Month: September 2014

The ghost at all our feasts: three lectures by Adam Tooze

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One of Zenpundit’s most influential book recommendations for me was The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy by Adam Tooze. Wages of Destruction made most other books on the Nazi complicated run German economy of 1920-1945 look infantile. I read Tooze’s newest book The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order 1916-1931 over July. A review is in the works. While you stay up nights waiting for that, Tooze gave three lectures at Stanford University’s Europe Center worth absorbing based on The Deluge:

  1. Making Peace in Europe 1917-1919: Brest-Litovsk and Versailles
  2. Hegemony: Europe, America and the problem of financial reconstruction, 1916-1933
  3. Unsettled Lands: the interwar crisis of agrarian Europe

The rise of the American empire 1849-1922 is the great question of our time.

[Cross-posted on Zenpundit]

9/11 Plus Thirteen Years

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9/11/2001

(Image source.)

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I guess I thought they were all gone, those types of monsters, stranded on reels of black and white film.

—Cara Ellison, in a 2007 post about 9/11/01.

 

Bookworm:  “My life is divided into two parts:  Before September 11, 2001 and after September 11, 2001.”

Simply evil: Christopher Hitchens suggests that sometimes the simple and obvious explanation for an event is more accurate than an explanation which relies on an elaborate structure of “nuance”

A time bomb from the Middle Ages. Roger Simon explains how 9/11 altered his worldview and many of his relationships

An attack, not a disaster or a tragedy. George Savage explains why the persistent use of terms like “tragedy” by the media acts to obfuscate the true nature of the 9/11 attacks. Much more on this from Mark Steyn

Claire Berlinski was in Paris on 9/11. Shortly thereafter she wrote this piece for City Journal

Marc Sasseville and Heather Penney were F-16 pilots with an Air National Guard squadron. Their order was to bring down Flight 93 before the terrorists in control of it could create another disaster on the scale of the World Trade Center…but their aircraft were configured for training, with no live ammunition and no missiles. A video interview with Major Penney here

Joseph Fouché writes about how the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in March 2001, and the murder of Ahmed Shah Masood on September 9 of that year, prefigured the 9/11 attacks.

The Diplomad posts a speech he gave on 9/14/01, when he was charge d’affaires at a U.S. embassy.  You will not hear speeches like that being given by diplomats under the administration of Barack Obama.

On September 11, 2005, Rare Kate didn’t go to church. Follow the link to find out why. In my original post linking this, I said “What if American and British religious leaders had responded the depradations of Naziism in the spirit of this liturgy?  Actually, some of them did. The impact on preparedness was certainly malign, and the people who took such positions certainly bear a share of moral resposibility for the deaths and devastation that took place. Ditto for those who are behaving in a similar way today.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an important leader of the anti-Nazi resistance in Germany (executed in 1945), wrote the following:

Today there are once more saints and villains. Instead of the uniform grayness of the rainy day, we have the black storm cloud and the brilliant lightning flash. Outlines stand out with exaggerated sharpness. Shakespeare’s characters walk among us. The villain and the saint emerge from primeval depths and by their appearannce they tear open the infernal or the divine abyss from which they come and enable us to see for a moment into mysteries of which we had never dreamed.

The refusal on the part of many individuals to face the seriousness of the radical Islamist threat to out civilization stems in significant part, I feel certain, from a desire to avoid the uncomfortable and even dangerous kind of clarity that Bonhoeffer was talking about.

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Under the Radar

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I guess it must matter to the elite class who seem to manage and report in our established American national main-line media – that no one notice the very ugly and violent racial war which is breaking out. Unless, of course, it is a case of a white, or nearly white, or almost-sort-of white in a confrontation with a member of the black thug class; there, I said it – the black thug class. This is a totally different class from the striving and generally hardworking and patriotic black middle and working class. And this I know very well, as a veteran, and through residence in a working-to-middle-class Texas suburb; a fellow military veteran once quoted to me something which one of his military comrades had said – “There is black and there is white, and then there is just trash.” The comrade was black, and he was quoting his grandmother, a lady of certain years – years sufficient to permit a degree of blunt honesty regarding matters racial. There is black, and there is white, and then there is trash.

The elite class appears to believe that anyone of Anglo pallor who points this out must therefore be a racist, especially if in reference to the unsavory, thuggish habits of the black variety of trash.

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The Defense Implications of Scottish Independence

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Trident Nuclear Submarine HMS Victorious

America 3.0 coauthor James C. Bennett has a post on National Review Online entitled What are Defense Implications of Scottish Independence?

Bennett notes: “First, it takes 5 million plus taxpayers, and most of the North Sea oil base, out of the funding available to keep the U.K. within the minimum 2 percent GDP contribution to its defense capabilities that NATO calls for … .” It will reduce Britain’s defense capabilities, and make Scotland a security free-rider.

Second, it will likely require Britain to remove the nuclear submarine base from Faslane, which is the base for Britain’s Vanguard class Trident ballistic missile submarines. Britain’s entire nuclear deterrent force is on these submarines. Building a new base to replace Faslane will be an enormous new expense at a time of declining defense budgets.

Bennett also notes that the Scots seem to have erroneous ideas about the prospects of making their country more socialistic than it already is.

But, as Bennett notes, a defeat for the independence referendum could mean a move toward a more federal United Kingdom, which would be more interesting than just another small, socialist ethnic enclave in Europe.

RTWT.

UPDATE: This article, entitled SCOTLAND’S REFERENDUM: TO GREAT MICHAEL OR CALUM’S ROAD? is also very good.

GE has sold its Appliance business

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…to Electrolux, for $3.3 billion.

Today’s WSJ story on the sale began with the words “General Electric, which commercialized the electric toaster and self-cleaning oven”…sounds sort of trivial  Actually, household appliances have been an important factor in the liberation of human energies and in social change.

Owen Young, who was GE’s chairman from 1922-1939, grew up as a farm boy.  To his biographer Ida Tarbell, he described what life had been like on each Monday–wash day:

He drew from his memory a vivid picture of its miseries: the milk coming into the house from the barn; the skimming to be done; the pans and buckets to be washed; the churn waiting attention; the wash boiler on the stove while the wash tub and its back-breaking device, the washboard, stood by; the kitchen full of steam; hungry men at the door anxious to get at the day’s work and one pale, tired, and discouraged woman in the midst of this confusion.