, in the ship's Palais Doré cocktail lounge ... muttering, grousing, grousing, muttering ... all the while doubting their own common sense. Is it any wonder, then, when survey after survey shows Americans entering the Second American Century, the Pax Americana, in a state of... whatever ...

We are left, finally, with one question. What exactly do the intellectuals want out of their Rococo Marxist mental acrobatics? Is it change they want, change for all the para-proletariats whose ideological benefactors they proclaim themselves to be? Of course not. Actual change would involve irksome toil. So what do they want?

It's a simple business, at bottom. All the intellectual wants, in his heart of hearts, is to hold on to what was magically given to him one shining moment a century ago. He asks for nothing more than to remain aloof, removed, as Revel once put it, from the mob, the philistines . . . "the middle class."

just think of the fun Nietzsche could have had, if only God were not dead! Think of what it would have been like for him if he could have lolled for the past hundred years-he died in 1900-on a king-size cloud in Heaven, with angels playing Richard Strauss (he had given up on Wagner) in harp quartets as he gazed down upon the creatures only he had been brilliant enough to foresee ... the barbaric brethren ... the world warriors ... the Truth demolition crews prowling about in children's clothes ... A prophet, I presume, enjoys seeing his prophecies come true, but I have the feeling Nietzsche would have become bored by a hundred years of... "the intellectual" ... I can almost hear that hortatory and apostrophic voice of his: How could you writers and academics have settled for such an easy, indolent role-for so long! How could you have chosen a facile snobbery over the hard work, the endless work, the Herculean work of gaining knowledge? I think he would have shaken his head over their elaborate theories of cognition and sexuality. I think he would have grown weary of their dogged skepticism, cynicism, irony, and contempt and would have said, Why don't you admit it to me (no one need know-after all, I'm dead): if you must rate nations, at this moment in history your "accursed" America is the very micrometer by which all others must be measured.

And he would have been right.

The Marxists of the Soviets' East European empire had their Havel; the Marxists of the Soviet Union itself had their Solzhenitsyn; and the Rococo Marxists of America --

"Chauvinism!" cry the intellectuals. "Patriotism!"

--may profit by their example. If this be patriotism make the most of it!

This originally appeared in the June 2000 Harper's Monthly and is reprinted in Wolfe's book "Hooking Up"

NO PLACE LIKE HOME

2007-05-01T14:27:00.000+11:00

The world is becoming less multiracial and less multicultural, says ANTHONY BROWNE. People like to live among their own kind

Many on the Left believe that the only way to end racism is to end races. The only way to conquer Nazism, they argue, is mass miscegenation - interracial love, rather than war. The champions of diversity believe our future is not as a species with many races, but with one race - a quarter Chinese, a quarter Indian, a quarter African and a quarter European.

There are a lot of good things to say about a future of mixed-race people such as champion golfer Tiger Woods and actor Halle Berry. Ever since I fell in love with a beautiful woman who was half Scottish, a quarter Thai and a quarter Jamaican, I have been convinced that mixed-race people combine the best of all their parts. As the Mayor of Vancouver said, reacting to public concern about the extent of Chinese immigration: We're going to have a generation of the most beautiful babies."

The developed world's immigration industry insists opposition to mass immigration is futile because it has been made inevitable by revolutions in transport, communications and human rights. There is only one future for human society, they insist, and it is multiracial and multicultural.

But this is looking at the world and history from the little bubble of the contemporary "West" - the island of prosperity and tolerance encompassing just one eighth of humanity in North America, Europe and Australasia. Surrounded by a world of deprivation and tyranny, it has become far more diverse.

However, the rest of the world, over the past hundred years has become less diverse, with multiracial societies turning into monoracial ones, and multicultural societies turning into monocultural ones. It is not inevitable that societies will become more diverse. Although emigration may be easier for more people, there may be fewer people wanting to do it. The urge for selfsegregation - surrounding yourself with people like you - is likely to triumph over the more ephemeral economic and political incentives to leave what you know.

The great engines of multiracialism over the past few centuries were the empires of Britain, France, Spain and Portugal, bringing Europeans as settlers to the Americas, Africa and Australia; bringing Africans as slaves to the Americas; and bringing Indians as indentured labourers to south and east Africa. But as the empires unwound, so did the multiracialism they brought, except in the lands where Europeans became a majority.

After the collapse of the French empire in North Africa 1.5 million "pieds noirs" - European settlers in Algeria - returned to France. East African states reduced their Asian populations by persecution, or, as with Uganda, expulsion. White populations in Africa have declined, with the white population of Zimbabwe dropping from 3 per cent of the population in 1950 to 1.1 per cent now.

In half a century, sub-Saharan Africa has gone from being a multiracial society to almost monoracial, with only South Africa holding out.

Across much of what is now the Islamic world, multifaith societies have become monofaith ones, with Christian and Jewish religious minorities dwindling to vanishing point. Afghanistan's Jewish community has fallen from 30,000 to just one Zebulon Simentov. In Morocco, tour guides show off the ghost towns where the Jews used to live. A hundred years ago, Baghdad was half Jewish, but now there are only a few dozen Jews in all Iraq. In what is now Turkey, the Christian minorities have been all but wiped out by the genocide in 1915 of 1.5 million Armenian Christians, and the expelling in 1923 of almost the entire Greek population, inhabitants of Asia Minor since before Troy. During the 12th century, Turkey went from being a quarter Christian to 99.8 per cent Muslim, while Syria has gone from 15 percent Christian to 5 percent.

David Coleman, a professor of demography at Oxford University in England, said: "There is a simplification of the Third World while the industrial world gets more complex."

The trend towards diversity is a uniquely Western phenomenon. Few in Japan are remotely bothered that, outside a couple of districts of Tokyo, you never see any whites or blacks, and the Ghanaians are unperturbed that white people there are as rare as snow.

The Japanese emigrated in large numbers during their turbulent and impoverished period last century, notably to North and South America. But as Japan became peaceful and prosperous, emigration all but stopped. The Japanese like being in Japan because they can speak Japanese, measure their homes in tatami mats, and eat Japanese food. And they don't have to catch a plane to visit relatives.

Sharing the same language, culture and values as the people you come into daily contact with may not be excitingly multicultural, but it means you end up with deeper relationships, a sense of community, belonging and security. From the English in the south of France and the Canaries, to the Bangladeshis in London, the Jews in Israel, the African-Americans in Harlem, and the whites in South Africa, self-segregation is one of the most powerful forces in human communities.

The white flight - or white self-segregation - which is such a feature of US cities is now endemic in the UK, with hundreds of thousands of white Britons fleeing the effects of the Government's open border policy. Self-segregation is apparent all around us, but there is a reluctance to accept it because it mocks multiculturalism. And as minorities keep telling us, it is not easy, since in democracies it is the majority that sets the rules.

Despite all the celebrations of diversity, people prefer the familiar. We are a world of stick-in-the-muds.

In the late 20th century, the desire for the familiar was overcome by the desire to escape poverty, hopelessness and tyranny. Tens of millions left their languages, cultures, families and communities to seek money, hope and safety. It may seem unlikely now, but the era when the world went to the West to escape their problems is coming to an end. With prosperity, democracy and declining birth rates spreading around the world, the desire for the familiar will bring the age of mass migration to a halt. We have been here before: Europe stopped unloading its demographic surplus on the New World - the 19th century's so-called golden age for migration - when it could start offering hope to all its citizens.

As China hurtles towards becoming the world's largest economy, the economic incentive to emigrate is shrinking. There is still mass poverty, but no one will escape it by paying a people-trafficker to take them to the other side of the world to work illegally in an alien culture where they don't speak the language, if they can just take the bus to Shanghai instead. Asia, with its rapidly developing economies, powerful culture and traditional family values, is likely to stop being a major exporter of people in the near future.

With their economic and population growth going in opposite directions, Africa and the Islamic world will be a source of push-migration for a long time to come, but they will be the exceptions, and not for ever.

The West is likely to harden its attitude to multiculturalism even further than it already has. As it begins to lose its dominance to China and India, it will lose the guilt that provided the psychological drive for diversity. Instead, Westerners are likely to rediscover the historic and cultural identities they have been so busy trying to forget, as is happening in the UK.

Not only will migration slow, there could also be returns, as the factors that originally drove people from their homelands disappear. When Spain and Portugal stopped being impoverished tyrannies, their diaspora returned from northern Europe. Ireland, whose historic export has been its people, is now welcoming many back. With startling economic growth, India is now seeing its 20-million-strong diaspora return. An Indian industrialist told me last month how he was stunned on a recent trip too the US at being mobbed by Indian professionals asking about opportunities to work in the mother country.

"Back to India" job fairs are spreading across the US, offering a better quality of life, and fuelling a reverse brain drain that has seen 35,000 emigres return to Bangalore alone. India has speeded up the process by adopting a racist policy of giving the right to live and work in India to "any person of Indian origin", carefully drafting the legislation to exclude any white Britons whose family spent generations there. (Ghana has an even more blatantly racist policy, offering citizenship to "any black person living in the West".)

The slowing of mass migration is good for those who appreciate real diversity. The decline of diversity within countries preserves the diversity between them. As Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech attacking multiculturalism, "the disappearance of nations would have impoverished us no less than if all men had become alike, with one personality and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind. its collective personalities."

March, 2005

Is it “racist” to describe yourself as “British”?

2007-04-30T17:50:00.001+11:00

Some of the great and the good in Britain seem to think so. Below is an article from October 2000, originally in “The Guardian” which summarizes a semi-official British report to that effect. Following the “Guardian article are some comments from a Reuters article that is now offline

‘British’ a term of coded racism, says report

Home Secretary declares patriotism should not be left to the far right

The term “British” has racial connotations and will no longer serve as a description of the UK’s multicultural society, a report by an influential thinktank said last week. Its conclusion that the UK should be formally recognised as a multicultural society whose history needs to be “revised, rethought or jettisoned” attracted fierce criticism from Conservative MPs, who said it was an affront to the “native British” who needed to stand up for themselves. But Labour ministers have promised to study its findings in detail and are likely to give it a warm welcome.

The Runnymede Trust-sponsored Commission into the Future of Multi-ethnic Britain, chaired by Lord Parekh, a Labour peer and political scientist, also suggests it is time to review the privileged position of the Anglican church in public life, and to take measures to boost the number of black and Asian faces in parliament.

But it is a short section on “the future of Britishness” in the wide-ranging 400-page report that has sparked most controversy. It says devolution, the Good Friday peace agreement and globalisation have undermined the notion of Britishness.

It rejects “Englishness” as an alternative: “To be English, as the term is in practice used, is to be white. Britishness is not ideal, but at least it appears acceptable, particularly when suitably qualified - Black British, Indian British, British Muslim and so on.

“However, there is one major and so far insuperable barrier. Britishness, as much as Englishness, has systematic, largely unspoken, racial connotations. Whiteness nowhere features as an explicit condition of being British, but it is widely understood that Englishness, and therefore by extension Britishness is racially coded.”

The report points out that it has been said, “there ain’t no black in the union jack,” and there is an assumption that whiteness and Britishness go together like roast beef and yorkshire pudding.

The failure to include in schools a rewritten history of Britain as an imperial force involving dominance in Ireland, Africa, the Caribbean and Asia is proving to be a disaster, the report claims. It argues that racial and cultural differences have been “written out of the national story”.

The report calls for the establishment of a human rights commission, action on discriminatory police stop-and-search policies, and the scrapping of the voucher system for asylum seekers. It says it is also time to review the connections between church and state. Such a review would have to look at how other religions are discriminated against in “customs related to civic religion, for example daily prayers at Westminster and various religious ceremonies, including memorial events, in local government; the law of blasphemy; and the coronation oath”.

The Home Secretary, Jack Straw, blamed the lack of patriotism of the political left for allowing the modern British identity to be seen as “narrow, exclusionary and conservative”. Mr Straw declared himself proud to be British. The challenge now, he said, was to meld the enormous range of races, accents and attitudes into a single shared identity. “This is made even more difficult by the way those on the left turned their backs on the concept of patriotism and left the field to those on the far right. Unlike the Runnymede Trust, I firmly believe there is a future for Britain and a future for Britishness.”

Mr Straw said George Orwell’s observation 50 years ago that in leftwing circles it was felt that there was something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman still applied today. “Orwell wrote that ‘it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during God Save The King than of stealing from the poor box’.

“Given the tendency of some of the left to wash their hands of the whole notion of nationhood, it is perhaps not surprising that some people’s perception of Englishness and Britishness became a narrow, exclusionary, conservative one. That’s a view of Britishness that I don’t recognise,” Mr Straw added. “We all benefit, economically and socially, from our diversity and difference.”

Gerald Howarth, the Tory MP for Aldershot and a member of the Commons home affairs select committee, said the report represented social engineering on a massive scale. “It is an extraordinary affront to the 94% of the population which is not from ethnic minorities. The native British must stand up for themselves.”

Lord Tebbit, the former Tory party chairman, claimed the greatest conflicts in the world were the product of multicultural societies such as Yugoslavia, Sri Lanka and the former Soviet Union. “Since no one is being held hostage in this kingdom, and those who arrived recently have come to get away from their own countries and enjoy the benefits of this country, the best way forward is integration rather than separation into cultural ghettoes,” he said.

Lord Parekh said his commission wanted to redefine what it means to be British. There is a very important role for a common national culture and a common civic nationality,” he said. “But we are requesting that this common culture needs to be discussed and renegotiated. It does not imply that it is not a coherent idea.”

Too often minority ethnic groups were seen at best as “welcome tenants”, not as common owners of the country. “The British national identity should be so defined that we all feel comfortable with it and we all feel proud to be British,” he said.

(Above article by Alan Travis, The Guardian Weekly, October 19, 2000)

Think tank ridiculed for 'Britishness' racism claim

Politicians and racial equality groups joined forces on Wednesday to ridicule a report by an influential think tank saying the terms "British" and "Britishness" were racist and needed replacing or qualifying. Even Prime Minister Tony Blair criticised the authors of the report for allowing "themselves, willingly or unwillingly, to have the whole debate (on national identity) skewed," his official spokesman told reporters.

The Commission into the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain's report argued that because English people are generally white, the term British was perceived to imply the same and so ignored the country's ethnic mix. The report -- which also said the United Kingdom's history books needed rewriting because race differences had been "written out of the national story" -- prompted widespread disbelief and derision.

"Britishness, as much as Englishness, has systematic, largely unspoken, racial connotations," an extract of the report published in the press said. "It is widely understood that Englishness and therefore by extension Britishness is racially coded." "There ain't no black in the Union Jack," it added, parodying a nationalist racist slogan and going on to criticise the government's asylum policy for creating "racial and ethnic divisions".

Defending the report, slammed as "scaremongering" and "politically correct garbage", Commission chairman Lord Parekh said Britain also needed to acknowledge its multi- religious as well as multi-ethnic mix. "There is no standard norm of being British. We often say in parliamentary debates Britain is a Christian society," he told BBC radio. "Now what could that possibly mean?" "We do say Britain is a multi-ethnic society, but we find it difficult to say Britain is also a multi-religious society or if you like a multi-national society...It is about time we defined British in an inclusive and plural kind of way."

Home Secretary Jack Straw, who launched the report, sought to play down the controversy it had sparked, saying the concept of Britishness was already "an inclusive plural one". "I am proud to be English and proud to be British," he said. "For a small island, we encompass an enormous range or races, accents and attitudes."

But British Racial Equality Commissioner Raj Chandran said the 400-page report sponsored by the Runnymede Trust -- a think tank which investigates religious and racial issues -- would dent race relations, not help them. "I am not impressed at all by this," said Chandran "It is...scaremongering." "(Parekh) is unable...to make himself feel British. Most of us in the race issue at the moment are immigrants born abroad. As I see it, this report is going to damage good race relations."

Others said the think tank's proposal that the United Kingdom's history needed to be "revised, rethought or jettisoned", was an affront to the vast majority of Britons. "(The report) is politically correct garbage," said Conservative MP Gerald Howarth. "It is an extraordinary affront to the 94 percent of the population which is not from ethnic minorities. The native British must stand up for themselves."

Australia has a Green rev-head!

2007-04-29T12:37:00.000+11:00

A Greens MP is reconsidering his request for taxpayers to provide him with a gas-guzzling parliamentary car. Michael Organ, who was elected to Federal Parliament last month, originally wanted a $40,000 supercharged Holden Commodore S which drinks 12 litres per 100km.

But after questioning by reporters Mr Organ, the MP for the Wollongong-based seat of Cunningham, decided the sporty six-cylinder sedan might not be the best vehicle for someone elected on an environmental platform.

Federal parliamentarians can choose from the Commodore Executive, Acclaim, Berlina, standard S or the supercharged S version. In May, Special Minister of State Eric Abetz also approved the use of the new eco-friendly Toyota Prius. Senator Abetz said the Japanese-made Prius was fitted with a revolutionary new petrol/electric powerplant. "It has the performance of a standard sedan, but gets a remarkable 4.6 litres per 100km on city cycle," he said.

Mr Organ originally justified his choice of the supercharged Holden, saying he wanted a "safe and economical" car because of all the travelling he would have to do between Canberra and his home near Wollongong. Mr Organ, who has been temporarily issued with a Ford Falcon, said the term "supercharged" was "unfortunate" "I need a good safe car that's going to be efficient," he said. "I am already doing a lot of travelling and I just wanted a nice safe Australian car."

A few hours later, he said he had reconsidered and would ask for an LPG-powered sedan. "As you know, I have been a bit of a rev-head in the past," he said. "I am reconsidering. With all the pollution, we have to think about these things."

The Australian Democrats' Greg Barns said a Greens MP choosing the supercharged S model was "gross hypocrisy". "What it demonstrates is that the Greens tend to represent a rag-bag of views with no consistency," Mr Barns said.

Mr Organ won the formerly safe-Labor seat of Cunningham at a by-election forced by the sudden resignation of Stephen Martin. A combination of anti-ALP sentiment and environmental concerns led to the defeat of Labor candidate Sharon Bird.

(From the "Sunday Mail" of Dec. 29, 2002)

Lazy British police

2007-04-28T17:39:00.000+11:00

A man who caught a youth breaking into his garden shed successfully brought his own prosecution yesterday after police failed to act.

David Asher's 18-month fight for justice resulted in the boy, 14 at the time of the offence, being convicted of burglary with intent to steal. The district judge in the case described it as "unfortunate in the extreme" that the police had decided to take no action when faced with an implausible explanation by the suspect on the night.

Mr Asher, 49, a computer programmer, of Sable Crest, Bradford, West Yorks, managed to hang on to the intruder until police arrived despite being pelted with bricks by two accomplices. The boy was arrested, but several witnesses were never interviewed and statements in the case were not passed on to the Crown Prosecution Service.

When Mr Asher was told the suspect had been released because of insufficient evidence he demanded to know the youth's identity. He was told that they were prevented from doing so under the Data Protection Act until he managed to convince them they were wrong.

The youth, now 16, was finally dealt with at Bradford Youth Court yesterday when he denied the offence. He claimed that he had been taking a short cut through Mr Asher's garden and went into the shed to get out of the rain.

District Judge Roy Anderson imposed a six-month conditional discharge and ordered the boy's parents to pay 150 pounds towards costs.

(From January 23, 2003)

Doomsayers should stick to the facts

2007-04-27T16:35:00.000+11:00

By economist ALAN WOOD

A fog of green hysteria has descended over the global warming debate -- at home and abroad

Playwright David Williamson has taken the odd shot in his time at political correctness, but he is a zealous convert, it seems, to the new green religion. Williamson's Australia Day oration is laced with the usual green litany of looming disaster: powerful corporations in the US and Europe run the world; growth is god; galloping GNP growth means a galloping rate of increase in the rate at which the world's resources are consumed and a galloping rate of increased pollution and environmental degradation.

He accepts uncritically that the severity of the current drought and bushfires is partly due to global warming, and thinks worse is to come, thanks largely to President George W.Bush's refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. ``In effect he's declared that if there's a choice between slowing economic growth rates in the US and increasing floods, droughts, fires, cyclones and rising sea levels over the rest of the world, then to hell with the rest of world,'' according to Williamson. There are, however, some things about Australians Williamson likes -- our black sardonic humour, our energy, our directness and honesty, our hatred of pretentiousness. Any country with a keen eye for spotting wankers has to be way ahead of countries where the aforesaid activity is a prerequisite for social and political success, he says.

If Williamson was watching television on Australia Day morning he might have seen a program made by an Australian with all the characteristics he admires -- Phillip Sawyer, a retired abalone fisherman. Called In Flinders Wake, it was ostensibly the story of the mapping of the coast of South Australia by Matthew Flinders and French explorer Nicolas Baudin. But Sawyer, who gained a BSc before he went fishing, made it much more than that. His program was a celebration of the values of confidence and optimism in the future held by Flinders, the scientific community of his time and all the pioneers (such as Sawyer's own family) that followed them. He fears these values and the spirit of progress they embodied are being threatened by a green religion that focuses not on progress but on an apocalyptic spectre of environmental doom and a static paradigm of sustainability.

A long-time Labor Party member and activist, Sawyer sent a video of the program (which was made last year) to the Hawke-Wran review of the ALP, with a warning. Those in the ALP who saw the green movement as progressive were wrong. The green agenda often meant the extinction of workers' jobs and lifestyles, the greens were often unscientific and in fact antiscientific, and the movement ``was shot through with Trots and New Age religious freaks who used pseudo-science to bluff politicians and journalists, who don't know any science''. As a fisherman, Sawyer no doubt has first-hand experience of what uncritical acceptance of the green agenda by Labor can mean for jobs, just as timber workers have. He sees it as a battle between green science and green religion. His faith in science is a touch naive.

Scientists are among the leading preachers of the new green gospel. This has become disgracefully evident in the debate over a book by a Danish statistician, Bjorn Lomborg. The book -- The Skeptical Environmentalist (Cambridge University Press, 2001) -- sets out, using mainstream data sources such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the UN, to test the various claims made about the deteriorating world environment made by the greens.

He finds many of these claims don't stand up. The world isn't running out of energy or natural resources, poverty has been reduced more in the past 50 years than the previous 500, air pollution has declined, less people are starving and food is more plentiful. Lomborg's aim is to ensure that important policy choices are made on the basis of the best available information. An example he gives is that economic analyses show it would be far more expensive to cut carbon dioxide emissions radically than to pay the costs of adaptation to higher temperatures. While Kyoto would have negligible impact on climate change, the cost to the US per year of implementing it could provide access to basic health, education, water and sanitation for everyone.

Lomborg invites debate about the statistics and the claims he makes based on them, but what he has got in return is assertion and abuse, not objective examination of his claims. The latest outrage is a finding by a body known as the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty that Lomborg's book ``falls within the concept of scientific dishonesty''. This curiously medieval sounding body has behaved much like an inquisition. Its inquiry was at the urging of some scientists who had already attacked Lomborg in the journal Scientific American last year. The DCSD made no attempt to check the validity of Lomborg's findings, nor does it offer any example of dishonesty or distortion. Instead it simply reproduces a summary of the articles in the Scientific American. It virtually ignored Lomborg's detailed reply to those articles.

Patrick Moore, a co-founder and a former international director of Greenpeace, called that reply brilliant, and went on to attack the unbridled conceit of the extreme environmental movement. ``They are convinced the world is coming to an end and no amount of facts or statistics will sway them from their self-righteous dogmatism,'' he said. The Economist has called the panel's ruling shameful and incompetent, as it is. So far Lomborg's criticism of the greens' litany of doom remains far more substantial than any of the attacks on it. And the available evidence is that economic growth in the developed world leads to environmental improvement and in the developing world to less poverty and starvation.

The above article originally appeared on Jan. 28 2003

2007-04-26T14:06:00.001+11:00

An AIDS vaccine for blacks and Asians only

NEW YORK - This morning, Brisbane, Calif.-based VaxGen unveiled the results of the first AIDS vaccine to finish human clinical trials. Overall, the HIV vaccine didn't work. But it does seem to have been effective in blacks and Asians, a finding that is sure to stir up controversy.

Already, expectations for VaxGen's AIDSVax were somewhat lowered: The bar of success had been placed at reducing infections by a mere 30%. But the 3,000 volunteers who received the vaccine were only 3.8% less likely to be infected with HIV than 1,500 volunteers who received only the placebo. That small benefit could occur purely by chance.

But the results were stunningly different among the 314 black volunteers, who saw their rate of infection reduced by a whopping 78%. When Asian and black volunteers were lumped together, the reduction was 67%. But because these results came from such small subsets of the study, it is still somewhat difficult to be sure of the results. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration might not be willing to put a vaccine on the market based on such limited data.

How skimpy is the data? A few more patients getting the disease in the black subgroup would have completely changed the results. Moreover, this particular vaccine would not be effective in sub-Saharan Africa, where AIDS has been most devastating. It targets a strain of the HIV virus that is predominant only in Europe and Asia.

Why would an AIDS vaccine work along racial lines? Geneticists have tried to have it both ways when it comes to genetic diversity. Companies like Myriad Genetics and DeCode Genetics have tried to use particular populations to find genes linked to disease. At the same time, many prominent geneticists, including those who mapped the human genome, have publicly said that genetic differences, especially those that occur along racial lines, don't amount to much.

But there are genes that are more likely to occur in Europeans, who are descended from a relatively tiny population that made its way up the continent, than in Africans. (There is also far more genetic diversity in Africa than anywhere else.) And sometimes these genes are medically important enough that guessing at their presence based on skin color is worthwhile to some doctors. For instance, some blood pressure medicines tend not to work as well in African-Americans as in Caucasians.

VaxGen, however, says that blacks and Asians also had higher elevations of antibodies against the proteins in AIDSVax. That could mean there is a genetic difference that determines whether the vaccine works, and that an assay might measure how effective the vaccine is in a particular patient. On its conference call today, VaxGen spoke about finding such an assay. That would be a step in the right direction to making this vaccine usable.

In a prepared statement, VaxGen co-founder, President and Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Donald Francis said, "The results from this groundbreaking effort will provide new insights into HIV and hopefully pave the way to ever more effective vaccines." The depressing thing for VaxGen investors is that the next effective vaccine could very well come from Aventis or Merck, both of which are working to develop their own AIDS vaccines.

AIDS activists have plenty to be sad about as well. The dream of a widely usable AIDS vaccine just slipped a little further away. At the same time, Roche and Trimeris announced that, at least in Europe, their widely anticipated AIDS drug Fuzeon would cost about $20,000 a year--twice as much as many currently available treatments. The companies explain the high price by saying that the drug is expensive to make.

(This article from Feb 24, 2003 is still up on Forbes but Google does not have it and it seems to have been totally forgotten. The company that made the vaccine has now just about gone broke)

D'OH

2007-04-25T15:18:00.000+11:00

A lazy, gluttonous loser who often tries to strangle his son has been voted the world's best father. How has Homer Simpson become Everyman?

By Bryan Appleyard (Originally written April, 2002)

His social security number is 568-47-0008. He lives at 742 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield. The state is unknown but internal evidence suggests it lies to the west of the Mississippi. His favourite foods, based on the number of times he has referred to them, are: burgers, hot dogs, pizza, chocolate, beer, doughnuts, sprinkles, pancakes, beer nuts and free goo. His weight fluctuates between 110kg and 120kg.

Born on May 12, 1956, he was raised by his father, Abraham, who struggled unsuccessfully to compensate for the absence of his mother, who had run away to be a full-time hippie. He graduated at the bottom of his high school class. After school, he was more or less unemployable, but he ended up as a safety officer at Springfield's nuclear power plant, owing to an insane misjudgment by its decrepit owner, the evil Montgomery Burns. There he won a special award for remaining at entry-level grade longer than any other employee.

He tried various business enterprises -- telemarketing, fraud, door-to-door salesman for Slash-Co knives, selling sugar salvaged from a crashed sugar truck, managing a country music star, snow remover, selling grease, selling rides on his son's elephant, selling tickets to see his daughter's angel and so on. And he tried various other jobs - bowling alley clerk, car designer, astronaut, mini-golf attendant, team mascot, boxer, blackjack dealer and so on. But all failed.

He drinks too much, eats too much and his inner life is entirely dominated by beer, doughnuts, television and periodic bouts of drooling lust, especially when women's beach volleyball is on the sports channel.

The one success in his life was the wooing and winning of his high school sweetheart, Marge Bouvier, with whom he has three children. She was pregnant when they married and they had to cross the state line to get to Shotgun Pete's wedding chapel. Despite temptations on both sides, he has always remained true to Marge and she to him. She is dumb, but virtuous. Everybody knows she is too good for him. Everybody except Marge.

His brilliant daughter Lisa humiliates him, he frequently tries to strangle his son, Bart, and he is only occasionally aware of the existence of his baby Maggie. Yet he loves his children to distraction.

He still believes in God, a vast white-bearded figure with five fingers on each hand as opposed to the four possessed by all the other characters, and God, in spite of everything, believes in him. For this is Homer Simpson, our age's Everyman and one of the most vivid, brilliant fictional creations of our time.

In a poll of British children conducted by Woolworths, he was voted best dad in the world. Across the world, the gormless face and globular body of this fat, gluttonous, yellow-skinned oaf appears on T-shirts, oven gloves and car windscreen cleaners.

Rubber Homer dolls are pinned by four suction cups to windows from Adelaide to Tokyo. As a global brand, he is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. His sayings are immortalised in books and on Internet "random quote generators". His philosophy is analysed by academics, and his connection to God inspires clergymen. Psychologists dissect his relationship to his children. Rupert Murdoch, Stephen Hawking and just about every Hollywood star are happy to be drawn alongside him. Al Gore wanted to be, but they wouldn't let him. And Homer himself has a star on the Walk of Fame in Hollywood.

THIS MALODOROUS FLOP, THIS SLY, work-shy, cowardly loser is a superstar. Homer Simpson is an icon, an emblem, a distillation of ... what? What exactly is it about Homer?

He was never meant to be the hero of The Simpsons. Matt Groening, the show's creator, had roughly modelled the family on his own and had conceived of his own alter ego, the son, Bart, as the central character. Early marketing of the show made his intentions clear. Bart's catchlines - "Eat my shorts", "Don't have a cow, man", "Underachiever and proud of it"- were those of the show as a whole.

The idea was that this was a children's show designed to annoy and, therefore, attract adults. But this was a limited objective that caused problems for the writing team. "As time goes on," says David Silverman, an animation director, "it gets more difficult to do episodes based on Bart. How many times can you say, 'Hey, that's another Barty thing he's done'? Homer is a more varied character. He gives you more avenues."

"There's just so many layers to Homer," says the executive producer Mike Scully. It was also clear that more adults were watching and that even the children were more drawn to Homer than Bart. This was, in part, because Homer had become a nicer guy than originally intended. In the first episodes he was a harsh, crude, unsympathetic character. But the voice didn't quite fit. Dan Castellaneta, the voice of Homer, had initially copied the growl of Walter Matthau. "It was the shape of the mouth", he said. "I started with Walter Matthau and dropped deeper naturally -- now I believe I'll be Homer until I die"

The voice was warm and vulnerable and it made Homer warm and vulnerable. He would exclaim "D'oh!" when things went wrong. This was originally just scripted as "an annoyed grunt" but Castellaneta adapted his interpretation from the slightly longer version - "Doooooh!" - often heard in Laurel and Hardy films. It was perfect. Not only did it enter the Oxford English Dictionary, it also became our age's version of the universal human cry against the perversity and intransigence of the world. Like Job, Homer knew that man was born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards, but, also like Job, he couldn't silence his anguished protest.

Yet, unlike Job, Homer is not an upright and virtuous man. He is, on the face of it, the paternal role model from hell. The achievement of which he is proudest is discovering a meal between breakfast and brunch. Cigarettes are about the only vice he doesn't have. Advising Bart, he says: "If you don't like your job, you don't strike. You just go in every day and do it really half-assed. That's the American way."

And again to Bart: "Remember, son, the trick to avoiding jury duty is to say you're prejudiced against all races." Raising a can of Duff beer, he toasts: "To alcohol. The cause of - and solution to - all of life's problems." He calls his TV set his "teacher, mother, secret lover". Merely the mention of fatty food or the sight of the volleyball players can start gobbets of saliva dribbling from his lower lip.

He is, we are repeatedly told, physically unpleasant. He smells, as Marge's two sisters keep pointing out, terrible. He eats with an animalistic intensity. Indeed, one of the show's writers describes him as "a dog trapped inside a man's body".

He is, in short, a slob. Or, rather, he is the slob, the yardstick for all other slobbery, the distillation of all the crude appetites, the disgusting selfish impulses, the pernicious habits and low, instant gratifications that afflict us all. More precisely, he is the man - lowlife masculinity in all its sweaty awfulness.

"If guys are honest", says Scully, "they realize there's a lot of Homer in most of us. The only difference is that Homer says things out loud".

The simple, moralistic reaction is to dismiss Homer as a bad guy. Indeed, President George Bush - the previous one - struck this posture in the 1992 election campaign when he said: "We need a nation closer to the Waltons than the Simpsons." About the same time, the chain-store JC Penney banned the sale of Simpsons T-shirts, under pressure from religious groups. To this day the show is banned in Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic as an affront to family values.

But Bush lost the election and Americans voted for Homer or, rather, Bill Clinton - another libidinous, gluttonous man. The 1990s were called the Clinton years, but they weren't, they were the Homer years. The point was that the Waltons were all very well - saintly, hard-working, salt-of-the-earth types - but they weren't real. They were two-dimensional prigs and nobody could love them. The more Homer aimed low and missed, the more we loved him. He was real because he was at one with his world. He pursued the gratifications it offered and said "D'oh!" when they turned sour or were denied him. That's what reality is, constant striving and constant disappointment. Homer may be a jerk, but he was a jerk like us.

But Homer studies have now moved beyond that simple formula. Perhaps it was the ending of the cold war and collapse of the old polarities. People no longer saw things in black and white: they began to see the limitless shades of grey -- or, rather, yellow. The good-guy, bad-guy opposition ceased to convince. We looked more closely at Homer and at our own feelings of affection for the big yellow guy.

"There's a scene when Marge comes home from the school," says Adrienne Katz of the charity Young Voice. "She's been to a talk on how to be a good father and, of course, Homer didn't go. One of the things she was told was that a father should know the names of and recognise his son's friends. Homer doesn't know any of them - he just calls them 'the spotty one' or 'the red-haired one'.

"But he is a good father and he shows that these tests don't work. He fails every test. But it all hinges on the quality of his relationship with Bart, and it is good. Bart doesn't find him useless." Katz is typical of the new wave of Homerphiles. They have seen the moral ambiguity of the man: utterly villainous on the surface but, just beneath, almost saintly.

"He's a failure, but he never loses our sympathy," says Alistair McCleery, professor of literature at Edinburgh's Napier University. "He always gives in to temptation but he always comes back to home and hearth in a reaffirmation of family values. There are two episodes in which he is tempted to commit adultery, but on both occasions he can't do it because he thinks of Marge. The family remains a core value in American society, even among liberal university students."

McCleery gives a lecture at Napier entitled Having the Donut and Eating It: Self-reflexivity in The Simpsons.

A key aspect of the new academic appeal of Homer is that he is a father, and fatherhood is a growing area of studies. The theme is carried back a generation via Homer's relationship to his own father, Abe. This is, again, superficially appalling. Abe is in a nursing home, he is dotty and, when he is not asleep, prone to either absent-mindedness or malevolent impatience. Also, as Bart reveals at one point, the family has been hypnotised not to hear a word he says.

But Abe is Homer. When somebody pulls back his facial skin, he turns into his son. They are both failures and equally vulnerable. "Thank you for not mentioning the outside world," says the sign outside the nursing home. Also, look at their names - Homer, patriarch of Western civilisation, and Abraham, founding father of the three great monotheistic religions. These are the ultimate fathers.

But there is another, even bigger father in the show - God. Though the prevailing ideology of The Simpsons is secular, liberal and rather anti-religious, it is the only American show to acknowledge the reality of American religiosity. One California State University survey showed that 70 per cent of Simpsons plots had some religious content and ten per cent had distinct religious themes. And Matt Groening has said: "Right-wingers complain there's no God on TV - not only do the Simpsons go to church, they actually speak to God from time to time."

Lovejoy, the local minister, and Ned Flanders, the Simpsons' evangelical neighbour - are both big irritants to Homer. The weary and rather faithless Lovejoy's sermons bore him to death and Flanders' sanctity inspires Homer to acts of revenge - he dumps rubbish in his yard and steals his air-conditioning unit. Flanders also takes a mafia bullet intended for Homer, though he is saved by the piece of the true cross he keeps with him at all times.

Worst of all for Flanders, Homer in one episode has brain surgery that raises his IQ by 50 points, and he writes down a proof that there is no God. Flanders scoffs but, on reading it, sees that it is unarguable. He burns the paper, saying: "Can't let this get out."

But in fact, Homer's God does exist, though He may be a bit unorthodox. "I feel this incredible surge of power", Homer says at one point, "like God must feel when he's holding a gun." His faith in the Bible is strictly limited: "If the Bible has taught us nothing else, and it hasn't, it's that girls should stick to girls' sports, such as hot-oil wrestling, foxy boxy and such and such."

But when Homer stops going to church, God descends from heaven to talk to him about it. They chat on the sofa and God is persuaded that Homer's version of religion is fair enough. It is certainly superior to Lovejoy's melancholy creed -- One of the signs outside his church reads: "God welcomes his victims". Homer, in contrast sees God as a nice guy who is real enough to be ambiguous "He's always happy", he says of God. "No, wait, he's always mad." "For Homer," says Tony Campolo, a professor of sociology, "God is like a parachute he hopes he never has to use, but he wants God to be there, just in case. When Homer is in deep trouble, he turns to God and begs for miracles, but when they do happen, they do not make him into a man of faith or deep moral convictions. Once a crisis has passed, Homer's thinking about God is over. God, for him, is somebody you bargain with in times of trouble, making all kinds of promises to change (which are never lived out), if God will just deliver on a needed miracle."

However, Homer fears he is on the losing side. "This series," writes Campolo, "leaves little doubt that Homer has a psychologically repressed conviction that he, himself, falls into the category of those bound for hell". Like a Graham Greene character, the very fervency of his belief in the day of judgment convinces him that he must be damned.

Just as his moral character is riven with ambiguity, so Homer's spiritual life balances uneasily on a contradiction: he rants atheistically against Flanders but, in his heart, he believes unquestioningly. And this, in the end, points to Homer's deep, if primitive, religious orthodoxy. In spite of himself, he is saved by the greatest of all Christian qualities - love. His vices are contained and his wounds healed by the love of his family. It is not just that he always returns to Marge; it is also that he both gives and receives unqualified love.

At one point Mr Burns offers him $lm for a teddy bear, but he turns it down because Maggie has grown so attached to the toy. And, in a fantasy sequence in which Lisa is about to marry an English fop named Hugh, she calls off the wedding because the cad turns up his snobbish nose at the spectacle of Homer. Her father represents everything his prodigiously intelligent and gifted daughter despises but, when the chips are down, her love for him comes first.

Homer is a colossal figure, bigger than either he or his creators fully understand or ever intended. He took over the show from Bart and he escaped the confines of the writers' and producers' secular imaginations. Much of the credit for this must go to Dan Castellaneta, a truly great voice artist, whose nurturing of the character has kept him balanced on a moral and spiritual tightrope.

But even more of the credit should go to the Americans' capacity for redeeming themselves through myth and laughter. Homer embodies the possibility that, foolish and stupid as we are, we can still be saved, not as angels but as ourselves. We can be loved for being the losers we are. A modern Job, a contemporary Sancho Panza, a petit bourgeois Falstaff, Homer Simpson says it for us all -- "D'oh!".

FSU prof praised for role in book on Nazi war criminals

2007-04-24T12:41:00.000+11:00

By Melanie Yeager

When a publisher first approached Robert Gellately about editing a psychiatrist's interviews with Nazi war criminals, he wasn't so keen on the idea. Editing can be very time-consuming, and Gellately had his own history books to write. But ultimately he didn't turn down the chance. Now the book the Florida State University professor fine-tuned - "The Nuremberg Interviews" - is being heralded for giving the world new insights into the chilling thoughts of Nazi leaders responsible for the Holocaust, the systematic extermination of more than 6 million Jews during World War II. The book, translated into nine different languages so that it can be sold from Brazil to Sweden, has garnered positive reviews in Newsweek and The New York Times.

"There is this kind of inner logic behind the outer madness," Gellately said of the book's 33 interviews. "That's the horror of the thing." That's because, Gellately said, for the most part, these Nazi rulers were as normal as next-door neighbors. "I think we all have an idea about what makes the Nazis tick. Some of us think they were demonic or crazy ... Really, two people in the book are like that, but they are not the interesting ones," Gellately said. "Most of the other ones are like you and me. They are well-educated, rational, sensible."

They pour out their thoughts to Dr. Leon Goldensohn, a U.S. Army psychiatrist, who kept detailed notes of his interviews with the war criminals and witnesses awaiting trial in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1946. Goldensohn died in 1961 at the age of 50. Apparently, his notes sat mostly untouched in his family's home for about 50 years until they were handed over to Gellately. "One fine day, this huge carton of stuff arrived," Gellately said. "I would say it was a good foot-and-a-half thick." Gellately went to work fact-checking spellings of names - many written more than one way - dates and military ranks. It was an exhausting task that took two years.

In some cases, Gellately had to find the truth and footnote it. "He's being lied to, and he's not aware of it. But I have to be aware of it," Gellately said. Other places in Goldensohn's notes, Gellately had to clear up the confusion. When Goldensohn asks a defendant how it feels to be involved in killing 5 million Jews, Gellately has to explain why 5 million was the best estimate at the time and cite the sources behind historians' 6 million count decades later.

Goldensohn, who was Jewish, sets out to understand what mentally ails these men. He keeps his distance in his notes, calling them "subjects" rather than by name. "It must have been nightmarish for him personally, but he retains his cool - mostly," Gellately said.

"They had a sense of duty, perverted, but they were rational, kind of cold, calculating killers," he said, "not this emotional, go-out-and-shoot-their-friend-in-the-woods kind of thing. You can't prove these were guys that actually hated the Jews or actually ever hit anyone."

Coming up next: Hitler vs. Stalin

Gellately, an expert on German and Russian history, has written several books that deal with the history of anti-Semitism and the Third Reich. FSU wooed Gellately to its history department last year from The Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University in Massachusetts. He teaches classes such as "Comparative Genocide in the 20th Century" and "History of Racial Thought in Modern Europe."

Neil Jumonville, chairman of FSU's history department, said Gellately's work provides important lessons for today's world. "His work on Hitler and his forthcoming work on Stalin have great relevance. That is, in a world that might be more at war after the fall of the Berlin Wall than it was during the Cold War, the study of violence and absolutism is very important," Jumonville said. "America, in this age of terrorism, might have more determined enemies than we have had since the era Gellately studies."

Gellately, a native of Newfoundland, is on research leave. Now that he's finished with Goldensohn's writings, he hopes to finish a book comparing Hitler and Stalin next year. He works seven days a week. "I refuse to call it 'workaholic' because it means I have some type of pathological disease," Gellately said. "But I work on it all the time." His editing work was done just as intensely, he said.

"Gellately has done a masterly job of editing," wrote William Grimes in Friday's New York Times. "In a short introduction, he lays out the legal framework of the trials and Goldensohn's role. Footnotes are kept to a minimum. Like Goldensohn, Mr. Gellately prefers to step aside and let the defendants and witnesses speak for themselves. Their testimony, vivid and chilling, requires no commentary."

Gellately said he felt he had made a commitment to historic truth. "I don't have an intention that everybody will react to the book the same way," Gellately said. "I really think it will leave an impression on everybody."

(Originally published on Nov. 28, 2004 in the Tallahassee Democrat)

Hitler: green guru

2007-04-23T15:28:00.001+11:00

By Australian columnist Andrew Bolt

The big risk in making films about Hitler isn't that you make the Nazi dictator look too nice. It's the very opposite, as we saw this week with Channel 7's hit mini-series, Hitler: The Rise of Evil. The real danger is making Hitler seem plainly crazy and evil - leaving viewers unable to understand why such a man won so much support from so many people, and not only Germans. We need instead to know what led people to admire Hitler, rather than to see him for what he was: an enemy of freedom. We need to know this, because some of the same cultural forces that helped Hitler -- such as the green movement -- are among us again today.

Of course I'm not saying that green activists are closet Nazis. Nor do I think Australians will ever pull on jackboots, torch Parliament House and fling liberal politicians into concentration camps. Still . . .

There is no one reason for Hitler's rise. Luck had something to do with it, so did violence. The men who opposed him were weak. But that wasn't all. Hitler's preaching about German strength and destiny was water in the desert to the millions of Germans who'd been stripped of pride, security and hope by their humiliating defeat in World War I, and the terrible unemployment that followed.

The world was also mad then with the idea that a dictatorial government should run the economy itself and make it "efficient", rather than let people make their own decisions. The Nazis -- National Socialists -- promised some of that, and their sibling rivals in the Communist Party more.

The theory of eugenics -- breeding only healthy people -- was also in fashion, along with a cult of health. The Nazis, with their youth camps and praise of strong bodies and a strong people, endorsed all that, and soon were killing the retarded, the gay and the different.

Tribalism was popular, too. People weren't individuals, but members of a class, as the communists argued, or of a race, as the Nazis said. Free from freedom -- what a relief for the scared!

You'd think we'd have learned. But too much of such thinking is back and changing us so fast that we can't say how our society will look by the time we die. A kind of eugenics is with us again, along with an obsession for perfect bodies. Children in the womb are being killed just weeks before birth for the sin of being a dwarf, for instance, and famed animal rights philosopher Peter Singer wants parents free to kill deformed children in their first month of life. Meanwhile support for euthanasia for the sick, tired or incompetent grows.

As for tribalism, that's also back -- and as official policy. We now pay people to bury their individuality in tribes, giving them multicultural grants or even an Aboriginal "parliament".

But most dangerous is that we strip our children of pride, security and even hope. They are taught that God is dead, our institutions corrupt, our people racist, our land ruined, our past evil and our future doomed by global warming.

Many have also watched one of their parents leave the family home, which to some must seem a betrayal.

They are then fed a culture which romanticises violence and worships sex -- telling them there is nothing more to life than the cravings of their bodies. No one can live like this and be fulfilled. People need to feel part of something bigger and better than ourselves -- a family, or a church, or a tradition or a country. Or, as a devil may whisper, the greens. The greens. Here's a quote which may sound very familiar -- at least in part.

"We recognise that separating humanity from nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind's own destruction and to the death of nations. "Only through a re-integration of humanity into the whole of nature can our people be made stronger . . . "This striving toward connectedness with the totality of life, with nature itself, a nature into which we are born, this is the deepest meaning and the true essence of National Socialist thought."

That was Ernst Lehmann, a leading biologist under the Nazi regime, in 1934, and he wasn't alone. Hitler, for one, was an avid vegetarian and green, addicted to homeopathic cures. His regime sponsored the creation of organic farming, and SS leader Heinrich Himmler even grew herbs on his own organic farm with which to treat his beloved troops.

Hitler also banned medical experiments on animals, but not, as we know to our grief, on Jewish children. And he created many national parks, particularly for Germany's "sacred" forests. This isn't a coincidence. The Nazis drew heavily on a romantic, anti-science, nature worshipping, communal and anti-capitalist movement that tied German identity to German forests. In fact, Professor Raymond Dominick notes in his book, The Environmental Movement in Germany, two-thirds of the members of Germany's main nature clubs had joined the Nazi Party by 1939, compared with just 10 per cent of all men. The Nazis also absorbed the German Youth Movement, the Wandervogel, which talked of our mystical relationship with the earth.

Peter Staudenmaier, co-author of "Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience", says it was for the Wandervogel that the philosopher Ludwig Klages wrote his influential essay Man and Earth in 1913. In it, Klages warned of the growing extinction of species, the destruction of forests, the genocide of aboriginal peoples, the disruption of the ecosystem and the killing of whales. People were losing their relationship with nature, he warned.

Heard all that recently? I'm not surprised. This essay by this notorious anti-Semite was republished in 1980 to mark the birth of the German Greens -- the party that inspired the creation of our own Greens party. Its message is much as Hitler's own in Mein Kampf: "When people attempt to rebel against the iron logic of nature, they come into conflict with the very same principles to which they owe their existence as human beings. Their actions against nature must lead to their own downfall."

Why does this matter now? Because we must learn that people who want animals to be treated like humans really want humans to be treated like animals. We must realise a movement that stresses "natural order" and the low place of man in a fragile world, is more likely to think man is too insignificant to stand in the way of Mother Earth, or the Fatherland, or some other man-hating god.

We see it already. A Greenpeace co-founder, Paul Watson, called humans the "AIDS of the earth", and one of the three key founders of the German Greens, Herbert Gruhl, said the environmental crisis was so acute the state needed perhaps "dictatorial powers". And our growing church of nature worshippers insist that science make way for their fundamentalist religion, bringing us closer to a society in which muscle, not minds, must rule. It's as a former head of Greenpeace International, Patrick Moore, says: "In the name of speaking for the trees and other species, we are faced with a movement that would usher in an era of eco-fascism." This threat is still small. But if we don't resist it today, who knows where it will sweep us tomorrow?

From the Melbourne Herald-Sun, July 21, 2003.

There is a more comprehensive coverage of the above topic reviewed here

The profits of doom

2007-04-22T09:36:00.000+11:00

Matt Ridley celebrates Bjorn Lomborg, the environmentalist brave enough to tell the truth -- that the end is not nigh

At the Christmas cabaret in the politics department of Aarhus University in Denmark last year, the cast members joined together at the end to sing a song about one of the associate professors. "Bjorn, when will you come back?" went the refrain. "Don"t just get lost out in the world." (It was better in Danish.)

Bjorn Lomborg -- young, blond, piano-playing, but basically a statistics nerd -- may not be back soon. He has just succeeded Monsanto as the official chief villain of the world environmental movement. In January Scientific American devoted 11 pages to an unattractive attempt to attack his work. He had a pie thrown in his face when he spoke in Oxford last September.

The great and the good of greendom are competing to find epithets for him: "Wilful ignorance, selective quotations, destructive campaigning," says E.O. Wilson, guru of biodiversity. "Lacks even a preliminary understanding of the science in question," says Norman Myers, guru of extinction. His book is "nothing more than a diatribe", says Lester Brown, serial predictor of imminent global famine. Stephen Schneider, high priest of global warming, even berates Cambridge University Press for publishing it.

What can this mild statistician have said to annoy these great men so? In 1996 he published an obscure but brilliant article on game theory, which earned him an invitation to a conference on "computable economics" in Los Angeles (and an offer of a job at the University of California). While browsing in a bookshop there he came across a profile in Wired magazine of the late Julian Simon, an economist, who claimed, with graphs, that on most measures the environment was improving, not getting worse. Irritated, Lomborg went back to Denmark and set his students the exercise of finding the flaw in Simon"s statistics.

They could find none. So Lomborg wrote The Skeptical Environmentalist, which not only endorses most of Simon"s claims, but also goes further, providing an immense compendium of factual evidence that the litany of environmental gloom we hear is mostly either exaggerated (species extinction, global warming) or wrong (population, air and water pollution, natural resources, food and hunger, health and life-expectancy, waste, forest loss).

You might think that environmentalists would welcome such news. Having argued that we should find a way to live sustainably on the planet, they ought to be pleased that population growth is falling faster (in percentage and absolute terms) than anybody predicted even ten years ago; that per-capita food production is rising rapidly, even in the developing world; that all measures of air pollution are falling almost everywhere; that oil, gas and minerals are not running out nearly as fast as was predicted in the 1970s; and so on.

Instead they are beside themselves with fury. It cannot be Lomborg"s politics that annoy them. He is leftish, concerned about world poverty, and no fan of big business. It cannot be his recommendations: in favour of renewable energy and worried about the pollution that is getting worse. Vegetarian, he rides a bicycle and approves of Denmark"s punitive car taxes. His sin -- his heresy -- is to be optimistic.

This is very threatening to lots of people"s livelihoods. The environmental movement raises most of its funds through direct mail, paid advertising and news coverage. A steady supply of peril is essential fuel for all three. H.L. Mencken said, "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and hence clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

For instance, remember acid rain in the 1980s and sperm counts in the 1990s? "There is no evidence of a general or unusual decline of forests in the United States or Canada due to acid rain," concluded the official independent study of the subject. Sperm counts are not falling. If you do not believe me, look up the statistics. Lomborg did.

The media, too, prefer pessimism. When the United Nations panel on global warming produced new estimates of the rise in temperature by 2100, they gave a range of 1.4 to 5.8C. CNN, CBS, Time and the New York Times all quoted only the high figure and omitted the low one.

An increasing number of scientists have vested interests in pessimism, too. The study of global warming has brought them fame, funds, speaking fees and room service. Lomborg"s crime is to rain on their parade.

In the Scientific American critique, four leading environmental scientists lambasted Lomborg. The magazine refused Lomborg the right to reply in the same issue, refused to post his response on its website immediately, and threatened him for infringement of copyright when he tried to reproduce their articles, with his responses, on his own website.

Yet the Scientific American articles are devastating not to Lomborg, but to his critics. Again and again, before insulting him, the critics concede, through gritted teeth, that he has got his facts right. In two cases, Stephen Schneider accuses Lomborg of misquoting sources and promptly does so himself. In the first case, Schneider"s response "completely misunderstands what we have done", according to Richard Lindzen, the original author of work on the "iris effect" and upper-level cirrus clouds. In the second, Eigil Friis-Christensen says that Schneider "makes three unsubstantiated statements regarding our studies on the effect of cosmic rays on global cloud cover". Result: there are worse howlers in Schneider"s short article than in Lomborg"s whole book.

By the end of 11 pages, the Scientific American critics have found two certain errors in Lomborg"s work. In one he uses the word "catalyse" instead of "electrolyse". In the other he refers to 20 per cent of energy use, when he means 20 per cent of electricity generation. You get the drift.

What the affair reveals is how much environmentalists are now the establishment, accustomed to doing the criticising, not being criticised. The editor of Scientific American, apparently without irony, condemns Lomborg for his "presumption" in challenging "investigators who have devoted their lives" to the subject, as if seniority defined truth.

Lomborg is also criticised for his effrontery in challenging the widely accepted figure that 40,000 species become extinct every year. The number was first used in 1979 by the British scientist Norman Myers. Yet what was the evidence for it? Here is what Myers actually said: "Let us suppose that, as a consequence of this manhandling of the natural environments, the final one-quarter of this century witnesses the elimination of one million species, a far from unlikely prospect. This would work out, during the course of 25 years, at an average rate of 40,000 species per year." That"s it. No data at all; just a circular assumption: if 40,000 species go extinct a year, then 40,000 species go extinct a year. QED.

Now look where this little trick of arithmetic has got Myers. He describes himself thus: "Norman Myers is an Honorary Visiting Fellow of Oxford University. He has served as visiting professor at universities from Harvard to Stanford, and is a foreign member of the US National Academy of Sciences. He works as an independent scientist, undertaking research projects for the US National Research Council, the World Bank and United Nations agencies. He has received the UNEP environment prize, the Volvo environment prize and, most recently, the 2001 Blue Planet prize." (Myers"s share of the Volvo prize was worth $130,000; Lomborg does not own a car.)

Lomborg does not deny that species are becoming extinct at an unnaturally high rate, but he cites a far from conservative calculation that this rate may reach about 0.7 per cent in 50 years, not the 25 to 75 per cent implied by Myers, and calls it "not a catastrophe but a problem -- one of many that mankind still needs to solve". Greens are trying to portray Lomborg as a sort of Pollyanna Pangloss with her head in the sand. But Lomborg does not dispute the need to save the planet, only the assertion that this is impossibly difficult and the particular priorities foisted on us by the big environmental pressure groups.

Forty years ago this year, Rachel Carson, in her book Silent Spring, alerted a complacent world to the dangers posed by pesticides. Vilified by the chemical industry, Carson was already dying of cancer when the book was published. In the intervening years the environmental movement has turned from David into Goliath. With huge advertising budgets and ready access to the media, it can dominate the news, terrify multinational companies and expect to be invited to policy discussions at the highest levels. It is the bully now.

Consider the treatment meted out to Julian Simon for having the temerity to be right. In 1990 Simon won $576.07 in settlement of a wager from the environmentalist Paul Ehrlich. Simon had bet him that the prices of metals would fall during the 1980s and Ehrlich accepted "Simon"s astonishing offer before other greedy people jump in".

When, a decade later, Simon won easily, Ehrlich refused a rematch and called Simon an imbecile in a speech. Ehrlich, who, in contrast, won a "genius award" from the MacArthur Foundation, is the man who argued in 1967 that with the world on the brink of starvation the West "should no longer send emergency aid to countries such as India where sober analysis shows a hopeless imbalance between food production and population". Since then India has doubled its population, more than doubled its food production, increased its cultivated land acreage by only 5 per cent and begun to export food. Hopeless?

The pessimists argue that Lomborg"s good news might lead to complacency. But Ehrlich"s counsel of despair is far more dangerous. Many people now work to improve the environment at a local level with optimism that they can make the world a better place. To be constantly told by the big pressure groups that all is doom and gloom is no help. There is something rotten in the state of environmentalism. It lies not just in the petty factual dishonesty that is rife within the movement -- Stephen Schneider once said, "We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts we might have" -- but in the very philosophy that lies at the heart of greenery: the belief in constraint and retreat.

If six billion people have both more food and more forest than their three billion parents did; if the prices of copper, wheat and natural gas are going down, not up; if there are 20 times more carcinogens in three cups of organic coffee than in daily dietary exposure to the worst pesticide both before and after the DDT ban; if renewable resources such as whales are more easily exhausted than non-renewables such as coal; if lower infant mortality leads to falling populations, not rising ones, then perhaps we need to think differently about what sustainability means. Perhaps the most sustainable thing we can do is develop new technology, increase trade and spread affluence.

Nor will it do to claim that these successes have come from green pressure. The reason so many environmental trends are benign is not because of legislation, let alone protest. Apart from the ozone layer and city smogs, where campaigns probably did accelerate change, most improvements have been brought about more by innovation, development and growth than by government action. If six billion people went back to nature, nature would be in desperate trouble.

The most arresting statistic that Lomborg produces is this. It is well known that meeting the Kyoto treaty on carbon-dioxide reduction will delay global warming by six years at most by 2100. Yet the annual cost of that treaty, in each year of the century, will be the same as the cost -- once -- of installing clean drinking water and sanitation for every human being on the planet. Priorities, anyone?

NOTES ON THE ABOVE

This article originally appeared in the [U.K.] "Spectator" here on 23 February, 2002 and was reprinted in "The American Spectator" (not online) of 2002, vol. 35(2), pp. 52-53 under the heading: The Borking of Bjorn Lomborg)

Robert Bork was of course one of Ronald Reagan's nominations to the U.S. Supreme Court. He believed that judges should stick to judging and not make the law up as they went along. Needless to say, his nomination was opposed by huge numbers of liberal pressure groups who depend on the court to get them what they could never get from Congress. So despite Bork's impeccable legal credentials his nomination was blocked by Democrats in the Senate -- causing great damage to Bork's career, of course. So to be "borked" now means to be roughly treated and denied influence on purely ideological grounds -- regardless of merit. Greenie sympathizers tried to treat Lomborg in a similar way, but with much less success.