The Italian political theorist and longtime socialist journalist Carlo Galli recently published a short volume called Perché ancora destra-sinistra (roughly translated, “Why is there still right and left?”). Galli’s definitions show scant evidence of semantic evenhandedness. He seems to identify with a perfumed definition of the left as the good guys “favoring equality and freedom for every individual.” The right, by contrast, is assigned the less palatable role of having to “defend authority, economic inequality, and ethnic roots.”

German legal theorist Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), on whom Galli and I have both written extensively, was much better than Galli in coming up with key definitions. Schmitt associated right-wing attitudes with such political theorists as Thomas Hobbes and St. Augustine—that is, with those who believed that human nature is violent and selfish and that social and political institutions exist to check dangerous human appetites. The left, by contrast, believes people are rational and kindly and can be made even better with a properly planned society. Unlike the right, the left also assumes that all human beings are roughly interchangeable and will develop similarly if exposed to the same meticulously engineered environment.

Galli associates the left with the creation of a modern democratic government aiming at universal equality. The right is not only against the progress of this scheme but is going nuts from failing to stop it. The “right” as defined in this book is not the Republican Party or the editorial staff of NR. It is, according to Galli, the side that views “disorder as a structural given, indeed as something primordial.” Having lost so often to its democratic-egalitarian enemy, this contemporary right “has come to view reality as unstable and contingent.” It now mocks any attempt to discuss “a priori conservative values” because “it is convinced that reality has no foundation.” The true right assumes “the contingent nature of all politics and the continuing disorder of the world.” In the interior of “any such possible right” is the “idea of existing without foundations (infondatezza), which suggests something irremediably nihilistic.”

Right and left are competing methods for trying to shape political life, and what is usually termed gradualism is a procedure for achieving a leftist vision by stages. The left has been getting what it wants all along. The reason the right is divided into fake conservatives and an embattled faction which oscillates between often pornographic cynicism and fanciful counterrevolutionary postures is that our side has been steadily getting creamed. Nor do we seem able to influence the course of events that our enemies almost entirely control. This leads not only to frustration but to a view that nothing around us makes sense anymore. Talking up “conservative values” seems especially futile since we are dealing with moral preferences that have nothing to do with our political life.

But this is something Galli misses: Our sense of contingency sometimes overshadows our nihilistic despair and smart-alecky cynicism. At one time the revolutionary right, as manifested in places such as fascist Italy, imagined it could cure all civilization’s ills with one bold stroke. It was disastrously wrong. But it may be in the underdog’s nature to reach for the impossible. The power structure is stacked against the right. But hope—and not only despair—springs eternal.

I watched a Pennsylvania GOP gubernatorial candidate bring an evangelical crowd to their feet three years ago by announcing that “Owning a gun is a human right.” I mumbled to myself: “So is protection from body odor.”

It’s not that I’m against people owning guns, but there are multiple reasons to defend such practices without invoking phantom “rights.” It is possible to defend broad gun ownership on practical grounds as something that reduces the likelihood that the carrier will be hurt in a violent assault. I could easily construct a defense of gun ownership without once mentioning the concoction of “human rights.”

Human rights is an invention of loudmouthed journalists, political theorists looking for trips to the UN, and celebrities who are pushing pet causes.

Times change, and so does the catalogue of human rights designed to justify the prevalent political and cultural attitudes. It is impossible to separate the idea of human rights from the political agendas of those wielding this rhetorical weapon.

Concepts of human rights usually reflect the biases of the age. These rights are also replaceable. It is naïve to think those “rights to life and liberty” in the Declaration of Independence as understood by Thomas Jefferson are the only rights around which our political lives have been made to center. Terms such as “liberty” and “the pursuit of happiness” have now been given meanings beyond anything that Jefferson—or the person from whom he cribbed the passage, John Locke—could have intended.

“Human rights” now encompass things such as wealth redistribution, protecting transsexuals from hostile glares, and banning all Confederate symbols—which a black student once complained violated her human rights when she espied a Civil War history book on my office shelf.

As a young man, I was told that the right to debate issues is a civilized society’s distinguishing mark. Open debate was often depicted in the 1950s and 1960s as a “human right.” Now it has been eclipsed here and in Europe by the even loftier human right of being sensitive to whatever group the government and media want us to treat with special sensitivity. 

The cult of human rights has also become an obvious successor religion to Christianity. It selectively incorporates Christian notions of universality and the sacredness of the person, but without Christian theology. Why should we think this successor religion, like its cousin multiculturalism, will have currency outside of the progressive remains of what were once Christian societies? Although African tribalists or Chinese nationalists may talk our talk, it is doubtful that our rhetorical tics will influence them very deeply.

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In the late 1990s, an attempt by the French right to condemn Hitler and Stalin’s human-rights violations in one sweeping statement brought forth a nasty rebuke from the French prime minister and was widely attacked in the French press. It seemed “outrageous” to liken acts that “flowed from a humanistic intention” to those of a “racist doctrine that relegates most of humanity to the shadows.” Presumably communist murders were less blameworthy than Nazi or right-wing ones because leftists defined “human rights” differently.

John McCain and other Fox News heroes go into a tirade every time Democratic Party leaders meet with the Chinese and fail to press them on “human rights.” Presumably we should be pummeling the Chinese with accusations about human-rights violations in between begging them to buy our devalued dollars. We’re also supposed to beat up on Putin for abusing the “human rights” advocates whom the National Endowment for Democracy finance in order to subvert the Russian government. If a foreign government tried such stuff with us, the feds would have the agents arrested and detained.

So which is it? Are we the supreme violators or the privileged upholders of human rights? One’s answer may depend on how long someone has listened to either Fox or MSNBC.

The best argument for ditching human-rights talk is that it stands in the way of saying something serious about one’s moral positions. The term “human rights” usually denotes something that one wants to impose or legislate universally. But why not frame these things as one’s personal beliefs rather than universal human rights? Isn’t it possible to address issues without spraying the listener with pious smarm?

Rosa Parks (center)

The recent pillorying of John Derbyshire and Bob Weissberg after being accused of making tactless remarks about race recalled a question that’s been bothering me for decades. Why should we think that race is the only untouchable subject or the only issue that, to use George Will’s misleading phrase, we as a society agreed to turn into a “stone, cold, dead, closed question”?

Yes, I know there used to be slavery and segregation, and then a civil-rights movement came along that raised our spirits to new, hitherto uncharted levels of tolerance. Because of this experience we agreed—or someone agreed for us (I was never asked my opinion)—not to discuss the forbidden subject in such a way that black spokesmen or their white liberal proxies in the media would find objectionable. I suppose this agreement was made in the same way as the one binding those who leave the state of nature and enter civil society in Hobbes’s magisterial work Leviathan. There the newcomers don’t have to agree to anything explicitly, but by hanging around, they implicitly consent to the arrangements that someone else set down for them. In a similar manner I have agreed not to broach forbidden subjects by not leaving a country the MSM rules.

With the towering prohibition against expressing politically incorrect views about race, why would anyone be naïve enough to believe that the demand for total consent will ever stop? The same bullying tactics that have been applied here have been extended to everything else that the left and its obliging conservative-movement collaborators have tried to keep from being mentioned. The left trots out the same victim narratives to shut us up about gender differences, our preference for heterosexual over homosexual family organization, or whatever else they deem unmentionable at a given moment. My friend, distinguished classicist Chris Kopff, says that at the university where he works it’s Christianity—not racism—that gets singled out as the villain. Anyone linked to Christian belief has to answer for the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Holocaust, and many other iniquities that are traced back to Christianity’s inherent intolerance. 

Those whom Pat Buchanan describes as the “kennel-fed conservatives” are desperate to curry favor with the media and centrist Republicans. These survivors rail against that ole debbil white racism, which appears to agonize them as much as it does the left. This Sturm und Drang allows them to address other moral issues such as getting Mitt elected president. These establishment conservatives may even occasionally suggest something that is indelicate about gender differences or declare their sympathy for heterosexual relations, and so far they have been able to pull this off without getting instantly zapped. These get-along types also get steamed up that others are noticing cognitive differences between racial groups. After all, can’t we all do equally well in our propositional nation that was founded on the principle of equality?

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My suggestion to those who wish to believe these statistically and historically questionable assumptions is to take up their argument with God or nature. This is not the way the world seems to operate, and those who wish to make counterarguments should be allowed to do their thing. The other side should be equally free to present a refutation on the basis of empirical evidence.

As PC demands get ratcheted up, I wonder whether those who are buying time (perhaps until they retire) understand the silliness of throwing people under the bus to stop a runaway vehicle. The left is not going to be stopped in its tracks by signs of weakness. As the French say, l’appétit vient en mangeant. Either our side permits open discussion—especially discussion of what the left doesn’t want to have discussed—or we simply agree to capitulate every time the left calls someone a racist, anti-Semite, anti-transsexual, or whatever. Although we should treat each other, including other races, with as much civility as circumstances permit, to me it is obscene that we should be kept from serious discussions of socially relevant empirical data because some media thugs may beat up someone who transgresses their no-nos.

I’m also not sure that noticing racial differences is less justified that observing other ones. We assume this priority because the media has usually come down harder on dissent here than they have with other verbal taboos. But that may be owing to the fact that other victim narratives have been piled on to the black and feminist ones, which gained momentum in the 1950s and 1960s. And in that period there was visible discrimination against blacks, particularly in Southern states, where they have always been most numerous. As Derbyshire and others have pointed out, this narrative should already be wearing thin. Other developments have overtaken it: desperate efforts by the government and private sector to provide blacks with compensatory justice, widespread violence among black youth, a conspicuously disintegrating black family structure, and increased restrictions on what members of other races are allowed to say about blacks. Then there are the publicized torrents of invectives against whites coming from black spokesmen and white liberals.

Given these problems, I’m not sure there is any moral or intellectual justification (if there ever was) for forbidding an honest discussion of innate racial differences as well as other group differences that may have genetic sources. It is not clear to me that these genetic disparities may be the most critical for understanding key behavioral differences, but it seems ridiculous to exclude them from public or scholarly discussion. The reason we do is our fear of suffering the wrath of the increasingly totalitarian left.

In places such as Germany, the left now unleashes collective violence on “fascist” targets rather than simply knocking them out of the public arena. It may reach that stage here no less than in Europe unless the right is willing to stand up for intellectual freedom. By the “right,” I don’t mean those “kennel-fed” publicists who are throwing people under the bus.

John Derbyshire

Unlike Rich Lowry’s predictably PC response to John Derbyshire’s controversial article on what parents should tell their kids about race, I was less than “appalled” by it. John’s judgments are not entirely mine, and unlike my good friend I probably would stop (and I hope my grown-up children would stop) for a black person stranded on a highway who didn’t look quite like “one of the boyz from the hood.” But John’s article was a response to numerous rants by black celebrities in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting. These anti-white invectives, proudly featured in TIME, The New York Times, and other establishment fixtures, were also directed toward the young and emphasized the persistence of white “prejudices.” In one passage particularly lacking in self-awareness, someone named Touré explained:

Being black could turn an ordinary situation into a life-or-death moment even if you’re doing nothing wrong.

Given the glaringly disproportionate number of violent crimes black youth commit each year, most often against each other, Touré and his editors should be medically treated for being delusional. What do they think is the color of violent crime? I doubt that any of John’s accusers would dwell critically on black responsibility for black crime any more than the editors of NR would feel impelled to express indignation at the statements that occasioned John’s rejoinder. A recent column by Rich Lowry affirming his agreement with Sharpton about the Trayvon Martin shooting would fit snugly into the obligatory liberal responses to this event.

I wonder whether the counter-instruction that John would bestow on his offspring would be an ultimately quixotic gesture. Most college students I encounter have had their heads so stuffed with misrepresentations of reality that mommy and daddy would have to use blowtorches to get the embedded nonsense off their brains. But these brain-damaged youths’ parents seem to have been socialized in the same counterfactual way. This week I learned that throngs of people in nearby Lancaster and Harrisburg had put on hoods to express solidarity with Trayvon Martin—or perhaps with Reverends Jackson and Sharpton. These esteemed clerics with their media buddies are busily reminding us of the horrendous crime committed against a black youth by a nonblack Latino they’re calling a “white Hispanic.” The same celebrities also consistently underplay the most widespread source of violent crime. Perhaps the black thugs who in January 2007 raped, mutilated, and murdered a white couple in Knoxville were also wearing hoods. The gruesome Knoxville murders and numerous other violent crimes blacks commit against whites remain underreported. If these crimes were treated in the same way as Martin’s shooting, The Atlantic, New York Daily News, Guardian, and all the other leftist publications denouncing my friend’s “disgusting rant on race” would eagerly print his dispassionately presented conclusions.

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Black hatemongers rarely provoke the public tongue-lashing that a scientifically literate English gentleman elicits by pointing out cognitive and social differences between races. Would any academic or journalist create the same brouhaha if a black “vocalist” called for “raping white bitches” or a professor of Black or Women’s Studies grossly insulted white males? Not on your life. No disparagement of whites in favor of blacks, or of men in favor of feminists, or of straights in favor of gays would cause discomfort in our PC-drenched country or in any other Western nation in a comparable state of cultural disintegration. Not even sadistic black murders of defenseless whites can produce this effect. I am stating this as my fellow whites are still exhibiting ritualistic shock over a partly white male shooting a black teenager in circumstances that are still to be clarified. 

I am impressed by the alacrity with which The Guardian and other leftist opinion sources close off discussions of non-approved subjects. The editors presume to speak for the rest of us. It was no surprise that the pint-size Stalins who run our ideologically controlled opinions would try to bully John’s employer into firing him for something posted on Taki’s Mag. And this is only proper. Were maverick writers and thinkers allowed to publish things free of PC gatekeepers, there’s no telling how far this exercise in intellectual freedom might go. The Guardian and likeminded publications are correct to insist that even the opposition should play by rules that favor them. This is not a double standard, since the left always and everywhere is totalitarian. When it tries to suppress dissent, it is being most thoroughly itself.

I was not disappointed that Lowry and his fellow intellectual pygmies caved in and fired their most talented thinker and writer. But there was an amusing side to this outrage. Before the adolescent crew kicked John out, they raked him slowly over the coals. While groveling toward the left as he was “parting ways” with John, Lowry complained about how Derb’s piece “lurches from the politically incorrect to the nasty and indefensible.” My thought at the time was that I’d like to see the clueless Lowry match wits with John by trying to prove that John’s assertions were “indefensible.” It would be like having a featherweight pick a fight with Mike Tyson during his prime.

I’d be delighted to see the utterly vapid NR go down the tubes now that its editors have humiliated and fired a brilliant, principled subordinate. But I doubt that will happen. However worthless the magazine is likely to become (and even with John it wasn’t very good), its neocon and GOP donors will probably continue to keep it afloat. At my age, I was hoping to see at least one pillar of the neocon agitprop empire collapse before I leave this vale of tears. Unfortunately, given its continued usefulness to its masters, this fate is not likely to befall NR.

Being recently stuck for many hours in an exceedingly narrow space on a plane headed from London to DC, I was desperate enough to grab that garish British tabloid the Daily Mail when the stewardess offered it to me. On page four, I noticed a column by a renowned critic of Third World immigration, Melanie Phillips, who in 2006 published the book Londonistan. In her book Phillips loudly lamented Islamists’ resettling of London. I’ve also encountered Phillips’s writing in various neoconservative publications where she deplores the peril to the Jewish people (Phillips is Jewish with a big chip on her shoulder) represented by “Christian supersessionism.”

Apparently the Christian belief that Christ’s New Covenant somehow supersedes the older Jewish covenant poses a threat to Jews everywhere. One would have to assume this danger exists to an alarming degree wherever orthodox Christians congregate, unless these Christians explicitly teach there are two equally valid covenants, one for the Jews and the other for themselves. Nowhere, however, does Phillips suggest that this theological generosity should be mutual, but then as a neocon she may not have to reach out to brain-dead goyim.

In her latest column Phillips is steaming that a British pol, George Galloway, won an election in Northern England by appealing to Muslim voters. She describes Galloway as a renegade Labourite who won as a Tory. She also calls him a “discredited demagogue” whose “torrid triumph” may be a threat to British democracy’s future. Galloway also had the gall (pardon the pun!) of praising his Muslim constituents’ piety and, to Phillips’s outrage, noting that his Muslim Labourite opponent “drank alcohol” in violation of Koranic teachings. 

Galloway is apparently pursuing the same alarming strategy as Ken Livingstone, the former London mayor who is now locked in a tight race with his Tory successor Boris Johnson. Livingstone has expressed respect for Muslim piety and is even suspected of having “aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood, whose goal is to conquer the free world for Islam.” Phillips expresses her fear that Livingstone, like Galloway, may win by becoming an anti-democrat:

And if Livingstone wins in London, the temptation will become overwhelming for other unprincipled politicians on the Left similarly to play the Islamist, anti-West, anti-gay, anti-Jew card….The very democratic process is at risk of being turned into a vehicle for the promotion not just of religious bigotry but of the destruction of the West itself.

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Putting aside the question of whether England or the US can stand the enriching experience of letting in droves of Islamist settlers, how does Livingstone or Galloway’s behavior differ from the political pandering in our paradigmatic global democracy? Does Chuck Schumer refuse to meet in Brooklyn with Hasidic Jews because they have an authoritarian theocratic culture? Do he and Joe Lieberman refuse to make concessions to Zionist organizations lest they drag this country into a foreign quagmire? Livingstone and Galloway are not the first politicians to try and accommodate non-Christian ethnic minorities in their constituency. 

Even more curious is Phillips’s repeated use of the term “the West,” a cultural and geographic designation that is used in her screed in a peculiarly neoconservative sense. It designates a political culture that is pro-Jewish, pro-Israeli, pro-gay, and pro-feminist. Having just walked the streets of Vienna and London, cities that are both coextensive with the history of what was once known as “the West,” I don’t recall seeing much evidence of what Phillips means by “the West.” Everywhere I turned I saw lots of churches, palaces, and statues, in most cases set up to honor non-democratic and non-Jewish national heroes. Should I infer that these cities were insufficiently “Western” because outside of certain small areas they did not celebrate Phillips’s totems of “the West”?

This kind of unsettling presentism has long been a research interest of mine. I’ve no idea, unless I posit absolute cultural illiteracy or note certain Jews’ anxiety about past anti-Semitism, why anyone would reduce Western civilization to Phillips’s pet causes. One could identify an entity called “the West” just as easily with animal rights, rock music, and organic vegetables. How would Phillips treat Euro-American critics of gay rights and secularism? Are they “anti-Western” in the sense that traditional Western cultures were not “Western” according to currently trendy standards? Where exactly do we put Bach, Luther, Pascal, Samuel Johnson, King James, etc., none of who could possibly have shared our late modern political-moral standpoint? Were they not parts of “the West”? If not, where do we stick such figures and countless other greats who up until five minutes ago I mistakenly thought were Western? I can’t believe Phillips and her fans are as historically ignorant as they appear to be.

Much to the consternation of Western intellectuals and journalists, Hungary’s government sponsors a House of Terror in Budapest which dares to devote attention to not only Nazi crimes, but also Stalinist ones.

Ever since the ascendance of the “antifascist” (read: neo-Stalinist plus PC) persuasion in our “liberal democracies,” it has become gauche and somehow even anti-Semitic to compare Nazi (or more generally “fascist”) atrocities to the collateral damage of the communist forced march into the globalist future.

But the House of Terror’s director, Gábor Tallai, says it is sometimes hard to distinguish between victims of Nazi and Soviet terror. “Many Hungarian Jews who escaped Auschwitz were then dragged off by the Red Army to perform compulsory labor in Siberia.” Since my cousin was one of these forced laborers, I concede Tallai’s point.

More importantly, Tallai observes that it’s wrong to divide those who were destroyed by Nazi and Soviet tyrannies into “first and second class victims.” Victims of murderous regimes are victims whether or not fashionable intellectuals condemn some mass murders but excuse others. In German newspapers, political speeches, and learned circles, any attempt to bring up Soviet crimes against Germans, or even to mention that Stalin killed people who were not “fascists,” is condemned as Holocaust-Verharmlosung—trivialization of Nazi genocide. The 12-14 million Germans who were expelled from Eastern Europe after World War II deserved what they got because they were allegedly Nazi collaborators. This is imagined to be true even for anti-Nazi Germans in the Sudetenland and regions of Eastern Germany.

“Conservative” German Chancellor Angela Merkel ran to Moscow last May to thank the Russian government for Stalin’s kindness in liberating the Germans from fascism. Such an act is not surprising from someone who had been a loyal communist almost up until the time the Berlin Wall fell and whose father remained a diehard Stalinist until his death last year. It is all too typical of the current double standard toward tyranny in her country and elsewhere in the PC West. Former Stasi agents remain key players in German politics and may even creep into the federal government after the next national election.

Because of this nauseating double standard about Nazi and Soviet or Soviet-inspired crimes, I initially welcomed the release of Yale historian Tim Snyder’s Bloodlands, which was supposed to do justice to the crimes of both of those tyrannies that oppressed and decimated Central and Eastern Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Snyder’s conclusions were published in the New York Review of Books, and after reading the article, it became apparent why an unmistakably leftist fortnightly went agog over his work.

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Although Snyder tells us that Stalin and his henchmen murdered lots of people, his depiction of Germans and Russians is very different. Unlike the victimized Russians under Stalin, the Germans are always at work—as they are in Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners—murdering and torturing Jews and Slavs. Even the German resistance in 1944 is condemned as a crew of Nazi mass murderers who decided to jump ship. This conclusion is reached on the basis of treating two peripheral figures as typical of this ill-fated resistance force, which included at its center such tried and true anti-Nazis as Leipzig Mayor Carl Goerdeler and longtime Prussian aristocratic opponents of Hitler’s regime.

A learned friend, Alfred de Zayas, has published several books on the treatment of ethnic Germans after the war. The most useful is “50 Theses on the Expulsion of the Germans from Central and Eastern Europe 1944-1948,” which is excerpted HERE. Zayas relies on German Federal Archives investigations from 1959 into the 1970s which show that between 1944 and the early 1950s over two million Germans lost their lives during brutal expulsions from Eastern Europe. This figure must be considered in the context of the “population transfer,” which the Western Allies approved at the postwar gathering in Potsdam.

Snyder describes these expulsions as a generally workmanlike removal of populations from one spot to another and pretends that the massacres of German populations in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe never occurred. After an asterisk, we learn that…

…of the 12 million Germans who fled or were expelled from Eastern Europe at the end of the War, the vast majority came from Czechoslovakia or Poland….[A]bout half of the twelve million fled, and about half were deported—though a neat division is impossible, since some of those who fled later returned and were then deported.

He makes no mention of the multiple murders that accompanied the forced deportations.

These expulsions and organized killings were not, as Snyder suggests, merely justified reactions to German war crimes. Czech, Polish, and other interwar East Central European governments, as Zayas explains, had well-publicized plans to expel their large German minorities. WWII’s aftermath served as a pretext for nationalists and pro-Soviet forces throughout Eastern Europe to carry out ethnic cleansing on a grand scale. As Zayas points out, both the UN and the Catholic Church fully accept his figures for German deaths and expulsions, numbers which are clearly unacceptable to Snyder and the New York Review of Books.

German historians and researchers now routinely lowball the figures for German deaths from wartime firebombing and later expulsions. Since the 1970s the deaths that resulted from the bombing of Hamburg, Dresden, and other then-defenseless German and Austrian cities seem to have fallen steadily. The impression created is that only neo-fascists could believe these supposedly justified bombings had devastating effects. Casualty figures are lowered by insisting that only a precise counting of “geborgenen Leichen (intact corpses)” can be accepted in determining who died where. Noticing the disappearance of people from this planet will not do. Nor will it suffice that someone testified that he saw his family or neighbors killed. Such people were obviously self-pitying Nazi war criminals.

If such fastidious criteria were applied to tallying Jewish victims of Nazi persecution, the researcher would be jailed in Europe or Canada as a Holocaust denier. But since no one at The New York Times, Weekly Standard, or any other establishment-press fixture complains about massacred Germans—and since most Germans don’t give a rap about atrocities against their ancestors—it is unlikely Zayas’s scholarship will attract much attention.

As I perused the program for the Philadelphia Society’s national meeting in April, featuring wall-to-wall denunciations of “America and Her Detractors,” I wondered whether all anti-Americanism is the same. At one time there were communist sympathizers who adored the Soviets for whatever lunatic reasons and who opposed the US as an obstacle to Soviet expansion. There were also lefties with whom I spent my graduate-school days who imagined that communism was the best guarantee against fascism. This attitude now seems endemic to German journalists and intellectuals who still praise the East German communist regime for its anti-Nazism and who vote for the recycled commies in Germany’s Party of Democratic Socialists. These Germans are not notably anti-American so much as they are ostentatiously anti-German, and many of them support the Israeli right as an ongoing act of contrition for Nazi crimes against the Jews.

As far as I can tell, there are three principal sources of anti-Americanism, and the US government can mitigate their effects in varying degrees.

The first is Islamic fundamentalism, which targets the Christian—and by now the post-Christian—West as its enemy. The Islamic fundamentalists will never accept us unless we convert, but it is possible to diminish their animus. We can stay outside their region politically and militarily, for example, by not stirring up revolutions or by not occupying Muslim countries with our armies. Our intervention in Iraq not only increased their animosity toward us, it resulted in the oppression and uprooting of the local Christian inhabitants. The neocon media whooping it up for “democratic revolution” in Egypt strengthened Muslim fundamentalists and led to persecution of the Christian minority. I’m not sure what we can do about the fact that Western Europeans have allowed, and sometimes encouraged, anti-Western Muslim populations to move into their space. But we can avoid complicating this mistake by carefully screening those who come into our country.

A second form of anti-Americanism has come from non-American multiculturalists who are upset that we haven’t all swallowed our own poisons. As I try to show in The Strange Death of Marxism, America generously bestowed our cultural industry on the Europeans. It is exceedingly hard for me to believe that Europe’s current fixation on feminism, gay rights, and open borders does not have an American provenance. The EU is about to introduce quotas for women on all corporate boards among member countries, perhaps testifying to the triumph of American feminist writers who are eagerly read and digested over there.

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Canada is an even more blatant cultural parasite (excrescence may be a better term) subsisting almost entirely on what we send them. It is infuriating to watch Canadian academics clutching our PC best-sellers while lecturing us on how naughty we are for not imposing gay marriage nationwide and not jailing anyone who opposes it. Our social poisons fill Canadian bookstores and permeate Canadian movie screens. If we’re unhappy that anti-American foreigners take our stupidities seriously, let’s stop sending them our entertainment and leftist political tracts.

America’s most intelligent critics stand on the true European right. They are the remnants of the conservative nationalists in England, France, Germany, Flanders, Spain, and Italy: cultural traditionalists who scorn our decadence and the tendency of our political class to jerk around Europeans. These “detractors” don’t take kindly to what Allan Bloom, in his strange 1987 “conservative” classic, The Closing of the American Mind, praises as the “American educational experiment” of making war to force others into embracing “democratic equality.” But Europe’s beleaguered conservative critics are isolated, which may make them despise American cultural influence and democratic imperialism all the more.

These critics of our late modernity resemble what David Frum once denounced as the “unpatriotic right” in the US. They also sound like the late George Kennan (1904-2005), who feared the American expressions of what the Bible called “the reign of arrogance.” A reflective patrician with a Presbyterian moral sensibility, Kennan became increasingly alarmed about where the US seemed headed. When he was 90, Kennan published a short book called Around the Cragged Hill advocating the country’s division into seven or more autonomous regions. This would have allowed regions to rule themselves in accordance with the once valued ideal of self-government. Kennan’s decentralizing plan was also designed to keep the American empire from poking obsessively into other countries’ affairs. Clearly such plans reveal subversive thinking, and I trust the Philadelphia Society will soon be devoting itself to Kennan’s treasonous, un-American mind. I also trust that none of us will be asked to comment on this subject.

I attended an event for Pat Buchanan and his biographer Tim Stanley at DC’s Politics and Prose Bookstore on February 17. After Tim and Pat’s informative presentations, the audience was invited to ask questions. Most of the questions seemed to come from admiring remnants of the Buchanan Brigades.

But there was one discordant note that came from a disheveled grouch who I knew would be a pain as soon as I heard his opening statement: “Now, I’m going to say something you won’t want to hear.”

What followed was resentment badly masked as “concern.” This party pooper announced that he was Jewish and therefore entitled to special consideration in this mixed multitude. He was feeling very insecure because “There would be no place for me in a world without the diversity that Mr. Buchanan would like to abolish.” He seemed to think everyone else in the room should grant him an elevated status—perhaps somewhere between an ordinary feminist and a black lesbian—because of his ancestry.

The diversity we’re now pushing at least made the questioner feel safe in what might otherwise be our North American Continental House of Horrors. Absent this diversity, or its indefinite expansion, the speaker would no longer be able to identify himself as an American. He would be a very frightened Jew, undoubtedly in search of a new home.

Pat tried to look sympathetic but in his response, he pointed out certain obvious facts. For example, when the US set up shop in the 1780s, over ninety percent of the population was Protestant, and most of the rest were Catholic. Jews, who then came mostly from Spain and Portugal by way of Holland or South America, made up a small fraction of the American population, but there is no indication they were disturbed about having to live in a very Christian country. They thought they had landed in paradise and rejoiced at the tolerance their Christian neighbors bestowed on them.

Pat’s questioner did not seem to believe anyone had a right to resist his notion of diversity. He acted not at all concerned about how our multicultural society throttles the opposition and brainwashes everyone in educational and professional institutions to make them “sensitive.” That’s what diversity now involves: punishing those who won’t go along with government-imposed programs about how to relate to everyone else. The term that best describes such politics is not tolerance but totalitarianism. In the name of a supposedly ennobling diversity, people now live in fear of saying or doing something that is “actionable” or may cost them their jobs and social respectability. In Europe the celebration of diversity has gone even further: Those who grumble too loudly about being culturally enriched can land up in jail as abettors of “hate.”

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I would have liked to ask our professional victim whether he would accept an agreement that I would gladly offer those with his mindset. I’ll allow their experiment to go forward by granting everyone the make-believe constitutional right to marry anything that moves. Why should we confine ourselves to same-sex marriage? Let people henceforth be able to marry their pet salamanders or anything else they want to betroth. They should also be able to change their sexual identities whenever it pleases them and engage in cross-dressing, if that’s what turns them on.

In return, those who don’t like what’s going on should be allowed to withdraw from the game. They should have the right not to employ or rent rooms to those whom they consider lunatics or perverts. They should be able to live and associate strictly with those holding their beliefs. In fact, they should be allowed to withdraw from this diversitarian experiment and form their own political community within the US. There they would be permitted to live undisturbed within their comfort zone.

I would propose a similar modus vivendi with immigration. In the decentralized America of the future, those who favor increased immigration from all over the solar system, such as The Wall Street Journal’s editorialists, would be able to impose their will in heavily urbanized areas. There they could allow the rest of the world to join them with minimal restrictions, perhaps stipulating that incoming residents must agree to some boilerplate language about human rights or gender equality. Undoubtedly things could get tense as the rival advocates of propositional nationhood battled over what formula the steadily arriving newcomers would have to recite. It is also likely that the experiment would eventually go awry as more and more huddled masses landed on these shores. That would be poetic justice as long as the self-segregated and autonomous “xenophobes” would not be required to deal with the overflowing crowds. Let those who want more diversity have it without inflicting their tastes on the unwilling.

This is not entirely a spoof. Listening to Pat respond to the multicultural zealot, I was again made aware that certain cultural and moral divides cannot be crossed. It may be futile to hope that multiculturalists will accept the need for cultural cohesion. So why bother? Wouldn’t it be easier to agree to disagree and perhaps even split up without coercion? But why should the social left accept my compromise? Right now they’re getting what they want—the power to jerk others around without the inconvenience of negotiating.

A vastly underexplored topic is the British government’s role in greasing the skids for World War I. Until recently it was hard to find scholars who would dispute the culturally comfortable judgment that “authoritarian Germany” unleashed the Great War out of militaristic arrogance. Supposedly the British only got involved after the Germans recklessly violated Belgian neutrality on their way to conquering “democratic“ France.

But British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey had done everything in his power to isolate the Germans and their Austro-Hungarian allies, who were justified in their concern about being surrounded by enemies. The Triple Entente, largely constructed by Grey’s government and which drew the French and Russians into a far-reaching alliance, encircled Germany and Austria with warlike foes. In July 1914 German leaders felt forced to back their Austrian allies in a war against the Serbs, who were then a Russian client state. It was clear by then that this conflict would require the Germans to fight both Russia and France.

The German military fatalistically accepted the possibility of England entering the struggle against them. This might have happened even if the Germans had not violated Belgian soil in order to knock out the French before sending their armies eastward to deal with a massive Russian invasion. The English were anything but neutral. In the summer of 1914 their government was about to sign a military alliance with Russia calling for a joint operation against German Pomerania in case of a general war. The British had also given assurances to French foreign minister Théophile Delcassé that they would back the French and the Russians (who had been allied since 1891) if war broke out with Germany.

Grey spurned attempts by German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg to woo his government away from their commitments to Germany’s enemies.

German concessions in 1912 included:

• The acceptance of British dominance in constructing railroads and accessing oil reserves in what is now Iraq
• Investments in central African ventures that would clearly benefit the English more than the Germans
• Meekly following England’s lead in two Balkan Wars where Austria’s enemy Serbia nearly doubled its territory.

The Russians and French were also vastly expanding their conscription to outnumber the German and Austrian forces, but neither German concessions nor the saber-rattling of England’s continental allies caused the British government to change direction. Lord Grey, who remained foreign secretary until 1916, never swerved from his view that Germany was England’s most dangerous enemy.

A book that makes this clear is Konrad Canis’s study of German foreign policy from 1902 until 1914. A massive volume of more than seven hundred pages, Canis’s Der Weg in den Abgrund (The Road Into the Abyss) is a groundbreaking revisionist account of the entanglements leading up to the war.

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Canis makes several points one is not likely to encounter in ordinary historical scholarship:

1. The German Second Empire’s foreign policy was largely passive. This was true not only of Bismarck after German unification in 1871 but almost equally true of German foreign policy from 1902 onward.

2. The British were more hostile to the Germans than vice versa. They viewed Germany as an upstart economic competitor which had established itself as the continent’s dominant military power. Both German public opinion and German leaders were strongly Anglophilic; the Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg considered English friendship to be something worth striving for even at the cost of German interests.

3. The German government and most of the German press made a sharp distinction between hoping to see their country become a world power and aspiring for dominance over all other countries. Canis’s sources suggest that influential Germans were hoping to become a power “on the scale of England,” a country they respected and had no interest in fighting.

In 1914 Russia posed more of a threat to England than either Germany or Austria did. England was struggling with Russia for dominance in Central Asia. Instead of reassessing its geopolitical priorities, Lord Grey offered Russia a third front against the Germans by promising to make British ships available for a landing in northern Germany. This was how the British government tried to settle its conflicts with Russia, as both of them were expanding into the same region. In these British commitments, it is unclear whether a distinction was still being drawn between offensive and defensive wars.

And then there’s the US. When the German ambassador approached Teddy Roosevelt to join the Germans in upholding open trade in China’s Yangtze River Valley and other regions then being closed off by the British and French, TR refused. He said he could not sign such a document before first consulting the British. This may be further proof for those who believe the US was a vassal state of England’s before the First World War.

The autocratic Russian government, which entered the war from the east, was not quite as “democratic” in 1914, but by the time Woodrow Wilson pulled us into the European cauldron, Russia had undergone the first of two revolutions, this one a democratic revolutionary change in March 1917. Thus the US could ally itself with Russia’s morally acceptable provisional government when it took up arms against putative German warmongers.

George Kennan’s The Fateful Alliance and Sean McMeekin’s The Russian Origin of the First World War both document the role the aggressively expansionist Russian government played in bringing about the Great War. But such revelations are no longer surprising.

What is more of a discovery is England’s role in creating this catastrophe. This oversight may be attributed to certain obvious causes: the mistaken view that England only entered the war because of the violation of Belgian neutrality (this confounds a pretext with a cause); the Anglophilic disposition of American political and academic elites; and more recently, the tendentious notion that “democracies never fight each other.” Unfortunately for this generalization, the governments of Germany and England (and certainly their societies) in 1914 looked much more like each other than either would resemble the present American or Canadian regime.

Canis does not defend Germany’s ultimately disatrous decision in 1914. The Germans should have restrained the Austrians even after Serb agents killed Austria’s Archduke Ferdinand. The ensuing war wrecked the Old Europe. The war industries that Grey, Churchill, and others of their kidney were lavishly funding were not what the populace wanted. The war hawks were diverting revenues from social reforms. Although I am hardly in favor of the welfare state, creating one in England in 1910 may have been less ruinous than Grey’s foreign policy.

In his recent syndicated column “A U.N. for the good guys,” Jonah Goldberg evokes the mindset of seventeenth-century puritanism. This is entirely understandable. Much of what the American left teaches, including its neoconservative element, resembles American Calvinism—albeit in a warmed-over form. In Puritan New England, Congregationalists—the only authorized communicants—were deeply troubled that unredeemed polluted their assemblies. Those who considered themselves visible saints were forced to break bread with those who could not properly prove their divine election. This led to a sectarian split that resulted in Rhode Island’s settlement by breakaway Calvinists disgusted by the toleration of impure religious assemblies in Massachusetts. This determined group of dissenters formed a purified congregation of the saints

In a similar way Jonah is looking for pure souls. He is agitated that Russia and China would not vote for “a fairly toothless U.N. resolution condemning the regime in Syria and calling for President Bashar Assad, the lipless murderer who runs the place, to step down.” Jonah points to a terrible spiritual defect in the governments that opposed the resolution. To him it is an outrage that the UN Security Council assigns seats to countries “because they are powerful, not because they are decent, wise or democratic.” This stems from what Jonah says is a “category error”: “There is nothing in the UN Charter…that says a government has to be democratic or even care for the welfare of its people.” The UN does something even more grievous from the neoconservative standpoint: It serves as a “counterweight to the United States” and allows morally reprehensible countries to thumb their noses at America..

Although Jonah holds back on the idea of “getting rid of the UN” completely, he says it may be possible to create a “league, or concert, of democracies” under American ideological leadership. Here the pure of heart would be able to assemble and act in concert because “good nations want to see good things done.”

Goldberg writes:

A permanent global clubhouse for democracies based on shared principles would make aiding growing movements easier and offer a nice incentive for nations to earn membership in a club with loftier standards than mere existence.

Has it ever dawned on Goldberg that not all nation-states have identical interests? Some of them vote against the American government or our establishment media because they are pursuing their self-interest, at least as they perceive it. In Syria’s case, as Taki astutely points out, the Sunnis’ supporters, led by the very undemocratic Saudi Arabia, are inciting an overthrow of the present Shiite-friendly regime. Whatever replaces that government is not likely to be any nicer than what it supplants, just as Mubarak’s ousting has not led to a surge of democratic liberties in Cairo. We are talking here not about a return to Edenic purity, but about a circulation of elites. The Chinese and Russians have opted for Syria’s Alawi rulers, who depend on their Iranian connection. This leadership is being opposed by the surrogates of the Saudis and other Sunni militants, who are trying to take power from Assad.

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It is the US government, or more exactly its neoconservative priesthood, whom Jonah would like to see make the admissions decisions for his “permanent global clubhouse for democracies.” Besides voting in lockstep with American interests as neoconservative journalists define them, all members will be required to support Israel’s Likud government.

Will any deviations be allowed? How long will dissenting members be indulged before they get booted? How closely will membership candidates have to approximate the current American regime before they are let in? Will applicants have to grant women the right to vote, and will they have to enforce what now passes for racial equality?

If such criteria are to be applied, then until recently the US would have been blackballed under its current standards. Women did not achieve national suffrage until 1920, and blacks were denied the vote in some areas until the mid-1960s. What about such democratic blessings as gay marriage? I gather they are now integral parts of our democracy, so we should insist that our cohorts introduce them as well. Will applicants be expected to protect intellectual and religious freedom within their borders—principles that our journalists complain are lacking in China and other bad places? If such freedom is to be the rule, then all Western countries that enforce political correctness against conservative Christians and arrest scholars for expressing criminalized positions will have to be excluded. But it may be such not-very-libertarian Western “liberal democracies” as Canada that Jonah would enlist for his league of “good nations.”

It is doubtful that he would judge their deficient liberty in the same way as he would judge, say, Turkey or Russia. Apparently, arresting people for questioning the Holocaust or for sermonizing about the prohibition against homosexuality in Leviticus is not the same as punishing those who blaspheme the Koran.

I noticed this double standard in looking at recent ratings regarding which countries are “free” according to the less-than-unbiased monitoring organization Freedom House. Turkey, which discourages discussions of the massacre of Armenians during World War I, was rated low for suppressing intellectual dissent. But France, which has criminalized any denial of the “Armenian genocide” and other historical events, received comparatively high ratings for intellectual freedom. What I learned from such strange ratings is that it’s OK to curtail liberties only for what Western progressives want to suppress. 

But Goldberg’s “nice incentives” for moral inclusion may never reach such complexity. All that may be required for membership in his club is that a nation votes in the manner he deems appropriate.

In the meantime Jonah has a problem. He can’t seem to get the entire world onboard for what he wishes to see universally enacted. Our world is simply too damned complicated for his latter-day puritanical imagination.

In a recent interview with the German weekly Junge Freiheit, popular satirist and onetime fixture of the left Eckhard Henscheid explained why he had moved toward the libertarian right and was fighting censorship in his “democratic” society. Junge Freiheit had been kept from exhibiting its products at the Leipzig Book Fair and for years has been under investigation by a government organization, the Verfassungsschutz, which goes after what are seen as “fascist” or “far rightist” dangers to German democracy. Although the paper’s editors have been accused of “Holocaust denial,” the newspaper has repeatedly featured articles detailing the Nazi regime’s hideous deeds. Its real sin seems to be operating as an old-fashioned (in the European sense) liberal publication, which calls attention to the outrageous abuses of liberty committed by German antifascists and their collaborators in the government.

Henscheid contrasts the fierce opposition to freedom of thought (Denkfreiheit) among German educators, the German media, and throughout the conformist political class to the far milder censorship in an older and supposedly “authoritarian” German society. In the early nineteenth century, German principalities censored subversive works but with few exceptions did so in a bumbling, halfhearted fashion. These clearly undemocratic regimes retained censors who were supposed to examine publications of a certain page length. If the texts appeared to advocate the government’s overthrow or might produce civil unrest, the authors were prohibited from distributing them in their original form. In some cases, the author could amend the text to remove the offending passages. With sufficient influence in the right quarters, they might even be able to bribe the censors to let their works through.

Unlike modern democracies, these “authoritarian” regimes did not give a damn about indoctrinating their subjects, and least of all about turning them into antifascist automatons. They aimed at a more modest goal: staying in power. As a means toward that end, they kept the masses from getting stirred up. My now deceased polyglot friend Eric von Kuehnelt-Leddihn was fond of telling a story about his conversation with a Spanish fisherman near Bilbao, whom he asked (probably in Basque) what he thought about the government. The fisherman answered laconically: “Franco worries about the government; I just fish.” The point of this narrative was not to show what a good guy El Caudillo was. It was to indicate how a traditional authoritarian regime proceeded to act once it had settled scores with the revolutionary left. It was interested in order, not in creating a new democratic or socialist man/woman or in opening hitherto undiscovered paths to sensitivity. 

Democracies are far more ideologically driven, and almost always in a leftist totalitarian fashion that becomes increasingly obvious as “liberal democracies” reveal their true nature. In democratic Europe there are ever increasing attempts to criminalize “insensitive” speech as violating laws that forbid even the implicit denial of the Holocaust, Armenian genocide, or whatever other historical events are now being treated as beyond discussion. In England one stands in fear of violating the Race Relations Act if one notices too conspicuously the propensity of certain visible minorities for violence or if one complains too loudly about the immigration problem. The European Union has become an antifascist “democratic” police state and is now inflicting prohibitions on its subjects against speaking unkindly of gays, immigrants, and other specially protected groups. 

In a militant mood last month, Brussels called for special restrictions to be placed on Viktor Orbán’s right-of-center Hungarian government. His administration had the effrontery to replace a leftist coalition that was full of ex-communists, and Orbán has shocked his PC critics by speaking about a “historic Magyar nation.” This Hungarian regime may be described as a national democratic one but certainly not a global antifascist one. The German government, which as Henscheid notes is ever on the alert for the “man from Branau [Hitler’s Austrian birthplace] to rise from the grave,” has now placed the Hungarians “under special vigilance.”

The same ritual of condemnation took place in 2000, when the right-of-center Austrian Freedom Party was about to put together a coalition in Vienna. Anti-immigration national governments in Europe are now deemed “undemocratic” and therefore have to be put on the international quarantine list. We Americans and our European fellow-democrats now seek to micromanage the entire Western world and to bring everyone there into conformity with democratic morality.

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This is not an accident, but something inherent in modern democratic ideology. I am not including older democratic models such as the one that Orbán is trying to revive in Hungary or which Swiss or American communities once practiced. I am talking about our notion of “democracy as a way of life,” which may be as totalitarian as what the communists attempted but is also more successfully liberticidal. Contrary to our self-congratulatory bromides, modern democracy is neither in favor of true diversity nor particularly peace-loving.

This was brought home to me dramatically in 2003, when on my return from an anti-discrimination “learning session” at a nearby college—a measure that both state and federal authorities required—I learned that we Americans and our British fellow-democrats had just invaded Iraq to bestow on its inhabitants the blessings of democracy and human rights. Although I would have been delighted to hear something else at the time—for example, that our governing class had been reduced to its pre-New Deal size—this was and is impossible. We now enjoy government social engineering coming through the woodwork and wars of national liberation modeled on Bolshevism.

I do not see these features as a distortion of our democratic system but as fully compatible with democracy’s emphasis on universal rights, equality, and in recent decades, the grand project of modernizing the rest of the world with what Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind praised as “democratic education.”

In the US, older institutions and traditions have prevented this development from producing more harm. The American Constitution was a pre-democratic eighteenth-century exercise in what James Madison called “the physics of government.” It was an ideologically neutral governing document which allowed for a high degree of decentralized power. Those who today insist on strict adherence to this document are actually (to their credit) antidemocrats. Whether or not they know it, they are standing athwart further efforts by democratic state power to extend its already meddlesome reach.

Appeals to universal rights are also a thoroughly democratic practice which arose in the eighteenth century and was used to justify the French revolutionary state’s aggressions. Much to neoconservatives’ regret, Americans after their Revolution ceased paying attention to the decorative phrases about natural rights that Jefferson stuck into our Declaration of Independence (much to the displeasure of many Continental Congress delegates). Therefore it was supposedly a good thing that Lincoln reactivated this universal-rights phraseology during the horrors of the American Civil War. Indeed, we are true to our democratic character by forcing our human rights and political peculiarities on those living in different cultures. And we are morally required to aggressively bring them our state-of-the-art democracy.

The end effect of modern democracy, as Kenneth Minogue observes in The Servile Mind and as I try to show in After Liberalism, is growing submissiveness to the state as a source of both financial support and imposed morality. Democratic regimes do not encourage individuality as much as they socialize their subjects. This priority becomes established and accepted as older centers of authority are weakened and the overriding goal of overcoming inequality and discrimination takes center stage. Although this egalitarian goal can never be reached, the endless journey toward it becomes democratic government’s justification for existing. Compensatory justice for once-scorned minorities is not a departure from the egalitarian ideal but is instead its perfect expression.

Democratic populists argue that the people are being ignored or that the elites are out of touch with them. But most voters seem to like what the system offers and are not hunting for reactionary, antidemocratic options. These citizens fully understand that democracy means the promotion of equality at home and abroad. They believe that such schemes as redistributing income, overcoming discrimination, and forcibly implementing “human rights” in our foreign policy are democratic ideals.

Outside the circles of reactionaries among whom I travel, I have yet to run into people who oppose democracy or equality or who question this ideological consensus. Those who don’t belong to this consensus should not blame politicians. They should indict democracy itself.

Wehrmacht soldiers

Political correctness has permeated the historian’s craft to such a degree that honest historians must reinvent the wheel. PC has infected German history in particular. The doctrine of German “collective guilt” is often held as a precondition for German good behavior. Established historians in the US, England, and especially Germany must assume their subjects’ general wickedness since at least the 1871 unification. The German Republic’s leading social theorist, Jürgen Habermas, has argued repeatedly that viewing Germans as less than responsible for all of modern European history’s major catastrophes is “pedagogically dangerous.”

Habermas seems unconcerned with what the father of modern technical history, Leopold von Ranke, gave as the historian’s true function: describing the past “as it actually occurred.” He is quite happy that Germans learn half-truths and even total fabrications, provided these make them aware of their sinfulness and therefore willing to atone. Such self-loathing will also make Germans eager to give up their tainted national identity and become members of a world community (whether or not one really exists). Certain untruths have an apparently salutary character, and all the major German political parties now accept Germany’s sole responsibility for both World Wars and the positive role of Stalin’s armies in “liberating” their country from “fascism.”

Basic to this self-flagellation is having Auschwitz serve, in a former German foreign minister’s words, as the “founding myth for the German Federal Republic.” One must believe that not only did the Third Reich murder millions of Jews, but that Germans of all classes and regions happily cooperated. The most extreme form of this accusation is found in Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996), released in Germany as Hitlers Willige Vollstrecker. The book was a German best-seller despite its insubstantial or invented evidence, a fraud methodically dissected by Jewish critics Norman Finkelstein and Ruth Bettina Birn in A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth (1998). Still, Goldhagen conducted book tours among the descendants of those he indiscriminately trashed, bringing mass displays of smarmily repentant German sinners.

Not all books about what Germans supposedly knew about the Holocaust and what they did to assist it are as tacky as Goldhagen’s work. The more respectable formulation of his thesis goes like this: The Nazi extermination of the Jews was an “open secret.” No German administrator or military officer was supposed to know “state secrets” unless they pertained to his assigned function. While any violation of this restriction would be met with severe punishment, the secret was not as well kept as Germans would have their conquerors believe. Jews could not have been removed, we are told, without their non-Jewish neighbors knowing they would suffer a horrendous fate wherever they were taken.

The now received view preaches that there was anti-Semitism in Germany going back many centuries. It notes that in the interwar period, nationalist parties urging the exclusion of Jewish citizens received many votes. There is something else that anti-German historians now emphasize but which they may exaggerate: the occasional breakdown of the distinction between the Waffen SS Einsatzgruppen—which rounded up and murdered Jews, Poles, and Russians—and Wehrmacht soldiers who were simply fighting a war.

Just about every Anglophone historian writing on the Third Reich is now arguing that the Holocaust was mostly the work of regular German soldiers. The complaint of “Holocaust minimizers”—that the numbers of prisoners killed in death camps has been inflated—now seems acceptable. But historians such as Tim Snyder and Richard J. Evans have turned the argument around: It wasn’t necessary to transport Jews to death camps to kill them because so many soldiers were rushing to do the dirty work. They depict the Holocaust as a public-works project, fueled by sympathy for Hitler’s “Final Solution.”

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This view has become so prevalent among antifascist Germans (there is no other kind now permitted) that in public demonstrations and lavish exhibitions the average Wehrmacht soldier has been turned into the major perpetrator of Nazi murders. On these occasions young people come forth to tell us that their grandfathers or great-grandfathers were most certainly mass murderers. These penitent descendants seem to hope their ancestral nation will soon disappear.

It is against this background of lunacy that Alfred de Zayas, a retired high official from the UN Commission for Human Rights, has released Völkermord als Staatsgeheimnis (Genocide as a State Secret, 2011). Zayas has authored other controversial works that go against the prevalent leftist grain. Among his earlier studies are heavily documented examinations of Eastern Europeans’ organized murders of Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) after the Second World War, as well as the postwar agreements that greased the skids for these crimes. Zayas’s works are all painstakingly documented, and his latest study is based on thirty-five years of interviews and a laborious sifting of sources. The author fine-combed the records and testimonies of the Nuremberg Trials in 1946-47 and interviewed surviving “war criminals” including Albert Speer and Admiral Karl Dönitz, the Nuremberg prosecutors, and former war prisoners of the Nazis.

Records from the Wehrmacht Office for the Investigation of Violations of International Law indicate an official willingness to investigate reported crimes against civilians. There is nothing to suggest that these investigators knew about Hitler’s Final Solution. When they received reports about “unwarranted” shootings of civilians in occupied areas, they prosecuted the offenders. Even the judges assigned to the Waffen SS were often in the dark about the Einsatzgruppen’s mission, and sometimes they launched inquiries into reports about mass murders taking place in the east. Even the regime’s enemies—ranging from anti-Nazi aristocrats associated with the Resistance, to persecuted Social Democrats (such as the partly Jewish family of former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt), and even former concentration-camp inmates—had no idea of the Final Solution. According to the official story, Jews were being “relocated” and would be employed in “work divisions” outside Germany. Although this forced evacuation caused some concern among friends and neighbors, what was happening did not look like the beginning of genocide.

The most obvious reason for this is that secrecy was strictly observed. The Holocaust was planned by a small circle meeting outside Berlin in January 1942. In addressing his SS subordinates in Posen in 1943, Himmler boasted about how well their secret was being kept. Other factors worked to keep the secret from getting out: The death camps, as opposed to generic concentration camps, were located in the east, not in Germany. Then from 1943 on, German civilians were subject to Allied bombing and had to protect themselves while enemy forces overran them. In this situation it was unlikely that a war-weary German would wonder about a “relocated” Jewish neighbor’s fate.

Even foreign sources, which were mostly available as radio transmissions, had little to say about the murdered Jews, and being caught using these sources could land the offender in a concentration camp. Germans who found out about the murders couldn’t do much to stop them, since divulging the secret to a government official could be deadly.

Ironically, Zayas confirms findings about the Holocaust that came out of the Nuremberg Trials. Although these trials were planned to make Germans feel ashamed of their country, the judges did not declare all Germans to be complicit in the Holocaust. It was assumed that the mass extermination of Jews was a carefully guarded secret. Very few of those put on trial were sentenced to death or to long imprisonment for planning to murder Jews. Even the prosecutors believed what Zayas tells us concerning knowledge of the Final Solution. Admittedly there were isolated instances of Wehrmacht units participating in the shooting of Jews and other civilians, particularly in Kharkov and elsewhere in the Ukraine. But those were treated as special cases and not seen as typical of Wehrmacht behavior.

It speaks volumes that Zayas—who echoes the post-War, Nuremberg Trial view of who knew what about the Holocaust—is now regarded in some circles as a German apologist. From the warped perspective of today’s German intelligentsia, their country’s post-war humiliation can never go far enough.

Even in this progressive age, religious uncertainties still abound as we approach Holy Season, which begins with St. Martin’s Day on January 16 and extends throughout Black History Month. This was made dramatically clear last week at a college near where I live, a place that has demoted the ancient Christian holiday that falls on December 25 and the weeks leading up to it as “holiday season.”

Meanwhile the institution is making every effort to commemorate MLK’s trials and martyrdom. Considering his stature, the customary one-day celebration was deemed inadequate, so they are preparing for a weeklong celebration of their twentieth-century savior. The sacred week will be devoted to recounting America’s racist past, what remains to be done to overcome that past, and most importantly, the question of whether King’s pronouncements can help advance gay and transvestite agendas.

When asked to submit lecture proposals, only one faculty member bothered to respond, but since this wiseacre had the temerity to question King’s spiritual purity, he was immediately turned down. Still, there’s no reason to suspect that other faculty members were equally irreverent. One retired professor wrote to his colleagues that the proposed celebration did not dwell sufficiently on Southern wickedness. He also said the college was not doing enough to exalt King, given what this truly heroic figure had done to raise us out of our bigotry.

The college community was peacefully and reverentially preparing for January 16 until someone expressed an idea that befouled the worshipers as if a garbage truck’s contents had been dumped on their heads. This disruption is equivalent to the controversy over Christ’s divinity that wracked the early Christian world. The person who set it off belonged to the college’s venerable Center for Global Citizenship and was helping to plan an international dinner to be served for foreign students on the academic liturgical calendar’s holiest day. In his childlike simplicity he suggested including a large fleshy-centered fruit called “w————n.”

Rather thoughtlessly, the committee was planning a festive menu without beseeching the approval of their religious superior—the black female Director of Diversity. Had they acted through the designated chain of authority, the ensuing controversy would not likely have arisen. The lower clergy would have known it was acting in a way that ran contrary to the teachings of the Church of Political Correctness, whose highest campus official is the diversity-directing minority lady. Similar grave oversights may have led to Christendom’s split in the sixteenth century, if one may be allowed to compare the present moment of high sensitivity to outdated religious superstitions.

The Director of Diversity issued a pronouncement emphatically prohibiting her flock from serving w————n on the Feast of St. Martin. The prelate explained that w————n is a “symbol of oppression to all black people,” thus it would be racist to serve at a college event. To their credit, those associated with Global Citizenship immediately withdrew their menu suggestion and have acted contritely ever since. But what sort of benighted being wouldn’t recognize the gravity of this offense on their own? They had ignored repeated warnings that a prohibition would be coming. For months the Director had lamented the fact that the forbidden fruit was being served on campus. But others chose to ignore these cries of despair.

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Still, it would be nice if the college’s highest ecclesiastical official spoke conclusively about how far the prohibition extends. This lady has been all too taciturn in engaging a question of deep moral and ritual significance. A clergyman who is still vaguely associated with the now-vanquished Christian religion has appealed to the Office of Diversity for further clarification. Are we about to see a political scandal erupt if the fruit were to appear again on campus? The college’s future may involve a local Watermelongate.

Will students still be permitted to eat w————n in the dining hall? What about their dorm rooms and while snacking between classes? Perhaps there will be differing degrees of prohibition, depending on whether or not one is pursuing the path to PC perfection. Students might be allowed to munch on the fruit in private, but for those seeking absolute sensitivity, it will be necessary to practice total abstinence.

I have picked a middle path. Since I am hopelessly addicted to the fruit of sin and buy it even during the winter when it has to be imported from Chile, I could not give up eating it. But I can show verbal restraint by not mentioning the word designating that green thing with the red juicy pulp in the middle. That’s the least I can do to exhibit solidarity with those true believers.

There are other repercussions to be feared. Fights may soon be breaking out in the dining hall if the dreaded red stuff shows up in a fruit salad and students are unclear about how to address such a grave situation. Should they throw the pollutant into the garbage can, or are they supposed to burn the red, pulpy matter lest they contaminate themselves with a “racist” substance? What does a fastidious practitioner of PC do if some of the contaminant gets on his/her shoes while he/she’s walking near a supermarket? Is he/she required to destroy the shoes lest they become polluted by contact with racism? What should I do if I accidentally blurt out the horrible word at a fruit counter? Is there some penance I’ll have to peform, such as reciting the “I Have a Dream” speech fourteen times or attending the College Diversity Committee’s monthly meeting? Those of us who are not fully sensitized beg for instruction. 

Ron Paul

Sometimes intelligent people say things that are so dumb, I wonder whom they are trying to please. In George Will’s latest diatribe, “Ron Paul, spoiler?,” he makes nice to those groups that have advanced his career—GOP foundations, the media establishment, and DC insiders whom he presumably sees socially. Unlike other Republican commentators, Will recognizes that Ron Paul can be a critical factor in the presidential election, even if the congressman cannot hope to win the GOP nomination: “His candidacy [as a third-party candidate] might guarantee Barack Obama’s reelection.”

Will pooh-poohs the supposedly bloated figure that comes out of a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll about Paul’s possible performance if he runs as an independent. He finds the predicted quotient, 18 percent, to be much too high, and he can’t imagine how Paul would poll more than about 7 percent. Nonetheless, according to Will, “at least 80 percent of Mr. Paul’s votes would come at the expense of the Republican nominee.” Will discusses a Ron Paul third-party candidacy’s probable electoral outcome in states where the GOP would likely win by less than 5 percent. He shows convincingly that Obama would carry all these states in 2012.

Paul may announce an independent run, and Will is fuming about this. Although he never uses the term specifically, he considers Paul and his current supporters to be kooks. Why the hell would anyone support a candidate who thinks that “Mr. Obama is only marginally more mistaken than Mr. Paul’s Republican rivals, who do not wake up each morning angry about the 1913 Federal Reserve Act”? These wacked-out supporters “are inclined to accept no substitute because no other candidate espouses anything like his high octane blend of libertarianism and isolationism.” Presumably these wingnuts are keeping us from electing a “moderate conservative,” someone who would put our country back on track the way it was before Bam wrecked the country. Will suggests it is eccentricity, or perhaps mental illness, which fuels Ron Paul’s candidacy. Paul and his backers are trying to turn back the clock to a time before 1913.

None of the Ron Paul supporters I’ve met would fit Will’s malicious description. Most of them are not philosophical libertarians, they’re profoundly disgusted with the Republican candidates that Will finds acceptable. I am such a person. I have never scorned the state in its proper place, nor have I thought about the FRA more than ten minutes in my entire life. Although I consider it a mistake to allow government to play politics with lending rates and the monetary supply, I do not sit up nights agonizing over what happened in 1913. I loathe the media and political class and find nothing significantly different in what the two national parties have to offer domestically.

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Extensive regulation of the economy, anti-discrimination controls over our social and commercial transactions, affirmative-action programs, calls for illegal amnesty, and a runaway national debt scarred Republican policy before Obama came along. An extensive study of Romney’s administration in Massachusetts shows that even in the area of judicial appointments this now reborn “conservative” candidate was at least as liberal as his Democratic predecessor.

And there is hardly a liberal position Newt Gingrich has not advocated. Until recently Newt was in favor of deficit spending and expanded social programs, as well as helping himself to Freddie Mac funds. He also favored sanctions on the former white South African government, pressed for the MLK national holiday, and has reamed out Georgians who display Confederate symbols in public. On immigration Newt differs little from Obama except for the fact that Bam actually wins minority votes by favoring amnesty for illegals.

Gingrich claims to represent “foreign policy conservatism,” but this takes such bizarre forms as describing the Palestinians as an “invented people” and promising to appoint the ranting John Bolton as Secretary of State. Mitt is no slouch in the “foreign policy conservatism” department and would have us appoint democracy inspectors to different parts of the developing world to help their governments become like ours. Listening to such “conservatives,” one gets the idea that we should be dropping bombs for educational purposes over regions where women are required to wear veils.

There is a growing minority on the right which is turned off by such ranting. These dissenters are not typically “pure-octane” isolationists, and they may not fully agree with Paul’s dismissive attitude toward nasty foreign powers. Like me, they may wish that there was some middle path between Paul’s attempt to ignore international relations and the saber-rattling that dominates GOP presidential politics. Equally exasperating is the GOP establishment and Murdoch media empire’s refusal to recognize the Bush Administration’s egregious ineptitude and its critical role in contributing to Obama’s problems. Bush was an activist president in the worst sense, and the eagerness of his party’s propaganda organs to get back to something like his administration is an outrage.

For those of us on the right who do not wish to get back to Karl Rove’s utopia, Ron Paul offers at least an opportunity to protest. Unlike George Will, some of us are no happier with the Reps than we are with the Dems. We are therefore willing to put up with four more years of Bam rather than replace him with a GOP technocrat who combines social democracy and crony capitalism with armed crusades for “human rights.”

In the December issue of The American Conservative, Gary L. Gregg defends the Electoral College as an integral part of the “Founders’ design.”

Gregg goes after the proponents of the National Popular Vote plan, a group accused of trying to nationalize presidential elections. He says they have carried out a “stealthy and disciplined state-by-state campaign” to undo a wise safeguard against hell breaking loose, and they have thus far won approval for their plan in eight states and the District with the aid of 2,100 presumably misguided state legislators. It’s not entirely clear what’s “stealthy” about a plan that lots of state legislatures are already earnestly debating.

Gregg has a thing for the now-threatened Twelfth Amendment, which was passed in 1804 to deal with the “problematic election” of Thomas Jefferson in 1800. This problem first erupted with the disputed election of John Adams in 1796. It was then that the original electoral plan in Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution came under fire. Under this plan, electors from every state cast two votes for president, and the candidate with the second-highest total was awarded the vice-presidency. Under deadlocks, the election was turned over to the House. Rivals for the presidency—some of whom such as Adams and Jefferson hated each other’s guts—could and did hold the #1 and #2 spots in the executive branch. The Twelfth Amendment, which Gregg praises to the skies, awarded state electors only one vote and required the candidates for president and vice president to run separately. It arranged for a more expeditious settlement of deadlocks which had to be handed over to the House of Representatives for a final judgment. In time vice-presidential candidates ceased to run separately because the two national parties started running vice-presidential and presidential nominees on the same ticket.

Gregg maintains that the Electoral College provided for a balance between “competing values” at stake in creating the president’s office. The college is based on “recognition that the people and their communities are the ultimate source of power,” but it “encourages the president to be sufficiently independent so that he could act his part with vigor and resolve.”

Gregg’s defense doesn’t speak to me—or, as the Germans would put it, it “couldn’t lure a dog behind the oven heat.” The Amendment harkens back to another society, one which approached elections very differently than we do. In 1789 electors were selected by state legislatures in seven out of thirteen states. It was entirely up to the state assemblies to decide how the electors were picked. This remained the case until many decades after the founding. Until the federal government began taking control of the situation after the Civil War, voting usually excluded women, vagrants, and sometimes people of color.

Defending the Electoral College as it now functions is not the same as upholding the principle of ordered liberty as understood in 1789. Like Madison and Hamilton, one can certainly be for limited government, dual sovereignty, and balance of power without having to defend a system of organizing presidential elections that in no way addresses such modern problems as an overly centralized executive regime and two privileged national parties that monopolize presidential races.

Gregg imagines that the two-party monopoly leads to moderation, and he views the EC as a necessary means to avoid having “the most extreme elements of each party empowered.” Further: “Without the moderating system [furnished by the duopoly in American politics], the extremes of each party would be empowered to blackmail more prudent candidates.”

Indeed we should rejoice over these government-sponsored two parties. If we didn’t have a system that “exaggerates” each major party’s victory, we’d be in a real pickle: “Our politics would be moved out of the center,” a situation that, we are warned, would create chaos. Our elections would degenerate into a “Jamaican limbo dance,” with eccentric figures like Ross Perot popping up all over the presidential landscape. (I’ve no idea what a Jamaican limbo dance is, but I’m sure it’s something quite nasty.)

In Gregg’s nightmare scenario, absent the Electoral College our politics would be shifted from the center in ways that would radicalize “the Democratic Party, as the path to the presidency became one where smaller states and rural areas could be ignored with impunity.” Have I been looking at the wrong political landscape? Does President Obama represent the “center” that the Electoral College is keeping alive? The “center” has been moving leftward since I was a kid in the 1950s. It’s silly to pretend that the two-party monopoly has encased us in a permanent centrist cocoon between two evil extremes. We’ve obviously moved away from what used to be the center—mostly toward the left.

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With its enforcement of political correctness and increasing government involvement in the workplace, our current “center” is a good deal less centrist than the one of my youth. I wouldn’t bring this up were it not for the fact that Gregg is a self-described conservative. He’s also revisiting positions that I’ve encountered in soi-disant conservative publications throughout my long adult life. The Straussian political theorist Martin Diamond, who spoke often before conservative groups, fell dead in the halls of the US Congress where he had gone in 1977 to urge retaining the EC.

None of this advocacy ever appealed to me as a critic of the duopoly. Gregg is correct that the EC helps sustain the two-party stranglehold, and this situation has rendered impossible a counter-movement from the old or libertarian right, which would have to operate outside the two-party system to succeed. Under the existing system an independent right could not push either of the two parties in its direction, even if both opportunistically adopted the usual campaign gibberish about keeping down taxes. Could one imagine the Dems or Reps getting rid of federal anti-discrimination agencies, minimum wages, the Department of Education, or a neo-Wilsonian foreign policy? I can’t conceive of any of these things happening in the present circumstances.

Only an “extremist” minority party running in a winner-take-all national election would be able to pressure the party hacks into the kind of deal-making that Gregg despises. Gregg asks whether Americans would “be satisfied if a president takes office after receiving only 40% of the national vote. How about 30% in a five-candidate race?” Personally, I’d be delighted. For once we’d have a president we may be able to control. Even better, he’d hesitate to blow up countries to bring them democracy and human rights or because Dick Cheney and FOX suggested he should.

I’ve no idea why Gregg sees the “nationalization” of elections as something we should try to prevent. He may be looking at the very recent past and no farther back. What stirs his juices has been going on since Reconstruction, starting with the Fifteenth Amendment granting federally protected voting rights to Negro Freemen. I also count at least three more amendments, namely Nineteen, Twenty-Four, and Twenty-Six, in which the federal government continued to have a hand in shaping or extending the franchise.

Is it still possible to speak of significant state control of elections after the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965? Already extended with bipartisan support four times, most recently under George W. Bush, it established “covered jurisdictions” in Southern states. These targeted areas are kept under what has become permanent federal supervision in order to avoid even a hint of racial discrimination. This act came three years after an amendment was passed that placed the franchise even more fully under federal supervisors. This was Amendment Twenty-Three, which prohibited states from disqualifying voters for non-payment of poll taxes. Even if this method of winnowing voters was applied unfairly against blacks in some places, it might be asked why states and localities everywhere should be denied the right to apply it. Shouldn’t we in the states have the right to restrict voting to those who are willing to pay a paltry fee for the privilege? Obviously not!

One may be for or against the federal supervision of voting. One may also think that if states wanted to lower the voting age to eighteen or extend the vote to women, they could have easily done so without involving the federal government through the amendment process. But it is foolish in light of the last hundred and forty years’ events to pretend that the states have retained sovereign control over voting. They abandoned most of it long before the NVP’s advocates came on the scene.

Gregg’s brief is really about defending the status quo that one can see and hear every night on FOX, with its predictable dialogues between GOP and Democratic regulars. These people certainly don’t want to rock the two-party Pleasure Ship, and with good reason. They’re in no mood to take caviar and truffles out of their diets or, perhaps even more importantly, miss payments on their yachts. They are immensely interested in maintaining things as they are. Accordingly, they like to be portrayed as ruling or criticizing from the “center.” As long as the pols can hand out patronage and get a chance to occupy government posts, they’re happy as clams with the system. Hey, isn’t this liberal democracy? We don’t want to ruin it with a messier way of electing presidents. Or do we?