A well-respected Rupublican sees Bozo

The Rest of the World Is Laughing at Trump

Anne Applebaum

Carl Bildt—a Swedish prime minister in the 1990s, a United Nations envoy during the Bosnian wars, and a foreign minister for many years after that—told me that, looking back on his 30-year career, he cannot remember a single international crisis in which the United States had no global presence at all.

“Normally, when something happens”—a war, an earthquake—“everybody waits to see what the Americans are doing, for better or for worse, and then they calibrate their own response based on that.”

This time, Americans are doing … nothing.

Or to be more specific, because plenty of American governors, mayors, doctors, scientists, and tech companies are doing things, the White House is doing nothing.

There is no presidential leadership inside the United States; there is no American leadership in the world. Members of the G7—the U.S. and its six closest allies—did meet to write a joint statement.

But even that tepid project ended in ludicrous rancor when the American secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, insisted on using the expression “Wuhan virus” and the others gave up in disgust.

Not only is the president talking nonsense, not only is America absent, but the nation’s top diplomat is a caricature of a tough guy—someone who throws around insults in the absence of any capacity to influence events.

. . . .

I wish I could say for certain that a President Joe Biden could turn this all around, but by next year it may be too late.

The memories of the prime minister at the airport, welcoming Chinese doctors, will remain.

The bleach jokes and memes will still cause the occasional chuckle. 

Whoever replaces Pompeo will have only four short years to repair the damage, and that might not be enough.

And if Trump wins a second term?

Any nation can make a mistake once, elect a bad leader once.

But if Americans choose Trump again, that will send a clear message: 

We are no longer a serious nation. 

We are as ignorant as our thoughtless, narcissistic, ignorant president.

Don’t be surprised if the rest of the world takes note of that, too.

Delusions or Lies?

No, it's not that they are ignorant, or confused, or short on information, or misled by fake news.

They truly admire these guys and agree with what is most vicious in and about them and their programs.

The False Romance of Russia

Anne Applebaum joins those who try valiantly to hide - or evade - the ugly truth.

Just as well claim the Nazi voters didn't vote for all that mad, anti-Semitic, anti-Slavic, racist shit.

Or deny their profound and forthright embrace of state criminality, violence, and an agenda of war.

As for the ludicrous, glowing (at least in their terms) portraits of the enemy societies and their leaders by useful idiots of the left and, now, the right, they are not evidence of delusion but flat out dishonesty.

They are just flat out lies.

But I can't help but laugh.

She may be the only critic of this new idiotic and contemptible right who sees the grandfather role of Pat Buchanan.

And her exposé of Russian realities as well as the loony leaders of the pop stupid right is an extremely important piece.

She is the kind of conservative I admire, and I have loved her work for many years, now.

Not just her columns but her books.

Her excellent books.

A brilliant and learned specialist in an oddly forgotten history

Anne Applebaum, Communism, and the Cold War

Take a look at her write-up on Scammell's bio of Arthur Koestler.

And at this marvelous review of Spies.

And here is something we might share with AOC, given her personal concern with the matter.

The real Islamphobia

9/11 in the US and Spain's later 3/11 convinced very nearly everybody but the truthers and the fringey left that Muslim terrorism was a much bigger threat to the US and the entire West than it is and licensed the American government to carry out numerous useless countermeasures many of which have been insanely expensive and some of which have been horrifically bloody.

Airport and homeland security.

The war in Afghanistan.

The war in Iraq.

Meddling in Libya, Syria, and Egypt.

And these last have been so inept and stupid that they have given rise to vast new opportunities for successful Jihad by creating violent chaos where there had previously been peace and order.

On the other hand, Anders Breivik convinced only the fringey left that the threat of popular hostility toward Muslims is much greater than it is, in the US and in Europe as well.

And so as I noted the other day the left is seizing the improbable occasion - while admitting it is improbable - of the Chapel Hill killings to lambaste organizations, websites, and individuals for inciting anti-Muslim sentiment.

It has been pointed out, evidently to no effect, that very few Americans have any exposure to the supposed Islamophobe propaganda.

But huge numbers of Americans are exposed almost daily to news of unrelenting and global Muslim violence, accompanied by nearly constant incitement to fear and dread.

Anne Applebaum is one of those who have it right about the danger posed to the West by Muslim terrorism.

Too bad she has it so wrong about Russia.

Anyway, this constant propaganda of fear and exaggeration of the threat to America, the West, and the whole world is the real Islamophobia.

Like this.

What Is the Point of This Week's Terror Summit?

WSJ on the terror summit

It is true that the threat exemplified by ISIS is Jihader Islam and nothing else.

It is true that while efforts of past and current American presidents to avoid saying or even seeming to say that the enemy is Islam per se are perfectly sensible if equivocal and not entirely candid, the tendency of the current White House to join the left in identifying the threat as "religious extremism" in general is cowardly, weaselly, and even ridiculous.

Does the president think the world today faces a threat from the Inquisition? From the Crusades?

Is that why this summit is even on the books?

And how Islamic can you get?

These guys are so Koranic it's impossible to deny the central place of Islam's holiest and foundational text in legitimating Jihad and other forms of barbarous violence.

What ISIS wants

Real Islamophobia lies not in recognizing the special, even global threat posed uniquely in our time by violent Islam and no other religion, primarily to Muslims but also to very nearly any non-Muslims within reach of Jihader attack.

Nor does it lie in recognizing the Jihaders' completely accurate claim to be followers of genuine and authentic, true-blue Islam rather than some perversion of it.

Real Islamophobia lies in greatly exaggerating the threat Jihaders pose to the Occident and in particular to the Western Hemisphere.

And on that basis insisting on even further useless, expensive, horrifically bloody, and doubtless counter-productive military action, along with other absurd, illegal, and even unconstitutional anti-terrorist and anti-Jihader undertakings.

That is the real Islamphobia.

And that is the real harm it has done and continues to do.

The extraordinary achievement of communism

Reading Iron Curtain.

For the extraordinary achievement of Soviet communism  .  .  .  was the system's ability to get so many apolitical people in so many countries to play along without much protest.

Chapter 16, page 387, Anchor pb.

Pshaw.

Nothing to it.

Anybody can do it.

Everybody always has.

After all, that is exactly what apolitical people always do, and always have done.

They play along.

We play along.

Which is not at all to say we are taken in.

Recall the skeptic's maxim quoted by Montaigne.

"Live according to the customs of the country."

Heroes of liberty

Leave it to communists to turn Christian clergy into admirable heroes of liberty.

Communists and Jihadists.

Though Christians, themselves, had done as much before them.

Not just Michael Servetus but Thomases Becket and More, for examples.

Reading Iron Curtain.

How the left honors clerics

The left honors clerics if they are atheists or communists, or at least reject requisite portions of what the religion to which they officially adhere officially or generally stands for, but only if not in favor of beliefs and values not of the left.

They would just as soon steal a church as destroy it.

Maybe sooner!

Reading Iron Curtain.

P.S.

Pope Francis?

Well, is their alternating approval and disapproval of him a counter-example to my claim?

I think not.

To understand the culture war and what the left is doing, and attempting to do, with morality it is useful, though not absolutely essential, to read Nietzsche.

On the other hand, how would I honor a cleric?

Well, in much the same way, really, come to that.

With reference to my own values and beliefs, of course.

Just like them.

Which is at least sincere.

As opposed to honoring those who believe or value what I do not, for my own advantage or for whatever reason.

Enemies of the Church

Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain.

Communist leaders instinctively hated and feared church leaders, and not merely because of their own doctrinal atheism.

Religious leaders were a source of alternative moral and spiritual authority. 

They had independent financial resources and powerful contacts in Western Europe.

Catholic priests in particular were feared, both because of their close links to the Vatican and because of the perceived power of international Catholic charities and societies.  .  .  . 

The church's organizing power, even aside from its ideological power, was formidable.  .  .  .  .

Every Sunday, priests and preachers had a guaranteed audience.

Church publications had a guaranteed readership.

Page 256 of the Anchor paperback edition.

Sound like anybody we know?

The liberation of Poland

From October 30, 1944, anyone who owned a radio of any kind or type without a license faced the death penalty. 

They meant it.

On May 1, 1945, a man in Poznan was executed for unauthorized possession of a Philips radio. 

Reading Iron Curtain.

Youth

Immediately after the war, there was a great resurgence of the Scouts and thousands of other youth groups, some of them sponsored by churches or political parties - overwhelmingly, not the communists - , but many of them independent activity groups like athletic, hiking, and chess clubs, throughout Soviet occupied Eastern Europe.

Though governments in the region at this point were democratic coalitions, Stalin, the Red Army, and Soviet-controlled national communist parties together ensured ministries of the interior, police, and the secret police were communist organizations devoted and obedient to Moscow.

Within a year or so the swarms of independent clubs and organizations had been banned, penetrated, or subverted from within and ultimately absorbed into unified state, and explicitly communist, control.

Always, the struggle involved not only illegal coercive measures by organs of the state under communist control but the sort of ghastly ideological warfare and horrific propaganda made too familiar by the left even in America from the 1960s on.

Culture war every bit as bitter and sweeping, but in a time frame of only the few years immediately after World War Two.

Reading Iron Curtain, one observes the hammering of traditional scouting in our time by the left, for example, with dread.

Exceptions

Most - no, nearly all - of those who want the world to dance to their tunes are mass murderers, horrific thugs, stupid, ignorant, possessed of fantastic and absurd beliefs or tragically mad aspirations.

Activists and party faithful, saints and crusaders.

True believers.

Psychopaths.

But not all.

How strange are those of the minority.

And how few.

Reading Iron Curtain.

The terrible choice

Reading Iron Curtain.

Considering what Stalin had already done to them before the war, you can't blame the Ukrainians who thought, "Better the devil we don't know," and fought with the Nazis on that account.

The Finns, after all, played each side against the other and came out of it well.

Little did the Ukrainians realize Hitler was no merely ordinary anti-Semitic fascist.

Rather, as euro-white racists go, he and his Nazis were in a class by themselves.

Far too many people, all over the world, failed to take Mein Kampf seriously enough.

Not least those Ukrainians.

Reading "Iron Curtain"

Despite the dedication to her book, lying is neither a unique nor the worst feature of communism.

She offers two definitions of "totalitarianism" in her introduction that are both no better than bumper stickers and immediately, pointlessly tars fascism, Nazism, and communism with that brush, not seeing that if the term is broad enough for all three it obscures rather than illuminates the distinctive natures and horrors of each.

Anne Applebaum.

Her book on the Gulag seemed, a few hundred pages in, like so much repetitive, undigested research material.

We'll see about this one.