Greek Drama Has Lessons for the Western World

As Greek prime minister George Papendreou submitted his resignation to the president on Saturday, there were no cheers of exaltation rising from the streets of Greek cities.  Instead, there was only a palpable sense of dread, as the future looked  more grimly uncertain than ever. 

Papendreou, the scion of the country’s most prominent political family- whose father and grandfather had both served as prime ministers - became the latest victim of  the sentient notion that  Europe would be a harbinger of a new era for mankind – a place where conciliation would replace confrontation and where amity would replace division.

But the Greek political class on Saturday demonstrated that the new Europe would be a far more divided place than any European leader could have imagined sixteen years ago following the signing of the Maatricht Treaty.  One can only gasp in wonder as a country roiled by a one trillion euro debt and confronted with the snarling contempt of other major European countries, could not bring itself to recognize that without a unified voice which accepts the austerity plan imposed upon it by the European Union, the entire country could be engulfed in an economic cataclysm that would make German stagflation of the 1920s look like a Saturday afternoon game of Monopoly.

For what had collapsed by Saturday night in Athens was not only the prime minister’s center-right coalition but  the very idea of a unified Greek nation, one that believed that as a people and a country it possessed a common destiny and common purpose.  The failure of the two major parties to forge an alliance to stave off the worst financial crisis in the country’s history, is a telling sign of what will become of other European countries as they pass through exactly the same crisis in the coming twelve months. It is very difficult to fathom how a democratic country, faced with such unflinching and demanding partners - who control the very monetary lifelines necessary to keep their economy alive, could be so conflicted on what is the only possible course for it to take. 

But this is the face of the New Europe.  Given to years of lassitude, the Greeks, and most Europeans have no stomach for austerity.  Profligacy, social welfare, neoptism, corruption and a vibrant, fairly open black market, has produced a country where people don’t work much, retire young and take long vacations. 

The Greek model actually describes the bulk of Europe, where the work ethic has given way to the pleasure ethic and the lambent idea that government can always be counted on to bail out failed enterprises.  But what happens when the government has no money to bail out anybody and the source that it must rely on – namely foreign investment, remains skittish and uncertain about the country’s future?  What happens when no one – not the European Union, not the United States and not China - is prepared to say we believe in your future and we will continue to fund your debt?

What then happens is a complete collapse of confidence and a fatalism that grips everyone from the prime minister to the local fruit vendor.   That is what was on display in the streets of Athens on Saturday night.  No matter what happens with the dissolution of the government or new elections in the not-too-distant future, the crushing weight  of debt will be the overriding, ever present concern of whomever takes over the running of the Greek Republic.  

The Greeks have good reason to wonder who will ultimately control their fate.  Angeliki Martaki, a retiree quoted in the Los Angeles Times on Friday, summed up what many ordinary Europeans must be feeling about their future:  “All the Euro has bought us has been pain.  At least with the drachma, we were what we were: Greek.  Now, I don’t know what we are and who is in charge of our national destiny.”

I heard the same sentiments expressed to me in villages in England and coffee shops in Madrid.   A collapse of national purpose; the absence of great leaders who can rouse the population to work and save; the lack of a pervasive national sentiment boldly declaring” we are all in this together.”  Instead, as countries such as Italy, Spain and Portugal progressively unravel, the citizens of these once great, independent countries will find themselves having to fend for themselves, with no one but the Gods to hear their cries of pain.

That idea – that soon there actually may be no one willling or able to come to the rescue - is a lesson that every citizen in the West should take to heart.

Stuxnet the Invincible

Yesterday”s New York Times finally broke the story  of 2010.   The gravest threat to world peace since the fall of the Soviet Union has been temporarily vanquished by a….. wait for it…… computer virus.  The Stuxnet virus finally gained its rightful place in the pantheon of world peace activists when the Times spotlighted its extraordinary success in reversing the momentum of the Iranian nuclear program by rendering many of its main computers inoperable and likely obsolete.   As a related story in the The Telegraph details, Russian scientists  working in the Nantaz facility, have warned  the Kremlin that they could be facing “another Chernobyl” if they are forced to comply with Iran’s tight deadline to activate the complex this summer.

The real news broken by the Times story of course is that the Stuxnet virus, the most sophisticated cyber weapon ever witnessed on earth, was more than likely created in Israel’s Dimona nuclear facility.   That is not really news to those of us who have for years admired and appreciated Israel’s extraordinary technological prowess;  but it might be news to a stubbornly ungrateful world that has been spared, at least for the moment, the economic catastrophe that might have ensued if Israel had been forced to take military action against Iran.

So while world leaders may be breathing a bit easier tonight, perhaps they ought to be paying a little more attention to  some of these  basic realities:  The West’s  security interests are being safeguarded by a tiny country the size of New Jersey; that the small country is on the very front lines of a war that it still largely refuses to either name or recognize; that peace is unlikely to come to the Middle East  – or to the rest of the world for that matter – until the scourge of the West, based in Tehran, is completely defeated and the  worldwide religious movement it leads is forced into ignominious retreat.

While there are no guarantees of anything  in this world,  it is a safer bet than most that Israel’s powerful technological capabilities and the tremendous ingenuity of its scientists, offers a key weapon in determining who will  ultimately win the war of civilizations in which we are all presently engaged.

Colonialism Regains Its Credibility

Since the 1960s the term ” colonialism” has been treated in the West with a level of contempt that has had it compared with genocide and mass slaughter.   Critics of  the European powers’ land grabs in Africa and Asia have consistently leveled their vitriol at European rapacity on this score and declared colonialism one of the greatest evils to ever befall mankind.

But as columnist Bret Stephens points out in today’s Wall Street Journal, the failed  states of Africa and many other former colonial nations around the world, may need a new form of intervention from  the civilized world to save them from barbarism.

What Stephens points out is that many of the African kingdoms were actually failed states before Western intervention, given over to constant warfare, cannibalism and self immolation.   Western rule, as admittedly exploitative as they might have been, at the very least brought Western concepts of order to Africa – building roads, introducing electricity, providing massively improved health care and involving Western concepts of administration unknown in these areas.

One now only needs to look at the majority of the crumbling nations of Africa – from the Ivory Cost ( once lauded as the model of what an African state should look like)  to the shining pearl of Rhodesia ( now reduced to the rotting corpse of Zimbabwe) to genocide plagued Sudan and  the manifestly corrupt South Africa, to recognize how horribly wrong the post colonial world has gone since independence.

Those celebrities and pundits in the West who regularly decry Western exploitation of these lands ought pay a little more attention to the meager progress that has been made  in former Western colonies since independence.  Perhaps there is indeed a need, as Stephens argues,  for a renewed form of stewardship for many of these countries which  will restore  a level of order and civilized conduct beyond anything they could achieve for themselves.

Jenny McCarthy Gets Her Comeuppance

For nearly 14 years, many parents in the Western world have been wringing their hands about what to do about vaccinations – a formality taken for granted over the past half century.   Measles, mumps, chicken pox and small pox- killers of children in past centuries, were nearly wiped out in the latter half of the 20th Century by the advent of preventative vaccinations which injected antibodies  that impeded the spread of the diseases.

That was until an unfortunate article appeared in the U.K’s premiere medical journal The Lancet in July 1998.  A study then published by Dr. Andrew Wakefield concluded that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine—a mainstay of public-health disease prevention efforts around the world—was linked to autism and gastrointestinal disorders in young children.

The study led to a highly charged campaign, led by such celebrities as former Playboy centerfold and television personality Jenny McCarthy, that called for the end of vaccinations.   At the same time, a parallel campaign was led by medical researchers who claimed that the original study had been based on a fraudulent and inaccurate data.

The Lancet finally withdrew the article in January of last year after concluding that “several elements” of the paper were incorrect. But the journal didn’t describe any of the discrepancies as fraud. A British regulator stripped Dr. Wakefield of his medical license last May, citing “serious professional misconduct” in the way he handled the research.

An article, published  a few days ago by journalist Brian Deer, found that important details of the cases of each of 12 children reported in the original study either misrepresented or altered the actual experiences of the children, the journal said. “In no single case could the medical records be fully reconciled with the descriptions, diagnoses, or histories published in the journal,” the editorial said. It called the study “an elaborate fraud.”

The damage done by the original article and the irresponsible advocacy of people like Jenny McCarthy and the organization Talk About Curing Autism is incalculable.   Hundreds of thousands of children in the West are now exposed to diseases that were already but wiped out by the mid 1960s. Much like the scare over DDT, fraudulently declared toxic to human beings by Rachel Carson in the mid- 1960s ( despite practically having wiped out malaria), the scare over vaccinations has proved again how politics has crept into science and how political correctness  has been used to assault the truth.

Jenny McCarthy and her supporters steadfastly cling to their version of the truth.   But her pseudo-science now deserves out right condemnation and a public backlash against her irresponsible advocacy and that of her claque  should be exposed as the posturing of a know nothing celebrity completely out of her depth.

Goodbye Juan Williams

Juan Williams’ ouster from his position as commentator at National Public Radio should come as little surprise to any regular listener to NPR. For years I have heard conservatives refer to NPR as National Communist Radio for its compulsive addiction to stories about the evils of capitalism and its apotheosis of the working class.

I have always felt that description went too far.  While NPR has certainly won its stripes as a left of center platform, its ideological core could hardly be described as communist.  Focusing on the poor and dispossessed does not mean a surrender to socialist dogma.  And even if the commentators and reporters could be described as latent socialists, I couldn’t wish for a more calming introduction to their new world order.   The mellifluous tones of Morning Edition‘s Bob Edwards’ voice, and those of his successors Renee Montagne and Steve Inskeep, gave me the capacity to swallow even the most devastating  news with a certain equanimity,a remarkable skill that in my view has not been replicated anywhere else in the United States – in either  print, television or radio.

Nevertheless, several years ago, after nearly 20 years as an NPR addict, I just stopped listening.  I failed to tune in at 6:00 am as was my wont and ceased to pay my annual membership dues to the local NPR affiliate, KCRW.  This was related directly to the unfathomably biased reporting I heard coming from the NPR reporters and commentators regarding the Arab- Israeli conflict.  In the process of making a documentary on the Battle for Jenin in 2002, I had the occasion to interview a few of the NPR reporters in both Israel and the United States and discovered, to my dismay, that there was an alarming absence of knowledge on the part of these individuals on basic historical facts – such as that Israel was created by a U.N. resolution in 1947  or that it had been three Arab armies which had initiated hostilities during the Six Day War ( resulting in the Israeli army’s conquest of the West Bank)  and not the reverse.

The virtual acceptance of  the Arab narrative of the conflict was certainly not the only example of bias. During the Iraq War, there were constant jabs at the Bush Administration’s policies, with a nary a response solicited from the other side.  I was appalled when I heard a NPR reporter in Denmark during the the Danish Cartoon Riots of 2006 call for the Muslim courts , rather than Danish courts, to try the violators of the peace.

And so I ended my membership.   I am not aware whether things changed at NPR but in all likelihood they have not.   There has never been a serious inquiry, to my knowledge,  of the distinctly  Islamic motivations of the 9/11 attacks, an oversight which conveniently side steps the most pressing issue which confronts Western civilization.

Which brings us to Juan Williams.  Williams, it should be noted, did not make his comments  about his nervousness around religiously garbed Muslims on NPR itself.  He made them on FOX News, where he knew such views would be more openly tolerated.  But he also knew he was expressing a sentiment that millions 0f other Americans would  voice without even a second thought -  that religious Muslims, in this country at least, have done an abysmal job over the past ten years in convincing us that their intentions are peaceable and that, as a group, they are categorically opposed to violence.

The failure of Muslim leaders to unequivocally and defiantly  repudiate the violent actions of their co-religionists arouses unease.   Is that really so controversial?  Where, we should demand from this publicly funded institution, are its in depth reports and interviews with the U.S. imams and Muslim community leaders who should be asked pointedly where they stand on the issue of violent jihad and terrorism?   Why is it, as Marty Peretz of the New Republic asked to a howl of liberal condemnation last month, that so few Muslims in this country voice protest about the Muslim slaughter of fellow Muslims in foreign countries?    Where is their outrage about what fellow Muslims do in the name of Islam?

Those are questions which do not find a home in National Public Radio.  And it is that abdication of responsibility which makes regular listeners such as me -  and  perhaps even in-house commentators such as Juan Williams, wonder which “public”  National Public Radio is actually addressing.

China’s Military Build Up Must Be Watched

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on  August 18, expatriate Dutch parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali amplified her charge that the United States was truly engaged in a clash of civilizations:

“The West is declining in relative power, Islam is exploding demographically, and Asian civilizations—especially China—are economically ascendant……………The West’s universalist pretensions are increasingly bringing it into conflict with the other civilizations, most seriously with Islam and China. Thus the survival of the West depends on Americans, Europeans and other Westerners reaffirming their shared civilization as unique—and uniting to defend it against challenges from non-Western civilizations.”

The identification of China may have  surprised many.  After all, the United States is China’s most important trading partner and China owns, according to the lastest reports, nearly 40% of American debt.  The two nations , it is argued, are wrapped in a symbiotic relationship where  armed conflict would be unthinkable.

But Hirsi Ali , without going into extensive analysis, was touching  on an important development which is all but ignored by the U.S. Government.  The Chinese are almost certainly preparing for an eventual military conflict with the United States.

In August, in its annual report to Congress,  the U.S. Department of Defense claimed that China was ramping up investment in an array of areas including nuclear weapons, long-range missiles, submarines aircraft carriers and cyber warfare. The military report said China was “already looking at contingencies beyond Taiwan” including through a longstanding project to build a far-reaching missile that could potentially strike US carriers deep in the Pacific.

“Current trends in China’s military capabilities are a major factor in changing East Asian military balances and could provide China with a force capable of conducting a range of military operations in Asia well beyond Taiwan” it said.

“China’s military doctrine has traditionally emphasized the ability to strike within an area extending to Japan’s  Okinawa Island chain and throughout the South China Sea east of Vietnam,” the report said.

But Chinese strategists are now looking to expand their reach further to be able to hit targets as far away as Guam including much of mainland Japan and the Philippines it said.

Andrew Krepinevich , the president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments wrote in Friday’s Wall Street Journal:

” China’s goal is to stop the United States from protecting its long standing interests in the region – and to draw Washington’s democratic allies and partners ( such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan) into its orbit.”

In the piece, he claims that the Chinese military has identified U.S.’ reliance on satellites and the Internet to monitor incoming attacks as its Achilles Heel.   The successful testing of a Chinese  anti-satellite missile in 2007   and the prospective use of lasers to blind satellites, presents an extremely discomfiting scenario for the United States.

The imperial ambitions of China to dominate its region should not come as any historical surprise.   There has  been a long standing Chinese view of itself as the center of  Asia and that those nations that surround it should exist as either vassal or tributary states.  In fact, China could remind its Asian neighbors of the once powerful tributary system of the Ming and Qing Dynasties, when the “Middle Kingdom” was in fact at the center of an Asian system of trade, cultural eminence and respect.  Though Beijing may have no aspirations of re-creating such a system, this “Middle Kingdom” mentality cannot be totally neglected today.

The Obama Administration, much like the Bush Administration before it, remains blissfully unaware of the Chinese military build up or of how, in any potential conflict breaking out over Taiwan or South Korea, U.S. forces in the Pacific could become neutralized within minutes.

China’s astonishing  economic development, its bustling metropolises and embrace of  the West in robust trade, should not blind us to the fact that the Chinese do not share the same civilizational values as ourselves, nor are they necessarily willing to play ball on issues of global concern – particularly when it comes to Iran’s nuclear program or even matters as hot button as global warming.

That is because to the Chinese mind,  the Middle Kingdom is not a quaint historical anecdote, consigned to a storied past, but an ever present reality in the thinking of many modern Chinese political  leaders and businessmen. It  dictates a view of China as the cynosure of  an Asian ascendancy with a concomitant indifference to Western leaders’ universalist ideals.   We would be foolish to ignore this kind of thinking and to believe so implicitly in Chinese professed good intentions.

Tony Blair Has Mashalled the West’s Tough Journey

Tony Blair’s recent published autobiography ” A Journey” is remarkable in a number of ways.

The first is that it is penned solely by the former prime minister without the benefit of a ghost writer;   The second is that it is a insouciantly honest  portrait of a Western leader that doesn’t seek to hide deep  insecurities or avoid blame for major errors of judgment.

As to the first, well, maybe he should have used a little help.  The book is riddled with cliches and unwieldy syntax. It is poorly organized and gives us little of Blair’s political or personal philosophy.   As to the second, the bare- it-all candidness can get a bit much, particularly when Blair intimates his penchant for spending time alone on the loo.

But a third  reason – and an  important one to laud this new memoir – is Blair’s insistence on the centrality of the Trans-Atlantic Alliance to the future of Western civilization.  Blair has understood, much like all his post- War predecessors and every American president since Franklin Roosevelt, that the very concept of  “the West”  as a civilization, would only survive if  the two nations which enshrined its values would continue to cooperate as partners in the greatest of human enterprises – the preservation of freedom and the willingness to fight to defend it.

The personal relationships between the leaders of the two countries – Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, Harold Macmillan and  John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher – shepherded the West through the grave crises represented by Nazism and Communism.  The Blair- Bush relationship was just as important in its ultimate recognition of and confrontation to the third great challenge to the West in our lifetime -  the scourge of terrorism and the rise of fundamentalist Islam.  The Trans-Atlantic alliance was undeniably strengthened during the first decade of this century by the development of a warm cooperation between these two men.

More than any European  leader in this century, Blair understood the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001 as an assault on the West itself and that an immediate and forceful response would be needed.  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as controversial as they now seem, will one day be viewed by history as the West’s defiant statement that it would be neither cowed, nor intimidated by tin pot dictators or highly financed terrorist leaders.

His cooperation with Bush in toppling the regime of Saddam Hussein was exactly the kind of cooperation missing in 1956 when  Egypt’s  president Abdul Gamal Nasser bestrode the Middle East as a puffed up Arab potentate, vowing to deliver a humiliating blow to ” the Western imperialists”.  When he nationalized the Suez Canal in August, 1956,  threatening world trade, the United States and the United Kingdom would have been in their rights to launch an international force to dislodge him.  That did not happen.  Anthony Eden’s government, sensing American reticence and indifference, colluded with France and Israel to seize the canal.  The action took the Eisenhower Administration by complete surprise and in an act of pique,  it threatened to condemn the actions in the U.N.  Security Council, resulting in a humiliating retreat by all three powers.  The damage to the West was incalcuable  and led to Eden’s immediate resignation, the eventual collapse of France’s Fourth Republic and the empowerment of Nasser, who eleven years later would launch the Six Day War and continue as a the bane of the West for another 14 years.

The absence of a personal relationship between the British prime minister and the American president was telling in those circumstances.  And so may it be today.  Neither David Cameron nor Barack Obama have evinced much interest in the Trans-Atlantic Alliance and the idea that the two nations must band together to defend the West and its values, is given short shrift.   Neither seems to be display a keen awareness of the threats posed by the multicultural revolution sweeping through the West; Neither has drawn at all upon the memory of Munich, as nearly every American and British  post – War leader has done, as a policy guide for confronting challenges to freedom and liberty.

Reports have indicated that Tony Blair, in conducting his book tour, must travel in an armed guard for fear of being assaulted.  He is seen in Britain today as largely a failure.   The reviews by his contemporaries of his book have been scathing, painting the former prime minister as a stooge in thrall to American imperialism.

History will inevitably be much kinder to Tony Blair, just as it will be to Bush.  It may sadly reveal that these two pragmatic men were the last of their line of great leaders who took hard, unpopular decisions they felt necessary to protect their populations.  That they understood this and acted in unison, may  be the last gasp of  recognition, among our political leaders at least, of the joint destiny of the English speaking peoples.

My Son’s World History Class

There is very little I enjoy more than discussing  the history of western civilization with my son.  He has a keen mind and a limitless curiosity about our past and we can spend many hours picking apart historical events and personalities.

He is unusual.  Most ninth graders wouldn’t spend a minute with their parents discussing the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny in India  or the fall of the Shoguns in Japan.

He attends an Orthodox Jewish day school in Los Angeles, well known for its out-of-the- box thinking on education and its emphasis on character development.  Lately we have been preparing for his history exam, which will provide him with most of his grade for the year.

It was in reviewing his teacher’s notes and comments on his papers and assignments that I began becoming somewhat concerned.  In one particular assignment, with which I had helped him, she had downgraded him for his comments on the value of Westernization in the 19th Century and his insistence that colonialism had actually brought some good things to foreign countries .  She correctly pointed out the depredations of King Leopold II in the Congo and the avariciousness of many colonial settlers from South Africa to China.  But it was her sneering comments about the moral and cultural equivalence of Western civilization to the native cultures encountered during the colonialist era, that got me riled.

There is a tacit acceptance in our schools that modern European history is irredeemably tainted by the presence of racism and supremacist ideologies among the Western nations who colonized the world.  Unfortunately there is a concomitant  failure to adequately appreciate the spread of the ideals of individual liberty, democracy and the belief in the sanctity of life which Western expansion also facilitated.

It is true  that some terrible crimes were committed in the cause  of human progress by Westerners seeking to bring  Western values to native peoples.      But this history  should not be allowed to shade our appreciation of the fact that there would be no commonly agreed standard for human rights,  no emphasis on human dignity and no commitment to peaceful resolution of conflicts without the colonists’/ imperialists’ intrepid work.

We live in a world where the legacy of the West comes under daily assault and it is brought about largely by those who feel that Westerners have something to atone for.

Perhaps I need to speak to my son’s history teacher about this, but for the rest of us, it might pay to spend some time remembering what the world once looked like without Western intervention and whether we would like to go back there.

THE UNLIKELY U.K. MARRIAGE OF CONSERVATIVES AND LIBERAL DEMOCRATS

Thirty years ago, it would have been unthinkable.  That right wing British conservatives would forge a union with left wing liberals in a coalition government would have seemed as likely to Thatcherite England as the Queen embracing Judaism.  The two parties, sporting ideologies miles apart – one party encourages free enterprise and the other to redistribute wealth – might now look  doomed to an early divorce.

But that would be mistaking the ungainly complexion of U.K. politics today.    Cameron’s Conservatives look nothing like Thatcher’s.  They have cooled their heels for 13 years in the political wilderness  watching as Tony Blair’s vapid centrist ideology wooed British voters through four national elections.  The Conservatives learned something in those years.   They learned that they were ” uncool” and out of touch.  They learned that traditional Conservative politics did not appeal any longer to a polity drenched in a multicultural ethos and Euro-centric philosophies. And they learned that they could only win an election by looking and feeling more like Tony Blair’s Labour Party.

Under Cameron’s four year leadership the Conservatives have therefore  undergone a transformative facelift, revealing them to be Conservatives without any true conservative convictions.   Civil liberties and human rights crowns both domestic and foreign policies.  Israel is regarded askance and the Trans Atlantic Alliance, so crucial to the defense of Western attitudes and values, is given less priority than the attachment to Europe.   Not once did Cameron refer to the decline of British traditions and values or the merciless multicultural assault on British identity.  Nor did he seek to address the alarming spread of a homegrown Islamic menace in England which has transformed London into Jihad Central.

The result is that for the first time in modern British history, conservatives are left without any true political representation in Parliament.  Those who are deeply concerned that their  local supermarket is now owned by a  Muslim who won’t offer alcohol or the sale of pork, or city Councils who declare it a hate crime for anyone to inveigh against homosexual practices and rights, will find no support from Cameron’s  Conservative Party nor even from the Anglican Church, both of whom now side with the multi-culturalists and the moral relativists.

So rather than being a shot gun wedding, the union of the Cameron Conservatives with the Clegg Liberal Democrats is more a marriage made in heaven than anyone might have expected.  Besides rancor over some basic economic issues, there is in truth very little difference between any of the current British parties and it is small wonder that Cameron didn’t seek to build a bridge to Labour first.

This is terrible news for the West.  With both the United States and Great Britain run by post-Christian governments,  refraining from any attachment to the support of the values and ideals upon which Western civilization has been built, I have to wonder whether those who believe in the transformative impact of  the Western Enlightenment on human freedom and liberty will have any role to play in our future.