Jan 3, 2020 | Culture
Writes Allen C. Guelzo in Preaching a Conspiracy Theory:
The 1619 Project is not history: it is polemic, born in the imaginations of those whose primary target is capitalism itself and who hope to tarnish capitalism by associating it with slavery. Slavery made cotton profitable; but profitability is not capitalism. Profit-seeking has been around since Abraham bought the cave at Machpelah in the book of Genesis. If profitability were capitalism, then the Soviet Union’s highly profitable sales of natural gas and other commodities would surely make it one of the great success stories of capitalism – which, of course, it was not. Ask any worthwhile Marxist: capitalism is about the creation of class, and especially the bourgeoisie. And one thing the South never developed was a bourgeoisie. Which is why no single American, North or South, before 1861 ever imagined that slavery and capitalism were anything but mortal enemies. The proslavery apologist, George Fitzhugh, frankly declared that slavery was a form, not of capitalism, but feudal socialism; the antislavery president, Abraham Lincoln, explained the war on slavery as a war on behalf of free labor.
Nov 22, 2019 | Culture
Theodore Dalrymple has written an eloquent, insightful review on the memoir of David Cameron:
David Cameron’s supreme achievement is banality
For a man to have been at the peak of political power for six years and to have written a 700-page memoir without a single arresting thought or amusing anecdote, without giving any insight into the important people he has met, and without displaying any interest in, let alone knowledge of, history, philosophy or higher culture, is an achievement of a kind.
Public relations as the queen of the sciences
In a sense, Mr. Cameron is a Kantian: he believes that we can never get beyond appearance to things in themselves. Behind presentation there is no substance: just more presentation, so that public relations is the queen of the sciences and opinion polls must be consulted as Roman soothsayers consulted chicken entrails.
A “bread and circuses” populist against Brexit populism
Mr. Cameron castigates supporters of Brexit as populist, but he is himself a firm believer in the circus-division of a bread-and-circuses regime, for example counting Britain’s high tally of medals in the London Olympics as a great national success and cause for pride, rather than as evidence of a shameful and frivolous concentration on a trivial diversion during a period of national decline.
Conserving the principle of statism
Mr. Cameron poses not only as a man of the people, but also as a conservative, admitting in his memoir, however, that he means by this the pursuit of progressive ends (that is to say, the fashionable nostra of the day) by conservative means: once again, the form without the content. And insofar as he can be said to have any philosophy at all, it is profoundly marked by statism.
“Valuting ambition” + “utter mediocrity” = Cameron
In the end, I felt slightly sorry for David Cameron. There is no plumbing his shallows. As politicians go, he was obviously at the decent end of the spectrum, he was no monster; but when vaulting ambition (as his must surely have been) is allied to utter mediocrity, the result is… 700 pages that are a torture to read.
Cameron’s memoir may not be worth reading, but the entirety of Mr. Darymple’s “arresting and amusing” essay, David Cameron’s Big Lie, surely is.
Nov 15, 2019 | Culture
Arthur Milikh exposes the lies and distortions behind the New York Time’s so-called “1619 Project” that seeks to reinterpret the history of America, over at City Journal.
Writes Milikh:
To make America’s Founding contemptible, one must hide, ignore, and distort the Founders’ writings and thoughts. Irresponsibly omitted from this narrative is the fact that not a single major Founder endorsed slavery.
[…]
Ample evidence shows that the Founders wished for an end to slavery, contrary to the Times’s assertion that “neither Jefferson nor most of the founders intended to abolish slavery.” John Adams argued, “every measure of prudence, therefore, ought to be assumed for the eventual total extirpation of slavery from the United States.” He hoped that the inequalities of the Old World would eventually disappear. In 1778, Jefferson introduced a bill in the Virginia legislature banning the importation of slavery, which he hoped would lead to the institution’s “final eradication.”
[…]
It is true that, in order to ratify the Constitution, the Founders decided to allow the abhorrent practice of slavery to continue for a limited time. North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, and possibly other states, would never have ratified the Constitution otherwise. This decision was made, however, on what the Founders considered prudential grounds—better to have union than endless wars among the states.
[…]
Another often-ignored fact is that America was home to approximately 60,000 free blacks around the time of the Founding; this number tripled in just 20 years. Black Americans voted in several states, which appears to make America the first nation in recorded history where both races voted side by side. Those free and freed persons represented the beginning of our long and strenuous path toward justice.
Black Americans have been treated in a grossly unjust fashion throughout our history. But the Declaration and the Constitution themselves, according to the Founders’ intentions, contain the principles through which justice would come, as Fredrick Douglass and, later, Martin Luther King, Jr. believed. These countervailing facts and statements, should produce a more balanced view of America’s Founding. Why, then, are they so thoroughly and carefully avoided by today’s narrative-creators, who intend to persuade through distortion?
Rather than indulge in recrimination, we should follow Lincoln in seeking “to bind up the nation’s wounds” and “to achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves.” Manipulating the next generation to disdain the American Founding will not accomplish this.
The 1619 Project, by selectively failing to highlight critical facts, is not a project to educate and enlighten, but to destroy and demean, and bury the actual principle that animated America’s greatness: individual rights.
The entire essay, America’s Founding Was Not Defined By Slavery and White Supremacy as NY Times’ 1619 Project Claims, is worth a read.
Nov 8, 2019 | Culture
Is history marching inevitably towards centrally planned socialism, as Karl Marx proclaimed? Or is the best path to continued progress and expanding prosperity liberal, democratic capitalism as recommended by Ludwig von Mises?
Learn more at http://misesvsmarx.aier.org
Nov 5, 2019 | Culture
Five myths cloud our perception of both the past and the present:
(1) The “robber baron” myth, which holds that in late nineteenth-century America there were powerful men who became rich at the expense of the poor. The reality is that they became wealthy by being productive, and that there is no other period in history which saw such a rapid and widespread improvement in the well-being of the average individual;
(2) The myth that the Great Depression was caused by a failure of business, when it was, in fact, produced by a failure of government and specifically by the Federal Reserve System;
(3) The myth that government in the economy has expanded in response to public demand, when, actually, the public has had to be sold “hard” for politicians to enact every major social program;
(4) The “free lunch” myth, which forces the individual to pay more, no matter how the government raises money – by taxing individuals, by taxing businesses, or by printing more money; and
(5) The myth that government, like Robin Hood, transfers wealth from the rich to the poor, when the reality is that the government usually transfers wealth and income from both the very rich and the very poor to those in the middle.
Oct 30, 2019 | Culture
Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe.
A major new book by New York Times bestselling author and geopolitical forecaster George Friedman (The Next 100 Years) with a bold thesis about coming events in Europe, this provocative work examines ‘flashpoints’—unique geopolitical hotspots where tensions have erupted throughout history—and why conflict is due to emerge again.
“There is a temptation, when you are around George Friedman, to treat him like a Magic 8-Ball.” —The New York Times Magazine
With uncanny accuracy, George Friedman has forecasted coming trends in global politics, technology, population, and culture. Now, in Flashpoints, he focuses on the continent that was the cultural and power nexus of the world for five-hundred years: Europe. Analyzing the historical fault lines that have existed for centuries within the borderlands of Europe and Russia–which have been the hotbed of numerous catastrophic wars–Friedman walks readers through the flashpoints that are smoldering once again. The modern-day European Union was crafted in large part to minimize these built-in geopolitical tensions, but as Friedman shows with a mix of fascinating history and provocative cultural analysis, that design is failing. Flashpoints is George Friedman’s most timely book, delivering an unflinching forecast for the coming years.
About the author:
George Friedman is the Chairman and founder of Stratfor, the world’s leading private intelligence company. He is frequently called upon as a media expert in intelligence and international geopolitics, and is the author of six books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Next Decade and The Next 100 Years. He lives in Austin, Texas.
