Chicago Boyz

Welcome to Jay Manifold, who blogs at the excellent A Voyage To Arcturas and joined us at our blog bash last weekend (Jay’s account of his trip to Chicago is here). Jay has graciously agreed to blog with us, at least some of the time, and we only had to offer him double his salary from Arcturas to get him to do it. He appears to know a lot about everything, and I fully expect to see him and Lex ruling the world one day. Until then we can look forward to reading his posts.

Barbara Amiel in a recent article in the Telegraph had some good insights:

The problem is the way that the EU developed and is continuing to develop. Now it stands for Western values in name only. In substance, it stands for accommodation with those forces of the world that are the opposite of such values.

Perhaps this can be explained by Europe’s history: accommodation has almost always been the way small countries deal with more powerful forces ranged against them. The dream of Prodi, to create what he calls an “association of minorities”, is not an illegitimate response to the painful European history of national and ethnic conflicts. The dream of many Europeans, from Stefan Zweig to Luigi Barzini and the founders of the EU, has been to escape their own history through a unified Europe.

But for Britain to continue further into this union means forsaking or potentially injuring a natural ally – the United States – and an alliance based not only on common values but a common legal and cultural heritage. In anybody’s books, this looks like a bad bargain.

I concur heartily with Amiel’s Anglospheric note about the basis for the Anglo-American alliance.

Europe, as a Grand Project, is all about the escape from history, and a flight from the present and the future as well. In other words, it is a fantasy project, performance art, smoke and mirrors, a collective delusion. If everyone whistles past the graveyard in unison, then Europe will somehow have the money to pay for its unsustainable social goodie-bag, and the blind luck to avoid being damaged by the evil forces at work in the world today without having to pay for real military power in the necessary (large) quantities. The European project bears a family resemblance to an earlier pan-European vision: the Thousand Year Reich. Hitler’s visionary “Europe” was also phony baloney all the way down, a papier mache Wagnerian stage set pretending to be a polity. Brussels doesn’t want to gas anybody, which is one small thing in its favor. It just wants to turn the continent with the most glorious history in the world into a three-hundred- million person Registry of Motor Vehicles office. Less malign than Hitler, though with less snappy uniforms — but just as impossible.

Britain does not need to escape from its history, or hide from the present or the future. As part of the global Anglosphere, Britain is poised to continue to play a significant role on the cutting edge of world civilization. Britain has, there for the grasping, a brilliant future which the continental Europeans cannot share. I hope they figure it out in time.

A bad bargain, indeed.

Via Instapundit.

My friend the former F-18 pilot, whom I’ll call Fighter Pilot Pundit, circulated this Mark Steyn piece, which is good. Even better is FPP’s prefatory email message, in his own inimitable warrior-speak:

It seems the spawn of 18th century British Imperialists who conquered the globe have not all become drag queens and Labour Party pacifists. I have the honor of knowing a few British Special Air Service (SAS) commandoes. They don’t sprout out of nowhere like mushrooms. They are the direct descendants of lionhearted British combatants of old. Don’t let the recent media circus turn you off of the Brits. They are a courageous people who won’t shrink from a fight to the death. Hats off to Tony Blair, a genuine statesman who, faced with the partisan carping of his own party, did the right thing for the preservation of civilization and the advance of democracy in the darkest, most wretched crevasse in humanity.

Fortuna favet fortibus.

Hear, hear.

In Orwell’s 1984, O’Brien , the thought-policeman, tells Winston Smith: “Whoever controls the present controls the past, whoever controls the past controls the future.” This is the totalitarian, fascistic vision of how to “do” history. It is how Hitler and Stalin did it. It is not about the factual record and what emerges from it. It is about manipulation and falsification to create political realities which have contemporary impact, and which shape people’s ideas going forward.

It is the kind of history practiced by so-called liberals, when they can get away with it. It is business as usual for them. Professor Michael Bellesiles, with his lies about gun ownership, was one typical example. He was caught and outed. But I am sure attempts will be made to rehabilitate him. The New York Times has gotten smacked around lately for practicing the kind of disinformation and spin that it has always practiced.

A good recent example of all this is the recent movie about Reagan, which Matt Drudge outed in advance, provoking a storm of protest, causing CBS to cave in on its original broadcast plans.

The idea that this response was “censorship,” or that the movie, starring leftist activist Barbra Streisand’s husband, was “art” is more totalitarian lies.

The movie was a political weapon in a political struggle. The movie would have been the only image that millions of unsophisticated Americans would have had of Reagan. What many people see on TV they take as accurate history. This is stupid, I know, but is a regrettable fact.

The point of this maneuver was not art, or expression, or any of the other weasel words used by liberals to cover up their shenanigans. It was to create a false image of Reagan in the minds of millions of people, for a political purpose. The political result would be to discredit Reagan, his image, his legacy, and those who are his political heirs. This effort was, for now, partly thwarted.

Fortunately, there are true and accurate depictions of Reagan and his accomplishments and his character available. Jonathan sent me this excellent article by Max Kampelman. It shows the astute and focused enemy of communism that Reagan was. Lou Cannon’s recent biography of Reagan as governor of California is reputed to be good. I hope to read soon the volume of letters recently published. I can vouch for the collection of his radio addresses, which is excellent. I read Peter Schweitzer’s book Reagan’s War: The Epic Story of His Forty Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism, which is a very good introduction to Reagan’s role in winning the Cold War. Michael Barone’s chapters on Reagan in Our Country are excellent.

Still, this is all highbrow stuff. Books. Who reads books? (Even people who should spend their time reading blogs instead.)

Keeping a lying, commie hatchet-job off of broadcast TV is a minor victory. But the liberals still control Hollywood, the universities, and most of the Old Media news outlets. All of them will tell baldfaced lies about Reagan all day long if they can get away with it, and we won’t be able to stop them every time. We need to create alternative popular media, to carry the war for the truth about the past to the enemy, defeat them, and present the facts as they actually were to a gullible public which knows too little history.

We don’t need to “control” the past. The facts, pretty much, speak for themselves. If they can be gotten out.

An Op Ed entitled The Great Job Machine (the link no longer works) was on the New York Times editorial page recently — cheek by jowl with Krugman.

I hope old Paul gets himself a nasty rash from the exposure.

The article is an excellent short summary of the process of creative destruction. It lays out how the American economy is structured both to destroy jobs and to create jobs, that it has always been that way, and that tolerance for the rigors of this process has led to our country being dynamic and increasingly wealthy.

Societies grow richer when new products emerge that better meet consumers’ needs, and when producers adopt new technologies that reduce costs by making workers more productive. In a dynamic, innovative economy, these forces unleash waves upon waves of change. Some industries and companies prosper while others wither. Some companies find themselves with too many workers while others struggle with too few. A free-enterprise system responds by moving resources — in this case workers — to where they’re more valuable.

Some illuminating numbers:

Since 1980, Americans have filed 106 million initial claims for unemployment benefits, each representing a lost job. Facing unemployment and rebuilding a life can be hard on families, but the United States today is better off for allowing it to happen. Even with the net decline in jobs over the past three years, during the past decade total United States employment has risen to 130 million from 91 million since 1980, a net gain of nearly 40 million jobs. Productivity, measured by output per worker, increased a staggering 56.2 percent.

This process of “savage capitalism” is what the folks in Old Europe want to “protect” themselves from. That’s fine. Suit yourself. Build yourself a cocoon, move into it, guarantee yourself a “right” to a cozy, trouble-free, event-free life. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger said, eighteen year old kids in Austria talk about their pensions, and he wanted more. Everyone with any gumption, globally, now hear this, straight from Lex: Get your ass to America, and we’ll build the free and prosperous future here. The Old Europeans can park their beach chairs on the ash heap of history, look around at the rubble of the great things their ancestors did, think about the kids and grandkids they never had and will never have, grumble about how the Americans are cowboys, and wait for their pension checks.

It’s been nice knowin’ ya, folks. See you in the rear-view mirror.