An excerpt of the 1924 Republican Party Platform:

The prosperity of the American nation rests on the vigor of private initiative which has bred a spirit of independence and self-reliance. The republican party stands now, as always, against all attempts to put the government into business.

American industry should not be compelled to struggle against government competition. The right of the government to regulate, supervise and control public utilities and public interests, we believe, should be strengthened, but we are firmly opposed to the nationalization or government ownership of public utilities.

In 1924 the GOP ran Calvin “Silent Cal” Coolidge for president. And he won on this platform.

Even then Democrats were trying to turn this country into a less powerful version of Europe by emulating its socialist systems. A proud Republican Party repudiated these socialist tendencies and reiterated its pride in the American way. These principles appealed to the true American spirit and also won elections.

Unfortunately, the very next president, himself a Republican, turned toward socialist, collectivist concepts and set the stage for what later became Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal destruction of the American economic system that compounded a market correction and turned it into “The Great Depression.” And save for a brief time under Ronald Reagan, it appears that the GOP has never recovered its principles as espoused in its 1924 platform.

Where are these strong principles today? Does the GOP stand for free markets, individual responsibility, self-reliance, and the right of the citizen to be left alone by a rapacious federal government under Democrats? It is getting harder and harder to think that the GOP does want to uphold these long-held American principles, those that made this country great.

So, let’s recall the words of the 1924 GOP Party platform and let us strive to return to these first principles.

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**And now a word from my inner swaggerer…

Europe is a chick’s name. That’s right, you heard me. The word Europa from which Europe is derived is of feminine gender in origin. In Greek mythology Europa was a Phoenician princess abducted by Zeus. Zeus disguised himself as a bull to pull off the caper.

So, what do we have? Let’s review: Europe is a defenseless but pretty chick fooled by a bunch of bull and ravaged by a God.

Yep. Sounds about right.

Now what about America? How chikified is our name? Well, not much.

As it happens America is named after Amerigo Vespucci, a cartographer and explorer from the mid 1400s who was one of the first westerners to map the coast of the Americas. He was a man, baby.

A man’s man, an explorer, a man of means (well, early in his life, anyway), a sailor. A real tough guy. And even if that isn’t true, at least a person with a swinging anchor and some ballast which is more than we can say for the weeping, cringing Europa.

And since the naming, our two continents have certainly lived up to the theme. Europe, constantly ravaged, always weeping, forever moaning about being nice to folks, and never strong enough to stand on its own for long has been as weak and feckless as can be imagined.

On the other hand America has been the jewel of the world. America was born of the woman but strode forward in confident, self-possessed strides leaving mommy behind sniffling and waving her handkerchief to her successful son and warning him not to forget to write or at least leave a text message. America has spawned riches uncountable with its toils and with the United States at its head has become the world’s father and policeman. It’s a manly nation to say the least.

So, what’s in a name, William old sod? Nothing less than the expression of character (or weakness thereof). We Americans stand astride the world in manliness while Europe swoons by our side in supplication… and nagging, nagging, nagging like the gnarled old hag she has become. Even Zeus would be tired of her by now.

Yep. Europe is our bi_ _h.

Take that you Euroweenies!

So, go on. Call me a cowboy. But whose twirling rope are you Euroweenies gonna reach for when you’ve let the Islamofascists take over your lands? Whose six-shooters will come in handy when the Chinese are blowing you away? Which man in the white hat are ya gonna call on when you suddenly find yourself surrounded by hostiles on all sides? If’n yer lucky, pardner, we might jess lope on by and help ya out. Ya never know. Give us a whistle and see.

… OK, I feel better. And now back to the news.

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This is the final installment [of] my three part report on the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s one day conference on The Roots of American Order. So here is part two of mine titled Lift a Glass to the Past: America Rooted in Tradition or a New Covenant? (Click for parts one and two)

After a break for lunch, Mark C. Henrie took up America’s Britishness. Henrie wrote the ISI’s A Student’s Guide to the Core Curriculum that explains the value of a traditional core of studies in Western civilization and his session reflected that study.

Capitalizing on Birzer’s citation of Edmund Burke who praised the colonist’s essential Britishness, Henrie made the point that America is best understood not as a break from tradition but as the culmination of a long series of continuous ideals that range back through Western history, specifically through England.

Henrie says that we get four essentials from England.

1. The English language and literature
2. The common law and a respect for the rule of law
3. A desire for self government
4. Manners and a social order

One of the questions that researchers have often wondered is why American English and British English are essentially the same? Why didn’t America reinvent English for its own purposes in the same way the Dutch altered German, for instance? Henrie says that the reason is that the focal point of language in the colonies was contained in the King James Bible and that pervasive reliance on a single source of language arrested any development of a widely diverging American version of English. We Americans inherited the English language through the Bible.

Next Henrie talked of our ideals of law. As an example of the American focus on the law, Henrie notes that Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Common Law was more popular per capita in the colonies than it was in England. He also said that it was likely that the ideals of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” came from Blackstone.

Our ideals of self-government are also a British idea. Accordingly, Officials in Parliament were initially elected from their own local areas and sent to Parliament to represent the nation just as we continued to do in Congress.

In the Q and A afterwards, though, I noted that one of the reasons that the Crown couldn’t understand our point of view on representation in Parliament was because we took our representation a tad farther than the British did.

In England, once elected to Parliament it was expected that those that took their seat were to stop worrying about representing their home turf and consider themselves as representatives of the whole of Britain. On the other hand, since we in America were so geographically isolated and since we did not initially have here a national body in which to sit, we had a higher expectation that our local representatives would go into colonial government to represent the views of those that elected them. In many cases, Americans bound their representatives to the voters and allowed them little room for maneuver while members of the House of Commons in Britain had no expectation at all that their constituents back home would control their efforts in Parliament in any way.

So, when Americans expected to have an actual seat at the table in Parliament where our own officials might sit to represent us, British officials deemed such a thing unnecessary because all of Parliament sat in virtual representation of the whole of the Empire. The Crown simply saw no reason for Americans to sit in Parliament but this was an abrogation of their right to self-government as far as the colonists were concerned.

As an outgrowth of this expectation of self-rule all the way down to the local community, federalism was born and this was an entirely new idea.

Finally, as Burke noted, America was bequeathed a particularly British sense of manners, comportment, and a social order that also saw us more like the British than unlike them. The Britishness that undergirded our entire culture in all parts of the colonies was strong enough to stave off the various other European influences (French, German, Spanish, what have you) and maintain our status as the true heirs to British sensibilities.

Once again we see that we are beholden to our traditions.

Finally we heard from E. Christian Kopff on The Philadelphia Miracle.

Reflecting the religious theme of the day’s events, Kopff recalls how nearly every founder termed our founding as a miracle born of divine intervention and that our efforts were not just efforts for us but for all mankind.

But he noted that Machiavelli said that every nation must be forced back to its first principles at some time or lose itself and that we are today at such a crossroads.

Here I think another Machiavelli quote is pertinent to the discussion:

Princes and republics who wish to maintain themselves free from corruption must above all things preserve the purity of all religions observances, and treat them with proper reverence; for there is no greater indication of the ruin of a country than to see religion condemned.
– Niccoló Machiavelli, The Discourses. 1517.

I might also stretch this to include civil institutions along with those religious. We are today in a state of eschewing our civil and religious traditions and this has led to our current discontent as far as I am concerned.

Kopff discussed how he thinks the conventional wisdom on the Constitutional debates states that there was some unknown shift during the debate of the Constitution from the one-state-one-vote plan to the current system of proportional representation. Kopff thinks that the delegates were actually persuaded by arguments of proportionalism as opposed to cajoled by some corrupt bargain as some historiography has led some to believe.

Kopff notes that during the debate, John Dickinson of Delaware said that experience should be “our only guide” because rationalism may “lead us astray.” (see the quote I started this piece out with above) Not only does Kopff think that the delegates were persuaded by Dickinson’s argument here, but he thinks there was a realization by the delegates that tradition and history should serve as their bedrock.

He rejects that the Enlightenment influence was as pervasive as many argue it was. He points out that rationalism — as espoused by Rousseau, for one — as a thing that is born free of past encumbrance is impossible. Kopff asserts that rationalism can only be built on tradition and past experience, he posits that tradition validates rationalism.

To my mind, he makes a good point. After all fans of rationalism seem to imagine that at its inception rationalism represented an anti-religious ideal and a breaking from tradition, a new way of thought. Yet, these same people accept that rational thought can be born of nothing, not based on past experience? Isn’t that the same thing as divine revelation? I mean, divine revelation insists that it is born of God’s word and not of earthly traditions and man’s efforts. And here comes rationalism divorced from man’s tradition to be born as if from a miraculous revelation? It seems to me that the rationalists merely exchanged the idea that God is divine with the idea that the individual human’s mind is divine.

Without experience and tradition, rationalism most certainly can lead us astray. We are seeing that today with a left-wing wishing of what could be if only…! With the left’s insistence that our traditions and systems are useless, corrupt, or need the panacea of “change” to “fix” them, we are truly seeing the “rational” going uninformed by tradition and experience in America today.

We are all too often rejecting our American principles as venal and broken. We have for fifty years told the world that we are wrong, even evil. And now we have a president that has made it his duty in nearly every single speech he’s given to say that we have been wrong on everything. Is it any wonder that we have an enemy in radical Islamists that have taken our word for it and decided to punish us accordingly?

The truth is, we are not a nation that needs to be remade. We are a nation that needs to get back to first principles. Are there some problems with our early ideas? Certainly. But to throw the baby out with the bathwater is a fool’s action. The fact is, we are a great nation because of our traditions and principles, not despite them and we need to retrain our citizenry in those principles.

I was glad to have gotten the chance to attend this ISI conference and look forward to its future efforts. In the mean time, if you’d like to see a whole series of video and audio lectures on American exceptionalism, history, and traditions some that stretch back some 40 years, visit ISI’s lecture series on its website. There you’ll see some great lecturers from folks like the four I met this weekend (and including them). ISI also has an interesting blog called First Principles that is worth visiting.

Part One: Lift a Glass to the Past: America Rooted in Tradition or a New Covenant?

ISI Conference Part Two: Christ in Our Soul

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This is part two of my three part report on the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s one day conference on The Roots of American Order. So here is part two of mine titled Lift a Glass to the Past: America Rooted in Tradition or a New Covenant? (Part one can be seen here)

The second speaker of the day was Brad Birzer who regaled us on America’s Judeo-Christian History.

Bizer began his session by noting that historian Donald Lutz discovered that the founders used Christian references in their pre-war writing far more than any other source. St. Paul was the most referenced New Testament figure with Micah 4:4 being the most referenced Old Testament verse.

But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the LORD of hosts hath spoken it.

On this Lutz quotation, though, I want to clarify something. Many have bandied about the claim that Donald Lutz said that 34 percent of the founder’s writing contain direct Biblical citations. This claim is not altogether true. On the other hand, it is not something to quickly dismiss as fans of the Enlightenment influence want to do, either.

The problem is that Lutz’ research didn’t reveal that this 34 percent came “directly” from Biblical citations. What Lutz found was that the Bible and quotes from sermons of the period added up to his finding of 34 percent. Lutz wasn’t saying the 34 percent was made up solely of Biblical quotations. It is a bit misleading to say that this large number of citations “came from the Bible” when a portion came from the sermons of famous preachers of the era — and political sermons at that. Granted sermons are generally of religious content, but a quote for a sermon isn’t the same thing as a direct citation from the Bible.

Add to this the fact that Lutz also found that the Federalist Papers and the debates about the Constitution contain very few Biblical citations and we get another shade of this debate that is necessary to consider. Many Atheists and Enlightenment influence fans claim that the lack of Biblical citations during this second period of the American founding proves that religion was meaningless. But I warn these deniers that Lutz was also not saying that the Bible was meaningless. In his study, after he notes that the Biblical influence seemed to disappear from the founder’s writing during the Constitutional phase, Lutz says it isn’t “surprising since the debate centered upon specific institutions about which the Bible has little to say.”

The fact is that this 34 percent of Protestant Religious citations isn’t meaningless. It still shows that a great preponderance of the founder’s citations were religiously based, and of the Protestant religion at that. It also shows that religious appeals formed a large part of the thinking of the founding era as they geared up both for war with Britain and the formation of the United States of America.

I sort of wish that Birzer had gone into this further, but I understand why he didn’t. He had a finite amount of time and this diversion would have moved away from his main point. In any case, both sides make at the same time too much and too little of Lutz’ study.

Birzer next noted that America was, indeed, a land of religious freedom even if its particular parts were “islands of intolerance.” He notes that the religious freedom that our early years are famous for did exist, but not in the laissez faire style we’d like to wish it were. Sure it was illegal to be a Catholic in Maryland after 1689, for instance, or one had to be an Anglican to hold office in Virginia but those particular restrictions were less extent in other parts of the country. Each segment had its particular religious sect as the officially recognized religion, but there wasn’t a single religion for all of the colonies leaving people free to choose where they might like to live in accordance with their individual principles.

The summation is that religion played a supremely important part in the early days from the first colonists to the founding era.

As an example Birzer notes that as laid out in his “On Conciliation With America,” Edmund Burke’s characterization of the American Colonies was that the colonies were born of English liberty and religion.

In this character of the Americans, a love of freedom is the predominating feature which marks and distinguishes the whole… This fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English Colonies probably than in any other people of the earth, and this from a great variety of powerful causes…

If anything were wanting to this necessary operation of the form of government, religion would have given it a complete effect. Religion, always a principle of energy, in this new people is no way worn out or impaired; and their mode of professing it is also one main cause of this free spirit. The people are Protestants; and of that kind which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion. This is a persuasion not only favorable to liberty, but built upon it.

Birzer, though, also pointed out that a chief motivating factor in rallying Americans to the revolutionary cause was an anti-Catholicism that was inflamed by the Crown’s 1774 Quebec Act that gave an official Crown-recognized status to French Catholics in Canada. This fear of “Papism” led many Americans to fear for their liberties expecting a creeping Catholic tyranny to invade their colonies through the Crown’s apostasy.

Birzer notes, though, that in many ways the establishment of local rule in the colonies was a bloodless coup of sorts. He gives the example of Charles Carroll of Carrollton a Roman Catholic who led Marylanders to form an extra legal government that eventually simply took over the colony as the official government in the minds of the people. At some point, the poor Royal Governor had to just go home because he was simply ignored by the whole colony as they favored their fellows instead.

Of course, Carroll’s efforts led him to become a celebrated citizen despite his Catholic religion and this, in turn, broke down some of those religious barriers for Catholics, at least in Maryland.

Birzer really pressed the point, though, that the main reason that colonists feared Papism was because of the top-down leadership of the Church, a style that necessarily negated, as far as they were concerned, the liberties that the colonists valued above all else.

He summed up his talk by asking of us all a question. In some parts of the colonies, men were required by law to bring two things to church with them on a Sunday morning: Their Bible and their rifle. These men were ready to give their all to protect their liberties. But are we today still ready to reclaim what is ours? With all the world flexing its muscles, from North Korea, to China to Iran, are we as Americans ready to fight to reclaim our legacy of freedom or are we to roll over and allow an out-of-control, socialist government to usurp our liberties as enemies gather at our gates?

Next: More British Than the British!

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Is the United States a grand experiment, a new covenant invented out of whole cloth by the fertile minds of the founders from never before seen ideas or is it a nation spawned from deeply rooted traditions of western thought? This was the question posited in a one-day-long conference on classicism in America’s founding, sponsored by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) and held in Skokie, Illinois, a near northern suburb of Chicago.

The short answer is that the liberal mindset that holds that we should invent the USA anew with each succeeding generation is an erroneous conception of what the United States was meant to be when it was founded. Sure America has some ideas never before seen by political man, but at heart, America is rationalism informed by tradition, not some amorphous mélange of constantly changing ideas.

The founders created a new nation based heavily on Western ideas through British tradition, not one based solely on rationalist thinking. As they struggled to set their new nation on its new Constitutional course, for instance, the words of Founder John Dickinson of Delaware served as their benchmark.

Let experience be our only guide. Reason may lead us astray.

An intimate crowd of 60 some participants enjoyed four separate addresses by lecturers associated with ISI. Appearing behind the lectern were Bruce Thornton, Professor of Classics at Fresno State University; Brad Birzer, Professor of History at Hillsdale College; Mark C. Henrie, Senior VP and Chief Academic Officer of ISI; and E. Christian Kopff, Professor of Classics at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

In these three installments, I will lay out what we talked about at this interesting one-day conference.

Part One: How it all Began

We began the morning with Bruce Thornton whose topic was America’s Classical Roots. Through Thornton we discovered the roots of democracy and western thought in classical Greek history.

As Thornton began, one of the points he made at the top was that politics is a result of citizenship and this was something new to man in the time of the ancient Greeks. Before the concept of citizenship men were governed by mere power as opposed to participation. What struck my mind with this point is that so many Americans today pronounce their disinterest in politics and have a mistaken conception that politics and politicians are separate from them. But, as Thornton reminds us, politics IS we the people. Politics isn’t separate from us, it IS us.

With this in mind, we must also remember that the law is also owned by we the people. Our politicians, our officers of the law do not own it. We do. It would behoove us to remember our role as citizens in this compact instead of sitting idly by grumbling about our out-of-control government.

Thornton warned us that it is a great mistake to dismiss the ancient Greeks (and Romans for that matter) as the fathers of our democratic freedoms just because they don’t today live up to our modern concept of what democracy and rights are. The idea of citizenship, though unevenly applied, was a revelation for the day and we cannot be over harsh in our judgment of their intellectual progress because they hadn’t yet reached the same level we have today. Yes, there was slavery, sure women did not have the same equal consideration under the law, but giving the citizen any role in government at all was an incredible breakthrough that should not be dismissed.

After all, for all of man’s history until the ancient Greeks (as far as we know) there were no other cultures that even had names for the totality of humanity. These peoples often used tribal words meant to describe people as “us” while everyone else was “them.” It manifested as if “them” were less than human, i.e. not “us.” But the Greeks philosophized about the human condition — again even though unevenly applied — they thought of humanity in totality.

Slavery is another touchy subject, of course. All the way until our Civil War, slavery was endemic to mankind. It had only been since the 1830s with England in the lead that the concept of slavery had at long last begun to suffer a loss of ready acceptance. So, to say that the Ancients are easily dismissed because they had slavery is ridiculous because they knew no other condition. But even at that, there is proof that the ancients were beginning to wonder about the legitimacy of slavery. Thornton related a concept from one of these philosophers (whose name I don’t recall) who said — and I paraphrase — The god makes men yet nature enslaves no one. The point here is that men use power to enslave. Slavery is not a natural condition but man made one.

Thornton’s main point was that the classical Greeks served as our touchstone, our bedrock for the American system. The main concepts of citizenship, participation, and the ideas of government were laid in those early centuries before Christ. Our founders cited the ancients more often than other influences except Christian principles in their tracts, letters and papers on their efforts to launch the U.S.A. So, to say that America was entirely “new” is absurd and a misreading of history.

Next: Christ in Our Soul

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We read:

“A swastika along Highway 36 flown on private property in Junction City is just one example of hate speech in Lane County, according to County Commissioner Pete Sorenson. He says flags like this are legal on private property, but he still doesn’t want to see them. “This kind of hate speech is just not welcome in our community,” he says.

In light of this recent swastika flag, county commissioners met late last month and voted on the “Proclamation Against Hate Speech.” Basically, commissioners are using their free speech to condemn this type of speech. They can condemn it but not change it. “As most people know, the swastika is a symbol of hatred,” says Sorenson. “We feel while we cannot regulate that kind of speech under the federal and Oregon constitution, we feel we certainly can condemn it. And that’s exactly what we did.”

Source

It’s difficult to know who is the dimmest here. The flag illustrated is NOT a symbol of hate. It is an Indian good luck symbol. You see them all over the place in India. In the Indian “swastik”, the arms normally point to the left. In the Nazi Hakenkreuz, they point to the right. The Nazis did NOT refer to their symbol as a “swastika”. It was the English who created that confusion. The German term translates as “Hooked Cross”.

But the learned commissioner was not the only dummy. The guy who put the flag up apparently was comparing Obama to Hitler — which is legitimate political speech, though something of an exaggeration. After all, Bush=Hitler was repeated ad nauseam from 2000 to 2008.

Posted by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

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Judge Andrew Napolitano announced on the Glenn Beck Show this week that he is planning to do a Constitutional Law seminar on Fox News. I see this as the next avenue of Tea Parties: We begin to talk about the U.S. Constitution, and what liberty really consists of, in detail, and we keep talking about it.

Thomas Jefferson said:

“… God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed.

The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive.

If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty…. And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.

The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
Thomas Jefferson Papers, 334 (C.J. Boyd, Ed., 1950)

That is an awesome quotation – an awesome thought.

Napolitano is the author of a wonderfully informative book, Constitutional Chaos. I’m looking forward to the lecture or lectures as a way to get the conversation started.

Not everyone is anxious to hear the Judge’s ideas, however. It would be naive to think Liberals would be interested in the U.S. Constitution. I found one Liberal site admitting they are “more than a little queasy” at some of the issues Napolitano addressed yesterday:

Freedom of choice and control over your own body will be lost.

More of your hard earned dollars will be at the disposal and tender mercies of federal bureaucrats. It was not intended to be this way.

We can vote the bums out of their cushy federal office

…we can persuade the state governments to defy the Feds in areas like health care where the Constitution gives the federal government zero authority.

We can ask our state legislatures to threaten to amend the Constitution to abolish the income tax, to return the selection of US senators to state legislatures and to nullify, to nullify! all the laws that Congress has written that are not based on the Constitution.

But there is one thing we can’t do. Just sit back and take it.”

Napolitano has been laying out our politically incorrect abuse of the US Constitution for a very long time. Here’s a snippet from the introduction to his book Constitutional Chaos:

What’s at Stake in America Today

I, myself, am a strong and fervent believer in Natural Law. The only valid laws are those grounded in a pursuit of goodness. Anything else – like taking property from Person A and giving it to Person B, like silencing an unpopular minority, like interfering with freedom of worship – is an unjust law, and, theoretically, need not be obeyed. St. Thomas Aquinas said only just laws impose an obligation of obedience, because unjust laws are not within the power of the government to enact; and only laws that seek goodness are just. This is the essence of Natural Law. No government may enact laws interfering with our freedoms no matter how popular the enactment.

The positivist would say since the government gives freedom, the government can take it away. The Natural Law says only God gives freedom and the government can only take it away as a punishment for violating the Natural Law, and then only through due process.

To a positivist, the government’s goal is to bring about the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people. Under the Natural Law, the only legitimate goal of government is to secure liberty, which is the freedom to obey one’s own free will and conscience, rather than the free wills or consciences of others.

The problem today in America – the greatest and gravest threat to personal freedom in this country – is that the positivists are carrying the day. Under their sway, the government violates the law while busily passing more legislation to abridge our liberties.

If we wish to survive the near future with our rights intact, we need to understand the size and scope of the threat. We must also understand its true identity: a government that breaks its own laws. ~  Constitutional Chaos, Judge Andrew Napolitan

About Natural Law, new President George Washington said:

The foundation of our national policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality; …the propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained…”

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An inscription on a WWII monument in Kohima, India fittingly describes the sacrifices that our soldiers make with their service to our nation. And on this Veterans Day it is also fitting to focus on it. The Inscription says:

“When You Go Home, Tell Them Of Us And Say, For Their Tomorrow, We Gave Our Today.”

What could be a more fitting tribute to the sacrifices made by our fallen loved ones, comrades, and servants? They gave their last full measure so we could enjoy the freedoms we are so fortunate to have today. They gave their lives for our benefit in the truest definition of sacrifice.

This memorial commemorates the Allied dead that faced the Japanese 15th Army upon its invasion of India in March of 1944. The invasion was beaten back by June of the same year through the sacrifice of these Allied troops.

The words are attributed to John Maxwell Edmonds (1875 -1958), an English Classicist who in 1916 added them to a collection of 12 epitaphs to commemorate World War One. Adding the inscription to the Kohima monument was a suggestion by Major John Etty-Leal, the GSO II of the 2nd Division who was a classical scholar in civilian life.

The verse is thought to have been inspired by the Greek lyric poet Simonides of Ceos (556-468 BC) who wrote after the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC: “Go tell the Spartans, thou that passest by, That faithful to their precepts here we lie.”

And now we too can recall this verse etched into a stone in a far away and foreign land as a perfect tribute to our fallen as well as for those who gave service to their fellows by wearing the uniform of our armed forces.

So, thank you all. We appreciate your sacrifice. And happy Veterans Day.

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Such thinking was once dominant in Anglo-Saxon philosophy schools but the great expansion of tertiary education in recent decades has meant that many less rigorous thinkers have been employed as philosophers, some even being third-rate enough to find enlightenment in the words of an obsolete economist called Karl Marx. So philosophy schools are now replete with people who seem to think they are being profound when they say: “There is no such thing as right and wrong” or “There are many realities”. To an Anglo-Saxon empiricist, such statements are simply confused.

Such confused thinking is usually described (rather fancifully) these days as “postmodernism” but for historical purposes it is probably best subsumed under the broad category of “existentialism” — and there were many prominent existentialist thinkers in the first half of the 20th century, particularly in Germany. And many existentialist thinkers at that time were sympathetic to National Socialism (Nazism), just as their counterparts today are solidly in favour of all sorts of Leftist thinking. So existentialist thinking and Leftism have always been intimately associated among many who call themselves philosophers. And it should therefore be no surprise that prewar existentialists sound very profound to existentialists today.

The Nazi connection is however embarrassing. Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, DeMan and others sound very good and wise and profound to Leftist philosophers today so how do you cope with the Nazi connection? Easy: In the traditional Leftist way of dealing with all inconvenient facts — by ignoring it.

One of the holier of today’s existentialists has however recently upset the applecart by pointing out that the great god Heidegger was a Nazi and calling for all Heidegger’s thinking to be denounced and renounced. Leftists are not letting go of such an inspiring (to them) figure as Heidegger, however. What Heidegger says is central to what they say, so to denounce Heidegger would be to denounce most of their own thinking. And there the matter rests at the moment. A small excerpt from a NYT story about the matter below. That Nazi thinking is one subset of socialist thinking is, of course, never acknowledged:

For decades the German philosopher Martin Heidegger has been the subject of passionate debate. His critique of Western thought and technology has penetrated deeply into architecture, psychology and literary theory and inspired some of the most influential intellectual movements of the 20th century. Yet he was also a fervent Nazi.

Now a soon-to-be published book in English has revived the long-running debate about whether the man can be separated from his philosophy. Drawing on new evidence, the author, Emmanuel Faye, argues fascist and racist ideas are so woven into the fabric of Heidegger’s theories that they no longer deserve to be called philosophy. As a result Mr. Faye declares, Heidegger’s works and the many fields built on them need to be re-examined lest they spread sinister ideas as dangerous to modern thought as “the Nazi movement was to the physical existence of the exterminated peoples.”

First published in France in 2005, the book, “Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy,” calls on philosophy professors to treat Heidegger’s writings like hate speech. Libraries, too, should stop classifying Heidegger’s collected works (which have been sanitized and abridged by his family) as philosophy and instead include them under the history of Nazism. These measures would function as a warning label, like a skull-and-crossbones on a bottle of poison, to prevent the careless spread of his most odious ideas, which Mr. Faye lists as the exaltation of the state over the individual, the impossibility of morality, anti-humanism and racial purity.

The book is the most radical attack yet on Heidegger (1889-1976) and would upend the philosophical field’s treatment of his work in the United States, and even more so in France, where Heidegger has frequently been required reading for an advanced degree. Mr. Faye, an associate professor at the University of Paris, Nanterre, not only wants to drum Heidegger from the ranks of philosophers, he wants to challenge his colleagues to rethink the very purpose of philosophy and its relationship to ethics.

At the same time scholars in disciplines as far flung as poetry and psychoanalysis would be obliged to reconsider their use of Heidegger’s ideas. Although Mr. Faye talks about the close connection between Heidegger and current right-wing extremist politics, left-wing intellectuals have more frequently been inspired by his ideas. Existentialism and postmodernism as well as attendant attacks on colonialism, atomic weapons, ecological ruin and universal notions of morality are all based on his critique of the Western cultural tradition and reason.

I go into some detail about the confusions of “postmodernist” thinking here

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For most of the last century, the West faced real enemies: totalitarian, aggressive, armed to the teeth. Between 1918 and 1989, it was possible to believe that liberal democracy was a parenthesis in history, destined to be undone by revolution, ground under by jackboots, or burned like chaff in the fire of the atom bomb.

Twenty years ago today, this threat disappeared. An East German functionary named Günther Schabowski threw open his country’s border crossings, and by nightfall the youth of Germany were dancing atop the Berlin Wall, taking hammers to its graffiti-scarred facade. It was Nov. 9, 1989. The cold war was finished.

Bark Bark Woof Woof actually has a pretty good summation of this

So perhaps the reason we’re not making a bigger deal out of the anniversary of the opening of the Berlin Wall is because it did not come after a brutal and bloody struggle. No shots were fired; after weeks of peaceful protests without repression from the state — a sign of impending capitulation itself — an East German bureaucrat mistakenly announced the lifting of visa requirements and the dreaded VoPos of East Germany stood meekly aside as the Trabants trundled through Checkpoint Charlie to the rhythm of rock music and dancing teenagers. What had been the stuff of James Bond and John Le Carre became Woodstock.

Still, BBWW failed to mention Reagan’s contribution to this. Without his economic war, disguised as a military one, we would not have seen what occurred on 11/9/89. Back to Ross

There will be speeches and celebrations to mark this anniversary, but not as many as the day deserves. (Barack Obama couldn’t even fit a visit to Berlin into his schedule.) By rights, the Ninth of November should be a holiday across the Western world, celebrated with the kind of pomp and spectacle reserved for our own Independence Day.

A nice little shot at Obama. I understand him not wanting to go. His writings showed that he had no clue what Reagan was doing, and, seriously, Obama has more in common with the Soviet leaders of that day than with strong American leaders willing to stand up for Freedom around the world at all costs. Plus, it would be difficult to turn the event into one about The One.

Never has liberation come to so many people all at once — to Eastern Europe’s millions, released from decades of bondage; to the world, freed from the shadow of nuclear Armageddon; and to the democratic West, victorious after a century of ideological struggle.

Thank you, Ronald Reagan!

Meanwhile, our domestic politics are shot through with antitotalitarian obsessions, even as real totalitarianism recedes in history’s rear-view mirror. Plenty of liberals were convinced that a vote for George W. Bush was a vote for theocracy or fascism. Too many conservatives are persuaded that Barack Obama’s liberalism is a step removed from Leninism.

Plenty? How about a majority of them, unhinged, constantly comparing Bush to Hitler, thinking that Bush was personally placing bugs in their homes and cars, spying on them, building detention centers for liberals, that he would not leave the White House on January 20th, 2009, but would stay as a dictator…..you know the whole thing.

Obama could never achieve Leninism, and doesn’t match up. He doesn’t have the leadership skills, nor the will power to make the tough decisions. He just floats from one PC to another, sprinkling campaign stops in between. But, he has way more in common with Lenin’s view points than with American viewpoints.

Problem being, totalitarianism is not dead and gone. Islamists exist, and their movement is growing. Is it as dangerous right now as the Soviet Union? Not even close. But, all it takes is people looking away, wishing the problem didn’t exist, treating it strictly like we can use RICO statues against it, for it to grow.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove

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