Anglosphere

The United States has now declared that it is going “to help India become a major world power in the 21st century. We understand fully the implications, including military implications, of that statement.” The official spoke on condition of anonymity. (here. Read the whole thing.)

If this is true, it is a major, major step.

The alignment continues to shape up. Anglosphere (Australia, hopefully UK will stay in) + Japan + India + (Israel?) + others on one side. China, Iran, Hezbollah, NK, France, maybe Russia, on the other. I like our cards.

The Bush administration is remolding the world and building an alliance structure to keep the peace and preserve democratic capitalism for decades, maybe centuries. Bush the supposed dolt is a visionary on a breathtaking scale. His recent appointments show that he is absolutely serious about kicking the UN and the World Bank into being useful. Picking Karen Hughes, his most trusted consiglieri, to run the USA’s public diplomacy means that this is a top-rung priority. Everything he is doing is meant to achieve world-transforming results.

Meanwhile, what is Chirac doing? He is draining his bladder in his pants at the prospect of having to compete with Estonia, nickle-and-diming on the deal that would allow some competition in services. Some Union. It isn’t even a free trade zone. What a joke. Europeans have forgotten how to reproduce. They once overran the world and grabbed much of it at swordpoint, and ransacked it and kept the proceeds. You don’t have to like it, but they used to be players. They can’t even face the prospects of a fouled diaper anymore, let alone playing in a league that includes the mammoth world powers of the next Century, India and China. Stick a fork in Old Europe.

What are the Chinese doing? Everything wrong, politically. Scaring their neighbors into an alliance against them. Very much like Kaiserian Germany, another economic powerhouse but political retard. Ludwig Dehio said that a country which feels itself rising to the status of a world power is overcome by a demonic sense of its own energies and potential greatness, which leads it to act provocatively, cause an alliance to arise around it and against it, and then lunge for hegemony in defiance of the odds. But the European countries based on land could not grasp the nature of the offshore power, England, then America, and one after another went down to defeat — Imperial Spain, Bourbon France, Napoleonic France, Kaiserian Germany, Hitlerian Germany — then on a worldwide scale, Soviet Russia. Will China play this role next? What I hope will happen is that China will be confronted by such an array of power that it won’t roll the iron dice. Instead, it will get across the chasm of political and cultural reform needed to become a free and open society with legitimately elected government. All this will of course be “with Chinese Characteristics”, as they might put.

Keep your eye on this India business. It is perhaps the biggest thing going amidst a whole boatload of major initiatives.

OK, this is cool. Jim Bennett now has a website to promote his new book The Anglosphere Challenge: Why the English-Speaking Nations Will Lead the Way in the Twenty-First Century. The website has a synopsis of the book. We’ll let the man speak for himself:

The Anglosphere Challenge is a new and different look at where globalization and information technology are taking the world, and specifically the USA and the other English-speaking nations. Unlike most of these observers, Bennett believes that these forces will not create a borderless world, nor will the process of globalization lead to a homogenized world culture. Instead, Bennett argues that what is emerging is a series of distinct but overlapping globe- spanning linguistic-cultural phenomena, which he terms “network civilizations”. (The Anglosphere, or English-speaking network civilization, is the first but by no means the last of such entities.) Within these network civilizations, cultures with strong civil societies can cross intra- civilizational boundaries with ease, widening the scope of easy interaction, particularly for smaller, entrepreneurial ventures. The task of the emerging era, then, is one of creating political forms of cooperation appropriate to these network civilizations. Bennett argues that such a form, which he terms the “Network Commonwealth”, is already emerging. Unlike national or imperial forms of organization, network commonwealths are characterized by extreme decentralization and lack of compulsory mechanisms. Network commonwealths will serve to replace the trade and defense functions once performed by large economic states. Bennett’s book contains a detailed discussion of the English-speaking world and why its strong civil society, and resultant entrepreneurial market capitalism and constitutional government will likely result in the Anglosphere’s retaining the lead role in the next stages of development, the multiple and simultaneous scientific-technological revolutions sometimes called the Singularity, and the emergence of the Network Commonwealth..

The site also has excerpts from the book, and the annotated bibliography. Check these out. They will make you want to get the book if you haven’t already.

I finished reading the book a while ago. I just need a chunk of time to write up a detailed review. Bear with me.

Instapundit had this post, and Nito posted these maps in response. The basic idea is that the Blue Staters are so horrified about living under the rule of George Bush that they want to break the USA into pieces and form their own country. Of course, they are just venting.

The core strength of “liberal” America resides in the descendants of Yankee puritans, a memetic “Greater New England” that sprang from the Yankee diaspora which settled the Northern tier of the country. These folks have been living uneasily with their fellow Americans for over 350 years. They have been trying to reform the rest of us for our own good the whole time: Revolution, abolition, prohibition, civil rights, environmentalism … . Sometimes they are even right, as much as I hate to admit it. Look at a picture of Cotton Mather, or Susan B. Anthony, or any eat-your-peas liberal do-gooder. The eyes: sad at the foolishness and injustice of the world — the mouth, a mirthless line — and the jaw, set in determination to rectify the world’s wrongs and smite its wrongdoers. Those Yankees, genetic or memetic, are the core of the “progressive” element in American life, and they have been for centuries, and they’ll never change.

Still, even though secession is not seriously on the table, it is interesting that the immediate impulse of the embittered defeated party in 2004 was to think about rearranging territory, not tearing up the Constitution and forming a Second Republic.

This all has an Anglospheric dimension to it. Jim Bennett in his new book reiterates a theme he has written about repeatedly. Anglospheric political struggles tend not to aim at regime change, ala the French, who are now on their Fifth Republic since 1789. Rather, Anglospheric Constitutional struggles end up being “compositional struggles” leading to attempted or successful secessions with territorial division being the outcome. A big issue in the 18th century was about the composition of Britain, and the Act of Union of 1707 (uniting England and Scotland) led to two wars in 1715 and 1745 before Scotland was firmly embedded in a “United Kingdom”. Our own Revolution of 1776, of revered memory, was similarly a matter of territorial composition and secession, much less about Constitutional values. The Americans claimed to be fighting for their rights as free-born Englishmen, after all. In 19th Century America the big question was: Will the slave states have their own country or not? They rolled the dice and lost. A tumultuous issue in 19th Century Britain was Irish Home Rule. This vexatious problem was resolved, incompletely, by civil war and secession. The peaceful devolution of rule to Canada, Australia and New Zealand was due in part to the painful lessons of 1776 et seq.

A large part of the success story of the Anglosphere has been the ability of its communities to maintain their cultural, economic and military ties while reconfiguring the territorial elements. These reconfigurations have, to an unusual degree, been peaceful and lawful. Where violence did occur it has usually come at the end of protracted efforts to compromise and work out differences peacefully. And once a conflict has ended there have always been strong constituencies pushing to restore the many ties of civil society relatively rapidly in the aftermath. The strands of civil society, across the Atlantic, and even across the Irish Sea, have been relatively swiftly rewoven repeatedly for many centuries. (An example that comes to mind is the Treaty of Washington, negotiated by President Grant’s administration, which resolved outstanding claims against Britain as a result of its assistance to the Confederacy. There was much bitterness against Britain, but there was also a strong desire to reopen the spigots of British investment capital. There are many other examples.)

So seeing maps with “Jesusland” and “United States of Canada” should not surprise us. It is the traditional Anglospheric way of thinking out loud about how to resolve seemingly irreconcilable differences. One way is to leave, physically, for some new place — “light out for the territories”, or “go West”, or as Davey Crocket put it “you people can go to Hell; I’m going to Texas”. And if there are too many dissatisfied people for this method to work, there is pressure to re-deal the cards on who runs which pieces of real estate.

Thankfully, for now, any proposed division of territory is merely political satire. But secession thinking is often the first straw in the wind of a storm of deeper conflict coming up.

The patterns repeat themselves like family resemblances, the living seeing echoes of their own faces in old photographs.

Jim Bennett has a new article in the current issue of The National Interest entitled “Networking Nation States”. This is a very solid piece of work, which will give us all something to mull while we wait for the book. Bennett is going to have his Anglosphere Institute up and running soon, and I will provide details about that as I get them.

OK. This should be three posts, but its late, I’m tired and I just kept typing. You have been warned.

What a vacation. Work issues ate a chunk, then a medical issue (don’t worry we’re all OK) ate a bunch more, and the return trip with four small kids was an ordeal. But mostly it was good. My sister got us a terrific house about a five minute walk from the beach in Ogunquit. With little kids, we don’t do a lot of restaurant dining, but you can get good fried whole clams at any of a dozen places, and I availed myself of this relatively inexpensive local delicacy.

I managed to finish Max Boot’s Savage Wars of Peace, (buy it here). It is a decent book, though it falls short of some of the raves it got. It is especially useful if you are not well-acquainted with America’s smaller wars. I also finished Neils Bjerre-Poulsens book Right Face: Organizing the American Conservative Movement 1945-65. That one is a great honking slab of all-beef political history of the type I like best. I may do a post at some point on the history of Conservatism, but there is a wave of current scholarship which I am not current on, and I’d like to be. It may be while on that one. I also read Bruce Gudmundsson’s book On Infantry, which is superb. I have read a shopping cart full of military books in the last several months, many of which touch on the themes which Gudmundsson focuses on like unit cohesion, and military effectiveness not being primarily a function of technology. I hope to do a big blog post on all that, too, time, energy and Divine Providence permitting. I ended up re-reading James Burnham’s (see this also) somewhat dated masterpiece Suicide of the West: an essay on the meaning and destiny of liberalism. I grew up with Burnham’s columns in National Review. He was the coldest of Cold Warriors. Like many of the initial National Review crowd, he was a former commie, and he brought an icy, hard-headed Leninist ruthlessness to the struggle against communism, which he was only able to wage through his writing. This book, once I finish rereading it, certainly merits a few good paragraphs of analysis here. I went to the Book Barn in Wells, Maine, which is a pretty good used book store. I got, for $1.50, Luigi Barzini’s American’s Are Alone in the World. Barzini was a great writer and very insightful about the United States. This will go on the shelf until the cows come home, probably, but anything by him is sure to be good and I may even get to it someday.

I also got, for $3.50, a damaged copy of G.R. Gleig’s Personal Reminiscences of the Duke of Wellington. This is a justifiably forgotten book, almost raw data for a real narrative biographer to refer to. Still, if you like this kind of thing, its very banality is a window into the political and cultural world of England circa 1830, when Gleig worked as a minion of the Iron Duke in the struggle against the Reform Bill, which was a major reform of the election of members of the House of Commons. The Duke, bless him, was a conservative of a stripe we can no longer even imagine. He loathed democracy which, with reason, he saw as mob rule. He remained a tough old bird, long after he left the army. At the time he was opposing the Reform, there was a lot of “agitation” in the country, “mobs burnt towns and sacked gentlemen’s houses”. Gleig warned Wellington to be careful coming out to his country house. Wellington responded, “I suspect that those who will attack me on the road will come rather the worst out of the contest, if there should be one.” Gleig, with a few gentlemen from the area rode out, each armed with “a heavy hunting whip, and pistols”, to meet the Duke: “I found him in his open caleche, provided with a brace of double-barrelled pistols, and having his servant likewise armed, seated on the box.” No mob emerged, so the Duke did not have to work the execution of any rustic miscreants with his own firearms. (Blair may make a good speech, but I’ll be believe he is the Iron Duke’s equal when I see him in an open-topped car with an automatic rifle in his lap.) Gleig, an Anglican clergyman, treats with admirable delicacy the question of Wellington’s relations with Mrs. Arbuthnot. I can say that as of page 224, I have gotten more than my $3.50 worth of utils out of it.

I saw Joschka Fischer on Charlie Rose. Fischer is a smooth and soothing phony. I read a column by William Pfaff in the Boston Globe, which I fished out of the trash at the airport — I’d never give a cent to the Globe. Both made the same point that it is simply awful how the Atlantic Alliance is crumbling, and how it is imperative that Europe and America work together, and according to Pfaff, how European intellectuals roll their eyes at the supposed global menace of Osama bin Laden. The only sane response to this, shorn of fully-merited profanity, is so what? Who cares? If the American public agrees with the president that there is a danger requiring a military response, and the European intelligentsia, lefty pols like Fischer, and would-be sophisticates like Pfaff don’t like it, so what? Why do we need them to do anything? If they don’t perceive a danger, stay home. Regulate the fat content of cheese, mandate a 32 hour work week, keep the grocery stores closed at night, create a “consitution” with a right to a government-employed guidance counsellor for anyone who is sad. Whatever. Do your thing, Europe. (Anyway, the Germans are in Afghanistan, because they agree it is important to be there, not out of sentimentality.)

We’ll do ours. “Ours” includes demolishing the Taliban and Saddam and hunting down al Qaeda, the purportedly imaginary menace that massacred 3,000 Americans. I was forwarded an email from an officer in the 101st Airborne recently. He had a lot to say, including this:

I know it looks bleak right now, but do not despair. Today they started to count the bodies at just one of the grave sites, and they counted at least over a hundred, and they believe that they can identify nearly a thousand bodies in this cave. I saw the photos from the sight. It’s in this cave and the bodies are pretty well decomposed though some still have hair and what not. Almost all are women and children with gunshot wounds to the head. They literally tossed the bodies into the cave into massive heaps like garbage, and then they left them there. It is pretty disconcerting to see. I have never seen so many bodies, and it reminds me of the Holocaust. We allowed this to happen twelve years ago, and after you see it, you can never be the same. You realize how you cannot allow these people to return to power. It will be a long fight.

He goes on to say: “We are America. We are the greatest country in history — not because of the countries we conquered, not because of the lands that flew our flag, we will be remembered for we are liberators, for the lands whose flags we returned.”

William Pfaff and liberals like him, for reasons of their own, would be embarrassed by these types of sentiments, and facts. They live in dread of the ironic smirks of Belgian journalists or French bureaucrats or German university professors. As for me, I don’t care about such people and I feel perfectly assured that a solid majority of Americans think and feel the same way.

The worst thing of all for these people is that what the United States is doing is working. I got an email containing some language from a senior officer in Baghdad. He does not sound like he is bogged down in any quagmire:

I travel with a loaded 9mm pistol on my lap. This place reminds me of Max Max and the Road Warrior movies. … We are fighting former regime-backed paramilitary groups, Iranian-based opposition, organized criminals, and street thugs. We have stood up governing councils from neighborhood to district to city level. We have conducted humanitarian action in numerous areas to include repair of electricity, water, sewer, hospitals, and schools; created refuse collection systems; and built numerous recreational facilities (particularly soccer fields). We have cleared hundreds of tons of UXOs and weapons caches. … On any given day I deal with the political realm of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the humanitarian realm of the NGOs, and the military realm of firefights/improved explosive devices/snipers/mortar attacks. [The brigade] contains active duty, reserv ists, and National Guardsmen. [It] has lost 4 soldiers since taking over the sector. The soldiers are staying focused and disciplined, and are getting more effective with each passing day. Our snipers have had some success of late – enough said. Even though we are still being shot at daily, the vast majority of the population supports our objectives and just want to get on with their lives. We are doing some excellent humanitarian work, but it doesn’t make the news because all the press wants to talk about is the attacks. The infrastructure is up and running and the shortfalls in electricity, water, sewage, etc., are being addressed. We have local advisory councils of Iraqi citizens set up in Baghdad and a functioning city council. The people we kicked out of power can’t stand our success, however, and will do everything they can to try to make us fail. Thus the ongoing gun battles in the streets. There is also a lot of organized crime here. I have flashbacks to “The Godfather” all the time. … We had a visit from a team from the British Army experienced in operations in Northern Ireland, and we were already doing everything they talked to us about.

These are the voices of an army which is winning, which has the momentum, and which knows it is serving a just cause. Don’t let the misleading news media reports fool you. They want the United States to fail, they want our soldiers to die for nothing, both out of malice and out of a belief that this outcome will help elect a Democrat president. But they are not going to get their wish.

To wrap up, we spent our last day out East in Natick, Mass., where my sister lives. We walked down to the town square. Like every New England town there is a Civil War monument, with the town’s dead listed by name. Natick lost about 100. Several names are in groups, three Manns, I noticed. Three brothers, maybe? The monument says that it there to preserve the memory of those who gave up their lives to save their country “in the war of 1861.” Nothing changes. Everything we have and everything we are was bought and paid for with blood. American soldiers are fighting in a remote place, tonight, now, to bring peace and order to a foreign land to advance our ideals and to preserve our safety and freedom. What they are doing is right. Those who oppose them, jeer at them, lie about them, are wrong. I will continue to pray for the souls of the ones who died so far in this war, and for their families, and for an end to these horrors for the people in Iraq and for a more peaceful and orderly world. God bless America.