Anglosphere

Patriot’s Day

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It all started today.

At the beginning of the Revolutionary War, on April 19, 1775, a company of minutemen from Acton responded to the call to arms initiated by Paul Revere (who rode with other riders, William Dawes and Samuel Prescott, with Prescott the only one of the three who was able reach Acton itself) and fought at the North Bridge in Concord as part of the Battle of Lexington and Concord. The Acton minutemen were led by Captain Isaac Davis. When a company was needed to lead the advance on the bridge which was defended by the British regulars, Captain Davis was heard to reply, “I haven’t a man who is afraid to go.”
 
The colonists advanced on the bridge; in the exchange of musket fire that followed, Captain Isaac Davis and Private James Hayward were killed and Abner Hosmer, also of Acton, was mortally wounded. Davis was the first officer to die in the American Revolutionary War. In Acton they refer to “the battle of Lexington, fought in Concord, by men of Acton.”

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How the West was Lost

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Via Instapundit comes a link to a James Kirchick article which contains this paragraph:

It has become de riguer among the press to call on South Africa, the regional power and, at present, Zimbabwe’s lifeline, to act. Newspapers ranging from the Los Angeles Times to the Wall Street Journal have reprimanded South Africa for its silence and complicity in Mr. Mugabe’s crimes. These remonstrations are necessary and right, but no matter how much international outrage there is over the horrors of Zimbabwe, there is little hope that South Africa will ever do anything close to what the West wants it to do.[emphasis added]

I’ve seen this usage before recently. When did South Africa stop being part of the western world?

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Sherman — Stoic Warriors

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Sherman, Nancy, Stoic Warriors: The Ancient Philosophy behind the Military Mind, Oxford University Press, 2005. 242pp.

A recent article in the New Yorker discussed the repeated use of torture on the TV program “24.” Portraying torture as an effective, speedy means of extracting critical information from prisoners is flawed, it claimed. The program’s producer, Joel Surnow, continues to make torture a key dramatic element in 24’s “ticking clock” format, despite informal requests from the US military to avoid doing so. The military is concerned that young soldiers will decide that Jack Bauer‘s repeated brutalities are indeed a useful emergency tool on the modern battlefield. A contrary point of view about whether “24” is innately conservative is outlined in this article in TCS Daily.

Two questions lingered after reading the New Yorker article. (1) Is torture ever useful for gathering information on an urgent basis? (2) Does the American public’s apparent comfort with the fictional torture in “24” indicate some unrequited desire for retribution and intimidation, and/or reflect an unacknowledged (and untapped) group resolve?

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“It seems as if the Anglosphere analytical framework is gaining a certain critical mass.”

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Jim Bennett notes exciting developments:

A century ago it was commonplace to use the idea of “the English-speaking peoples” as a conceptual category and analytical framework. But the idea eventually faded, partly because too many of the people who wrote about it used a social-darwinist, or even a racially-based analysis that became increasingly suspect and increasingly irrelevant as a predictor. The rise of an educated, English-speaking middle class in India, for example, demanded that the British authorities either launch India down the path to self-governing Dominion status along the lines of Canada, or abandon its fundamental principles, or eventually see India become an independent republic. So in away the first iteration of english-speaking consciousness became a victim both of the ideological confusions of its time, and its own success.

 

Now a new iteration of the idea and analytical framework, suitable for its times, is emerging. It promises to be an interesting period.

Read the whole thing.

The Great U-Turn and the Three Who Made It

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The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World, by John O’Sullivan; Regnery, 448 pages.

Cross-posted at Albion’s Seedlings

John O’Sullivan is a journalist with a fine sense of history. Thus it is appropriate that he should write a book about a time, and a set of people, who are now crossing the threshold between being the subject of journalism, to being the subject of history. Of the three — Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and John Paul II — two belong now to the ages, and Lady Thatcher has become less and less active as health issues reduce her speaking schedule. The students who will be entering university this year were born in 1988 — Reagan’s last year in office — and were two when Margaret Thatcher left government. They were sixteen when the white smoke heralding John Paul II’s successor issued forth over the Sistine Chapel; if they were not Catholics, and were incurious about current events, they might have barely registered his passing.

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