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[Should be read in conjunction with Thomas W. Chittum’s, Civil War 2 if you can get a copy. I looked on Amazon and CW 2 in readable form goes for ~$200.]

THE FATE OF EMPIRES
and
SEARCH FOR SURVIVAL
Sir John Glubb
John Bagot Glubb was born in 1897, his father being a regular officer in the Royal Engineers.
At the age of four he left England for Mauritius, where his father was posted for a three-year
tour of duty. At the age of ten he was sent to school for a year in Switzerland. These youthful
travels may have opened his mind to the outside world at an early age.
He entered the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich in September 1914, and was
commissioned in the Royal Engineers in April 1915. He served throughout the first World War
in France and Belgium, being wounded three times and awarded the Military Cross. In 1920 he
volunteered for service in Iraq, as a regular officer, but in 1926 resigned his commission and
accepted an administrative post under the Iraq Government.
In 1930, however, he signed a contract to serve the Transjordan Government (now Jordan).
From 1939 to 1956 he commanded the famous Jordan Arab Legion, which was in reality the
Jordan Army. Since his retirement he has published seventeen books, chiefly on the Middle
East, and has lectured widely in Britain, the United States and Europe.
William Blackwood & Sons Ltd
32 Thistle Street
Edinburgh EH1 1HA
Scotland
© J. B. G. Ltd, 1976, 1977
ISBN 0 85158 127 7
Printed at the Press of the Publisher
Introduction
As we pass through life, we learn by
experience. We look back on our behaviour
when we were young and think how foolish
we were. In the same way our family, our
community and our town endeavour to avoid
the mistakes made by our predecessors.
The experiences of the human race have
been recorded, in more or less detail, for
some four thousand years. If we attempt to
study such a period of time in as many
countries as possible, we seem to discover
the same patterns constantly repeated under
widely differing conditions of climate,
culture and religion. Surely, we ask
ourselves, if we studied calmly and
impartially the history of human institutions
and development over these four thousand
years, should we not reach conclusions
which would assist to solve our problems
today? For everything that is occurring
around us has happened again and again
before.
No such conception ever appears to have
entered into the minds of our historians. In
general, historical teaching in schools is
limited to this small island. We endlessly
mull over the Tudors and the Stewarts, the
Battle of Crecy, and Guy Fawkes. Perhaps
this narrowness is due to our examination
system, which necessitates the careful
definition of a syllabus which all children
must observe.
I remember once visiting a school for
mentally handicapped children. “Our
children do not have to take examinations,”
the headmaster told me,” and so we are able
to teach them things which will be really
useful to them in life.”
However this may be, the thesis which I
wish to propound is that priceless lessons
could be learned if the history of the past
four thousand years could be thoroughly and
impartially studied. In these two articles,
which first appeared in Blackwood’s
Magazine, I have attempted briefly to sketch
some of the kinds of lessons which I believe
we could learn. My plea is that history
should be the history of the human race, not
of one small country or period.
The Fate of Empires
I Learning from history
‘The only thing we learn from history,’ it
has been said, ‘is that men never learn from
history’, a sweeping generalisation perhaps,
but one which the chaos in the world today
goes far to confirm. What then can be the
reason why, in a society which claims to
probe every problem, the bases of history are
still so completely unknown?
Several reasons for the futility of our
historical studies may be suggested.
First, our historical work is limited to short
periods—the history of our own country, or
that of some past age which, for some
reason, we hold in respect.
Second, even within these short periods,
the slant we give to our narrative is governed
by our own vanity rather than by objectivity.
If we are considering the history of our own
country, we write at length of the periods
when our ancestors were prosperous and
victorious, but we pass quickly over their
shortcomings or their defeats. Our people
are represented as patriotic heroes, their
enemies as grasping imperialists, or
subversive rebels. In other words, our
national histories are propaganda, not wellbalanced
investigations.
Third, in the sphere of world history, we
study certain short, usually unconnected,
periods, which fashion at certain epochs has
made popular. Greece 500 years before
Christ, and the Roman Republic and early
Roman Empire are cases in point. The
intervals between the ‘great periods’ are
neglected. Recently Greece and Rome have
become largely discredited, and history tends
to become increasingly the parochial history
of our own countries.
To derive any useful instruction from
history, it seems to me essential first of all to
grasp the principle that history, to be
meaningful, must be the history of the
human race. For history is a continuous
process, gradually developing, changing and
turning back, but in general moving forward
in a single mighty stream. Any useful lessons
to be derived must be learned by the study of
the whole flow of human development, not
by the selection of short periods here and
there in one country or another.
Every age and culture is derived from its
predecessors, adds some contribution of its
own, and passes it on to its successors. If we
boycott various periods of history, the
origins of the new cultures which succeeded
them cannot be explained.
_______________________________
Sir John Glubb, better known as Glubb
Pasha, was born in 1897, and served in
France in the First World War from 1915 to
1918. In 1926 he left the regular army to
serve the Iraq Government. From 1939 to
1956, he commanded the famous Jordan
Arab Legion. Since retirement, he has
published sixteen books, chiefly on the
Middle East, and has lectured widely.
The Fate of Empires
2
Physical science has expanded its knowledge
by building on the work of its predecessors,
and by making millions of careful experiments,
the results of which are meticulously
recorded. Such methods have not yet been
employed in the study of world history. Our
piecemeal historical work is still mainly
dominated by emotion and prejudice.
II The lives of empires
If we desire to ascertain the laws which
govern the rise and fall of empires, the
obvious course is to investigate the imperial
experiments recorded in history, and to
endeavour to deduce from them any lessons
which seem to be applicable to them all.
The word ‘empire’, by association with the
British Empire, is visualised by some people
as an organisation consisting of a homecountry
in Europe and ‘colonies’ in other
continents. In this essay, the term ‘empire’ is
used to signify a great power, often called
today a superpower. Most of the empires in
history have been large landblocks, almost
without overseas possessions.
We possess a considerable amount of
information on many empires recorded in
history, and of their vicissitudes and the
lengths of their lives, for example:
The nation Dates of rise and fall Duration in years
Assyria 859-612 B.C. 247
Persia 538-330 B.C. 208
(Cyrus and his descendants)
Greece 331-100 B.C. 231
(Alexander and his successors)
Roman Republic 260-27 B.C. 233
Roman Empire 27 B.C.-A.D. 180 207
Arab Empire A.D. 634-880 246
Mameluke Empire 1250-1517 267
Ottoman Empire 1320-1570 250
Spain 1500-1750 250
Romanov Russia 1682-1916 234
Britain 1700-1950 250
This list calls for certain comments.
(1) The present writer is exploring the facts,
not trying to prove anything. The dates given
are largely arbitrary. Empires do not usually
begin or end on a certain date. There is
normally a gradual period of expansion and
then a period of decline. The resemblance in
the duration of these great powers may be
queried. Human affairs are subject to many
chances, and it is not to be expected that they
The Fate of Empires
3
could be calculated with mathematical
accuracy.
(2) Nevertheless, it is suggested that there is
sufficient resemblance between the life
periods of these different empires to justify
further study.
(3) The division of Rome into two periods
may be thought unwarranted. The first, or
republican, period dates from the time when
Rome became the mistress of Italy, and ends
with the accession of Augustus. The imperial
period extends from the accession of
Augustus to the death of Marcus Aurelius. It
is true that the empire survived nominally
for more than a century after this date, but it
did so in constant confusion, rebellions, civil
wars and barbarian invasions.
(4) Not all empires endured for their full lifespan.
The Babylonian Empire of Nebuchadnezzar,
for example, was overthrown by
Cyrus, after a life duration of only some
seventy-four years.
(5) An interesting deduction from the figures
seems to be that the duration of empires
does not depend on the speed of travel or the
nature of weapons. The Assyrians marched
on foot and fought with spears and bow and
arrows. The British used artillery, railways
and ocean-going ships. Yet the two empires
lasted for approximately the same periods.
There is a tendency nowadays to say that
this is the jet-age, and consequently there is
nothing for us to learn from past empires.
Such an attitude seems to be erroneous.
(6) It is tempting to compare the lives of
empires with those of human beings. We
may choose a figure and say that the average
life of a human being is seventy years. Not all
human beings live exactly seventy years.
Some die in infancy, others are killed in
accidents in middle life, some survive to the
age of eighty or ninety. Nevertheless, in spite
of such exceptions, we are justified in saying
that seventy years is a fair estimate of the
average person’s expectation of life.
(7) We may perhaps at this stage be allowed
to draw certain conclusions:
(a) In spite of the accidents of fortune, and
the apparent circumstances of the human
race at different epochs, the periods of
duration of different empires at varied
epochs show a remarkable similarity.
(b) Immense changes in the technology of
transport or in methods of warfare do not
seem to affect the life-expectation of an
empire.
(c) The changes in the technology of transport
and of war have, however, affected the
shape of empires. The Assyrians, marching
on foot, could only conquer their neighbours,
who were accessible by land—the
Medes, the Babylonians, the Persians and
the Egyptians.
The British, making use of ocean-going
ships, conquered many countries and subcontinents,
which were accessible to them
by water—North America, India, South
Africa, Australia and New Zealand—but
they never succeeded in conquering their
neighbours, France, Germany and Spain.
But, although the shapes of the Assyrian
and the British Empires were entirely
different, both lasted about the same
length of time.
III The human yardstick
What then, we may ask, can have been the
factor which caused such an extraordinary
similarity in the duration of empires, under
such diverse conditions, and such utterly
different technological achievements?
The Fate of Empires
4
One of the very few units of measurement
which have not seriously changed since the
Assyrians is the human ‘generation’, a period
of about twenty-five years. Thus a period of
250 years would represent about ten generations
of people. A closer examination of the
characteristics of the rise and fall of great
nations may emphasise the possible significance
of the sequence of generations.
Let us then attempt to examine the stages
in the lives of such powerful nations.
IV Stage one. The outburst
Again and again in history we find a small
nation, treated as insignificant by its
contemporaries, suddenly emerging from its
homeland and overrunning large areas of the
world. Prior to Philip (359-336 B.C.), Macedon
had been an insignificant state to the
north of Greece. Persia was the great power
of the time, completely dominating the area
from Eastern Europe to India. Yet by 323
B.C., thirty-six years after the accession of
Philip, the Persian Empire had ceased to
exist, and the Macedonian Empire extended
from the Danube to India, including Egypt.
This amazing expansion may perhaps he
attributed to the genius of Alexander the
Great, but this cannot have been the sole
reason; for although after his death everything
went wrong—the Macedonian generals
fought one another and established rival
empires—Macedonian pre-eminence survived
for 231 years.
In the year A.D. 600, the world was divided
between two superpower groups as it has
been for the past fifty years between Soviet
Russia and the West. The two powers were
the eastern Roman Empire and the Persian
Empire. The Arabs were then the despised
and backward inhabitants of the Arabian
Peninsula. They consisted chiefly of wandering
tribes, and had no government, no
constitution and no army. Syria, Palestine,
Egypt and North Africa were Roman
provinces, Iraq was part of Persia.
The Prophet Mohammed preached in
Arabia from A.D. 613 to 632, when he died.
In 633, the Arabs burst out of their desert
peninsula, and simultaneously attacked the
two super-powers. Within twenty years, the
Persian Empire had ceased to exist. Seventy
years after the death of the Prophet, the
Arabs had established an empire extending
from the Atlantic to the plains of Northern
India and the frontiers of China.
At the beginning of the thirteenth century,
the Mongols were a group of savage tribes in
the steppes of Mongolia. In 1211, Genghis
Khan invaded China. By 1253, the Mongols
had established an empire extending from
Asia Minor to the China Sea, one of the
largest empires the world has ever known.
The Arabs ruled the greater part of Spain
for 780 years, from 712 A.D. to 1492. (780
years back in British history would take us to
1196 and King Richard Coeur de Lion.)
During these eight centuries, there had been
no Spanish nation, the petty kings of Aragon
and Castile alone holding on in the
mountains.
The agreement between Ferdinand and
Isabella and Christopher Columbus was
signed immediately after the fall of Granada,
the last Arab kingdom in Spain, in 1492.
Within fifty years, Cortez had conquered
Mexico, and Spain was the world’s greatest
empire.
Examples of the sudden outbursts by
which empires are born could be multiplied
indefinitely. These random illustrations must
suffice.
The Fate of Empires
5
V Characteristics of the outburst
These sudden outbursts are usually
characterised by an extraordinary display of
energy and courage. The new conquerors are
normally poor, hardy and enterprising and
above all aggressive. The decaying empires
which they overthrow are wealthy but
defensive-minded. In the time of Roman
greatness, the legions used to dig a ditch
round their camps at night to avoid surprise.
But the ditches were mere earthworks, and
between them wide spaces were left through
which the Romans could counter-attack. But
as Rome grew older, the earthworks became
high walls, through which access was given
only by narrow gates. Counterattacks were
no longer possible. The legions were now
passive defenders.
But the new nation is not only distinguished
by victory in battle, but by unresting
enterprise in every field. Men hack their way
through jungles, climb mountains, or brave
the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans in tiny
cockle-shells. The Arabs crossed the Straits
of Gibraltar in A.D. 711 with 12,000 men,
defeated a Gothic army of more than twice
their strength, marched straight over 250
miles of unknown enemy territory and seized
the Gothic capital of Toledo. At the same
stage in British history, Captain Cook discovered
Australia. Fearless initiative characterises
such periods.
Other peculiarities of the period of the
conquering pioneers are their readiness to
improvise and experiment. Untrammelled by
traditions, they will turn anything available
to their purpose. If one method fails, they try
something else. Uninhibited by textbooks or
book learning, action is their solution to
every problem.
Poor, hardy, often half-starved and ill-clad,
they abound in courage, energy and
initiative, overcome every obstacle and
always seem to be in control of the situation.
VI The causes of race outbursts
The modern instinct is to seek a reason for
everything, and to doubt the veracity of a
statement for which a reason cannot be
found. So many examples can be given of the
sudden eruption of an obscure race into a
nation of conquerors that the truth of the
phenomenon cannot be held to be doubtful.
To assign a cause is more difficult. Perhaps
the easiest explanation is to assume that the
poor and obscure race is tempted by the
wealth of the ancient civilisation, and there
would undoubtedly appear to be an element
of greed for loot in barbarian invasions.
Such a motivation may be divided into two
classes. The first is mere loot, plunder and
rape, as, for example, in the case of Attila
and the Huns, who ravaged a great part of
Europe from A.D. 450 to 453. However, when
Attila died in the latter year, his empire fell
apart and his tribes returned to Eastern
Europe.
Many of the barbarians who founded
dynasties in Western Europe on the ruins of
the Roman Empire, however, did so out of
admiration for Roman civilisation, and
themselves aspired to become Romans.
VII A providential turnover?
Whatever causes may be given for the
overthrow of great civilisations by
barbarians, we can sense certain resulting
benefits. Every race on earth has distinctive
characteristics. Some have been distinguished
in philosophy, some in administration,
some in romance, poetry or religion, some in
The Fate of Empires
6
their legal system. During the pre-eminence
of each culture, its distinctive characteristics
are carried by it far and wide across the
world.
If the same nation were to retain its
domination indefinitely, its peculiar qualities
would permanently characterise the whole
human race. Under the system of empires
each lasting for 250 years, the sovereign race
has time to spread its particular virtues far
and wide. Then, however, another people,
with entirely different peculiarities, takes its
place, and its virtues and accomplishments
are likewise disseminated. By this system,
each of the innumerable races of the world
enjoys a period of greatness, during which its
peculiar qualities are placed at the service of
mankind.
To those who believe in the existence of
God, as the Ruler and Director of human
affairs, such a system may appear as a
manifestation of divine wisdom, tending
towards the slow and ultimate perfection of
humanity.
VIII The course of empire
The first stage of the life of a great nation,
therefore, after its outburst, is a period of
amazing initiative, and almost incredible
enterprise, courage and hardihood. These
qualities, often in a very short time, produce
a new and formidable nation. These early
victories, however, are won chiefly by
reckless bravery and daring initiative.
The ancient civilisation thus attacked will
have defended itself by its sophisticated
weapons, and by its military organisation
and discipline. The barbarians quickly
appreciate the advantages of these military
methods and adopt them. As a result, the
second stage of expansion of the new empire
consists of more organised, disciplined and
professional campaigns.
In other fields, the daring initiative of the
original conquerors is maintained—in
geographical exploration, for example:
pioneering new countries, penetrating new
forests, climbing unexplored mountains, and
sailing uncharted seas. The new nation is
confident, optimistic and perhaps contemptuous
of the ‘decadent’ races which it has
subjugated.
The methods employed tend to be practical
and experimental, both in government and
in warfare, for they are not tied by centuries
of tradition, as happens in ancient empires.
Moreover, the leaders are free to use their
own improvisations, not having studied
politics or tactics in schools or in textbooks.
IX U.S.A. in the stage of the pioneers
In the case of the United States of America,
the pioneering period did not consist of a
barbarian conquest of an effete civilisation,
but of the conquest of barbarian peoples.
Thus, viewed from the outside, every
example seems to be different. But viewed
from the standpoint of the great nation,
every example seems to be similar.
The United States arose suddenly as a new
nation, and its period of pioneering was
spent in the conquest of a vast continent, not
an ancient empire. Yet the subsequent life
history of the United States has followed the
standard pattern which we shall attempt to
trace—the periods of the pioneers, of
commerce, of affluence, of intellectualism
and of decadence.
X Commercial expansion
The conquest of vast areas of land and
their subjection to one government
The Fate of Empires
7
automatically acts as a stimulant to commerce.
Both merchants and goods can be
exchanged over considerable distances.
Moreover, if the empire be an extensive one,
it will include a great variety of climates,
producing extremely varied products, which
the different areas will wish to exchange with
one another.
The speed of modern methods of transportation
tends to create in us the impresssion
that far-flung commerce is a modern
development, but this is not the case. Objects
made in Ireland, Scandinavia and China
have been found in the graves or the ruins of
the Middle East, dating from 1,000 years
before Christ. The means of transport were
slower, but, when a great empire was in
control, commerce was freed from the
innumerable shackles imposed upon it today
by passports, import permits, customs,
boycotts and political interference.
The Roman Empire extended from Britain
to Syria and Egypt, a distance, in a direct
line, of perhaps 2,700 miles. A Roman
official, transferred from Britain to Syria,
might spend six months on the journey. Yet,
throughout the whole distance, he would be
travelling in the same country, with the same
official language, the same laws, the same
currency and the same administrative
system. Today, some twenty independent
countries separate Britain from Syria, each
with its own government, its own laws,
politics, customs fees, passports and
currencies, making commercial co-operation
almost impossible. And this process of
disintegration is still continuing. Even within
the small areas of the modern European
nations, provincial movements demanding
secession or devolution tend further to
splinter the continent.
The present fashion for ‘independence’ has
produced great numbers of tiny states in the
world, some of them consisting of only one
city or of a small island. This system is an
insuperable obstacle to trade and cooperation.
The present European Economic
Community is an attempt to secure commercial
cooperation among small independent
states over a large area, but the plan meets
with many difficulties, due to the mutual
jealousies of so many nations.
Even savage and militaristic empires
promoted commerce, whether or not they
intended to do so. The Mongols were some of
the most brutal military conquerors in
history, massacring the entire populations of
cities. Yet, in the thirteenth century, when
their empire extended from Peking to
Hungary, the caravan trade between China
and Europe achieved a remarkable degree of
prosperity—the whole journey was in the
territory of one government.
In the eighth and ninth centuries, the
caliphs of Baghdad achieved fabulous wealth
owing to the immense extent of their
territories, which constituted a single trade
bloc. The empire of the caliphs is now
divided into some twenty-five separate
‘nations’.
XI The pros and cons of empires
In discussing the life-story of the typical
empire, we have digressed into a discussion
of whether empires are useful or injurious to
mankind. We seem to have discovered that
empires have certain advantages, particularly
in the field of commerce, and in the
establishment of peace and security in vast
areas of the globe. Perhaps we should also
include the spread of varied cultures to many
races. The present infatuation for indepenThe
Fate of Empires
8
dence for ever smaller and smaller units will
eventually doubtless be succeeded by new
international empires.
The present attempts to create a European
community may be regarded as a practical
endeavour to constitute a new super-power,
in spite of the fragmentation resulting from
the craze for independence. If it succeeds,
some of the local independencies will have to
be sacrificed. If it fails, the same result may
be attained by military conquest, or by the
partition of Europe between rival superpowers.
The inescapable conclusion seems,
however, to be that larger territorial units are
a benefit to commerce and to public stability,
whether the broader territory be achieved by
voluntary association or by military action.
XII Sea power
One of the more benevolent ways in which
a super-power can promote both peace and
commerce is by its command of the sea.
From Waterloo to 1914, the British Navy
commanded the seas of the world. Britain
grew rich, but she also made the Seas safe for
the commerce of all nations, and prevented
major wars for 100 years.
Curiously enough, the question of sea
power was never clearly distinguished, in
British politics during the last fifty years,
from the question of imperial rule over other
countries. In fact, the two subjects are
entirely distinct. Sea power does not offend
small countries, as does military occupation.
If Britain had maintained her navy, with a
few naval bases overseas in isolated islands,
and had given independence to colonies
which asked for it, the world might well be a
more stable place today. In fact, however, the
navy was swept away in the popular outcry
against imperialism.
XIII The Age of Commerce
Let us now, however, return to the lifestory
of our typical empire. We have already
considered the age of outburst, when a littleregarded
people suddenly bursts on to the
world stage with a wild courage and energy.
Let us call it the Age of the Pioneers.
Then we saw that these new conquerors
acquired the sophisticated weapons of the
old empires, and adopted their regular
systems of military organisation and
training. A great period of military expansion
ensued, which we may call the Age of
Conquests. The conquests resulted in the
acquisition of vast territories under one
government, thereby automatically giving
rise to commercial prosperity. We may call
this the Age of Commerce.
The Age of Conquests, of course, overlaps
the Age of Commerce. The proud military
traditions still hold sway and the great
armies guard the frontiers, but gradually the
desire to make money seems to gain hold of
the public. During the military period, glory
and honour were the principal objects of
ambition. To the merchant, such ideas are
but empty words, which add nothing to the
bank balance.
XIV Art and luxury
The wealth which seems, almost without
effort, to pour into the country enables the
commercial classes to grow immensely rich.
How to spend all this money becomes a
problem to the wealthy business community.
Art, architecture and luxury find rich
patrons. Splendid municipal buildings and
wide streets lend dignity and beauty to the
wealthy areas of great cities. The rich
merchants build themselves palaces, and
money is invested in communications,
The Fate of Empires
9
highways, bridges, railways or hotels,
according to the varied patterns of the ages.
The first half of the Age of Commerce
appears to be peculiarly splendid. The
ancient virtues of courage, patriotism and
devotion to duty are still in evidence. The
nation is proud, united and full of selfconfidence.
Boys are still required, first of all,
to be manly—to ride, to shoot straight and to
tell the truth. (It is remarkable what
emphasis is placed, at this stage, on the
manly virtue of truthfulness, for lying is
cowardice—the fear of facing up to the
situation.)
Boys’ schools are intentionally rough. Frugal
eating, hard living, breaking the ice to
have a bath and similar customs are aimed at
producing a strong, hardy and fearless breed
of men. Duty is the word constantly drummed
into the heads of young people.
The Age of Commerce is also marked by
great enterprise in the exploration for new
forms of wealth. Daring initiative is shown in
the search for profitable enterprises in far
corners of the earth, perpetuating to some
degree the adventurous courage of the Age of
Conquests.
XV The Age of Affluence
There does not appear to be any doubt that
money is the agent which causes the decline
of this strong, brave and self-confident
people. The decline in courage, enterprise
and a sense of duty is, however, gradual.
The first direction in which wealth injures
the nation is a moral one. Money replaces
honour and adventure as the objective of the
best young men. Moreover, men do not
normally seek to make money for their
country or their community, but for themselves.
Gradually, and almost imperceptibly,
the Age of Affluence silences the voice of
duty. The object of the young and the
ambitious is no longer fame, honour or
service, but cash.
Education undergoes the same gradual
transformation. No longer do schools aim at
producing brave patriots ready to serve their
country. Parents and students alike seek the
educational qualifications which will
command the highest salaries. The Arab
moralist, Ghazali (1058-1111), complains in
these very same words of the lowering of
objectives in the declining Arab world of his
time. Students, he says, no longer attend
college to acquire learning and virtue, but to
obtain those qualifications which will enable
them to grow rich. The same situation is
everywhere evident among us in the West
today.
XVI High Noon
That which we may call the High Noon of
the nation covers the period of transition
from the Age of Conquests to the Age of
Affluence: the age of Augustus in Rome, that
of Harun al-Rashid in Baghdad, of Sulaiman
the Magnificent in the Ottoman Empire, or
of Queen Victoria in Britain. Perhaps we
might add the age of Woodrow Wilson in the
United States.
All these periods reveal the same
characteristics. The immense wealth accumulated
in the nation dazzles the onlookers.
Enough of the ancient virtues of courage,
energy and patriotism survive to enable the
state successfully to defend its frontiers. But,
beneath the surface, greed for money is
gradually replacing duty and public service.
Indeed the change might be summarised as
being from service to selfishness.
The Fate of Empires
10
XVII Defensiveness
Another outward change which invariably
marks the transition from the Age of
Conquests to the Age of Affluence is the
spread of defensiveness. The nation, immensely
rich, is no longer interested in glory or
duty, but is only anxious to retain its wealth
and its luxury. It is a period of defensiveness,
from the Great Wall of China, to Hadrian’s
Wall on the Scottish Border, to the Maginot
Line in France in 1939.
Money being in better supply than courage,
subsidies instead of weapons are employed
to buy off enemies. To justify this departure
from ancient tradition, the human mind
easily devises its own justification. Military
readiness, or aggressiveness, is denounced as
primitive and immoral. Civilised peoples are
too proud to fight. The conquest of one
nation by another is declared to be immoral.
Empires are wicked. This intellectual device
enables us to suppress our feeling of
inferiority, when we read of the heroism of
our ancestors, and then ruefully contemplate
our position today. ‘It is not that we are
afraid to fight,’ we say, ‘but we should
consider it immoral.’ This even enables us to
assume an attitude of moral superiority.
The weakness of pacifism is that there are
still many peoples in the world who are
aggressive. Nations who proclaim themselves
unwilling to fight are liable to be conquered
by peoples in the stage of militarism—
perhaps even to see themselves incorporated
into some new empire, with the status of
mere provinces or colonies.
When to be prepared to use force and when
to give way is a perpetual human problem,
which can only be solved, as best we can, in
each successive situation as it arises. In fact,
however, history seems to indicate that great
nations do not normally disarm from
motives of conscience, but owing to the
weakening of a sense of duty in the citizens,
and the increase in selfishness and the desire
for wealth and ease.
XVIII The Age of Intellect
We have now, perhaps arbitrarily, divided
the life-story of our great nation into four
ages. The Age of the Pioneers (or the
Outburst), the Age of Conquests, the Age of
Commerce, and the Age of Affluence. The
great wealth of the nation is no longer
needed to supply the mere necessities, or
even the luxuries of life. Ample funds are
available also for the pursuit of knowledge.
The merchant princes of the Age of
Commerce seek fame and praise, not only by
endowing works of art or patronising music
and literature. They also found and endow
colleges and universities. It is remarkable
with what regularity this phase follows on
that of wealth, in empire after empire,
divided by many centuries.
In the eleventh century, the former Arab
Empire, then in complete political decline,
was ruled by the Seljuk sultan, Malik Shah.
The Arabs, no longer soldiers, were still the
intellectual leaders of the world. During the
reign of Malik Shah, the building of
universities and colleges became a passion.
Whereas a small number of universities in
the great cities had sufficed the years of Arab
glory, now a university sprang up in every
town.
In our own lifetime, we have witnessed the
same phenomenon in the U.S.A. and Britain.
When these nations were at the height of
their glory, Harvard, Yale, Oxford and
Cambridge seemed to meet their needs. Now
almost every city has its university.
The Fate of Empires
11
The ambition of the young, once engaged
in the pursuit of adventure and military
glory, and then in the desire for the
accumulation of wealth, now turns to the
acquisition of academic honours.
It is useful here to take note that almost all
the pursuits followed with such passion
throughout the ages were in themselves
good. The manly cult of hardihood, frankness
and truthfulness, which characterised
the Age of Conquests, produced many really
splendid heroes.
The opening up of natural resources, and
the peaceful accumulation of wealth, which
marked the age of commercialism, appeared
to introduce new triumphs in civilisation, in
culture and in the arts. In the same way, the
vast expansion of the field of knowledge
achieved by the Age of Intellect seemed to
mark a new high-water mark of human
progress. We cannot say that any of these
changes were ‘good’ or ‘bad’.
The striking features in the pageant of
empire are:
(a) the extraordinary exactitude with which
these stages have followed one another, in
empire after empire, over centuries or even
millennia; and
(b) the fact that the successive changes
seem to represent mere changes in popular
fashion—new fads and fancies which sweep
away public opinion without logical reason.
At first, popular enthusiasm is devoted to
military glory, then to the accumulation of
wealth and later to the acquisition of
academic fame.
Why could not all these legitimate, and
indeed beneficent, activities be carried on
simultaneously, each of them in due moderation?
Yet this never seemed to happen.
XIX The effects of intellectualism
There are so many things in human life
which are not dreamt of in our popular
philosophy. The spread of knowledge seems
to be the most beneficial of human activities,
and yet every period of decline is characterrised
by this expansion of intellectual
activity. ‘All the Athenians and strangers
which were there spent their time in nothing
else, but either to tell or to hear some new
thing’ is the description given in the Acts of
the Apostles of the decline of Greek
intellectualism.
The Age of Intellect is accompanied by
surprising advances in natural science. In the
ninth century, for example, in the age of
Mamun, the Arabs measured the circumference
of the earth with remarkable
accuracy. Seven centuries were to pass
before Western Europe discovered that the
world was not flat. Less than fifty years after
the amazing scientific discoveries under
Mamun, the Arab Empire collapsed. Wonderful
and beneficent as was the progress of
science, it did not save the empire from
chaos.
The full flowering of Arab and Persian
intellectualism did not occur until after their
imperial and political collapse. Thereafter
the intellectuals attained fresh triumphs in
the academic field, but politically they
became the abject servants of the often
illiterate rulers. When the Mongols conquered
Persia in the thirteenth century, they
were themselves entirely uneducated and
were obliged to depend wholly on native
Persian officials to administer the country
and to collect the revenue. They retained as
wazeer, or Prime Minister, one Rashid al-
Din, a historian of international repute. Yet
The Fate of Empires
12
the Prime Minister, when speaking to the
Mongol II Khan, was obliged to remain
throughout the interview on his knees. At
state banquets, the Prime Minister stood
behind the Khan’s seat to wait upon him. If
the Khan were in a good mood, he
occasionally passed his wazeer a piece of
food over his shoulder.
As in the case of the Athenians,
intellectualism leads to discussion, debate
and argument, such as is typical of the
Western nations today. Debates in elected
assemblies or local committees, in articles in
the Press or in interviews on television—
endless and incessant talking.
Men are interminably different, and
intellectual arguments rarely lead to
agreement. Thus public affairs drift from bad
to worse, amid an unceasing cacophony of
argument. But this constant dedication to
discussion seems to destroy the power of
action. Amid a Babel of talk, the ship drifts
on to the rocks.
XX The inadequacy of intellect
Perhaps the most dangerous by-product of
the Age of Intellect is the unconscious
growth of the idea that the human brain can
solve the problems of the world. Even on the
low level of practical affairs this is patently
untrue. Any small human activity, the local
bowls club or the ladies’ luncheon club,
requires for its survival a measure of selfsacrifice
and service on the part of the
members. In a wider national sphere, the
survival of the nation depends basically on
the loyalty and self-sacrifice of the citizens.
The impression that the situation can be
saved by mental cleverness, without unselfishness
or human self-dedication, can only
lead to collapse.
Thus we see that the cultivation of the
human intellect seems to be a magnificent
ideal, but only on condition that it does not
weaken unselfishness and human dedication
to service. Yet this, judging by historical
precedent, seems to be exactly what it does
do. Perhaps it is not the intellectualism
which destroys the spirit of self-sacrifice—the
least we can say is that the two,
intellectualism and the loss of a sense of
duty, appear simultaneously in the life-story
of the nation.
Indeed it often appears in individuals, that
the head and the heart are natural rivals. The
brilliant but cynical intellectual appears at
the opposite end of the spectrum from the
emotional self-sacrifice of the hero or the
martyr. Yet there are times when the perhaps
unsophisticated self-dedication of the hero is
more essential than the sarcasms of the
clever.
XXI Civil dissensions
Another remarkable and unexpected
symptom of national decline is the intensification
of internal political hatreds. One
would have expected that, when the survival
of the nation became precarious, political
factions would drop their rivalry and stand
shoulder-to-shoulder to save their country.
In the fourteenth century, the weakening
empire of Byzantium was threatened, and
indeed dominated, by the Ottoman Turks.
The situation was so serious that one would
have expected every subject of Byzantium to
abandon his personal interests and to stand
with his compatriots in a last desperate
attempt to save the country. The reverse
occurred. The Byzantines spent the last fifty
years of their history in fighting one another
in repeated civil wars, until the Ottomans
The Fate of Empires
13
moved in and administered the coup de
grâce.
Britain has been governed by an elected
parliament for many centuries. In former
years, however, the rival parties observed
many unwritten laws. Neither party wished
to eliminate the other. All the members
referred to one another as honourable
gentlemen. But such courtesies have now
lapsed. Booing, shouting and loud noises
have undermined the dignity of the House,
and angry exchanges are more frequent. We
are fortunate if these rivalries are fought out
in Parliament, but sometimes such hatreds
are carried into the streets, or into industry
in the form of strikes, demonstrations,
boycotts and similar activities. True to the
normal course followed by nations in
decline, internal differences are not
reconciled in an attempt to save the nation.
On the contrary, internal rivalries become
more acute, as the nation becomes weaker.
XXII The influx of foreigners
One of the oft-repeated phenomena of
great empires is the influx of foreigners to
the capital city. Roman historians often
complain of the number of Asians and
Africans in Rome. Baghdad, in its prime in
the ninth century, was international in its
population—Persians, Turks, Arabs, Armenians,
Egyptians, Africans and Greeks
mingled in its streets.
In London today, Cypriots, Greeks,
Italians, Russians, Africans, Germans and
Indians jostle one another on the buses and
in the underground, so that it sometimes
seems difficult to find any British. The same
applies to New York, perhaps even more so.
This problem does not consist in any
inferiority of one race as compared with
another, but simply in the differences
between them.
In the age of the first outburst and the
subsequent Age of Conquests, the race is
normally ethnically more or less
homogeneous. This state of affairs facilitates
a feeling of solidarity and comradeship. But
in the Ages of Commerce and Affluence,
every type of foreigner floods into the great
city, the streets of which are reputed to be
paved with gold. As, in most cases, this great
city is also the capital of the empire, the
cosmopolitan crowd at the seat of empire
exercises a political influence greatly in
excess of its relative numbers.
Second- or third-generation foreign
immigrants may appear outwardly to be
entirely assimilated, but they often constitute
a weakness in two directions. First, their
basic human nature often differs from that of
the original imperial stock. If the earlier
imperial race was stubborn and slowmoving,
the immigrants might come from
more emotional races, thereby introducing
cracks and schisms into the national policies,
even if all were equally loyal.
Second, while the nation is still affluent, all
the diverse races may appear equally loyal.
But in an acute emergency, the immigrants
will often be less willing to sacrifice their
lives and their property than will be the
original descendants of the founder race.
Third, the immigrants are liable to form
communities of their own, protecting
primarily their own interests, and only in the
second degree that of the nation as a whole.
Fourth, many of the foreign immigrants
will probably belong to races originally
conquered by and absorbed into the empire.
While the empire is enjoying its High Noon
of prosperity, all these people are proud and
The Fate of Empires
14
glad to be imperial citizens. But when decline
sets in, it is extraordinary how the memory
of ancient wars, perhaps centuries before, is
suddenly revived, and local or provincial
movements appear demanding secession or
independence. Some day this phenomenon
will doubtless appear in the now apparently
monolithic and authoritarian Soviet empire.
It is amazing for how long such provincial
sentiments can survive.
Historical examples of this phenomenon
are scarcely needed. The idle and captious
Roman mob, with its endless appetite for
free distributions of food—bread and
games—is notorious, and utterly different
from that stern Roman spirit which we
associate with the wars of the early republic.
In Baghdad, in the golden days of Harun
al-Rashid, Arabs were a minority in the
imperial capital. Istanbul, in the great days
of Ottoman rule, was peopled by inhabitants
remarkably few of whom were descendants
of Turkish conquerors. In New York,
descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers are few
and far between.
This interesting phenomenon is largely
limited to great cities. The original conquering
race is often to be found in relative
purity in rural districts and on far frontiers.
It is the wealth of the great cities which
draws the immigrants. As, with the growth of
industry, cities nowadays achieve an ever
greater preponderance over the countryside,
so will the influence of foreigners increasingly
dominate old empires.
Once more it may be emphasised that I do
not wish to convey the impression that
immigrants are inferior to older stocks. They
are just different, and they thus tend to
introduce cracks and divisions.
XXIII Frivolity
As the nation declines in power and
wealth, a universal pessimism gradually
pervades the people, and itself hastens the
decline. There is nothing succeeds like
success, and, in the Ages of Conquest and
Commerce, the nation was carried
triumphantly onwards on the wave of its own
self-confidence. Republican Rome was
repeatedly on the verge of extinction—in 390
B.C. when the Gauls sacked the city and in
216 B.C. after the Battle of Cannae. But no
disasters could shake the resolution of the
early Romans. Yet, in the later stages of
Roman decline, the whole empire was deeply
pessimistic, thereby sapping its own
resolution.
Frivolity is the frequent companion of
pessimism. Let us eat, drink and be merry,
for tomorrow we die. The resemblance
between various declining nations in this
respect is truly surprising. The Roman mob,
we have seen, demanded free meals and
public games. Gladiatorial shows, chariot
races and athletic events were their passion.
In the Byzantine Empire the rivalries of the
Greens and the Blues in the hippodrome
attained the importance of a major crisis.
Judging by the time and space allotted to
them in the Press and television, football and
baseball are the activities which today chiefly
interest the public in Britain and the United
States respectively.
The heroes of declining nations are always
the same—the athlete, the singer or the
actor. The word ‘celebrity’ today is used to
designate a comedian or a football player,
not a statesman, a general, or a literary
genius.
The Fate of Empires
15
XXIV The Arab decline
In the first half of the ninth century,
Baghdad enjoyed its High Noon as the
greatest and the richest city in the world. In
861, however, the reigning Khalif (caliph),
Mutawakkil, was murdered by his Turkish
mercenaries, who set up a military dictatorship,
which lasted for some thirty years.
During this period the empire fell apart, the
various dominions and provinces each
assuming virtual independence and seeking
its own interests. Baghdad, lately the capital
of a vast empire, found its authority limited
to Iraq alone.
The works of the contemporary historians
of Baghdad in the early tenth century are still
available. They deeply deplored the
degeneracy of the times in which they lived,
emphasising particularly the indifference to
religion, the increasing materialism and the
laxity of sexual morals. They lamented also
the corruption of the officials of the
government and the fact that politicians
always seemed to amass large fortunes while
they were in office.
The historians commented bitterly on the
extraordinary influence acquired by popular
singers over young people, resulting in a
decline in sexual morality. The ‘pop’ singers
of Baghdad accompanied their erotic songs
on the lute, an instrument resembling the
modern guitar. In the second half of the
tenth century, as a result, much obscene
sexual language came increasingly into use,
such as would not have been tolerated in an
earlier age. Several khalifs issued orders
banning ‘pop’ singers from the capital, but
within a few years they always returned.
An increase in the influence of women in
public life has often been associated with national
decline. The later Romans complained
that, although Rome ruled the world, women
ruled Rome. In the tenth century, a similar
tendency was observable in the Arab Empire,
the women demanding admission to the
professions hitherto monopolised by men.
‘What,’ wrote the contemporary historian,
Ibn Bessam, ‘have the professions of clerk,
tax-collector or preacher to do with women?
These occupations have always been limited
to men alone.’ Many women practised law,
while others obtained posts as university
professors. There was an agitation for the
appointment of female judges, which,
however, does not appear to have succeeded.
Soon after this period, government and
public order collapsed, and foreign invaders
overran the country. The resulting increase
in confusion and violence made it unsafe for
women to move unescorted in the streets,
with the result that this feminist movement
collapsed.
The disorders following the military takeover
in 861, and the loss of the empire, had
played havoc with the economy. At such a
moment, it might have been expected that
everyone would redouble their efforts to save
the country from bankruptcy, but nothing of
the kind occurred. Instead, at this moment of
declining trade and financial stringency, the
people of Baghdad introduced a five-day
week.
When I first read these contemporary
descriptions of tenth-century Baghdad, I
could scarcely believe my eyes. I told myself
that this must be a joke! The descriptions
might have been taken out of The Times
today. The resemblance of all the details was
especially breathtaking—the break-up of the
empire, the abandonment of sexual morality,
the ‘pop’ singers with their guitars, the entry
of women into the professions, the five-day
The Fate of Empires
16
week. I would not venture to attempt an
explanation! There are so many mysteries
about human life which are far beyond our
comprehension.
XXV Political ideology
Today we attach immense importance to
the ideology of our internal politics. The
Press and public media in the U.S.A. and
Britain pour incessant scorn on any country
the political institutions of which differ in
any manner from our own idea of
democracy. It is, therefore, interesting to
note that the life-expectation of a great
nation does not appear to be in any way
affected by the nature of its institutions.
Past empires show almost every possible
variation of political system, but all go
through the same procedure from the Age of
Pioneers through Conquest, Commerce,
Affluence to decline and collapse.
XXVI The Mameluke Empire
The empire of the Mamelukes of Egypt
provides a case in point, for it was one of the
most exotic ever to be recorded in history. It
is also exceptional in that it began on one
fixed day and ended on another, leaving no
doubt of its precise duration, which was 267
years.
In the first part of the thirteenth century,
Egypt and Syria were ruled by the Ayoubid
sultans, the descendants of the family of
Saladin. Their army consisted of Mamelukes,
slaves imported as boys from the Steppes
and trained as professional soldiers. On 1st
May 1250, the Mamelukes mutinied,
murdered Turan Shah, the Ayoubid sultan,
and became the rulers of his empire.
The first fifty years of the Mameluke
Empire were marked by desperate fighting
with the hitherto invincible Mongols, the
descendants of Genghis Khan, who invaded
Syria. By defeating the Mongols and driving
them out of Syria, the Mamelukes saved the
Mediterranean from the terrible fate which
had overtaken Persia. In 1291, the Mamelukes
captured Acre, and put an end to the
Crusades.
From 1309 to 1341, the Mameluke Empire
was everywhere victorious and possessed the
finest army in the world. For the ensuing
hundred years the wealth of the Mameluke
Empire was fabulous, slowly leading to
luxury, the relaxation of discipline and to
decline, with ever more bitter internal
political rivalries. Finally the empire collapsed
in 1517, as the result of military defeat
by the Ottomans.
The Mameluke government appears to us
utterly illogical and fantastic. The ruling
class was entirely recruited from young boys,
born in what is now Southern Russia. Every
one of them was enlisted as a private soldier.
Even the sultans had begun life as private
soldiers and had risen from the ranks. Yet
this extraordinary political system resulted
in an empire which passed through all the
normal stages of conquest, commercialism,
affluence and decline and which lasted
approximately the usual period of time.
XXVII The master race
The people of the great nations of the past
seem normally to have imagined that their
pre-eminence would last for ever. Rome
appeared to its citizens to be destined to be
for all time the mistress of the world. The
Abbasid Khalifs of Baghdad declared that
God had appointed them to rule mankind
until the day of judgement. Seventy years
ago, many people in Britain believed that the
The Fate of Empires
17
empire would endure for ever. Although
Hitler failed to achieve his objective, he
declared that Germany would rule the world
for a thousand years. That sentiments like
these could be publicly expressed without
evoking derision shows that, in all ages, the
regular rise and fall of great nations has
passed unperceived. The simplest statistics
prove the steady rotation of one nation after
another at regular intervals.
The belief that their nation would rule the
world forever, naturally encouraged the
citizens of the leading nation of any period to
attribute their pre-eminence to hereditary
virtues. They carried in their blood, they
believed, qualities which constituted them a
race of supermen, an illusion which inclined
them to the employment of cheap foreign
labour (or slaves) to perform menial tasks
and to engage foreign mercenaries to fight
their battles or to sail their ships.
These poorer peoples were only too happy
to migrate to the wealthy cities of the empire,
and thereby, as we have seen, to adulterate
the close-knit, homogeneous character of the
conquering race. The latter unconsciously
assumed that they would always be the
leaders of mankind, relaxed their energies,
and spent an increasing part of their time in
leisure, amusement or sport.
In recent years, the idea has spread widely
in the West that ‘progress’ will be automatic
without effort, that everyone will continue to
grow richer and richer and that every year
will show a ‘rise in the standard of living’. We
have not drawn from history the obvious
conclusion that material success is the result
of courage, endurance and hard work—a
conclusion nevertheless obvious from the
history of the meteoric rise of our own
ancestors. This self-assurance of its own
superiority seems to go hand-in-hand with
the luxury resulting from wealth, in
undermining the character of the dominant
race.
XXVIII The welfare state
When the welfare state was first introduced
in Britain, it was hailed as a new high-water
mark in the history of human development.
History, however, seems to suggest that the
age of decline of a great nation is often a
period which shows a tendency to
philanthropy and to sympathy for other
races. This phase may not be contradictory
to the feeling described in the previous
paragraph, that the dominant race has the
right to rule the world. For the citizens of the
great nation enjoy the role of Lady Bountiful.
As long as it retains its status of leadership,
the imperial people are glad to be generous,
even if slightly condescending. The rights of
citizenship are generously bestowed on every
race, even those formerly subject, and the
equality of mankind is proclaimed. The
Roman Empire passed through this phase,
when equal citizenship was thrown open to
all peoples, such provincials even becoming
senators and emperors.
The Arab Empire of Baghdad was equally,
perhaps even more, generous. During the
Age of Conquests, pure-bred Arabs had
constituted a ruling class, but in the ninth
century the empire was completely
cosmopolitan.
State assistance to the young and the poor
was equally generous. University students
received government grants to cover their
expenses while they were receiving higher
education. The State likewise offered free
medical treatment to the poor. The first free
public hospital was opened in Baghdad in
The Fate of Empires
18
the reign of Harun al-Rashid (786-809), and
under his son, Mamun, free public hospitals
sprang up all over the Arab world from Spain
to what is now Pakistan.
The impression that it will always be
automatically rich causes the declining
empire to spend lavishly on its own
benevolence, until such time as the economy
collapses, the universities are closed and the
hospitals fall into ruin.
It may perhaps be incorrect to picture the
welfare state as the high-water mark of
human attainment. It may merely prove to
be one more regular milestone in the lifestory
of an ageing and decrepit empire.
XXIX Religion
Historians of periods of decadence often
refer to a decline in religion, but, if we
extend our investigation over a period
covering the Assyrians (859-612 B.C.) to our
own times, we have to interpret religion in a
very broad sense. Some such definition as
‘the human feeling that there is something,
some invisible Power, apart from material
objects, which controls human life and the
natural world’.
We are probably too narrow and
contemptuous in our interpretation of idol
worship. The people of ancient civilisations
were as sensible as we are, and would
scarcely have been so foolish as to worship
sticks and stones fashioned by their own
hands. The idol was for them merely a
symbol, and represented an unknown,
spiritual reality, which controlled the lives of
men and demanded human obedience to its
moral precepts.
We all know only too well that minor
differences in the human visualisation of this
Spirit frequently became the ostensible
reason for human wars, in which both sides
claimed to be fighting for the true God, but
the absurd narrowness of human
conceptions should not blind us to the fact
that, very often, both sides believed their
campaigns to have a moral background.
Genghis Khan, one of the most brutal of all
conquerors, claimed that God had delegated
him the duty to exterminate the decadent
races of the civilised world. Thus the Age of
Conquests often had some kind of religious
atmosphere, which implied heroic selfsacrifice
for the cause.
But this spirit of dedication was slowly
eroded in the Age of Commerce by the action
of money. People make money for
themselves, not for their country. Thus
periods of affluence gradually dissolved the
spirit of service, which had caused the rise of
the imperial races.
In due course, selfishness permeated the
community, the coherence of which was
weakened until disintegration was
threatened. Then, as we have seen, came the
period of pessimism with the accompanying
spirit of frivolity and sensual indulgence, byproducts
of despair. It was inevitable at such
times that men should look back yearningly
to the days of ‘religion’, when the spirit of
self-sacrifice was still strong enough to make
men ready to give and to serve, rather than
to snatch.
But while despair might permeate the
greater part of the nation, others achieved a
new realisation of the fact that only readiness
for self-sacrifice could enable a community
to survive. Some of the greatest saints in
history lived in times of national decadence,
raising the banner of duty and service
against the flood of depravity and despair.
The Fate of Empires
19
In this manner, at the height of vice and
frivolity the seeds of religious revival are
quietly sown. After, perhaps, several
generations (or even centuries) of suffering,
the impoverished nation has been purged of
its selfishness and its love of money, religion
regains its sway and a new era sets in. ‘It is
good for me that I have been afflicted,’ said
the psalmist, ‘that I might learn Thy
Statutes.’
XXX New combinations
We have traced the rise of an obscure race
to fame, through the stages of conquest,
commercialism, affluence, and intellectualism,
to disintegration, decadence and
despair. We suggested that the dominant
race at any given time imparts its leading
characteristics to the world around, being in
due course succeeded by another empire. By
this means, we speculated, many successive
races succeeded one another as superpowers,
and in turn bequeathed their
peculiar qualities to mankind at large.
But the objection may here be raised that
some day the time will come when all the
races of the world will in turn have enjoyed
their period of domination and have
collapsed again in decadence. When the
whole human race has reached the stage of
decadence, where will new energetic conquering
races be found?
The answer is at first partially obscured by
our modern habit of dividing the human race
into nations, which we seem to regard as
water-tight compartments, an error responsible
for innumerable misunderstandings.
In earlier times, warlike nomadic nations
invaded the territories of decadent peoples
and settled there. In due course, they
intermarried with the local population and a
new race resulted, though it sometimes
retained an old name. The barbarian
invasions of the Roman Empire probably
provide the example best known today in the
West. Others were the Arab conquests of
Spain, North Africa and Persia, the Turkish
conquests of the Ottoman Empire, or even
the Norman Conquest of England.
In all such cases, the conquered countries
were originally fully inhabited and the invaders
were armies, which ultimately settled
down and married, and produced new races.
In our times, there are few nomadic
conquerors left in the world, who could
invade more settled countries bringing their
tents and flocks with them. But ease of travel
has resulted in an equal, or probably an even
greater, intermixture of populations. The
extreme bitterness of modern internal political
struggles produces a constant flow of
migrants from their native countries to
others, where the social institutions suit
them better.
The vicissitudes of trade and business
similarly result in many persons moving to
other countries, at first intending to return,
but ultimately settling down in their new
countries.
The population of Britain has been
constantly changing, particularly in the last
sixty years, owing to the influx of immigrants
from Europe, Asia and Africa, and the exit of
British citizens to the Dominions and the
United States. The latter is, of course, the
most obvious example of the constant rise of
new nations, and of the transformation of
the ethnic content of old nations through this
modern nomadism.
The Fate of Empires
20
XXXI Decadence of a system
It is of interest to note that decadence is
the disintegration of a system, not of its
individual members. The habits of the
members of the community have been
corrupted by the enjoyment of too much
money and too much power for too long a
period. The result has been, in the
framework of their national life, to make
them selfish and idle. A community of selfish
and idle people declines, internal quarrels
develop in the division of its dwindling
wealth, and pessimism follows, which some
of them endeavour to drown in sensuality or
frivolity. In their own surroundings, they are
unable to redirect their thoughts and their
energies into new channels.
But when individual members of such a
society emigrate into entirely new surroundings,
they do not remain conspicuously
decadent, pessimistic or immoral among the
inhabitants of their new homeland. Once
enabled to break away from their old
channels of thought, and after a short period
of readjustment, they become normal
citizens of their adopted countries. Some of
them, in the second and third generations,
may attain pre-eminence and leadership in
their new communities.
This seems to prove that the decline of any
nation does not undermine the energies or
the basic character of its members. Nor does
the decadence of a number of such nations
permanently impoverish the human race.
Decadence is both mental and moral
deterioration, produced by the slow decline
of the community from which its members
cannot escape, as long as they remain in
their old surroundings. But, transported
elsewhere, they soon discard their decadent
ways of thought, and prove themselves equal
to the other citizens of their adopted country.
XXXII Decadence is not physical
Neither is decadence physical. The citizens
of nations in decline are sometimes
described as too physically emasculated to be
able to bear hardship or make great efforts.
This does not seem to be a true picture.
Citizens of great nations in decadence are
normally physically larger and stronger than
those of their barbarian invaders.
Moreover, as was proved in Britain in the
first World War, young men brought up in
luxury and wealth found little difficulty in
accustoming themselves to life in the frontline
trenches. The history of exploration
proves the same point. Men accustomed to
comfortable living in homes in Europe or
America were able to show as much
endurance as the natives in riding camels
across the desert or in hacking their way
through tropical forests.
Decadence is a moral and spiritual disease,
resulting from too long a period of wealth
and power, producing cynicism, decline of
religion, pessimism and frivolity. The
citizens of such a nation will no longer make
an effort to save themselves, because they
are not convinced that anything in life is
worth saving.
XXXII Human diversity
Generalisations are always dangerous.
Human beings are all different. The variety
in human life is endless. If this be the case
with individuals, it is much more so with
nations and cultures. No two societies, no
two peoples, no two cultures are exactly the
same. In these circumstances, it will be easy
The Fate of Empires
21
for critics to find many objections to what
has been said, and to point out exceptions to
the generalisations.
There is some value in comparing the lives
of nations to those of individuals. No two
persons in the world are identical. Moreover
their lives are often affected by accidents or
by illness, making the divergences even more
obvious. Yet, in fact, we can generalise about
human life from many different aspects. The
characteristics of childhood, adolescence,
youth, middle and old age are well known.
Some adolescents, it is true, are prematurely
wise and serious. Some persons in middle
age still seem to he young. But such
exceptions do not invalidate the general
character of human life from the cradle to
the grave.
I venture to submit that the lives of nations
follow a similar pattern. Superficially, all
seem to be completely different. Some years
ago, a suggestion was submitted to a certain
television corporation that a series of talks
on Arab history would form an interesting
sequence. The proposal was immediately
vetoed by the director of programmes with
the remark, “What earthly interest could the
history of medieval Arabs have for the
general public today?”
Yet, in fact, the history of the Arab imperial
age—from conquest through commercialism,
to affluence, intellectualism, science and
decadence—is an exact precursor of British
imperial history and lasted almost exactly
the same time.
If British historians, a century ago, had
devoted serious study to the Arab Empire,
they could have foreseen almost everything
that has happened in Britain down to 1976.
XXXIV A variety of falls
It has been shown that, normally, the rise
and fall of great nations are due to internal
reasons alone. Ten generations of human
beings suffice to transform the hardy and
enterprising pioneer into the captious citizen
of the welfare state. But whereas the life
histories of great nations show an unexpected
uniformity, the nature of their falls
depends largely on outside circumstances
and thus shows a high degree of diversity.
The Roman Republic, as we have seen, was
followed by the empire, which became a
super-state, in which all the natives of the
Mediterranean basin, regardless of race,
possessed equal rights. The name of Rome,
originally a city-state, passed from it to an
equalitarian international empire.
This empire broke in half, the western half
being overrun by northern barbarians, the
eastern half forming the East Roman or
Byzantine Empire.
The vast Arab Empire broke up in the
ninth century into many fragments, of which
one former colony, Moslem Spain, ran its
own 250-year course as an independent
empire. The homelands of Syria and Iraq,
however, were conquered by successive
waves of Turks to whom they remained
subject for 1,000 years.
The Mameluke Empire of Egypt and Syria,
on the other hand, was conquered in one
campaign by the Ottomans, the native
population merely suffering a change of
masters.
The Spanish Empire (1500-1750) endured
for the conventional 250 years, terminated
only by the loss of its colonies. The homeland
of Spain fell, indeed, from its high estate of a
The Fate of Empires
22
super-power, but remained as an independent
nation until today.
Romanov Russia (1682-1916) ran the
normal course, but was succeeded by the
Soviet Union.
It is unnecessary to labour the point, which
we may attempt to summarise briefly. Any
regime which attains great wealth and power
seems with remarkable regularity to decay
and fall apart in some ten generations. The
ultimate fate of its component parts,
however, does not depend on its internal
nature, but on the other organisations which
appear at the time of its collapse and succeed
in devouring its heritage. Thus the lives of
great powers are surprisingly uniform, but
the results of their falls are completely
diverse.
XXXV Inadequacy of our historical
studies
In fact, the modern nations of the West
have derived only limited value from their
historical studies, because they have never
made them big enough. For history to have
meaning, as we have already stated, it must
be the history of the human race.
Far from achieving such an ideal, our
historical studies are largely limited to the
history of our own country during the
lifetime of the present nation. Thus the timefactor
is too short to allow the longer
rhythms of the rise and fall of nations even to
be noticed. As the television director
indicated, it never even crosses our minds
that longer periods could be of any interest.
When we read the history of our own
nation, we find the actions of our ancestors
described as glorious, while those of other
peoples are depicted as mean, tyrannical or
cowardly. Thus our history is (intentionally)
not based on facts. We are emotionally
unwilling to accept that our forbears might
have been mean or cowardly.
Alternatively, there are ‘political’ schools of
history, slanted to discredit the actions of
our past leaders, in order to support modern
political movements. In all these cases,
history is not an attempt to ascertain the
truth, but a system of propaganda, devoted
to the furtherance of modern projects, or the
gratification of national vanity.
Men can scarcely be blamed for not
learning from the history they are taught.
There is nothing to learn from it, because it
is not true.
XXXVI Small nations
The word ‘empires’ has been used in this
essay to signify nations which achieve the
status of great powers, or super-powers, in
the jargon of today—nations which have
dominated the international scene for two or
three centuries. At any given time, however,
there are also smaller states which are more
or less self-contained. Do these live the same
‘lives’ as the great nations, and pass through
the same phases?
It seems impossible to generalise on this
issue. In general, decadence is the outcome
of too long a period of wealth and power. If
the small country has not shared in the
wealth and power, it will not share in the
decadence.
XXXVII The emerging pattern
In spite of the endless variety and the
infinite complications of human life, a
general pattern does seem to emerge from
these considerations. It reveals many
successive empires covering some 3,000
years, as having followed similar stages of
The Fate of Empires
23
development and decline, and as having, to a
surprising degree, ‘lived’ lives of very similar
length.
The life-expectation of a great nation, it
appears, commences with a violent, and
usually unforeseen, outburst of energy, and
ends in a lowering of moral standards,
cynicism, pessimism and frivolity.
If the present writer were a millionaire, he
would try to establish in some university or
other a department dedicated solely to the
study of the rhythm of the rise and fall of
powerful nations throughout the world.
History goes back only some 3,000 years,
because before that period writing was not
sufficiently widespread to allow of the
survival of detailed records. But within that
period, the number of empires available for
study is very great.
At the commencement of this essay, the
names of eleven such empires were listed,
but these included only the Middle East and
the modern nations of the West. India, China
and Southern America were not included,
because the writer knows nothing about
them. A school founded to study the rise and
fall of empires would probably find at least
twenty-four great powers available for
dissection and analysis.
The task would not be an easy one, if
indeed the net were cast so wide as to cover
virtually all the world’s great nations in 3,000
years. The knowledge of language alone, to
enable detailed investigations to be pursued,
would present a formidable obstacle.
XXXVIII Would it help?
It is pleasing to imagine that, from such
studies, a regular life-pattern of nations
would emerge, including an analysis of the
various changes which ultimately lead to
decline, decadence and collapse. It is
tempting to assume that measures could be
adopted to forestall the disastrous effects of
excessive wealth and power, and thence of
subsequent decadence. Perhaps some means
could be devised to prevent the activist Age
of Conquests and Commerce deteriorating
into the Age of Intellect, producing endless
talking but no action.
It is tempting to think so. Perhaps if the
pattern of the rise and fall of nations were
regularly taught in schools, the general
public would come to realise the truth, and
would support policies to maintain the spirit
of duty and self-sacrifice, and to forestall the
accumulation of excessive wealth by one
nation, leading to the demoralisation of that
nation.
Could not the sense of duty and the
initiative needed to give rise to action be
retained parallel with intellectual development
and the discoveries of natural science?
The answer is doubtful, though we could
but try. The weaknesses of human nature,
however, are so obvious, that we cannot be
too confident of success. Men bursting with
courage, energy and self-confidence cannot
easily be restrained from subduing their
neighbours, and men who see the prospect of
wealth open to them will not readily be
prevented from pursuing it.
Perhaps it is not in the real interest of
humanity that they should be so prevented,
for it is in periods of wealth that art,
architecture, music, science and literature
make the greatest progress.
Moreover, as we have seen where great
empires are concerned, their establishment
may give rise to wars and tragedies, but their
periods of power often bring peace, security
and prosperity to vast areas of territory. Our
The Fate of Empires
24
knowledge and our experience (perhaps our
basic human intellects) are inadequate to
pronounce whether or not the rise and fall of
great nations is the best system for the best
of all possible worlds.
These doubts, however, need not prevent
us from attempting to acquire more
knowledge on the rise and fall of great
powers, or from endeavouring, in the light of
such knowledge, to improve the moral
quality of human life.
Perhaps, in fact, we may reach the
conclusion that the successive rise and fall of
great nations is inevitable and, indeed, a
system divinely ordained. But even this
would be an immense gain. For we should
know where we stand in relation to our
human brothers and sisters. In our present
state of mental chaos on the subject, we
divide ourselves into nations, parties or
communities and fight, hate and vilify one
another over developments which may
perhaps be divinely ordained and which
seem to us, if we take a broader view,
completely uncontrollable and inevitable. If
we could accept these great movements as
beyond our control, there would be no
excuse for our hating one another because of
them.
However varied, confusing and contradictory
the religious history of the world may
appear, the noblest and most spiritual of the
devotees of all religions seem to reach the
conclusion that love is the key to human life.
Any expansion of our knowledge which may
lead to a reduction in our unjustified hates is
therefore surely well worth while.
XXXIX Summary
As numerous points of interest have arisen
in the course of this essay, I close with a brief
summary, to refresh the reader’s mind.
(a) We do not learn from history because
our studies are brief and prejudiced.
(b) In a surprising manner, 250 years
emerges as the average length of national
greatness.
(c) This average has not varied for 3,000
years. Does it represent ten generations?
(d) The stages of the rise and fall of great
nations seem to be:
The Age of Pioneers (outburst)
The Age of Conquests
The Age of Commerce
The Age of Affluence
The Age of Intellect
The Age of Decadence.
(e) Decadence is marked by:
Defensiveness
Pessimism
Materialism
Frivolity
An influx of foreigners
The Welfare State
A weakening of religion.
(f) Decadence is due to:
Too long a period of wealth and power
Selfishness
Love of money
The loss of a sense of duty.
(g) The life histories of great states are
amazingly similar, and are due to internal
factors.
(h) Their falls are diverse, because they are
largely the result of external causes.
(i) History should be taught as the history
of the human race, though of course with
emphasis on the history of the student’s own
country.

July 14, 2017 by Evan Sayet

My Leftist friends (as well as many ardent #NeverTrumpers) constantly ask me if I’m not bothered by Donald Trump’s lack of decorum. They ask if I don’t think his tweets are “beneath the dignity of the office.” Here’s my answer:

We Right-thinking people have tried dignity. There could not have been a man of more quiet dignity than George W. Bush as he suffered the outrageous lies and politically motivated hatreds that undermined his presidency. We tried statesmanship. Could there be another human being on this earth who so desperately prized “collegiality” as John McCain? We tried propriety – has there been a nicer human being ever than Mitt Romney? And the results were always the same.

This is because, while we were playing by the rules of dignity, collegiality and propriety, the Left has been, for the past 60 years, engaged in a knife fight where the only rules are those of Saul Alinsky and the Chicago mob.

I don’t find anything “dignified,” “collegial” or “proper” about Barack Obama’s lying about what went down on the streets of Ferguson in order to ramp up racial hatreds because racial hatreds serve the Democratic Party. I don’t see anything “dignified” in lying about the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi and imprisoning an innocent filmmaker to cover your tracks. I don’t see anything “statesman-like” in weaponizing the IRS to be used to destroy your political opponents and any dissent. Yes, Obama was “articulate” and “polished” but in no way was he in the least bit “dignified,” “collegial” or “proper.”

The Left has been engaged in a war against America since the rise of the Children of the ‘60s. To them, it has been an all-out war where nothing is held sacred and nothing is seen as beyond the pale. It has been a war they’ve fought with violence, the threat of violence, demagoguery and lies from day one – the violent take-over of the universities – till today.

The problem is that, through these years, the Left has been the only side fighting this war. While the Left has been taking a knife to anyone who stands in their way, the Right has continued to act with dignity, collegiality and propriety.

With Donald Trump, this all has come to an end. Donald Trump is America’s first wartime president in the Culture War.

During wartime, things like “dignity” and “collegiality” simply aren’t the most essential qualities one looks for in their warriors. Ulysses Grant was a drunk whose behavior in peacetime might well have seen him drummed out of the Army for conduct unbecoming. Had Abraham Lincoln applied the peacetime rules of propriety and booted Grant, the Democrats might well still be holding their slaves today. Lincoln rightly recognized that, “I cannot spare this man. He fights.”

General George Patton was a vulgar-talking, son-of-a-bitch. In peacetime, this might have seen him stripped of rank. But, had Franklin Roosevelt applied the normal rules of decorum, then Hitler and the Socialists would barely be five decades into their thousand-year Reich.

Trump is fighting. And what’s particularly delicious is that, like Patton standing over the battlefield as his tanks obliterated Rommel’s, he’s shouting, “You magnificent bastards, I read your book!” That is just the icing on the cake, but it’s wonderful to see that not only is Trump fighting, he’s defeating the Left using their own tactics.

That book is Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals – a book so essential to the Liberals’ war against America that it is and was the playbook for the entire Obama administration and the subject of Hillary Clinton’s senior thesis. It is a book of such pure evil, that, just as the rest of us would dedicate our book to those we most love or those to whom we are most indebted, Alinsky dedicated his book to Lucifer.

Trump’s tweets may seem rash and unconsidered but, in reality, he is doing exactly what Alinsky suggested his followers do.

First, instead of going after “the fake media” – and they are so fake that they have literally gotten every single significant story of the past 60 years not just wrong, but diametrically opposed to the truth, from the Tet Offensive to Benghazi, to what really happened on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri – Trump isolated CNN. He made it personal. Then, just as Alinsky suggests, he employs ridicule which Alinsky described as “the most powerful weapon of all.”

Everyone gets that it’s not just CNN – in fact, in a world where Al Sharpton and Rachel Maddow, Paul Krugman and Nicholas Kristof are people of influence and whose “reporting” is in no way significantly different than CNN’s – CNN is just a piker.

Most importantly, Trump’s tweets have put CNN in an untenable and unwinnable position. With Trump’s ability to go around them, they cannot simply stand pat. They need to respond. This leaves them with only two choices.

They can either “go high” (as Hillary would disingenuously declare of herself and the fake news would disingenuously report as the truth) and begin to honestly and accurately report the news or they can double-down on their usual tactics and hope to defeat Trump with twice their usual hysteria and demagoguery.

The problem for CNN (et al.) with the former is that, if they were to start honestly reporting the news, that would be the end of the Democratic Party they serve. It is nothing but the incessant use of fake news (read: propaganda) that keeps the Left alive.

Imagine, for example, if CNN had honestly and accurately reported then-candidate Barack Obama’s close ties to foreign terrorists (Rashid Khalidi), domestic terrorists (William Ayers), the mafia (Tony Rezko) or the true evils of his spiritual mentor, Jeremiah Wright’s, church.

Imagine if they had honestly and accurately conveyed the evils of the Obama administration’s weaponizing of the IRS to be used against their political opponents or his running of guns to the Mexican cartels or the truth about the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and the Obama administration’s cover-up.

This makes “going high” a non-starter for CNN. This leaves them no other option but to ratchet up the fake news, conjuring up the next “nothing burger” and devoting 24 hours a day to hysterical rants about how it’s “worse than Nixon.”

This, obviously, is what CNN has chosen to do. The problem is that, as they become more and more hysterical, they become more and more obvious. Each new effort at even faker news than before and faker “outrage” only makes that much more clear to any objective observer that Trump is and always has been right about the fake news media.

And, by causing their hysteria, Trump has forced them into numerous, highly embarrassing and discrediting mistakes. Thus, in their desperation, they have lowered their standards even further and run with articles so clearly fake that, even with the liberal (lower case “l”) libel laws protecting the media, they’ve had to wholly retract and erase their stories repeatedly.

Their flailing at Trump has even seen them cross the line into criminality, with CNN using their vast corporate fortune to hunt down a private citizen for having made fun of them in an Internet meme. This threat to “dox” – release of personal information to encourage co-ideologists to visit violence upon him and his family — a political satirist was chilling in that it clearly wasn’t meant just for him. If it were, there would have been no reason for CNN to have made their “deal” with him public.

Instead, CNN – playing by “Chicago Rules” – was sending a message to any and all: dissent will not be tolerated.

This heavy-handed and hysterical response to a joke on the Internet has backfired on CNN, giving rise to only more righteous ridicule.

So, to my friends on the Left – and the #NeverTrumpers as well — do I wish we lived in a time when our president could be “collegial” and “dignified” and “proper”? Of course I do. These aren’t those times. This is war. And it’s a war that the Left has been fighting without opposition for the past 50 years.

So, say anything you want about this president – I get it, he can be vulgar, he can be crude, he can be undignified at times. I don’t care. I can’t spare this man. He fights.

[If you can find a copy, after reading this, read Thomas W. Chittum’s “Civil War II”.]

Freedom and Tyranny: The Meaning of Independence Day
July 5, 2017 11:46 am / Leave a Comment / victorhanson
A reflection amidst the barbecues and fireworks and the paeans to patriotism.
By Bruce Thornton // Front Page Mag

Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

The Fourth of July is not just another day off from work. Nor is it just the celebration of our country’s birth, the bold act of the Colonists in challenging the world’s greatest power and creating a government based on freedom and self-rule. On this day 241 years ago the delegates to the Second Continental Congress adopted a document that laid the foundations of the American political order. Sadly, the meaning of the Declaration of Independence has been lost, and the order it created eroded by progressivism.

One of the greatest statements of political philosophy occurs in the preamble to the Declaration:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. ––That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . .

Government is a creation of the sovereign people who must consent to its forms and functions. It is thus accountable to the people, and exists primarily to protect their rights, especially freedom, that precede government. These rights are the “unalienable” foundations of our human nature, and come from a “Creator” and the “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.” They are not gifts of the powerful or any institutions that an elite of wealth or birth create to serve their interests. They cannot justly be taken away by any earthly power, but they can be limited and destroyed by tyranny.

Central to these rights is freedom, which implies self-rule as well as the scope to pursue “happiness,” the actions and behaviors, the way of living that achieves a good and virtuous life suitable for a human being possessing reason and free will. To secure the freedom of the individual requires political liberty expressed through a government of laws and institutions that reflect the collective consent of the people, and whose agents are chosen by the citizens or their representatives, and thus are accountable to the people.

A little more than a decade later the Constitution formalized the structures of governing that would protect this ideal. Recognizing that human nature is flawed and subject to “passions and interests,” and fearful of power’s “encroaching nature,” the framers separated, checked, and balanced power through federalism and mixed government. James Madison in Federalist 51 famously expressed the assumptions lying behind a form of government designed for the “preservation of liberty”:

Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

Given a fallen human nature, power must never be allowed to be concentrated into an elite of any sort, for neither birth, wealth, nor wisdom can guard against the destructive excesses of power. Defend the people’s ordered liberty, equality of opportunity, and equality under the law, and the freedom of all will be protected.

This is the American creed, the set of ideas assent to which makes one an American­­––not blood, or soil, or any mystic “identity” exclusive of others and claiming a natural superiority over them.

The bulk of the Declaration, however, is a catalogue of the despotic acts of George III, whose “repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States,” justified the rebellion against Britain. The word “tyranny” here is not used casually: it is a technical term from political philosophy going back to its beginnings in ancient Athens. Tyranny is the opposite of liberty and equality, for it makes power the instrument of the self-aggrandizement of the few at the expense of the many. As Aristotle wrote, tyranny is “arbitrary power . . . which is responsible to no one, and governs all alike, whether equals or betters, with a view to its own advantage, not to that of its subjects, and therefore against their will. No freeman willingly endures such a government.” A tyranny is diametrically opposed to the ideas set out in preamble to the Declaration.

At the end of the 19th century, progressivism began to undermine and dismantle the American creed, and to create a government in many ways similar to “absolute tyranny.” The advances of science and technology deluded many into believing that human nature and behavior could be understood and manipulated and improved with the same success natural science enjoyed. The old American creed based on a permanently flawed human nature and the need to disperse and balance power had to be discarded. As Woodrow Wilson said, the Constitution had to be interpreted “according to the Darwinian principle,” with a centralized government of technocrats who could shape or “nudge,” as our progressives today put it, human nature into greater “fitness” for happiness in a new world of science and technology. Now power is to be concentrated into an elite of superior knowledge charged with shaping people’s lives in order to “improve” them, and empowered to confiscate and redistribute wealth in order to finance this social engineering.

Also contrary to the Declaration is the progressive view of rights. Now rights come not from “Nature and Nature’s God,” their origins and nature transcendent. Now rights are derived from the will of flawed men, defined according to their limited and contingent vision of happiness and the good. Just as they disparage the Constitution, progressive thinkers sneer at the notion of natural rights “beyond the reach, not only of the majority but of the state itself,” as progressive historian Charles Beard wrote in 1912, who reduced natural rights to an “obsolete and indefensible” notion. Putting rights into the hands of powerful men meant that they could be multiplied and expanded by political power, as Franklin Roosevelt did in his 1944 inaugural address, in which he called for a Second Bill of Rights including everything from a “useful and remunerative job” to “adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.” But this turns rights into the gifts of power wielded by flawed and limited human beings, and as such the foundations of our rights are temporal and always up for debate and redefinition, as we have seen in communist countries or in Islamic sharia law.

Finally, the progressives rejected the idea of the transcendent, divine authority that defined humans by their innate freedom and equality. Hence the relentless efforts to drive religion from the public square and reduce it to a lifestyle choice and expression of private identity, no different from one’s taste in food, clothes, or entertainment. In this way the moral order sanctioned by “Nature’s God” and the “Supreme Judge of the world,” as the Declaration describes the divine order, which enforced limits on license and self-indulgence, can be marginalized and bereft of its power to sanction destructive behavior. This leaves the state––a collection of flawed, corruptible human beings limited by their own “passions and interests” –– as the only authority for regulating people’s lives.

The result is to set all rights adrift, vulnerable to chance and change. The author of the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson was a deist, but even he recognized the necessity of religious belief for the American order, and the dangers of ignoring its transcendent foundations: “God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the Gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever.”

Today we live in a political order that the progressives have altered and distanced from its philosophical roots in the Declaration of Independence. Political power is now concentrated in the federal government and its 2.6 million mostly anonymous, unelected unaccountable workers who staff over 430 agencies and departments, which extend their coercive and regulatory power into every aspect of our lives. Every day we witness their tyrannical “repeated injuries and usurpations” at the expense of our freedom and autonomy, and the Constitutional balance of powers. The government confiscates wealth and redistributes it to political clients, just like the tyrants of old, in order to make people “accustomed to feed at the expense of others” and to make “their prospects of winning a livelihood depend upon the property of their neighbors,” as Polybius described the modus operandi of the ancient tyrant. Political freedom is degraded into license, the power to do what we want rather than to live as people deserving of freedom. Today we are subjects of Tocqueville’s “soft despotism,” which seeks “to keep [the people] in perpetual childhood,” and is “well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing.”

Donald Trump has pruned back federal power to some degree, and praises patriotism and faith. But weaning the citizens from their dependence on entitlements––the engine of soft despotism–– is a monumental task that so far he has shown little interest in attempting. The difficulties the Republicans are currently facing just in reducing the growth in Medicaid spending that accelerated under Obamacare illustrate the scope of the problem. Given our $20 trillion in debt and trillions more in unfunded liabilities, our children and grandchildren are facing a fiscal Armageddon, and when it comes freedom and equality may be its first victims.

So today, amidst the barbecues and fireworks and the paeans to patriotism, we should take time to contemplate how far we have drifted from the ideals for which our ancestors fought and died.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/267172/freedom-and-tyranny-meaning-independence-day-bruce-thornton

THE
SWISS REPORT
A special study for Western Goals Foundation
by General Lewis W. Walt, U.S.M.C. (Ret.) and
General George S. Patton, U.S.A. (Ret.)
WESTERN GOALS
309-A Cameron Street, Alexandria, Virginia 22314 (703) 549-6688
Congressman Lawrence P. McDonald, Chairman
Western Goals
Advisory Board
Rep. Jean Ashbrook
Mrs. Walter Brennan
Taylor Caldwell
Roy M. Cohn, Esq.
Rep. Philip M. Crane
Gen. Raymond G. Davis
Henry Hazlitt
Dr. Mildred F. Jefferson
Dr. Anthony Kubek
Roger Milliken
Adm. Thomas Moorer
E.A. Morris
Vice Adm. Lloyd M. Mustin
Mrs. John C. Newington
Gen. George S. Patton
Dr. Hans Sennholz
Gen. John Singlaub
Dan Smoot
Robert Stoddard
Rep. Bob Stump
Mrs. Helen Marie Taylor
Dr. Edward Teller
Gen. Lewis Walt
Dr. Eugene Wigner
Western Goals
Executive Staff
Linda Guell, Director
John Rees, Editor
Julia Ferguson, Research
Design/Type: Ellis Graphics
March 1983
LETTER FROM
THE CHAIRMAN
Dear Reader:
In the contemporary arena of political chicanery, reality
counts for little and illusion is frequently king, but in the
struggle for the survival of Western Civilization, it will be
the real world, not illusions or delusions, that will determine
which way the future will go. This basic truth is
especially the case in areas of national defense. Politicians
may play politics as usual right up to the time of actual
conflict; after that point, only the mislabeled fool or
dedicated traitor would continue the deception.
National defense matters present many real problems
at both the policymaking and electorate levels. One such
case may be found in the question of a draft as a means of
supplying the necessary military manpower. A military
service draft causes apprehension to eligible teenage
males, and this is especially the case when the inequitable
draft of the Vietnam War era is remembered.
The all-volunteer military force is an alternative to a
draft, but it is an expensive way to go as illustrated by the
fact that approximately 60 percent of the defense dollar
goes to personnel and personnel related costs (by way of
comparison, in the Soviet Union the comparable figure is
22 percent, thus leaving the lion’s share for weapons
development and production). Too, historically, there are
serious questions as to whether a paycheck is an adequate
substitute for patriotic fervor.
While Americans wrestle with the defense matters of
growing costs, manpower needs, volunteerism vs. the
draft, and even the matter of a national will, it is refreshing
to note that there is one country that has adopted a formula
that has resolved those same vexations. That country
is Switzerland, and amazingly, the Swiss have successfully
applied this national defense formula for centuries
without the problems of popular division. To the
(continued on inside back cover)
Published by WESTERN GOALS, 309-A Cameron Street, Alexandria, Virginia 22314. (703)
549-6688. Additional copies of this publication are available from the foundation at $4.00 per copy.
This study should not be interpreted as an effort to influence any legislative program of the U.S.
Congress. The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and contributors and do
not necessarily represent the position of WESTERN GOALS.
WESTERN GOALS is a Virginia Corporation and is recognized by the Internal Revenue Service to
be an organization described in Section 501 (c) (3) of the Internal Revenue Code.
Copyright © 1983-Western Goals
THE
SWISS REPORT
A special study for Western Goals Foundation
by General Lewis W. Walt, U.S.M.C. (Ret.) and
General George S. Patton, U.S.A. (Ret.)
The Authors
General Lewis W. Walt,
USMC (Ret.)
General Lewis William Walt, who has seen more combat
on the battlefield than any other living Marine, led
combat troops in three wars, was a U.S. Marine Platoon
Leader in the defense of the International Settlement in
Shanghai, China in 1938-39, and retired from active service
in the Corps on February 1, 1971.
During his active military career of nearly 35 years,
General Walt was awarded 19 personal decorations for
combat, including two Navy Crosses, our Nation’s second
highest combat award. He was also awarded two
Distinguished Service Medals—one as Commander of
the Marines and other combat troops in Vietnam, and one as Assistant Commandant of
the Marine Corps.
Following his retirement, the 4-star General served as Director of the United States
Marines Youth Foundation and subsequently he headed up the U.S. Senate Investigation
on International Drug Traffic. From September 1974 to September 1975, General Walt
served as the senior military member of President Ford’s Clemency Board, followed by his
service as Consultant to the Department of Defense in the areas of weapons development
and combat training.
General Walt, one of 12 children who worked his way through college, was born on a
farm near Harveyville, Kansas on February 16, 1913. He graduated with honors from the
Military Department at Colorado State University with a degree in Chemistry. His
authored works include Strange War, Strange Strategy (1970); America Faces Defeat
(1971); and The Eleventh Hour (1979).
The General currently resides in Orlando, Florida with his wife, the former Mrs. June
Burkett Jacobsen.
Major General
George S. Patton, USA (Ret.)
Major General George Smith Patton was born
December 24, 1923, in Boston, Massachusetts, the
youngest of 3 children of Major George S. Patton, Jr. and
Beatrice Ayer Patton.
General Patton graduated from The Hill School, Pottstown,
Pennsylvania, and from the U.S. Military Academy
at West Point. He holds a Masters Degree in International
Affairs from George Washington University. The General
also attended the Armed Forces Staff College, the U.S.
Army Armor School, and the U.S. Army War College.
General Patton served in Korea as Company Commander and volunteered for service
in Vietnam, serving initially as Special Forces Operations Officer concurrently with an
assignment at the American Embassy, Saigon. One of his several other Vietnam
assignments included his service as Commanding Officer, 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment.
Peacetime missions include General Patton’s service as follows: Headquarters and Student
Company Commander and Commanding Officer of the Tank Training Center and
63rd Heavy Tank Battalion, respectively, in Germany (General Patton’s career with the
U.S. Army includes approximately 11 years European service alone); Company Tactical
Officer with the Department of Tactics at West Point and similar duties at the Executive
Department at the U.S. Naval Academy; Assistant Commandant of the U.S.
Army Armor School in Fort Knox; Director, Security Assistance with Headquarters at the
U.S. European Command; and Director of Readiness, HQ DARCOM.
The General’s decorations include the Distinguished Service Cross with one oak leaf
cluster; Silver Star with one oak leaf cluster; Legion of Merit with two oak leaf clusters;
Distinguished Flying Cross; Meritorious Service Medal; several South Vietnam decorations,
and the Purple Heart.
General Patton is married to the former Joanne Holbrook and they reside on their farm
in South Hamilton, Massachusetts.
Acknowledgements
Western Goals wishes to express its sincere appreciation to the following individuals
for their invaluable assistance in the presentation of this study:
1. Divisionnaire (MG) Edmund Muller
Deputy Chief of Staff, Logistics
Federal Military Department
Berne, Switzerland
2. Colonel Jean Rossier
Chief of the Territorial Service
Staff Logistics
Federal Military Department
Berne, Switzerland
3. Colonel Philippe Zeller
Chief of Operations, General Staff
Federal Military Department
Berne, Switzerland
4. Hans Mumenthaler, Director
Federal Office of Civil Defense
Berne, Switzerland
5. Honorable G. A. Chevallaz
Minister of Defense
The Federal Council
Berne, Switzerland
6. Brig. General Heinrich Koopman and staff
Office of the Swiss Military Attache
Washington, D.C.
7. Colonel George E. Thompson
The American Embassy
Berne, Switzerland
The Foundation wishes to say a special “thank you” to Charley Reese, Orlando,
Florida, for his editorial assistance and contributions.

The Swiss Report
Switzerland lies landlocked in Western Europe, a small densely populated nation
of nearly seven million people. To the west lies France, to the south Italy
and to the north and east, West Germany and Austria. By modern jet fighter, it
is ten minutes from the Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern Europe. Since 1815
Switzerland has remained an inviolate island of peace in the midst of war. Even
Adolph Hitler’s Wehrmacht, which conquered all of Europe in the early months
of World War II, chose not to attack Switzerland despite the fact that the small
country was in the crossroads of Western Europe.
Switzerland is, of course, neutral, but it was not mere respect for its neutrality
which kept the Nazi armies and others before it out of the tiny country. It was
the determination of the Swiss people to defend their neutrality and the credibility
of their means to do so. That determination remains alive today in the face
of weapons of mass destruction. So, too, does the credibility of the means.
Within 48 hours, the Swiss can field an army of more than 600,000 men,
100,000 more than the present army of West Germany. Today, it can provide
shelter space for 85 percent of its civilian population and by the 1990s intends
to have shelter space for the entire population. War supplies, medical supplies
and food supplies are meticulously stored in more than 100 kilometers of tunnels.
About 4,000 permanent obstacles and barriers and more than 2,000 demolition
devices are in place, ready to hamper and block an aggressor’s progress.
In short, Switzerland is an armed bunker.
Yet, there is no standing Army, no bunker mentality, no enormous drain on
the Swiss economy, no militaristic threat to Europe’s oldest and most fiercely independent
democracy.
How the Swiss have achieved this credible deterrent to invasion is the subject
of this report. The Swiss security system is unique as well as an example of what
a democratic nation can accomplish by applying reason and logic to problems
which have been realistically and carefully analyzed.
History
Niccolo Machiavelli, the 15th century Italian student of power, remarked of
the Swiss, “They are the most armed—and most free people in Europe.” Indeed,
Switzerland was born in the 13th century out of a desire to be free of domination
by the Habsburg family. In 1291 three Swiss cantons signed the Perpetual
Covenant which marked the beginning of the Swiss Confederation. In the
1300s, the Swiss fought several wars for independence with Austria and in 1499
Switzerland won its independence from the Holy Roman Empire.
The policy of neutrality originated in 1515 when the Swiss suffered a stunning
defeat by the French, but that early neutrality did not save it from an invasion
and occupation by the French under Napoleon in 1798. The Congress
of Vienna of 1815 restored Swiss independence and guaranteed its neutrality.
Switzerland adopted a new constitution in 1848, modeled somewhat after
the American constitution and this was amended in 1874 to increase the federal
government’s powers in military and court matters, although the cantons (equivalent
to American states) generally retain considerably more power than American
states.
The Swiss economy today is built around precision manufacturing, chemicals,
banking, and tourism. It has one of the highest standards of living in the world
and the land is criss-crossed by a 3,150-mile railroad network and 30,000
miles of hard-surfaced roads. Three major rivers have their origin in Switzerland—
the Rhine, the Rhone, and the Po. Most of the population and most of
the agriculture are located in the plateau region between the Jura and the
Alps. Swiss agriculture can produce only three-fifths of the nation’s food supply,
a factor carefully weighed in the Swiss security system planning. The nation
is greatly dependent on imports for food and most raw materials for its industry,
including oil, natural gas, and coal.
Since 1815 the Swiss have not fought in a foreign war, yet they have maintained
the tradition of a citizen army and rifle and pistol shooting are among the
nation’s most popular sports with almost every village having a shooting range,
over 3,000 ranges in all.
Today Switzerland maintains its neutrality, but practices what it calls solidarity—
participating in international humanitarian projects, offering its good offices
for the resolution of disputes, and providing technical assistance to Third World
countries. The Swiss participate in those international activities and organizations
which do not require it to violate its policy of neutrality. Neutrality is central
to Swiss thinking and, in fact, is the determining factor in the Swiss security
system.
Swiss Strategic Thinking
Divisionnaire Major General Edmund Muller, deputy chief of staff, logistics,
summarized Swiss strategic thinking this way:
“Historical experience shows that if a nation is not able to defend itself
and to protect its spiritual and material values, it will become, sooner or
later, the target of power politics and force. Efforts to defend ourselves
against force are therefore still necessary. These efforts must be integrated
within a comprehensive security policy expressed in the form of clear guidelines.
Our government is convinced that we can successfully undertake
peace-keeping efforts in the future only if we can ensure at the same time
our own security in a credible way. The security policy of a country is only
credible if a realistic evaluation of the threats and a sober estimation of its
own possibilities lead to the implementation of a concept capable of inspiring
confidence at home and respect abroad.”
The words, “credible”, “respect”, “realistic”, and “planning” occur over and
over in Swiss defense documents and briefings. To a remarkable degree, the
Swiss government has approached its problems in a supremely logical manner,
setting out basic premises and drawing the correct inferences.
The objectives of the security policy are set forth as follows: (1) preservation
of peace in independence; (2) preservation of freedom of action; (3) protection
of the population; and (4) defense of the territory.
Each of these objectives has been carefully analyzed and the choice of words
is not careless. What the Swiss mean by “Peace in independence” is made clear
in the following excerpt from a report of the Federal Council to the Federal
Assembly:
“The preservation of peace—no matter how much we are interested in it—
is not an end in itself. It can neither be separated from the preservation of
self-determination nor can one be played off against the other. Our goal is peace
in independence; both aspects are therefore of equal importance.”
In defining preservation of freedom of action, the Swiss make clear they mean
freedom from foreign pressures, which can be achieved only by having available
a powerful means of resisting them and freedom from internal pressure
generated by illegal means or the use of force.
Having defined their security policy objectives, the Swiss then proceed to examine
the threat. In doing so, they include “the state of relative peace” along
with indirect war, conventional war, war with weapons of mass destruction,
and blackmail.
The following quotations from the same Federal Council report reveal not
only the Swiss view of the present threats but provide an insight in their thinking
processes:
“Today, peace does not correspond to the ideal and conditions usually associated
with it. The general situation is characterized by continuous confrontations,
also in those cases where there is no open employment of force.”
“The danger of a breach of international agreement is always present. The
collective security system envisioned by the Charter of the United Nations has
not been allowed to become effective, particularly because of the lack of unanimity
among the permanent members of the security council….today’s state
of relative peace is to a great extent due to the fact that the two superpowers
neutralize each other. The balance of fear, maintained only by the mutual threat
of annihilation, is not stable. It can be jeopardized by the excessive armaments
efforts of one side, by technological breakthroughs as well as by irrational actions….
under the protection of this relative balance of forces, powers and
groups of powers attempt to enlarge their spheres of influence through political,
economical, propagandistic and psychological pressures.”
“Conflicts are increasingly being waged by indirect means, with the goal of
influencing, weakening and finally overcoming the opponent through political,
psychological and terrorist means….this type of warfare takes advantage of the
increasing vulnerability of the modern state with its numerous vital facilities
(such as power utilities, communication, transportation and information facilities)
. Those who resort to this kind of warfare, whether they act in the interest of
a foreign power, a foreign ideology or out of anarchistic motives, take advantage
of the frictions existing within a society, as well as of all forms of political
and social malaise of certain population groups. By attempting to break up the
existing liberal order through the paralysis of the public institutions, facilities
and the democratic processes by way of defamation, intimidation and the employment
of force, they hope to be able to achieve their goals.”
“The possibility of blackmail exists at each level of conflict, taking advantage
of the opponent’s fear of the threatened actions. Blackmail acquires a particular
dimension if it is exercised by nuclear powers. The authorities of the state
against which the blackmail is directed could be put under intense public pressure
and be forced to make decisions of such a magnitude as to be without historical
parallel….the four levels of conflict are characterized by those methods
and means which would, at each level, be predominantly employed. During
large confrontations, the parties to the conflict will try to combine these methods
and means acting simultaneously in a direct and indirect manner.”
Thus, the Swiss take a hard look at the world and indulge in no escapist thinking.
They recognize that they could become the victim of blackmail, of subversion,
of a conventional or a nuclear attack. Yet they also realize that because
of their small size, they are not likely to be a primary target and therefore cannot
justify a continued state of mobilization.
The Swiss see the military as only one component of a spectrum of strategic
means to achieve their security objectives. Their foreign policy initiatives are a
strategic means to defend their policy of armed neutrality, to provide access to
raw materials and markets to exports. Social policy is a strategic means to provide
the stability necessary to withstand threats. Economic policy is a strategic
means of insuring that in times of crisis or war, the Swiss people can continue
to exist. The Swiss Government has actually formed what it calls a war economy
organization with the specific goals of planning for self-sufficiency in time of war.
In this regard, Swiss citizens are required to maintain in their homes a twomonths’
supply of food; industrialists and importers are required to maintain war
stocks of raw materials and food. Civil Defense is seen as the strategic means
of insuring survival of the population. In short, the Swiss approach the problem
of security with a totally integrated methodology that involves the entire nation.
The Militia System
The purpose of the military forces of Switzerland are two-fold: (1) to deter
war by the principle of dissuasion; and (2) if deterrence fails, to defend the
territory and the population.
“Dissuasion is a strategic posture which should persuade a potential aggressor
to avoid an armed conflict, by convincing him of the disproportion existing between
the advantages gained from an attack on the country and the risks entailed.
The risks which a potential aggressor must be made to perceive consists
in the loss of prestige, military forces, war-potential and time, as well as in running
counter to his ideological, political and economic interests.”
The Swiss have no illusions about their ability to defeat a major military
power. They could not have defeated the Nazi army which for a time considered
invading Switzerland. They mobilized, however, and made it clear beyond
a shadow of a doubt that if the Nazi army invaded, it would be fiercely resisted
and that the tunnels and passes into Italy would be destroyed. In a classic
example of dissuasion at work, Hitler’s general staff recommended against an
invasion on the grounds that the costs would be disproportionate to the gains.
The Swiss military forces are composed almost entirely of the militia. Only
800 out of 50,000 officers are professionals. They, and the recruits which happen
to be training at any given time, are the only people in Switzerland on
“active duty”
The Swiss militia system is unique and is not comparable to the present Reserve
and Guard forces in the United States. The basis for conscription is the
constitution, which mandates military service for every Swiss male from age 20
to 50 (55 in the case of officers). There are no exceptions. Conscientious objectors
are given a choice between Army non-combat units and jail. Those physically
unfit for military duty but employable are required to pay a tax. Women
are not included in the compulsory military service system, but small numbers
of them are accepted on a volunteer basis for non-combatant positions.
The universality of the Swiss system provides several advantages. It is fair and
therefore enjoys popular support. In the 1970s a national referendum was held
on the question of providing alternative service to conscientious objectors. The
Swiss people defeated it by an overwhelming majority.
A second advantage is that the Swiss Army does not have to operate a vocational
school system, training unqualified people in special skills which they take,
as soon as their enlistment is completed, into the civilian market. The Swiss system
operates in reverse. The Swiss Army, because everyone is obligated, can
choose those people trained in their civilian roles for the military jobs which
match their specialty. In the Swiss system, the burden of specialized training is
on the civilian sector.
A third advantage is that every male, age 20 to 50, who is an elected official
or civil servant in the government at all levels is also a member of the Swiss
Army. This helps prevent the jealousy and hostility that armies sometimes confront
in competing with other government services for their share of the public
resources. The lack of separation between the army, the people, and the government
is one of the unique and valuable characteristics of the Swiss system.
A fourth advantage is that Switzerland does not have a high proportion of its
defense dollars going to personnel costs. There are no military retirement systems
(the 800 full-time officers are included in the civil service pension system),
no veterans benefits, no massive payroll of a large standing army. There is
a medical insurance program to take care of injuries or death while serving on
active duty. Consequently, 50 percent of all Swiss defense appropriations can
be directed toward the acquisition of weapons and equipment. A comparable
figure is 30 percent in the Republic of West Germany.
At the age of 19, young men are given physical and mental tests in preparation
for military service. By this age, most young men in Switzerland have already
chosen their career paths and so permitting the Army to channel them into
the proper slots. Some consideration is given to the recruit’s preference and to
his locale, but the Army makes the final decision according to its own needs.
At age 20, recruits report for 17 weeks of training. The Swiss do not operate
separate training facilities for recruits and then others for military specialties.
Each training camp handles both the recruit’s basic training and his military
specialty. In other words, a young man destined for the medics reports directly
to a medical training company; an infantryman to an infantry training camp.
At the end of the training cycle, the recruit, now a member of a militia unit
with which he will stay in most cases for the duration of his obligation, returns
home. He carries with him his rifle, an allotment of ammunition, uniforms, military
pack, and CBR mask. He is responsible for the maintenance of this equipment
and is inspected annually. Once a year he is also required to qualify with
his personal weapon on a rifle range or face an additional three days of training.
Once a year, he will report for three weeks of military training in a rugged field
exercise set up as a problem the type of which his particular unit would face.
The Swiss Army is organized into four Army Corps. Each Army Corps controls
three Divisions. The Field Army Corps are composed of two Infantry Divisions
and one Mechanized Division. The Mountain Corps has three Mountain
Divisions. In addition, each Field Army Corps has some separate Border Defense
Brigades and the Mountain Corps, separate Fortress Brigades.
These 12 Divisions plus the Air Defense Command constitute the elite. Young
men aged 20 to 32 serve in these Divisions. Men of the “Landwehr”, 33 to 42
years old, are found in the separate Brigades. Those in the “Landsturm”, 43 to
50 years old, serve in the Territorial Forces. Thus, the duties of the militiamen
are adjusted as his physical capabilities change with age.
These elite field forces with the eight youngest classes of soldiers plus all Commissioned
Officers and Non-Commissioned Officers are mobilized for three
weeks of training each year. “Landwehr” forces train for two weeks every two
years, and “Landsturm” units for one week every four years.
All officers are chosen from the ranks. A young man chosen to become an officer
while he was a private must attend a one-month non-commissioned officers
school. If he is successful, the soldier is promoted to corporal and, to pay
off his new rank, he must serve as a group leader for a period of 17 weeks
immediately following recruit school.
The requisite number of corporals to meet requirements are sent to officer
training schools for four months. After successful completion of this school, he
is promoted to lieutenant. This is followed by service as a platoon leader with another
recruit training unit. After five years in grade, he will be promoted to first
lieutenant.
After two years as a first lieutenant, he is eligible for promotion to captain.
To be promoted to captain, a first lieutenant has to attend a three-week
weapons school, a four-week tactical school and serve as company commander
in a recruit training cycle. As a captain, he will command and administer a
company.
After eight years, a captain can get promoted to major, and then, if he completes
successfully special training, he may become a battalion commander.
Subsequent promotions to lieutenant colonel after seven years as major and to
colonel two years later depends upon individual ability and vacancies. The highest
rank a militia officer may attain is that of brigade commander. Divisions and
Army Corps are commanded by professional officers.
A first lieutenant or captain who desires to become a career officer has to attend
a series of branch schools and then attend a one-year course at the Military
Division of the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. To be eligible for selection
as a member of the Corps of Instructors, an officer must have a civilian profession.
In peace time, the Swiss Army has no supreme commander. The Federal
Council leads the army. The general chief of staff is the “primus inter pares” of
the army staff. In case of war mobilization, the Parliament would select a fourstar
general as supreme commander.
Tours of Duty in Schools
1. RS
NCOS
2. RS
OS
3. RS
Tact
Shoot
4. RS
Tact
Shoot
5. RS
Tact
Shoot
Days
RS
NCOS =
OS
Tact
Shoot =
(Recruits and Superiors)
Private Corp Lt Cap
118 118 118 118
27 27 27
118 118 118
118 118
118 118
27
20
118
118 263 499 664
Recruit-School
Noncommissioned officer-School
Officer-School
Tactical School
Shooting-School/ -Course
Major
118
27
118
118
118
27
20
118
27
6
27
724
Colonel
118
27
118
118
118
27
20
118
27
6
27
27
14
765
The Swiss Air Force is composed of one Air Force, one Airbase and one Anti-
Aircraft Brigade. All combat aircraft are ready for use and are stored in rock-covered
underground bases containing fuel, ammunition, spare parts and repair
Equipment (value $2,000.00). Every Swiss militia soldier has the above equipment
ready at his home. (See opposite page for itemized list)
PERSONAL EQUIPMENT FOR MEN
(Standards)
No. Arming and Leathers
1 1 assault-gun with magazine and sling
2 1 cleaning-things for assault-gun
3 1 night-sight
4 1 bayonet with fitting
5 1 knife
6 1 belt
7 1 scabbard for bayonet
8 1 box with pocket-ammunition
Clothing
9 1 helmet 71
10 1 pass-cup, ord 72
11 1 working-cup, ord 49
12 1 pass-uniform, ord 72
13 1 pass-trousers, ord 72
14 1 working-trousers, ord 49
15 1 coat
16 3 shirts with breast pockets
17 2 jerseys
18 2 black ties
19 1 pass-raincoat
20 1 pass-leather belt
21 1 trousers-belt (elastic)
22 2 pairs of march shoes
Luggage
23 1 rucksack, mod 58/73
24 2 shoe-bags, grey
25 1 effects-bag, olive
26 1 supplies-bag, white
27 1 effects bag 58
28 1 haversack
29 1 canteen with cup
30 1 mess tin
31 1 spoon and 1 fork
32 1 cleaning things 67
Special Equipment
33 1 ABC (atomic/biological/chemical) protective mask with filter
34 1 bag for ABC-protective mask
35 2 pairs of plugs for hearing protection, in boxes
36 1 service book with identity card
37 1 identification tag
38 3 pairs of epaulettes
39 Miscellaneous
Cyclists — light infantry
Volunteer in Civil Defense telephone exchange
The infantry in action
Farmer on the way to his unit
Mechanized troops
Air-defense
Militia pilots for jet fighters
Telecommunications
Dogs for protection and rescue
Repair shop
Sheltered surgery
shops. There is an automatic surveillance and guidance system to help engage
the air defense and ground attack armaments.
The number of main weapons in the Swiss Army is as follows:
350 aircraft
800 tanks
1,200 armored personnel carriers
900 artillery guns (self-propelled or mobile)
300 artillery tubes in fortresses
2,000 mobile anti-tank guns
300 antitank guns in bunkers
2,000 anti-aircraft guns
3,000 anti-tank guided missile systems
20,000 bazookas
Thousands of grenade launchers and millions of mines are also on hand as
well as 30,000 army-owned special vehicles and 50,000 civilian-owned vehicles
tagged for mobilization. Each owner knows precisely where to bring his vehicle
in case of mobilization.
These and other war supplies are stored in arsenals and underground facilities
all over the country. They are stored by unit. A military unit, for example, will
draw the same equipment from the same arsenal each year for its annual training
exercise so that it becomes familiar with it, with its location, and can assist the
civilian maintenance personnel in spotting problems.
The Swiss logistics system is a work of genius and is tailored to the requirements
of a militia army in a neutral country which, if it fights, cannot count on
allies for re-supply or assistance.
Of 17,000 civil servants in the Ministry of Defense, 10,500 are in logistics. In
1981 the budget was 800 million Swiss francs and it maintains 5,500 buildings
and installations, 600 war bases, 170 maintenance facilities, and more than 100
kilometers of underground facilities.
These underground facilities not only contain stores of ammunition and other
war supplies but also underground repair facilities for tanks, artillery pieces, electronics
equipment and vehicles. The value of the Swiss Army inventory is 12.8
billion Swiss francs.
The Swiss Army maintains 40 military hospitals, ten of them underground—
completely equipped, spotless and ready. They are used only for training purposes.
When the Swiss purchase a weapons system from abroad, they purchase
enough spare parts for both the life of the system and for war reserves. This is
to insure continuity of use in a war even though Switzerland is cut off from the
original source of supply.
They also practice the principle of commonality so that military, civil defense,
and civil police equipment are the same. An example of Swiss ingenuity applied
to logistics is the storage of perishable medical supplies for war-time use.
These supplies are obtained from pharmaceutical companies, stored, and then
at the appropriate time, returned to the Pharmaceuticals for sale in exchange for
fresh supplies for storage. By arrangement, the Swiss government would actually
pay for the supplies only in the event of their consumption during a war.
Military Doctrine
Once mobilized, the Swiss Army would fight as a conventional force. Swiss
military doctrine calls for meeting the aggressor at the borders and waging total
war. This is a departure from earlier doctrine which in World War II called for
abandoning the plateau area for the mountain fortresses.
In the event of mobilization, the 4,000 permanent obstacles and barriers
would be activated and the more than 2,000 demolition devices already built
into key bridges and tunnels would be set off. Industrial machines would be disabled;
water levels in the more than 900 dams lowered; fuel tanks burned.
The Swiss terrain—a hilly plateau region between two mountain ranges—
would necessarily channelize the aggressor’s attacks. These obvious avenues
of approach are heavily fortified and would be defended from built-in positions
and by mobile forces of the three Army Corps backed up by the Air Force. The
Swiss plan is to make every inch gained by the enemy a bloody and costly gain.
In the event main units of the Army are destroyed, Swiss doctrine calls for continued
passive and active resistance by means of guerrilla warfare.
This combination of powerful resistance by conventional forces, continued resistance
by guerrillas, and the self-destruction of Switzerland’s industrial, communications,
and transportation networks constitutes the strategy of dissuasion.
The message to the potential aggressor is clear: after a bloody, expensive, timeconsuming
war, he will have gained nothing of value. He will be faced with
occupation of a hostile area, denuded of economic or transportation value, and
continued resistance by a determined and armed population.
The armed population is no bluff. Swiss militiamen are not required to turn
in their weapons upon completion of their obligation. It is said that every Swiss
home contains at least three weapons, for not only is there the militia system,
but there is a long tradition of civilian ownership of firearms and, as pointed out
before, rifle and pistol shooting are virtually the national sports of Switzerland.
There are few restrictions on the Swiss purchase, ownership or carrying, of firearms.
An armed occupation force would indeed be literally faced with the prospect
of a Swiss rifleman behind every tree.
The Territorial Service
A unique component of the Swiss Army is the Territorial Service. It has no
equivalent in the United States and so deserves special attention in this report.
Within the army itself, the Territorial Service operates as logistical units, but it
does much more and is the main link between the army and the civilian sector.
It is composed of those men in the “Landsturm” who are 43 to 50 years of age
as well as some younger men assigned to it for Air Raid Rescue Battalions.
The duties of the Territorial Service can be summarized as follows: (1) It has
the mission of providing warning services to both the Army and the civilian population
in case of danger from air, atomic, biological and chemical weapons as
well as dam bursts; (2) it is responsible for coordinating the lowering of the water
level of hydroelectric reservoirs and for other measures concerning the electrical
supply system; (3) it has the mission of caring for internees, prisoners of war and
refugees; (4) it provides military police to assist civil authorities when necessary;
(5) it is responsible for the military economy service—to supply all the
goods needed by the army from the civilian sector and to handle the dismantling
or destruction of civilian economic assets that could be used by the enemy; and
(6) to protect important and vital installations.
This Territorial Service is primarily designed for war, but portions of it can be
mobilized in peacetime to assist civilian authorities with non-military catastrophies.
Structurally, the Territorial Service is designed to parallel the Swiss civil government
structure. The basic civilian unit of the Swiss Confederation is the canton.
Some of the larger cantons are divided into districts. Cantons are grouped
together to form Territorial Zones.
At the level of a district (a portion of a canton) there is a District Civil Staff and
a Territorial Regional Staff; the Territorial Service equivalent of the canton is
called a Territorial Circle. Here again, the military staff works with the civil staff.
At the Territorial Zone level (groups of cantons), there are also parallel civilian
and military staffs.
To make this relationship clearer, we might imagine a United States military
service which had a command structure at the level of the Federal Government,
at the level of the Federal Regions, at the state levels, and at the district
levels within the states with the missions of providing domestic intelligence, security
for key installations, control of the economy in time of war, and assistance
to civilian authorities in handling disasters and civil disturbances. There is,
of course, no such organization in the United States.
The Swiss have not only clearly defined the missions of the Territorial Service
but also the rules under which it operates. For example, the needs of the army
take precedence over the needs of the civil sector. The Territorial Service can
assist the civil sector only on the request of civilian authorities and, even then,
authority and responsibility for civilians remain with the civil authorities. In other
words, in the event of a catastrophe, the Territorial Service is not authorized to
step in and take over operations, but only to provide assistance to civil authorities
under their direction.
On the other hand, in the event of war, the Territorial Service’s first obligation
is to the army and under those circumstances it would override, if necessary,
the civil authorities in the event of a conflict of interests. It is also the Territorial
Service which provides the manpower earmarked for use by civil defense.
Civil Defense
Some critics of the Swiss system have expressed the belief that the possession
of nuclear weapons has made the strategy of dissuasion obsolete. These are, to
be sure, those critics who view nuclear war as an offense for which there is no
defense.
The Swiss do not agree. Recalling one of their strategic objectives as protection
of the civilian population, the Swiss government has realistically assessed
that objective in light of nuclear, chemical and biological warfare. Their answer
was to embark on an extensive civil defense program with the idea of accomplishing
two of their strategic objectives—protection of the population and maintaining
freedom of action. They reason that an extensive and useable civil defense
program will give the Swiss government the means to withstand nuclear
blackmail, thus preserving freedom of action.
Hans Mumenthaler, director of the Federal Office of Civil Defense, put it this
way: “Lack of protection (for the civilian population) means an impairment of
our freedom of decision and lacking freedom of decision is rightly felt as an unfree
condition.”
The latest Swiss laws pertaining to civil defense were revised in 1978 and they
have made remarkable progress. To date, the Swiss have shelter space for 85
percent of the population and by 1990 plan to have 100 percent of the population
covered. In many cases, there will be two shelter spaces per person—one
at the place of work and one at home.
Swiss law requires compulsory participation in civil defense for all males aged
20 to 60 with exemption only for military service. Consequently, most of the
civil defense personnel are over 50. There is presently a mandatory five-day introductory
course and two days of annual training. Swiss officials believe this is
not sufficient and, even though supervisors train more extensively, they would
like to see the training schedule expanded for everyone.
The law requires that communities have full responsibility for enforcing federal
and cantonal civil defense regulations. Each family is required to provide a
shelter at home and all new construction, even of commercial buildings, must
provide shelters built to federal specifications. The confederation subsidizes the
construction of public shelters, but not private ones.
Private shelters are required to withstand one atmosphere of overpressure
while public shelters are built to withstand three atmospheres (one atmosphere
equals ten tons per square meter). In other words, the Swiss opted for blast
shelters that are rather simply shelters adequate for protection against fallout. A
shelter built to withstand three atmospheres of overpressure could theoretically
provide protection for people within nine-tenths of a mile from ground zero
with a one-megaton explosion.
Public shelters are equipped with independent water, air filtration, communications,
food and medical supplies and private citizens are required to stock
food for two week’s duration.
The Swiss have spent, since 1970, 5 billion Swiss francs on civil defense and
are currently spending at the rate of 210 million Swiss francs annually. Mumenthaler
says this is a ratio of about $1 for every $8 spent on defense. He estimates
that for the United States to have reached the same level of protection would
have required the expenditure of $85 billion.
Public support for civil defense is widespread. Mumenthaler explains, “We
are mountain people and we are used to living with danger—but we are also
used to preparing for it.”
Several key decisions were made in approaching the problem of civil defense.
One was to discard the idea of evacuation. Not only are warning times for Switzerland
practically nil, but Swiss authorities reasoned the country is too small for
evacuation to be feasible. Evacuees would hinder other military operations and
would likely be no safer. Therefore, the Swiss opted for “vertical as opposed to
horizontal protection.” This dictated the construction of blast-proof shelters.
Another was the adoption of the principle that every inhabitant must have an
equal chance of survival. The Swiss seem to be meticulous about the principle
of equal sharing of both responsibilities and privileges. The first obligation of
every Swiss citizen is to their country.
Because of the proximity to likely opponents, the Swiss have adopted the
strategy of ordering people into the shelters as soon as political or military tension
reaches a critical level. From that point on, only key workers would leave
the shelters until such time as there was an actual attack or the situation became
less tense.
Finally, the Swiss made a basic decision to separate civil defense from the military
operations. The office of civil defense operates under the Minister of Justice
and Federal police. While some 30,000 troops from the Territorial Service
would be made available to civil defense, primarily for fire-fighting and rescue
work, it is not a fighting organization nor does it replace normal civilian rescue
and emergency aid organizations during peacetime. It can be mobilized for
peacetime rescue work, but this is clearly a secondary mission.
Summary
Switzerland, a small country with limited res6urces, has conceptualized,
planned, and implemented a rational security policy which provides maximum
effect with minimum expenditures. The militia system, being both universal and
a part of the constitution, has wide public acceptance. It allows mobilization of
a large army without the draining costs of a large professional army. The personnel
savings have been invested in redoubts, barriers, equipment, storage facilities,
hospitals, and weapons.
To a remarkable degree, the Swiss require private sector participation in the
defense effort. These private contributions are estimated to equal the annual
government expenditures. By integrating their security policy to include foreign
policy, social policy, defense, civil defense and economic measures, the Swiss
have, in effect, oriented their entire public effort toward the end of security for
their nation and their people.
The Swiss General Defense system provides a high dissuasive value and credibility
to this small, neutral country in the heart of Europe. In case of war Switzerland
would not attract the more powerful nations who might consider Switzerland
to be a military vacuum. On the contrary, Switzerland can activate the
densest defense system—on the ground and in the air on short notice—in
Western Europe.
Thanks to Civil Defense as well as intricate economic preparedness, there is
a high degree of survivability even in a modern war of long duration. The most
important factor remains that the overwhelming majority of the Swiss has a
strong will to defend the country against any aggressor. They are prepared to
fight, and will fight whenever and whomever necessary.

On Peace…
“To be prepared for war is one of the most effective
means of preserving peace.”
— George Washington
in his first annual address to
Congress on January 8, 1790
On War…
“War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest thing. The
decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic
feeling which thinks nothing worth a war is worse. A man
who has nothing which he cares about more than his
personal safety is a miserable creature who has no
chance of being free unless made and kept so by the
exertions of better men than himself.”
— John Stuart Mill
(1806-1873)
Chairman’s letter, continued
contrary, the Swiss concept has promoted unity among the people of that small but
mature nation.
The people of Switzerland are to be envied for their many achievements, and the policy
achievement of a plan for armed neutrality could be a model either in whole or in part for
those seeking a rational approach to survival problems.
The concept of armed neutrality was a policy favored by our Founding Fathers but the
warnings and advice of Founding Father George Washington has been lost to Twentieth
Century Americans. Perhaps even at this late date, we could find many answers to our
current problems by observing the Swiss way of a total defense concept.
Sincerely,
“…to rebuild and strengthen the political, economic, and
social structure of the United States and Western Civilization so as
to make any merger with totalitarians impossible.”
WESTERN GOALS
Lawrence P. McDonald
Chairman and President

It’s the Hypocrisy, Stupid
June 6, 2017 11:52 am / Leave a Comment / victorhanson
by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review

Progressives go the full Jimmy Swaggart.

Some concerned Democrats are worried that their party may have lost the key blue-wall states because of its elitism, manifested as disdain for Americans between the coasts.

Perhaps emblematic of their worry is the strange metamorphosis of Hillary Clinton’s two presidential campaigns. In 2008, as Bill Clinton 2.0, she drank boilermakers, bragged about bowling and shooting, boasted about her resonance with the “white” working class, and clobbered Obama on his Pennsylvania clingers speech.

But after Obama’s win — and his assumed new formula of registering record numbers of minority voters and seeing them often vote in a bloc on the basis of racial solidarity — Clinton thought she too could follow this new pathway to Democratic victories. So she made the understandable political contortions

This time around, Clinton was bent on out-Obaming Obama’s “clingers” with her own “deplorables” and “irredeemables.” Her campaign was based on pandering to identity-politics groups — while she had cashed in on Wall Street in what can be fairly called a payola scheme with Bill to enrich the Clinton Foundation and thus indirectly themselves. The result was both a cultural and economic affront to what used to be the bedrock of the Democratic party.

Americans neither hate nor envy meritocratic elites. Here in one of the poorer areas of the nation in rural southwestern Fresno County, the poor admire the skilled surgeons who operate on their children. Most of the new agri-barons are up-by-their-bootstraps ethnics: Basques, Punjabis, and descendants of the Okie diaspora and the 1960s waves of immigrants from Mexico who may now farm more than 2,000 or 3,000 acres of orchards and vineyards and on paper be worth $10 or $15 million, though they dress in old clothes and drive run-down pickups. They are looked upon as success stories worthy of emulation because most talk and act like the people who work for and with them.

So perhaps what drives proverbially average Americans crazy is not the success and money of others, but the condescension and hypocrisy of what a particular elite says contrasted with how it lives: The disconnect recalls the Reverend Jimmy Swaggart, the televangelist who on Sunday mornings three decades ago used to break into tears as he loudly condemned the sins of the flesh, while he privately indulged his worldly appetites.

Elites, whose lifestyles lead them to burn lots of carbon, rail about the Paris accords to those who get by burning lots less. What is galling is to see how little the elites’ green rhetoric is backed up by their green behavior. Could Hollywood celebrities at least for a year swear off the use of their private jets that emit more carbon emissions in a year than entire small towns in Ohio?

Why do not college professors who are strident activists for climate change agree to limit their intercontinental jet trips to one a year? Could our pundits and politicians who warn Middle America to brace for radical changes in their lifestyles at least agree to live in houses smaller than 2,500 square feet?

How do our elites square the circle of identity politics and big money? The notion that reparatory admissions and hiring are based on race and gender presupposes that past endemic bias has led to oppression that in turn had hit hard the livelihoods of the Other. But what happens when after a half-century of affirmative action, many who receive preferences are richer than those whom they accuse of white privilege?

Or is it more ironic than that? Wealthy white college kids chant about the demon white privilege, going so far as to help demand racially segregated safe spaces, dorms, and, in one case currently in the news, temporary expulsion of white people from campus. They rage against a privilege that they enjoy and that their perceived targets — the unenlightened middle of America — do not. Yet one easy way of ending white privilege, to the extent that it exists, among elite enclaves would be to send one’s children to public high schools rich in diversity.

One wonders how many hecklers and disrupters at Middlebury College, to take one example, chose prep school when there were better opportunities to mingle with minorities at inner-city schools? And if they really wished to address culpable whites, shouldn’t the college sponsor field trips to rural Pennsylvania or southern Ohio where such chanting demonstrators might more directly address the targets of their ire?

If one believes that charter schools and vouchers weaken the public-school system, then an effective way to counter such challenges would be to put one’s own children in public classrooms rather than to deny the poor the ability to disconnect from the public schools for the same reasons that so many elites have. One of the most surreal paradoxes of Washington, D.C., is the number of progressives (including the former president of the United States) who put their children in Sidwell-Friends while passionately opposing charter schools and vouchers.

The list of progressive paradoxes is limitless: handgun possession by the law-abiding is a supposed catalyst for violence, but not for security details who surround Hollywood and political celebrities. Elites lecture Americans on their supposed – isms and -ologies (sexism, racism, nativism), but when such sins are endemic to Middle Eastern societies abroad or indeed among immigrant communities inside the West, they are paternalistically excused or ignored.

Common themes in rap music are misogyny, racism and calls for violence against police — the sort of career-ending lyrics for most other entertainers.

The media are overwhelmingly progressive and critical of America for its supposed backward and unprogressive values. Yet reactionary ideas are most evident on the coastal corridors and on supposedly tolerant and liberal campuses. Who thought the liberal civil rights of the 1960s would end in the neo-segregationist movements of the 2010s, most recently at Evergreen College, where all whites were asked to leave the campus for a day while minority students shut down the campus?

Yet visit liberal Silicon Valley or Hollywood boardrooms, and a self-described and purported meritocracy rules, which so far has resulted in few minorities in those corridors of influence and power.

All these hypocrisies raise the question among fly-over Americans about the entire politically correct progressive agenda of elites: Has it become reduced to a cynical sort of indemnity insurance that elites take out to lubricate their own privilege? (Will Bill Maher survive his use of the N-word, given his loud liberalism?) Al Gore got rich by creating a veritable global-warming-alarmist industry, only to offload his largely failed cable channel (in a fire sale timed to help him beat anticipated higher capital-gains taxes) to the gas- and oil-exporting autocracy of Qatar. He got away without criticism because he was Al Gore, liberal environmental-justice warrior.

John Kerry has spent a political career prompting higher taxes — only in 2010 to attempt to berth his $7 million yacht in Rhode Island rather than his home Massachusetts to avoid high sales and excise taxes. He thought he could square that circle because he was John Kerry, fierce supporter of higher redistributive taxes to expand social services.

California is the locus classicus of sanctimonious elite hypocrisies: Interior farmers must give up their contracted irrigation water to save the Delta smelt, while San Francisco environmentalists insist that their own water supplies flow from the distant Sierra uninterrupted over the San Joaquin River into the reservoirs of the Bay Area.

Stanford students lecture about erasing things named after Junipero Serra, who purportedly exploited and maltreated native Californians while founding the mission system. But Leland Stanford, the founder of the university, as governor of the state, often lectured on the inferiority of nonwhite populations, while Stanford’s first president, David Starr Jordan (co-founder of the racist “Human Betterment Foundation”), was an unapologetic eugenicist who feared the effects of miscegenation. It is quite easy to airbrush Father Serra from a few streets, but campus social-justice warriors apparently value their Stanford brand name on their diplomas too much to Trotskyize away their own investment. Left unstated is that liberal students cannot be parties to racism so, presto, Stanford is exempt from rebranding.

Obama, who lectured the country that wealthy people did not build their own businesses, that everyone should realize when they had made enough money, and that it was not the time for profiting, now earns $400,000 from Wall Street interests for short speeches on his past successes — on the heels of raking in a reported $60 million for a his-and-hers book deal. How does the tire saleswoman in Grand Rapids or the welder in Tennessee square that? Americans have no problem with Obama’s post-presidential lucrative entrepreneurialism, but they do mind that he is never subject to the ramifications of his own loud redistributionist ideology.

In sum, the progressive Left’s problem is not elitism per se, at least in the sense that it’s now the party of wealthy people, investors, professionals, academics, the media, and celebrities. Rather the rub is the Left’s grating habit of lecturing America on its shortcomings while exempting themselves.

Finally, why do progressive elites act so patently hypocritical when they must sense it is destroying the Democratic party?

Other than the Dirty Harry answer “because they like it,” the answers are complex.

In part, they virtue-signal their own distance from the shunned middle classes, who are assumed to lack both the romance of the distant poor and the tastes and culture of the proximate rich.

Lectures without personal consequences allow the enjoyment of privilege without personal guilt. Without Barack Obama’s boilerplate on diversity and social justice, the public would see that he now lives a far more privileged life than does a Mitt Romney.

In career terms, the more memos you write deploring the lack of diversity, the less likely you or your old-boy white staff will be scrutinized by diversity czars. Hold up a simulacrum of Donald Trump’s severed head, dream to a crowd of blowing up the White House, flip the finger to Trump’s picture while flashing the V-sign to Snoop Dogg, the ex-felon and pimp, and there is little careerist downside. Mutatis mutandis, do that in the context of Obama, and your career would be over.

Big-city coastal culture is also closer to a postmodern hip Europe than to the premodern uncool interior a few miles away. There is a sense of globalized entitlement of a particular class that has prospered as a domestic market of 300 million turned into a world market of 6 billion. Our new plutocrats believes that because they became capitalist demi-gods, they also deserved commensurate cultural and spiritual exceptionalism.

An elite’s lectures on melting ice caps, transgendered restrooms, or Black Lives Matter are progressive versions of an unapologetic sinner’s singing hymns in church on Sunday; the harangues bring them closer to their social-justice deities and apparently give personal meaning to their otherwise quite non-transcendent lives.

In all their own manifest hypocrisies, Americans take for granted that elites of the Left have become the Jimmy Swaggarts of our age.

The Fusion Party
May 30, 2017 10:35 am / Leave a Comment / victorhanson
By Victor Davis Hanson
National Review

The Democrats are following the lead of the progressive media — together, they now form the anti-Trump brigade.

Is there a Democratic-party alternative to President Trump’s tax plan?

Is there a Democratic congressional proposal to stop the hemorrhaging and impending implosion of Obamacare?

Do Democrats have some sort of comprehensive package to help the economy grow or to deal with the recent doubling of the national debt?

What is the Democratic alternative to Trump’s apparent foreign policy of pragmatic realism or his neglect of entitlement reform?

The answers are all no, because for all practical purposes there is no Democratic party as we have traditionally known it.

It is no longer a liberal (a word now replaced by progressive) political alternative to conservatism as much as a cultural movement fueled by coastal elites, academics, celebrities — and the media. Its interests are not so much political as cultural. True to its new media identity, the Democratic party is against anything Trump rather than being for something. It seeks to shock and entertain in the fashion of a red-carpet celebrity or MSNBC talking head rather than to legislate or formulate policy as a political party.

The result is that in traditional governing terms, the Democratic party has recalibrated itself into near political impotency. Barack Obama ended the centrism of Bill Clinton and with it the prior Democratic comeback (thanks to the third-party candidacies of Ross Perot) from the disastrous McGovern, Carter, Mondale, and Dukakis years.

Indeed, Obama’s celebrity-media/identity-politics/community-organizing model brought him more new voters than the old voters he lost — but so far, his new political paradigm has not proven transferable to any other national candidates. No wonder that over the eight years of the Obama administration, Democrats lost the majority of the state legislatures, the governorships, local offices, the Senate, the House, the presidency, and, probably, the Supreme Court.

Most Democratic leaders are dynastic and geriatric: Bernie Sanders (75), Hillary Clinton (69), Elizabeth Warren (67), Diane Feinstein (83), Nancy Pelosi (77), Steny Hoyer (77), or Jerry Brown (79). They are hardly spry enough to dance to the party’s new “Pajama Boy” and “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” music.

Yet those not past their mid-sixties appear unstable, such as the potty-mouth DNC head Tom Perez and his assistant, the volatile congressman Keith Ellison. Or they still believe it is 2008 and they can rally yet again around “hope and change” and Vero possumus. That politicos are talking about an amateurish Chelsea Clinton as a serious future candidate reflects the impoverishment of Democratic political talent.

In such a void, a traditionally progressive media, including the entertainment industry, stepped in and fused with what is left of the Democratic party to form the new opposition to the Republican party and in particular to Donald Trump. The aim now is to alter culture through the courts and pressure groups rather than to make laws.

A disinterested observer would have seen that the Democratic antidote to Trumpism was a return to Bill Clinton’s focus on working-class, pocketbook issues — the issues that might win back swing voters in the proverbially blue-wall states. But that won’t happen. The Democratic party is now in the hands of Obama progressives, who in turn follow the lead of the hip, cool, and outraged media that have no responsibility other than to appear hip and cool and outraged. Trump apparently understands that and so focuses most of his invective not against a tired Nancy Pelosi or the shrill Chuck Schumer but at the major networks, mainstream newspapers, and Hollywood celebrities — the heart now of the progressive fusion party.

Trump’s strategy is understandable. A recent study released by the Harvard Kennedy School and Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy reported that in Trump’s first 100 days, 80 percent of major-media news coverage was negative (double the figure during President Obama’s first three months). More important, anti-Trump news constituted 41 percent of all media news coverage, a percentage three times greater than coverage accorded prior presidents. In clinical terms, we might call that an obsession.

If it were not for Fox News’s much caricatured “fair and balanced” coverage (52 percent of its Trump coverage was negative, Harvard reported) to average in with other major print and television media, the anti-Trump bias would have been far greater — given that CNN and NBC ran almost no media coverage that portrayed Trump in a positive light (their coverage was 93 percent negative).

The symptoms of the Media-Democratic party fusion range from the trivial to the profound. The merger is emblematized by the annual White House Correspondents Dinner, which has now fully morphed from a self-congratulatory night for Washington media insiders to a star-studded Petronian banquet of progressive celebrities.

Operationally, the celebrity world and the media have institutionalized political obscenity and street theater. On Inauguration Day, Madonna dreamed out loud of blowing up the White House; Ashley Judd went on a crude, incoherent rant about Trump. Since then, media fixtures such as Steven Colbert and Bill Maher have melted down, the one suggesting on the air that Trump had committed a sex act on Vladimir Putin, the other that he commits incest with his daughter. Yet both were simply amplifying the prior gross slur from Politico reporter Julia Joffe: “Either Trump is f***ing his daughter, or he’s shirking nepotism laws. Which is worse?”

Democrats in Congress and party functionaries have parroted the media’s obscenity and its pettiness. Sixty-seven representatives boycotted the inauguration. A new Democratic-party T-shirt reads “Democrats Give a S*** About People.” The head of the DNC, Tom Perez, routinely uses “s***” as if he were a stand-up on late-night TV. John Burton finished chairing the California Democratic convention with group chants of “f*** Trump,” with collective outstretched middle fingers.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D., N.Y.) cried out that if the Democrats could not offer an antidote to Trump, then “we should go the f*** home.” California senator Kamala Harris, supposed icon of the future of the party, rushed in with her own four-letter obscenities.

Celebrity ex-felon Martha Stewart thinks it’s hip to flip the bird to a photo of Donald Trump while simultaneously flipping the V-sign to an image of rapper Snoop Dogg, the violent ex-felon and former pimp who was most recently in the news for shooting an effigy of Donald Trump. Obscenity has become the media tail wagging the Democratic-party dog, even though such vulgarity might shock television audiences rather than win voters.

Note also the media’s idea of the “Resistance” to Trump, as if multimillionaire celebrities attacking Trump while camped out in the scrub of the Hollywood hills were our version of the World War II maquisards who ambushed Waffen SS patrols in rural France. After the media hyped the “Resistance,” even sore-loser Hillary Clinton piled on that she too had enlisted. Role playing, rumor peddling, and virtue signaling, in lieu of winning elections and offices, are for now the new Democratic agendas.

Instead of formulating policy, the fusion party targets its opponents in Whac-A-Mole fashion. After moving on from the smear of First Lady Melania Trump as an illegal alien and call girl, we went to Steve Bannon, the Charles Lindbergh–style fascist; then Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the duplicitous Russian patsy; on to daughter Ivanka Trump, the incestuous peddler of trinkets; then to National Security Council member Sebastian Gorka, the Hungarian Nazi sympathizer; and now presidential adviser Jared Kushner, the Russian collaborator. Each “scandal” got its 15 minutes of cable-news outrage and unhinged tweets from celebrities, before the wolf cries howled on to the next target.

The media brag that they now more or less run the Democratic agenda. Univision’s Jorge Ramos (whose daughter worked for the Hillary Clinton campaign) recently thundered:

Our position, I think, has to be much more aggressive. And we should not expect the Democrats to do that job. It is our job. If we don’t question the president, if we don’t question his lies, if we don’t do it, who is going to do it? It’s an uncomfortable position.

In other words, Ramos confessed that the Democratic party apparently has neither new ideas nor a political agenda that would win over the public, and thus self-appointed journalistic grandees like him would have to step forward and lead the anti-Trump opposition as they shape the news.

Fellow panelist and CNN’s media correspondent Brian Stelter answered Ramos, “You’re almost saying we’re a stand-in for the Democrats.” Thereby, Stelter inadvertently confirmed Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon’s widely criticized but prescient assertion that the media are in fact “the opposition party” — and should be treated as such.

During the 2016 campaign, James Rutenberg of the New York Times reminded journalists that they should feel no need to treat the exceptional Trump candidacy by “normal standards,” a de facto admission that journalistic crusaders would take the political lead in opposing Trump. Christiane Amanpour said nearly the same thing in reference to Trump’s stance on global warming: Journalists are now to be advocates, not disinterested reporters of the news.

In the matter of the Podesta WikiLeaks trove, it was often difficult to determine whether reporters such as Glenn Thrush and Dana Milbank were colluding with the reelection efforts of Hillary Clinton, or whether an inept campaign without ideas had turned to such reporters and columnists to develop its campaign talking points and strategies.

When Thrush was caught massaging his stories with the Clinton campaign and confessed himself to be a hack, he received a career boost: The New York Times hired him. The message seemed to be that more reporters should do what the Democrats could not. The common theme of the Obama-era Journolist, Ben Rhodes’s “echo chamber,” the Washington Beltway power media/politics marriages and sibling connections, and the WikiLeaks revelations was that the media and the Democratic party were more or less indistinguishable.

Most of Hillary Clinton’s agendas and campaign themes were not policy-oriented; nor did they grow from a coherent and detailed political ideology shared by Democratic officials. Instead, Hillary Clinton modeled her talking points on media-driven agitprop such as Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and global-warming activism.

Yet outside Hollywood, New York, and Washington, the issues facing voters are not income redistribution, transgendered bathrooms, the division of Americans by race, or the radical alteration of the economy to supposedly address recent climate change induced by carbon emissions. In a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll in late 2016, the media earned only a 19 percent favorable rating, which raises the question of whether the fusion between Democrats and the media is the old party’s salvation or suicide.

Donald Trump has been given a great gift in that his gaffes are seen by most Americans in the context of an obsessed and unhinged Democratic-media nexus. He is pitted against a new fusion party of media elites and aging political functionaries, who all believe that America should operate on their norms, the norms of Washington, New York, Hollywood, and Malibu — all places that symbolize, to most Americans, exactly how the country has gone wrong.

[What is as important and should be mentioned, is that the Left no longer believes in democracy. We voted, they voted, we got GOP/ Conservative officials, stop crying and respect the vote.

Further, reported today, is that thousands have voted in VA who are not U.S. citizens. A new commission is looking into voter fraud. Remember, after Hillary lost, there was an outcry to check the vote and in Detroit they found hundreds of illegals had voted.]

What We Remember on Memorial Day
May 25, 2017 12:59 pm / Leave a Comment / victorhanson
The obligation to honor the war dead has often conflicted with the need to make distinctions among them and their causes
By Victor Davis Hanson// Wall Street Journal

A few years ago I was honored to serve briefly on the American Battle Monuments Commission, whose chief duty is the custodianship of American military cemeteries abroad. Over 125,000 American dead now rest in these serene parks, some 26 in 16 countries. Another 94,000 of the missing are commemorated by name only. The graves (mostly fatalities of World Wars I and II) are as perfectly maintained all over the world, from Tunisia to the Philippines, as those of the war dead who rest in the well-manicured acres of the U.S. military cemetery in Arlington, Va.

A world away from the white marble statuary, crosses, Stars of David, noble inscriptions and manicured greenery of these cemeteries is the stark 246-foot wall of polished igneous rock of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the mall in Washington. On its black surfaces are etched 58,307 names of American dead in Vietnam. They are listed in the chronological order of their deaths. The melancholy wall, birthed in bitter controversy at its inception in 1982, emphasizes tragedy more than American confidence in its transcendent values—as if to warn the nation that the agenda of Vietnam was not quite that of 1917 and 1941.

The Vietnam War may have reopened with special starkness the question of how to honor our fallen dead, but it is hardly a new problem in our history. As today’s disputes over the legacy of the Civil War and the Confederacy suggest, it has never been enough just to lament the sacrifice and carnage of our wars, whether successful or failed. We feel the need to honor the war dead but also to make distinctions among them, elevating those who served noble causes while passing judgment on their foes. This is not an exclusively American impulse. It has deep roots in the larger Western tradition of commemoration, and no era—certainly not our own—has managed to escape its complexities and paradoxes.

Our own idea of Memorial Day originated as “Decoration Day,” the post-Civil War tradition, in both the North and the South, of decorating the graves of the war dead. That rite grew out of the shock and trauma of the Civil War. In the conflict’s first major battle at Shiloh (April 6-7, 1862) there were likely more American casualties (about 24,000 dead, wounded and missing on both sides) than in all the nation’s prior wars combined since its founding.

The shared ordeal of the Civil War, with some 650,000 fatalities, would eventually demand a unified national day of remembrance. Memorial Day began as an effort to square the circle in honoring America’s dead—without privileging the victors or their cause. The approach of the summer holidays seemed the most appropriate moment to heal our civic wounds. The timing suggested renewal and continuity, whereas an autumn or winter date might add unduly to the grim lamentation of the day.

But could the distinctions so crucial to war itself really be suppressed? Consider the themes of the two greatest speeches in the history of Western oratory: Pericles’ long Funeral Oration for the Athenian dead of the first year of the Peloponnesian War, delivered in 431 B.C. and amounting to some 3,000 words in most translations; and nearly 2,300 years later, President Abraham Lincoln’s 272-word Gettysburg Address of 1863.
An illustration of Pericles’ Funeral Oration.
An illustration of Pericles’ Funeral Oration. Photo: Alamy

Both statesmen agree that the mere words of the present generation cannot do justice to the sacrifice of the fallen young. Lincoln sees the talking and the living as less authentic commemorators than the mute dead: “We can not consecrate—we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.”

Pericles argues that even a notable such as himself has almost no right to assess the sacrifices of the dead: “I could have wished that the reputations of many brave men were not to be imperiled in the mouth of a single individual, to stand or fall according as he spoke well or ill.”

By their ultimate sacrifice—what Lincoln calls “the last full measure of devotion”—the mute war dead argue that even heroic men are less important than the eternal values of freedom and democracy that “shall not perish from the earth.” Such chauvinism assumes that democracies are by nature superior to the alternatives. Thus to Pericles, Athens was the “school of Hellas” and for Lincoln America was “a new nation, conceived in Liberty.”

For both orators, the dead are the natural link between self-sacrificing forefathers and the present generation’s own progeny, who at some future date may be called upon to emulate those who have died to perpetuate the nation. In this view, we are not quite unique individuals but part of a larger generation whose values and accomplishments are to be judged collectively and in comparison to what came before and will follow.

‘Both Pericles and Lincoln see war and its evils as tragically innate to the human experience.’

Finally, both Pericles and Lincoln see war and its evils as tragically innate to the human experience. Conflict will demand sacrifices, in varying degrees, from each successive generation of free peoples. As the philosopher George Santayana more pessimistically put it, “Only the dead have seen the end of war.” Both orators suggest that democracies and republics will always be the natural targets of aggressors who see their freedom as weakness to be exploited rather than as magnanimity to be appreciated.

The Western tradition of commemoration also includes a unique idea of individual moral exemption. As first articulated by Pericles, we overlook any defects of character of the war dead, attributing to one brief moment of ultimate sacrifice the power to wash away all prior moral faults.

A noble death serves, in the words of Pericles, as “a cloak to cover a man’s other imperfections; since the good action has blotted out the bad, and his merit as a citizen more than outweighed his demerits as an individual.” The great playwright Aeschylus wanted his epitaph to read only that he was a veteran of the Athenian victory at Marathon—a battle where his brother fell.

These themes still resonate in our own habits and rites. This Memorial Day the flags on graves in American cemeteries set the dead apart, in a special moral category that discourages any discussion of the bothersome details of their short lives.

‘We now tend to see the Confederate dead as faceless emblems of larger causes.’

Pericles and Lincoln assume that the sacrifice of the war dead is enhanced by the nobility of their cause and the victories they have won. In the age of the Parthenon and Sophocles, democratic Athenians considered themselves superior to oligarchic Spartans, seeing vindication in their early successes (Athens would go on to lose the war 26 years after the great speech of Pericles). Similarly, the Union believed itself the moral better of the slaveholding South and would march to triumph under that banner two years after Gettysburg.

For democratic peoples, it is difficult to separate victory and nobility from commemorations of the fallen. This is especially true when it comes to events that directly engage our own moral imperatives. In the case of the Civil War, we now tend to see the Confederate dead as faceless emblems of larger causes, not as unique individuals who wrestled with their own moral paradoxes. Yet we seem to think that future generations will not do the same to us, applying their own—possibly quite different—standards to the collective sacrifices of our generation.

Herodotus, the Greek historian of the Persian Wars, saw armed conflict as a tragedy for all warring parties precisely because it was central to the human experience and thus endless. In obscene fashion, war inverted the natural order of peacetime by compelling fathers to bury sons. Pericles bluntly reminded us that the tragedy is not when we the middle-aged and old die but when the youth do, “to whom a fall, if it came, would be most tremendous in its consequences.”

A portrait of Abraham Lincoln.
A portrait of Abraham Lincoln. Photo: Getty Images

Railing at the loss of the nation’s youth has thus long accompanied the tradition of praising noble sacrifice for a just cause. The historian Thucydides nearly wept over the young Athenians senselessly killed—in the wrong place, at the wrong time, on the wrong mission—by the tribes of wild Aetolia: “These were by far the best men in the city of Athens that fell during this war.” When Lincoln said of the dead that they “shall not have died in vain,” he implied that the sacrifices of the aggregate Union war dead by November 1863 would be for naught if the North lost the war.

The Roman lyric poet Horace in his Odes famously praised the ultimate contributions of Roman legionaries, declaring, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”: “It is a sweet and fitting thing to die on behalf of the fatherland.” Wilfred Owen, the English poet and veteran of the trenches of World War I (killed one week before the armistice), would have none of it. In the conclusion of his nightmarish signature poem, he bitterly channeled Horace:

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est

Pro patria mori.

After the Somme and Verdun, Owen no longer saw clear moral winners and losers, only endless carnage without hope of resolution: hence the “old Lie.” Similarly scornful was the poet and critic Randall Jarrell’s response to the contribution of Allied bombing to winning World War II. His poem “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” ends with the verse, “When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.”

‘We don’t mourn all war dead equally or find tragedy in every loss.’

Still, for all the carnage and senselessness in just and unjust wars alike, we don’t mourn all war dead equally or find tragedy in every loss. Certainly the SS officers who were buried at Bitburg, Germany—where President Ronald Reagan in 1985 caused a storm by visiting on the 40th anniversary of V-E Day—were connected to the horrors of Auschwitz. And while there is something understandable in solemn visits of Japanese officials to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo to honor the 2,466,532 names of the dead found in the Shinto shrine’s “Book of Souls,” many of those men left a trail of 20 million dead throughout Asia and the Pacific from 1931 to 1945.

I grew up in a Swedish-American family in which the name “Okinawa” went unmentioned, a campaign that was tactically unimaginative and strategically incoherent—and yet aimed at finally stopping a murderous imperial regime. My uncle and namesake, Victor Hanson, a corporal in the 6th Marine Division, was killed in the last hours of the last day of battle for Sugar Loaf Hill.

I inherited both Vic’s college athletic equipment and a Periclean admonition from my father (who himself flew on 39 missions over Japan in a B-29) to “live up to Vic”—without much elaboration other than the implicit advice that the only thing worse than fighting a dirty war on Okinawa would have been to lose it.

I visit Victor Hanson’s grave each Memorial Day in the nearby small California Central Valley farming town of Kingsburg, still in astonishment that such a mythical person, whom I never met, gave up his youth (and a long life ahead) for what we have now collectively become. Pericles hoped that such sacrifices would move the living of subsequent generations to a deeper appreciation of the greatness of Athens: “feed your eyes upon her from day to day, until love of her fills your hearts.”

On Memorial Day we should remember that all commemoration is underpinned by ambiguities about the causes, conduct and aims of particular wars. No one has captured the heartbreak of the war dead more effectively than the Marine memorialist E.B. Sledge, who wrote “With the Old Breed,” a horrific account of his nightmare on Peleliu and Okinawa.

Sledge is sometimes simplistically described as an antiwar voice (“So many dead. So many maimed. So many bright futures consigned to the ashes of the past.”), but he did not end his gruesome story of combat with a universal denunciation of war. He finished instead with a solemn reminder—somewhere between Horace and Wilfred Owen—that circumstances count.

His words are worth recalling as we cast our eyes over the endless fields of tiny flags we will again see this Memorial Day on the graves of Americans who gave their all for us:

Until the millennium arrives and countries cease trying to enslave others, it will be necessary to accept one’s responsibilities and be willing to make sacrifices for one’s country—as my comrades did. As the troops used to say, “If the country is good enough to live in, it’s good enough to fight for.” With privilege goes responsibility.

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Was the Civil War Necessary?
By Brion McClanahan
May 3, 2017

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Trump supposedly stepped in it. Again.
In an interview that aired Monday with Salena Zito, he wondered aloud that if better leadership could have prevented the Civil War [sic].
Trump thought that Andrew Jackson would have prevailed in a showdown between the North and the South. After all, he did it before in the 1830s. Trump then said this: “He [Jackson] was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War, he said, ‘There’s no reason for this.’”
Trump followed up by committing the most heinous of all heinous acts. He questioned if the Civil War [sic] was necessary!
The leftist media immediately pounced, with several openly mocking Trump for believing that Andrew Jackson was alive in 1861.
Time to buy old US gold coins
A USA Today headline read: “Note to Donald Trump: Andrew Jackson wasn’t alive for the Civil War.”
The LA Times: “Trump makes puzzling claim about Andrew Jackson, Civil War.” The Chicago Tribune ran the same headline (groupthink) as did a number of other “news” outlets.
Social media trolls ran post after post criticizing Trump’s “revisionist” history, lambasting him for not knowing when Jackson was alive, or that he dared to buck modern historical interpretation. The snarky liberal establishment dimwit historian Kevin Krause Tweeted “When the Civil War came, Andrew Jackson had been dead fifteen years.”
Zing! You nailed him Dr. Kevin. How bright! How engaging! Only a Princeton prof could have come up with that one.
The congratulatory remarks rolled in from his “esteemed” colleagues.
And then The Atlantic staff lowered the boom. At least that is what they thought.
In only a matter of hours, this “news” magazine published two pieces on Trump’s supposed gaffe.
Young leftist twit David Graham published a piece titled “Trump’s Peculiar Understanding of the Civil War” in which he made a number of “peculiar” claims himself.
Graham suggested that: 1) “nullification” is unconstitutional because the federal courts say so. 2) “The Civil War [sic] was fought over slavery, and the insistence of Southern states that they be allowed to keep it.” 3) The Civil War [sic] wasn’t tragic because the “great thinker” Ta-Nehisi Coates said so in 2011. 4) War was inevitable because of the “Confederate states’ commitment to slavery.” 5) If Trump had read great history like Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Lincoln biography Team of Rivals, he would have a different position on the War—this position is hysterical.
Graham also dusted off the “Dunning school” pejorative in order to show his supposed intellectual superiority to the sitting president. After all, Graham insisted that Trump can’t be blamed for being such a dunderhead because even though he attended great schools, “Many Americans are still taught, incorrectly, that the war was essentially a conflict over state’s rights, with abolition as a byproduct of the war. This revisionist view flourished after the war, and though gradually being displaced, is common across the country.”
This is the revisionist calling traditional history revisionism.
The Atlantic followed up just over an hour later with a piece by Yoni Applebaum titled “Why There Was a Civil War.” The revisionist hits just kept coming.
Applebaum didn’t berate Trump for suggesting that historians don’t ask if the Civil War [sic] could have been avoided—he proved that this has been done for years by going through about a century of American historiography on the issue—but for claiming that the War could have been avoided and by “the omission of a critical word: slavery.” To Applebaum, the question of the War begins and ends with slavery and nothing but slavery. He provided one quote from Lincoln to prove his point and as most shallow Lincoln apologists do today, several quotes from the Southern States’ declaration of causes that seem to prove unequivocally that slavery and only slavery led to the War.
He concluded his article with a strange application of moral causation to the War, a moral causation that the vast majority of Americans missed in both 1860 and 1861 when the question of war or peace was still on the table. “There are some conflicts,” he wrote, “that a leader cannot suppress, no matter how strong he may be; some deals that should not be struck, no matter how alluring they may seem. This was the great moral truth on which the Republican Party was founded.”
If only it were that simple. And if only Lincoln was the great leader that both Graham and Applebaum believe him to be.
It seems both Graham and Applebaum fell asleep in class or at the very least have swallowed the Lincoln myth so thoroughly that no evidence to the contrary could persuade them of their folly or their revisionism.
Certainly, Trump is no scholar and his reverence for Jackson is troubling, for it was Jackson who provided the blueprint for Lincoln’s heavy handed tactics toward the South in 1861. To suggest that he would have worked out a compromise is a stretch, though he did support the deal Henry Clay brokered with South Carolina in 1832, a deal that resulted in the people of South Carolina nullifying the Force Bill and then heading home.
That is often lost in the story. Nullification worked and contrary to what Graham suggested, the federal court system has never had the final say on the constitutionality of nullification. That was always the point. States don’t ask permission from the federal courts to nullify unconstitutional legislation, and as every proponent of the Constitution swore in 1787 and 1788, including Alexander Hamilton and James Wilson, laws contrary to the Constitution would be void. Jefferson and Madison made it clear the States could void them.
The real problem with both pieces in The Atlantic, however, is the insistence that the War was inevitable and some moral conflict over slavery caused the shooting.
Applebaum understood that the entire fabric of early American history was built on compromise, but Graham seemed to miss that.
Based on the history of the United States, there was never an “irrepressible conflict” until the North decided to fabricate one.
The South, in fact, was willing to compromise in 1860 and 1861, as it had been for the eighty years prior. Jefferson Davis insisted that any compromise placed before the special Committee of 13 established to handle the crisis needed the support of both Republican and Democratic members. He could get the Democrats to support several. But the Republicans, at the insistence of president-elect Lincoln, said no to every single one. Is that the work of a leader?
That led six other Southern States out of the Union in early 1861. Lincoln could still have saved the Union through compromise at this juncture, but chose not to do so. As Senator James Bayard of Delaware stated in 1861, the Union still existed even with seven States missing. The government, banking houses, and infrastructure remained. It seems that the “Confederate States insistence on slavery” had nothing to do with War. War and secession are separate issues. Secession didn’t mean war was inevitable. Most Americans hoped otherwise, even in the South where President Davis insisted that the South simply wanted to be left alone. To think the opposite is to assume the posture of the British in 1776. That is un-American.
There were still six other slave States in the Union as late as April 1861, over a month after Lincoln took office, six slave States that had already rejected secession. Lincoln was not worried about slavery at this point. He supported a proposed thirteenth amendment which would have protected slavery indefinitely in the States where it already existed. He promised never to interfere with the institution in the South. Lincoln’s objective in March 1861 was to “preserve the Union” at all costs, and by “preserving the Union” Lincoln meant preserving the Republican Party and his fledgling administration. Letting the South go would have certainly made him a one term president. He received less than forty percent of the popular vote in 1860.
Applebaum is correct that letting the South go would have ensured the existence of slavery both within the Union and out for the near future (every other power abolished slavery by 1880), but this was not a moral question for most Americans. Lincoln received thunderous applause across the North in 1860 when he made promises to leave the institution alone. Racism was an American institution and Lincoln never challenged the prevailing attitudes on blacks. He embraced them. The Republican Party didn’t dabble in “moral truths.” Their objective was always political. Bottle the South up, ensure that the Whig economic agenda could be ascendant, and control the spoils.
This still doesn’t take away from the tragedy of the War. Contrary to what the “great scholar” Coates had to say—and he has as much claim to being a great scholar as David Barton, which isn’t much—the loss of one million men, the best blood in America, to a war for Union as Lincoln insisted was unnecessary at best and diabolical at worst. The elimination of slavery was for much of the war an afterthought. Lincoln considered it nothing more than a war measure to “best subdue the enemy.”
The simple fact is that Lincoln wanted war. He had the chance to save the Union without war before he took office. He had the chance to save the Union without war in March 1861. He rejected attempts to peacefully purchase federal property and began polling his cabinet about provisioning Sumter less than a week after taking office knowing full well it would cause war. As he later told a political ally, his decision to provision Fort Sumter had the desired outcome, meaning armed conflict. Nothing can sugarcoat Lincoln’s headlong rush into the bloodiest war in American history.
Trump may have been on to something here. Better leadership could have avoided the carnage. But saying that is now considered sacrilege. How closed minded of the “liberal” historical profession and establishment gatekeepers of acceptable truth.
But who cares. No one really reads The Atlantic anymore, anyway.
The Best of Brion McClanahan

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Brion McClanahan [send him mail] holds a Ph.D. in American history from the University of South Carolina and is a faculty member at Tom Woods’s Liberty Classroom. He is the author or co-author of six books, most recently 9 Presidents Who Screwed Up America and Four Who Tried to Save Her (Regnery History, 2016). Find him at http://www.brionmcclanahan.com.

Previous article by Brion McClanahan: The Latest 18th Century Fake News

Angry Reader
May 1, 2017 5:14 pm / Leave a Comment / victorhanson
From an Angry Reader:

Mr. Hanson,

Did you volunteer or were you drafted (like so many of us) to fight in Vietnam? Did you know “we” lost that war to those so called “commies” and now those “commies” make Trump brand shirts and ties?

Also, are you willing to pay for increased US military involvement throughout the world with more tax cuts as the US did in the never ending wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? Cutting spending for meals on wheels, planned parenthood, health insurance benefits for Americans, clean air and water, might not be enough to pay for all your munitions or even meet payroll for a lowly paid non drafted military. At least US tax dollars paid for our napalm in Vietnam. What are you willing to sacrifice in Syria, Iran, Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. etc. etc. to “make America great again?” Perhaps your own life or limbs again?

Perhaps reading a little more George Santayana might help balance your thirst for blood. And perhaps a “proportionate” bombing of an air base before warning Russia and Assad before time might actually be actually a bit more equal in “proportions” to scare your enemies. And as a veteran and historian try to remember how many bombs, and napalm, and bullets, and killings of the enemy and our own troops it took in that classic military loss. Revenge may be sweet but it doesn’t always go as planned, even for those willing to pay for the effort with massive tax cuts. As a historian, that is one thing you should know by now.

Happy Easter.

Sincerely,

Jimmy Gorman

Chicago Tribune Subscriber

Victor Davis Hanson’s Reply:

Dear Angry Reader Jimmy Gorman,

I registered for the draft the day that I was eligible, and received a lottery number in 1972 at a time when the draft then shortly ended and less than 25,000 Americans were left in Vietnam at year’s end—and when U.S. combat operations on the ground were largely over in Vietnam.

Do you eat food? If so, would you be competent and morally qualified to comment on food policy, given the likelihood that you have never farmed or shared the life of a farmer, and have no first-hand experience with tractor work, peach pruning, or fertilization—or the work of others that brings your food to your table? I also did not live in ancient Greece and therefore should not write about the Peloponnesian War? I cannot adjudicate the success or failure of a past ruptured appendix operation because I am not a surgeon?

We did not lose to North Vietnam, but achieved a settlement that was set up by a peace agreement between the two countries in 1973. The aftermath of Watergate and the serial cut-offs of all U.S. military aid to the South Vietnamese government encouraged North Vietnam to resume the war, and it did so successfully—sort of as if Eisenhower had cut all U.S. aid to South Korea in the election year 1956 and withdrawn U.S. peacekeepers. Do you think South Korea would exist today?

Vietnam is opening its economy, but otherwise it is a Stalinist country; the millions who were jailed, executed, or fled as boat people might not share your rosy scenarios or jest. I opposed the bombing in Libya. I suggested that Obama was foolish to have set a redline in Syria that he never intended to honor and would empower the Assad government to kill even more innocents. I criticized judge/jury/executioner drone assassination missions (which Obama joked about at a White House Correspondence Dinner). Do you read or just rant?

You must know, of course, that current defense spending is near historic postwar lows as a percentage of the budget, and that entitlements and social spending are at record highs. Go back and check the ratios between social expenditures as a percentage of the federal budget versus defense spending in 1950 and then compare those ratios to today’s figures. And you must know that Obama doubled the debt in the largest spending spree in U.S. history, despite raising taxes and earning record revenues. Yet he never achieved 3% economic growth unlike both Bush and Clinton. Do you think those massive outlays since 2009 made the U.S. safer, the inner-city more tranquil, or the “blue wall” rust-belt states more prosperous?

Have you really read George Santayana other than to pull out his tired, one-trick pony quote on learning from history? I suggest you try reading his collected lectures on aesthetics published as The Sense of Beauty and then once you get through them, write how inspired you were about its argument and aims. (Incidentally, the widely quoted “only the dead have seen the end of war,” which is usually and wrongly attributed to Thucydides, was Santayana’s Soliloquies in England).

I was waiting for the leftist ad hominem attack and of course it appeared with the slur “thirst for blood.”

Deterrence keeps the peace; appeasement starts wars and gets people killed. I have written repeatedly that war never goes as anticipated, that it is often more costly than expected, and that those who urge it often bail when it becomes controversial. Had “war monger” Winston Churchill been prime minister in 1936 instead of the appeaser Stanley Baldwin there was a far greater chance that millions would not have subsequently perished as victims of the Third Reich.

The usefulness of military history is in trying to keep the current peace (unless you think oncologists like tumors or seismologists enjoy earthquakes), and in remembering that the tragic lessons from the past are predictable: military readiness in a consensual society deters aggressors and keeps the calm; disarmament or appeasement encourages belligerents to try something stupid.

As a self-described historian of some sort, that is one thing you should know by now.

Happy Post-Easter.

Sincerely,

Vic Hanson

Chicago Tribune syndicated columnist

[As a Viet Nam vet & former Marine, it is interesting to note that N. Vietnamese Gen. Giap, the man who ran the war for Hanoi, wrote a book explaining how and why they won. In it, he explains how everything was lost for the North, until the Democrat Congress bailed them out. The US Military and RVN Military had won the war, and US politicians lost it. That is what Gen. Giap says!]

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The Deification of Lincoln
(and of the American State)

By Thomas DiLorenzo

April 27, 2017
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“The violence of the criticism aimed at Lincoln by the great men of his time on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line is startling. The breadth and depth of the spectacular prejudice against him is often shocking for its cruelty, intensity, and unrelenting vigor. The plain truth is that Mr. Lincoln was deeply reviled by many who knew him personally, and by hundreds of thousands who only knew of him.”

–Larry Tagg, The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln: America’s Most Reviled President

In his book, The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln, historian Larry Tagg, a native of Lincoln, Illinois, constructs a powerful case that Abraham Lincoln was by far the most hated and reviled of all American presidents, North and South, during his lifetime. For example, in May of 1864 the New York Times labeled Lincoln “a perjurer, a usurper, a tyrant, a subverter of the Constitution, a destroyer of the liberties of this country, a reckless desperado, a heartless trifler . . . there is no circle in Dante’s Inferno full enough of torment to expiate his iniquities.”

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The Lacrosse, Wisconsin Democrat newspaper warned in November of 1864 that should Lincoln be reelected, “we hope that a bold hand will be found to plunge the dagger into the tyrant’s heart . . .” Such views were commonplace in the North.

This all changed after Lincoln’s death, as the Republican Party recruited (and probably paid quite handsomely) the New England clergy to capitalize on the assassination for political propaganda purposes. Professor Tagg explains this in a chapter entitled “The Sudden Saint.” After viciously vilifying him for four years as an infidel, and worse, “pastors across America rewrote their Easter sermons” after Lincoln’s death on Good Friday, “to include a new, exalted view of Lincoln as an American Moses, a leader out of slavery, a national savior who was not allowed to cross over into the Promised Land.” The Republican Party, with the help of a highly-politicized clergy, saw that “all their political enemies would fall before the sword that Lincoln’s death had put into their hands” in the post-war world. THE UNPOPULAR MR. LINC… Larry Tagg Best Price: $50.24

Such were the origins of the Lincoln Myth, a much bigger rewriting of history than anything the Soviets or any other totalitarian regime ever attempted, for it has been going on now for more than 150 years. An important part of this story is told in a 1943 book that I recently discovered entitled The Deification of Lincoln by Ira D. Cardiff. It is for sale on Amazon.com, and is also online. It was recently reprinted by the Christopher Publishing House of Boston and is dedicated to “those lovers of truth who are unafraid of special interests, public opinion or popular superstitions.”

The book starts out stating that, by 1943 most Americans were already “not at all interested in the truth about Lincoln” thanks to nearly eighty years of lies, myths, and superstitions about him in thousands of books. “They are not interested, in other words, in the real Lincoln,” wrote Cardiff. “They desire a supernatural Lincoln, a Lincoln with none of the faults or frailties of the common man, a Lincoln who is a savior, leading us to democracy and liberty – though most of said readers are not interested in democracy or liberty . . .” Moreover, “a biography of Lincoln which told the truth about him would probably have great difficulty in finding a publisher.” That was nearly seventy-five years ago.

Nearly three quarters of a century before Larry Tagg’s book was published, Ira Cardiff wrote of the widespread hatred and revulsion of Lincoln by Northerners, especially the Northern clergy, and how that all changed after his death for purely political reasons, based on an ever-growing mountain of lies. Cardiff focuses on perhaps the biggest lie told by the hyper-political New England clergy, the zealots who instigated the war in the name of eradicating America – and then the world – of sin in order to create a Kingdom of God on Earth that would pave the way for the Second Coming of Christ. That is what motivated the “abolitionist” movement much more than concern for the slaves. (See Murray Rothbard’s essay, “Just War”). The Deification of Lin… Ira D. Cardiff Best Price: $15.57 Buy New $9.57

All of a sudden, the atheist Abraham Lincoln was portrayed by the lying New England clergy, in cahoots with the Republican Party, as the holiest and most saintly man in America, if not on the entire planet. His father, who he hated so much that he did not attend his funeral, suddenly was said to have possessed “sterling mental and moral qualities.” Lincoln the atheist was said to have spent most of his time on his knees in prayer in the White House. “His mother became second only to the Virgin Mary in her chastity.”

“Thousands of sermons were preached to prove him devoutly religious . . “ There was of course never any evidence or proof of any of this. In fact, there is voluminous evidence that exactly the opposite was true, as Cardiff explains in great detail. The first biographies of Lincoln, of which there are now over ten thousand, were filled with statements like “He [Lincoln] believed in his inmost soul that he was an instrument in the hands of God for the accomplishment of a great purpose.” It is of course absurd to assert that you know what is in a man’s “innermost soul.” Yours truly has found that contemporary Lincoln biographies are polluted with similarly silly statements about what was supposedly in Lincoln’s heart, his soul, his mind, etc. Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Lincoln is especially ridiculous in this regard. There are statements on nearly every page about what was “in his mind” or “in his heart.”

Another hallmark of contemporary Lincoln “scholarship” is the repetition of statements just like this one from one of the very first Lincoln biographies: “He was in the White House as God’s instrument.” The assumption here is that the biographer knows what is in the mind of God. Such nonsense set the template for almost all future Lincoln biographies, with very few exceptions.

Cardiff devoted much of his book citing primary sources describing how atheistic and anti-religious the “saintly” Lincoln really was. For example, “previous to his nomination for the presidency, he was roundly condemned by the clergy as an infidel, while after his martyrdom, the same clerics were loud in the claim of his piety (emphasis added).” Larry Tagg says the exact same thing. Killing Lincoln: The S… Bill O’Reilly, Martin … Best Price: $0.82 Buy New $6.97

When Lincoln was a candidate for president, Cardiff points out, only three of the twenty-three ministers in Springfield, Illinois supported him. Moreover, early biographers who actually knew Lincoln had a very different take on his views on religion than writers who never had any personal contact with him, or anyone else who did. Colonel Ward Lamon, a close friend and confidant of Lincoln’s, wrote a biography in which he called Lincoln “an infidel.” His personal White House secretary, John G. Nicolay, wrote that “Mr. Lincoln did not, to my knowledge, in any way, change his religious ideas, opinions of beliefs from the time he left Springfield till the day of his death.” Those “religious ideas” were the ideas of a non-believer. Nicolay made this comment to counter the absurd lie pedaled by the Republican Party, the New England clergy, and court historians after the war that Lincoln experienced some kind of religious conversion late in life. This lie is still repeated to this day in myriad Lincoln biographies.

Judge David Davis, who managed Lincoln’s presidential campaign and who was subsequently appointed to the Supreme Court, wrote that Lincoln “had no faith, in the Christian sense of the term . . .” Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd, said that “Mr. Lincoln had no hope, and no faith, in the usual acceptation of those words.”

All of this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to The Lincoln Myth, as I discuss in The Real Lincoln and Lincoln Unmasked. Mountains of lies, myths and superstitions envelope almost every fact of Lincoln’s life, thanks to generations of “Lincoln scholars.” To be a card-carrying “Lincoln scholar” one must demonstrate the ability to come up with at least a half dozen excuses or rationales for every tyrannical or immoral act or words of Lincoln’s. His lifelong racist, white-supremacist speeches were not his sincere beliefs but a ploy to win over white racist voters, we are told. He objected “to making voters or jurors of Negroes,” he said in a Lincoln-Douglas debate, so that Negroes could eventually become voters and jurors, Harry Jaffa informed us in his last book on “Father Abraham.” He proposed the The Real Lincoln: A Ne… Thomas DiLorenzo Best Price: $2.91 Buy New $7.62 enshrinement of slavery explicitly into the Constitution with the Corwin Amendment, Doris Kearns-Goodwin informs us, to “save the Republican Party” so that it could, someday, maybe in fifty years, end slavery. When he advocated the deportation or “colonization” of black people, “this is how honest people lie,” Gabor Boritt tells us. And on and on. As Cardiff wrote: “The unfortunate and defenseless public . . . is almost powerless to protect itself from Lincoln hysteria. If it attempts to get the truth about Lincoln, it is confronted with a mountain of fable and froth, foolishness and fancy . . . . Of the thousands of books published on Lincoln [as of 1943], one can almost count on his fingers those of any value as critical, scientific productions.”

Cardiff believed that the U.S. could have ended slavery peacefully, as all the rest of the world did in the nineteenth century (including the British, French, Dutch, Danes, Swedes, Spaniards, the northern states in the U.S.). That would have taken a real statesman, however, and not a small-time Illinois railroad lobbyist who once stated his life’s aspiration as being the political party boss of Illinois. Without the war, wrote Cardiff:

“[T]here would have been saved several million valuable lives and several billions of money . . . . But the secondary effects [of the war] were even more disastrous . . . . the enmity and sectional hatred which arose, the political oligarchy of ex soldiers with their disgusting pension raids upon the public treasury and a monopoly by them of political offices, a false and distorted idea of patriotism, the retardation to the material development of the South, the racial hatred between southern whites and blacks greatly exaggerated . . .”

To all of this “is now added the debasing moral effect of presenting to the innocent youth of the land the account of a prominent national character of this period in an utterly false light.” Even worse, as Clyde Wilson once remarked, is the fact that the deification of Lincoln led to the deification of the presidency in general, and then eventually to the entire government.

Robert Penn Warren wrote about this phenomenon in his book, The Legacy of the Civil War, in which he explains how the Lincoln myth – The Legacy of the Civi… Robert Penn Warren Best Price: $3.48 Buy New $9.64 and myriad other myths about the war in general – were used by the Republican Party to create The Mother of All Political Myths – that thanks to Lincoln, the U.S. government had acquired a “treasury of virtue.” This meant that anything the government did from then on – genocide against the Plains Indians, murdering hundreds of thousands of Filipinos, the imperialistic Spanish-American War, entering World War I, dropping atomic bombs on Japan, etc., was virtuous, by definition, because it was the U.S. government that was doing it.

The founding fathers never argued that Americans were so morally exceptional that they therefore had a right to become the bullies of the world and attempt to remake the entire planet in their image. That is the Lincoln legacy. Actually, the idea emanates from the New England “yankees” and their Mid-Western compatriots like Lincoln. See Clyde Wilson’s “The Yankee Problem in America.” Lincoln’s own political rhetoric, which has been faithfully repeated by generations of court historians, is what the late Professor Mel Bradford called “the rhetoric of continuing revolution.” Others call it the rhetoric of “American exceptionalism.”

The Latest Skullduggery: Too Much Even for the Gods
April 7, 2017 6:26 am / Leave a Comment / victorhanson

The Corner: The one and only.

By Victor Davis Hanson// National Review

The latest disclosures that former Obama national-security adviser Susan Rice may have requested that intelligence agencies reveal or “unmask” those from the Trump team who were surveilled in purportedly normal intelligence gathering — and that such requests may have extended over an apparently considerable period of time — remind us that at some point there is always an accounting.

Rice’s past serial and shameless untruths about the tragic deaths at Benghazi (a 2012 Obama re-election “al-Qaeda on the run” narrative, with a supposedly spontaneous riot over a YouTube video as the cause of the attack) were contextualized by the media and eventually vaporized. Her sad “honor and distinction” narrative about the Bowe Bergdahl betrayal of his comrades — the infamous purported “prisoner of war” “captured on the battlefield” fabrication — was intended to mask what was otherwise a dishonest and terrible hostage swap for someone who had endangered the lives of his fellow soldiers. Recently, she has denied all knowledge of what House Intelligence chairman Devin Nunes had been fighting to uncover, and has even tweeted periodically to criticize the purported ethical lapses and unprofessionalism of the Trump administration.

All that is a lot for even the gods to grind. If, as likely, she had access to, or requested, such raw data, and sent it, with names illegally unmasked, to primary players of the Obama administration (e.g., Clapper, Brennan, Rhodes, etc.), that fact would blow up some heretofore denials of any knowledge of such skullduggery and perhaps become the greatest presidential scandal of the last half century.

The Rice revelation might also put into the proper landscape the following: a) the astounding self-confessionals of Hillary adviser Evelyn Farkas about her frantic efforts to convince Obama operatives to increase intelligence gathering and to leak the information to the press (what gave a former mid-level Department of Defense employee the presumption that she could influence the intelligence operations of the U.S. government?), b) the unprecedented eleventh-hour Obama effort to broaden access to classified data to spread and leak such unmasked individuals, c) the political and media landmines that Representative Nunes (facing “kill the messenger” efforts to kill the message) had to navigate around and the character assassination to which he has been subjected, d) why the Russian-collusion narrative, denied by intelligence chiefs, has become the necessary distraction — first, to steer attention away from the improper leaking and surveillance, and, second, to be used to offer pseudo-moral equivalence to stop further investigation: as if Russian collusion is the bookend to unmasking Trump; as if Nunes is the mirror-image of Representative Adam Schiff, to achieve an impasse of “so let’s just call it even and quit the entire mess and ‘move on.’” e) the relative silence of former president and “constitutional law professor” Barack Obama.

What will be most interesting will be two corollary inquiries: 1) We need to know when, why, and how the White House put such unmasked data illegally into the hands of the New York Times, Washington Post, BBC, etc. perhaps initially to smear the Trump campaign (will the same reporters who ran with the “Trump frolicking in Moscow” collusion narratives now reboot and run with the true story?), and later the Trump transition and presidency; and 2) were these unmasked individuals really incidentally picked up data from surveilled foreigners — or, in fact, were they the primary targets of monitoring all along, with supposedly preplanned surveillance of foreign operators acting as cover?

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/446417/susan-rice-unmasking-trump-associates-allegations

Journey to the Center of the Country
April 5, 2017 3:00 pm / Leave a Comment / victorhanson
By Victor Davis Hanson// National Review

Trump seems radical only to the radicals who aim to take America far, far left.

There have been roughly two sorts of Democratic presidents over the last century. A few were revolutionaries who sought to take the country leftward with them. They were masters of “never letting a serious crisis go to waste” transformations and came to power after the chaos of national crises and near collapse.

Franklin Roosevelt created the modern notion of intrusive, redistributive government during the panic of the Depression. Lyndon Johnson, following the trauma of the John F. Kennedy assassination, pushed through the Great Society, which institutionalized the idea that it was the duty of government to use its power and money to seek an equality of result among the citizenry.

Barack Obama, following the economic crisis of 2008, sought to implant “lead from behind” foreign policy and an update of the Great Society, and to “fundamentally transform” the country, usually by focusing on identity politics as the core of the culture (in which the color of our skin rather than the content of our character would brand us for who we are).

In contrast, Democratic presidents such as Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton acted more as caretakers. They more or less administered what they had inherited but lacked the ideological fervor (or perhaps the political savvy or desire) to take the state further leftward.

The immediate Republican antidotes to Democratic revolutionaries were rarely themselves counter-revolutionaries. Dwight Eisenhower modestly tried to pull the country back to the center after 20 years of the New Deal — but nonetheless was hounded unmercifully for trying to do so. The supposedly dark and evil Richard Nixon instituted wage and price controls, created the EPA, and went to China. He did not dismantle the Great Society.

A true conservative revolutionary has been rare — Goldwater failed to get elected, and Reagan, without both houses of Congress, ended up more moderate than he expected and was followed in office by a Republican centrist.

Nonetheless, the media and the Left, in their respective arenas, howled that these modest corrections back to the center by Eisenhower, Nixon, and now Trump were nihilistic and extreme.

True to form, we are now hearing those same end-of-days accusations — even as Trump seeks to bring the U.S. back to about where it was between 1980 and 1992. Note that this endless cycle of change and counter-change is not a static phenomenon but incrementally (and over time radically) takes government and the culture ever more leftward.

So far, Trump has adopted the old Bill Clinton approach to illegal immigration, a formerly centrist but now strangely unorthodox position: He favors law enforcement rather than politically inspired amnesties calibrated to give him electoral and demographic political advantage.

His appeals to the white working classes are right out of the Clinton-Gore appeals in 1992, and they’re a rehash of Reagan’s courting of Democrats.

Hillary Clinton pandered more to working-class whites in 2008 than Trump did in 2016. The latter never said something akin to Hillary’s overt boasts about her white support in the 2008 primaries. “I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,” she told USA Today, adding that an AP story “found how Senator Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in [Indiana and North Carolina] who had not completed college were supporting me.”

Trump seeks to finish the border wall that was authorized and started by others. And he is called nativist, racist, and worse, largely because between 2009 and 2016 what was extreme was presented not just as the new normal but as the new foundation of something even more radical to come. Trump’s proposed modest cuts in discretionary spending — less than 2 percent of a quarter of the budget — will hardly affect the deficit or the $20 trillion national debt. Nonetheless, Democrats will condemn him as a modern-day Scrooge.

On energy, Trump again is simply trying to finish the Keystone and Dakota pipelines that were authorized by others. His approach to coal is standard 1990s boilerplate Democratic politics. Sarah Palin’s 2008 mantra of “drill, baby, drill” was smugly written off by then-candidate Obama as Neanderthalism. In fact, she not only proved prescient; she also outlined the eventual energy protocols that saved the Obama presidency. When all of Obama’s efforts failed to achieve 3 percent economic growth, what he opposed — fracking and horizontal drilling — prevented a weak economy from completely tanking.

Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch is mild-mannered and superbly qualified, and by design he avoids polarization. Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor had far greater records of unapologetic political activism.

Trump’s vision of the EPA, of regulations in general, and of taxes take us back to what was also normal in the George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton eras. They seem revolutionary — again only because Obama used executive-branch regulations along with the courts as a means to implement radical agendas that otherwise lacked both public and congressional support.

If Trump’s tax reform is successful, the top brackets won’t be that much different from what they were under George W. Bush.

The furor over Trump’s efforts to reform Obamacare (rather than repeal it and start over) largely grew out of the assumption formed over the last eight years that it was the duty of the federal government to demand that everyone have one standard brand of health insurance, regardless of individual circumstance and preferences. If Trump ever reforms health care, it will probably be a return to the old system prior to Obama, with some state subsidies for the indigent to buy their own private health-care plans and with a few protections about preexisting conditions and young adults being able to stay on their parents’ plans until age 26. These are radical ideas only to radicals who had envisioned Obamacare as the final step to a one-payer system like Britain’s National Health Service.

So far, the Left has not said much about Trump’s foreign policy, to the extent its shape can be discerned in the administration’s first 100 days. But again, what is emerging is something that is neither neoconservative nation-building nor “lead from behind” Obama-era recessionals.

Practically, it looks to be an unleashing of the restrictions on American power against ISIS, but no intention of occupying and rebuilding Syria; a Jacksonian determination to deter Iran and North Korea, but no desire to implement regime change by force in either country; and a return to the status quo of old friends and enemies after the Obama-era recalibration of American interests (Israel and the Gulf States are once again friends, Iran most certainly is not). Putin is Putin — to be quietly deterred rather than loudly, gratuitously romanced or alienated. He is neither worthy of attempting another reset along the lines of Obama’s open-mic promises of “flexibility,” nor is he the existential demon who robbed them of a third term of the Obama presidency, as the Democrats have suddenly decided.

Trump’s foreign-policy team has few hard-core politicos like Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Samantha Power, Susan Rice, or Ben Rhodes.

James Mattis, Rex Tillerson, and H. R. McMaster may or may not have voted for Trump; they are Jacksonians, certainly not international utopians, ideologues, and globalists. They have never been elected to anything. Mostly, the trio wishes to protect American interests abroad, and they agree that U.S. interests come first. In other words, in them, we have something in between George Marshall and John Foster Dulles at the helm, rather than Cyrus Vance and John Kerry.

If Trump so far has tried to push the country back to the center after the last eight years of Obama’s efforts to “fundamentally transform” the country, why the hysteria?

Three obvious reasons come to mind.

1) Some in the media and the liberal community are mimicking Trump’s own “Art of the Deal” methodology. They know that Trump’s agenda so far is pretty much centrist by their own standards, but they believe that by exaggerating and demonizing it as nearly a John Bircher project, Trump will back off — and therefore end up to the left-center rather than in the center or right of center. If Trump is smeared now as 90 percent demonic, they can later negotiate downward for a 55 percent demonic president and consider it a smashing victory.

2) Other hysterical leftists are still furious, as much at themselves as at Trump. In the 2016 election, they had everything imaginable going for them: the Clinton brand name, the country’s Big Money from Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood, Republican civil war and Never Trump insurrections, a captive and toady media, an abandonment of Trump by conservative megaphones, veritable collusion between the press and the Obama campaign, popular culture, the foreign press, and the European bureaucracy — and they blew it.

To admit that they imploded because Hillary Clinton was a shrill and unimaginative candidate, that the campaign was both horribly and arrogantly run, and that the proverbial “people’s party” was not seen as populist by millions of Americans in the key swing states is still impossible. In contrast, Trump as the beneficiary of Russian collusion and as a veritable Hitlerian Gruppenführer offers leftists the psychological atonement they require to recover from their self-inflicted disasters.

3) Finally, Trump the person, not the particulars of his agenda, drives the Left crazy. It is not just that he can be crude, blunt, and uncouth, but that by doing so he delights the half of the country that is sickened by supposedly elegant political correctness.

If Trump’s political agendas so far are correctives of Obama radicalism, his cultural and rhetorical agendas — Americans first, nationalism in lieu of globalization, economic and military rather than soft power, confident American ascendance rather than slow and comfortable adjustment to decline, the melting pot over the salad bowl — represent to the Democrats heretical apostasies from the entire politically correct national faith.

We know from the history of American politics that zealots more often are provoked by words than deeds, and react more to symbols than to statistics.

What to expect in this new civil war?

Trumpism, to the extent it can be defined, will be deemed successful and even iconic if it achieves a GDP growth of 3 percent or above.

If not, then expect the present hysteria over the journey back to the center to grow.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/446384/trump-centrist-moderate-course-correction-after-obama-era-radicalism

03/29/17
From an Angry Reader:

Do you mean educated people who worked hard to better themselves? Let’s all just stay in the old steel mill towns and coal mining towns gripping about how unfair the world is to us. You know, the good old days when blacks knew their place and we didn’t have no Mexicans around. You are right I guess they were ready for a Trump and the left was unprepared but it does not make them correct. Carol Hoyt, Big Lake Ak. And Las Vegas Nv.
Victor Davis Hanson’s Reply:

Dear Angry Reader Carol Hoyt,

How you managed to cram such a stream of confusion into just four sentences is in a way impressive.

Sentence one: I did not conflate elites with educated people, but rather with a subset of urban, powerful people in politics, academia, the media, and entertainment who exercise influence and power without any discernible display of competence. These are not neurosurgeons or engineers but the architects of $20 trillion in debt, stereotyped and dull Hollywood movies, and inaccurate and undependable news accounts of the Dan Rather/Brian Williams sort.

Sentence two: Those who voted for Trump were not just people “in the old steel mill towns and coal mining towns” but half the country that felt the progressive project under Obama had bankrupted the treasury, left the world in a terrible state abroad, divided the nation along racial lines, and stalled the economy (first in over 80 years not to achieve 3% economic growth) in a way not seen since the Hoover administration. Incidentally, I’ve been to Appalachia and steel mill towns and discovered that those who have been the losers of globalization complain a lot less about their tragedies than do the winners of globalization their psychodramas and neuroses.

Sentence three: On no evidence you equate the working classes with racism. Is the sarcastic “we didn’t have no Mexicans around” an attempt to mimic what you think is the patois of the poor white working classes? You are no more effective in envisioning how the supposed poor speak than was an equally condescending Hillary Clinton in all her myriad fake accents and mannerisms.

Sentence four: My column was a political observation of why Trump, against all odds and predictions, won, and why such a victory might have been anticipated had anyone turned off pundits and ignored conventional wisdom.

Whether “they” are correct (I take it you mean the white working classes who abandoned the Democratic Party for Trump), depends entirely on Trump, not what I or you say. If he achieves 3% economic growth, reforms the tax code and regulations, address the ACA, ups the labor non-participation rate, then, yes, his supporters were “correct”; if he doesn’t do any of that, then they were either misled or asked the impossible. We shall soon find out.

Victor Hanson, Huntington Lake, Ca. And Stanford, Ca.

The Russian Farce
March 28, 2017 11:36 am / Leave a Comment / victorhanson

by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review

Remember when Obama and Hillary cozied up to Putin? And recall when the media rejoiced at surveillance leaks about Team Trump?

The American Left used to lecture the nation about its supposedly paranoid suspicions of Russia. The World War II alliance with Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union had led many leftists to envision a continuing post-war friendship with Russia.

During the subsequent Cold War, American liberals felt that the Right had unnecessarily become paranoid about Soviet Russia, logically culminating in the career of the demagogic Senator Joe McCarthy. Later, in movies such as Seven Days in May, Doctor Strangelove, and The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming, Hollywood focused on American neuroses as much as Russian hostility for strained relations.

In the great chess rivalry of 1972 known as “The Match of the Century,” American liberals favored Russian grandmaster Boris Spassky over fellow countryman Bobby Fischer, who embarrassed them by winning.

In the same manner, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev was often portrayed in the media as the urbane, suave, and reasonable conciliator, while President Ronald Reagan was depicted as the uncouth disrupter of what could have been improved Russian–American relations.

Senator Ted Kennedy reportedly reached out to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov in 1984 to gain his help in denying Reagan his reelection.

In sum, the American Left always felt that Russia was unduly demonized by the American Right and was a natural friend, if not potential ally, of the United States. That tradition no doubt influenced the decision of the incoming Obama administration to immediately reach out to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, despite is recent aggressions in Georgia and steady crackdown on internal dissent, and despite Russia’s estrangement from the prior Bush administration.

Obama’s Entreaty to the Russians

In March 2012, in a meeting with President Dimitri Medvedev of Russia, President Barack Obama thought his microphone was either off or could not pick up the eerie assurances that he gave the Russian president:

“On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved, but it’s important for him [Vladimir Putin] to give me space.”

Medvedev answered: “Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you . . . ”

Obama agreed and elaborated, “This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.”

Medvedev finished the hot-mic conversation with, “I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir, and I stand with you.”

A fair interpretation of this stealthy conversation would run as follows:

Barack Obama naturally wanted to continue a fourth year of his reset and outreach to Vladimir Putin, the same way that he was reaching out to other former American enemies such as the Iranians and the Cubans. Yet Obama was uneasy that his opponent, Mitt Romney, might attack him during his reelection campaign as an appeaser of Putin. Thus, to preempt any such attack, Obama might be forced to appear less flexible (offer less “space”) toward Putin than he otherwise would be in a non-election year. In other words, he couldn’t publicly assure Putin that he would be “flexible” about implementing missile defense in Eastern Europe (“all these issues”) until after he was reelected.

An apprehensive Obama, in his hot-mic moment, was signaling that after his anticipated victory, he would revert to his earlier reset with Putin. And most significantly, Obama wished Putin to appreciate in advance the motives for Obama’s campaign-year behavior. Or he at least hoped that Putin would not embarrass him by making international moves that would reflect poorly on Obama’s reset policy.

Furthermore, Obama did not want his implicit quid pro quo proposal to become part of the public record. Had it been public, it might have been interpreted as a message to Putin that he should empathize with Obama’s plight — and that he should interfere with the American election by behaving in a way that would empower Obama’s candidacy rather than detract from it.

In the present hysterical climate, substitute the name Trump for Obama, and we would be hearing Democratic demands for impeachment on grounds that Trump was caught secretly whispering to the Russians about compromising vital national-security issues in a quid pro quo meant to affect the outcome of the 2012 election.

The Architects of Russian Outreach

The Obama administration came up with a reset–soft-glove approach to Vladimir’s Russia, characterized by Secretary Hillary Clinton’s heralded pushing of the red plastic button on March 6, 2009, in Geneva. Reset was couched in overt criticism of George W. Bush, who had supposedly alienated Putin by reacting too harshly (like a typical cowboy) to Russia’s aggression in Georgia.

Over the next few years, the reset policy consisted of, among other things, backtracking on previously agreed-on missile-defense plans in Eastern Europe. In the second presidential debate of 2012, Obama portrayed Romney as being too tough on Russia, to the point of delusion:

A few months ago when you were asked what’s the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia, not al-Qaeda. You said Russia. In the 1980s, they’re now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.

The Obama administration invited Russia into the Middle East for the first time in nearly a half-century to help Obama back off from his own redline threats to attack Syria if evidence of WMD usage appeared. Moreover, after the Crimea and eastern Ukraine aggressions, the perception in most of the Western world was that the U.S. was not sufficiently tough with Putin, largely because of its commitment to a prior (though failed) outreach.

So what ended this one-sided reset in 2016?

The estrangement certainly did not coincide entirely with Putin’s aggressions on Russia’s borders. Nor were Democrats inordinately angry with Putin when he bombed non-al-Qaeda Syrian resistance fighters.

Rather, Democrats’ split with Putin grew from the perception that hackers had easily entered the porous e-mail account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign guru John Podesta and released his messages to WikiLeaks. This led to general embarrassment for Hillary and the Democrats — and they floated the theory that WikiLeaks and Julian Assange were taking orders from Putin or at least operating with the encouragement of the Kremlin’s intelligence services.

Hating Hillary?

After the WikiLeaks mess, the image of Putin was reset again, and now he was said to have ordered the hacking because he hated Hillary Clinton and indeed the Obama administration in general.

That was a bizarre indictment. If Putin were really a conniving realist, he would have much preferred Hillary in the 2016 election — given his success in manipulating the Obama-era reset.

Unlike Trump, Clinton would probably have kept the radical Obama defense cuts and perpetuated the restrictions on domestic energy development that were helping Russia. She probably would have likewise continued Obama’s therapeutic approach to foreign policy.

From Russia’s point of view, considering their strategic and economic interests, a pliable Obama 2.0 would have been far better than Trump, with his pro-oil-and-gas domestic agenda, his promised defense buildup, and his unpredictable Jacksonian promises to help friends and hurt enemies.

Squaring the Surveillance Circle

The entire Trump-collusion-with-Russia narrative has now descended into incoherence.

For five months, dating back to the heated final stretch of the 2016 election, mainstream media — in particular Obama-administration pet reporters at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the BBC — ran creepy and occasionally near-obscene stories about “collusion” between the Trump campaign and the Russians. These published rumors were based on “unnamed sources” often identified generically as American intelligence officers inside the FBI, CIA, and NSA.

Soon that narrative went from ominous to hysterical — but only once Hillary inexplicably lost the election. The anonymous allegations of collusion were used to convict the Trump circle of a veritable pre-election partnership with the Russians. The collusion was to be followed, the story went, with a new reset with Putin — this time born not out of naïveté but of lucre and near treason.

We forget that the Democrats’ narratives of the purported Trump collusion also radically changed to meet changing circumstances.

Before the election, a sure and poor-loser Trump was pathetically cheating with the Russians to stop the fated winner Clinton.

Then, in the post-election shock and transition, the Russian-interference storyline was repackaged as an excuse for the poorly conducted Clinton campaign that had blown a supposedly big lead and sure victory. “The Russians did it” was preferable to blaming Hillary for not visiting Wisconsin once.

Finally, Trump’s Russian connection served as a useful tool to delegitimize an abhorrent incoming Trump administration. And the delegitimizing was made easier by Obama’s eleventh-hour order, days before his departure, to expand the list of federal officials who would have access to sensitive intelligence and surveillance transcripts.

But all such accusations of Trump-Russian complicity, based on admitted leaks from intelligence agencies, required some sort of hard evidence: leaked transcripts of Trump officials clearly outlining shared strategies with the Russians, hard proof of Russian electronic tampering in key swing states, doctored e-mails planted in the Podesta WikiLeaks trove, travel records of Trump people in clandestine meetings with Russian counterparts, or bank records showing cash payoffs.

Yet a hostile media, in collusion with intelligence-agency leakers, has so far provided no such proof. John Podesta had as much invested in Russian profiteering as did former Trump aides. Bill Clinton and the Clinton Foundation had as many financial dealings with pro-Russian interests as did Trump people. The ubiquitous Russian ambassador had met as many Democratic grandees as he had Trump associates.

The lack so far of hard proof gradually created a boomerang effect. Attention turned away from what “unnamed sources” had alleged to the question of how unnamed sources had gathered surveillance of the Trump people in the first place — as evidenced by media reports of General Flynn’s conversations, of Trump’s private talks with foreign leaders, and of allegations of electronic contact between Russian and Trump Tower computers.

In other words, the media and their sources had gambled that congressional overseers, law enforcement, and the public would all overlook surveillance that may have been illegal or only partly legal, and they would also overlook the clearly illegal leaking of such classified information on a candidate and a president-elect — if it all resulted in a scandal of the magnitude of the Pentagon Papers or Watergate.

So far such a scandal has not emerged. But Trump’s opponents continue to push the Russian narrative not because it is believable but because it exhausts and obfuscates likely illegal surveillance and leaking.

The real scandal is probably not going to be Trump’s contacts with Russians. More likely, it will be the rogue work of a politically driven group of intelligence officers, embedded within the bureaucracy, who, either in freelancing mode, or in Henry II–Thomas Becket fashion (“Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?”) with Obama-administration officials, began monitoring Team Trump — either directly or more likely through the excuse of inadvertently chancing upon conversations while monitoring supposedly suspicious foreign communications.

Added to this mess is the role of three unsympathetic characters who are on record as either not telling the truth, deliberately obfuscating it, or showing terrible judgement.

Obama CIA director John Brennan, who assumed that role after the still mysterious and abrupt post-election departure of David Petraeus, has a long history of political gymnastics; he has made many a necessary career readjustment to changing Washington politics. He is on record as being deceptive — he failed to reveal that the CIA intercepted Senate communications. He also stated falsely that the drone program had not resulted in a single collateral death. And, in the spirit of Obama’s new Islamic outreach, Brennan strangely suggested that jihad was a sort of personal odyssey rather than a call to use force in spreading Islamic influence. Brennan is also on record as critical of Trump: Trump “should be ashamed of himself,” Brennan said the day after the inauguration, in response to Trump’s speech to CIA staffers gathered in front of the Memorial Wall of Agency heroes.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has in the past lied to Congress, when he assured that the NSA did not monitor the communications of American citizens. Likewise, he bizarrely asserted that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was largely a secular organization. And more than 50 CENTCOM officers formally accused Clapper of distorting their reports about the Islamic State. Like Brennan, Clapper has been critical of Trump, asking, “Who benefits from a president-elect trashing the intelligence community?”

During the 2016 election, FBI Director James Comey popped up to assure the nation that while Hillary Clinton had conducted herself unethically, and probably in violation of federal statutes in using her private e-mail server for government business and wiping away correspondence, her transgressions did not rise to the level of indictable offenses. It was as if the investigator Comey, rather than the appropriate federal attorney, was adjudicating the decision to charge a suspect.

Then in the final stretch of the race, Comey resurfaced to assert that “new” evidence had led him to reconsider his exculpation of Clinton. And then, on November 6, 2016, just hours before the nation went to the polls, he appeared a third time in front of cameras to reiterate his original judgment that Hillary’s transgressions did not merit further investigation, much less criminal prosecutions. The media contextualized Comey’s schizophrenia as see-saw reactions either to liberal Obama-administration pressures or to near revolts among the more conservative FBI rank-and-file. Just as likely was Comey’s own neurotic itch to seek public attention and to position himself favorably with a likely new president.

Comey’s weird election-era prominence was also apparently fueled by the fact that Attorney General Loretta Lynch was caught in an embarrassing private meeting on the tarmac with Bill Clinton — a meeting during the investigation of his spouse. (The encounter was intended to remain secret, but a local reporter was tipped off.) That unethical encounter had tainted Lynch’s pose of disinterested adjudication, and she accordingly de facto fobbed off her prosecutorial responsibilities to Comey. Comey most lately has asked the Justice Department to refute Trump’s claims that he was subject to electronic surveillance by the government during the last days of the Obama administration.

Given the past assertions and political natures of Brennan, Clapper, and Comey, none are very credible in any future testimony they might give about the Trump-Russia narrative or the role U.S. intelligence agencies played in the possibly illegal monitoring of Trump associates. All three men are even less credible when it comes to the illegal leaking of such classified information to media outlets.

Trump’s infamous and clumsy tweet (“just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower”) may well prove to be inaccurate — literally. But it could also end up being prescient if revelations show that Obama-appointed officials or their underlings used surveillance on foreign officials — three years after the NSA got caught tapping Angela Merkel’s cellphone — in order to sweep up Trump communications and then leak them to the media to damage his candidacy and later his transition.

We are left in the end with paradoxes:

How did Obama’s naïve pro-Putin reset and Clinton-family profiteering transmogrify into wild accusations that others had become even friendlier to such an unsavory character?

How did the image of a sacrosanct media speaking the “truth” of Trump’s collusion with Putin rest on the peddling of false narratives — many of them based on likely illegal surveillance and certainly unethical and unlawful dissemination?

And if Trump was unhinged for leveling wild allegations based on mainstream news reports, why were news outlets themselves — and those who quoted them chapter and verse — not unhinged for spreading such suddenly unreliable information?

What is the explanatory sword that cuts this Gordian knot?

Trump supposedly had zero chance of winning. But when he did, facts had to adjust to a bitter actuality — at first perhaps to explain away reality, but quite soon after to alter it by any means necessary.http://www.nationalreview.com/article/446148/russian-farce-trump-collusion-hysteria-diverts-attention-surveillance-scandal