Posted on 04/19/2006 9:35:20 PM PDT by Dont Mention the War
You were correct .. ROTFLOL!!! These people are brain dead.
I think Hillary would declare a Vast Rightwing Conspiracy is the countrie's biggest problem, not the poor, misunderstood terrorists. She would then unleash 1000 Wacos.
Oh please Lord don't ever let their periods occur at the same time! Yeah as if either one of then=m is that feminine
then=m=them. Sorry I was letting the chimp type tonight.
Well I was thinking that, but I wasn't going to post it. I bet they kept track of each others.
To turn from all these books, which illuminate the challenges now facing Europe in a variety of ways, to Timothy Garton Ash’s Free World is to step through the looking glass from reality into fantasy. Most of the writers I’ve discussed here are scorned by the academic establishment for their politically incorrect views; Garton Ash, by contrast, is a professor at Oxford, where he directs the European Studies Centre, and is a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He is considered a world-class expert on Europe and its future, and he refers frequently in his book to his participation in glamorous-sounding international conferences on weighty topics. In short, he is at the heart of the European academic elite—and his book’s main value, it turns out, is that it is an absolutely perfect example of today’s European-elite mentality in all its arrogance, self-delusion, and folly. As such, it is worth looking at in some detail.
Garton Ash focuses on what he claims is the most important issue in Europe today—the conflict between “Euro-Gaullists,” who want Europe to band together as a counterweight to American power, and “Euroatlanticists,” who seek to maintain strong ties to America. Britain, as the linchpin between America and Europe, occupies a key position in this conflict. Which way, he asks, should it turn? His answer: both. Opposing the idea that either America or Europe is superior, his main point is that America and Europe belong to a “family of developed, liberal democracies” and that “America is better in some ways, Europe in others.” I can agree with this thesis; but when Garton Ash begins developing it, he leaves reality behind.
For while he intends this book to be a vision of, and prescription for, Europe’s future, he all but ignores two critical problems—its growing, and increasingly alienated, Muslim minorities, and its vulnerability to Islamist terrorism. Far from sharing the concerns about these matters articulated by Fallaci and Fortuyn, he views both writers as troublemakers, describing Fallaci’s The Rage and the Pride as “garish” and echoing the Dutch establishment’s demonization of Fortuyn, whom, like them, he dishonestly equates with Jean Le Pen and Austria’s Jörg Haider. These three politicians, he writes, practice “poisonous populist politics” and “have come close to destabilizing the traditional party system in long-established European democracies”—a curious way to describe the fact that Europe’s political elite has become so insulated from the people, and so unwilling to address the problems that people are worried about, that many voters are taking their support elsewhere. Unfortunately, in some countries there has been nowhere for them to turn other than to right-wing extremists like Le Pen and Haider; in the Netherlands, there was Fortuyn, who became a martyr for liberalism and was recently named by the Dutch people as the greatest Dutchman of all time. For Garton Ash to lump him in with fascists is reprehensible.
As he sees it, the rise of a self-segregating, anti-democratic minority in Europe is not a problem; the problem is that some people are concerned about this development. “The populations of Europe,” he explains, “are aging fast, so more immigrants will be needed to support the pensioners, and these will largely be Muslim immigrants. For this increasingly Muslim Europe to define itself against Islam would be ridiculous and suicidal.” It’s true that Europe is going to need immigrants to support pensioners; but this fact, in and of itself, doesn’t close the door on legitimate questions about Muslim immigration. Europeans, he charges, don’t make Muslims feel at home in Europe; they don’t make them feel they’re really Europeans. Now, it’s true, as Walid al-Kubaisi makes blindingly clear, that immigrants who wish to assimilate into European society are often discouraged from doing so; but they’re discouraged not by the kind of ordinary middle-class folks that Garton Ash tends to dismiss as racists but by establishment types like Garton Ash who prefer that they retain their “cultural distinctiveness.” But it’s also true that many Muslim immigrants don’t want to be Europeans—a fact that Garton Ash prefers not to acknowledge. No, the trouble, as he sees it, lies with the “populist, anti-immigrant parties” which win “the votes of less affluent native-born voters who resent rapid change in their traditional ways of life and blame immigrants for rising crime and job losses—even if those jobs actually went to Asia.” This is a dishonest and insulting way of treating the legitimate anxieties of working stiffs in places like Leeds and Birmingham whose lives have been transformed by social problems that, at Oxford, are mere abstractions.
Astonishingly, however, after ignoring or denying these problems in chapter after chapter, Garton Ash does a sudden about-face, admitting (on pages 197–8) that there is a problem with Islam in Europe, and that if it isn’t addressed properly, “we face a downward spiral which will be the curse of the national politics of Europe for years ahead . . . To halt this downward spiral is the single most urgent task of European domestic politics in the next decade. We may already be too late . . .” This admission follows 196 pages of pretending that the “urgent tasks” of European politics lie elsewhere; and after he’s made it, he drops the topic cold and returns to the more comfortable conceit that the real European dilemma is this business about Britain bringing the U.S. and Europe together.
Though his book is entitled Free World, freedom doesn’t figure importantly on his radar screen. Indeed, despite his conspicuous use of the word “freedom,” he seeks, in good European-establishment fashion, to shift the focus from freedom to poverty: instead of freeing people from dictators, he argues, we should secure them “freedom from want.” It’s a clever argument—argue with him, and you sound as if you don’t care about poverty. But he’s playing a semantic shell game, hijacking the word “freedom” and implying that freedom is somehow inimical to economic welfare, when in fact the opposite is the case. As for his subtitle’s reference to “the surprising future,” there’s nothing at all surprising here: his references to such things as America’s failure to ratify the Kyoto accords and the need for America to respect the UN are standard establishment boilerplate.
Garton Ash is also typical of the European elite in his removal from the reality of human suffering. Apropos of the toppling of Saddam, he’s able to write that “What qualifies as genocide is also a matter for the most serious debate.” (How many graves full of dead children are necessary? Let’s have a conference about it.) And he holds up as role models the leftist West German politicians who, eager to reunite their country, “plugged away at it for twenty years” by appeasing Soviet Communism and eventually achieved their goal only because Communism collapsed—no thanks to them. “Never mind the different route,” he says blithely—eager to blur the distinction between whitewashing Communism and liberating people from it. Like other European elitists, moreover, he distrusts genuine (i.e., national) patriotism but adores the EU, thinking out loud about the need for a factitious European patriotism (“flags, symbols, a European anthem we can sing”) to encourage “emotional identification with European institutions.” He further argues that the EU should be led by Germany, France, and Britain. How is any of this compatible with democracy? It’s stunning how remote that question often seems in this book—which is largely a prescription for manipulating the masses. His romanticism about the EU recalls earlier European romanticisms (about Napoleon, the Third Reich, Communism) in that it, like them, has nothing to do with a love of freedom and everything to do with an elite’s desire to forge a Greater Europe.
Why does Europe need an EU? Garton Ash’s answer: “To prevent our falling back into the bad old ways of war and European barbarism.” But how is the EU necessarily a guard against that barbarism? Can’t he see in his own attitudes toward terrorism and European Muslims a suicidal echo of “bad old” European appeasement? He applauds the Europeans whose street protests against the U.S. invasion of Iraq gave birth, in his view, to a new Europe—but doesn’t it trouble him that many of them waved signs equating American leaders with Saddam, thus evincing the familiar European inability to choose democracy over dictatorship? He favorably quotes a postwar observation by Bertolt Brecht: “The womb is fertile still, from which [Hitler] crawled.” For Brecht, the womb was capitalism; Garton Ash disagrees, saying that it was “human nature, additionally misshaped by some distinctively European forms of stupidity.” But he avoids mentioning that Brecht was a committed Stalinist, and thus hardly a shining light for the new Europe but rather a cautionary example—an embodiment of the time-honored European knack for rejecting one form of tyranny while embracing another. For Garton Ash to identify nation-states with Europe’s historical problems while holding up an undemocratic EU superstate as a magical solution to those problems seems benighted in much the same way as Brecht’s damning Hitler only to praise Stalin. What Garton Ash fails to see is that the “distinctively European forms of stupidity”—as exemplified by Brecht himself—amount to an attraction to tyrants and a failure to appreciate and defend liberty.
This failure is on view throughout Free World. He writes that “even if it were possible for the United Nations to be composed entirely of crypto-Americas [i.e., democracies], this would be deeply undesirable, on grounds of, so to speak, the biodiversity of world politics—not to mention sheer boredom.” This may well be the most offensive sentence in the book: better, apparently, to have millions living under autocrats’ heels than under democracy, because it makes the UN more interesting for the likes of Timothy Garton Ash. (This is not the only place in the book at which Ash sounds like a farcically self-absorbed star academic out of a David Lodge novel.) Similarly, he sneers—with spectacular unoriginality—that “the recipe for human happiness is mysterious and cannot be purchased at Wal-Mart.” Well, you can certainly get more happiness at Wal-Mart than you could’ve gotten at a food market in Soviet-era Moscow. One could argue, by the same token, that human happiness can’t be engineered by social-democratic nanny states, either—a statement that would at least be relevant in this context, for while the U.S. doesn’t pretend to supply happiness (the founding American idea is that the state stays out of your business, giving you space to find your own happiness), the premise of European social democracy is that government, if it’s intrusive enough, can come up with a recipe that optimizes the happiness of its citizenry.
In his last chapter, Garton Ash, referring to America, asks: will “the free remain indifferent to the misery of the unfree?” Whatever one’s position on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the fact is that thousands of American soldiers in those countries have put their lives on the line precisely because they are determined to bring freedom to the unfree. But, again, he isn’t talking about this; he’s talking about important stuff, like going to high-level conferences and participating in dialogue. By way of dismissing the differences between Western and Islamic cultures, he writes that “to see your daughter raped in front of your eyes by a militia gang is as soul-rending for a Muslim mother as for a Jewish mother.” Perhaps—but it wouldn’t occur to a Jewish parent that the girl should then be murdered for having dishonored the family. (Such honor killings, though now routine in Europe, aren’t a part of Garton Ash’s reality.) Europe, he writes, needs “more cross-cultural knowledge . . . How many non-Muslims know when or what Eid-ul-Fitr [a Muslim holiday] is?” (Don’t worry, Professor: at the present rate, all of Europe will know soon enough.) I would suggest that a more important question for the fate of European democracy is: How many Muslims in Denmark, say, can speak Danish? Among his suggestions is that Europe encourage “the formation of an Arab Union.” He makes no mention of Arab democracy; nor does he explain why a union of corrupt Arab governments would be preferable to a non-united assortment of corrupt Arab governments. Imagining “Europe in 2025 at its possible best,” he pictures it as a “partnership” with Arab countries and Russia that would extend “from Marrakesh, via Cairo, Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Tbilisi, all the way to Vladivostok.” He gushes: “That would not be nothing.” Nope—it would be Eurabia.
“The only things Hitlery would bomb are republicans and anyone who knows the truth about her and is willing to tell it.”
May be so, but I still want to see what she wrote in college, that is still classified, while these leftists were demanding W’s PDBs to be declassified.
Why don’t we have some tricky dicks among us, who know how to do this opposition-research stuff? --for the common good. --for the truth.
It would be fun to learn. --and to know more.
Hillary wouldn't bomb them in response to closing the strait or even in response to bombing Israel. However if she had a personal scandal she needed to cover, then she would bomb them.
It worked.
This is the UK Guardian. It considers the Clintons as non-leftist - sort of centrist, that it can't stand the defence/terrorism stance of them. I remember when Bubba was in the White House, he was damned on an almost daily basis on the Guardian.
To these people, going from Bubba to Dubya is like dropping out of the frying pan into the naked fire.
Good point. I'd love to see a reporter blindside her with questions on live TV about Rose Law Firm, Vince Foster and many other issues. Maybe her head would explode.
I agree, it is easy to see why the Brits lost their empire.
"I'm not sure which is the more ridiculous fantasy - President Hillary, or the amusing idea that the Iranian mullahs need a pretext before they commit murder..."
Secretary of Defense Biden... HAHAHAHAHAHAHA thud.
Thanks for directing us to this article TheMole.
In the near future I will be back to one of these old communist, European areas I grew up in (that really changed to the better) except for the nonsense, even the better members of their society—still believe. Seems to me, they are getting their warped ideas from these Timothy Garton Ash-like guys.
One of the proofs for the correctness of their views was in the past, –they thought-- that these are the ideas the college professors and the intellectual elite believes (besides themselves, my friends) so they must be correct. After all, they are the educated ones, the smart ones, with the communal paternalistic feelings and high-minded plans for others. They grew, out-and-above of the petty, self-interest-directed American mindset, where everything is business. Where Free Enterprise means that you can freely cheat, rob and exploit, without the moral restrains of the society. Society, where the primary rule is that “the stronger dog ……”
I am looking forward to some enlightening conversations over the bbq’s.
LOL
*snrk*
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