Auschwitz: Ignoring History, Predicting the Future

The gates of Auscwitz - a Nazi death camp

By Alan Caruba

The late Israeli scholar and diplomat, Abba Eban, (1915-2002) said, “History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.”

Similarly, Winston Churchill said, “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they have tried everything else.” In Churchill’s case, he was referring to the U.S. reluctance to become involved in another war in Europe, but the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 changed that overnight. By 1945, along with our allies, the wars in Europe and Asia were over.

Sixty-seven years ago, on January 27, 1945, elements of the Soviet army came upon the Auschwitz concentration camps to discover a Nazi killing machine, one of several such camps created to exploit forced labor and to systematically kill Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, clerics, prisoners of war, and anyone else deemed an enemy of the Nazi state, right down to children and infants.

The Nazis killed people on such a scale that it is almost incomprehensible. It happened within my lifetime and that of many others, some of whom are among the fortunate survivors. And yet, today, the denial of the Holocaust and the millions of other Nazi victims is an article of faith among Arabs in the Middle East and countless others around the world.

A January 25th Agence France-Presse article reported that “One in five young Germans has no idea that Auschwitz was a Nazi death camp, a poll released Wednesday showed, two days ahead of Holocaust memorial day. Although 90 percent of those asked did know it was a concentration camp”, the Stern magazine poll revealed “that Auschwitz meant nothing to 21 percent of 18-29 year olds.”

It is essential that people in their respective nations know their own and other’s histories. A hallmark of the former Soviet regime in Russia was the way it rewrote history and, in George Orwell’s classic “1984”, a work of fiction about communism, there was a Ministry of Truth in which history was rewritten.

In the United States, since around the 1960s, strenuous efforts have been made to alter the teaching of the nation’s history. The Founding Fathers are often portrayed as slaveholders to downplay their devotion to liberty.

Even they knew that slavery was an abomination, but their task was to create a new nation, one dedicated to liberty. The U.S. Constitution was approved by twelve state delegations in 1787, but in 1861, barely 74 years later it would take a Civil War to put an end to slavery and another hundred years to end the exclusion of African Americans from access to their full rights under the Constitution.

Several generations of Americans have passed through our school systems—literally controlled by the federal government after the creation of the Department of Education in 1979 after being transferred from the former Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, a legacy of Jimmy Carter’s single term. All curriculum taught in the schools comes from the DOE thanks to its control over a national, one-size-fits-all testing system introduced with the “No Child Left Behind” program championed by George W. Bush.

To not know about Auschwitz, whether one is German, American, or any other nationality is a failure on a grand scale because it means that it can be repeated. To not know America’s epic struggle to fulfill its promise of liberty leaves new generations at a disadvantage, as in the case of a fifth of young Germans today, ignorant of their nation’s past.

In today’s world, many worry about the fate of Israel, surrounded by hostile nations and openly threatened by an Iran seeking nuclear weapons. Its independence was declared in 1948, barely three years after the end of World War II. Its first task was to absorb, not only the survivors of the Nazi regime throughout Europe, but those who were forced to flee Arab nations in the wake of the war. Its independence was greeted with the first of several wars against it. The general hostility to Jews that preceded the Holocaust by centuries is a stain on humanity.

So there is cause for concern when one in five young Germans have no idea what went on in Auschwitz and the other Nazi death camps.

It is a concern when the Syrian dictatorship has already killed 5,000 of its own people to maintain itself.

It is a concern for Iraq, already falling back into an internal conflict after decades of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship and the end of the U.S. occupation.

It is a concern for an Iranian dictatorship on the cusp of creating its own nuclear weapons.

It is a concern for Venezuela, held in the grip of Hugo Chavez’s dictatorship, an acolyte of Communist Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

It is a concern for Europeans whose political experiment, the European Union, threatens the financial stability of its member nations with the sole exception of Germany.

It is a concern for Americans who witnessed the unilateral limited nuclear disarmament of the nation and the huge reduction of its military power by the Obama administration, less than the lifetime after the end of World War II.

The world remains a dangerous place. That is the lesson of history.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Short Attention Spans

By Alan Caruba

The American Revolution, from the day in 1773 when tea got dumped in Boston Bay to the day in 1781 when the British were defeated at Yorktown took eight years. If it had been on television, the ratings would have fallen off in about two weeks.

My point is that, by the end of the second week of the turmoil in Egypt, it mattered less and less to those in the West that a million Egyptians were showing up in Cairo and Alexandria to demand Mubarak’s resignation or that demands for real freedom, real liberty in the Middle East are a very big deal!

Mubarak says he intends to stay in office until the election in September. He appointed a vice president, gave a pay raise to government workers, and has patiently waited for the crowds to grow tired of singing, chanting, listening to speeches, and to get on with their lives.

These events are cultural in nature.

Despite common ties with England, the colonists had been quite distinctly “American” for a very long time and didn’t like being treated poorly by the British crown and parliament. “No taxation without representation” became their rallying call.

Egyptians have been around a lot longer than Americans; several millennia in fact.

They have been Muslims since the religion was “introduced” by its early zealots in the seventh century A.D. Designed to appeal to Arabs in particular, but proclaimed as a universal faith to which everyone would have to submit, Islam put its stamp on Egyptians, just as it would on Persians and others throughout the Middle East, northern Africa, and into India..

It wasn’t that long ago that Egyptians were ruled by a monarch, King Farouk, crowned at age 16 and ruling until 1952 when a coup led by Gamal Abdel Nasser forced him into exile in Monaco. The defeat Egypt had suffered in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war would lead to the end of the king’s reign. Until then, from around the 1800s, the British had been deeply involved in Egypt, eventually wresting control of the Suez Canal from the French while the monarchy increasingly became a figurehead.

The British literally modernized Egypt, but by the end of World War Two, depleted in wealth to maintain their empire, they watched it drift away into new, independent nations. Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956 and continued to engage in wars with Israel. When Nasser died his successor, Anwar Sadat, made a cold peace with Israel and, shortly after, was assassinated by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Seated beside him that day was Hosni Mubarak, an air force general and, when he came to power shortly thereafter, he clamped down on the Muslim Brotherhood who wanted to turn Egypt into the same kind of hellish regime that was later imposed on Iran in 1979. As in Turkey earlier, Egypt installed a secular government whose military ensured that it stayed that way.

Most of this is unknown history to Americans who have already tired of seeing Egyptians in Cairo’s main square and, if they have paid any attention to the White House, know that President Obama, Vice President Biden, and Secretary of State Clinton have managed to say conflicting things about the uprising, looking and sounding clueless and foolish in the process.

Freedom, however, is not a joke and, thanks to the Internet, a lot of Egyptians, a lot of Iranians, a lot of Tunisians, a lot of Yemenis, and, in general, people through northern Africa, the Maghreb, and elsewhere in the Middle East would like to vote in legitimate elections where there are real choices among candidates and parties. They would like to live without secret police and other forms of oppression.

We tend to forget that George W. Bush’s aim when invading Iraq was to depose a dictator, to bring about democracy there, and to spread the message throughout the Middle East.

Mostly, the Egyptians would like to be rid of the endemic corruption that authoritarian regimes establish among a small, ruling elite that, in turn, discourages everything from owning a deed to one’s own home to being able to start a business without paying off several levels of bureaucracy and waiting a very long time.

The Egyptians want real opportunity, an energetic economy, and some form of actual democracy. Concessions are being made, but progress is likely to take a while.

The Muslim Brotherhood, al Qaeda, the Taliban, and all the other Islamists are in a race to gain control over the nations of the Middle East before freedom breaks out everywhere.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Picking a Fight with Patriots

By Alan Caruba

The British, when they still ruled the American colonies, learned to their displeasure what a bad idea it is to pick a fight with patriots.

By the time the Revolution began the colonies had been running their own affairs for a long time and, while many saw benefits in being allied with one of the great powers of their times and their world, they soon tired of “taxation without representation.”

The colonists had no say in Parliament and generally regarded it, not the king, as the source of their problems. The British, however, had spent themselves into huge debt by pursuing various wars. Parliament saw the colonies as a source of revenue with which to dig themselves out of that debt. One way was to monopolize what the colonies could import and another way was to tax those imports.

The problem for the British was the long established practice of Americans to ignore any legislation or taxes they did not like. Decades before the Revolution ignited, a British official named Edward Randolph wrote “There is no notice taken of the act of navigation, plantation, or any other laws made in England for the regulation of trade. All nations having free liberty to come into their ports and vend their commodities without any restraint…” Apparently, Randolph noted, Americans regarded themselves as “a free state and do act in all matters accordingly.”

We tend to see men like Sam Adams, John Hancock, and Paul Revere through the gauzy haze of a distant time, but we should remind ourselves that they were real men trying to cope with an increasingly difficult situation.

Their grievances were real and they had grown up in a place where liberty, the freedom to worship as they wanted, to publish what they wanted, and engage in commerce as they wanted was not only well established, but valued above all else. They had a good understanding of the British constitution and the rights it granted. It was Britain, far across the Atlantic, that controlled their fortunes and, through a series of abuses, Britain lost their allegiance.

The importance of tea cannot be underestimated. By 1769, Americans were importing 900,000 pounds of English tea, but by 1773 that was not longer the case, in large part due to the Tea Act of 1773. It was a tax specific to the colonies. Americans began to boycott tea. Coffee would come to be seen as a more patriotic brew to drink.

Adams, Hancock, Revere, and others had formed the Sons of Liberty, a group that on December 16, 1773 boarded three ships from England, the Dartmouth, the Eleanor, and the Beaver, and dumped 342 crates of tea into Boston Harbor.

The event would become known as the Boston Tea Party and from that event today’s Tea Party members take their name. The source of oppressive taxes, unimaginable waste, and unpopular legislation is now the federal government in Washington, D.C.

Such events and groups do not occur in a vacuum. They are preceded by earlier abuses and in the case of the colonies there was a Stamp Act that was so strongly resisted Parliament repealed it. In Massachusetts, the royal governor and other officials appointed by the king were so unpopular that they were frequently under attack. Effigies were hung from an elm in North Boston that became known as the Liberty Tree.

There can be few more foolish acts by any government in power than to ignore Americans, to force upon them legislation the majority opposes, to bring shame to the nation in various ways. Patient to a fault, Americans have a long track record of opposing oppression that runs contrary to the U.S. Constitution.

By coincidence, I have been reading Joel J. Miller’s excellent biography, “The Revolutionary Paul Revere.” Made famous by a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Paul Revere’s Ride”, Revere had made a long ride the night of the Tea Party to inform the New York Committee of Correspondence about the event. Another rode to Philadelphia for the same purpose. The ride immortalized by Longfellow was “On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five.”

Paul Revere, silversmith and patriot, lived to the age of 83, dying in May 1818; long enough a life to encompass the tempestuous birth of America in its earliest years. He would live through the Revolution, the original Articles of Confederation, and in 1787, the Constitution under which Americans live today, still enjoying the blessings of liberty.

In Boston, the church bells tolled his passing. One newspaper said, “Seldom has the tomb closed upon a life so honorable and useful.”

The spirit of Paul Revere and the Sons of Liberty still lives. America is home again to Tea Parties.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Looking for Democracy

By Alan Caruba

Every time I use the word “democracy” to describe the process by which Americans elect their representatives, someone leaps to their computer to inform me that America is a “republic” and not a democracy. I am well aware of this, but it does not change the process.

It got me thinking about Alexis de Tocqueville’s trip throughout America in 1831-1832. It resulted in his famed analysis, “Democracy in America.” By coincidence, I just read a new book by Leo Damrosch, “Tocqueville’s Discovery of America,” that chronicles his journey, accompanied by his friend Gustave de Beaumont.

At the time, Tocqueville was twenty-five years old. Born an aristocrat in France, his immediate family had escaped the horrors of its Revolution, though several relatives had been guillotined. France would undergo a number of “Republics” as politics roiled the nation.

At that time America was composed of 24 States and a population of approximately 13 million.

The nine-month journey took the two young men throughout much of what was then America; Boston, New York, Philadelphia being the major cities of the time. Longing to see the “frontier” they journeyed by steamer, the only way to get around via navigable rivers other than by stagecoach or via horseback to areas served by neither. There were no trains and the Civil War was yet to be fought for another thirty years.

Ostensibly on a trip to study the American penal system for the French government, it was in fact a great adventure both men wanted to undertake in order to understand what the comparatively new American experiment in democracy was all about and what it was that distinguished Americans from their European cousins. The U.S. Constitution had been ratified a scant 43 years earlier.

Together they would journey as far south as New Orleans with stops in Memphis, Nashville, Cincinnati, Detroit, briefly in Washington, D.C., and other cities which at that time barely qualified to be so described.

Beyond the Mississippi and up into the Great Lakes area, the nation was still forested and wild. Reading Damrosch’s excellent account of the journey is to be transported back to a distant time, but one that lay the foundations for today’s America.

Damrosch notes that what Tocqueville produced was not an account of “Americans” as a unique national type, “but rather a structural explanation of some profound reasons why democracy, by its very nature, tends to produce certain characteristics in its citizens.”

By 1831, America already had class distinctions; all related either to wealth as opposed to aristocracy. The other distinction was the institution of slavery on which the South depended for its economy. It was bitterness itself to be black.

“In France,” Tocqueville noted, “even the most minor local decisions were made in Paris. In the United States, on the other hand, the federal government legislated for the whole country but left administration and enforcement to the states and localities.” Today, the States have largely forfeited their sovereignty as distinct republics.

Tocqueville noted that “Democracy doesn’t give people the most competent government, but it does what the most competent government is often powerless to do. It spreads throughout the entire social body a restless activity, a superabundant strength, an energy that never exists without it.”

An observer today might come to a very different conclusion as Americans now labor under a huge centralized government that intrudes into every aspect of their lives and into the commerce of the nation, as often as not creating obstacles and penalties to entrepreneurs and corporations alike.

Today’s government requires a virtual army of lobbyists in Washington, D.C. to try to steer a ship of state that, under the present administration, is indifferent to the public will. It is one that is as close to despotism as America has ever come.

Prophetically, Tocqueville feared a huge, centralized government no matter where it occurred, warning that “It is absolute, detailed, regular, farsighted, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if its object was to prepare men for adult life, but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in permanent childhood.”

“It likes citizens to enjoy themselves, so long as all they think about is enjoyment. It labors willingly for their happiness, but it wants to be the sole agent and arbiter of their happiness…The sovereign power doesn’t break their will, but it softens, bends, and directs them. It rarely compels action, but it constantly opposes action.”

“It doesn’t destroy, but it prevents birth; it doesn’t tyrannize, but it hinders, represses, enervates, restrains, and numbs, until it reduces each nation to a mere flock of timid and industrious animals, with government as their shepherd.”

This, written 180 years ago, is a description of communism and socialism. It is the antithesis of the Tea Party movement and the protest rallies currently being demonized by the news media and by the Democrat Party as it plots to retain control of Congress and over our lives.

Presciently, Tocqueville wrote, “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” That day has arrived.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Pearl Harbor Then and Now

By Alan Caruba

On December 7, 1941, I was four years old, but no one born in the years of World War II grew up without memories, conscious and unconscious, of that great conflict. It affects the way you look at the world, how you regard history, how you examine global threats to peace.

The United States was caught flat-footed. Most of the population was opposed to participation in the European war that had begun in 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. The peace that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain thought he had negotiated with Adolf Hitler proved to be a dangerous delusion and England was literally fighting for its life.

Everything turned around for Americans on the day the Japanese Empire attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii in much the fashion that September 11, 2001 changed the worldview of many Americans.

My earliest memories of the war were trains that were filled with young men in uniform. My Mother’s parents lived in Long Branch, NJ and nearby Fort Dix was where many inductees received their training and processing. Under Mother’s watchful eye I would stroll the aisle of the passenger car and talk with soldiers, many of whom would never return. As a child I had no idea what danger lurked for them or the nation.

By 1945, at war’s end, I was eight years old and fully aware of the war. In school children contributed pennies and nickels to the nation’s drive to fund the conflict. Adults bought “war bonds” and the entire nation was on a war footing, focused on defeating the Axis in Europe and the Japanese in the Pacific and Asia.

Five years later the U.S. was dispatching troops to Korea to thwart an attack from the Soviet puppet in the North. When Red China joined the conflict, the end became a stalemate, a truce that remains to this day, but our action would produce a South Korea that is a vibrant capitalist economy while leaving the North to starve its people in order to maintain a million-man military. It would, in time, become a nuclear power.

Today, we live in no less dangerous a world, but an America that never entered a war without being first attacked is operating under a policy set forth by a President who believes in pre-emption and has positioned the nation as the policeman of the world. This is not a good formula for peace. A more patient approach such as the more than 45 years we patiently worked to bring about the fall of the Soviet Union suggests that strength, held in reserve, works better.

While proxy wars, most notably in Vietnam, were fought, a global conflict was avoided. That is perhaps the lesson of Pearl Harbor. Today, America with its great military power, but significantly smaller fighting force, needs to practice patience, use all the arts of diplomacy, and resist the urge to use our military until every other option has been exhausted or an actual attack is imminent or—God forbid—occurs.

There is little point to criticizing the second invasion of Iraq because it is a fait accompli. Only history will determine whether it was the right thing to do. It may well have been, but today’s children will not know the answer to that for another 50 years.

What we do know is that totalitarian forces and dictators exist in a world that is greatly changed from 1941. It is one in which many new democracies have emerged, many new nations have joined the world community, and all are now threatened by a resurgent, radical Islam.

Beyond that threat, there’s the United Nations, an international institution bent on imposing control of the world through the Big Lie of “global warming”, a false crisis designed to divert attention from a matrix of treaties that cede national sovereignty to a group of corrupt bureaucrats with little care for the genocides that have occurred on its watch and which engages in the most blatant intolerance when it suits their purposes.

It is folly to let the memory of December 7, 1941 fade. A new generation has experienced a new sneak attack and, six years later, its lessons have yet to have been learned. We excel at waging short decisive wars, but we are faced with the ultimate weapon of the weak, terrorism. We need patience to undermine its motivation and use.

The American Empire dreamed of in the minds of some faces the same challenges that former empires encountered. A study of history suggests we need to mix our power with humility along with the resolve to resist and defeat evil. We have done this in the past.

Ignoring the Constitution

By Alan Caruba

“The Senate failed to obtain cloture on the DREAM Act amnesty (S. 2205) on October 24 by a 52-44 vote, for which 60 YES votes were needed to prevent a filibuster. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev) and Assistant Majority Leader Dick Durbin (D-Ill) were attempting to bring this nightmarish amnesty bill to the floor under Senate Rule XIV without it ever having been debated in committee.” (Oct 24, 2008)

This was the notice that arrived from an organization devoted to getting a handle on the immigration mess that is one part Bush administration indifference and one part the effort of Mexico to alter the population of the United States. Mexico has encouraged one tenth of its population (much of it illegal) to move to the U.S.A. instead of finding the means to build an economy whereby they might actually want to stay in Mexico.

As bad as the failure to get control over the nation’s southern border is, the notice to me bespoke Sen. Reid’s complete contempt for the U.S. Constitution. The notion that the Democrat Majority Leader would try to slip a bill through the Senate without that body having an opportunity to even debate it is obscene.

Americans of a generation or two born since the years just preceding and following World War II received an education that placed a fair amount of emphasis on American history and about the Constitution that binds us together and has afforded us becoming the most powerful financial and military nation on earth. There was a time when that honor belonged to the British Empire, but they let it slip away.

We are in very real danger of letting the requirements of the Constitution slip away as more and more power is ceded to the Executive branch, the Presidency, and while the Legislative branch, Congress, fails to engage in the primary job of democracy, compromise. The whole purpose of the Constitution was to slow down and require debate among opposing factions for the purpose of requiring them to compromise. Failing that, we end up with more bad laws than good.

We now live in a vile era of politics in which a “winner take all” philosophy exists and the warfare between Democrats and Republicans does injury to the purpose of government. The Republican majority that began when voters turned Congress over to Republicans in 1994 and then the first Bush presidency with its hair-thin victory. The lesson of that was lost on Bush and Cheney.

“The Chief Executive will on occasion feel duty bound to assert monarchical notions of prerogative that will permit him to exceed the laws,” said an obscure Representative from Wyoming back in the days when Congress was investigating an illegal operation to supply Nicaraguan anti-communists under cover of Reagan’s National Security Council. That’s what Dick Cheney thought then and he has pursued that philosophy and policy in spades since becoming the Vice President.

In the same way that Congress has not acted upon its exclusive Constitutional mandate to declare war since WWII, it has been the presidents since Truman that have controlled that process. It’s why we drifted into Iraq without much serious debate in Congress. It’s why Americans wonder out loud if (or when) Bush will get us into a war with Iran without taking the decision to Congress.

Everybody senses that something is very wrong with Congress and out of control with the White House.

If more people actually knew something about American history in general and the U.S. Constitution in particular, they would be a lot more worried.

Linking Up for the Common Good

By Alan Caruba

I'm pleased to welcome "Right Truth", "Texas Fred" and "Stop the ACLU" to our list of favorite sites. As bloggers who share common views and values link with one another and afford visitors to our sites to check out others, the world of ideas expands like the galaxy.

It was shared ideas that moved the colonists to break with the most powerful empire of its time, Great Britain, and after a period in which the founding fathers discovered the Articles of Confederation were not going to work, it was the Federalist Papers that disseminated the ideas behind the new Constitution and convinced the States to yield power to a federal authority of surprising complexity.

Those of us on the Right still put our faith in that Constitution and understand that the United States is the only power that stands between a return to a time in which the will of a few determined the policies of nations and a world moving toward greater democracy and power sharing with the governed. We are still a very long way from that world.

A billion Chinese have little say in the policies of that nation. A billion citizens of India have kept democracy going there against great odds. A billion Muslims are being forced to decide between tolerance and peace, and the ancient mission of Islam to dominate the world. A whole continent of South America is wavering back and forth between the pull of communism/socialism and free market capitalism. The experiment of the Eureopean Union is finding growing resistance as people are urged to forego their national histories, their culture, to see themselves solely as Europeans.

And here in the United States, powerful and influential forces are trying to tear down our borders and merge the nation with Mexico to the south and Canada to the north in a North American Union. That effort must be thwarted and ended because it is driven by greed, not the welfare of the people affected and because our national sovereignty must be protected.

So it behooves as all who share common views and hopes to "link up" in a great community of ideas and to advance those ideas for the common good.

The Worst Ex-President Ever

By Alan Caruba

Historians and others love to make lists of the best and the worst of personalities and events, so permit me to offer a candidate as the Worst Ex-President Ever. I give you Jimmy Carter, anti-Semite, intellectual and moral weakling, and all-around bad person.

I think Jimmy will edge out Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor who made a botch of the Reconstruction after the Civil War and cannot even begin to compare with the largely unknown Harry Truman who succeeded Franklin Delano Roosevelt to see through to a successful conclusion of World War II, the implementation of the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe, and after other wise decisions, retired to his home in Independence, Missouri. Neither Truman, nor other former Presidents, constantly sought the public spotlight to voice criticism of those who followed him into the Oval Office.

Jimmy Carter, who gained the highest office largely because of the voter’s revulsion against the Watergate scandals and the resignation of Richard M. Nixon, cannot shut up. During his time in office he blamed the American people for a “malaise” that affected the economy that was largely in the dumps. It never occurred to him that cutting taxes and taking other measures might have helped stabilize or jump-start the economy.

He was in office in 1979 when the Iranian revolutionaries stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took our diplomats hostage. Other than a poorly planned, failed military mission to extricate them, the voters would have to wait 444 days for Ronald Reagan to take office before their release.

Jimmy Carter presided over the giveaway of one of the most important U.S. assets on this and the southern continent, the Panama Canal. The result of that idiotic decision is that the People’s Republic of China now owns property at both ends of the Canal. He is best known for negotiating a 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt in which Israel gave up the Sinai captured in the 1967 war, a conflict initiated by Egypt. Islamic militants rewarded the Egyptian president by assassinating him.

His response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was to cancel U.S. participation in the Moscow Olympic Games and imposing a grain embargo. The former short-circuited the benefits that would have accrued from any victories by U.S. athletes and the latter created a world of pain for U.S. farmers.

Jimmy Carter was and is a dunce, a dolt, a moron of spectacular proportions and since his defeat by Ronald Reagan, he has been a petulant, vile little man. Never mind that he won the Nobel peace Prize in 2002. Yassir Arafat, the father of all Arab terrorists, also won that prize and it has since been handed out to a succession of people like Mikhail S. Gorbechev and Kofi Annan with sometimes dubious credentials.

The complete destruction of that Prize’s diminished stature will occur if Al Gore receives it.

Of late, Carter has written a book comparing Israel’s sixty years of being under attack by its Arab “neighbors” to South Africa’s Apartheid policies. This totally ignores Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from southern Lebanon and from the Gaza strip, the occupation of both were the result of wars waged against it.

He is in the news again for having publicly attacked Vice President Dick Cheney as a “disaster” and a “militant.” He accused Cheney of avoiding any service in the military, ignoring the obvious fact that Cheney served as Secretary of Defense at one point in his career of public service.

The former President (1977 to 1981) needs to take heed of the meritorious behavior of former Presidents who refused to criticize those who held the job after them, but he can’t because he knows what a failure he was and is oblivious to what a failure he is.

American Self-Loathing

By Alan Caruba

If there is one trend I see in ascendancy in America it is a tremendous amount of self-loathing that is expressed by all manner of people about America. It is different from the typical criticism that is endemic to a society obsessed with self-improvement. The tone of the loathing is a belief that America is inherently bad.

What was bad about removing from power a pathological dictator named Saddam Hussein? What was bad in trying to bring some understanding and implementation of modern society, human rights, and a democratic form of government to a place littered with the mass graves of Iraqis? What was bad about removing from power a man who had waged war for eight years against Iran and who had invaded Kuwait? Is not a more peaceful Middle East to be preferred over one in the thrall of Saddam’s ambitions and greed?

What Iraq represents to me is America’s courage. When other nations look the other way, surrender to tyranny, substitute rhetoric for action, America can and will take up the burden of deterring men doing bad things that ultimately can harm the general welfare of the world.

My parent’s generation, fresh from a Depression, was not cowed by the attack on Pearl Harbor and took up arms against both the Japanese Empire and the Nazi and fascist regimes in Europe. Today, I actually hear some people say that America “deserved” to be attacked on 9/11. That is appalling. And absurd.

Lost in the midst of our concern over the rise of militant Islam is the fact that, having brought the Soviet Union to its knees after some four decades or more of resolutely resisting its efforts to expand Communism and its hegemony worldwide, Americans are too distracted to see its rise in South America and, worse, here at home where all kinds of Communist programs such as universal healthcare are proposed, the attacks on private property are unending, and an endless variety of laws to intrude into and control all aspects of our lives.

Major reasons America came into being was the concept of individual liberty, the essential right of private property, and freedom from taxes without representation. These were radical ideas at a time when monarchy ruled in most places of the world.

This tendency to blame America for the world’s ill is bad for our national soul and wrong beyond description. It plays to people’s worst instinct, the desire to tear down that which is good and cast blame on everyone but themselves. America still does most things astonishingly well and much better than in other nations.

What we have been permitting since the end of World War II is the growth of the federal government and its increased control of too many aspects of our lives. Big government isn’t the answer. It’s the problem.

America and the Restoration of Israel

By Alan Caruba

In Iran and throughout the Palestinian territories, Persians and Arabs poured into the streets on October 5th otherwise known as “Al-Quds” day. They shouted “death to Israel” and “death to the U.S.” The Arabic name for Jerusalem is Al-Quds.

At one point, that poisonous viper, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, speaking at Tehran University, said, “Europeans cannot tolerate the Zionists in their region and country, but they want to impose them on the people of the region”, meaning the nation of Israel. “Give these vast lands of Canada and Alaska to them to create a country for themselves,” he said.

Ahmadinejad, who fancies himself a scholar, is an ignorant fool who, if he knew anything of history would have to begin by acknowledging that more than two thousand years before Islam was invented by Mohammed, Israel had been home to the Jews and that, not once, but twice they had built the temple in Jerusalem, its capitol.

He would also know that the Temple Mount was and is the holiest site in Jerusalem for the Jews, but with the customary arrogance of Islam, it was where, having conquered the city they choose to build their mosque. Accept for conquest, Arabs, i.e., Muslims, have no claim whatever on Jerusalem, nor on Israel.

Not once in the Koran, Islam’s holy book, is Jerusalem ever mentioned!

Yet Muslims lay claim to Jerusalem with the absurd story that Mohammed flew there on his horse one evening and communed with the long dead prophets of Israel and Christianity. For a while, Mohammed commanded that early Muslims face Jerusalem when they prayed in the hope he could convert the Jewish tribes residing in Arabia. When that failed, he commanded that Muslims face Mecca. And he attacked and slaughtered the Jews.

Yet Ahmadinejad has the gall to suggest that Jerusalem and Israel does not rightfully belong to the Jewish people as a Jewish nation.

This ignorant fool does not know that one of the earliest religious movements in America was for the restoration of Israel to the Jews! On October 31, 1819, in Boston’s Old South Church, Levi Parsons took the pulpit to offer a sermon. “They who taught us the way to salvation were Jews,” he began. “Our God was their God. Our heaven is their heaven.” Parsons said that, were the Ottoman (Muslim) occupation of Palestine were to vanish, “nothing but a miracle would prevent their [the Jews] immediate return.”

An indelible part of American history are the Christian missionaries who went to the Middle East to perform deeds of righteousness so that the Jews would be enticed to return home and “receive Him”, that is to say, Jesus. As historian Michael B. Oren writes in his book, Power, Faith, and Fantasy, “The emergence of a Messianic Jewish polity in Palestine would fulfill the conditions necessary for the Second Coming, Parsons affirmed.”

The very earliest settlers of America, the Pilgrims, saw themselves as an extension of the Jewish faith. “Come let us declare in Zion the word of God,” proclaimed William Bradford, the future governor of the Plymouth Colony, as he stepped off the Mayflower in 1620. For him, the new land was a Zion in which the much-persecuted Pilgrims could worship freely, drawing their faith as much from the Old Testament as the New.

Many a missionary suffered and died for the belief that Jerusalem was and is the capitol of the Jewish State, Israel.

Long after Ahmadinejad is dead and freedom is restored to the Iranian people, there will be Jews in Israel and the long history of America’s belief in the rights of Jews to live there will continue.

There Really Was a Thomas Paine

By Alan Caruba

A friend of mine sent a birthday gift, Christopher Hitchens’ “Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man”, part of a series, “Books That Changed the World”, published by Atlantic Monthly Press. Hitchins, of course, is most famed of late for writing “God is Not Great”, a book about his (and others) atheism that has sold rather well.

I don’t know what, if anything, they teach these days about the Founding Fathers, but I'm told the current politically correct garbage that children are learning is that they were all horrible slave owners and unworthy of any other attention except for that business about fighting the American Revolution and later writing the oldest living Constitution in the world.

Parenthetically, I have frankly wondered why we didn’t just hand the Iraqis a copy of our Constitution and suggest they write in the words “The Republic of Iraq” and get on with the business of democracy. But no, that would have been too easy. Instead Iraq has a constitution that requires it be governed by Islamic sharia law, something that means Islam is the state religion and God help you if you’re not a Muslim. Just ask the Christians who have lived there forever. They are being subjected to all kinds of depredations. This is so common where Muslims are in charge that it hardly seems worth mentioning except for the fact that most Americans are totally unaware of it.

As it was in my youth, Paine gets shunted aside when it comes to famous Founding Fathers. I don’t believe there’s even a statue in Washington, D.C. for the man. Yet this was the brilliant pamphleteer whose Common Sense sold an astounding half a million copies in the course of the American Revolution. It was truly a bestseller, but more importantly, it argued the cause for a break with England and did so assuming the intelligence of his readers. A copy of it can be had from Penguin Books “Great Ideas” series. It runs to just over 103 pages in a small, handheld edition. And it is brilliant.

Hitchens does an excellent job of bringing the legendary Paine alive in a portrait of a very real man with all the flaws that attain to being brilliant, far ahead of his time, seriously mistaken about the French Revolution, and, to his credit, utterly opposed to monarchy and aristocracy, a form of feudalism that had been the standard of government for hundreds of years in Europe.

Born in England, Paine would find a true home in America and especially an America composed of colonies whose people had decided to break free of the taxation and other abuses of the Crown.

If all this sounds like something from “long ago”, I would remind you that monarchies are still the order of the day in the Middle East. The Saudis are ruled by a royal family as are the people in Yemen, Qatar, the United Arabic Emirates and similar entities. The king of Morocco still mostly calls the shots. And, of course, though they do not rule as in former times, there is still a British royal family. Why, I do not know.

It’s always a good idea to reacquaint oneself with an important figure from the past through a really good biography. It’s also a good idea to remember that America is a relatively young nation despite its ascendancy to superpower status. It wasn’t that long ago—my youth actually—when it was desperately trying to climb out of a calamitous Depression and then plunged into World War II to save the world from despotism.

Americans, now our aging parents and grandparents, had the courage and resiliency to wait out the Soviet Union from 1945 to the early 90s, resisting Communist tyranny and giving hope to all those in its grip.

There’s an old threat to the world that has become a new threat and it’s called Islam. I have no doubt Thomas Paine would be warning us of it were he alive today.