Middle East Peace Requires A Warmer Nest

There is an old Yiddish proverb ” Beware of still water, a still dog and a still enemy”.  That is an adage Benjamin Netanyahu’s peace delegation might take to heart as it prepares for peace talks in Washington this Thursday.   For months the Palestinian Authority has been claiming that it has finally exerted control over its extremist elements, making it a fit partner for a peace talks and respectable to enough be taken seriously by the international community.

But that claim was put to the lie last night as an Israeli family of four was gunned down in cold blood on the outskirts of Hebron.   The murder, by the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigade, should make everyone understand that seeming Palestinian quietude is often a mask for the execution of the next terrorist strike.

On the surface, these times may indeed seem propitious for final negotiations. The Palestinian economy is booming, Israelis are desperate to find a passage out of  their current diplomatic isolation and the Obama Administration seems fully engaged, eager to end a nettlesome problem which stands in the way of a broader compact with the Arab world.

But lets get real.  The Palestinian delegation arriving in Washington this week is nothing more than a rump party, representing barely a third of Palestinian population and less than a quarter of domestic opinion ( which remains avowedly opposed to the recognition of Israel) ;  Its leadership has not foresworn the right of return for millions of Palestinian refugees to Israel proper ( a deal killer for any Israeli government – of  either right or  left) and Palestinian school books still preach the value and benefit of murdering Jews.

Not exactly the ideal nest for hatching a peace egg, now is it? .

Beyond even this uncomfortable reality is the specter of  of the 800 pound gorilla that everyone conveniently ignores.    Hamas is not party to these talks, nor does it wish to be.  It is doing just fine, thank you very much, garnering global sympathy as a victim of Israeli intransigence while gleefully opening its Get Well mail sent by the world following the Flotilla incident of late May.  Yet Hamas represents nearly one and a half million Palestinians and is still, by all accounts, very much in control of its tiny territory.  Its willingness to defy the local superpower has transformed its image among ordinary Palestinians ( not to mention the broader Arab world)  from one of spoiler to that of gladiator.  The Palestinians in the West Bank have little to offer as comparable symbols of Muslim manhood.

The failure to recognize that the Palestinian people as irredeemably splintered and wracked by internecine feuds and tribal hatreds – and that is has never had any real incentive to make progress in peace negotiations, has bedeviled almost all peace negotiations since 1991 and will doom these ones as well.  No one seems to remember today that the vast majority of Palestinians killed in the first Intifada ( 1987-91) perished at the hand of other Palestinians.   Or that hundreds of Palestinians died during Yasser Arafat’s reign in the West Bank, merely for supporting the notion of peace with Israel.  Mahmoud Abbas, a weak leader whose chief ability appears to be his skill in evading assassination, has none of the charisma or confidence of Yasser Arafat ( nor consummate skill at duping Western leaders) and for years has appeared more than content to sit on his hands and do nothing.

For good reason.  A peace agreement does not serve his nor, to his mind at least, Palestinian interests.  The Palestinian leadership gains nothing from statehood ( and the implicit expectation that it recognize its neighbor’s right to exist), except death warrants from groups such as the Qassam Brigade and the possible loss of the nepotistic monopolies that they control in their territories.  The Palestinian people are  also doing fine as inveterate wards of the West, the recipients of more aid per capita than any other people on Earth.

Given this reality there is another Yiddish proverb the Netanyahu folks might wish to recall:  “If things are not as you wish, then wish them as they are”.   This an apt second guide for all the parties to the peace negotiations.  Taken seriously, it may just awaken the peace dreamers to the reality that the Palestinians might actually fight ( as Arafat once did) to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state.   The result could be a renewed Intifada far more desperate and catastrophic than any that has come before it.

Is Anyone Interested in the Truth About Communism?

Claire Berlinki, whose book, Menace in Europe, was one of the influences for the organization of  the first AFA conference in June, 2007,  has written an important piece in this Quarter’s City Journal, that everyone should read.

It deals  with two Russian exiles.  The first is Pavel Stroilov, living  in London,who has on his computer 50,000 unpublished, untranslated, top-secret Kremlin documents, mostly dating from the end of the Cold War and which he stole in 2003 before fleeing Russia. The second is Vladimir Bukovsky, another emigre, who possesses a large  collection of stolen and smuggled papers from the archives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, which, as he writes, “contain the beginnings and the ends of all the tragedies of our bloodstained century.”

Berlinski goes on to explain:

“Within living memory, they would have been worth millions to the CIA; they surely tell a story about Communism and its collapse that the world needs to know. Yet they can’t get anyone to house them in a reputable library, publish them, or fund their translation. In fact, they can’t get anyone to take much interest in them at all.”

Why is no one interested in such a fantastically rich trove of documents about the beginnings and end of a regime that consigned to death over 35 million people?  Surely historians would be champing at the bit for an inside view of such a repugnant institution.

Stroilov himself  explains the indifference in this way:

“a kind of a taboo, the vague common understanding in the Establishment that it is better to let sleeping dogs lie, not to throw stones in a house of glass, and not to mention a rope in the house of a hanged man.” I suspect it is something even more disturbing: no one much cares.”

An argument could be made that it may still be too early to exhume the corpse of the Soviet Union.   After all, the shell shocked First World War generation didn’t begin producing  their memoirs for a full decade after  the end of the conflict and Holocaust studies did not kick into gear until thirty years had passed from the end of the Second World War.

But I have another explanation.  The collapse of the Soviet Union and the repudiation of Communism as an integrated economic, social and political system, came as an embarrassment for the West’s intelligentsia.  They, who largely saw it as an important prod to Western greed and expansionism, are still oriented towards socialistic idealism, while clinging to dreams of its revival.  Thus many of our politicians, academics, entertainers and social leaders are noticeably uncomfortable discussing the collapse of the Soviet Union since the very subject inspires reflection on the nature of the repugnant and failed system to which it once gave birth.

But failure to confront these realities, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn bitterly pointed out in his last years, encourages a historical numbness,which inevitably erodes our ability to make distinction between righteous and evil systems of government and good and bad economic philosophies.

Someone will, eventually, publish and translate these documents.   But it will have to await a time when our intelligentsia has the courage to admit the reality of a collapsed dream and evince a willingness to move on.

Winston Churchill and the Pivot of History

If there can said to be true turning points in history, when the future of mankind seems to pivot on the outcome of a single event, perhaps the afternoon of May 9, 1940, 70 years ago, might qualify.  This was the day  that British prime minister  Neville Chamberlain, Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax ,Government whip David Margesson and  First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill conferred over scotch and cigars at 10 Downing Street on the future of Chamberlain’s Conservative government.

By that time Britain had been at war with Germany for eight months but had  little to show for it.   Germany had invaded and then crushingly defeated Poland and Czechoslovakia the previous Fall.  Denmark had capitulated in April in less than 12 hours with barely a fight.   Norway, where the British Expeditionary Force had fought a two week, half-hearted and poorly planned campaign, was fighting a losing battle for its existence against overwhelming German force.

But even more devastatingly, British intelligence reported that Belgium, the Netherlands  and Luxembourg were likely to be invaded within hours by the advancing Wehrmacht – its aim a lightning Panzer strike on France itself through the Ardennes.  The Blitzkrieg, confined at that time to Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, was now ripping through the heart of Europe and rumbling dangerously close to home.

Neville Chamberlain, whose policies of appeasement had led Britain into such dire straits, was being increasingly ridiculed in Parliament and had suffered a division in the House of Commons only the day before on the issues of his governmental stewardship.  Although Chamberlain won the contest, his usual muscular majority of 250 was reduced to a feeble 80 – which was read as a bitter, humiliating defeat.

At this point, Chamberlain had two options:  He could attempt to form his own national government, bringing in Labour and the Liberals members into a unity coalition.  Or he could resign and hand over his prime ministerial responsibilities to another man more capable of inspiring the confidence of parliament and the citizenry.  He chose to go on.  Yet when the answer returned that neither Labour nor the Liberal leaders would serve under him, he accepted that he had no choice but to tender his resignation to the King.

The four men sitting together at Downing Street, then had to make a fateful decision about the leadership succession. Chamberlain’s own choice was Halifax, a man who had loyally supported his policies of appeasement and had demonstrated little taste for war.

Churchill, the alternate choice, had many things going against him.   He was intensely distrusted by senior members of his own Conservative Party, who saw him as vainglorious and unstable.  Members of the Opposition had been aggrieved by his steadfast commitment to Chamberlain’s lackadaisical conduct of the war (he had been appointed as First Lord of the Admiralty in September) and largely blamed him for the Norwegian fiasco.

Moreover, there was Churchill’s resistance to the idea himself.   Once in government, he had become a loyal supporter of Chamberlain and had even mounted a vigorous defense of the prime minister when he was denounced in Parliament the day before.  He made it clear to Chamberlain that he would accept any decision the prime minister made about a successor.   For the young and aggressive back-benchers who had, since Munich, been clamoring for a Churchill prime-ministership, this was deeply puzzling, if not tantamount to a betrayal.

The one thing that tipped the balance was Halifax himself.   Noting how difficult it might prove to lead the government during wartime from the House of Lords, he made it clear that he didn’t want the job, even if there was support from the Commons.   After he made that comment, a long silence followed and Chamberlain, looking at Churchill, designated him as his heir.

How the world might have looked today if things has swung the other way and Halifax had accepted Chamberlain’s choice is one of the truly great counter-factual questions of history.   For Halifax was not a fighter, nor a particularly inspiring figure.  A sense of his thinking on the matter of war and peace was revealed two weeks later when the Italians sent feelers to the British government to help negotiate a separate peace between the U.K. and Germany.   Churchill had retained Halifax (along with a number of Chamberlain’s appeaser crew) in his government in an effort to maintain continuity.  Halifax argued aggressively for a peace treaty with Hitler, essentially conceding the European continent to the German dictator.  This, he argued, might keep the British fleet in tact and allow the U.K, to use its over stretched resources to defend against grave threats to the British Empire in Asia and the Pacific.

After four days of heated debate, Churchill rejected Halifax’s proposals out of hand and soon enough went on to rally not only Parliament but the entire nation behind his defiant policy.  “Then and there,”  historian John Lukacs has written, ”Churchill saved Britain and Europe and Western civilization.”

But what if it had been Halifax in charge and not Churchill who led  that cabinet debate in late May?   The likely outcome would have been a peace treaty that surrendered not just the Continent, but also Britain’s control of the Atlantic, giving the Germans effective command, through unrestricted submarine warfare, of its sea lanes.   The United States would then have stood alone, relatively unprepared, as the sole major world democracy facing totalitarian challenges on two fronts.

Recognizing American vulnerability, the Japanese might well have stepped up their planned attack on Pearl Harbor to December, 1940 – a year early, giving the United States little time for its rearmament  program to have any significant impact on the war’s  outcome.    The Soviet Union, after many setbacks, including the destruction of Moscow and the defeat of Stalingrad, but drawing on its enormous human resources, may have recovered sufficiently to force back a German retreat, which would have led to the Russians’ ultimate advance on Berlin.

Without the presence of Allied forces to prevent their progress, the Soviet armies would have quickly swept into France, Spain and Italy and crushed any resistance.   The entire European continent would inevitably have come under the shadow of Communist rule, leaving a brittle, ineffectual Britain and a struggling United States to defend the last bastion of world democracy.   In such a scenario, the Cold War might have taken on a completely different complexion, as the appeasement of an indomitable Soviet Union became the governing foreign policy of a succession of American administrations.

Not many people today realize how close the world came in those crucial Spring days to the utter decimation of Western civilization.  It was the West’s great fortune to produce a man of Winston Churchill’s charisma, energy and fighting spirit at the moment of its greatest challenge.  As prosaic as it may sound, this one man did indeed stand on the division between a world given over to slavery and oppression and one where freedom and liberty are both cherished and defended.   He understood the stakes and appreciated the importance of his role.  Would we have leaders today who are similarly endowed with such a breadth of vision and greatness of purpose.

Their absence is made all the more glaring by Churchill’s extraordinary example.

Avi Davis is the president of the American Freedom Alliance in Los Angeles. His writings and blog entries can be found at The Intermediate Zone and at the Los Angeles Jewish Journal blog On The Other Hand



Contested Will

This week I had the good fortune of interviewing James Shapiro author  of  1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare and the newly published Contested Will:  Who Wrote Shakespeare? Both are superb works of scholarship and I have deeply appreciated Shapiro’s sensitive and analytic approach to complex matters of authorship and literary construction.

I have already written about the Shakespeare authorship debate in my piece  Good William Hunting.    But I was particularly taken by the author’s answer to a question I asked about the reason behind such a venomous campaign against the man known as William Shakespeare and the deep doubts shared by so many about the origins of the works ascribed to him. The argument that Shakespeare, the son of an illiterate tradesman in a provincial English village could not possibly have had access to the knowledge that informs his work, is a condescending trope that has developed feathers and flight for nearly 230 years.

But as  to the question of the impact of the campaign to strip Shakespeare of his author’s mantle  ( a new film titled Anonymous, directed by Roland Emerick  which supports the candidacy of Edward de Vere as the true Shakespeare, will be released in the Fall), Shapiro argues that it has devalued the quality that makes the plays so valuable – human imagination.  The deniers’ contention that a glover’s son could not have written the plays performs as a direct assault on the idea that the human mind has vast resources to transport itself to places and times it has never experienced.   The deniers cannot deal with the notion that  Shakespeare’s plays were almost certainly not autobiographical  and reject any belief  that  authors  of fiction do not need to live something in order to write  about it.

In addition, today we seem to accept that all writing to be valid, must , in some way, be  confessional.   But back in the 16th Century, this was a relatively unknown concept.  The insistence  that Shakespeare wrote from experience, as it is alleged the true Shakespearean authors such as either Francis Bacon or Edward de Vere did, assaults the very structure of literary creativity.

The assumptions we bring to literature are therefore fast changing.   Shakespeare forms a fundamental building block of our intellectual heritage  – yet fewer and fewer schools are demanding that he be read and analyzed as  he is increasingly cast him off to the pile of dead white males who have little to say about our life and times.  To humanize him, to make him relevant, the Shakespeare  of Stratford-upon- Avon, about whom we know so little, is therefore being replaced  by an aristocrat whose biography and confessional style is far more recognizable in today’s Oprah Book Club world.

Yet if we can deny the reality of the author,  what does that say about the quality and the necessity of the plays themselves?  The debate may inevitably followed by one in which the literary quality of Shakespeare’s plays themselves will be impugned.

The Shakespeare authorship debate therefore plays a very important role in the rapid growth of moral and cultural relativism in our society.  As Shapiro says, we are  witnessing a degradation of culture in the rise of “truthiness”  as opposed to  truth.   In other words we settle for something close enough to be truth, but not truth  itself.

This is not a sign of health for Western civilization.   Ripping to shreds the reputation and character of  a man responsible for some of the English language’s greatest litrary works will, in the end, only assist in the deconstruction and despoliation of a culture centuries in the making.

No Blanks: Kent State 40 Years Later

The student antiwar movement of the late 60s and early 70s lives on in American consciousness as a symbol of high-minded idealism.  Some like to point to the altruism and innocence of the movement and the way it stirred students out of their apathy, creating a generation of activists.  Such a view conveniently ignores the movement’s essential self-centeredness, its denunciation of patriotism, its rejection of authority and its penchant for violence.  Yet all of those things were clearly on display in the events leading up to the afternoon on May 4, 1970, perhaps the very apogee of student protest in this country.

Much of what we know about the event popularly referred to as the Kent State Massacre has come down to us only in history’s shorthand — that the military sought to kill innocent unarmed students and bystanders in an effort to subvert dissent.  But the back-story does not always conform to the heroic narrative of this tragic event.

Perhaps the first thing to appreciate about the events at Kent State is the highly charged political atmosphere of the time. The escalation of the U.S. bombing campaign into Cambodia, and the perceived expansion of the Vietnam War, galvanized an anti-war movement that was beginning to lapse into dormancy. As a result of a number of incendiary campus incidents in the month of April 1970, there were widespread fears that student protests had become generalized riots, associated with attacks on private property, threats to life, and with unsavory elements such as bikers and criminals joining in the general havoc.

The decision of Ohio governor James A. Rhodes to send the National Guard to the city of Kent, Ohio, on May 2, was sparked by a request from the city’s mayor, Leroy Satrom, who had earlier urged the declaration of a state of emergency after a riot in Kent’s downtown on May 1. At that time, a bonfire had been lit in the main street and the crowd seemed to be a mix of students, bikers, and itinerants who frequented Kent’s bars.  Beer bottles had been thrown at police as they tried to restore order and shop fronts were damaged.

On May 1, arsonists had also set the ROTC building at Kent State on fire and a large crowd of students, nearly 1,000, had applauded as it burned. Moreover, the students did their best to interfere with fire fighters’ efforts to extinguish the flames.

On Monday, May 4, the Kent State University administration, fearing the same kind of violence that had broken out only a few days earlier, sought to cancel a protest rally set for noon that day.  Nevertheless 2,000 students showed up for the rally on the University Common and within minutes of the appearance of the National Guard, began to throw rocks and other projectiles at the soldiers. The National Guard, with bayonets fixed, ordered the rally to disperse and when there was no response, lobbed gas canisters at the students.  When this had no effect, the Guard advanced, forcing the students to flee the Common.

That’s where it should have ended. But the Guard pursued the students from the Common, over what was known as Blanket Hill and on to a practice field. What happened then was eerily reminiscent of the events on Boston Common almost exactly 200 years before. Soldiers, feeling trapped and perhaps fearing for the lives, let loose several volleys designed to frighten the crowd, only to result in injury and death within the crowd.  Much like the earlier historical event, three people died almost instantly — two of them bystanders, who were merely walking to class.  A fourth victim died in hospital a short while later.

Much has been made of Rhodes’ decision to send the National Guard to the University and the legality of the University’s right to disperse the crowd.  But a decision of the United States Court of Appeals Sixth Circuit found, in an action subsequently brought against the University and the State of Ohio, that the University did have such a right, given the threats to the peace and the provocations of earlier in the month.

Why the National Guard was armed with live bullets and not blanks, how the level of command collapsed to allow American soldiers to fire on unarmed American civilians and why the Nixon administration was so slow to condemn the shootings, remain some of the imponderables of history.

But what is not so imponderable is the fact of the students’ motivations.  David Horowitz, one of the editors of the New Left Magazine Ramparts in the 1960s, has written extensively about the student anti-war movement and its descent into radicalism and violence. He pays particular attention to the discrepancy between the attendance at a rally in Washington D.C. in June 1970, which drew nearly one million people, and another in May 1971 which drew only 30,000.

What had happened in between? Nixon had ended the draft.

“When the fact registered on me, ” Horowitz concludes in Radical Son, “the effect was devastating.  The driving force behind the massive anti-war movement on America’s campuses had been the desire to avoid military service.”

This seems to put the burning of the ROTC building on the Kent State University campus on May 1 and the Kent riots of the next day in rather stark perspective.  The students were not anti-war, as much as they were anti-draft, far more focused on self-preservation than on idealism. The bombing of Cambodia in April 1970 made it appear to students that Nixon intended to widen the war rather than end it — a manifest betrayal.

Since the 1960s and early 70s, a number of the anti-war movement’s erstwhile leaders came to regret their involvement in a campaign that reeked of self indulgence and narcissism.  But by then it was too late.  Resistance to any form of militarism had become a sine qua non of student life, as a generation who participated in the movement gradually assumed positions of authority on our college campuses. Today these same people feel relatively at ease in educating our students about the evils of American imperialism, the absence of any nobility in American enterprise, and contempt for government.

Kent State became a rallying cry and slogan for these disaffected Americans.  While most of the 60s generation moved on to productive lives in American society, these stalwart peace activists, men such as Noam Chomsky and Bill Ayres, have remained fixated on the events of May 4, 1970 and have used the tragic event to denounce the United States as a locus of repression and terror.

Kent State was no doubt a tragedy that could and should have been avoided.  But the far greater tragedy was the continued insistence by a small but influential lobby that the events of that day somehow reflected the true nature of the United States.  In this way the student protesters of May 4, 1970 are wreaking their continued vengeance on America.  The lethality of their attack is just as focused as the National Guard’s was 40 years ago. And like the young National Guard soldiers, they are certainly not firing blanks.

Avi Davis is the president of the American Freedom Alliance in Los Angeles. His writings and blog entries can be found at The Intermediate Zone and at the Los Angeles Jewish Journal blog On The Other Hand

This piece originally appeared in The American Thinker

Theodor Herzl: A Remembrance

If anyone in the mid-1880s had identified the young Viennese dandy, Theodor Herzl, as a likely savior of the Jewish people, he would have almost certainly been laughed off as a fantasist.

Herzl, born 150 years ago this week, was then a law school graduate whose facility for the German language had driven him towards journalism and the theater, with which he had a particular affinity.

His upbringing produced very little sign that he would become widely regarded as a great Jewish emancipator.  His parents were thoroughly assimilated Jews and although they gave their son a bar mitzvah (which Herzl recorded as a confirmation), he grew up without a substantive knowledge of the Jewish religion nor its practices.  In fact, prior to the first Zionist Congress in Basle in 1897, both he and Max Nordau could not follow the Sabbath services they had been invited to attend – their Hebrew language skills and familiarity with the Jewish prayer service being so limited.

While experiencing anti-semitism, first as a schoolboy and then as a university student, he had become accustomed to accepting, like many of his generation, that it would only be through a  process of assimilation that Jews would finally be accepted within Austrian society.

His conversion  from that view, to one in which he accepted and the creation of Jewish national homeland in Palestine itself was the only realistic solution to Jewish suffering , became one of the most consequential journeys of self discovery in modern history.

It began in France, where he was posted as a reporter for the Neue Freie Presse in the early 1890s.  Here, he was certain, he would find nothing of the rabid hatred he had experienced in his own country, since the land of liberté, egalité and fraternité was sure to proscribe such an attitude.  He was not only to be shocked to find that it did not, but was distressed to discover that the situation was even more dire than in Austria.

When, in 1895, Captain Alfred Dreyfus of the French army, was falsely accused of transferring national military secrets to the German High Command, the country was set aflame with a level of hysterical anti-Semitism that he had never before  experienced.  Major newspapers concocted the most vile accusations against Dreyfus and French Jews and key intellectuals took their side.  He witnessed mass rallies in Paris following the Dreyfus trial where many chanted “Death to the Jews!”

Herzl thereafter came to reject his early ideas regarding Jewish emancipation and assimilation, and to believe that the Jews must remove themselves from Europe and create their own state. Despite the existence of a powerful lobby which fought for Dreyfus’ innocence, Herzl came to believe that the contagion of anti-Semitism could not be ever eliminated and that Jews would be subject to the torments of the anti-Semitic plague wherever they went.

To enshrine his ideas, Herzl published Der Judenstaat ( The Jewish State) in 1896 and an idealized view of the new nation in Alte Neue Land (Old New Land) in 1898.   His drive for a political solution to anti-semtism attracted few adherents among the Jewish leaders of the Diaspora.  Lord Rothschild in England refused to see him and even worse, made his refusal public.  Baron Maurice de Hirsch, the French philanthropist who had for many years supported the development of Jewish settlements in Palestine, dismissed him as an ignorant theorist. Edmund de Rothschild in Paris , who ran nine existing small colonies in Palestine, thought that a political movement such as Herzl proposed would jeopardize his nascent project.

It was only among the poorer Jewish communities – of England, Poland and the Russian Pale of Settlement – that the nascent political movement of Zionism began to catch on with the force of a whirlwind.  In London’s East End, when he addressed a Jewish audience at a synagogue, his reception was so rapturous that he  began to understand the power of a grass roots movement and recorded in his diary that he watched as his own legend was spun to life .  Future Zionist leaders such as Chaim Weizmann, then a university student and David Ben Gurion, then only 10,  saw in the appearance of the man the harbinger of a Jewish renaissance.

One of the things that gave Herzl his power to attract supporters was his extraordinary appearance.  Over six feet tall, with a stentorian voice, a shock of black hair, dark, piercing eyes and a flowing beard that reached to his chest, Herzl presented much the model of an ancient Jewish prophet – a commanding presence capable of awing Jewish peasants and European nobility alike.

Herzl also brought a decisive edge of drama to Zionist proceedings which was to have an impact on the development of the public realtions side of Jewish nationalism. He was determined that Jews dress the part of a people who deserved a state, insisting on a strict dress code at all meetings, which included starched shirts and expensive frock coats.  He also urged the playing of  bombastic Wagnerian music at the opening of the Zionist Congresses (the first of which took place in Basle, Switzerland in the late summer of  1897) and was given to dramatic flourishes in his speech.

The combination of these traits began to bear fruit.  The English Rothschild moved from hostility to neutrality; British leaders, such as the powerful Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, was won over and began meeting with Herzl with some regularity.

Within a few years, he was being received by the monarchs of Europe including Wilhelm II of Germany and the Sultan of Turkey as well as the political leaders of Austria. He had gradually transformed himself, through sheer dint of will and perseverance, into an international celebrity.

It was a long way to come from the self centered dandy who had  so cynically dismissed Judaism and observant Jews only a few years before.

But Herzl also made some very serious mistakes which have bedeviled the Zionist movement until this day.  By launching a purely secular movement, unattached in any formal way to Judaism or Jewish teachings, he undercut one of the prime arguments of religious Zionists – that a return to Zion was mandated by  Jewish law, inscribed and predicted in the Torah.  He thereby delayed by decades the subscription of Orthodox Jewry to his cause and threatened a division in the Jewish world which took on a very vitriolic cast in Zionism’s early years.   His willingness to accept Joseph Chamberlain’s offer of Uganda as a temporary solution to Jewish suffering, brought unprecedented condemnation down upon him and may, in some way, have contributed to his early death in 1904.  It made many feel that he was not serious about his own Zionist ideas, an attack that must have been mortifying.

Yet in the light of the growth of the Zionist movement and the ultimate establishment of a Jewish state in the late 1940s, these are minor quibbles.  Herzl, through his personal magnetism, the power of his pen and oratory , as well as his brilliance as an organizer, was able to marshal the resources of the Jewish world and funnel them into a nationalist movement that gave a goal and a purpose to a largely oppressed and unfocused people.

Today’s tea partiers and budding nationalist movements could learn a great deal from Herzl’s example.  In only eight years, this Viennese journalist, with little political or diplomatic experience nor connections, was able to bring international attention to the plight of his people and the justice of their cause in securing a permanent national home.   His name and image rightly festoons the Israeli currency, Jerusalem streets and Israeli cities.  He left his people with a dramatic vision of a future that in 186o  few of them could appreciate.

But even more than this he left them with a credo that has come to define Israeli perseverance and willingness to take risks – “Im tirzu ein zo aggada” -  if you will it, it  is no dream.”

In an age of deep cynicism, this is a rallying cry that should find resonance among Israelis and non-Israelis, Jews and gentiles, alike.

How the Dominoes Fell

Declaring the Vietnam War a just and necessary American war these days is about the equivalent of suggesting that Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were humanitarians.  So seared into American consciousness is antipathy to that conflict and so convinced have we become of the  needless loss of life, that it has all but obscured the original purposes for which the United States consigned itself to defend freedom in Indo-China at all.

By the time the tanks of the People’s Army of Vietnam smashed through the gates of Saigon’s Presidential Place on April 30th, 1975, America had already long before given up the fight to save Vietnam.  Earlier in April, President Gerald Ford had urged Congress to provide aerial support for the retreating ARVN — the South Vietnamese armed forces, only to be rebuffed by a war weary and Democrat-controlled House.  Ford himself closed the books on the conflict when he announced, on April 23rd, that the Vietnam War was over.

Not many people at the time Ford made his announcement recalled the days when supporting Vietnam stood as a central plank in the effort to stem Communist aggression in South East Asia. Not many seemed to care that millions of people were about to be subjected to lives beyond endurance.

For within weeks the Viet Cong had depopulated South Vietnam’s cities of  intellectuals, professionals, political leaders, and military personnel and sent them to ” re-education camps.”  Over 250,000 were dispatched in this way, many to suffer torture and many never to return.

Worse than this was the unleashing of the most devastating refugee crisis the world had witnessed since the end of the Second World War.  Middle class Vietnamese citizens, desperate to escape fast enveloping North Vietnamese repression, boarded rickety boats that then plied the dangerous waters of the South China Sea.  Sinkings, piracy, rape by Thai pirates – of both women and children, were common occurrences during these years. Nearly one million Vietnamese are estimated to have fled Vietnam and hundreds of thousands of them perished in the process.

In Laos, the communist insurgency Pathet Lao, along with the Vietnam People’s Army and backed by the Soviet Union, overthrew the royalist Laos government, forcing King Savang Vatthana to abdicate on December 2^nd 1975. A ruthless purge followed which reproduced much of the pattern already set in Vietnam.   Particularly hard hit were the Hmong, whose tapestries to this day depict the savagery of their Communist oppressors.

Perhaps the worst result of the American abandonment of Indo-China was the events that followed in Cambodia.  The Khmer Rouge reached Phnom Penh in December 1975.  They immediately evacuated the cities and sent the entire population on forced marches to rural work projects. They instituted an austere form of agrarian reform, eschewing Western medicine, subverting religion, burning libraries, and proscribing as decadent anything Western.  Over the next four years, the death toll from executions, overwork, starvation and disease spiraled into the millions as the trials of Cambodia, renamed the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea, and burned an indelible scar onto the consciousness of the West.

Was any of this foreseen in the 1950s when the U.S. government first set its sights on upholding fledgling democratic regimes in Indo-China in the wake of Communist threats?

Well, yes. In fact in June, 1956, a young East Coast senator, made the case quite convincingly:

” Vietnam represents the cornerstone of the Free World in South East Asia, the keystone to the arch, the finger in the dike. Burma, Thailand, India, Japan, the Philippines and obviously Laos and Cambodia are among those whose security would be threatened if the Red Tide of Communism overflowed into Vietnam.   …..Vietnam represents a test of American responsibility and determination in Asia. And if it falls victim to any of the perils that threaten its existence – Communism, political anarchy, poverty and the rest, then the United States, with some justification, will be held responsible and our prestige in Asia will sink to a new low.”

Who was to know that the words of Senator John F. Kennedy would prove not only prophetic, but also far more dire than anything he could have foreseen?   Certainly not the burgeoning anti-War movement, for whom the bad guys had come to be represented by those wearing green berets; nor the U.S. media, who casually bought into the idea that a loss in Vietnam gave the United States a well deserved comeuppance.

But can we ever forget that during the 20^th Century nearly 100 million people died as a result of Communist takeovers and another 30 million were annihilated through starvation, imprisonment and summary execution?  One has to wonder if those so vociferously opposed to the war still think today, in the light of what became of Indo-China, there never existed any good reason to fight for a free Vietnam.

In an age of cynicism and ideological retrenchment, when a new U.S. administration has repudiated any idea of involving this country in the struggle for freedom and democracy for other peoples, it might pay to learn the true lesson of Vietnam:  Abandonment of our allies’ quest for freedom may not just lead to their enslavement; it can lead to the betrayal of our own ideals and principles — a calumny that will corrode America’s very soul.

This article originally appeared in American Thinker.

Myths and Mistakes of the Vietnam War

This week marks the 35th anniversary of the fall of Saigon.   In anticipation of that anniversary, I have been reading the Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War by Philip Jennings.  It is a good work of history, putting the Vietnam War in the context of the ideological struggles of the 20th Century and decisively exposing  the myths and major mistakes of that war.

Some of the more egregious errors Jennings lays bare are the following:

• The Eisenhower administration’s failure to come to the aid of  the French at the Battle of  Dien Bien Phu in 1954 resulted in the strengthening of the Communist insurgency and ultimate secession of North Vietnam.   That set the stage for the next 20 years of war between North and South.
• The Kennedy administration  had a firm commitment to an American presence in Vietnam and there is little doubt  that Kennedy, had he lived, would have undertaken much the same strategy of  U.S. troop deployments  and escalation as did his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson
• The decision of the Kennedy administration to  facilitate the removal of   prime minister Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu,  the putative strong men of  South Vietnam in 1963, was a mistake of incalcuable proportions, leaving a power vacuum that no other leader in the South was able to fill.   South Vietnam had a succession of nine leaders between 1963 and the fall of Saigon.  North Vietnam had only one.
• Many of the most famous photos of the war – and the ones that arguably turned the American public decisively against it -  had  back stories that were never reported.  For instance the photo  taken during the Tet Offensive in Saigon of a North Vietnamese inflitrator being summarily executed on the street by a South Vietnamese colonel, followed in the wake of  the murder of a South Vietnamese politician and his six children.  The photographer, who had a close relationship with the colonel and regarded him as an outstanding officer and individual, deeply regretted the image and the way it was used to convey South Vietnamese brutality.
• Famous U.S.  reporters in the conflict, David Halberstram, Stanley Karnow, Neill Sheehan and the Australian, Peter Arnett – all of whom wrote best selling books about the conflict, leapt at stories of disaster on the American and ARVN front as providing  good copy and rarely reported advances  and successes in the campaign.  They generally dismissed reports from the military as ” cover- your -ass” propaganda and used any opportunity they could to highlight the folly of Americas involvement in South East Asia.
• The Tet Offensive, decried by the press as a signal defeat  for South Vietnam, was actually nothing of the sort.  The North Vietnamese  lost 75,000 to 85,000 of the of the 150,000 they had thrown into the campaign and held on to not a single South Vietnamese city.  Yet Walter Cronkite’s special report, aired on CBS News on February 27, 1968   concluding that the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies had no alternative but to sue for peace with honor,was used as evidence of a defeat, leading to Johnson’s decision not to seek re-election and the growth of the anti- war movement.
• The war prosecuted by the Nixon campaign between 1969 and 1973 brought great victories for the South but these were not reported nor given credence by the media. In fact in the books written by Halberstram, Sheehan and Karnow, only a relatively few pages is devoted to these latter years of the war.  The  campaign actually improved for the South as U.S. troops pulled out.    The situation in the North had become so desperate  by the summer of 1973 that they had  no option but to negotiate a truce.
• It was a failure of American resolve  and steadfast commitment to an ally that ultimately brought an end to South Vietnam.   When the North broke its agreements under the Paris Peace Treaty of 1973, and invaded again in 1975,  the Democratic controlled Congress has no stomach for any further engagement in the conflict and refused to provide aerial support to the retreating ARVN.   Such support, claims Jennings, could have forestalled the collapse that ensued and forced the Viet Cong back across the border.
• By war’s end, the Vietnamese had been fighting foreign involvement or occupation (primarily by the French, Chinese, Japanese, British, and American governments) for 116 years.  But far worse was to befall the people of Vietnam as the  Viet Cong launched a brutal campaign of repression.
• The U.S.  fought a limited defensive war in Vietnam and did not commit itself to total war – which might shock many who list American depredations as among the things that turned them against the conflict.

The absence of military strength can often be compensated by the presence of political will.   In Vietnam, the United States had the military strength and power to overwhelm the Viet Cong.   What it lacked was the commitment of  its civilian leaders.   That is a lesson the present administration should take to heart as it works out how to achieve ultimate victory in Afghanistan and Iraq.

San Francisco 1906

I  have always been fascinated by old film footage – particularly that which captures people unaware that they are being filmed.

A few days ago this wonderful footage was sent to me.   A 33mm print of a cable car trip down a street  in San Francisco in 1906.   Automobiles have definitely made their impression on this scene and it is startling to see how many of them traverse the path of the cable car as it rattles along the street.

But more impressive is the quotidian nature of the footage.   Here we look in on the life on an average day ( and one assumes before the great earthquake which almost destroyed the town in the same year) of a great American city at the turn of the 20th Century.   Men in great coats and bowler hats amble  across  the road.  Boys in large, outsize hats ride bicycles;  Billboards advertise medicines and root beer.  Life is busy.

Viewing such footage gives one a certain feeling of familiarity and warmth, much like the photographs I presented in my piece The Color of History.

We could ask questions about  where this cable car is going and whether we are in store for any surprises.  But the answer is that it is not going anywhere in particular and the only surprises are in the fascinating details of the journey itself.

So enjoy this footage as you experience a day in the life of San Francisco, 1906.

http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=NINOxRxze9k

ANZAC Day: Well Done Ted

No one can deny that the memory of the First World War is almost as doddery as its survivors.  Save for two men and one woman, all aged 109,  every veteran of that war, on both sides of the conflict,  is now  dead.   Harry Patch, the oldest of them at 113, died last year within months of the two other surviving British veterans.

Today there are  no surviving Australians from the conflict.   This year, for the first time, only a riderless horse represented the fallen at the annual April 25  ANZAC ( Australian and New Zealand Armored Corps) Day Parade.

Growing up in Australia, I was well acquainted with how seared into the national consciousness was the  Gallipoli campaign in Turkey which took place between  April and November, 1915.  I had watched for years as the aged soldiers of that forgotten war would amble down St. Kilda Rd. in Melbourne, bearing their medals and wearing their Digger caps.

It was First Lord of  the Admiralty, Winston Churchill’s idea to attack the Turkish Dardanelles, the narrow strait that led to Constantinople( today’s Istanbul) which lay athwart the entrance to the Black Sea.  Churchill’s idea – and it was a sound one – was that if Constantinople could be taken, Turkey and the Ottoman Empire it controlled, could be knocked out of the war and the British and Russian fleets could link up.   This would give the Allies  overpowering control of the Mediterranean and would inevitably tip the balance of the war in favor of the Allies.

In order to break the Turkish resistance on the Dardanelles and allow the British navy safe passage, the British High Command decided to send, with their own troops,  the newly minted Australian and New Zealand Armed Corps, which had been training in Egypt.   It was decided to attack the Gallipoli Peninsula on its Western coast which faced the Aegean.

The mistakes made – of underestimating the strength of the Turkish defenses, the steepness of the terrain, the absence of shade and difficultly of resupply have been heavily documented.  The ANZACs in the north of the peninsula and the combined British and French forces in the south, could not break the Turks who had command of the highlands and far more effective  resupply from their hinterland.  After seven long months of attrition and nearly 15,000 dead, the Allies were forced into an ignominious retreat.

No Australian schoolchild grows up without knowing these facts.   Although only a relatively small number of Australians perished at Gallipoli (8, 700), the Australian participation in the war was the first armed conflict with which the young nation had been involved and the devastating impact of the losses for a country with a population of only 5 million, began to meld a sense of national purpose and identity.

Like other schoolboys I had been quite taken with the stories of the courageous Australian”diggers ” who had fought in the trenches and endured shocking casualties in their assault on the Turks.  So naturally my first trip to Turkey I felt should  necessitate a trip to the Australian military cemeteries on the Gallipoli Highlands.  Since I was riding a bicycle I knew the trip was going to be difficult.

But I didn’t realize how difficult.  Impossible head winds, rutted roads, broken spokes and blown tires bedeviled the journey -  and that was all in the first six days!  I huffed up those hills under a scorching summer sun, not having endured anything quite like it before.

When I arrived, exhausted, at the Gallipoli Battlefield I traveled  along ridges where the ANZAC  and Turkish trenches could still be seen on opposite sides of the road – in places only ten yards apart.  The ANZAC cemeteries were immaculately groomed and maintained and the numerous memorials told the story of the legendary battles which took place there.

I  have always maintained an interest in military cemeteries.  I am fascinated by how little remains of  the men who fought and died in the places they are buried, save for a name, date of birth and date of death. There are very little other associations left for us to appreciate – the comradeship under fire; the relationships with commanding officers, nor the homesickness of  boys eating bully beef out of tins cans longing  for their mothers’  home cooking.

Among the grave stones I saw in the Gallipoli cemetery, I read the usual inscriptions one would read on any military tombstone in Australia.

Until I came to one in the middle of the field.  It was a simple plinth with the name,  date of birth and death of the soldier inscribed as usual. But below the inscription were just three words which seemed to tell me more about the soldier and his loved ones than any other memorial in the park.

“Well done Ted.”

Those three words  spoke to me across the generations about  two parents’ reverence for their lost son’s sacrifice, for his calm in the face of battle and for the sense that he stood for something beyond his own preservation.

We live in a cynical age where there is little respect or interest in the sacrifices of an older generation.  But we shouldn’t forget how it all happens.   Young boys, shipped overseas on a great adventure, come face to face with the sheer brutality of war, its indifference to human suffering and the shattering realization of how life can end in a split second.  Under such circumstances one grows up in a hurry and the awakening maturity leaves its scar, not only on the men who come to fight, but on the nation that has sent them.

Western civilization has yet to recover  from the shock of the First World War.  We are all deeply scarred by it and almost everything that has occurred in history since that time can find its roots planted in the that conflict’s soil.  Australians are generally nonchalant and casual people, not standing on ceremony, nor given to hyperbole.   For their sacrifices, remembered on this 95th anniversary of the day Australia truly became a united nation, perhaps then the most fitting words spoken to the country’s First World War veterans  might be “Well done boys “  -  even if  there is no one now left to hear them.