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Edited by Ralph Raico. Submissions are very welcome.
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under. ~ H. L. Mencken And when General Powell started blathering on about "decades'' of contact between Saddam and al-Qa'ida, things went wrong for the Secretary of State. Al-Qa'ida only came into existence five years ago, since Bin Laden – "decades" ago – was working against the Russians for the CIA, whose present day director was sitting grave-faced behind General Powell. ~ Robert Fisk, The Independent, February 5 "There could be a permanent human presence on the Red Planet within a century, Sir Martin Rees of the Institute of Astronomy told a science conference. ‘If the explorers were privately funded adventurers of free-enterprise, even anarchic disposition, the Wild West model would be more likely to prevail.’" Sir Martin, who frets about the prospect of lawlessness absent the blessings of government, evidently is not familiar with recent research on how law and order was actually established in the old West. He would have done well to have reviewed the important article by Terry Anderson and P. J. Hill, "An American Experiment in Anarcho-Capitalism: The Not So Wild, Wild West," in the Journal of Libertarian Studies (1979). As Anderson and Hill write:
Mars should have it so good. ~ Robert Higgs Time magazine/Europe recently conducted an online questionnaire: Which country poses the greatest danger to world peace in 2003? Here are the results as of February 5:
Note that the 15.5 per cent who voted for countries other than the United States did not indicate that the U. S. was not a danger to peace, or that it would not have been their next choice. Time cautions that this is an unscientific, informal survey (thanks, but somehow we already knew that). Still, over 340,000 persons responded …all "wimps" from "Old Europe"? ~ Guido Hülsmann [On director Ron Maxwell’s new movie, Gods and Generals, on the War between the States, due to be released to theatres on February 21. Maxwell was the director of the award-winning Gettysburg. ] Maxwell expects to draw flak for his depiction of Confederate soldiers as human beings rather than the racist caricatures which the viewer expects from a modern film. "The culture has stiffened them into a politically correct straitjacket," he says. "People don’t feel they have permission to question certain shibboleths: among them that the Civil War was fought only for slavery." Maxwell provides the fairest, most eloquent exposition of the Southern point of view ever presented on film – and yet as counterpoint we have always Joshua Chamberlain, the fighting scholar of the 20th Maine and the conscience of the movie, reminding us that black-skinned Americans were being held as chattel. Contra Chamberlain, General [Stonewall] Jackson frames the war as a question of competing patriotisms: "Though I love the Union, I love Virginia more." He explains to his Shenandoah Valley volunteers at the war’s onset: "Just as we would not send any of our soldiers to march in other states and tyrannize other people, so will we never allow the armies of others to march into our state and tyrannize our people." ~ Bill Kauffman, The American Enterprise, March 2003 For anyone who suspects that all pro-Southerners today are either open or covert Klansmen, or, as Professor Harry Jaffa graciously implied in his debate with Thomas DiLorenzo at the Independent Institute, supporters of Adolf Hitler’s philosophy of government, or who might be open-minded on the Union vs. Confederate question, there’s a chance to listen to the libertarian and true conservative point of view. On March 22, a conference takes place in Richmond, Virginia, "Lincoln Reconsidered," with talks by Tom DiLorenzo, Donald Livingston, Joseph Stromberg, and other scholars. Paul Gottfried’s talk on "Why They Lie" should alone be worth the price of admission. You can hear and interact with the speakers on Father Abraham’s warping of the original concept of our American republic, mingle with dozens of people sympathetic to your way of thinking, or else be courteously challenged in your own ideas, as well as stroll the capital of the Old South. The cost for the conference and hotel rooms is surprisingly modest. (Click on the Lincoln icon at the bottom of the LRC website page, or click here.) Myself, I wouldn’t miss it for the world. ~ Ralph Raico Michael Bellesiles, author of the fraudulent anti-gun work Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, has been dishonored and shamed more than any other American academic within memory. He was forced to resign his tenured professorship at Emory University, and his publisher, Knopf, has withdrawn his book from distribution (though the Knopf editor who saw the work through evidently still has his job. Why?). Now comes the coup de grâce. Columbia University has announced that its Trustees have voted to rescind the Bancroft Prize to Bellesiles, up to now the most prestigious award in American historiography. "The Trustees made the decision based on an investigation of charges of scholarly misconduct against Professor Bellesiles by Emory University and other assessments by professional historians." The press release neglects to mention that this is a totally unprecedented action by Columbia. No one before Bellesiles has ever had the Bancroft prize revoked. A friend of mine who works and writes in the DC area raises a pertinent point. When will the Columbia School of Journalism revoke the Pulitzer prize awarded in 1932 to Walter Duranty, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times? Duranty won the award for his reportage from Soviet Russia, which scoffed at the very idea of famine and oppression in Stalin’s slave empire. Every year, when the Times wins ever more Pulitzers, they run a full page house ad, listing among their trophies Columbia’s prize for Duranty’s Stalinist lies. It’s time to apologize, gentlepersons. Come on, just do it. ~ Ralph Raico Nowadays our attention is more and more directed to anti-Jewish attitudes, with no end in sight. This comes out in the reception of the latest biography of H. L. Mencken, by Terry Teachout (The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken, HarperCollins, 2002). The disparagement and dismissal of the great libertarian were remarkable. The fact is that Henry Mencken was the foremost civil libertarian and the greatest American literary critic of this time. He composed The American Language, fostered the Harlem Renaissance, and promoted many of the now famous writers of the 20s and 30s. There’s much else. Murray Rothbard’s essay is a place to start. Look up the list of his books in the catalog of your college, at your local library or on the Internet. It will give you an idea of who H. L. Mencken was. Over his lifetime Mencken made a number of disparaging remarks about Jews. But his disapproving remarks about white Southerners are at least as cutting. Curmudgeon that he was, he despised just about every other ethnic group, including, like the estimable and now shamefully politically persecuted Taki, Italians and Italian-Americans: "wops," in their nomenclature (not too funny, in my personal opinion). Like all Americans of his time, like all northern urban Americans of my time, from the 1940s and 50s, Mencken thought ethnically. So what? Tackling the Teachout biography, most reviewers took the opportunity to dredge up Mencken’s sometime anti-Jewish attitude (not mentioning his contempt for Italians, for some reason). Christopher Hitchens, in the New York Times Book Review, also assailed Mencken for his early Nietzchean and German-nationalist views. This was a bit nervy from the erratic Hitchens, who is for the time being a neocon. Shouldn’t Hitchens have some sympathy for Mencken’s ideological transgressions, considering that he himself was up until a few years ago an apologist for Leon Trotsky, whom Robert Conquest labeled "the most ferocious of all the Bolsheviks"? Trotsky was the worst totalitarian thinker of the twentieth century. This may be hard to believe, but just read the disgusting last pages of his Literature and Revolution, which the learned Hitchens seems to have missed somewhere along the way. It was Trotsky who proposed the enserfdom of the whole Russian working class as the solution to the impasse of "War Communism." Who, like his fellow Leninists, oversaw the mass-murder of "class enemies," any owners of private property, anyone involved in private economic exchanges to keep their families alive, Christian priests and lay-believers, and many others. Come on, Hitchens, apologize for your Trotskyism as of, what was it, four or five years ago? You know you should. Just do it. The bottom of the barrel was reached by the reviewer for the Chicago Sun-Times. Its review, by a freelance writer, was titled, brazenly, "Mencken, the Anti-Semite of Baltimore." Sadly, it happens that some of the most distinguished figures in our intellectual history have been biased against the Jewish people. Their judgments were often harsher than Mencken’s. Should they all be smeared and dismissed as fatally tainted? Are we now, for instance, to refer to Cicero and Tacitus as the anti-Semites of Rome? To Martin Luther as the anti-Semite of Wittenberg? Voltaire as the anti-Semite of Paris? Dostoyevsky as the anti-Semite of Moscow? ~ Ralph Raico [send him mail] February 18, 2003
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