Democrats: We Have To Destroy The Country To Save It

I have no idea what this is all about. I can only assume they hyperventilated so much last week they suffered a lack of oxygen to the brain: Impeach the Supreme Court Justices If They Overturn Health-Care Law

The problem with the current court is not merely that there is a good chance it will strike down a clearly constitutional law. The problem is that this decision would be the latest salvo in what seems to be a sustained effort on the part of the Roberts Court to return the country to the Gilded Age.

Uh, ok. Good luck with that "argument." The problem with all of this is it is imbecility bordering on madness. Actually, in the case of historian David Dow, the author of the above, I'm pretty sure he jumped over the border, moved right into looney-toonsville, and built a duplex.

Why are we supposed to think Obamacare is "clearly" cconstitutional? Well, because Dow says it is. After all, who is the Supreme Court to argue with an historian!?! If only Dow had issued his inerrant proclamations earlier we could have foregone all these hearings and court dates and legal briefs and such.

Also, you may be surprised to know that in all the years before Obamacare was passed we were practicing "Social Darwinism." Yes, because those are the only choices. Obamacare or letting babies die in the streets. Who knew?

I'll tell you who it is a shame we cannot impeach; idiot professors whose intellectual dishonesty is only matched by their, to get all urban dictionary here, dumbassery. There are historical analogs to the good professor here. All of the blindly partisan Southern Democrats who sowed discord, bad logic and set the stage for the Secession movement and the Civil War would find a kindred spirit in David Dow. For all of their certainty in their moral righteousness they did nothing but harm to their country. The Dow's of our day haven't reached those depths yet, but they are working on it.

UPDATING:

More craziness:

Here is CBS News's Jan Crawford on a federal appeals court's angry response to the gauntlet Pres. Obama threw down:

...Overturning a law of course would not be unprecedented -- since the Supreme Court since 1803 has asserted the power to strike down laws it interprets as unconstitutional...

What Jan Crawford does not mention here is that the judicial right that 1803 ruling asserted -- Marbury v. Madison -- has only been invoked once since 1803.

This seems to be claiming that the Supreme Court has only struck down a law as unconstitutional once in 209 years. Uh, wow.

I've tried to figure out an alternative rational meaning for this statement... I really have... but, damn it all, I can't come up with one. I've even considered the possibility they were trying to say something else and this just inexplicably appeared. No dice there either. The only thing I can think of is they were hacked and some devious person posted this to make them look like utter fools.

Sadly, I believe they mean every word of this.

Stasis And The Left

Surprise, surprise; George Will has something worth reading: The inexorable march of creative destruction

After 244 years — it began publication five years before the 1773 Boston Tea Party — the Encyclopaedia Britannica will henceforth be available only in digital form as it tries to catch up to reference Web sites such as Google and Wikipedia. Another digital casualty forgot it was selling the preservation of memories, a.k.a. “Kodak moments,” not film.

America now is divided between those who find this social churning unnerving and those who find it exhilarating. What Virginia Postrel postulated in 1998 in “The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise and Progress” — the best book for rescuing the country from a ruinous itch for tidiness — is even more true now. Today’s primary political and cultural conflict is, Postrel says, between people, mislabeled “progressives,” who crave social stasis, and those, paradoxically called conservatives, who welcome the perpetual churning of society by dynamism.

I have often found this aspect of the American Left unusual. Be it the longing for the artificial industrial dominance of the U.S. after World War II or the period of social upheaval labelled "The 60's"; the strange desire to stop "climate change" when change is what climate does by definition (and as if any given climate has any claim to being the best or most proper climate); and countless other examples.

Maybe it all stems from the irrational notion that somewhere out there there must be an egghead who can solve our problems, or maybe it is simply a lack of vision and a deficiency in historical knowledge. Whatever the root cause, it certainly results it an outlook which can be as often regressive as progressive, backward looking as often as forward looking.

Very strange.

The Intellectual Bankruptcy Of Journalism

The title of this post may give you the wrong idea. One might read it and believe I'll be arguing that journalism today has descended from some earlier lofty perch to a degraded position. It is true, in many ways journalism has done exactly that. However, not in the arena of the intellect where journalism has always been inherently bankrupt.

Case in point: David Brooks writes the following piece commenting upon and comparing the present political situation in the UK with the US: Britain Is Working

In 1920, Winston Churchill’s mother held a dinner for M. Paul Cambon to celebrate the end of his 20 years as the French ambassador to Britain. One of the guests asked Cambon what he had seen in his two decades in London.

“I have witnessed an English revolution more profound and searching than the French Revolution itself,” Cambon replied. “The governing class have been almost entirely deprived of political power and to a very large extent of their property and estates; and this has been accomplished almost imperceptibly and without the loss of a single life.”

Buried in that answer is a picture of how politics should work. Britain faced an enormous task: To move from an aristocratic political economy to a democratic, industrial one. This transition was made gradually, without convulsion, with both parties playing a role.

From this snippet you can get the gist of the bad analogy Brooks is working on. This represents the garden variety from of journalistic bankruptcy. To suit the needs of the op-ed writer most everything can be turned in a facile allegory, which always crumbles the second you start to pick at it.

However, the intellectual bankruptcy continues in those journalists who criticize the Brooks' of the world.

It can range from the truly stupid, such as when Glenn Greenwald opines, "David Brooks flew to London so now he's an expert on British politics...." Yeah Glenn, and your being a New York lawyer and journalist gives you the credentials of an expert. Besides, like or don't like what he wrote, Brooks makes no claim to being an expert on Britain. While I'll happily admit if we confined journalists to only expressly writing about topics about which they are demonstrable experts it would have the joyous consequence of eliminating 85% of Greenwald's writing to date, their editors may still demand more copy.

Even British journalists, who presumably know a thing or two more about their own country than a hapless American, display their own brand of intellectual bankruptcy. Take Daniel Knowles of the Telegraph for example:

[T]his column is laughably ignorant of British history and bizarrely naive about British political culture.

Let’s take a few choice bits, starting with the opening paragraph. Apparently, from 1900 to 1920:

Britain faced an enormous task: To move from an aristocratic political economy to a democratic, industrial one. This transition was made gradually, without convulsion, with both parties playing a role.

Gradually? Without convulsion? I don’t know if you’re aware of this David, but most British historians believe that the First World War was pretty convulsive. And definitely not very gradual. He seems to think that Britain cast off her aristocratic rulers by a process of “constructive competition.” In fact, what happened was that we went to war, conscripted millions of young men and sent them to France to be machine-gunned.

The intellectual dishonesty of this is, frankly, staggering. For starters, Brooks did not pull this idea out of thin air. As anyone can see from my quote of Brooks above, he was elaborating upon a comment made by Paul Cambon who was the French ambassador to England from 1898 to 1920, and intimately connected to the efforts that brought England into the Great War so he was obviously taking that into account. Indeed, Messr. Cambon's 22 years of experience working and moving in the highest levels of British political society vastly outweighs the "experience" of Assistant Comment Editor Knowles who, based upon the Harry Potter like quality of this head shot, may not have 22 months on the job as a journalist.

Obviously, Brooks and Cambon were limiting their remarks to the domestic situation in Britain during those years, particularly as it related to questions of political economy. As such Brooks' remarks are quite similar to the views put forward by the historian Barbara Tuchman in her book The Proud Tower, and by the late British MP Robert Rhodes James in his The British Revolution: 1880-1939. One could certainly take issue with such interpretations, but there is nothing "bizarre" about them.

Just as there is nothing intellectually honest about journalism.

End Of The Century Blues (19th Century Edition)

I saw this interesting look at what 8th graders were expected to know in 1895. I just wonder at what the acceptable answer was for this question:

2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas?

Rampant horse and buggy use?

Also, look at this question:

5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fermandez [sic], Aspinwall and Orinoco.

Forget 8th graders, today zero percent of college graduates could answer this. I cannot answer it either - I'd never heard of Hecla (and, even after trying to look it up, I'm not sure which Hecla they are referring to, the small town on the South Dakota/North Dakota border, the small town in Montana now designated a ghost town, or the uninhabited island in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.)

Thank goodness we live in an age where not knowing any, what are they called.... oh yeah, facts, is considered a sign of progress.

UPDATE:

Evidently, Hecla is Hekla, which would make it an Icelandic volcano. OK, that makes it a little more doable.

America, "Captive Of A Scientific Technological Elite"

As I get older it certainly seems to turn out that much of the history I learned in my youth was only partially true. Part of this can be chalked up to new discoveries and ideas that simply were not around when I was first introduced to something. But, there are also things in history which writers of history and, by extension, my teachers choose to ignore.

A good example of this can be found in Dwight D. Eisenhower's farewell address, the famous "Military-Industrial Complex Speech."

In this speech, Eisenhower first lays out the scope of his concern:

Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties. A huge increase in newer elements of our defense; development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture; a dramatic expansion in basic and applied research -- these and many other possibilities, each possibly promising in itself, may be suggested as the only way to the road we wish to travel.

But each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs -- balance between the private and the public economy, balance between cost and hoped for advantage -- balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between actions of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration.

The record of many decades stands as proof that our people and their government have, in the main, understood these truths and have responded to them well, in the face of stress and threat. But threats, new in kind or degree, constantly arise. I mention two only.

The first threat he goes on to talk about is the Military-Industrial Complex. This is the part of the speech I was taught, both formally and via the media who often brought up this idea in a variety of contexts.

But, what exactly was the second threat? I have to admit, I never knew there was a second threat Eisenhower had discussed, until recently.

Here is how Ike laid it out:

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite.

It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system -- ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.

It is impossible to read this and not think of how the Global Warming crowd embodies the precise worries Eisenhower laid out. Instead of the goals of a free democratic society being paramount, we now live in an age where a scientific elite is demanding the suspension of democratic rule because the stakes are supposedly too high to be left to the vagaries of the ballot box. In the name of "saving the planet" and with billions of Federal research dollar behind them, we have witnessed a wholesale assault upon the standards of free inquiry. Peer reviews has been subverted; editors have been intimidated from freely publishing work/ideas the elite wishes to see squashed; Federal funding, directed by, and largely allocated to, members of the elite, ensure only pre-approved ideas are encouraged. etc. etc. etc.

In every way the warnings of Eisenhower are being played out before our eyes.

It's too bad so few of us know about this particular warning, isn't it? Especially as Eisenhower's warning seems to tell us this is the graver threat, as it is largely responsible for the military-industrial threat in the first place.

So Howard Zinn Supported Stalin

It is confirmed (for any who had doubts), Howard Zinn was a communist. Really it should come as no big surprise given his "intellectual" output. Zinn was a man consumed by ideology (and a particularly violent and hate filled variant to boot.) It oozed like toxic slime over practically everything the man ever wrote, which amounted to making a mockery of the enlightenment idea of history. Zinn is to real history what Lysenko is to real biology, that is, a joke.

Truth, History Deemed "Far Right" By Associated Press

Really, how can the press write things like this and be surprised they are viewed as imbeciles? Texas ed board vote reflects far-right influences

A far-right faction of the Texas State Board of Education succeeded Friday in injecting conservative ideals into social studies, history and economics lessons that will be taught to millions of students for the next decade.

Teachers in Texas will be required to cover the Judeo-Christian influences of the nation's Founding Fathers, but not highlight the philosophical rationale for the separation of church and state. Curriculum standards also will describe the U.S. government as a "constitutional republic," rather than "democratic," and students will be required to study the decline in value of the U.S. dollar, including the abandonment of the gold standard.

Look, I'll agree the "Judeo-Christian influences" part is complete bullshit (if you disagree go read Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and come back and report where you find Judeo-Christian influences - I'll be here holding my breath). However, we are a constitutional republic. We are not a democracy. That isn't a matter of opinion any more than the existence of gravity is a matter of opinion. If you don't understand that you probably shouldn't be writing anything for the Associated Press.

Furthermore, our moving off of the gold standard, and its effect on monetary policy is a matter of history, not ideological dogma. Since when it is considered "objective" to hide matters of history from students? In my experience, it is the desire to hide facts that most often represents an ideological agenda at work.

Really, this story is almost criminally stupid.

"Please Don't Criticize Our Evil Scumbag On His Birthday!"

Russia Communists: don't slight Stalin on his bday:

The Russian Communist Party asked the nation Monday for a daylong moratorium on criticizing Soviet dictator Josef Stalin as they celebrate his 130th birthday.

Screw that.

Stalin, was a punk; an irredeemably evil son-of-a-bitch who when given a chance embraced Adolph Hitler rather than opposed him. He was a worthless piece of shit who deserves no credit at all in defeating Hitler. In fact, Stalin's cowardice and obvious in-bred hillbilly stupidity led to the near annihilation of Russia by the fascists. Russia was ultimately saved by real soldiers like Georgy Zhukov, despite the moronic ravings of the quite possibly psychotic Stalin.

Luckily for humanity in general, Stalin has been burning in hell for 56 years.

I hope he likes the next few million years.

Obama Denounces D-Day Landings

From a nearby slightly altered universe:

In a speech today presidential candidate Barack Obama maintained his steadfast disapproval of the D-Day landings of June 6th, 1944, despite the historical evidence of it as a smashing Allied victory over Nazi Germany.

"Even knowing what we know today, I would never commit to Operation Overlord," the Senator explained to a diverse cross section of New York Times reporters and members of NARAL's executive committee. "It should have been obvious from the debacles at Kasserine Pass and the Anzio landings, not to mention the unending quagmire of the Italian campaign as a whole, that simply putting more troops into the European theater was never going to bring the violence to an end."

When asked what his alternative approach would have entailed, Obama responded, "I would have brought the troops home via a 16 month timetable." This was greeted with wild applause. "Peace in our time!" yelled more than one.

At that point an unidentified man in the back of the room pointed out, historically speaking, the entire European war didn't even last a further 12 months after the successful D-Day landings. Obama waived this away by proclaiming the need for, "change! We cannot be bound to the history of dead facts!" Many of the crowd moved towards the unidentified questioner for "further clarification" of his point.

After a short delay for the removal of the corpse, Obama brought the throng to its feet one last time. "This is the reason I have been chosen! This is the reason I am running unopposed for the White House! Because, I would rather lose than admit to being wrong. Facts be damned."

Several NARAL supporters received medical treatment after swooning.

I'm Sorry, But Stupid Is Stupid

Just because one is of the left, do you need to be incurably stupid...or does it just help? I only ask because the more I read things like this, the more dip shit ignorant I believe the left has become.

In February, 2007, when Barack Obama declared that he was running for President, violence in Iraq had reached apocalyptic levels,

That is all I need to read to know the author of this piece, George Packer, is an ignorant fool. And if I know that, why should I bother to read the rest of his piece?

How do I know he is a fool?

Well, in February 2007, we had lost around 3300 troops in four years of combat operations, for an average of 69 per month. You can call that a lot of things, but calling it "apocalyptic" is, from an historical perspective, so wrongheaded its practically retarded.

I have noted before this utter lack of historical knowledge back in January 2007:

I also have a problem with it because it minimizes the enormity of the WWII sacrifice. Even what were considered minor combat operations at the time produced what would be considered today massive casualties. For example, seven days worth of fighting in the Kasserine Pass produced over 6000 casualties. In Italy in 1945 (Jan 6th to May 2nd,) hardly a focal point of the war, the 10th Mountain Division alone had nearly 5000 casualties. Indeed most individual divisions to see combat in WWII suffered more than the entire US Army has in this war.

Notice, we are 17 further months along, and we still have not had as many casualties in Iraq (now at 4113) as we did for the WWII forces I talked about. At current rates it would still take three more years until we equaled the casualty list from those seven days in North Africa in 1942.

Every soldier lost is a source of sadness, but to call it the moral equivalent of the Apocalypse is simply stupid.

Is It Sheer Ignorance? God, I Hope So

I know intellectual history isn't everyone's cup of tea, but this is getting stupid:

If you can stomach watching it, you'll see Stein explain, with Hannity and Colmes' help, that "Darwinism" wasn't really responsible for the death camps, and biologists aren't really Nazis, it's just that evolution logically led to ... the Nazi death camps. Stein's two-faced con is on display everywhere you look, here using a quote from the Expelled website itself:

Alas, Darwinism has had a far bloodier life span than Imperialism. Darwinism, perhaps mixed with Imperialism, gave us Social Darwinism, a form of racism so vicious that it countenanced the Holocaust against the Jews and mass murder of many other groups in the name of speeding along the evolutionary process.

Gosh Ben, how could anyone possibly get the mysterious idea that evolution is pro Holocaust?

OK I can understand disliking the simplistic correlation Stein puts forward, but is there really any doubt that "social Darwinism" played an active role in the perpetration of the Holocaust?

The answer to that question is a resounding "no." The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has an exhibit travelling the country now called "Deadly Medicine" that connects the dots. The first thing to remember is that the roots of the Holocaust lie not in Hitler's warped brain. The underlying pathology pre-date Hitler's political rise:

Following Germany’s defeat in World War I and during the ensuing political and economic crises of the Weimar Republic, ideas known as racial hygiene or eugenics began to inform population policy, public health education, and government-funded research. By keeping the “unfit” alive to reproduce and multiply, eugenics proponents argued, modern medicine and costly welfare programs interfered with natural selection –the concept Charles Darwin applied to the “survival of the fittest” in the animal and plant world. In addition, members of the “fit,” educated classes were marrying later and using birth control methods to limit family size. The result, eugenics advocates believed, was an overall biological “degeneration” of the population. As a solution, they proposed “positive” government policies such as tax credits to foster large, “valuable” families, and “negative” measures, mainly the sterilization of genetic “inferiors.”

Eugenics advocates in Germany included physicians, public health officials, and academics in the biomedical fields, on the political left and right. Serving on government committees and conducting research on heredity, experts warned that if the nation did not produce more fit children, it was headed for extinction. A growing faction, linking eugenics to race, championed the long-headed, fair “Nordics” as “eugenically advantageous” and discussed “race mixing” as a source of biological degeneration. Eugenic ideas were absorbed into the ideology and platform of the nascent Nazi Party during the 1920s.

Thus, the Nazi's didn't originate these ideas, they turned them into a political platform, a platform that had enthusiastic support from much of the scientific community:

Nazism was “applied biology,” stated Hitler deputy Rudolf Hess. During the Third Reich, a politically extreme, antisemitic variation of eugenics determined the course of state policy. Hitler’s regime touted the “Nordic race” as its eugenic ideal and attempted to mold Germany into a cohesive national community that excluded anyone deemed hereditarily “less valuable” or “racially foreign.” Public health measures to control reproduction and marriage aimed at strengthening the “national body” by eliminating biologically threatening genes from the population. Many German physicians and scientists who had supported racial hygiene ideas before 1933 embraced the new regime’s emphasis on biology and heredity, the new career opportunities, and the additional funding for research.

On July 14, 1933, the Nazi dictatorship fulfilled the long-held dreams of eugenics proponents by enacting the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring, based on a voluntary sterilization law drafted by Prussian health officials in 1932. The new Nazi law was coauthored by Falk Ruttke, a lawyer, Arthur Gütt, a physician and director of public health affairs, and Ernst Rüdin, a psychiatrist and early leader of the German racial hygiene movement. Individuals who were subject to the law were those men and women who “suffered” from any of nine conditions assumed to be hereditary: feeblemindedness, schizophrenia, manic-depressive disorder, genetic epilepsy, Huntington’s chorea (a fatal form of dementia), genetic blindness, genetic deafness, severe physical deformity, and chronic alcoholism.

Special hereditary health courts lent an aura of due process to the sterilization measure, but the decision to sterilize was generally routine. Nearly all better-known geneticists, psychiatrists, and anthropologists sat on such courts at one time or another, mandating the sterilizations of an estimated 400,000 Germans. Vasectomy was the usual sterilization method for men, and for women, tubal ligation, an invasive procedure that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of women.

International reaction to the Nazi sterilization law varied. In the United States, some newspaper editors noted the mass scale of the policy and feared that “Hitlerites” would apply the law to Jews and political opponents. In contrast, American eugenicists viewed the law as the logical development of earlier thinking by Germany’s “best specialists” and not as “the hasty improvisation of the Hitler regime.”

In his 1934 book, American eugenicist Leon Whitney wrote: “Many farsighted men and women in both England and America have long been working earnestly toward something very like what Hitler has now made compulsory.”

It amazes and saddens me that I felt the need to write this post. The historical record is clear, so I'm uncertain what political advantage people believe they are gaining by trying to muddy it. There is no "war against science" whatever the hysterical or bigoted try to tell us all. And, there is nothing wrong with noting that, yes, science too has a dark side. Those who wish to deify the scientific endeavor into something akin to the Platonic "Good" are profoundly misunderstanding it.

Science does not sit above moral standards, and it is not the source of such standards. It is open to criticism and it has at times been blameworthy. The best science flourishes because of these facts not despite them, and we do it (and ourselves) a disservice by trying to pretend otherwise.

Death By Historical Analogy

Historical analogy may just be the death of us all, especially when those engaged in it don't seem to know the actual history involved. Today's case in point is this piece by John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt: The real analogy for Iraq

The civil war that is the most fitting historical reference point to Iraq today is the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). That war revolved around two main sides: one pro-democracy, the other pro-fascist. Neither side was particularly cohesive or well-organized. Both consisted of fractious coalitions of diverse organizations and agendas, many based on personality. It often looked more like a war of fragmented tribes and clans than modern organizations.

The simplistic partitioning of the warring factions into "pro-democracy" and "pro-fascist" camps does extreme violence to the actual historical situation. Yes, the nominal conflict was between the "republican" forces, aligned with what was left of the Spanish government in 1936, and the "nationalist" forces, aligned around the military led proto-fascists. However, to label the "republican" cause as "pro-democracy" is an outright falsehood. Yes, many liberals in 1936 wished to maintain the existing constitutional order, but it is in no way clear that such sentiments were dominant. (As can be seen by the repudiation of the "republic" by such thinkers as Jose Ortega y Gasset, Menendez Pidal, and Perez de Ayala.) To argue the growing tide of anarchist and communist parties in the republic wished to maintain Spanish "democracy" is simple nonsense. (It is telling that Arquilla and Ronfeldt's article never once uses the words "anarchist" or "communist.") The actual political situation in Spain was not a dichotomous choice between democracy and fascism, but a teeming morass of various totalitarian visions and utopian schemes, where those few who supported traditional liberalism or Christian democratic politics were used when useful, discarded when not.

The Spanish Civil War became an arena for great-power competition; only two (America and Japan) remained aloof. Outside governments maneuvered overtly and covertly to reshape the dynamics within each side, including through infiltration and betrayal.

This gives a very warped view of the actual historical events. In truth, the Western democratic powers, namely France and England, were very stand-offish. In the earliest days of the conflict, when the liberal elements in Spain were rallying behind the republic, France and England withheld crucial support. They were so afraid of getting involved against the rising tides of extremism, either attacking fascism or indirectly helping communism, that they did basically nothing. This helped define the battle in Spain as a proxy battle between fascism (with the direct material support of Germany and Italy) and communism (with the less open but still direct support of the U.S.S.R.) Now, it is an open question as to how efficacious French or English help might have been for liberal democratic forces in Spain, but certainly the withholding of open support ensured democracy would not survive.

And in the end, dictatorship won in Spain, partly because its vision of restoring an authoritarian past provided unifying glue for its forces. The pro-democracy side tried to rally around a utopian vision of the future, but it was not well-defined and provoked internal argument far more than solidarity.

This gives you a sense of just how bizarre this piece is. Arquilla and Ronfeldt must believe that no one reads Homage to Catalonia anymore. I'm not sure if this identification of the communist and anarchist projects as being "pro-democracy" is the result of their trying to shoe-horn the Iraq war into this strained analogy, or if it represents the warped ideological vision of the authors. Either way it can only be convincing to people completely ignorant of history. Dictatorship "won" in Spain because, by the second year of the war, the conflict had become a battle of competing dictatorial visions and nothing else.

Over at Power Line they have a similar take on this:

Arquilla and Ronfeldt draw a further policy lesson from the Spanish experience:

[I]t may be advisable to pull back from pressing for an American-style democracy in Iraq. Ending the Spanish Civil War resulted in the installation of a dictatorship for 40 years before Spain eventually transitioned into a liberal democracy.

This is an odd way to describe what happened in Spain. That country's civil war wasn't "ended" by some outside agency, resulting in the "installation" of a dictatorship. The Nationalists won the war, and Franco assumed dictatorial powers, as he had always intended. The truth is that democracy was probably not an alternative for Spain in the 1930s. The Republicans were led largely by Soviet agents and other radicals, and would no more have instituted a democracy, had they won, than Franco.

But why does that Spanish reality of the 1930s tell us what will happen in Iraq? In Iraq, there is a genuine democratic alternative; in fact, however one may evaluate its government, Iraq is already a functioning democracy. Iraq's experiment in self-government may very well fail, but the Spanish experience tells us nothing about that, one way or another.

In too many ways to count, the Iraq-Spanish Civil War comparison seems to be the wrong analogy, at the wrong time, for the wrong ideological reasons.

This is cross-posted at Blue Crab Boulevard.

How Dumb Does He Think We Are?

Every so often I read some egregious bastardization of history that really gets me going. Courtesy of Jacob Heilbrunn and the L.A. Times: Once Again, the Big Yalta Lie

During his visit to the Baltics over the weekend, President Bush infuriated Russian leader Vladimir V. Putin by declaring the obvious: that the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe was "one of the greatest wrongs of history." But it was what he said next comparing the Yalta accord among Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin in 1945 to the Hitler-Stalin pact that should cause outrage here at home.

How so? The original Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was denounced as illegitimate by FDR (among many others) when it was enacted in 1939. In 1945 the very same FDR legitimized the exact same agreement (and more) at Yalta. Granted, there wasn't much the U.S. or Britain could have done about it (short of using Atomic weapons against the communists), but that does not make FDR's actions suddenly honorable. The fact that FDR didn't even bother to make the rhetorical case for freedom is damning, even if his other options were severely limited.

The slander against Roosevelt that Bush has taken up dates back to the early 1950s, after Harry Truman and Dean Acheson had supposedly "lost" China to communism. That's when the American right first decried what it viewed as a consistent pattern of "appeasement" in the Democratic Party. The right contended that Roosevelt "sold out" Eastern Europe at the Yalta conference by promising the Soviets an unchallenged sphere of influence in the region.

One element of the right-wing mythology developed in those years was that Alger Hiss, who served during the war as an assistant to Secretary of State Edward Stettinius Jr. and who was charged in the years that followed with being a Soviet spy and was convicted of perjury was instrumental in getting Roosevelt to collude with Stalin against Churchill.

Jesus Christ...not the Alger Hiss stuff again. Here is a news flash to anyone who bases anything on the old (& tired & stupid & useless & decrepit & BORING) "Alger Hiss/Whittaker Chambers controversy": NO ONE CARES!!!!!!! It's akin to going on an on about the Spanish Civil War or something. Today, and the last time I checked it was 2005 and not 1957, this sort of thing looks simply childish and moronic. Please, for the love of all that's holy, stop.

With a straight face Heilbrunn states:

[At Yalta they] discussed postwar borders and issued a "Declaration on Liberated Europe" calling for free elections in Poland and elsewhere.

And then adds in the next paragraph:

Stalin had made clear his plan to take over as much territory as possible back in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939, which carved Poland in half and gave the Soviets the Baltic states. The discovery in 1943 of the massacre of Polish officers by the Soviet army in the Katyn forest was further evidence of Stalin's malign intention to exterminate the leadership of Poland. Then, in 1944, during the Warsaw uprising by the Polish Home Army, Stalin halted the advance of his army on the banks of the Vistula River and allowed Nazi SS units to return to slaughter the Poles.

This supports FDR's legacy how exactly? This just underscores the fact FDR went along with the Yalta declarations on "Free Elections" with full knowledge that they were nothing more than a fraud and mere propaganda for the Soviet regime.

Heilbrunn seems to realize that his case is incredibly weak here so he attempts to spice it up with a few lies.

Theoretically, Churchill and Roosevelt could have refused to cut any deal with Stalin at Yalta. But that could have started the Cold War on the spot. It would have seriously jeopardized the common battle against Germany (at a moment when Roosevelt was concerned with winning Soviet assent to help fight the Japanese, which he received).

This is simply false, and anyone with the slightest knowledge of the Second World War knows it is false. Let's look at the calendar:

February 1945: Yalta conference

April 3, 1945: The Soviet Union finally renounces its non-aggression pact with the Empire of Japan. The Soviets had been the nominal ally of the United States for over three years at this point.

August 6, 1945: Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

August 8, 1945: The Soviet Union (finally) declares war on the Empire of Japan.

August 9, 1945: Soviet forces attack Japanese forces in Korea and Manchuria. Second atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki.

August 14, 1945: Japan surrenders.

The suggestion that the grand total of six days of combat operations by the Soviets against Japan somehow validates the Yalta agreement is grotesque. In truth, by August neither the U.S. or the British, who had both been slogging it out against Japan since 1941, wanted the Russians involved in the Pacific war at all. Heilbrunn's suggestion to the contrary is nonsense.

Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower was happy to let the Soviets bear the brunt of the fighting as they marched toward Berlin, and he was unwilling to expend American troops on storming the German capital.

This ignores the fact Stalin had already told the U.S. and British that he wanted Soviet forces to be the ones to take Berlin.

Roosevelt was hardly perfect at Yalta. He was naive about Stalin's intentions and believed he could cajole the dictator into following more moderate policies. But FDR's approach was not particularly different from that of Churchill (who had declared that he would "sup with the devil" to win the war, which is what he and Roosevelt, in effect, did).

This could only make sense if Germany still had the capability to win the war in February 1945. Germany, of course, did not have the ability to win the war in February 1945. (Just try and find an historian to gainsay that point.) Heilbrunn's suggestion otherwise is fatuous. The notion that the Soviet Union might have quit the war in March 1945 and, as a consequence, left the post-war settlement entirely up to the U.S. and U.K. is equally fatuous.

What gets me about all of this is, this country being the way it is, there are a lot of people that do not know their history very well. Such folks can be easily swayed by the fact Heilbrunn acts like he knows what he is talking about. He doesn't know what he is talking about, and he doesn't mind lying to disguise the fact. Please fell free to ignore him for now on.

I know I will.