http://www.davidwarrenonline.com ESSAYS ON OUR TIMES - A Collection of Essays on Contemporary Events by David Warren (c)2005 davidwarrenonline.com, David Warren, The Ottawa Citizen. All rights reserved. Will Israel last another 60 years? Will Canada? Will the West? I believe the questions are closely related, and will begin by giving two quick answers. The first is, “I don’t know.” Attempts to predict the future from the historical past have a track record around zero, and while it is true that history is constantly repeating itself, it is able to repeat itself in many different ways. On the present leadership performance of Israel’s complacent, incompetent, and probably corrupt prime minister -- and in view of the assembling forces dedicated to the country’s annihilation -- one might reasonably say that Israel will be lucky to reach three score and ten. But as I’ve myself frequently argued, all trends are reversible. The second is, “It depends what you mean by survive.” If the world is still here -- and let’s not take anything for granted -- there is likely to be a little patch of land corresponding to that upon which Israel now sits. And if there are still Jews, it will still belong in their hearts, as it has done for millennia. It is not inconceivable to me that Israel might be annihilated, or nearly annihilated, and then restored. Such events are compatible with very large, planetary wars. They hardly bear thinking about. But I insist, that Israel’s survival is tied to that of the West. She is our front line, an embodiment of unambiguously Western values. The enemies we have are common enemies -- Left-fascist ideology (formerly expressed as Communism, but now reorganizing around the “scientific materialism” of the environmentalist cause), and Islamo-fascist ideology (now called “Islamism,” to distinguish political from religious Islam, on the assumption that this can be done). These are the two great contemporary Sirens, and each calls upon constituencies lodged deep in the West itself. The appeal of simplistic ideological movements spreads in the spiritual vacuum left by the recession of Christianity. But whatever dark forces answer to the command of these two great Sirens, there is agreement between the Left and the Islamists that Israel is the front line of the West, and that she is sufficiently isolated to be worth destroying first. There is moreover agreement between them that the ultimate target is “Amerika” and the whole “bourgeois, Judeo-Christian” order that has sustained our freedom and prosperity. What happens if our enemies succeed? I would guess it is then Green versus Green, and the Islamist monster eats the Environmentalist monster, for the former is more wilful and ruthless. I risk being misunderstood at this point, for I am not exactly equating Osama bin Laden with Al Gore. Environmentalism, and the current “global warming” hysteria, is only a flag of convenience, just as the “class war” served the Left in a previous generation, and there are many alternative flags. Its root cause is a Gnostic, religious atheism: it forms and disperses and reforms like the mist. Whereas, Islamism is a unified and cogent force, with an instinctive recourse to violence. To understand what I mean, the reader must consider almost any contemporary university campus, in which the radical political causes are quite various, but there is general agreement among radicals on each other’s agendas. That one must attack Zionist Israel, and conversely champion Oppressed Palestinians, is something every little half-educated campus ideologue knows he can take for granted. What has this got to do with the future of Israel? Everything. For while Israel’s proximate enemies are Hamas and Hezbollah, and the unspeakable regimes in Iran, Syria, and elsewhere that control and supply these frontline terrorists, and are themselves pledged to Israel’s physical annihilation, and are assiduously building missile stockpiles for the task -- they have no chance of prevailing so long as the West remains united behind Israel. But for various reasons, the will to defend Israel is crumbling, and Israel’s enemies know this. She resides in a region where she is outnumbered 60-to-1 in population, and by a much greater ratio in land area or elbow room (with accompanying natural resources). Israel has no prospects on her own. And this is where I feel least hopeful about the future. The desire to defend Israel is being sapped, across the West, by causes ranging from exhaustion with endless trouble in the Middle East, to the thirst for oil, to the rapid growth of Muslim immigration, and thus of an electoral constituency that tends to be extremely unsympathetic to Israel. But more profoundly, the Left-Islamist alliance -- forged in common opposition to everything the West stands for -- has made the abandonment of Israel a common priority across the spectrum of people who take their politics from fashion. Alas, most of the West’s internal enemies, demanding the abandonment of Israel as first step, do not even know what they are doing. They are like parasites upon a host organism, and do not understand that when the host organism dies, they too will die. http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=867 http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=867 I have it on reliable authority that today is Mother’s Day -- to say nothing of Pentecost -- and I hope to fit in a few words on that topic before my readers all head out to join the nearest Marian procession in honour of Our Lady. Well, perhaps not all my readers. Still, perhaps, the best place to start: for I seem to have earned at least a local reputation as some kind of Catholic religious nutjob, and I am rather proud of it. We do need to start somewhere, for the very idea of “motherhood” has been so transformed through the last couple of generations -- during which first divorce, then abortion, and then a lot of other things were turned from unthinkable options into consumer goods -- that it is now rather at sea. We get a lot of sentimental blathering, still, about motherhood in some meta-biological sense, increasingly abstracted from the pregnant realities. And of course, we all have or had mothers, or at least surrogate mothers, or at the very least institutional surrogates of surrogate mothers, and many of us are sentimentally partial to whomever. By all means, send a card. Even a visit to the nursing home with flowers might be “indicated,” to use the legal term. I have nothing against sentiment, on the one condition that it is deeply founded. In other words, I have everything against sentiment that is in its nature cheap, and that consists of wallowing in some transient emotion. The beauty of sentiment associated with motherhood is that it tends indeed to be deeply founded, in long personal experience, descending in shafts of memory far beneath the surface slagheaps of our lives. And the tremendous power that exists, or can exist, in the bond between a mother and her child, is stronger than the acids of any political ideology. Nevertheless, raised myself through most of my childhood in very Protestant surroundings -- of a kind that were impressive and worthy but have almost evaporated through the last few decades -- I was necessarily deprived of an important spiritual anchor. For reasons and unreasons going back to the Protestant Reformation, my people had lost the veneration of Mary, as she had been presented to Christian believers from the earliest centuries, and as she is still presented in the “Salutatio Angelica.” That is, as, “Holy Mary, Mother of God.” The very phrase would give my ancestors seizures, and while this is not a theological column, it may be worth quickly explaining the inevitability of that phrase, once one has accepted the Trinity, and the indivisibility of Our Saviour. In a sentence, the veneration of Mary is an inevitable extension of the worship of Christ: for if there is God the Son, there must be a Mother of God. Or to be plainer still, in line with the Council of Ephesus in 431 A.D. -- the human “Jesus,” and the divine “Christ,” are not two different persons. They are one and the same, and He was the Son of God, and of Mary. Hence the extraordinary veneration of Mary, from the earliest Christian times, and through the centuries -- so powerful that even the Muslims, appearing from the 7th century A.D., also venerate her. And long, long before even Christianity dawned upon the world, she is anticipated in every “Mother Goddess” known to anthropology. A Darwinist, or a Jungian, or sociobiologist, or whatever, may hold that this is all merely a projection of the big raw fact of human motherhood -- onto a cosmos that is fearfully beyond the comprehension of the primitive human mind. This hypothesis has the glib plausibility that is required to monopolize teaching in the academy, today. It is itself a view of considerable antiquity, and the anthropologists have discovered essentially atheist primitive tribes. This is a “secular” newspaper and I am only dealing with the pragmatic consequences of religious beliefs. What is the consequence of Marian “idolatry” (as my Protestant ancestors would call it, while turning in their graves), or as I would characterize it, the veneration of “Sancta Maria, Mater Dei” that has animated so much of this world’s most magnificent art and poetry? Its practical effect is to found all our intellectual and emotional ideas about motherhood, deep as they are, in something still deeper. It is to believe that real substance and significance underlies our natural love for our own human mothers, that it is not simply a biological quirk to be explained away by a few material causes. That it is instead the profoundest echo of what Dante finally called, “l’ amor che move il sole e l’ alter stele” -- “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.” Buy into that, and one’s own human mother is not reduced to a mechanism of “sexual selection” (to quote a zoological sage of the century before last), nor arbitrarily salvaged with the tearjerk posturing of a Mother’s Day card. She is rather enlarged to her true proportions. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen. http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=866 http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=866 While waiting through late March, April, and early May for the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission to publish the results of the presidential vote in that country, I noticed another election in progress. It was in London, England, and there it was the mayor, “Red Ken” Livingstone, who had condescended to submit to a public plebiscite. My insinuation that Red Ken, now removed from office, was on a level with Robert Mugabe, still not removed, is perhaps a little unfair. The chief difference between them was opportunity. The scope for leftwing or “progressive” political thuggery is much greater in a post-colonial country, such as former Rhodesia, and with it the opportunity to “massage” an election result until it comes out right. The poor inmates of Zimbabwe have lived now for more than a quarter century under Mugabe’s reign of terror, with no prospect that e.g. the United States Marines might suddenly arrive and give the Western media something to talk about. Whereas, Red Ken ruled the Greater London Authority for only eight years. And in the absence of armed revolutionary “war veterans” or any other proximate means to intimidate the inmates of London, he was compelled to manifest some of the personal charm that, I’m told, even Robert Mugabe is capable of displaying when he has no other choice. Both gentlemen probably started by sincerely wishing the best for their respective constituencies. Absolute power, plus an ideological agenda, and a pronounced personal partiality to violence, made Mugabe into a monster who has visited little upon his people except fear, famine, pestilence, four-digit monthly inflation rates, and desperation, in a country that (under his demonized “racist” predecessor, the late Ian Smith) was the breadbasket of southern Africa. Whereas, Mr Livingstone inherited a municipal bureaucracy that had previously been trashed and then extinguished by Margaret Thatcher. There was very little he could do with the city, besides trying to make the underground trains run on time. Of course, he often chafed under his restrictions. “Lord Mayor” of the (inner) City of London, in the olden days, became an almost purely ceremonial post, a potential “bully pulpit,” except, filled by a succession of decorative figures with nothing much to say. The mere Mayor of the Greater London Authority is for practical purposes also a token, but with a pulpit set up very high. Mayor Livingstone made good use of it, and adapted himself to life as a fairly entertaining talking head. Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, or more simply, “Boris” -- the new mayor -- is a former editor of the “highbrow” weekly Spectator (appointed by Conrad Black), who has been more journalist than politician. Sir Max Hastings, his boss when Boris worked at the Daily Telegraph, mentions his "facade resembling that of P.G. Wodehouse's Gussie Finknottle, allied to wit, charm, brilliance, and startling flashes of instability." Just the man for the job. Quote: "If gay marriage was OK -- and I was uncertain on the issue -- then I saw no reason in principle why a union should not be consecrated between three men, as well as two men, or indeed three men and a dog." Quote, after the London terror strikes of 7/7: "It is time to reassert British values. That means disposing of the first taboo, and accepting that the problem is Islam. Islam is the problem. To any non-Muslim reader of the Koran, Islamophobia -- fear of Islam -- seems a natural reaction, and, indeed, exactly what that text is intended to provoke.” Quote, likening Tory leadership disputes to "Papua New Guinea-style orgies of cannibalism and chief-killing." Condemned by that country's High Commissioner, Mr Johnson replied that he would add Papua New Guinea to his global apology itinerary. He further added: "My remarks were inspired by a Time Life book I have which does indeed show relatively recent photos of Papua New Guinean tribes engaged in warfare, and I'm fairly certain that cannibalism was involved." Quote, on the city of Portsmouth: "One of the most depressed towns in Southern England, a place that is arguably too full of drugs, obesity, underachievement, and Labour MPs." Needless to say, Boris Johnson, in office, will be trying to keep a sock in it. But I find it interesting that e.g. the collapse of Britain’s Labour government scheme for a vast new bureaucracy to enforce “carbon credit trading” among the general population has already been attributed to “the Boris effect.” Merely having such a man on the horizon changes the way things are done. http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=865 http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=865 It wasn’t the dinosaurs’ fault the asteroid hit them. Okay, let’s back up a bit. I am alluding to an hypothesis, first advanced by Luis Alvarez and son, that a large asteroid hit the earth, causing the mass die-off of dinosaur and many other species, at what we used to call “the K-T boundary” (the end of the Cretaceous geological period) about 65 million years ago. This was proposed in 1980, and given apparent confirmation by the discovery of traces of a huge impact crater in the Yucatan around 1990. It then quickly became al-gorey “settled science” -- before being challenged with increasing confidence from many different angles. I have no axe to grind on that one. Really. I’m just using it as a metaphor. It wasn’t the newspaper’s fault that it was hit first by radio, then by television, then by the massive and continuing sub-literacy engendered by “progressive” education reforms, and finally by the Internet. I doubt even cockroaches could survive being successively hit by four asteroids. Back to the dinosaurs. While it might easily be imagined that they were helped to extinction, it might also be imagined, even surmised, that various dinosaur species contributed materially to their own eclipse, if, as the Darwinists suggest, they were too big and stupid to compete. I don’t buy this, myself, but my reader is always welcome to accept any hypothesis that is superficially plausible, even if I think it is, like Darwinism itself, unnecessarily big and stupid. Like many other things, evolution happens, and the fact that it has happened is beyond human remedy. There is (for better or worse) no magic wand that will restore the age of the dinosaurs, or turn back the clock to the heyday of newspapers a century ago. Over the weekend, reports began to appear (in the deadtree New York Post, but mostly on the Internet) about the impending bankruptcy of one of North America’s major metropolitan dailies, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, known affectionately as the “Strib.” And in my postal mailbox this morning, the parrot-sheet of the union of which I am involuntarily a member, informs me in its headline that, “Newspaper biz, like icebergs, is cracking up.” This is by no means an exhaustive survey of the evidence that daily print journalism (and most other forms of print journalism), are on deathwatch. I have been noticing the industry-wide relaxation of paid circulation and advertising revenues with morbid fascination for some time. Verily, it is more than 15 years since I was myself first invited to speak to an audience about “the decline of the daily newspaper,” and asked to predict its future. Big newspapers have gone bust before; but the interesting thing about the Strib is that it’s the last big newspaper in a big town. It has been sold twice in the last decade, the second sale for half the price of the first, and now its principal creditors are hovering. The idea of a major city without even one major newspaper (of course, Minneapolis still has little papers) remains so unthinkable, that people assume Credit Suisse will find a way to keep the thing afloat. The age of the great sailing ships was also prolonged by such optimism. Well-managed newspapers -- and there are a few, contrary to popular belief -- have been in the “adapt or die” mode for years. Many have moved audaciously and cleverly into the Internet, trading on their infrastructural strengths while shedding as much as possible of the overheads associated with a huge printing plant and distribution network -- “reducing their carbon footprint,” as it were. The physical paper itself gets thinner, and harder to find, but the enterprise becomes increasingly visible on laptops. In my view (the view that always prevails in this column), our future need not be so grim. The idea of the news sheet remains essentially sound, judging by the success of the nasty little rags with which commuters are now scattershot in urban transit systems across the Western world. People still want something to read, that is portable and companionable and requires no technological savvy whatever. But those who can read want something to read, i.e. something intrinsically lively, informative, interesting, and even reliable and trustworthy and aesthetically satisfying. This is where the decline in journalism itself is most felt, not only in newspapers but throughout big media. The content has become diffuse, predictable, boring. In particular, with the triumph of “professional” journalism schools, and the credentialism that followed, “mainstream” journalists have come to represent a single, tedious class. Newspapers are now editorially staffed, overwhelmingly, by members of this one class, who think and sound like sociology majors, and express themselves in a jargon stream of pompous, preachy, preening, vaguely leftist and reptilian drivel. My suspicion is that an asteroid has now hit this class, and we await the emergence of something more lean, clean, warm-blooded, and mammalian. http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=864 http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=864 For at least the next decade, we were told this week by the most august scientific authorities, global average temperatures will not increase. My first instinct, had I any free money to blow in, would be to bet that they will rise: less from a betting impulse than from greed, for I’ve noticed that a lot of money has been made betting against the consensus of the authorities in my lifetime, and a lot lost on assuming it was sound. I might hesitate, however, in this instance, for from the little I know about world climate -- enough to dismiss global warming alarmists, but not enough to make my own confident predictions -- a cooling trend is more likely than a warming one, in the foreseeable future, for two big reasons. First, earth weather seems to track space weather, and the solar magnetic activity cycle seems to be entering relaxation mode. Second, we have, as everybody agrees, regardless of their views on greenhouse warming, just passed through a decades-long phase of slightly rising global temperatures, that followed a few decades of slightly falling temperatures. The rise ended about 1998, a record warm year. We’re at the top of the roller coaster now. Experience should tell us: hang on for the plunge. Another analogy might be to trends in breathing. It would not follow that my reader will never inhale again, from the fact that he is exhaling now. The news, for what it’s worth, was from the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences, in Kiel, Germany, prominently played in the international science journal, Nature. The authors of the study applied existing knowledge of oscillations in ocean temperatures, especially in the North Atlantic, to computer models of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that show consistent upward trends. This had not been done before, and when it was, the IPCC’s predicted 0.3C rise in global atmospheric temperatures over the next decade was cancelled out. Cautions within cautions: the Leibniz Institute is also dealing in computer models, which, in their nature, cannot even reliably predict the weather in Ottawa next weekend. Close readers of the news would discover that IPCC’s “grand central” model did not even consider such major known climatological factors as Gulf Stream pressures and the El Nino cycle. In turn, the Leibniz Institute’s modeling necessarily focuses on the North Atlantic, because that’s what we have information on. Vast tracts of the Pacific, Indian, and Southern oceans have not yet been seeded with networks of instrumental buoys, and most of these read only the surface. For all practical purposes, the influence on climate of seas covering well over half the world’s surface are “maria incognita.” Conversely, information about human contributions to the world’s climate is only too plentiful, thanks to the global craze for gathering economic statistics. We have every reason to believe it is quite small, yet the mere availability of mountains of data about it confers a systemic bias on any computer modeling, as on any other kind of statistical analysis. You go with the numbers you have, and draw very big conclusions from very narrow assumptions. This is a routine flaw in all modern scientific thinking, which scientists themselves are loath to consider, just as we all are loath to consider facts of life that must tend to make us very, very humble. To be charitable to the scientists who take the pay of the IPCC -- though only for the briefest moment -- myopia is a universal human condition. We all imagine that what we know is intrinsically more significant than what we don’t yet know, or even cannot know. This is why the empirical outlook of science needs balancing against the philosophical outlook, which demands context, and seeks breadth. It is incidentally also why the greater advances in scientific understanding are often made by rank amateurs -- people like Einstein working in places like Swiss patent offices, who can see the forest in spite of all the trees. It is also why such a disproportionate number of the greatest theoretical advances have been made by religious “nutjobs” (in the current parlance) -- from the evangelical Newton, to the Catholic fundamentalist Galileo, to monks such as Copernicus, Mendel, and Lemaître -- people chilled out by disposition, with a grand view of nature and her infinitely distant, but transubstantially present, God. Without such vision, we all tend to become easily panicked data crunchers. I was struck this week by another science story, also in Nature magazine. The techies at Hewlett-Packard have successfully fabricated “memristors,” a fourth building block for electronic circuits (after capacitors, resistors, and inductors). The achievement promises significant advances in computer memory and processing. The possibility of memristors was first established by Leon Chua, a professor at Berkeley, in 1971. He said this week, "I'm thrilled because it's almost like vindication. Something I did is not just in my imagination, it's fundamental." I love the implicit faith and humility in that statement. The man is thrilled because he didn't really invent anything after all, merely discovered (“dis-covered”) something already there, in nature or "the mind of God." And THAT is where authority comes from. Not from “scientists.” http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=863 http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=863 In my five weeks of absence from this space, I was saddened to learn, the assault on free speech and the free press in Canada has been escalated. In addition to the very ugly cases that have been brought before various so-called “human rights commissions,” to silence such “politically incorrect” Canadian writers as Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn, frivolous lawsuits have now been brought against several prominent journalists and bloggers for their efforts in exposing how the human rights commissions work, and for their audacity in mocking ludicrous behaviour by members of the HRC’s “Anti-Hate Teams.” Barbara Hall, the leftist former mayor of Toronto, who now presides over the Ontario Human Rights Commission, publicly pronounced Maclean’s magazine guilty of spreading anti-Islamic hatred (by publishing Mr Steyn), while declining to review the complaint which the radical Canadian Islamic Congress brought against the magazine. (The case had already been accepted by the federal and B.C. “human rights” commissions.) So to the HRCs’ existing repertoire of star chamber tactics -- no due process, no standards of evidence, crimes defined and punishments assigned at the commissioners’ whims, etc. -- Ms Hall has now added the obscenity of conviction without a trial or hearing. Meanwhile the Canadian Islamic Congress has graduated to shakedown tactics, calling a press conference Wednesday to announce the settlement terms on which it might cease to harass Maclean’s with “human rights” complaints. Updates, and links to sources, for these and many other developing cases, may be had through the blogs. I especially recommend that of Ezra Levant, a lawyer by training, and a magnificent aggregator and explicator of the details and arguments involved in each case. I would also put him at the top of any current list of those who actually deserve the Order of Canada, for valiant action of permanent value to our country. Mark Steyn’s website posts, and Kate McMillan’s “Small Dead Animals” blog in Saskatchewan, also belong on the shortlist of essential sources of information from day to day, and my reader may follow their links to more. The whole issue is proving too complex for conventional media reporting, although the National Post in particular has done an impressive job of trying to keep up with it. At a time when “human rights” commissars such as Barbara Hall can make us deeply ashamed of our country, it is important to remember there are Canadians like Levant, Steyn, McMillan, and many others to make us proud. I have been referring only to headline cases -- those of which the better-informed general public will be aware, already. But many others are currently defending themselves against Kafkaesque prosecutions, in dark places where media lights never shine, that require them to raise far more money for lawyers and other legal expenses than they could ever afford, against plaintiffs whose costs are paid by the taxpayer. Moreover, a large and necessarily expensive effort is needed to exhume and document the long record of past miscarriages of justice, performed by Canadian “human rights” tribunals, in the hope that eventually their numerous unpublicized victims may be vindicated, and that the rights and property wrongfully stripped from them may be restored. The notion that “freedom of speech is an American concept” -- I am quoting Dean Steacy, principal “mediator” (i.e. thought-crime investigator) for the Canadian Human Rights Commission -- is proving sadly true in the limited sense that most of the money donated to the various legal defence funds has come, via Internet, from citizens of the USA, outraged upon learning what has happened up here, and acting proactively before the same kind of moral and intellectual garbage spreads across the border. It is a further shame that the decisions of Canada’s human rights commissars have received more publicity in the States than up here. On the other hand, mainstream Canadian journalists do seem to be waking, gradually, to the realization that what has been done to their “conservative” colleagues could be done to them some day. Our Conservative government’s cowardly failure to intervene in defence of free speech and press, by e.g. immediately withdrawing the egregious Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Code, gives another indication of the Canadian sleepiness and complacency. (This is the section which empowers the “human rights” commissions to go trawling for political incorrectitude on the Internet.) In light of which, perhaps the most effective way to help, is for people who have given money to the Conservative Party in the past, to make all future donations to the legal defence funds for Canadian authors, journalists, and bloggers instead, until Prime Minister Harper and company get the message. Don’t forget to send the Conservative Party a note explaining what you have done, and why. The basic strategy of the enemies of freedom in Canada has been to tie freedom’s defenders up in courts -- the HRC kangaroo courts by preference. They may or may not have erred, tactically, in creating the headline cases I have mentioned above, which have helped rally many against them who are not among the usual friends of Messrs Steyn and Levant. It is a high-risk enterprise for the HRCs, but the rewards if they succeed are substantial: for they will have eliminated the very possibility of dissent, in Canada, against the various fanatic leftist, feminist, gay activist, and Islamist agendas with which they openly ally themselves. This is a battle that absolutely must be won, if Canada is to remain a free country. But it is only one battle in the long war that will be necessary to roll back the front line against the ideologues. Getting rid of Section 13 is a crucial immediate objective. But we must follow it up by finding ways to demolish the whole apparatus of the falsely-labelled “human rights” industry, which has been infecting the Canadian legal system for decades, and has left its toxic sprue in every department of our public life. It will be a task not of an hour, but perhaps of several generations, to reclaim our country. But we must start mobilizing now. N.B. the text above is expanded from the version of the column appearing in the Ottawa Citizen, which had to be shoehorned into my usual Saturday space. http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=862 http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=862 Write each column as if it were your last. And sooner or later it will be,” an editor once explained. I recall this sage advice, upon returning to my day job, after annual leave. And with my first deadline falling smack on my 55th birthday. (That is, yesterday. If you haven’t sent a card, it is already too late.) Five weeks of staying as far from the news as I could contrive to get. Some of this time spent fighting curiosity. But most of it caring for ancient parents, now shifted to a nursing home from their need for constant medical supervision. This is a common experience among baby-boomers, as my much younger, current editor explains: no call for “empathy” there. And my many contemporaries, whose parents are neither dead nor disowned, may well have learned that no empathy is appropriate. For the experience, though painful, is full of reward. Verily, this is among the forgotten truths of what I call, for shorthand, “post-modernity” -- a.k.a. “the mall culture” or “the age of abortion” -- that all human reward is founded in pain. That all true joy is founded in duty; and freedom in duty, too. That, in the words of my priest, “Principles are something you pay for, not something you collect on.” And let me add, since we are dealing in old saws this morning, that one cannot begin to appreciate the glory and beauty and preciousness of a human life, until one has grasped how tenuous and transient it is. To this end, I recommend pushing a stroke victim out in his wheelchair, under the spring sun amid birdsong -- and the laughter of children playing in a schoolyard -- after he has been shut in the whole winter. An old man who cannot talk, but does not need words to radiate his pleasure, in being still alive. An old man who suddenly defies his condition, to tell his crippled old wife, after sixty-something years through thick and thin together, that he still loves her. I was going to write today about certain items in the news -- specifically about our government’s cowardly failure to intervene in defence of freedom of speech and press, as Canada’s ideologized “human rights” commissions mount their increasingly vigorous assault on “thought crimes” -- but that battle can wait till Saturday. (My mind is still re-gearing.) The whole earth often appears a war zone, for the battle against human malice and stupidity must never be given up. It is a war that must moreover be fought in charity and good humour, for that is the ultimate confutation of all the devil’s claims. “First heal thyself,” for the front line runs through every human heart, and it is there the tyrant must first be defeated. I make this (unoriginal) observation after considerable research. My holiday, when not at the call of my parents, was spent mostly sorting family archives, rich in paper and pictures from both sides. This is another part of the experience, passing down the generations. Family is at the root of every civilization, and the lore of a family -- extending through space and time -- is the formation of every child not abandoned at birth. It is a precarious thing, getting born -- especially these days, but also in the past. Item, from the letters of my paternal grandparents, “Mabel” and “Roy.” The family belief is that it is a wonderful correspondence between two tempestuous young lovers, tragically separated when grandpa was sent off into the South American wild as a geological cartographer from Imperial Oil. A closer reading reveals, that grandpa did write earnest love letters. He went to heroic lengths to get them mailed, from jungles and mountaintops, and hid his disappointment at the few replies. He wrote ten letters for every one from Mabel. And each of those letters ten times the length of one of hers. And every sentence with ten times her passion and commitment. On his way back north, at the end of this adventure, flush with cash, he sent her money so she could meet him in New York. He'd separately sent a letter to a lawyer, asking if a marriage in New York City would be recognized in Canada. (Duh, yes.) Mabel got the money, but did not show up. It was another year before Roy finally cornered her in a Methodist church. (For, once grandpa had an idea in his head, he wouldn't give up.) Result: one big, happy family. Item, just after returning from the last World War, my papa rented an aeroplane -- an old Tiger Moth trainer I think it was. He called his mom and dad, then buzzed them, skimming up the Credit River, right in front of their house. At the last second, he noticed there were cables slung from the railway bridge, and decided not to fly under it. Result: my column today. http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=861 http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=861 For a lark, before writing this Easter Sunday column, I typed the single word “Easter” into an Internet search box, and looked for “news results.” Here, in order, were the top five stories, as of midway through Holy Week, MMVIII: Item, plastic Easter eggs, spinning tops, bunny hair clips, and “chick-style sipper cups,” linked to lead paint by a Cleveland-area chemistry professor. (And guess what? They were made in China.) Item, motorists queue to beat Easter fuel price rises. (Various locations.) Item, Easter kangaroo cull by Australian defence department postponed in deference to animal rights activists. (Until next week!) Item, flat retail spending for Easter expected. (Various locations.) Item, police to be out in force on roads for Easter drunk-driving blitz. (Various locations.) And now, the first “upbeat” story. It is item six: extra-thick Easter eggs a hit in London, England. (Price of leading brand at Harrod’s, 18 pounds each.) Christian that I am, to say nothing of Catholic, my eye was caught by another feature from the British High Street: an “advertorial” I would guess, that had tricked the Google search engine into treating it as “news.” The headline read, “Easter: We do the hard work for you!” This would be quite an offer, if the copywriters had any idea what they were saying. For as I recall, the hard work of Easter consisted of being arrested, mistried, scourged and otherwise humiliated and tortured, carrying a crucifix across the city of Jerusalem, and then being nailed to it. The Resurrection from the Dead might also present difficulties. We tend to think of glibness as a neutral thing, and the characteristic distractions of our age as light, meaningless, trivial, and therefore inconsequential. “Religious freedom” has been so long taken for granted in our culture, that we hardly notice now that it begins to be taken away (see various rightwing bloggers). The assumption is that people who only concern themselves with chocolate eggs, and suchlike candy for the body and mind, and whose political interests are restricted to the safety of children’s toys, or a kangaroo’s right-to-life, are of no danger to themselves or others. There is a lady I adore (I adore many) who reads a lot of trash. She admits it is trash, “light reading,” frankly escapist, and that she does it as a release from tension she associates with “work.” Her argument is unanswerable, as far as it goes: “You just have to relax sometimes, you can’t be serious all the time.” Her job is a stupid and unnecessary (nay, counter-productive) one in a bureaucracy. She pushes paper all day long, according to her instructions. I can easily understand the temptation to withdraw from it, into a mildly romantic fantasia. But my question for her would be: “Do you ever read anything serious?” And the answer to that would have to be, “No.” Consider for a moment: exhaustion from repetitive, mindless, soul-destroying labour. And then, relaxation into repetitive, mindless, soul-destroying leisure. Eventually pensioned off. For an increasing proportion of the population, childlessness and thus, none of the traditional consolations of family. Personal relationships, by fifty, all in ruins. Death, typically, in a nursing home; though maybe not if the Welfare State collapses. What’s wrong with this scene? While I was describing one person, who varies light reading with an addiction to Facebook and other Internet treats, I might be describing a cross-section of what I call “postmodern man.” He lives as a cipher in a complex “mixed” economy, a tiny little interchangeable cog in a vast dysfunctional machine, designed by competing simpletons to produce “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.” And if you look at all deeply into his psyche, you will find that he is sad. The question for the Church and Christians today, is how do we explain the Crucifixion, Death, and Resurrection of Christ to that very person? How do we even begin? The case is not hopeless; though in saying that, I am committing what any intelligent unbeliever would immediately decry as a tautology. The Resurrection itself, celebrated by Christians for more than 19 centuries as the central feast of their liturgical year, is the answer to despair, including the postmodern despair. In the Northern Hemisphere, it returns with spring, as if all nature were witnessing redemption; but it transcends nature. Faith, hope, and love, the three “theological virtues,” can all be dismissed as self-referential. If man is indeed the random product of unthinking forces, none of them can have any meaning at all. Alternatively, we are the children of God, and these virtues make sense. The Google search with which I opened was into the empty shell of a world that is, even as I write, passing away into nothing. It will soon be extinct, and having produced nothing worth remembering, it will not be remembered. The life of the spirit goes on, outside the comprehension of this world. To anyone who wants to know where the path begins, that leads out of nowhere, and towards somewhere, towards Hope -- let me refer him to the instruction that begins: “In the beginning.” N.B. I am off on my annual leave, as is my wont, the five weeks after Easter. http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=860 http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=860 It is not necessary to have views on Tibet’s claims to national independence, to condemn the obscene Chinese Communist occupation of that land, and the consistent policy of the butchers of Beijing to “Sinicize” or de-Tibetanize the conquered territories. Since the Maoist invasion of 1949-51, Tibetans have lived either under a reign of terror, or in exile. They watched the Communists demolish their monasteries, and slaughter their monks, and purposefully desecrate everything of beauty and value in the Tibetan Buddhist heritage. Since, they have watched them appropriate the cultural space with forced Chinese immigration, until by most accounts today the Tibetans are outnumbered in their own country. We can do even less about that, than the surviving Tibetans. We watch from a great distance while a new generation of young Tibetans, radicalized by the experience of slavery, and boldly demonstrating for the world’s attention, are murdered and imprisoned in their turn by the thugs of the “People’s Liberation Army.” The Western media, today as ever since the triumph of Mao Zedong, gather news out of Red China at the pleasure of the Communist authorities, and we have no direct way of knowing the extent of carnage over the last fortnight. Historical experience, in Russia and elsewhere, should teach us to take the information that escapes through the international exile groups at close to face value. In their estimation, several hundred have been gunned down, and the Chinese military have now rounded up many thousands. These latter will be caged -- and many tortured and killed -- to assure relative peace and quiet while the Olympic torch is carried through Tibet. Like the 1936 Olympics in Hitler’s Berlin, or the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing have been designed from the beginning as a celebration of the world’s biggest and ugliest totalitarian regime. There was no moral excuse for anyone who participated in bringing the games to Beijing; nor is there an excuse now for anyone assisting in the huge public relations enterprise. It should be realized, however, that the athletes themselves are relatively innocent. They are simply being used in a political stunt. The exploitation of non-political people to make political statements is disgusting. Whatever the intentions of its idealistic promoters in the 19th century, the modern Olympic Games have become an exhibition of national chauvinism instead of amateur sport; even when they are held in free countries. But by now the Olympic movement has attached so many vested interests to itself, that we cannot hope for its elimination. The masses must have their bread and circuses. My point here is that we didn’t need current events in Tibet to know that Canada, and other free countries, should not participate in the Beijing Games. For the current massacre in Tibet, like the massacre in Tiananmen Square 19 years ago, teaches us nothing new about the nature of the regime. It merely reminds us what that is. It is unfortunate that we needed reminding. The demonstrations have already proved as ineffectual as the Tibetan uprising, also of 1989, or the recent uprising in Burma. Unarmed demonstrators are no match for jackboots with guns, when the State functionaries are prepared to use them. Yet their courage is inspiring, and over time, they contribute to the destruction of the regime’s self-confidence. We should thus honour the Tibetans’ painful, Quixotic gesture. Nobody listens to the Dalai Lama. By this I mean, hardly anyone in the West; in Beijing, I’m sure, his every statement is monitored carefully. In the West, Hollywood narcissists embrace him as a paragon of cool, but what he says seldom registers in the cool imagination. For instance, he is, like the Catholic Pope, among the most unambiguous opponents of contraception, abortion, and the “culture of death”; and has been as eloquent as the late Mother Teresa on the need to replace morally destructive bureaucratic welfare arrangements with direct acts of personal charity. On the question of sovereign independence for Tibet, it is worth noting that he does not seek it. He has consistently sought, instead, some practical arrangement in which the Chinese State will recognize Tibet’s ancient autonomy, and leave the Tibetan peoples to get on with their own lives, according to their own lights. He has little hope in the efficacy of big power arrangements to achieve real political goods, but focuses the struggle on actual human freedom. All we can add to this is a refusal to lie, or to accept the Beijing regime as “normal.” http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=859 http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=859 It was my hero, Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992), economist of the “Austrian School,” and historian of ideas, who wrote the book entitled, Road to Serfdom. It appeared in the spring of 1944, in England, not the most convenient moment given the paper shortages of wartime, and the continuing distractions from the life of the mind offered by Herr Hitler. Nor could it have been calculated to please Keynesians and other supporters of the prevailing economic wisdom -- which was that the success of centralized war production, and Roosevelt’s New Deal in America, had permanently validated “central planning” in every national economy. More than that, the ideologues of the Left, having had to withdraw their pacifist approach to Hitler after the disintegration of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, were now arguing that the Nazi Party of Germany was “capitalism’s answer to the socialism of Mother Russia,” and laying down the rhetorical notion that “capitalism equals fascism,” as a way to tarnish the people who had actually risked their lives in fighting the Nazis tooth, nail, and soul. While the idea that Hitler’s programme of “National Socialism” worked on free market principles was utterly absurd, not only on its face but on every possible level of analysis, we must remember that then as now the batty ideas of the Left enjoyed a tremendous cachet in fashionable society, among people who do not so much think as preen themselves. Moreover, those were the days of “Uncle Joe” Stalin, when the Western world was too busy fighting a war in which he had become an ally, to remember that the socialist system in Russia was an obscene and murderous tyranny. Friedrich Hayek’s book was an attempt to write, for the broadest possible intelligent audience, a warning of what central planning entails. While it might be necessary under conditions of total war, in which a nation is struggling for survival alone, and the freedom of the individual is a matter of no consequence, it cannot exist in peacetime except with the effect of crushing that freedom. Moreover, all systems of central planning, with their massive unproductive Kafkaesque bureaucracies, and their Byzantine regulatory systems, are by nature economically inefficient. They turn an entire nation into a vast top-heavy war machine, when there is no war; finally collapsing (as in Soviet Russia and elsewhere) under their own weight and leaving the society underneath them in ruins. Yet the idea that anonymous geniuses in a central planning office will be able to organize all human activity more efficiently and fairly than it can organize itself, persists as a waking dream. George Orwell was among the reviewers who praised Hayek’s book when it appeared, and I think it helped him develop the concept of “Big Brother,” expounded in his prophetic novels, Animal Farm, and Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is now nearly twenty years since the Berlin Wall came down, and for a moment we could indulge the alternative waking dream that socialism was over, and the prestige of central planning systems was at an end. Hayek himself lived long enough to become an adviser to Margaret Thatcher, and to witness that marvelous moment when the chains were removed from the peoples of central and eastern Europe. And yet to the end of his life he knew the battle against the commissars had hardly been won: that new ideologies would arise in the void left by Communism, and that the struggle against tyranny in this world is never over. Writing in the National Post this week, Peter Foster invoked Hayek’s book again with an article entitled “The New Road to Serfdom,” and variations on the phrase appear frequently elsewhere. Never having been appropriated by the Left, the phrase continues to be useful, as intellectual shorthand, to remind us that all of the political experience of the last sixty-something years has tended to vindicate Hayek, and to show consistently the disastrous consequences of bureaucratic solutions to human problems. But Mr Forster reviews the process by which the ideals of Communism, expressed in that Berlin Wall, are being resurrected under the new ideological banner of Environmentalism. From the UN’s Brundtland Commission of 1987, which launched the phrase “sustainable development,” to the follow-up Rio Conference of 1992, organized by the Canadian socialist, Maurice Strong, to the radical Kyoto Accord of 1997, which proposed a scheme for centrally planning the economy of the entire planet, Environmentalism has provided the new home for the old Left. As I wrote above, the plausibility of “democratic” central planning on a gargantuan scale emerged, in the West, from the circumstances of a World War. After that war, the idea of the “mixed economy” replaced it, as a kind of compromise. Free enterprise became our engine of wealth, while state bureaucracies expanded alongside, their parasitical “sustainable growth” depending upon ever higher levels of taxation. The “new Western man” is half-free, with approximately half our earnings retained, and half surrendered to the Moloch, which tells us how to live with ever-growing self-confidence. But to get beyond this half-measure, the central planners need a war. The “climate change” and “global warming” scares are intended to provide this war, and justify Moloch in seizing the rest of our earnings, property, and freedom. http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=858 http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=858 A few weeks ago I wrote in this space -- facetiously -- that an effective response to global warming and/or the atmospheric accumulation of carbon dioxide would be to cut the world’s food consumption by half. This could be achieved if we would all agree to eat only on odd-numbered days. Among the advantages of having our environmental commissars enforce this scheme, I mentioned the halving of the factory and transport infrastructure, that delivers the planet’s food. But beyond this, the food industry’s billion or so poorest customers, who barely get enough to eat now, would be removed from the carbon account entirely. Think of it on the analogy of a corporate buy-out, I suggested: “At first, there is a net increase in CO2 ‘costs’ as people die and their corpses decay. But later, after they have finished decaying, there are substantial and permanent net savings.” Perhaps I shouldn’t joke. A scheme to kill off the world’s poor, through starvation, has already been launched on the advice of environmental “experts,” and is showing promising results. The tactics are cleverer than mine, by half. “Biofuel” is the means. By turning much of the planet’s limited arable land, including especially the lower-cost breadbaskets of the Third World, into grain generators for biofuel, the environmental revolution is creating the conditions for famine on a colossal scale. Thanks to massive First-World subsides for biofuel, and state regulations requiring constant increases in the biofuel component of Western oil consumption, the tonnage of the world’s crops being fed into biofuel production appears, from various estimates, to be growing about five times faster than the amount being fed into human mouths. The turnover is accelerating. Even in the economically advanced West, the rise in food prices has become noticeable. My observant reader will find plenty of signs in his local supermarket, where the price of dairy products is leading an advance that must necessarily spread -- for wholesale prices are outstripping retail prices in food across the board. The secondary effect of the monetary inflation this re-ignites is in itself beginning to cause economic havoc. But we, who spend (in North America) less than 15 percent of our income on food, can nevertheless survive if that proportion doubles or triples. It is in the poorest countries of the world, where people often spend more than half their income obtaining food, that a doubling or tripling of prices is fatal. And note, the supply of food does not need to halve, in order to double prices. It only has to fall, consistently, a little behind demand. Please don’t take my word for this. The United Nations’ World Food Programme and various other collectivist agencies are already becoming eloquent on the subject. In a statement to the European Parliament last week, the executive director of the WFP explained that their own cost of obtaining food for distribution to the world’s hungry had risen by 40 percent since last June. They are not predicting a catastrophe. They are experiencing one. And all this is happening for what? So that we, the rich, can feel some smug environmentalist satisfaction while pumping biofuel into our cars. The economics of biofuel are themselves distorted by subsidies representing around half of production costs. It is a way of producing petroleum that is structurally more expensive than refining oil, not only in cash, but in environmental fallout -- for there are more production stages to be passed through, and fossil fuels are burned in passing through them. Cheap gas we are not going to get. The world’s oil prices have much more to do with the OPEC cartel than any shortage of reserves or supply. Huge new reservoirs have come to light (most recently off the coast of Brazil), and there were already huge unexploited reserves (such as Alberta’s tar sands). But by consistently choking down supply, a fraction behind growth in demand, OPEC can keep the whip hand for the foreseeable future. Biofuel has thus already joined the list of environmental catastrophes caused by environmental scares. That list began with the DDT scare in the early 1960s, since when tens of millions have died from malaria and other diseases that could have been eradicated by spraying with this effective pesticide. The triumph of “environmentalism” is symptomatic of the madness that has gripped our power elites, under the thrall of “political correctness” -- for there is real insanity in creating an actual and predictable disaster, to avert an imaginary one. Noting food riots already in Egypt, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Mexico, and food rationing in Pakistan and China, the Indian development economist Deepak Lal writes: “For the Western ‘good and the great’, their academic acolytes and the pop stars grandstanding to save Africa and to end poverty, this latest Western assault on the world's poor by their promotion of biofuels to replace food on the limited land in the world, can only evince contempt.” http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=857 http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=857 The defence, “I was only following orders,” didn’t work well at Nuremberg, and hasn’t worked well in courts where the rule of law is more securely grounded. And yet, every large bureaucratic system depends on this defence, as a kind of “unspoken mantra.” Can a mantra be unspoken? For the purposes of this column I will argue, Yes. But the argument may strike any post-Christian reader as arcane. It is my earnest belief that the human being is endowed with a conscience, an innate understanding of right and wrong, and the ability, when that conscience is cultivated, to detect his own hypocrisies. In doing evil things, he must suppress a natural revulsion for his own acts. He must, in effect, “talk over” the angel of his better self, and keep inwardly repeating some absurd justification for the way in which he is actually behaving. This is the “unspoken mantra,” and it is a source of spiritual pain. With me so far? Possibly not, for I have just invoked the “s” word. (“Spiritual.”) Indeed, one of the most effective ways to shut down conscientious activity is to adopt an atheist, materialist, and morally relativist worldview, in which all “spiritual” considerations may be marked as illusory, together with any such absolute concepts as “good” and “evil.” In Friedrich Nietzsche’s brilliant analysis, we have gone “beyond good and evil,” now that “God is dead.” Already I am up against a wall. How does one argue from conscience with people who don’t think conscience exists? Or, who will allow that the word has some “psychological” meaning, but obfuscate on what it might be? For I have observed that very few of my post-Christian contemporaries are full-bore Nietzscheans, or consistent antinomians. Most people today are slovenly ones -- resorting to the explicit rejection of God and any absolute non-material standards only when it is convenient to themselves. But still willing to invoke the standards when judging the behaviour of others. So let me return to my point about bureaucracy, since it will surely make the whole point clearer. Bureaucracies operate on things called “policies,” which are settled at the top and passed down as directions. (Sometimes, however, they create themselves, or are inserted somewhere in the food chain by a con artist, or other evil genie.) It does not matter how nice, kind, kitten-loving, democratically-elected, and wonderfully well-informed, the policy-maker is. Or, how many beneficiaries the policy will reward. For what he designs is by definition one-size-fits-all. And like the bed of Procrustes, the machinery of state stretches or mangles every human creature whose case does not fit precisely. Quite apart from the question of unimaginably massive waste of resources -- inevitable when people are spending huge quantities of money that is not their own -- there is a far more damning moral objection to bureaucratic systems. The establishment of each policy frees every member of the bureaucracy from moral responsibility for his acts. Hence you get what I have directly experienced in countless encounters with the tax, family law, drug, hospital, veterans, pension, disability, nursing home, “human rights,” and other bureaucracies, both on my own behalf and on behalf of others, over the last many years. (And never, not even once, demanding financial assistance.) It is the stone-faced functionary -- nay, moral zombie -- who knows perfectly well what the unjust consequences will be to some innocent person, of following the policy of his department. And then does it anyway. On the day of judgement, and in the presence of his accumulated victims, he will be able to say: “I was only following orders.” Time and again we have heard politicians arguing for better policies. “Think tanks” (aptly named) are created to review them from this side or that. And it is probably true that some policies are more ruinous than others. Indeed, new policies are usually introduced to mitigate the evils of old policies, after those have been publicized. And having failed to mitigate them, the new policies then introduce evils of their own. Inevitably. For the idea of a “humane policy” is like the old idea of “humane ammunition,” that led to the development of everything from the Dum-Dum bullet to the Taser gun. It is a contradiction of terms. “But you can’t have a bureaucracy without policies,” I can hear a reader objecting. That reader will be on the threshold of grasping my point. Bureaucracy is the body, policy is its soul, and the whole thing is the very devil. http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=856 http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=856 Latin America has been, in the main, a mysterious blind spot in my comprehension of the contemporary world, and remains so, despite advice received from four different friends with some expertise in the region, who tell me the solution to the problems my enemies have created for me in Canada would be emigration to Brazil. (They are kind, and they are practical, but I would not dream of giving anyone the pleasure of seeing the back of me.) It is with this proviso that I comment on interesting developments in the Spanish Main, where the democratically-elected, mostly constitutional, and reasonably decent government of Colombia has been enjoying some success in exterminating the vile, narcotics-trafficking Marxist bush army of the FARC. This “Revolutionary Armed Force of Colombia” was, as everyone should know, founded as the terrorist wing of the Colombian Communist Party, under Cuban and Soviet patronage, nearly half a century ago. It has evolved through the years, surviving the loss of that patronage after the fall of the Berlin Wall, by engaging in criminal activities on a larger and larger scale. Needless to say, for the sort of people who still sport Che Guevara tee-shirts -- and they are legion, even in Barack Obama campaign offices in Texas -- slaughter, kidnapping, extortion, and drug-trafficking hardly impede worship of what can be touted as a chic revolutionary movement. And when such people learn that the Colombian government is eager to conclude a free trade pact with the United States -- well, what could be more wicked than trying to raise an impoverished people out of abject dependency by means of honest capitalist enterprise? I admit, there was some sarcasm in the previous paragraph, but entirely deserved. The outrage expressed in some sections of the media, because the Colombian army briefly trespassed into Ecuadorian territory to get at an important FARC operation, is beyond risible so we should not laugh. In international law, going back nigh unto the treaty of Westphalia (1648), a country is entirely within its rights to invade a neighbour that is harbouring its violent insurgents. The operation last week, in which Raul Reyes, the FARC “foreign minister” and second-in-command, was returned to his maker for final disposition, was, on the evidence presented, a brilliant success. Not only did an air strike demolish the guerrilla headquarters, but a subsequent commando operation sifted the ruins for evidence that will now be presented to an international court, showing direct financial and logistical support for the FARC by the Venezuelan government of that psychopathic buffoon, Hugo Chavez. Like the mad mullahs of Iran, though working from a different ideology, Mr Chavez manifests behaviour that is quite impossible to predict. He has already ordered the Venezuelan army into threatening positions along Colombia’s eastern border -- during a meandering television address in which he was quite visibly frothing at the mouth. Colombia’s sane president, Alvaro Aribe, has so far refused to respond to this bait. The leftwing governments of Ecuador and Nicaragua have joined Chavez in withdrawing their embassies from Bogota. All three are pursuing a regional diplomatic campaign to harm Colombian interests as much as possible. There is a constant danger that, if he thought he could survive it, Hugo Chavez might actually start a war. This is traditionally the way ideological monsters, in Latin America and elsewhere, secure their domestic power, after making a mess of a country’s social and economic order. Nationalism worked even for Stalin, in resisting Hitler, and even for Hitler, in resisting Stalin. It tends to evaporate only when a country has been thoroughly laid waste, and occupied. With the declining prestige of Karl Marx and V.I. Lenin, Chavez and his ilk have reached for another old revolutionary standard to wave -- that of a certain Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar Palacios y Blanco -- better known more simply as “Simon Bolivar.” History, if I may paraphrase the famous Marxian analysis, is repeated first as tragedy and then as FARC. My suspicion is that we are in need of a deeper historical understanding, if the persistent fall of Latin American countries into demagogic populism, jingoism, caudillism and monocracy, is ever to be reversed. Why was it that the American struggle for independence turned out so well, yet the Latin American so poorly -- despite being founded on largely the same Scottish Enlightenment ideals, and the latter having the U.S. example before it? I leave this question to people who know more about Latin America. http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=855 http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/index.php?id=855