Having apparently enjoyed an earlier article of mine of these pages, The Science Cartel vs. Immanuel Velikovsky, author Joshua D. Smith contacted me thinking I might enjoy his recently published book, Egypt and the Origin of Civilization: The British School of Culture Diffusion, 1890s-1940s (Volume 1). Published in March of this year, this intriguing and accessible book explores, as did my article on Immanuel Velikovsky, a highly plausible and fascinating interdisciplinary theory that encountered not only hostility but outright suppression from the academic powers-that-be.

As the reader will see, there are many resonances between the British school of diffusionism, also known as the Heliolithic school, and the Austrian school of economics, not only in the treatment both schools received but also in the conclusions they reached; indeed, the “anti-state, anti-war, pro-market” orientation championed by LewRockwell.com finds support by many of the diffusionists’ findings. But first, let us examine what this school taught before we examine why it was important.

The book examines primary source materials written by W. H. R. Rivers,Grafton Elliot Smith, and William James Perry, the British diffusionists. These thinkers, the author informs us, believing in the “uniqueness of civilization” (46), argued that “Egpyt passed on key innovations over time to all peoples — but not through direct or intentional contacts, contrary to the claims of anti-diffusionist detractors” (12). They concluded that human civilization had spread, “like the addition of one link after another to a chain, or a series of chains, that stretched… from Egpyt to India to China and out through the Pacific islands to the higher centers of civilization in the New World” (65). If one ponders the accepted timelines of the history of civilizations, the theory is plausible, and their goal was “to create a scientifically sound synthesis of the best research then available, which they thought pointed to ancient culture movements across broad spans of the globe” (92).

About this theory’s plausibility, I must add two insights from my own field of study, linguistics, that came to mind upon learning of it and which, if indirectly, support it. Linguistic monogenesis holds that all human languages have a common ancestor, bringing to mind the Biblical narrative of the Tower of Babel. Proto-Human language, of course, would have been spoken and subsequently diffused long before any Egyptian civilizational developments would have been diffused, but the point here is that our remote ancestors were capable of travelling far greater distances than many moderns care to admit. More to the point, it is widely held that all the world’s alphabets are descended, that is to say were diffused, from that of the Phoenician language, which itself was based on the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, descended from Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Like Velikovsky and indeed the Austrian economists, the diffusionists opposed scientism, arguing against the “hyper-scientific, anti-humanistic, and ‘posivitist’ attitude[s]” (50) of the day. They desired “to merge the sciences and the humanities into a ‘unified discipline’ or a ‘science of history,’ yet carefully pointed out that human behavior does not fit neatly into any ‘laws of nature’” (105). Also like Velikovsky and the Austrians, the diffusionists faced powerful opposition, in their case rising from the “unlikely alliance” that was “formed among anthropologists, colonial policy makers, and philanthropists” (114). Author Smith informs, “Colonial regimes were intrigued by structural-functionalism because it seemed to adhere to their aims of applicable, practical, and utilitarian science.” The structural-functionalist “method included a combination of climatic determinism and progressionism with a defense of authoritarian or autocratic notions” (76). Funding for the diffusionists dried up, and the school withered by the 1940s.

That brief history of the diffusionists outlined, let us turn our attention to the school’s “anti-state, anti-war, pro-market” themes a LewRockwell.com reader might well appreciate.

The diffusionists countered the prominent “social evolutionist” schools of thought and their “implicit and explicit cult of progress” (27). Instead of this vision of “an inexorable progressive direction in history that was impeded only by irrational resistance to the inevitable,” (ibid) the diffusionists, bringing to mind Velikovsky, saw history as “periods of stasis intermittently punctuated by moments of drastic change” (ibid). Importantly, the diffusionists fought against the social evolutionists’ assertions that “all worthwhile progressive change in the human past resulted from conflicts with the stronger necessarily prevailing over the weaker” (26), i.e. that “progress stemmed directly from violence” (ibid). These same social evolutionists whom the diffusionists opposed “proclaimed individualism akin to ‘primitive barbarism’” (28).

Rejecting these “assumptions which represented violence as natural and progressively developmental for humanity and that a conflict-oriented culture has been endemic as an overall component of human nature” (94), the diffusionists instead saw in history as an “oscillatory interchange of ‘progress’ and ‘barbarism’” (75). In all of this one can see parallels with Albert Jay Nock‘s delineation of the civilizational struggle between “state power and social power.”

The diffusionists also rejected “then current social psychology that explained modern violence and warfare by projecting it into humanity’s ancient past and, by implication, asserting that this behavior was innate to humankind, leaving warfare as an inevitably and an intrinsic component of the human future” (63). The diffusionists argued that it was not by war and conquest that civilization was diffused, but rather by trade, a component of “the movements of culture that have obviously taken place” (62). Thus, they “placed human selectivity and behavior at the center of change rather than blind natural forces as the key determinants of cultural developments” (ibid).

The diffusionists’ “anti-state, anti-war, pro-market” vision is, in short, one of “all humanity as intricately connected over a vast timescale” (99).

Readers of LewRockwell.com, as well as anyone interested in the history of ideas and the history of civilization, would be wise to add this insightful and illuminating little book to their shelves. Fortunately, author Joshua D. Smith has two more books planned in his series.

An American Catholic son-in-law of Korea, Joshua Snyder [send him mail] lives with his wife and two children in Pohang, where he lectures English at a science and technology university. He blogs at The Western Confucian.

The Best of Joshua Snyder

Thomas Jefferson, in his inaugural, addressing what would later come to be known as “foreign policy,” called for “peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none.” His country has been ignoring his sage advice for more than a century. And nowhere on the planet has his advice been more roundly transgressed than on the Korean peninsula, where, for the past six decades, it is not only ignored, but indeed reversed.

With the southern half of that tragically divided country, America finds herself tied up in an “entangling alliance,” and with the northern half, rather than “peace, commerce and honest friendship,” we find war, sanctions, and animosity. Didn’t George Washington warn us against “the mischiefs of foreign intrigue” resulting from “excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another” in his farewell address?

Ending the permanent and entangling alliance with South Korea is a no-brainer. If the alliance ever made sense, it clearly no longer does. Americans find themselves expending treasure and potentially blood defending one of the richest countries in the world against one of the poorest. Lest one point to China, South Korea has been enjoying decades of friendly political and commercial relations with the regional power. (Do they read Jefferson in South Korea?) The South Koreans have even been attempting the same with the North, with some degree of success, and with much opposition from Washington (the misnamed imperial capital, not the Founder of the Country).

But peace, commerce and honest friendship with North Korea? Surely Thomas Jefferson, that lover of liberty, would not advocate extending peace, commerce and honest friendship to a tyrannical, Stalinist state like North Korea? Of course, such nightmare states could hardly have been imagined in Jefferson’s time, products of late modernity that they are. Thus, the more important question is whether our six-decade-old policy of war, sanctions, and animosity has brought any change to North Korea, which it obviously has not, with a third Kim in line for the throne.

The corollary to that question is whether a policy of peace, commerce and honest friendship, which is affected by people not states at the deepest level, might not be better at bringing some measure of freedom to the long-suffering people of North Korea. There is every indication that it would, if one is willing to go beyond the “analysis” offered by the mainstream media’s “experts” on Korea and read accounts by scholars who actually know the country and her language.

Addressing the first of Jefferson’s specifics, peace, we can turn to Asia Times Online correspondent Peter Lee, whose analysis of the WikiLeaks cables in his Dec. 4, 2010 article Dear Leader’s designs on Uncle Sam explained clearly that “North Korea is desperate to establish relations with the United States.”

About this prospect, Kim Keun-sik, a professor of North Korean Studies at Kyungnam University in Seoul, quoted by Sunny Lee in her Mar. 16, 2011 Asia Times Online article, Don’t let Kim be misunderstood, argues that this would be “the best conduit to integrate the country into the international community,” saying, “Establishing diplomatic relations will do.”

Then why not sign the peace treaty ending the Korean War and establish diplomatic relations with North Korea? Is it that important that Hollywood and video game makers have a politically correct enemy? Is it that important that the Pentagon have a percieved enemy to con the American people out of more tax dollars?

Moving to the effect that commerce is already having within the country, we turn to Andrei Lankov, among the most perceptive pundits on North Korea, having studied in the country and grown up in the Soviet Union, giving him first-hand experience of life under similar economic, political, and cultural tyranny. In his Mar. 11, 2011 offering for Asia Times Online, Why the Kim regime will falter, Prof. Lankov says that each “report that another famine was looming in North Korea” reminds him “the Soviet media’s habit of reporting that a crisis in the capitalist West was becoming ever-more profound.”

He goes on to explain that “in recent years, the economic situation of the population has improved markedly,” and more importantly, why “these changes do not necessarily bode well for the regime’s future.” He writes:

People seldom rebel when their lives are desperate: they are too busy looking for food and basic necessities. Most revolutions happen in times of relative prosperity and are initiated by people who have time and energy to discuss social issues and to organize resistance. Another condition for a successful revolution is a widespread belief in some alternative that is allegedly better than present-day life.

There is little doubt that the North Korean elite welcome signs of economic growth, but paradoxically, this growth makes their situation less, not more, stable. North Koreans are now less stressed and have some time to think and talk — more so since the once formidable surveillance and indoctrination system was damaged during the crisis of the 1990s, perhaps beyond repair.

B.R. Myers, perhaps the foremost outside scholar of North Korean propaganda, noted the same, warning us against “North Korea watchers who speak no Korean” in an Apr. 1, 2009 editorial for The New York Times, with the refreshingly non-interventionist title To Beat a Dictator, Ignore Him, in which he also goes deeper into explaining the paradox for the regime that economic growth entails:

As for economic matters, the leadership in the North has always considered them secondary to domestic security. If the masses lived well, fine, but Mr. Kim's father, Kim Il-sung, once told the East German dictator Erich Honecker that they behaved better when they didn't. In the mid-1990s, when Kim Jong-il was forced to choose between opening his country to the outside world and letting perhaps a million citizens starve to death, he did just what his father would have done.

North Koreans now know that they are much poorer than their brethren in the South. They know this not just because the information cordon that once sealed off the country is in tatters, but also because the Kim Jong-il regime openly, even proudly, admits the gross economic disparity. The propaganda apparatus assures the masses that their heroic sacrifices are helping to nuclearize the North and keep America down. They are also told that the South Korean masses, for all their material comfort, are ashamed of being under the thumb of the Yankees and yearn to live under Kim Jong-il.

North Korean defector Mok Yong Jae, writing on Mar. 10, 2011 for Daily NK, a reliable online journal run by defectors that never falls into the trap of exaggeration, clarifies in his article, Economic Role in the Spotlight, that it was not socialist planning but “ten years of North-South economic cooperation” that have brought about the economic improvements Prof. Lankov spoke of. Mr. Mok also quotes South Korean Minister of Unification Hyun In Taek as suggesting that “unification would be more readily feasible once the average income of North Koreans rose to approximately $3,000.”

Mr. Mok also quotes Professor Kim Yong Ho of Yonsei University about the fact that “50,000 North Korean people are working in the Kaesong Industrial Complex,” an area where South Korean firms are allowed to operate. Prof. Kim says, “If we include their families, it's like having 200,000 people in the Kaesong Complex's sphere of influence. As with the way to achieving German Unification, from East Germany through Hungary to West Germany, Kaesong too can play the role of a channel for influence.”

While conservatives in South Korea and the United States have long maligned the “Sunshine Policy” of economic engagement with North Korea, defectors themselves, and the local experts they quote, understand that it is indeed the best way to effect long-term change in the North. Why not let trade bring about the economic growth necessary for the North Korean people to bring about regime change in their own country? While it might be gradual and piecemeal, in the long run, it will be far more cost effective than continuing the confrontational policies of the last six decades.

On April 4, 2011, Kim Jong-wook of South Korea’s JoongAng Daily reported on a delegation of North Koreans sent to Stamford University to study free market economics, in his article, Capitalism 101 Tour for Northerners ends. Let us hope this is a first step towards peace, commerce and honest friendship with North Korea.

An American Catholic son-in-law of Korea, Joshua Snyder [send him mail] lives with his wife and two children in Pohang, where he lectures English at a science and technology university. He blogs at The Western Confucian.

The Best of Joshua Snyder

POHANG, SOUTH KOREA — “Just let me know if I have to worry,” read
my mother’s email. With her son living in South Korea for close
to fifteen years, we have been through this several times. Whenever
North Korea is in the news, she naturally worries about my safety,
and now that I’ve given her a lovely daughter-in-law and two beautiful
children, her worries have quadrupled.

Since I’ve been here, there have been raids by commandoes, missile
launches, alleged nuclear tests, threats of a “Sea of fire,” two
sea battles, claiming six and forty-six South Korean sailors respectively,
and, most recently the first artillery exchange since the 1953 armistice
that lulled the Korean War, in which four South Koreans, including,
most disturbingly, two civilians, were killed.

When I first got here, I, too was, spooked whenever North Korea
was in the news, but I soon did what any resident of a foreign country
should do; I learned from the locals. I saw that South Koreans didn’t
care. They ignored the news coming from the North. They acted like
the sibling of someone with Tourette’s Syndrome or severe Autism;
while the behavior looked scary to outsiders, they were used to
it. Those of us who’ve been “in country” a few years like to laugh
at the “rookies” who get all jittery and start packing their bags
whenever CNN finds it necessary to show scary pictures of menacing
North Korean soldiers at Panmunjŏm.

So I wrote back to my mother, “You don’t have to worry, Mom.”

I lied.

This time is different. This year, South Koreans are talking about
it. The naval battle on the eve of the 2002 Korea-Japan World Cup
was ignored. (A traffic accident involving the US military at the
same time, in which two middle school girls tragically died, was
not ignored; there were anti-American demonstrations that
brought hundreds of thousands to the streets, unreported by most
mainstream media in America.) The sinking of the Ch’ŏnan
earlier this year was not ignored, perhaps because the loss of life
was so great. The 46 sailors were properly mourned, and, along with
the anger directed northward, there seemed to be even more conspiracy
analysis in the South regarding their government’s version of the
story.

Things are really different with last month’s shelling of
the disputed Yŏnpyŏngdo Island, perhaps because of the
loss of civilian life and property. My students and colleagues are
talking about this event, bringing it up freely, voicing their concerns
and fears.

I, too, am a bit nervous, but I’m less nervous about what P’yŏngyang
(and Beijing) might intentionally do than what Seoul (and Washington)
might accidentally do.

A day after the November 23rd Yŏnpyŏngdo attack, Justin
Raimondo rightly noted that “the South Koreans were conducting military
‘exercises’ near the disputed island, which North Korea claims as
its territory, and South Korean ships had opened fire,” going on
to suggest that “the military exercises, code-named ‘Hoguk,’ involving
all four branches of the South Korean armed forces and some 70,000
troops, simulated an attack on North Korea, and were meant to provoke
the North Koreans, who responded as might be expected” [Korean
Conundrum: Is There a Way Out?]. He continued, “US troops were
supposed to have participated in the exercises, but apparently the
Americans thought better of it and pulled back at the last moment
— perhaps because they knew a provocation was in the making” [ibid].

Mr. Raimondo went on to argue, even more pointedly, “For the South
Koreans to conduct military exercises in this explosive region,
never mind firing off rounds, is nothing but a naked provocation
of the sort the West routinely ascribes to Pyongyang. In the context
of North Korea's recent revelation that it is increasing its nuclear
capacity, the South Korean military maneuvers were meant to elicit
a violent response — and succeeded in doing so” [ibid].

A few days later, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak said of
the incident, “Launching a military attack on civilians is a crime
against humanity, even during wartime” [South
Korean president takes responsibility for failing to protect country,
signals hardened military stance toward North]. Of course, he
is about right attacks on civilians being crimes against humanity,
but he said nothing of the irresponsibility of holding war games
so close to an inhabited and disputed island.

Speaking of President Lee, analyst Peter Lee has argued that “significant
North Asian takeaways from the WikiLeaks cables” clearly show that
“South Korea, under President Lee Myung-bak, wants the North to
collapse and to dominate the reunification process” (while “North
Korea is desperate to establish relations with the United States”)
and that “South Korean government officials are indefatigably, crudely
and rather transparently ‘working the refs’ — selectively packaging
and vociferously pushing their arguments — to persuade the United
States to abandon mediation through the People’s Republic of China
(PRC) and/or negotiation with North Korea and instead put South
Korea and its reunification agenda in the diplomatic driver’s seat”
[Dear
Leader's designs on Uncle Sam].

Since the Yŏnpyŏngdo attack, there have been joint games
with the United States, which sent the U.S.S. George Washington,
against Chinese warnings (not to mention the warnings of George
Washington against “foreign entanglements”). These were followed
by joint war games between the United States and Japan, who has
her own territorial dispute with Russia, leading South Korean journalist
Yi Yong-in to warn that “a ‘three against three’ framework with
South Korea, the United States and Japan on one side and North Korea,
China, and Russia on the other is showing signs of taking shape
once again” and to speak of a “New Cold War” [Cold
War alliances reborn with regional tension].

If the danger of a “New Cold War” were not bad enough, there is
the very real danger of a hot war, with South Korea launching its
own live fire war games in dozens of areas around the peninsula
and warning of responding to any North Korean reaction with air
strikes: “The extent of possible South Korean air strikes on the
North is not clear, but anything other than an extremely limited
and localized action is likely to trigger total war,” warned Koreanologist
Gregory Elich, “a war that the U.S. will inevitably be drawn into”
[Menacing
North Korea].

The last total war on this peninsula resulted in the deaths of
tens of thousands of Americans, hundreds of thousands of Chinese,
and millions of Koreans. Even a cursory glance at world history
shows how a minor incident can escalate to a total war.

(Of this possibility, fellow Korea resident Andray Abrahamian has
reminded us, “If through an overly aggressive deterrence posture
war breaks out, millions on both sides could die [and] the two generations
of sweat and tears that drove South Korea’s economic growth could
be undone,” rightly concluding that “it is absolutely inappropriate
for foreign Korea-watchers to call for greater aggression in confronting
the North” [Pyongyang
stretches deterrence limits].)

There
are those who would argue that with the indisputably tyrannical
nature of North Korea, total war would be “worth it.” Perhaps the
best argument I’ve read recently against such interventionist arguments
comes from James Church, pseudonymous Western intelligence officer
turned mystery novelist, in the second of his great Inspector O
series, Hidden
Moon, which he put into the mouth of his North Korean detective
hero in a retort to a Western spy caught attempting to destabilize
his country:

“This isn’t about you, Inspector, it’s about something bigger.
The future of your country. Your people’s future.”

“You have no idea what you are talking about, do you? You’re
just reciting some crap they handed you at a briefing. My country’s
future? Forgive me, Superintendent, I don’t know anything that
flourishes when it’s washed in blood. Let’s not float away on
visions of the future… What happens here is not yours to worry
about. It’s for us, it’s our business, our future, our fate.”

Yes. Let the Koreans, South and North, decide their future. It’s
not for us to worry about as it’s their business, their future,
their fate. The last thing we Americans need is to get sucked into
another war on this peninsula.

December
15, 2010

An American
Catholic son-in-law of Korea, Joshua Snyder [send
him mail] lives with his wife and two children in Pohang, where
he lectures English at a science and technology university. He blogs
at The Western Confucian.

The
Best of Joshua Snyder

Madam Secretary is right that it was indeed an “unacceptable provocation,” but wrong that the “international community has a responsibility and a duty to respond.” The “unacceptable provocation” was against South Korea, which reserves the right to respond. Seoul’s hands are tied by all this talk about some abstraction called “the international community,” the same phantom which only emboldened Pyongyang, knowing it to be a myth, to provoke in the first place.

This kind of boilerplate just plays into Kim Jong-il’s hands. With it, he has scored a propaganda victory, which he will use to bolster his domestic support. Nothing can be used to unite a people to its government like threats from the outside, as Americans learned in 2001.

There will be no resumption of the Korean War, which has not yet ended, as it would spell the end of the Kimist régime and Kim Jong-il knows it. The South has two-and-a-half times the people and forty times the economic output as the North, not to mention a couple of inches in average height and a much stronger military, even without the U.S. presence.

What’s more, the South has political and, more importantly, economic freedom, one glimpse of which, which an open conflict would surely allow, would consign the Kimist régime to the trash bin of Korean history. This is not 1950, when both parts of the peninsula were equally poor and backward. (The North was actually better off back then.)

Kim Jong-il knows this and will push only so far as to get what he wants and needs for his own personal survival. I don’t know whether to declare him a genius, or to declare the Clinton, Bush, and Obama régimes (not to mention South Korea’s Kim and Roh régimes) morons for cutting deal after deal with this thug for the past decade-and-a-half, during which time North Korea became the largest recipient of U.S. aid in Asia. Had we pursued a policy of benign neglect, the North Korean state might by now have withered away.

Doug Bandow recently argued that “the ROK’s military alliance with America makes it more difficult for both nations to act in their respective interests” — Avoiding Pyongyang. Noting that “there is little the DPRK can do to harm the United States,” Mr. Bandow reminded us that “Washington is stuck in the center of Korean affairs today only because of the U.S.-ROK alliance, which provides a security guarantee to South Korea with no corresponding benefit to America.”

“The sinking of the Cheonan was an outrage, but it was an outrage against the ROK,” he said, suggesting that the incident “should not be an issue of great concern to America, which normally would offer diplomatic backing but not military support to a democratic friend.” On the Korean side, he noted that “the South finds its decision-making, even on the question of its national survival, affected and directed by American policy makers half a world away.” Restated, “Seoul finds its future being decided at least in part in Washington, where America’s, not South Korea’s, interests understandably are treated as paramount.”

Mr. Bandow concluded by suggesting that “both sides should use this crisis to rethink an alliance that has outgrown its original security justification,” and saying, “Neither the ROK nor the United States is well-served by a relationship where South Korea’s fate is decided in Washington.”

South Korea was attacked, not America, much less the world. We heard this same kind of internationalist blathering sixty years ago, shortly before another Democrat president got America involved in its first undeclared, United Nations-sponsored war on this very peninsula.

Fabiano Choi Hong-jun, chairperson of the Catholic Lay Apostolate Council of Korea, has the right approach: “With Christian faith, we view this as another ordeal on the way toward national reconciliation and we must keep hope” — Church leaders pray to ease Korean tension. He continued, “We need to pray for peace and reconciliation.”

An American Catholic son-in-law of Korea, Joshua Snyder [send him mail] lives with his wife and two children in Pohang, where he lectures English at a science and technology university. He blogs at The Western Confucian.

The Best of Joshua Snyder

Speaking in
Seoul yesterday, “U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton
says the world has a duty to respond to sinking of a South Korean
warship that has been blamed on North Korea” —  Clinton:
World must act on SKorean ship sinking. “After talks with South
Korean leaders Wednesday, Clinton told reporters the attack, which
killed 46 sailors, was an ‘unacceptable provocation’ by the North
and the ‘international community has a responsibility and a duty
to respond.’”

Madam Secretary
is right that it was indeed an “unacceptable provocation,” but wrong
that the “international community has a responsibility and a duty
to respond.” The “unacceptable provocation” was against South Korea,
which reserves the right to respond. Seoul’s hands are tied by all
this talk about some abstraction called “the international community,”
the same phantom which only emboldened Pyongyang, knowing it to
be a myth, to provoke in the first place.

This kind of
boilerplate just plays into Kim Jong-il’s hands. With it, he has
scored a propaganda victory, which he will use to bolster his domestic
support. Nothing can be used to unite a people to its government
like threats from the outside, as Americans learned in 2001.

There will
be no resumption of the Korean War, which has not yet ended, as
it would spell the end of the Kimist régime and
Kim Jong-il knows it. The South has two-and-a-half times the people
and forty times the economic output as the North, not to mention
a couple of inches in average height and a much stronger military,
even without the U.S. presence. 

What’s more,
the South has political and, more importantly, economic freedom,
one glimpse of which, which an open conflict would surely allow,
would consign the Kimist régime to the
trash bin of Korean history. This is not 1950, when both parts of
the peninsula were equally poor and backward. (The North was actually
better off back then.) 

Kim Jong-il
knows this and will push only so far as to get what he wants and
needs for his own personal survival. I don’t know whether to declare
him a genius, or to declare the Clinton, Bush, and Obama régimes (not
to mention South Korea’s Kim and Roh régimes)
morons for cutting deal after deal with this thug for the past decade-and-a-half,
during which time North Korea became the largest receipient of U.S.
aid in Asia. Had we pursued a policy of benign neglect, the North
Korean state might by now have withered away.

Doug
Bandow recently argued that “the ROK's military alliance
with America makes it more difficult for both nations to act in
their respective interests” — Avoiding
Pyongyang. Noting that “there is little the DPRK can do to harm
the United States,” Mr. Bandow reminded us that “Washington is stuck
in the center of Korean affairs today only because of the U.S.-ROK
alliance, which provides a security guarantee to South Korea with
no corresponding benefit to America.”

“The sinking
of the Cheonan was an outrage, but it was an
outrage against the ROK,” he said, suggesting that the incident
“should not be an issue of great concern to America, which normally
would offer diplomatic backing but not military support to a democratic
friend.” On the Korean side, he noted that “the South finds its
decision-making, even on the question of its national survival,
affected and directed by American policy makers half a world away.”
Restated, “Seoul finds its future being decided at least in part
in Washington, where America's, not South Korea's, interests understandably
are treated as paramount.”

Mr.
Bandow concluded by suggesting that “both sides should use this
crisis to rethink an alliance that has outgrown its original security
justification,” and saying, “Neither the ROK nor the United States
is well-served by a relationship where South Korea's fate is decided
in Washington.”

South Korea
was attacked, not America, much less the world. We heard this same
kind of internationalist blathering sixty years ago, shortly before
another Democrat president got America involved in its first undeclared,
United Nations-sponsored war on this very peninsula.

Fabiano Choi
Hong-jun, chairperson of the Catholic Lay Apostolate Council of
Korea, has the right approach: “With Christian faith, we view this
as another ordeal on the way toward national reconciliation and
we must keep hope” — Church
leaders pray to ease Korean tension. He continued, “We need
to pray for peace and reconciliation.”

May
27, 2010

An American
Catholic son-in-law of Korea, Joshua Snyder [send
him mail] lives with his wife and two children in Pohang, where
he lectures English at a science and technology university. He blogs
at The Western Confucian.

The
Best of Joshua Snyder

Americans, I’m sure, will be happy to learn that this “relieves Seoul’s worry over national security,” one of our most pressing concerns. Americans might also like to know that, according to the editorialist, “the National Assembly in Seoul is doing nothing to express the country’s gratitude for the sacrifices made by countries that sent soldiers to fight in the Korean War, including the U.S.”

Why should one of the world’s most prosperous nations have to worry about its own defense, after all, when Uncle Sam has willing to do the dirty work for six decades? As an expatriate who pays taxes to the Korean government, I thank my fellow Americans, who, through their duly elected representatives, have agreed to reduce my tax burden here and pick up the tab themselves. Koreans will not be thanking you. You can rest assured that your sons (and daughters) will remain here within distance of the Dear Leader’s artillery and missiles, protecting Koreans from themselves.

In related news, a Dong-A Ilbo story on the same day reports that “Korea and the U.S. have agreed to delay Washington’s transfer of wartime operational command to Seoul that had been scheduled for April 2012″ (Korea, US Agree to Delay Command Transfer). Seoul has convinced Washington to maintain responsibility should the Korean War flare up again. Madeleine Albright was right; we’re indispensable.

You’d think Koreans, famous for their nationalism (and now their wealth), might want to take over defense of their own country. But Koreans are also famous for their intelligence, and they know a good deal when they’ve got one, and how to keep it going. Here’s how they convinced us, according to the report: “The two countries reportedly agreed to the postponement considering factors such as South Korea’s troop deployment to Afghanistan; U.S. consideration for its ally; Korea’s participation in the U.S. missile defense system; and instability on the Korean Peninsula stemming from the sinking of the Korean naval ship Cheonan.”

South Korea’s troop deployment to Afghanistan was negligible and deployed so as to suffer no danger of casualties (smart of Seoul to support its troops that way); no mention was made of the ally’s consideration for the U.S.; the U.S. missile defense system defends South Korea; and how is “instability on the Korean Peninsula” an American, not a Korean problem? At least Washington consulted the people about this decision, albeit not the American people, the story informs: “The U.S. has also listened to public opinions in Korea on the postponement.”

The above-mentioned “sinking of the Korean naval ship Cheonan” is a worrisome development that illustrates how easily the United States might be forced to exercise wartime operational command on this peninsula. One month ago, on the night of March 26, the ship sank near North Korean waters after an explosion. There has as of yet been no official explanation of the sinking of the ship.

An April 10 Asia Times Online editorial by Aidan Foster-Carter suggested that “the [South Korean] president’s Blue House would rather you not think about it, and they’ve been pretty successful” (The Cheonan cover-up). He wrote:

Quick to deny any North Korean role (while never quite ruling it out), Seoul’s spin-doctors set to work. First they focused on the quest to rescue anyone who might have survived — long after it was clear that they couldn’t possibly have. It was cruel to keep false hopes alive, but politically it did the trick of distracting the populace for several vital days.

A second tack, essential to defusing any sense of crisis, was to put out alternative theories. Could the Cheonan have run aground or hit a reef? May its own munitions have exploded? An oldish craft, built in 1989, might it be unseaworthy as some family members suggested?

Well, maybe. But none of this sounds very convincing. It was getting harder to deny that something had hit the Cheonan, even before the survivors — whose sequestering for nearly two weeks was itself suspicious — confirmed on April 7 that an external blast was to blame.

But what? Enter the mine hypothesis. An old mine — either the South’s or the North’s, left over from the Korean War or soon after — may have come adrift and floated into the unfortunate Cheonan’s path. Or perhaps been floated? Or maybe not a mine, but a torpedo?

It was not until almost a month later, on April 22, that what most suspected at the time, “that the North attacked with a heavy torpedo,” was semi-officially reported, based on “intelligence gathered jointly by South Korea and the United States,” according to a story filed by Joseph Yun Li-sun of AsiaNews (For South Korea, a torpedo from the North sank the ship). According to Mr. Yun’s source, “no formal charges will be made” because “the United States hopes that the North can be brought back to the nuclear disarmament table.” The source suggests that with “heightened tensions between the two Koreas…. will stop any real inquiry into the sinking.” The source clarified, “Washington is still hoping to bring Pyongyang back to the negotiating table, and an open accusation by Seoul would bury that hope forever.”

So, Seoul is unable to even confirm an attack that claimed 46 of its sailors, an attack which could have easily brought Washington into a full-fledged war on the peninsula, so that Washington might continue the ongoing negotiations, stalled since 2008, that began with the Clinton administration, which have produced nothing. Our true policy toward North Korea should be one of benign neglect.

The American Conservative blurb introducing Doug Bandow’s latest on the subject said it best: “the South Koreans would be better served by having a freer hand — without U.S. interference — and the U.S. would be better served without a South Korea that may eventually drag them into another war” (Time To Leave Korea).

“It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world,” said our first president (George Washington’s Farewell Address). Our third counseled “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none” (Jefferson’s First Inaugural Address). “They call upon us to supply American boys to do the job that Asian boys should do,” said our thirty-sixth (Lyndon B. Johnson Quotes).

America has already had troops on this peninsula for more than a quarter of our country’s existence. Isn’t it time to leave Korea to the Koreans, whether they want their own country or not? Isn’t our bankruptcy excuse enough to finally cut and run?

An American Catholic son-in-law of Korea, Joshua Snyder [send him mail] lives with his wife and two children in Pohang, where he lectures English at a science and technology university. He blogs at The Western Confucian.

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He noted, for example, that Venus, the second brightest object in the night sky, was not mentioned by the earliest astronomers. He proposed that the planet was a newcomer to our solar system, a comet, appearing in historical times with an irregular orbit that caused catastrophic events on our own planet.

Coming in close contact with the Earth, the latter’s rotation altered, making it appear that The Sun had stood still, a phenomenon reported on in the Book of Josue. What has come to be known as Joshua’s Long Day is corroborated by the texts of the ancient Chinese, Japanese, Egyptians, Babylonians, and Mayans; the East Asians reporting a extremely long sunset, the Mexicans reporting an extremely long sunrise.

Immanuel Velikovsky was too eminent a scholar to be dismissed outright as a kook, and he counted some respected people among his friends. (See The Einstein-Velikovsky Correspondence). Nevertheless, his Catastrophism was rejected outright by a scientific establishment that couldn’t stomach an interdisciplinary challenge to its dogmatic Uniformitarianism, even after Velikovsky’s predictions about the temperature of Venus and radio activity from Jupiter were proven true.

Stephen Jay Gould summed up mainstream scientific opinion, saying, “Velikovsky is neither crank nor charlatan — although to state my opinion and to quote one of my colleagues, he is at least gloriously wrong … Velikovsky would rebuild the science of celestial mechanics to save the literal accuracy of ancient legends.” Velikovsky would counter that “the ancient traditions are our best guide to the appearance and arrangement of the earliest remembered solar system, not some fancy computer’s retrocalculations based upon current understanding of astronomical principles.”

While recognized as “neither crank nor charlatan,” Velikovsky and his ideas were denied a hearing in what same to be known as the “Velikovsky Affair.”

Australian philosopher David Stove, took up the Velikovskian cause in a 1972 essay — "The Velikovsky story: the scientific mafia." He begins, “The story of Velikovsky’s theory, its reception, and its subsequent confirmations, constitutes one of the most fascinating chapters in the entire history of thought; and it is one which is still unfolding.”

While acknowledging the book’s “enormous appeal to what I call the ‘anti-fluoride belt’ in modern societies,” he says “the books convinced me of two things: that a thesis of extraterrestrial catastrophes in historical times is at least a distinctly live option; and that in historical times Venus has done- something peculiar, at any rate.”

Prof. Stove notes the book “became the target of nearly universal abuse and derision” and “[t]he professional scientists’ campaign against Worlds in Collision began well before the book appeared” and resulted in, among other things, its author being “rigorously excluded from access to learned journals for his replies,” “the sacking of the Senior Editor of Macmillan responsible for accepting the Velikovsky manuscript,” “the sacking of the director of the famous Hayden Planetarium in New York, because he proposed to take Velikovsky seriously enough to mount a display about the theory,” and “Macmillan finally cav[ing] in, and prevailed on Velikovsky to let them transfer their best-selling property to a competitor, Doubleday, which, as it has no textbook division, is not susceptible to professorial blackmail.”

Prof. Stove also “mention[s] some of the more startling pieces of evidence that have come to light since Velikovsky published.” It was he who gave “altogether novel importance to electrical and magnetic forces in the solar system” and who “said that the earth must have a magnetosphere much stronger, and extending much further into space, than anyone else believed possible.” He also “predict[ed] that Jupiter would be found to be a radio source, long before the astonished radio-astronomers found it so.” Most interesting was what he said about the second planet:

According to Velikovsky, there were all over the world, as folklore alleges, rains of burning pitch. This, among other things, led him to assert in 1950 that the clouds of Venus must be very rich in petroleum gas. All contemporary knowledge of the chemistry of the planet’s clouds was flatly against it. Yet it has turned out to be so. If you think this is a bit creepy, you have heard nothing yet.

According to Velikovsky in 1950, Venus must still be very hot, because of the circumstances of its recent birth and subsequent career. The astronomers had long “known” that it was cool, and as late as 1959 accepted estimates of its temperature, such as 59 degrees centigrade, were still being revised slightly downward. Yet it has turned out that the planet has a surface temperature around 800 degrees Fahrenheit.

This would be hard enough to reconcile with any “uniformitarian” theory which requires a common origin for all the planets. But worse was to come. For Mariner II put it beyond doubt that the rotation of Venus is retrograde — that is, while it revolves in the same direction as that in which all the other planets both revolve and rotate, it rotates in the contrary sense! No doubt ad hoc amendments will be tried, to fit this fact into conventional theories of the origin of the planets (just as desperate ad hoc amendments to a “greenhouse” theory are still being made to account for the temperature); but this one will test their ingenuity, that is certain.

Prof. Stove offers an observation “quite independent of the question whether Velikovsky’s theory is true,” suggesting that “it is on professional science itself that the case throws the most revealing light.” He says, “The great Italian probability-theorist, de Finetti, speaking in 1964 about Velikovsky’s case, compared the scientific complex to a ‘despotic and irresponsible Mafia.’”

Say what you will of Velikovskian cosmology, more scientists themselves are questioning whether it is right to dismiss outright celestial events as described in ancient texts, as this article suggests — The Odyssey astronomically accurate? And exciting news just today that the largest planet of our solar system “snared a passing comet in the middle of the last century, eventually releasing it 12 years later,” rings a Velikovskian bell — Jupiter had temporary moon for 12 years.

Whatever conclusions one may come to on this matter, it raises interesting questions about the tyrannical conformity of thought that plagues not only the scientific but also the economic and political spheres as well. Are not proponents of the Austrian School of Economics similarly marginalized by the academic cartel, as are advocates the traditional United States non-interventionism by the political cartel? Alternative medicine‘s long history of suppression by the American Medical Association is also a parallel.

The thoughts of Frank Furedi, who recently suggested that “deference to traditional authority has given way to the reverence of expertise,” come to mind — Specialist pleading. The author noted, “Unlike traditional authority, which touched on every dimension of the human experience, the authority of the expert was confined to that which could be exercised through reason.”

Like Velikovskianism, both Austrianism and Non-interventionism touch on more dimensions of the human experience than do the “mainstream” approaches to economics and foreign policy they oppose. Velikovskianism appeals to the traditional authority of ancient texts; Austrianism appeals to the traditional authority of the discoveries of the School of Salamanca, and Non-interventionism to the traditional authority of the Founders.

Also, just as many insights of Velikovskian Catastrophism were confirmed and are still being confirmed, as the search for Moon Water attests, the many insights of the “anti-war, anti-state, pro-market” philosophies that gird LewRockwell.com have been confirmed and are being confirmed, especially within the past year.

Fascinating as the cosmological speculations detailed above are, they are far less convincing than the economic and political ideas mentioned in the last paragraphs. It is nothing less than scandalous that these are denied a hearing.

An American Catholic son-in-law of Korea, Joshua Snyder [send him mail] lives with his wife and two children in Pohang, where he lectures English at a science and technology university. He blogs at The Western Confucian.

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Of course, with her comments, Mrs. Clinton "reiterated Obama administration concerns that North Korea… is now developing ties to Myanmar’s military dictatorship." But those are American concerns (or better said, we are told that those are American concerns), not really Asian concerns, even if they concern Asians. Living in South Korea, I can say that the only threat South Koreans feel from North Korea is that it will collapse and place a burden on the South’s economy. ASEAN nations are so threatened by Myanmar that they have included her as a member.

About Mrs. Clinton’s announcement that "[t]he United States is back" and is not only again "giving great importance to this region" but also "has to be involved in this region" I have four thoughts.

First, I hadn’t realized we had left. I live in a country with a sizable American military presence. American forces have been here in Korea the whole time since I arrived a dozen years ago. Across the sea, in Japan, the American presence is even bigger. Sure, here in Korea, some American soldiers have left, but mostly they’ve been shifted to other parts of Asia, namely Iraq and Afghanistan.

$24 $20

Second, doesn’t Madam Secretary realize that such statements are not only laughable but also deeply insulting? She’s lucky Asians are known for their politeness or she would have faced some choice words. Upon hearing that "[t]he United States is back," are the peoples of this region supposed to be grateful? Asians got along quite well in our "absence," not only the fake one Madam Secretary refers to but the one that lasted several millennia before our gunships "opened" Japan to trade in the mid-nineteenth century. The hubristic comment from Mrs. Clinton’s husband’s secretary of state Madeleine Albright, that "America is the indispensable nation," comes to mind. Does our government really think that these kinds of statements will be received by foreigners with anything other than scorn of derision?

Third, just why are we are “giving great importance to this region” and why is it that “the United States has to be involved in this region?” How about “giving great importance to” and being “involved in th[at] region” sandwiched between Canada and Mexico? Most Americans would not like the idea of China being greatly involved in our region, and most Central and South Americans, patriots of their own republics, would feel the same way. Why should our involvement in the affairs of Asia extend beyond the free exchange of goods and ideas?

Fourth, how is our bankrupt country supposed to finance our “return” to the region? Are we going to go into deeper debt to the Chinese and other Asians for the privilege of being “involved” in their region? Our government seems to see our involvement in Asia and the rest of the world as a kind of twenty-first century white man’s burden (sorry, Mr. President) that is not only our birthright, but our honor-bound obligation to uphold, no matter how much it costs our country. I suppose those in power need the self-satisfying illusion of indispensability so badly that they are willing to forfeit our future by sinking our country deeper and deeper in debt to maintain it.

Never "misunderestimate" the stupidity of the American government (thank you, Messrs. Mencken and Bush). Perhaps we should reverse the question posed in the title: What would America do without Asia? Even better, let us rephrase the question: What would both America and Asia do without the "entangling alliances" Thomas Jefferson warned us against but with instead the "peace, commerce, and honest friendship" he advised? The answer is that both America and Asia would get along quite well and be more prosperous and peaceful places.

An American Catholic son-in-law of Korea, Joshua Snyder [send him mail] lives with his wife and two children in Pohang, where he lectures English at a science and technology university. He blogs at The Western Confucian.

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Gore Vidal gave us a date, February 27, 1947, when “Harry Truman replaced the old republic with a national-security state whose sole purpose is to wage perpetual wars, hot, cold, and tepid.” Others, like Laurence M. Vance, suggest the date might go back as far as 1787 — Is Our Government Legitimate? Many of us would agree that the War of Northern Aggression serves as a convenient marker.

The American Lenin, pictured behind the next occupant of the White House, was born 200 years ago, and the media are already congratulating us on how far we’ve come, what progress we’ve made, whose dreams are being realized, etc. This is not to diminish the fact that America, the least racist country in the world, has been given the chance to show the world, and herself, her true colors.

But what’s missing is how little has changed and how much has remained the same since 1865, aside from the brief periods of light that were the nonconsecutive presidencies of the great Grover Cleveland, the “committed isolationist” who “opposed imperialism, taxes, corruption, patronage, subsidies and inflationary policies, while adhering to the principles of classical liberalism.”

You don’t need me to recount the many comparisons between Barack Obama and Abraham Lincoln. I just ask, will the former abolish Habeas Corpus as did the latter? Will the former imprison opponents to his wars, as did the latter, and war presidents in between like the other one to whom he is also often compared? Will he be, as Lincoln-scholar Thomas J. DiLorenzo asks, Abraham Delano Messiah Obama?

It seems evident that with “the death of our old republic” we need a new anthem. Here’s one possible suggestion, borrowing a rousing tune that many of you may already be familiar with:

I prepared the following question: “Madam Ambassador, our country is bankrupt. This so-called ‘ROK-US Alliance’ of which you speak is in its sixth decade and here we are today talking about adding ten more. Two-hundred-and-twelve years ago, George Washington advised us, ‘It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.’ Five years later, Thomas Jefferson advised us to pursue ‘peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.’ Is there anyone in the city named after our first president who takes seriously his sagacious advice? Is there anyone intent on sparing us the collapse that befell the Macedonian, Roman, Mayan, Ottoman, Spanish, French, British, French, and Soviet Empires? Anyone other than the Honorable Ron Paul, that is?”

I never had the chance to ask that question, nor even attend the speech. My son needed someone to watch him at that hour. Family first! It seems I did not miss much. “Standard diplomatic fare” was how a Canadian colleague described the speech. Even had I attended, it seems I would not have had my chance to speak truth to power; Madam Ambassador’s time was limited, and she took only two questions, both of them selected in advance. I know, because one of my student’s questions was vetted and approved.

This student asked about joint ROK-US efforts to prevent China’s designs on North Korea should that régime collapse. I met him before the speech, and tried to Socratically lead him to question why America should have any role in this at all, asking him what benefit it could possibly be to Americans (not American defense companies) to be involved in an imbroglio that South Korea, China, Japan, and Russia, as regional powers, could much better work out amongst themselves. My student answered that he had never once considered the possibility of American troops leaving before reunification. (What adjectives did Messrs. Washington and Jefferson use to warn us about alliances?)

They may want us here, but does it follow that we should maintain an alliance that we cannot afford and that serves no vital American interest?

South Koreans talk a lot about reunification, but they don’t really want it because of the expenses it would entail. They’re very happy to have America cover their defense, freeing up public funds to invest in a corporatist economy. What’s true of Korea was and is true for Germany, Japan, and every other country under our wing.

Empires of old used mercantilism to secure for themselves some benefits for imperial rule. (Even so, the empire business proved to be a drain on the home economy.) Americans enforce a kind of reverse mercantilism. We agree to open our markets to a certain degree to our protectorates while allowing them to keep theirs mostly closed to us.

What’s worse, American taxpayers have for decades been robbed to pay for World Bank and International Monetary Fund projects in protectorates abroad while America itself was deindustrialized. While other people make and sell things, our economy is expected to support 300 million people through our role as “global security exporter.” Is it any wonder why “Military Keynesianism” is seen as the only way out of the current economic morass?

Soon, Americans will hear a farewell and an inaugural address. Will George W. Bush’s make any reference to Washington’s Farewell Address, with its advice “to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world?” Will Barack Hussein Obama’s make any reference to that of the founder of his party, Jefferson’s First Inaugural Address, with its counsel of “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none?” Of course not.

The reason is to be found in Eisenhower’s Farewell Address to the Nation, when he spoke of the “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” He wanted to call it the “military-industrial-congressional complex,” but was advised against it. Now, any mention of Ike’s more modest phrasing is enough to get one exiled from political discourse.

Regardless of the empty rhetoric the speechwriters put into the mouths of the two bit players in next week’s drama, what we will get is what the military-industrial-congressional complex wants: permanent entangling alliances with all parts of the foreign world; peace, commerce, and honest friendship with none.

An American Catholic son-in-law of Korea, Joshua Snyder [send him mail] lives with his wife and two children in Pohang, where he serves as an assistant visiting professor of English at a science and technology university. He blogs at The Western Confucian.

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Disturbing news — Highly-organized national street gang a major presence on Buffalo’s West Side — has me thinking about my hometown and its unique place in the history of the transition from the American Republic to the un-American Empire. The Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation, it seems, has established itself in a neighborhood that used to be home to other Latins, the original ones that come from Italy. We learn these new Latin Kings “have their own prayers, religion, constitution and bylaws.” And this from its rule book indicates that the group is not all that different from the nation-states it emulates: “You are not to put God, religion, family or friends before the nation.” They even have their own progressive tax code: “The dues are $5 a week for members who don’t sell drugs and $10 to $20 for those who do.”

This article is not intended to be a VDARE.com-style anti-immigration piece, not that it even could be. Say what you will about the Hispanic community of Buffalo, you cannot accuse its members of being illegal immigrants, being that they come from the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, which is part and parcel of the un-American Empire this article has as its target. (One of my professors at Buffalo State College was a Puerto Rican independence activist who lamented the fact that his countrymen were by and large content to live under the Empire, and only saw as a matter of debate whether to push for statehood or keep the status quo; he called his homeland “the country that never was.”) Interestingly, both Buffalonians and Puerto Ricans at the turn of the 20th Century were at the center of the transition from Republic to Empire.

Buffalo’s giant (both literally and figuratively), Grover Cleveland, was the last president to oppose the Empire which ultimately brought the Latin Kings to the streets of City of Good Neighbors, where he had served as mayor. Thomas DiLorenzo hailed him as “The Great Libertarian from Buffalo” in The Last Good Democrat. I’d say he was the last good president. He was a Bourbon Democrat, who, among other things, “opposed imperialism and U.S. overseas expansion, fought for the gold standard, and opposed bimetallism.” Fat, and standing for freedom, he could not be elected today. He fought to keep the Kingdom of Hawai’i free, as the text of this 1893 address to Congress attests — Grover Cleveland Opposes the Annexation of Hawaii.

Hawai’i was annexed, during the administration of one of America’s worst presidents, by the man who replaced Cleveland after his two non-consecutive terms and ushered in the Empire, William McKinley. It was he who “annexed the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam, as well as Hawaii, and set up a protectorate over Cuba.” In 1903, he was assassinated by the anarchist Leon Frank Czolgosz at the globalist Pan-American Exposition, in Buffalo! (Might the Latin Kings be McKinley’s Revenge?) Of course, political violence is always to be condemned, and the best we can say about Mr. Czolgosz is that, being a European perhaps, his was not the non-violent “Star-Spangled Anarchism” written about in Daniel J. Flynn’s A Conservative History of the American Left.

Decades before Cleveland there was Millard Fillmore, who, in 1865, refused to publicly mourn after the assassination of the man who laid the foundations of the Empire, a man who L. Neil Smith called “The American Lenin.” Western New Yorker Bill Kauffman is fond of reminding us that Queen Victoria remarked that Fillmore was the handsomest man she had ever met. Mr. Kauffman also likes to note that this is not a condition rare to the male race of Western New York, as I’m sure you will agree by scrolling down and looking at the photo of the author of this piece.

But in post-Cleveland America, hard times have befallen Buffalo as imperial reign took root. One hundred years ago, I have been told, Buffalo was the richest city in the world. Today, it is the second poorest city in the country. One need not abandon Austrian Economics and embrace protectionism to understand that taxing middle Americans to fund IMF and World Bank industrial development projects in Third World countries is not a good idea for American workers. The “planners” Friedrich Hayek warned us about in The Road to Serfdom decided to “think globally and act locally” by building up industries globally while shutting them down locally, in places like Buffalo, all in the name of some abstract notion they called the service economy. And I wouldn’t suggest telling a Buffalo steelworker laid off in the ’70s that he lost his job because he was lazy or uncompetitive, at least not to his face unless you want to lose yours. Buffalo has lost more than half its population since the 1970s.

Yet the flame of liberty has not been extinguished, and the spirit of Grover Cleveland lives on. Ralph Raico, Michael S. Rozeff, and James Ostrowski are among the anti-imperialist Buffalonians who make LewRockwell.com what it is.

“The British Empire may annex what it likes, it will never annex England,” said the great Englishman G. K. Chesterton. “It has not even discovered the island, let alone conquered it.”

The American Empire will never annex Buffalo!

An American Catholic son-in-law of Korea, Joshua Snyder [send him mail] lives with his wife and two children in Pohang, where he serves as an assistant visiting professor of English at a science and technology university. He blogs at The Western Confucian.

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Who would have thought that in the United States, it would be lawful for the government to prohibit a business from testing the quality and safety of its own products? As of this past Friday, that is the case — Court: US can block mad cow testing. First, let us look into some background.

Beginning four months ago, the city of Seoul came to standstill as hundreds of thousands of Koreans took the streets in nightly protests against the resumption of imports of American beef, fearing that it was tainted with mad cow disease. The case was best summarized by this May 9th headline from The Times — South Korean internet geeks trigger panic over US ‘tainted beef’ imports. Only the British could come up with copy like this:

Tens of thousands of young internet-obsessed South Koreans, whipped into a frenzy by alarmist television programmes, a complex scientific paper on genetics and a hyperactive online rumour-mill, have held candlelit vigils protesting against imports of American beef.

Believing that the meat carries a high risk of BSE and that Koreans are genetically predisposed to contracting the linked Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the online masses have taken to the streets, cursing America and demanding that their Government should act to avert catastrophe.

“I’d rather swallow potassium cyanide than eat American beef” became a popular slogan, quoted here in a May 7th article about some sensible folks at the time who called the rumors “unfounded or exaggerated” — Korean-Americans Try to Calm Mad Cow Fears. Deputy Director General Jean-Luc Angot of the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) found the need to weigh in and pronounce American beef safe for consumption, as reported on in this May 19th report — World Body Speaks on U.S. Beef Row for 1st Time. On May 28th, conservative columnist Yang Sang-hoon spoke of the futility of injecting reason into the debate, saying, “No matter how you stress that no U.S. cow born since 1997 has contracted BSE, and that no American has ever caught vCJD, the human form of mad cow disease, 70—80 percent of the public believe that BSE-infected U.S. beef will be imported into the country” — Let Them Eat Beef.

The television show that sparked the controversy later came under scrutiny, and was quick to find a fall girl, who fought back, as this June 26th report tells us — MBC’s excuse maddens translator. While the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center had “ruled out the possibility of vCJD as the cause of death of a young Virginia woman who died earlier this year,” the show reported that she had died of the disease. “Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease” was wrongly translated as “human mad cow disease” and the producers argued that the “translation of ‘dairy cow’ as ‘mad cow disease-infected cow’ was not a poor translation, but a translation with interpretation.”

All this reminds one of the universality of the great H. L. Mencken observation: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” In this case, it was the opposition that endeavored “to keep the populace alarmed,” as it was widely suspected that the protests were organized by leftists unhappy with the fact that ten years of liberal rule had come to an end with the election as president of conservative statist Lee Myung-bak, whose new government barely survived the protests.

The response of his government was to ask America to go back to the free trade agreement negotiating table. The United States could hardly say no, with the South Koreans owners of so much of the debt amassed to fund Mr. Bush’s Wars. Senator John McCain on May 21st summed up the Republican position, hailing “an ally that deployed the third largest contingent of troops to Iraq, and has helped us in the rebuilding of Afghanistan as well,” and warning that this “partnership in a dangerous part of the world could be harmed by casting aside our trade agreement with South Korea” — McCain Throws Weight Behind KORUS FTA.

The result was a renegotiated agreement that specified the exact age and parts of the American beef to be imported to Korea, as sure an indication as any that Free Trade Agreements are, as described by Jeffrey Tucker, nothing more than “Mercantilism in disguise” — Free Trade versus Free-trade Agreements.

Amid the madness on both sides, Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, a heroic small company whose aim it is to “provide superior beef products to satisfy the most discerning of palates,” proposed a simple free market solution to the issue, only to meet government obstruction: “Bizarrely, federal officials have even sued a Kansas slaughterhouse to stop it from performing additional voluntary testing in an effort to regain skittish Asian customers,” reported a Texan editorialist on June 18th — Editorial: Korea’s beef with America.

The company was a pioneer in taking Small Farm Direct Marketing, which should appeal to adherents of both Distributivism and Austrian Economics, from a largely local form of trade to an international one. Creekstone Farms had lost about a third of its sales and was forced to layoff 150 employees when Japan placed restrictions on American beef in 2003. The company spent half a million dollars to build a lab and hire the necessary personnel to test its beef for mad cow disease, only to encounter obstruction from the USDA.

Last Friday, that obstruction was deemed legal — Court: US can block mad cow testing. Qui bono? “Larger meat packers,” we learn, “opposed such testing.” One is reminded of those whom “Ayn Rand referred to as ‘the aristocracy of pull,’ the principal villains of her famous novel Atlas Shrugged, i.e., corrupt businessmen who succeeded on account of their political connections rather than their entrepreneurial skill,” as mentioned by Justin Raimondo in a June May 29th article on the “new plutocrats” — Is War Good For the Economy?

Most laughable is the sheer baselessness of the ruling, a reminder that we have entered into an age of rule by law not rule of law:

A federal judge ruled last year that Creekstone must be allowed to conduct the test because the Agriculture Department can only regulate disease “treatment.” Since there is no cure for mad cow disease and the test is performed on dead animals, the judge ruled, the test is not a treatment.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit overturned that ruling, saying diagnosis can be considered part of treatment.

“And we owe USDA a considerable degree of deference in its interpretation of the term,” Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson wrote.

The Principle of Subsidiarity, which “holds that nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organization which can be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization,” is grossly violated by this detestable ruling. The tenet suggests that “any activity which can be performed by a more decentralized entity should be” and serves as “a bulwark of limited government and personal freedom.”

Clearly, Creekstone Farms, or any business, is responsible first and foremost for the safety and quality of its products. For the State to infringe upon this right is as dangerous as it is absurd. This ruling is a sign of the dark times in which we live.

An American Catholic son-in-law of Korea, Joshua Snyder [send him mail] lives with his wife and two children in Pohang, where he serves as an assistant visiting professor of English at a science and technology university. He blogs at The Western Confucian.

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Milblogger “GI Korea” of ROK Drop does a yeoman’s job in exposing just one aspect of the folly of Empire — Korea Continues to Delay Cost Sharing Deal. He makes the startling observation that “South Korea pays far less per year in USFK upkeep fees then what they send to North Korea every year,” or, in other words, “the South Korean government pays more to the regime sworn to destroy the nation and less to the nation committed to defend it.”

(Of course, this should not seem strange to Americans, as back in 1999, “the DPRK st[ood] as the number one recipient of our nation’s assistance in East Asia,” according to this Press Release. In A Foreign Policy of Freedom, Congressman Ron Paul pointed out that the United States government often supports both sides in any given conflict.)

Whatever justification the alliance ever had is now gone, as Doug Bandow, Libertarian Party nominee Bob Barr‘s issues coordinator, recently pointed out in Strengthening the US-South Korea Alliance: For What? An excerpt:

[T]he circumstances in which the alliance was originally created have disappeared. The mutual defense treaty was a means to protect South Korea and allow it to become self-sufficient. American policy succeeded. Preserving the alliance today turns the means into an end, with the U.S. empire-builders attempting to generate new justifications for a security commitment which has fulfilled its ends.

(“She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all,” said John Quincy Adams of America. “She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”)

“GI Korea” also reports that “the [current] money South Korea pays primarily goes to pay Korean workers.” That is, the money they do pay stays in the Korean economy, not that if it were to go directly into the Military Industrial Complex would much of it trickle down to the average American.

Of course, the money saved by Koreans by having their defense subsidized by the United States is used by a government that has practiced export-driven Corporatism since the 1960s. To make matters worse, as Chalmers Johnson points our on page 68 of The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, “From the moment we turned Japan and South Korea into political satellites in the late 1940s, the United States has paid off client regimes, either directly or through rigged trade, to keep them docile and loyal” [emphasis mine]. This “rigged trade” is nothing but the “mercantilism in disguise” Jeffrey Tucker describes in Free Trade versus Free-trade Agreements. If the American worker need be sacrificed in order to maintain global Military Keynesianism, so be it say our leaders.

Ivan Eland put it best in Ungrateful Allies when he noted that “the formal empires of old were not cost-effective, according to classical economists,” and that the “informal U.S. Empire that defends other countries abroad using alliances, military bases, the permanent stationing of U.S. troops on foreign soil, and profligate military interventions is even more cost-ineffective.” Here’s more from Mr. Eland:

South Korea is not the only wealthy U.S. ally to reap the rewards of a U.S. security guarantee, while not fully opening its market to the United States. Japan and most of the European NATO allies also do the same. The foolish U.S. policy of continuing to subsidize the defense of these now rich countries — all economic competitors of the United States — allows them to reduce the drag that added defense expenditures would impose on their economies. Meanwhile, the U.S. economy has to bear the costs of defending the world.

Back to “GI Korea,” who concludes that " as long as the political will in Washington remains the way it is the USFK gravy train will continue to roll at the expense of the welfare of US soldiers forced to serve a year in Korea separated from their families while also living in sub-standard living conditions [emphasis mine]. Obviously few people in Seoul or Washington care about that." Bill Kauffman, for one, cares; in George Bush, the Anti-Family President, he observed that “the first casualty of the militarized U.S. state is the family.”

Leaving aside the illegality and immorality of the un-American Empire, everything above is indicative of its sheer idiocy, and points to why it should be scrapped as soon as possible, if it is not too late. We can start dismantling the Empire by leaving Korea. As Patrick J. Buchanan, in More Troops — or Less Empire, put it a few years back, “If the 60 million Koreans, North and South, were raptured up to heaven, how would America be imperiled?”

An American Catholic son-in-law of Korea, Joshua Snyder [send him mail] lives with his wife and two children in Pohang, where he serves as an assistant visiting professor of English at a science and technology university. He blogs at The Western Confucian.

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“I don’t want to alarm anybody, but maybe it’s time for Americans to start stockpiling food,” begins The Wall Street Journal’s Brett Arends in an article earlier this week, Load Up the Pantry. (Yes, The Wall Street Journal!) Mr. Arends blames “the surge in demand from China and India” and “the growing demand for ethanol as a fuel additive.” Both statements are correct, but miss the underlying source of the crisis.

“There is more than enough grain to feed every hungry human on the planet, but the poor cannot compete with wealthier buyers of meat and biofuels,” says truthout’s Kelpie Wilson, also this week, in Why More Food Is Not the Answer. Her statement is accurate, as are the facts that “it takes about seven pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef” and that “[t]he grain used to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed one person for a year.” However, in approvingly citing a report that “indicts markets with failing to eradicate hunger and poverty,” Ms. Wilson misses the root cause of the problem.

Before we identify that root problem, let’s look at the crisis we face.

Food riots have occurred across the globe and are threatening governments in poor countries. Last year there were tortilla demonstrations in Mexico and pasta demonstrations in Italy. More recently, in sub-Saharan Africa, Egypt, and Haiti, people have taken to the streets demanding rice. Argentina, Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan have banned the export of wheat. Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, China, Cambodia, and India have done the same with rice. South Korea has issued price controls on basic foodstuffs. Japan has run out of butter, and with wheat and barley prices skyrocketing, is resorting to government reserves to buy grains from overseas. In the United States, Sam’s Club is rationing rice and citizens are heeding Mr. Amends’ advice and stockpiling food. It has been reported that global grain reserves stand at eight to twelve weeks.

The root of this crisis lies in the fact that grains are being used not to feed people, but to feed cattle and cars. And, not surprisingly, both ideas came from the State and have been financed with State funds, confiscated, it goes without saying, from the citizenry.

How the Nixon administration dealt with a similar rise in grain costs not only informs us what approach not to take in the current crisis, but was also the fundamental cause of the current crisis. In 1972, it was Americans who took to the streets demanding government action on rising grain costs, after a grain deal with the Soviet Union fell through. Nixon’s agriculture secretary, Earl Butz, was charged with the task of reducing the cost of grains by any means necessary.

(This same Earl Butz is the main villain of The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry, the 1977 classic detailing the profound cultural consequences of Mr. Butz’ imperative for farmers to “get big or get out,” which led to the death of the family farm; State intervention, not the free market, led to the birth of agribusiness.)

Mr. Butz engineered a system in which massive subsidies replaced loans to American farmers, causing grain prices to artificially plummet, giving rise to the state-subsidized corn industrial complex. Corn cost less to buy than it did to grow, inconceivable in a free economy. New products, impossible if corn had been sold at its market value, were developed to make use of the artificially low cost commodity. The ubiquitous high fructose corn syrup replaced sugar and became the sine qua non of the modern American diet, leading to today’s “obesity epidemic,” detailed by Michael Pollan in his October 2003 article for The New York Times, The (Agri)Cultural Contradictions Of Obesity. Importantly to today’s crisis, corn feed became the staple for cattle, grass-eating animals whose stomachs are not designed to eat grains. Thus, they require massive injections of enzymes and antibiotics to be able to digest what we force-feed them, a process whose consequences are described in graphic detail by Corby Kummer in his May 2003 article for The Atlantic, Back To Grass.

Hence, we now have a global agricultural system in which an artificial demand for cheap corn led to an artificial dependency on it. Thus, the “the surge in demand from China and India” mentioned by Mr. Arends only exacerbates the problem as more folks enter the middle class in those countries and want to eat meat on something more than an irregular basis.

If using corn to force-feed grazers like cattle flies in the face of reason and sound market principles, using it to fuel cars is absurd. In essence, ethanol is nothing more than the continuation ad absurdum of the same policies begun in the Nixon administration as part of its corporate welfare package to agribusiness. At least with the above examples, corn was converted into food, or, more accurately, “edible foodlike substances,” to use Michael Pollan’s phrase from his book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. With ethanol as a biofuel, corn is being converted into something entirely unfeasible.

“Ethanol is so costly that it wouldn’t make it in a free market,” said Walter E. Williams in an article last month for Human Events, Ethanol Hoax Spreads Economic Havoc. The economic absurdity of ethanol is made clear by the fact that “it takes more than one gallon of fossil fuel — oil and natural gas — to produce one gallon of ethanol.” The only reason it is produced in the first place is that it is subsidized, and subsidized heavily, with money confiscated from citizens, while cheaper and more efficient Brazilian ethanol made from sugar is targeted with stiff tariffs.

Ethanol, like corn feed, creates an artificial, State-subsidized demand, which has caused the prices of other grains to skyrocket. The United States, once the breadbasket of the world, is still the world’s major producer and exporter of grains, and its irresponsible State corporatist policies have thrown the world grain market out of whack. To use an agricultural proverb, “The chickens have come to roost.” Tragically, it is the poorest of the poor in other countries, not those who put these policies into place, who are paying the heaviest price.

The Austrian School teaches us that State intervention in markets leads to often unforeseen and disastrous consequences. The global food crisis is a result of State intervention in that most vital of markets, the grain market. We may well be headed for an unprecedented global catastrophe.

Is the legacy of Nixon’s corporatism leading to similar results as those of Stalin’s collectivism, and bringing about an unintentional global Holodomor? Will Bush’s insistence on making the great leap forward to biofuels lead to a similar catastrophe as that caused by Mao’s Great Leap Forward? We pray not, but like those 20th Century disasters, the growing 21st Century Global Food Crisis has as its cause reckless State intervention in the economy.

An American Catholic son-in-law of Korea, Joshua Snyder [send him mail] lives with his wife and two children in Pohang, where he serves as an assistant visiting professor of English at a science and technology university. He blogs at The Western Confucian.

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Perhaps not since Alexis de Tocqueville (1805—1859) visited our shores have we received as a guest from Europe so illustrious a proponent of Classical Liberalism as when Pope Benedict XVI arrives on April 15th. Indeed, if that philosophy can be said to be the founding principle of our country, we can turn around the old cliché of describing someone as “more Catholic than the pope” and say the Holy Father is “more American than the president.”

Benedict’s five-day visit to America, his first as Pope, will be much shorter than Tocqueville’s nine-month journey in 1831 and ’32 that produced Democracy in America, the single greatest book written about our country and one of the classics of political philosophy. The book, in which from the American experience is discerned both the promises and perils of liberal democracy, was of great influence on the Pontiff.

In a 1992 speech then-Cardinal Ratzinger made upon being inducted into the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques of the Institut de France quoted by Alejandro A. Chaufren in Benedict XVI and Freedom, he said “Democracy in America has always made a strong impression on me.” He added that to establish “an order of liberties in freedom lived in community, the great political thinker [Tocqueville] saw as an essential condition the fact that a basic moral conviction was alive in America, one which, nourished by Protestant Christianity, supplied the foundations for institutions and democratic mechanisms.”

(It might not be too much to suggest that both Benedict and Tocqueville share the same appreciation that Catholic Joseph Sobran wrote of in 2002 in Protestant America, in which he argues that “so gracious a majority deserves more grateful minorities than it has received.” Referring to Benedict’s predecessor, Mr. Sobran even jokes, “Protestants are so unassuming that even the Pope hasn’t apologized to them.”)

The Tocquevillean influence on the Pope is evident in his first encyclical and is particularly strong in these sentences from paragraph 28 of Encyclical Letter “Deus Caritas Est” excerpted below:

The State which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing which the suffering person — every person — needs: namely, loving personal concern. We do not need a State which regulates and controls everything, but a State which, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, generously acknowledges and supports initiatives arising from the different social forces and combines spontaneity with closeness to those in need.

The Principle of Subsidiarity, to which Benedict refers, “holds that nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organization which can be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization” and is rightly hailed as “a bulwark of limited government and personal freedom.”

“The State may not impose religion, yet it must guarantee religious freedom and harmony between the followers of different religions,” says the Pontiff in the same paragraph of his encyclical. In a recent Time article, The American Pope, we are reminded that the Pope “entertains a recurring vision of an America we sometimes lose sight of: an optimistic and diverse but essentially pious society in which faiths and a faith-based conversation on social issues are kept vital by the Founding Fathers’ decision to separate church and state.”

Of course, this vision goes back further than Tocqueville and the Founders. Earlier this year, referring to The City of God by Saint Augustine, the Holy Father said, “Even today, this book is the source used to clearly define true secularism and the jurisdiction of the Church, the true and great hope that gives us faith” (quoted in Pope: St. Augustine Defined “True Secularism”).

More evidence of Benedict’s Tocquevilleanism can be found in the beatification last year of Blessed Antonio Rosmini-Serbati, reported on by Sandro Magister and Dario Antiseri in Blessed Liberty: The Posthumous Miracle of Antonio Rosmini. From the article:

He was a dyed-in-the-wool liberal during a period — the mid-19th century — when liberalism, for the Church, was synonymous with the devil. In his book “Filosofia della politica [Philosophy of Politics],” Rosmini expresses his admiration for “Democracy in America,” the masterpiece of his contemporary Alexis de Tocqueville, a founding father of faith-friendly liberalism.

Rosmini anticipated by more than a century the statements on religious freedom affirmed by Vatican Council II. He was a critic of Catholicism as a “religion of the state.” He was a tireless defender of the freedom of citizens and of “intermediate bodies” against the abuses of an omnipotent state.

It is not surprising, therefore, that those spreading Rosmini’s thought in the Catholic camp today are above all the proponents of a form of liberalism open to religion, which in Europe has its leading figures in the “Vienna school” of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek.

Tocqueville likely would not recognize the America that Benedict will visit next week, or perhaps he would: Tocqueville and the Tyranny of the Majority. Whatever the case, let the above serve as an illustration of how far America has strayed from its founding values.

The Rockwellian understanding, as quoted by Karen De Coster, of “religion as the bedrock of liberty, property, and the natural order” is being lost as churches sell themselves out to become “faith-based organizations” at the service and on the payroll of the State. The subsidiaritarian vision is surrendering to increasing centralization. Most troubling, our representative republican democracy is transforming into a Jacobinical State hell-bent on imposing “democracy” abroad.

This papal visit is more than needed at a time when there has been no shortage of prominent American Catholic neocon war apologists who have seen themselves as “more Catholic than the pope” in trying to twist the Just War Doctrine to justify a very un-American war on Iraq. Expounding upon Pope John Paul II‘s forceful antiwar statements before the war began, then-Cardinal Ratzinger clearly reminded Americans, “The concept of a ‘preventive war’ does not appear in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.” His clear teaching fell on deaf ears, not only in the White House but among Catholics who should have known better. After the war began, he was reported to have shaken his fists in the air, angrily shouting, “Basta!” — Enough!

Hope, let it be remembered, is the second of the Theological Virtues, and let us then hope that in the person of Pope Benedict XVI Americans will see a reflection of what we once were and could be again.

An American Catholic son-in-law of Korea, Joshua Snyder [send him mail] lives with his wife and two children in Pohang, where he serves as an assistant visiting professor of English at a science and technology university. He blogs at The Western Confucian.

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For my fellow Catholics on what Bill Kauffman called the “peace-and-love left wing of paleoconservatism,” no two beatifications have done more for our faith in recent years than those of Blessed Charles of Austria and Blessed Franz Jägerstätter.

At first glance the two Austrian holy men couldn’t seem to be more different. His Imperial and Royal Apostolic Majesty, descendant of Holy Roman emperors, died in poverty and exile on the island of Madeira, Portugal on April 1, 1921. His compatriot was a small farmer, the illegitimate son of peasants, who was beheaded in Brandenburg, Germany on August 9, 1943. Indeed, the emperor and the peasant remind us that in The Catholic Faith, in the words of the Apostle, “There is neither Jew nor Greek: there is neither bond nor free: there is neither male nor female” (Epistle Of Saint Paul To The Galatians, III, 28).

Yet, however different their backgrounds were, the two beatified Austrians speak from Heaven with the same thunderous voice for peace, if not near-pacifism, in this day and age of war and rumors of war.

To the young Karl Franz Josef Ludwig Hubert Georg Maria von Habsburg-Lothringen, Pope Saint Pius X bestowed this prophetic blessing: “I bless Archduke Charles, who will be the future Emperor of Austria and will help lead his countries and peoples to great honor and many blessings — but this will not become obvious until after his death.”

Blessed Karl’s reign began at the end of 1916, when the Great War was already nearing in its third bloody year. He immediately entered into secret peace negotiations with France. He was the only European leader to support the peace efforts of Pope Benedict XV, who “maintained the Vatican as politically neutral throughout the war, working with both sides for peace, and supporting widows, orphans, the wounded, prisoners, and refugees.”

Blessed Karl’s tireless peace efforts were ignored and he and his empire were crushed by Woodrow Wilson‘s crusade to make the world safe for democracy. Indeed, the religious fanatic who then sat in the White House had a personal and visceral hatred of the saintly emperor. In his recent article An Inconvenient Miracle, John Zmirak, reporting that “the Catholic Church has recognized the final miracle required to make a saint of one of Wilson’s greatest enemies,” also reminded us of the following:

It’s rarely remembered now, but Woodrow Wilson set as one of the primary war aims of the U.S. as she entered (thanks to his careful maneuvering) World War I the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. As a multi-ethnic state based not on 19th century nationalism but ancient dynastic loyalty cemented by a majority Catholic faith, it offended his modern notions of what should constitute a countryu2014and as a good Princeton academic, who was in addition convinced that he personally embodied the Will of God, Wilson knew that he could do better.

“Wilson’s name continues its slow decline into disgrace,” notes Mr. Zmirak, of a man once sainted by American academia. Blessed Karl is soon to be sainted by a much more ancient and venerable institution.

Blessed Karl was sent into exile and poverty. He twice attempted to regain his throne, but abandoned the effort to avoid civil war. He died of severe pneumonia in the company of his beloved Empress Zita and their eight children.

(Among the children present on that sad day was Archduke Otto von Habsburg, originator of this great political observation: “I am often asked if I am a republican or a monarchist. I am neither, I am a legitimist: I am for legitimate government. You could never have a monarchy in Switzerland, and it would be asinine to imagine Spain as a republic.”)

Of the emperor-king, English author Herbert Vivian said, “Karl was a great leader, a prince of peace, who wanted to save the world from a year of war; a statesman with ideas to save his people from the complicated problems of his empire; a king who loved his people, a fearless man, a noble soul, distinguished, a saint from whose grave blessings come.”

“Emperor Karl is the only decent man to come out of the war in a leadership position, yet he was a saint and no one listened to him,” said Anatole France. “He sincerely wanted peace, and therefore was despised by the whole world. It was a wonderful chance that was lost.”

The war Blessed Karl tried so desperately to end claimed the life Blessed Franz’s father when the boy was ten years old. There were few signs of his future greatness in his youth, which was spent like many young men sowing his wild oats and busying himself with his beloved motorcycle. After marriage and the birth of three daughters, he began to take his religion seriously. A patriot, he was the only member of his village to vote against the 1938 Anschluss, the annexation of his native land by Nazi Germany. To the greeting “Heil Hitler” he never responded with anything but “Pfui Hitler.”

Like his namesake Saint Francis of Assisi, Blessed Franz was ostracized by his fellow villagers. Both Francises were Holy Fools, in that they refused to do the “respectable” thing that society demanded of them. Blessed Franz was drafted into the German army but found he could not in good conscience serve a régime he opposed with all his soul. He deserted. He was court-martialed and sentenced to death.

Any speculation that he was motivated by cowardice or contrarian peasant stubbornness is dispelled when one reads his writings from prison. Awaiting the guillotine, Blessed Franz wrote, “I definitely prefer to relinquish my rights under the Third Reich and thus make sure of deserving the rights granted under the kingdom of God.” Here is another striking passage:

Just as those who believe in Nazism tell themselves that their struggle is for survival, so must we, too, convince ourselves that our struggle is for the eternal Kingdom. But with this difference: we need no rifles or pistols for our battle but, instead, spiritual weapons…Let us love our enemies, bless those who curse us, pray for those who persecute us. For love will conquer and will endure for all eternity. And happy are they who live and die in God’s love.

On the morning of his execution, he wrote to his beloved wife Franziska, who was present sixty-four yeas later at her husband’s beatification mass, the following words: “The heart of Jesus, the heart of Mary and my heart are one, united for time and eternity.” After receiving “Last Rites” (Extreme Unction), Blessed Franz told the priest, “I cannot and may not take an oath in favor of a government that is fighting an unjust war.” From this priest, Blessed Franz was happy to learn of another Catholic priest who had recently been martyred by the Nazis (there were 4000 of them by the war’s end), and he had always been charitable and maintained that his fellow Catholics, laity and churchmen alike, who did not oppose Hitler simply “were not given the grace” that he had received.

Like the saints of early Christian history (Saint Martin of Tours, a Roman officer who renounced the sword, comes to mind), news of his sanctity spread by word of mouth and his cultus grew. Twenty-one years after his death, Gordon Zahn’s biography, In Solitary Witness, provided inspiration to those opposing the unjust war against Vietnam.

“A week before George W. Bush arrived in Rome for their first meeting,” observed Frank Purcell in A Martyr for Peace, “Benedict XVI put his signature to a document proclaiming Franz Jägerstätter a martyr of the Church for refusing to serve in an unjust war, such as Benedict and John Paul the Great insisted the Bush war against Iraq has been from the beginning.”

In declaring him a martyr, the Church clarified her Just War Doctrine. Catholic neocon war apologists hinged their support for the War on Iraq on this single phrase: “The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good.” Official recognition of Blessed Franz’s witness, and well as clear statements by the popes, taught that that line was not a trump card. The other criteria for a just war, which are very strict, take absolute precedence.

Blesseds Karl and Franz were beatified by Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI respectively. These two pontiffs have raised the strongest and clearest voices of opposition against Mr. Bush’s Wars. In Pope John Paul II and the Iraq War, Austin Cline, an atheist, admitted the following:

The most public and serious condemnations of the invasion of Iraq came from Pope John Paul II and other top officials at the Vatican. Catholic leaders did as much as they could to dissuade Britain and America from their bellicose course of action, but to no avail.

In September of 2002, in the build up to the war, then-Cardinal Ratzinger stated, “The concept of a ‘preventive war’ does not appear in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.” Then, in May of 2003, after the start of the war, the future pope made this following remarkably clear statement:

There were not sufficient reasons to unleash a war against Iraq. To say nothing of the fact that, given the new weapons that make possible destructions that go beyond the combatant groups, today we should be asking ourselves if it is still licit to admit the very existence of a “just war.”

This past Palm Sunday, the Holy Father issued an “appeal to the Iraqi people, who for the past five years have borne the consequences of a war that provoked the breakup of their civil and social life.”

(Roma locuta est, causa finita est. Rome has spoken, the case is closed.)

And the Pope may well be the last best chance for Iran to avoid annihilation, as a Time Magazine article from last year, Iran’s Secret Weapon: The Pope, speculated: “According to several well-placed Rome sources, Iranian officials are quietly laying the groundwork necessary to turn to Pope Benedict XVI and top Vatican diplomats for mediation if the showdown with the United States should escalate toward a military intervention.”

Holy Mother Church is above and beyond politics, especially when it comes to beatifications. Blessed Karl and Franz were made “heroes of the faith” for their personal holiness, not for their political positions. But the two are sometimes inseparable, as evidenced by these words Blessed Franz wrote in prison: “It is always possible to save one’s own soul and perhaps some others as well by bearing individual witness against evil.”

And we can see the Church’s beatifications as being politically providential. It is hard not to see in Blessed Karl’s beatification and eventual canonization the rejection of the Wilsonian interventionism that still guides American foreign policy, carried out in the name of “self-determination by ethnic groups,” “the spread of democracy,” and “intervention to help create peace and/or spread freedom.” In Blessed Franz’ beatification and by declaring him a martyr, a “witness” who died for the Faith, the Church has affirmed forever the primacy of conscience over State power.

Although I’d love to see the Holy Father do what this petition asks, you will not find my name among the undersigned — Letter urges Pope to protest Iraq war during US visit. Not only do I find unseemly the politicking of an institution as august and venerable as the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Roman Church, which is only perverted by anything reeking of democracy, but I also find such petitioning utterly unnecessary. The popes have already spoken. And Blesseds Karl and Franz bore and continue to bear witness in life, death, and in the afterlife.

Orate pro nobis.

An American Catholic son-in-law of Korea, Joshua Snyder [send him mail] lives with his wife and two children in Pohang, where he serves as an assistant visiting professor of English at a science and technology university. He blogs at The Western Confucian.

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A conflict is simmering here in South Korea over who will pay how much of the costs for the construction of a brand new $10 billion base for the United States Forces Korea (USFK). The new base is, ironically, part of a modest downsizing of the American contingent in Korea, now entering its sixty-third year on a peninsula, which, in the words of General Douglas MacArthur, “hangs like a lumpy phallus between the sprawling thighs of Manchuria and the Sea of Japan.” The empire and its protectorate are in behind-closed-doors discussions over payment for the controversial base.

Asia Times Online analyst Donald Kirk has said “how ‘welcome and wanted’ US forces remain in South Korea will depend to some extent on whether Seoul is prepared to pick up the tab” for the base (from Pyongyang cashes in on US row). As the title of Mr. Kirk’s piece suggests, the North Koreans have weighed in on the issue, with a statement that “cooperation with foreign forces for aggression ‘would…’ lay a stumbling block in the way of the cause of national reunification.” For once, the North Koreans are right, as we will later see.

Koreans, North and South alike, are masters of brinkmanship. Thus, it is the American taxpayer who will likely pick up the lion’s share of the base’s $10 billion price tag. The row will not result in the orgy of anti-Americanism unleashed in 2002 after a fatal traffic accident involving US forces claimed the lives of two middleschool girls. At the time, there were massive demonstrations in Seoul, American citizens ─ citizens, not soldiers ─ were denied services by restaurants, and Caucasian foreigners of all nationalities were accosted on the streets. (It didn’t seem to matter to one unruly mob that the two foreigners they had detained were Swiss, not Americans.)

In that presidential election year, both “conservatives” and “liberals” were quick to exploit the “gusts of popular feeling which pass for public opinion” that Victorian travel writer Isabella Bird described in her 1898 account of Korea. It was the “conservative” presidential candidate Lee Hoi-chang, ironically, who felt himself compelled to make his presence seen at the anti-American rallies. He lost to the “liberal” Roh Moo-hyun, and many analysts have cited the anti-American sentiment as the deciding factor in that election.

But one thing that the South Korean “conservatives” and “liberals” agree on, as do many if not most of the anti-American protesters, is that the US forces should remain here. “Yankee go home” is not the rallying cry here, but rather, “Yankee stay on your bases but keep us safe.” Heck, even the “Dear Leader” himself lent support to the idea as far back as 2000: “Kim Jong Il told South Korean President Kim Dae Jung at their June 13—15 summit that U.S. forces stationed in South Korea should remain on the Korean Peninsula after its reunification” (from North’s Kim said U.S. troops should stay in Korea: paper). The reasons for the near-universal support of the American presence here are obvious, but we will examine them at the end of this article. First, let’s examine the American rationale for maintaining a presence here.

Two reasons are generally given for a continued American presence in South Korea. Interventionists, both neoconservative and humanitarian liberal, will tell you that the “indispensable nation” (to use Madeleine Albright‘s nauseatingly hubristic phrase) is needed to here to defend poor South Korea from its ideologically berserk compatriots to the north. So-called “realists” will more honestly say that the American presence here serves as a counter to China. In my essay entitled America’s Entangling East Asian Alliances, I outlined why both of these reasons are wrong, and will summarize myself here.

The idea that we are defending helpless South Korea against its belligerent “brother nation” to the north is as absurd as it is offensive. The south has a population two-and-a-half times that of the north, and an economy forty times larger. There is no reason why the world’s twelfth largest economy cannot take care of its own defenses. And even if our involvement in Korea were a purely noble effort on behalf of a weak ally, the question Pat Buchanan asked years ago comes to mind: “If the 60 million Koreans, North and South, were raptured up to heaven, how would America be imperiled?” (from More Troops — or Less Empire).

As for the second argument, China is already contained. Clockwise, the Middle Kingdom is surrounded by Russia, the Koreas, Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Burma, India, Pakistan and several other central Asian Islamic states, all regional powers in their own right. She is also contained by a demographic timebomb resulting from a rapidly rising standard of living coupled with the lingering effects of the one-child policy (see China may grow old before it gets rich, new study warns).

While Americans offer two reasons for maintaining troops in South Korea, Koreans have but one, but they leave it unmentioned: money. Having its defense taken care of by the United States allows Seoul to invest public moneys in subsidies that fuel its export-driven economy. South Korean army bases look like American Boy Scout camps. An American withdrawal would force the economic powerhouse that is South Korea to invest, and invest heavily, in its own defense.

Importantly, the American presence here helps to delay Korean reunification, which is, as Koreanologist Andrei Lankov has pointed out, despite the “lip service… still paid by virtually all political forces in both Koreas,” something that “both sides try to avoid” at all costs (see Working through Korean unification blues). The thriving South Korean economy would reel for decades from having to absorb its basketcase counterpart to the north. In the North, it is the presence of “American imperialists” which serves as a rallying point for the brainwashed citizenry and as the rationale behind the Songun, or “Military First,” Policy, which serves to protect the quivering “Dear Leader” from meeting the fate of Nicolae Ceauşescu.

In centuries past, Korea pursued a policy of Sadaejuui, “serving the great-ism,” with its giant neighbor to the west. Korea acknowledged that the Chinese emperor, the “Son of Heaven,” alone could offer sacrifices to Heaven and paid a yearly tribute to the Middle Kingdom. Yet, rather than being a servile state philosophy it was a highly calculated one that carried with it great benefits. The material gifts the Koreans received in return for their yearly tribute far exceeded what they gave, and the Koreans were protected and allowed to develop their country without molestation from abroad.

In recent times, the South Koreans have provided the third largest contingent in Mr. Bush’s War on Iraq. But you may be forgiven if you were not aware of them. In an occupation described as “one of the most absurd in human history…, South Korea is the official occupier of ‘Northern Iraq’ [where] the Kurdish military, the Peshmerga (‘those who face death’), surround the South Koreans to make sure they’re safe” (from A New Power Rises in Iraq). The Peshmerga have done good job, and the occupiers they protect have suffered not a single combat casualty in the nearly four years they have been in the country. This trivial tribute given to the American Empire for six decades of protectorate-hood allowed the “Son of Heaven” in Washington to briefly speak of a Coalition of the Willing, while at the same time it allowed South Korea to join the very lucrative Coalition of the Drilling.

The two Koreas are, after nearly six decades, still in a state of war. An armistice, not a peace treaty, ended the major fighting in 1953, but there are still skirmishes today. Truman and the National Security State he inaugurated made the Korean War, or rather, “police action,” the first of America’s many undeclared wars in the second half of the Twentieth Century. It’s high time that America stopped expending her treasure over here, left this peninsula, and let history take her course.

But it may not be that easy to leave. The South Koreans own huge dollar reserves and a large share of the debt accumulated by the Bush regime during its seven years of misrule. If the South Koreans want us to stay, we might not have much say in the matter.

What was it the Founding Fathers said about “foreign entanglements” and “entangling alliances?”

An American Catholic son-in-law of Korea, Joshua Snyder [send him mail] lives with his wife and two children in Pohang, where he serves as an assistant visiting professor of English at a science and technology university. He blogs at The Western Confucian.

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“Burke was liberal because he was conservative”
~ Russell Kirk (1918—1994) of Edmund Burke (1729—1797)

Chong Yagyong: Korea’s Challenge to Orthodox Neo-Confucianism by Mark Setton tells the story of Korea’s last great Confucian scholar, who lived from 1762 to 1836 and wrote under the nom de plume of Tasan, meaning “Tea Mountain.” The title of the book refers to the sage’s calls to reform Neo-Confucianism by eschewing its metaphysical ponderings and returning to the humanistic and practical teachings of Confucius and Mencius. He sought to show that “this prevailing ‘orthodoxy’ was, in important ways, unorthodox.”

Although he is remembered and respected by his countrymen today as a reformer and even visionary, due to his being on the wrong side in a dispute over royal succession and his familial ties to the newly introduced Catholic religion (his brother was one of the first martyrs), in 1801 Tasan found himself stripped of his government position and spent the rest of his life in lonely exile near the Tea Mountain that gave him his name. While in exile, “the sympathies he had for the economic and social difficulties of the peasantry” and well as his concerns about “concentration of power” (pg. 65) and “the ineptitude of the scholar-bureaucrats” (pg. 109) became more pronounced. However, the chief “reform” he was interested in, as we will see, was in “the cultivation of self” (pg. 67).

As a young man, Tasan was influenced by his reading of The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven by Matteo Ricci, S.J., the Apostle to China, and was baptized as "John." His faith lapsed, however, because of what came to be known as the Chinese Rites Controversy. The Church, under the influence of Jansenism, rejected the learned opinion of Fr. Ricci and declared the Confucian ancestral rite to be incompatible with Christian teaching. (The Church corrected this opinion on Dec. 8, 1939, and has allowed the Confucian rite ever since.) In another Riccian parallel, the Apostle to China found Confucianism more compatible with The Catholic Faith than with either Buddhism or Taoism, whose influences Tasan hoped to remove in his restoration of Confucianism even as he had a great deal of respect for both traditions.

His faith lapsed, Tasan nevertheless remained “monotheistically inclined, and [his] depiction of the Confucian Heaven as a personal being stood in sharp contrast to [the Neo-Confucian] interpretation of Heaven as principle” (pg. 50). “Tasan pointed out that Shang-ti, or ‘supreme ruler,’ was a term in common use prior to the late Chou” and that, as he saw it, “Shang-ti came to be referred to as ‘Heaven’ just as the ruler of a state was referred to simply as ‘state’ in Chinese, the impersonal nature of the appellation ‘Heaven’ eventually attributed to its ruler” (pg. 76).

“Tasan’s monotheistic interpretation of Shang-ti as an entity with ethical predilections responsive to, and involved in, human affairs” (pg. 77) led Tasan to speak of “human beings as a subtle combination of spirit and physical form, their natures being the appetites or propensities exhibited by these dual aspects” (pg. 78). He was wary of cosmologies that “denigrated man’s status as a unique being with capacities unparallelled in the animal and plant kingdoms” (pg. 80). For Tasan, our “moral nature, which is transcendent in form” (pg. 81) is what makes us unique. Recognition of the resulting “internal struggle” led to “the great, and unprecedented, importance that Tasan placed on the role of free will, and particularly kwŏnhyŏng, the faculty or power of deliberation, which gave human beings the power to decide on moral courses of action” (pg. 83).

This “dynamic interpretation of human nature and virtue” led not only to his “outward-looking theory of self-cultivation” (pg. 108) but also served as the basis for his ideas on “the ordering of society” (pg. 109), these being the “dual goals of Confucian learning” (pg. 110). For Tasan and the Confucian tradition he belonged to, “the ordering of society was achieved through the power of moral example” (pg. 114). Here, the term chih-jen “is translated as ‘ordering society,’ as opposed to ‘governing society’” (pg. 182).

The “ordering of society” for Tasan “revolved entirely around moral example and had nothing to do with the ruler’s active involvement in the inculcation of values or the provision of resources” (pg. 115). Tasan put these words into the mouth of his ideal sage-king:

Once I have attained the highest goodness the people will follow me of their own accord and attain goodness. So the highest goodness of the people is not something which I can forcefully demand of them. “The practice of humanity depends on oneself. Does it depend on others?” (ibid.).

By quoting The Analects, XII, 1. to end the above passage, Tasan is reiterating one the chief Confucian principles, rule not by force but by moral example.

Tasan was, in a sense, a populist. He rejected “the traditional assumptions that the educated class had a head start in the pursuit of virtue and thus enlightened leadership” and professed “an unprecedented confidence in the ability of the uneducated majority to choose virtuous leaders” (pg. 120). But he was also a realist, observing that “any attempt to promote concrete reforms under the prevailing system of government would prove fruitless without an accompanying change in attitudes on the part of the leadership” (pg. 120—1). Ever wary of “abuse of power,” he “favored systems of government built upon populist principles that would discourage such abuse” and “qualitative change in political attitudes along the lines of classical political humanism” (pg. 121). Here, Tasan, “in the typically Confucian manner of appealing to ancient tradition,” looks at the roots of government itself:

How did the emperor come to exist? Was he sent down and inaugurated by Heaven? Or did he become emperor by springing up from the grassroots?

Five houses formed a hamlet [lin], and the leader selected by these five became a hamlet chief. Five hamlets formed a village [li], and the leader selected by these five became a village chief. Five towns [pi] formed a district [hsien], and the leader selected by these five became a district chief. The representative selected by the district chiefs became a feudal lord, and the representative selected by the feudal lords became the emperor. The position of emperor was established by the people…. In ancient times those below selected those above — this accords with the Way. Nowadays those above select those below — this contravenes the Way.

Tasan was perhaps as unaware of his contemporaries Edmund Burke (1729—1797) and Thomas Jefferson (1743—1826) as they were of him, but they were of a like mind. And, if we are to believe Roderick Long, author of Rituals of Freedom: Austro-Libertarian Themes in Early Confucianism, Tasan, whose life’s work was to restore early Confucianism, might well be of a like mind with Dr. Ron Paul and LewRockwell.com as well.

An American Catholic son-in-law of Korea, Joshua Snyder [send him mail] lives with his wife and two children in Pohang, where he serves as an assistant visiting professor of English at a science and technology university. He blogs at The Western Confucian.

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Whether English is one’s native language or second language, learning the English spelling system can be quite a daunting task. English-speaking children find it hard to learn, and so do adolescents and adults who learn English as a second language. At first glance it seems the only rule is that for every rule there is an exception. To complicate things, English spelling is far less phonetic than that of other languages; many letters have more than one sound and many sounds are represented by more than one letter.

To make a difficult situation even worse, in recent years the teaching of spelling has been considered pass at best and verboten at worst. Few things are as anathema to the Whole Language Ideology that dominates education departments and classrooms than orthography, with its connotations of politically incorrect linguistic prescription evident in its prefix ortho-, meaning “right, true, straight” in the Greek.

Linda Schrock Taylor has shown that there is rhyme and reason to the English spelling system in two excellent recent articles on these pages, Spell Logically and Spelling Rules Rule. Her articles show that Rothbardian “spontaneous order” arises out of the seeming chaos of English spelling. This article will attempt to retell how the English spelling system came to be what it is and to show how it is a unique expression of Anglo-Saxon freedom.

To understand English spelling, it is necessary to understand the script by which it is represented, the Roman or Latin alphabet. The alphabet used by English speakers has its origins in the murky depths of protohistory, long before Romulus and Remus founded the Eternal City on April 21, 753 BC. The Roman alphabet is descended from the Greek alphabet, which is in turn descended from the Phoenician alphabet. The Phoenician script emerged around 1050 B.C. from the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, itself descended from Egyptian hieroglyphs, and is thought to be the parent script of every Western alphabet and those of the India, Thailand, and Mongolia as well. Thus, if one accepts Gari Ledyard‘s theory that the Korean Hangul script is descended from the Mongolian Phagspa script, then the Roman and Korean alphabets are distant cousins!

The use of the Roman alphabet in the British Isles predates Anglo-Saxon colonization. Thus, the alphabet we use arrived before the language we speak. The Roman Empire extended well into what is today Scotland, as marked by the Antonine Wall, built as a defense against the Picts. But as their empire was collapsing, the Roman legions withdrew in 410 A.D., leaving their alphabet behind with the pockets of Romans who remained.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us that the first speakers of what was to become English arrived in 449 A.D., less than four decades after the Romans left. The invaders subjugated the native Celts (vid. England’s apartheid roots). But while the populations did not remain separate (vid. Genetic Survey Reveals Hidden Celts Of England), linguistically, the Welsh, Scots, and Irish were marginalized. This 1600-year-old conflict simmers today, as evidenced by the Welsh and Scottish independence movements and The Troubles (Na Trioblid) experienced on the other side of the Irish Sea, a conflict simplistically blamed on religion. Today Welsh, Scots, and Irish by and large learn their languages not at home from parents but at schools as a second language.

In 597 A.D., Saint Augustine of Canterbury reintroduced to the British Isles The Catholic Faith, which had survived in pockets, much like the Kakure Kirishtan of Japan a millennium later. The “Apostle to the Anglo-Saxons” managed to convert the English people within a generation, not by the sword but by the Word, and once converted the English people gave up their Runic alphabet for the one still used today and which is the subject of this article. Notably, letters like the eth () were added to express native sounds, but were sadly lost over the generations.

With the new religion was introduced the vocabulary of a Latin liturgy and a Greek theology, as well as even more exotic terms from the Near and even Far East, thereby adding to a Germanic base thousands of words with new, diverse, and foreign spellings to the English lexicon. To name but a few, we have disciple, priest, and nun from Latin, apostle, pope, and psalm from Greek, angel and devil from Hebrew, camel, lion, cedar, and ginger from Oriental languages.

“The English language is the sea which receives tributes from every region under heaven,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson. With the Christianization of England arrived the first of many tributaries that flooded the language with their words, but as we will see this was only the beginning.

Between 750 and 1050 A.D., the invaders were invaded. Said the great Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, “Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts.” History has no perennial good guys or bad guys, perennial victims or victimizers. The English who had invaded the British Isles three centuries earlier were in turn invaded, by Vikings. They established kingdoms and settled in the new lands. Indeed, some of them became heroes of English history, like King Canute the Great. Whether friend or foe, they introduced at least 900 words, ranging from leg and skin to yard and sky to die and the now-ubiquitous “f-word.”

A mere sixteen years of peace separated the invasions described in the previous paragraph from the greatest one of all, militarily, politically, and linguistically: The Norman Conquest. In 1066 A.D., England was conquered by the Norman French, and for three hundred years a French-speaking aristocracy ruled over an English-speaking peasantry. This being essentially a fraternal conflict within a more or less united Christendom, there was of course no change of religion, and Latin retained its place of as the language of religion and education, but French became the language of social prestige. English remained the common tongue. Over time, these three linguistic traditions gave English a tripartite system of expressing the same base concept with different words for different situations. The farm, restaurant, and lecture hall come to mind when we hear cow-beef-bovine and pig-pork-porcine. The words kingly, royal, and regal have different shades of meaning, nuance, and significance.

The French never left. Over time, they became English. The two languages fused. On top of a German base was added the French lexicon. While the two languages merged, some areas remained the exclusive province of French; into the 16th Century, Saint Thomas More argued his court cases in Law French, and we still use terms like felony, perjury, and attorney. Today, an English-speaker can readily recognize a common German sentence, and vice versa, but this is not the case with French. However, the same English speaker might be able to decipher the title of an academic treatise in French, but not in German, which still uses native vocabulary in science. English is the ideal common language for Europe, for speakers of southern Romance and northern Germanic languages can both find points of familiarity with the language.

Much of the new vocabulary was Anglicized. In the heady days before printing, idiosyncratic spellings were tolerated and writers sometimes spelled the same words in different ways within the same text. Those days came to an end with Johannes Gutenberg‘s invention of the printing press in Germany in 1439. In 1476, William Caxton set up shop as England’s first printer. Basing his orthography on London speech of his time, he was responsible for fixing many of the idiosyncratic spellings that confuse learners of English to this day. For example, right and straight both had the rough Germanic “ch” sound represented by the letters “gh,” a sound which has since been lost in English. Such phonological change in words with fixed spellings occurred in thousands of cases. English was at the time in the midst of the Great Vowel Shift, but with the popularity of printing, archaic pronunciations were assigned to words for eternity.

With a largely fixed orthography, England, with the rest of Europe, entered into the Renaissance. This revival of classical learning added hundreds of resurrected words from Latin and Greek into the English language, spelled as they were in their language of origin. And also from Greek and Latin were coined new words for the new discoveries from the Scientific Revolution that followed.

With the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, England became a maritime power. The British Empire was born, and with the largest empire in history came an influx of new words from all corners of the world. Colonists added words like tomahawk and boomerang to the English lexicon. Words like verandah from Bengali, amok from Malay, and kowtow from Chinese entered English. All empires are bound to collapse and this one was succeeded by American Militarism, which in its wars added expressions like gung-ho from Chinese and “head honcho” from Japanese into the English lexicon.

The result of all the history detailed above, Emerson’s “tributes from every region under heaven,” is a language with an unrivaled vocabulary, resulting in an often-unwieldy orthographical system. “Why not just fix it?” some have asked. Such a one was the intolerable George Bernard Shaw, who proposed a complete phoneticization of English spelling. But, as tends to be the case with revolutionary schemes based on cold logic and a tossing of tradition out the window, what would be lost would be far greater than what might be gained. Under Shaw’s system, sign would become sain and no longer recognizably related to the verb signify, thus losing its significance. And this is but one example. English spellings, like Chinese ideograms, often carry valuable etymological clues as to the meanings of words, and just as much was lost when the Chinese communists simplified their country’s writing system, so much would be lost by any radical attempts to simplify English. Besides, just as the old Chinese characters are more beautiful than the new, is not “through” more beautiful than “thru?”

The English language has no equivalent to the Acadmie franaise governing the use of the language including orthography. The anarcho-traditionalism of the English-speaking peoples, until recently at least, would never tolerate such an intrusion into something as organic as language. The stubborn Anglo-Saxon distrust of both authority-for-authority’s-sake and change-for-change’s-sake inevitably doom grandiose efforts such as Shaw’s to failure. Correct grammar or spelling is determined not by some institution, but by what the majority of educated native speakers use. Thus, past tense forms such as “dove” or “dived” are both acceptable. In some rare cases alternative spellings are available, as in judgment and judgement. But spelling is by its nature, fixed as it is on paper and in books, resistant to change. It would take a Pol Pot and a Khmer Rouge—like assault on tradition to do anything about English orthography.

An American Catholic son-in-law of Korea, Joshua Snyder [send him mail] lives with his wife and two children in Pohang, where he serves as an assistant visiting professor of English at a science and technology university. He blogs at The Western Confucian.

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Ch’in Shih-huang (259—210 B.C.) was the first Chinese emperor. In 221 B.C., he united the various Chinese states under one empire and established the Ch’in Dynasty, by whose name Westerners still know the Middle Kingdom. Ending by force what was known as the Warring States Period (5th—3rd centuries B.C.), he ruled under the name Shih Huang-Ti, literally First Emperor. Ch’in Shih-huang centralized governance under his command, and the provinces and localities were placed directly under his rule. To solidify his rule, he undertook massive statist projects, such as the building of a precursor to the Great Wall and the famous Terracotta Army for his tomb in Hsi-An.

More importantly and terribly, in an effort to consolidate absolute power in his hands, he outlawed Confucianism, the humane philosophy of governance dating from the Spring and Autumn Period (8th—5th centuries B.C.), which held that a king should lead by example, not force. The tyrant buried Confucian scholars alive. In place of Confucianism, he erected Legalism, in Chinese Fa-chia, a term that sounds like the similar European school of governance given its name by Benito Mussolini. Legalism was egalitarian, and held that all were equal before the law and also that none should be outside of state control. It was focused on order, and held that punishments should be strict, with power placed firmly in the hands of a unitary ruler, endowed with shih, “the mystery of authority.” Had Ch’in Shih-huang spoken French, he might have said, “L’État, c’est moi.”

The parallels between China’s first emperor and America’s sixteenth president are clear. And yet, while Ch’in Shih-huang is remembered as a tyrant by the Chinese, who managed to restore Confucianism to its proper place, Abraham Lincoln has been nearly deified by Americans of subsequent generations.

Abraham Lincoln also unified the country by force. Unlike Ch’in Shih-huang, Honest Abe initiated our own Warring States Period. (The Confederacy attacked Fort Sumter, in effect a foreign base, four months after the South Carolina had declared her secession, during which time U.S. Army Major Robert Anderson had refused to surrender.) In what is considered the world’s first modern war, 620,000 soldiers were slaughtered in Lincoln’s quest to unite the country. As a total war, it was waged also against civilians, and an untold number of men, women, and children lost their lives. As a result of Lincoln’s rule, these “United States” ceased forever to be plural. The Federal government took on unprecedented powers over the states, just as had done Ch’in Shih-huang, whose imperial districts known as “commanderies” were echoed by the military governments that ruled over the defeated South.

If there is a parallel to Confucianism in the Anglo-American political tradition it is Constitutionalism, and its classics are the Magna Carta, the Great Writ (habeas corpus), and the Bill of Rights. Lincoln may not have buried Constitutionalists alive, but he brought “the midnight knock on the door” to America and “disappeared” thousands of those opposed to his war on the South. The Bill of Rights was suspended and habeas corpus tossed out the window. (Twentieth century Chinese philosopher Lin Yutang, in contrast, said “one writ of habeas corpus is worth more than all the Confucian philosophy ever written.”)

Lincoln was not the first to flirt with imperial ambitions. The younger Lincoln even opposed Mr. Polk’s War, a shameless land-grab that robbed Mexico of nearly half her land, sowing the seeds of animosity that have not yet healed. James Monroe’s war on the Seminoles and Creeks and Andrew Jackson’s war on the Cherokees were other instances.

But after Lincoln, the idea of Empire, as alien as it was to the Founders, became as American as apple pie. Empire became the order of the day, with the exceptions of Grover S. Cleveland, the anti-imperialist and last Jeffersonian president, and Warren G. Harding, who promised a “return to normalcy” after the unabashedly imperial reign of Woodrow Wilson. FDR’s New Deal, Truman’s National Security State, LBJ’s War on Poverty, Reagan’s War on Drugs, Bush’s Global War on Terror all have their root in Lincolnianism, and all echo the centralizing schemes of Ch’in Shih-huang, who would have been a Welfare/Warfare Statist today.

Emperor Bush II now carries on the imperial tradition, but it seems the luck of Empire may be running out. In fact, Bush Dynasty America has many similarities with Ch’ing Dynasty China, the last of its imperial dynasties, but that is the subject for a different essay.

An American Catholic son-in-law of Korea, Joshua Snyder [send him mail] lives with his wife and two children in Pohang, where he serves as an assistant visiting professor of English at a science and technology university. He blogs at The Western Confucian.

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Madeleine Albright,
who quipped that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children were
“worth it,” infamously called America the “indispensable nation.”
Max Boot echoes her saying that “we guarantee the security of the
world, protect our allies, keep critical seal-lanes open and lead
the war on terror.” Madeleine and Max and their neoliberal and neoconservative
interventionist ilk would be wise to give ear to this parable told
by the Chinese Taoist Chuang Tzu, translated here by Lin Yutang:

Tsech’i of
Nan-po was traveling on the hill of Shang when he saw a large
tree which astonished him very much. A thousand chariot teams
of four horses could find shelter under its shade. “What tree
is this?” cried Tsech’i. “Surely it must be unusually fine timber.”
Then looking up, he saw that its branches were too crooked for
rafters; and looking down he saw that the trunk’s twisting loose
grain made it valueless for coffins. He tasted a leaf, but it
took the skin off his lips; and its odor was so strong that it
would make a man intoxicated for three days together. “Ah!” said
Tsech’i, “this tree is really good for nothing, and that is how
it has attained this size. A spiritual man might well follow its
example of uselessness.”

The moral of
the story: make yourself indispensable and you are likely to get
cut down. Earlier in the text, our sage also contemplates a useless
tree and draws a lesson from which interventionists of all stripes
would be wise to learn:

Hueitse said
to Chuangtse, “I have a large tree, called the ailanthus. Its
trunk is so irregular and knotty that it cannot be measured out
for planks; while its branches are so twisted that they cannot
be cut out into discs or squares. It stands by the roadside, but
no carpenter will look at it. Your words are like that tree –
big and useless, of no concern to the world.”

“Have you
never seen a wild cat,” rejoined Chuangtse, “crouching down in
wait for its prey? Right and left and high and low, it springs
about, until it gets caught in a trap or dies in a snare. On the
other hand, there is the yak with its great huge body. It is big
enough in all conscience, but it cannot catch mice. Now if you
have a big tree and are at a loss what to do with it, why not
plant it in the Village of Nowhere, in the great wilds, where
you might loiter idly by its side, and lie down in blissful repose
beneath its shade? There it would be safe from the ax and from
all other injury. For being of no use to others, what could worry
its mind?”

America’s geography
has been her greatest blessing. Like “the yak with its great huge
body,” her land is large and bountiful, protected on either side
by vast seas. She is far away from the rest of the world, in the
“Village of Nowhere” if you will. She has no need to imitate the
“wild cat” that “springs about, until it gets caught in a trap or
dies in a snare.” Let her rather remain contentedly at home “in
the great wilds” to “loiter idly” and “lie down in blissful repose.”

Our Founding
Fathers understood this without ever having read Chinese philosophy.
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson warned us of “foreign entanglements”
and “entangling alliances.” The original Taoist, Lao Tzu, would
agree. In the Tao
Te Ching, translated here by James Legge, the sage reminds
us that “[w]herever a host is stationed, briars and thorns spring.”
Yet America has had troops stationed in Germany, Japan, and Korea
for more than six decades! Lao Tzu might laugh, but the founders
would be appalled.

John Quincy
Adams said of America that “she goes not abroad, in search of monsters
to destroy.” But what has America been doing since 1898 if not “go[ing]…
abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.” After 105 years of “spring[ing]
about,” America was duped into the biggest foreign policy blunder
in her history. Like Chuang Tzu’s “wild cat,” she has been “caught
in a trap.”

There is a
time for legitimate military action when attacked, but prudence
and restraint is always called for. America would have been spared
the quagmire that followed the justifiable pursuit of terrorists
in Afghanistan and the unjustifiable invasion of Iraq had her leaders
followed the advice of Lao Tzu:

A skilful (commander)
strikes a decisive blow, and stops. He does not dare (by continuing
his operations) to assert and complete his mastery. He will strike
the blow, but will be on his guard against being vain or boastful
or arrogant in consequence of it. He strikes it as a matter of necessity;
he strikes it, but not from a wish for mastery.

“Now arms,
however beautiful, are instruments of evil omen, hateful, it may
be said, to all creatures,” Lao Tzu continues. “Therefore they who
have the Tao do not like to employ them.” Not so our chickenhawks.

The
imbroglio in the Middle East and the resulting isolation of America
can only be turned around by America returning to her founding principle
of non-interventionism. And there is only one presidential candidate
who is suggesting this sagely course, the author of this brilliant
essay: The
Original Foreign Policy.

November
23, 2007

An American
Catholic son-in-law of Korea, Joshua Snyder [send
him mail] lives with his wife and two children in Pohang, where
he serves as an assistant visiting professor of English at a science
and technology university. He blogs at The
Western Confucian.

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The Pareto
principle, also known as the “80–20 rule,” is a business
model that holds that 80% of a company’s business comes from 20%
of its customers, or that 80% of its revenues come from 20% of its
products. In the Web 2.0 world, this model has been largely supplanted
by The Long
Tail, graphically depicted in yellow below:

Picture
by Hay Kranen/PD

The portion
shaded yellow represents the many diverse elements that make up
business for a particular company. Elements that may be insignificant
in of themselves gain significance when taken as a whole.

The Internet
abounds with examples of the Long Tail at work. For example, most
of the revenue for Amazon.com comes not from best-sellers but from
more unique, specialty titles. Most of iTunes.com downloads are
not for hits, but for more obscure songs. In recent years, print
newspapers were undercut by smaller, niche-market, on-line upstarts,
which were in turn undercut by blogs. Attempts by newspapers to
emulate the competition and establish blogs have not had promising
returns.

The Pareto
principle seems to be the old paradigm in politics as well. A small
number of candidates in a given party account for most of the attention
given by the media. In turn, these candidates tend to play to the
middle, trying to reach a wide range of votes by appealing to what
are thought to be middle-of-the-road positions that won’t rock the
boat either way. Hillary, Giuliani, and Romney represent this paradigm.
Likewise, Fred Thompson has no substance, only image, and appeals
to the Pareto principle. Obama and Edwards appealed to it as well,
but as they are eclipsed by Hillary, they are looking to the Long
Tail for support.

Other candidates
are and always were Long Tail candidates. The Democrats have produced
two who are right about the war. Kucinich has put forth papers of
impeachment of the vice-president. Gravel has called his party’s
top-tier candidates unqualified to serve as president for their
lack of moral judgment in voting to enable the war. Yet the former’s
call for welfare statism and the latter’s hints at world government
will leave many, if not most, in the Long Tail cold.

Ron Paul is
the one candidate able to unite the diverse elements in the Long
Tail. His supporters range from strippers to evangelicals, from
gun-totters to peaceniks, and yet his message is as mainstream as
the Constitution. His libertarianism and federalism will drive crazy
the busy-bodies on the left and the right who want to impose their
vision on the rest of the country, but these same laissez-faire
ideals will unite those in the Long Tail who simply want the
federal government out of their lives. This is the key to Ron Paul’s
diverse range of supporters, and why they don’t mind spending time
together under the good doctor’s big tent.

But
his appeal is to mainstream America as well. What could be more
American than the Constitution? Attempts to discredit Ron Paul as
an extremist have largely failed, and his popularity is growing,
the media are giving him a fair shake, and other candidates are
aping him. However, attempts by the so-called “top-tier” candidates
to emulate his strategy have been as unsuccessful as big media’s
attempts at blogging. Ron Paul’s Long Tail will propel him to victory.

Acknowledgment:
This essay was inspired by a presentation by the author’s student,
Choi Jae Yong.

November
13, 2007

An American
Catholic son-in-law of Korea, Joshua Snyder [send
him mail] lives with his wife and two children in Pohang, where
he serves as an assistant visiting professor of English at a science
and technology university. He blogs at The
Western Confucian.

DIGG THIS

Ron Paul gives
the more than five million Americans living abroad the opportunity
to hold their heads a little, no, a lot higher. Having
spent twelve of the last fourteen years abroad, in Chile, Malaysia,
and South Korea, this writer, for one, has never felt prouder to
be an American than in the recent months since Dr. Paul of Texas
launched his presidential bid. And if this Incomplete
List of Ron Paul Blogs is any indication, our foreign hosts
and friends are catching on as well:

• Asia for Ron Paul
• Bavaria
  for Ron Paul
• Belgians for Ron
  Paul
• Brits for Ron Paul
• Brazilians for
  Ron Paul
• Canadians for
  Ron Paul
• Chile
  for Ron Paul
• French for Ron Paul
• Europe 4 Ron Paul
  
• Holland 4
  Ron Paul
• Hungary for Ron
  Paul
• Ron Paul Spanish
• Indian
  & Pakistani Friends of Ron Paul
• Poland for Ron Paul
• Portugal
  for Ron Paul
• Romania for Ron
  Paul
• Swiss Friends
  of Ron Paul
• Venezuela for
  Ron Paul

Many of my
fellow American expatriates and our foreign friends find in the
good doctor the embodiment of what makes America beautiful, its
original traditions of self-government and non-interventionism.
These are now all but lost save for that quixotic figure, Dr. Ron
Paul. While he may not be as well known (yet) overseas as Obama,
Hillary, or Giuliani, these three are known mostly for who they
are (or, in last case, for where he was), rather than for
what they believe.

Dr. Ron Paul,
quite simply and radically, stands for the principles stated in
our founding documents. The Declaration of Independence has inspired
countless peoples the world over in the grip of tyranny. (For but
one example, take a look at how the Declaration
of Korean Independence, proclaimed on March 1st,
1919, parallels that one proclaimed on July 4th, 1776.)
Similarly, the Constitution of the United States, described by the
régime as “quaint,” has been a model for governments the
world over, including even the Swiss, who, in imitating American
federalism, are more Catholic than the Pope.

While the ideals
upon which our country was founded are lauded by many, no one wants
them imposed at the barrel of a gun. The wave of spontaneous sympathy
and solidarity from Paris to Tehran that followed the attacks of
September 11th, 2001 was quickly squandered by an administration
that took a “you’re-either-with-us-or-against” approach to diplomacy,
that has alienated us from our allies and further alienated us from
our enemies. The adoption of the neocon “Democracy on the March”
ideology has only made matters far worse.

In the last
six years, ours has become the opposite of the “humble nation” Mr.
Bush promised in the debate of October 12th, 2000. Indeed,
Dr. Paul has publicly stated that his foreign policy is the one
the future president promised on that day: “If we’re an arrogant
nation, they’ll resent us; if we’re a humble nation, but strong,
they’ll welcome us.” We have become an arrogant nation, more arrogant
than ever, and we are resented more than ever.

Merely entrusting
the presidency to the other wing of The
War Party will do nothing to restore our ravaged image abroad.
Mr. Bush made his “humble nation” remark to the vice-president of
a régime whose secretary of state has called ours the “indispensable
nation,” implying that all the rest just can’t get by without us.
She also infamously called “worth it” the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi
children under the rgime sanctions. This, and Mr. Clinton’s cruise
missile diplomacy, his wagging of the dog to divert domestic attention
from his numerous scandals, and his pravoslavophobic bombing of
Serbia, caused a great deal of hatred for America and Americans.

Of course,
the history of interventionism and its blowback goes back much further
than the era of the Bush and Clinton dynasties. What is the American
Century if not a century of American interventionism in the four
corners of the globe? We have to go back to the end of the 19th
Century to find a president who recognized this to be “every bit
as odious as imperialism and misguided nationalism” and who advocated
that “we never get caught up in conflict with any foreign state
unless attacked or otherwise provoked.” That president was Grover
S. Cleveland, whom Thomas J. DiLorenzo called the “great libertarian
from Buffalo” (and from whose article The
Last Good Democrat come the quotes in the preceding sentence).
His presidency ended in 1897, the year before the Empire began.
It is time for the “great libertarian from Texas” to take the White
House.

Dr. Ron Paul
stands for non-interventionism, as described in his brilliant essay,
The Original American
Foreign Policy. They don’t hate us for our freedoms. They hate
us for our Wilsonian foreign policy as advocated by the other candidates
in both parties, which is in direct opposition to the Washingtonian
and Jeffersonian non-interventionism expressed by Dr. Ron Paul.

Oderint
dum metuant (let them hate as long as they fear) is the order
of the day under the current régime. It has succeeded in
that they do, indeed, hate us. They don’t fear us as much as they
did because they realize we’re broke and in perhaps the terminal
decline that has destroyed all empires, but they still hate us.
They have even grown to resent us in allied countries. While most
people understand that people are individuals, not representatives
of their governments, it becomes tiresome for an expatriate to need
to incessantly explain his self and his country to his hosts, although
with Dr. Paul’s candidacy it has become easier and more enjoyable,
which is the starting point for this essay.

But
it is not to make our lives easier that Paulistas abroad support
the man. Most Americans abroad hope to return home someday, and
we hope to return home to a country that we recognize. It is even
becoming doubtful whether we will even have country to which to
return, a possibility pondered by Michael S. Rozeff in his recent
essay, On
Track for U.S. Collapse. Ron Paul is the only candidate who
speaks of turning things around.

Your fellow
Americans abroad want to come home someday! Support Ron Paul!

November
6, 2007

An American
Catholic son-in-law of Korea, Joshua Snyder [send
him mail] lives with his wife and two children in Pohang, where
he serves as an assistant visiting professor of English at a science
and technology university. He blogs at The
Western Confucian.

DIGG THIS

On August 9th,
1945, two-thirds of Japan’s Catholics were annihilated. Nagasaki’s
historic importance as the center of Japanese Christianity and openness
to the West, one would think, would have spared it from being targeted
by a Western Christian nation. Leaving aside the question of the
unquestionable immorality of targeting a civilian center of population
with a weapon of mass destruction, surely the leadership of an even
nominally Christian and Western country would have realized that
a city with Nagasaki’s legacy would have served as a bridge for
future trade and cultural ties, and thus would have protected it
from destruction at all costs. This was not the case.

On that day
that will live in infamy, at 11:02 AM, history’s second atomic war
crime slaughtered more Japanese Christians than had been martyred
in four centuries of brutal persecution. Fat Man exploded over St.
Mary’s (Urakami) Cathedral, the largest church at the time in the
Far East, where the faithful were gathered to pray. In that House
of God, and in the surrounding neighborhoods, extended families
of Kakure Kirishitan, hidden Christians, who had kept the
Faith in secret for generations over the centuries, were obliterated
from the earth forever, their seed wiped out in an instant.

Even if the
destruction of Hiroshima had been understandable – and it never will
be; even without the peace overtures of the previous months, the
deliberate targeting of civilians is never justifiable under Christian
just war principles – the destruction of Nagasaki was unfathomable.
Father James Gillis, editor of The Catholic World and stalwart
of the Old Right, labeled the bombings of these two cities “the
most powerful blow ever delivered against Christian civilization
and the moral law.”

This “most
powerful blow ever delivered against Christian civilization and
the moral law” was an example of what today’s neocons call “creative
destruction.” (Interesting that Michael Ledeen should have appropriated
and perverted a positive term originally used by Austrian economist
Joseph Schumpeter, but that is a topic for a different essay.) The
fate of Japan’s Catholics, one of Christianity’s younger communities,
was of absolutely no consequence to the war planners in 1945. The
war planners six decades later have shown an equal disregard for
some of Christianity’s oldest communities in Iraq.

Over half of
Iraq’s Chaldeans and Assyrians, ancient Catholic and Orthodox communities,
some of whom speak the same language spoken by Christ, have fled
the country in the wake of chaos generated by the “creative destruction”
unleashed by Mr. Bush’s illegal invasion of 2003. The vast majority
have found refuge in that “Axis of Evil” member Syria, itself high
on the list for neocon “creative destruction.” These Christians
had not found the need to flee during the rgime of Saddam Hussein,
nor during the fourteen centuries of what neocons like to call “Islamo-Fascism.”
Is it any wonder that Christians in Syria were praying for a Hezbollah
victory against American proxy Israel – or is it America that
is Israel’s proxy? – in its war on Lebanon last year?

Like
the Japanese Catholics of Nagasaki, the Iraqi Chaldeans and Assyrians
would have been a natural bridge for trade and cultural ties for
the Christian nations of the West. Instead, our so-called leaders
have again shown themselves to be apostates, and meted out “creative
destruction” upon our brothers. How can we expect our so-called
government to deal humanely with other nations of the world when
it treats its supposed co-religionists as nothing more than inconsequential
Japs and A-rabs?

November
2, 2007

An American
Catholic son-in-law of Korea, Joshua Snyder [send
him mail] lives with his wife and two children in Pohang, where
he serves as an assistant visiting professor of English at a science
and technology university. He blogs at The
Western Confucian.

DIGG THIS

Dr. Ron Paul
has called for American troops to be brought home not only from
Iraq, but also from Germany, Japan, and South Korea, where in all
countries they have been stationed for sixty years and counting.
The case for pulling our forces from Germany is so obvious that
it need not be discussed. But what about Japan and South Korea?
The author has resided in South Korea for ten years, and will demonstrate
why Dr. Paul is correct.

“What about
North Korea?” is the first rejoinder on the lips of those who maintain
that our continued presence is vital for Northeast Asian stability.
No one who reads past headlines believes that North Korea is poised
for world domination, and even if it were, it would have to seek
the approval of its “big brother” in China, who has the most to
lose from instability in the region. It is true that North Korea,
still bitter about the colonization that took place between 1910
and 1945, has occasionally launched a test missile in the direction
of Japan, with South Koreans, also bitter, silently cheering on.
However, there is no reason to believe that Japan, the world’s second
largest economy, could not quickly muster the capability to defend
itself, if its “self-defense” forces do not have that capability
already. What, then, about South Korea?

The North launched
an invasion of the South on June 25, 1950, but it would not do so
today. Kim Jong-il may well be evil, but he’s not a fool. The South
Korean government has been his country’s best ally during the past
ten years. Under the so-called “Sunshine Policy” of South Korean
Presidents Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun, the North Korean regime
has been propped up by aid and outright contributions from the South.
This aid feeds the military and keeps the economy from coming to
a standstill, preserving, for the time being, the Dear Leader from
a coup d’tat or from meeting the fate of Nicolae Ceauşescu.
Kim Jong-il is wise enough to know not to bite the hand that feeds
him and keeps him in power.

It could be
argued that Kim Jong-il might launch an invasion of the South in
order to cement his place in power, after which ruling over a reunified
Korea with all the South’s resources in his control. But he is no
moron, and realizes that there is no Soviet Bloc to support him
or even trade with him after such an invasion. An invasion would
simply make him the leader of a larger, war-devastated, and even
more isolated pariah state. Kim Jong-il has witnessed first-hand
the market successes of China and his children have been educated
abroad, in Switzerland. While he has a genius for brinkmanship,
he realizes that further isolation will only weaken his hold on
power, which is why he has been scurrying to further economic cooperation
with the South. And even if this North-South cooperation were but
a ruse, South Korea has the means to protect itself; its high-tech
juggernaut economy is the world’s twelfth largest and is forty times
larger than that of the North.

This fact is
not lost on the slight majority of South Koreans who support a continued
American presence. They realize that if they were to have to bear
full responsibility for the defense of their country, public funds
available for mercantilist subsidies of South Korean conglomerates
would dry up. In South Korea, government and business are in cahoots
to an extent that causes shock to any Anglo-Saxon observer. Eminent
domain on behalf of big business is a fact of life. Even brainy
conscripts under South Korea’s mandatory military service are often
sent to serve companies in the private sector. By subsidizing South
Korea’s defense and thereby freeing up South Korean public funds
for domestic corporate welfare of the type even Washington would
balk at, America is selling her own companies and their workers
down the river.

The Chinese
bogeyman is the last argument for maintaining an American presence
in Asia. Surely we should at least maintain the U.S.S. Japan as
a last line of defense against the threat of the looming Chinese
Century!

However, this
line of thinking ignores the fact that the Middle Kingdom is contained
as is perhaps no other major country on the planet. Moving counter-clockwise
from the north, we have Russia, the ‘stans of Central and South
Asia, India, several very large ASEAN countries, and finally the
Koreas and Japan. Among these countries are many of the world’s
most powerful countries in terms of diplomatic, economic, and military
strength, not to mention population. And if this geographic containment
were not enough, China’s demographic containment will not allow
it to become a world power any time soon.

One unintended
result of Beijing’s one-child policy is that China is one of the
world’s fastest aging societies. As a result of its rising standard
of living, the elderly, who will soon be the majority, will demand
an unprecedented amount of resources, which the Confucian Chinese
would deem unthinkable to deny their elders. This demographic time
bomb is only exacerbated by the prevalence of sex-selective abortion
resulting in an alarming surplus population of males. It is very
conceivable that fifty million young men with no possibility of
marriage or family could find a substitute in military glory, even
given the traditional Confucian disrespect toward things military.
This could conceivably pose a risk for international instability.
But it is inconceivable that China would target America for a land
and resource grab.

Finally, our
presence in Asia only serves to create a negative image of our country,
which for many Koreans and Japanese begins with the red-light districts
near US military bases. The culturally nearly-identical British
bemoaned the fact that the Americans were “overpaid, oversexed,
and over here.” What of the racially homogeneous, historically xenophobic,
and traditionally modest Japanese and Koreans? It is immaterial
whether or not it was American GI’s who brought modern prostitution
to Korea; most Koreans accept this as an article of faith and it
reflects poorly on our country. So do the violent crimes that inevitably
occur when tens of thousands of men are far from home in an alien
land.

We
are under no constitutional obligation to maintain these East Asian
alliances. In fact, doing so flies in the face of the Washingtonian
and Jeffersonian warnings against “foreign entanglements” and “entangling
alliances.” And we are under no moral obligation to bankrupt ourselves
retaining as protectorates two of the world’s richest countries,
Korea and Japan. It’s high time we heeded the wisdom of Dr. Ron
Paul and the founders by ending a military presence in East Asia
which ultimately only serves against our national interests.

October
17, 2007

An American
Catholic son-in-law of Korea, Joshua Snyder [send
him mail] lives with his wife and two children in Pohang, where
he serves as an assistant visiting professor of English at a science
and technology university. He blogs at The
Western Confucian.

DIGG THIS

News of the
several successful experiments by several European cities with getting
the state out of traffic regulation created quite a stir last year.
(See European
Cities Do Away with Traffic Signs.) Non-libertarian-minded folks
saw it as counter-intuitive, not self-evident, that people themselves
would do a better job looking out for their own safety rather than
relying on a nanny state to warn them of every conceivable danger.
But it turned out that drivers slowing down at intersections and
looking both ways was much, much safer than blindly trusting one’s
life to a mindless green light.

Perhaps these
successful experiments with traffic anarchism would have come about
sooner had planners visited a city ironically located in a socialist
country and renamed after a socialist “icon” of the 20th
Century. The streets of what is now called Ho Chi Minh City offer
the same lessons learned from the European experience, and much
more. Following is a description of what the author experienced
on a visit in 1997. In the intervening decade, I’m not sure to what
extent archy has broken out, if at all, and destroyed the glorious
freedom on the streets of the Paris of the East that I am about
to describe.

Saigon’s thoroughfares
are a breath-taking sight. The tree-lined boulevards teem with motorbikes
moving in every direction, competing with the Vietnamese pedicabs
known as “cyclos” (xch l), lovely o di-clad
lasses and others on bicycles, and the occasional car or truck.
The scene becomes even more remarkable upon first viewing an intersection.

There are no
stoplights. Nor are there the ubiquitous red octagonal signs one
sees in every script in just about every other corner of the planet.
Mayhem, blood, and death must surely result, no?

No. Traffic
merely slows, never stopping fully, and vehicles yield and merge,
and then safely pass through the intersection. They then accelerate,
and move on happily and unshaken to complete the process again at
the next intersection. It is, if traffic can be described in such
terms, beautiful. But surely, adding pedestrians into the picture
is a recipe for disaster and carnage, no?

No. Admittedly,
I found quite daunting the prospect of crossing one of Saigon’s
wide avenues the first time I had occasion to do so. After all,
growing up in the United States, I had taken in traffic signals
and rules with my mother’s milk. In the absence of both traffic
lights and stop signs, I resorted to the cardinal rule of street-crossing:
“Look both ways before you cross the street.”

This rule was
utterly useless, I found. Looking both ways, I was paralyzed with
fear. Getting struck by a motorbike or cyclo probably wouldn’t finish
me off, and colliding with a lovely o di-clad lass on
a bicycle might be a pleasant experience, but nonetheless I hesitated
to put my foot on the street. When I finally got up the nerve, I
hastily bolted through the traffic, looking in every direction and
wishing I had eyes on the back and sides of my head.

I grew anxious
every time it came for me to cross a street, and did so as quickly
as possible. I did not realize that my haste and overcautiousness
were putting myself and others in greater danger.

Then, I observed
the Saigonese. What was it that allowed the city’s natives to cross
so effortlessly across the teeming streets? At first, I chalked
it up to being one of the many mysteries of the East. “The Oriental
doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner,” said
General William Westmoreland. “Life is plentiful. Life is cheap
in the Orient.” Could this man I held to be a monster have been
correct after all?

Unlike the
general, however, I decided that there might be something to learn
from the Vietnamese, so I observed them. With Zen-like serenity,
they crossed the streets, with their eyes focused directly in front
of them, never glancing to the left or the right. This, then, was
the key, but I did not realize it until I gave it a try myself.

I crossed the
street slowly, calmly, without looking from side to side. Motorbikes,
cyclos, lovely o di-clad lasses and others on bicycles,
and even the occasional car or truck passed by without so much as
coming near me. They had no personal interest in hitting me, and
thus avoided me. I had simply needed to learn to place my trust
with my fellow human beings, rather than with the state.

In
The Ancient Chinese Libertarian
Tradition, Murray N. Rothbard notes that the “spontaneous order”
spoken of by Proudhon and F.A. Hayek was presaged by the Chinese
Taoist Chuang Tzu (369 BC–286 BC). Said the sage, “Good order
results spontaneously when things are let alone.” The Vietnamese
are Taoists of the highest order, at least on the streets of Saigon.

I learned many
lessons during my short visit to Vietnam, a culturally-rich country
blessed with a joyful people. A visit to what was then called “The
Museum of American War Crimes,” with its rows of formaldehyde jars
filled with dead babies deformed by Agent Orange, taught me much
about American foreign policy. Witnessing the entrepreneurial vigor
of the Vietnamese taught me much about the triumph of the human
spirit even under socialism. But the “spontaneous order” I witnessed
on the streets of Saigon gave me perhaps the most valuable lesson
I took with me.

October
16, 2007

An American
Catholic son-in-law of Korea, Joshua Snyder [send
him mail] lives with his wife and two children in Pohang, where
he serves as an assistant visiting professor of English at a science
and technology university. He blogs at The
Western Confucian.

DIGG THIS

Dr. Ron Paul of Texas is our American sage. He merits the honorific tzu, meaning “master,” given to the great thinkers of Chinese antiquity: K’ung Fu Tzu (Confucius), Meng Tzu (Mencius), Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Sun Tzu and others. Ron Paul Tzu is both a Confucian gentleman and a Taoist sage.

Dr. Paul’s advocacy of constitutional principles and the thought of the founders would gain approval from Confucius, who said “I transmit but do not innovate; I am truthful in what I say and devoted to antiquity (The Analects, VII, 1).” The Paul Administration will serve to “transmit” the ideas of our founders and their documents, which are our classics. There will be no officials who “innovate” upon them with creative interpretations or dismiss them as “quaint.” Indeed, Dr. Paul’s strict adherence to the letter of the Constitution is reminiscent of the Confucian devotion to the “Rectification of Names,” i.e. the restoration of original interpretations of words and the rejection of arbitrariness. Said China’s first teacher, “When words lose their meaning, people lose their liberty (ibid. XIII, 3).”

The Confucian statement of the Golden rule-”What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others (ibid. VX, 24)”-is remarkably similar to the “no harm” principle that guides Dr. Paul’s libertarian philosophy. While the Confucian version may be less active than the Christian version, it is perhaps more suitable to governance, in that it allows individuals and voluntary associations more leeway and incentive to carry out mutual aid and charity work.

Confucius would applaud Dr. Paul’s opposition to rule by a unitary executive with unchecked powers. Confucius rejected rule by force, going as far to say, “Barbarian tribes with their rulers are inferior to Chinese states without them (ibid. III, 5).” Instead, he proposed leadership by example, which is what the Paul Administration will offer America, at home and abroad. Confucius offered this admonition which could have been levelled at the current occupant of the Oval Office: “Sir, in carrying on your government, why should you use killing at all? Let your evinced desires be for what is good, and the people will be good (ibid. XII, 19).” Indeed, Confucius, like Dr. Paul, was an arch-enemy of tyranny: “An oppressive government is fiercer and more feared than a tiger (The Record of Rites II, 2).”

If Dr. Paul is the consummate Confucian gentleman, he is even more of a Taoist sage. Here, Lao Tzu presages Dr. Paul’s social and economic platform of individual liberty:

The more prohibitions there are, the more ritual avoidances, the poorer the people will be… The more laws are promulgated, the more thieves and bandits there will be… So long as I ‘do nothing’ the people will of themselves be transformed. So long as I love quietude, the people will of themselves go straight. So long as I act only by inactivity the people will of themselves become prosperous. (The Classic of the Way and Virtue II, 57).

The essence of Dr. Paul’s economic ideas are that “by [governmental] inactivity the people will of themselves become prosperous.” When Thomas Jefferson famously reminded us that “the government is best which governs least,” he was expressing a Taoist sentiment.

This “inactivity” or “do-nothingness” is the Taoist ideal of wu-wei, or non-action. What is the non-interventionism Dr. Paul proposes for America, and which he reminds us was our original foreign policy, if not wu-wei writ large? In warning us of “foreign entanglements” and “entangling alliances,” Washington and Jefferson showed themselves to be Taoist sages as well. Like the Chinese, Dr. Paul knows that it is wise to listen to one’s ancestors.

Dr. Paul is a man of peace, but his thoughts echo those of that greatest theorist of war, Sun Tzu, who, not a chickenhawk, warned that unnecessary wars should never be waged. Certainly, a Congressmen Sun Tzu would have voted with Dr. Paul against invading a country that neither attacked us nor had the means to do so: “Unless endangered do not engage in warfare. The ruler cannot mobilize the army out of personal anger (The Art of War XII, 11).” Dr. Paul’s call to bring the troops home immediately from what has been foolishly but accurately advertised as “The Long War” would have been seconded by Sun Tzu, who observed, contra Randolph “War is the Health of the State” Bourne, “There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare (ibid. II, 4).”

Confucius, Lao Tzu, and Sun Tzu all lived and taught in pre-imperial China. In 221 B.C., Ch’in Shih-huang united the various Chinese states into an empire and set about to burn the Confucian classics and bury their scholars alive. The Legalism of Han Fei Tzu, which centered on the totalitarian power of the ruler, replaced the humanistic teachings of Confucianism and Taoism.

The situation is not unlike our own today. The only difference between our Republic’s transformation to Empire and that of ancient China is that ours has been more subtle. (Ours is the “soft tyranny” spoken of by Alexis de Tocqueville.) Our Declaration of Independence and Constitution have not been burned (yet), nor have their defenders been buried alive (yet), but our founding documents and those who defend them have been ignored, scorned, circumvented, and trampled upon.

Confucianism survived the suppression and became the governing philosophy of the Han and all subsequent dynasties until 1911. Our constitutional republic, too, will survive and be restored. And there is one man calling upon our country to return to its founding principles, Ron Paul Tzu.

Mencius, Confucius’ great heir, carried on and elaborated his master’s theory of benevolent government, calling for a sage-king to lead, not rule, the people. Who among the current crop of Republicrat candidates, or even those of the last generation, has even an ounce of sagacity, save for Dr. Ron Paul, in whom it abounds. Ron Paul Tzu, the Confucian gentleman and Taoist sage, stands alone offering “Hope for America” and the restoration of our Republic.

An American Catholic son-in-law of Korea, Joshua Snyder [send him mail] lives with his wife and two children in Pohang, where he serves as an assistant visting professor of English at a science and technology university. He blogs at The Western Confucian.