Free Republic

snip... America-bashing is anti-Americanism at its most radical and totalizing. Its goal is not to advise, but to condemn; not to fix, but to destroy. It repudiates every thought of reform in any normal sense; it sees no difference between American liberals and American conservatives; it views every American action, both present and past, as an act of deliberate oppression and systemic exploitation. It is not that America went wrong here or there; it is that it is wrong root and branch. The conviction at the heart of those who engage in it is really quite simple: that America is...

Not long ago, while waiting to meet some friends for dinner, I dropped into a bookstore where I happened to glance through the political bestseller, What's the Matter With Kansas? -- a title borrowed from a once famous article by a once famous editor, William Allen White. I didn't buy the book, nor did I have enough time to read very much of it. But, then, who needs to read very much of any bestseller nowadays? Thanks to the thoughtful tendency of modern publishing houses to restrict themselves to publishing books that can be summed up in a single sentence,...

When 9/11 happened, no one asked me to write an article about it the next day, because no one, outside my immediate circle of friends, had any interest in my opinion. This was fortunate, because I did not need to make a snap judgment about the significance of that fateful morning. Had I rushed my violent first impressions into print, I might have found it difficult to ever get around to having any second thoughts -- second thoughts like the ones that finally came together in the essay "Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology," published in Policy Review a full six months...

Once there was a farm located by a tranquil river. One day a duck from the river bumped into a chicken from the farm, and they immediately fell head over heels in love with each other. Sadly, no one else in the barnyard community could appreciate their romance, and both were mocked by all the other animals. "Ducks and chickens were not meant to fall in love," guffawed the cows and the dogs and the roosters — especially the roosters. Deeply mortified by the ridicule, the duck told his beloved hen, "We will flee these narrow-minded bigots. Come, let us...

America has been in the midst of a culture war for some time and will probably remain so for some time longer. But culture war is not peculiar to this country. Indeed, there have been at least three great culture wars fought in the course of Western history, including one contemporaneous with the rise of the Sophists in ancient Greece, the epoch identified with the French Enlightenment and the German Aufklärung, and our own current battle. The first two ended in disaster for the societies in which they occurred — the outcome of the third is still pending. Each of...

Jennifer Wilbanks, the notorious runaway bride of Duluth, Georgia, was indicted Wednesday on two charges of lying to the police, and could face up to six years in prison. Some, no doubt, will find these indictments to be overly harsh. After all, can't a girl change her mind? Other prospective brides have been known to get cold feet before their weddings, so why should Ms. Wilbanks be so signally punished? Besides, her lying to the police was just the frantic response of a woman caught in an embarrassing pickle — though a pickle of her own making. Who could blame...

1. THE PALESTINIANS' MOMENT OF TRUTH The Palestinian people stand at a critical moment in their history. They can rally behind the efforts of their new leader, Mahmoud Abbas, to bring an end to the Palestinian tradition of terror, or they can continue to give their support to those who are pursuing a fatal and futile fantasy -- a fantasy that has cost the lives of thousands of innocent men, women, and children, both Israelis and Palestinians.             The fantasy in question is the fantasy that one day the so called "Zionist occupation" will end. And the reason it is...

This once useful linguistic distinction has been completely lost in the intellectual discourse of contemporary politics. Lee Harris explains the vital differences between hegemony and empire and why it matters today.The word "hegemony" has become an essential part of the jargon of the anti-American left. Followers of Noam Chomsky, for example, use the word as often as possible. For most of them, hegemony has become a synonym for empire, and its frequent use a badge of intellectual sophistication. Hence the many references to American hegemony in the political discourse of the noveau enlightened: it is a bit like a password...

Everyone who thinks that democracy in Iraq is a good thing, hold up your hand. Now everyone who thinks that interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi should have been soundly defeated in the Iraqi national elections, hold up your hand. Okay -- now how many people who held up their hands to the first question held up their hands for the second question? Few, if any, I would wager. After all, the Americans who were cheering for democracy to work in Iraqi were also cheering for Allawi to win by a landslide. Indeed, for many of us, our hopes for democracy...

Orson Scott Card critically reviews 4 very different authors that try to explain our current situation, highlights some of their best points and comes with some very interesting conclusions. Orson's Observation: For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert.Card's Corollary: There is no subject on which anybody knows everything. I recently read a valuable book called Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History. The back-flap bio of the author, Lee Harris, talked about how he entered Emory University at age fourteen and graduated summa cum laude. Well, I entered BYU at age sixteen and graduated...

It is often said that we are fighting a war of ideas. We are not. We are fighting a war of images, and right now our enemy is winning this war, while we are losing it, and losing it badly. Consider the images that have worked their way into our collective mind since the beginning of April: the images of the massacre at Fallujah; the images of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib; the images of the decapitation of an American civilian. Now compare the overwhelming intensity of these images with the "idea" that the Bush administration is invoking in order...

In his review of Civilization and Its Enemies in the New York Times Book Review, dated April 4, 2004, Philip Bobbitt leaves the unfortunate impression that my book advocates violence as a policy that should be single-mindedly pursued by the United States to the exclusion of all other political considerations. Let me quote the passage in full: "…the shortcomings of Harris's approach are pretty considerable…[t]he successful use of violence, rather the concord with a particular theory of justice, does indeed establish legitimacy, as Harris argues. Violence alone, however, cannot maintain legitimacy. 'The strongest man is never strong enough to be...

<p>The fate of the American mission in Iraq depends on the answer to a simple question: Who is our enemy there?</p> <p>If our enemy is made up of die-hard followers of Saddam Hussein, a handful of Brown Shirt Shi'ites, and/or imported cliques of terrorists, then it may be possible for the Bush administration to eliminate these highly specific toxic elements from the body politic of Iraq; and to eliminate them without evoking general outrage among the ordinary Iraqis whose future we are determined to make brighter.</p>

In my book, Civilization and Its Enemies, I wrote that the West is suffering from forgetfulness. After reading and listening to some of the responses from the Right to Fallujah, I am inclined to believe that I was being an optimist in my assessment. The problem, it is beginning to appear, is not forgetfulness, but denial. It is not that we in the West have forgotten what our enemy is like; it is that we refuse to see what he is like even when it is being shown right before our eyes, as was the case with the atrocities in...

The Bush administration has promised to respond to Fallujah. But how can a civilized nation such as our own respond to what had happened there this week? We cannot do to them what they did to us. They know that, and we now know it too. We cannot dismember bodies, and hang them from telephone lines. We cannot cheer and yell when men who have done nothing to hurt us are butchered like animals. We cannot do to them the things that they have done to us. We cannot pay them back in kind. Yes, we can declare our intention...

Among the people who have generously taken the time and trouble to comment on my book, a few of them appear to be extremely annoyed that I did not criticize America for all the things that it has done wrong — or, at least, for those enormities that are always sure to make the Top Ten list of anyone who has spent even a few hours in a college or junior college American history course. Why didn't I devote a chapter to the atrocities committed in the Philippines after the Spanish-American war — one of the sentimental favorites of the...

If Americans have one collective shortcoming, it is that we have no use for failure. Success alone is what counts for us; and though we are apt to applaud those who have given their best to come in at second or third place, we all tend to shrink back from complete and abject failure. That is why, whenever a President looks around for men to be by his side, to guide him and to give him counsel, he will look to those who have been successful at everything that they have put their hand to. It is one of our...

The vicious circle of weakness dominating European thought is countered by the virtuous circle of strength that George W. Bush has expressed. I am not a European. Lee Harris argued, "The world changed on Sunday," March 14, with the Spanish elections, but the real problem is that Europe failed to change. If Europe cannot rouse itself to fight back, after it has been attacked on its own soil, we may conclude that the cowardice we saw after 9-11 was not merely the expression of anti-Americanism and opportunism, but of a deeper paralysis, which is now in its terminal stage. And...

To begin with, President Bush should invite John Kerry to the White House for a confidential discussion on how to bring the world wide threat of terrorism to an end. Kerry will have no choice but to accept the invitation; and the press will be fed tips from high governmental officials that the meeting between the two men will have the profoundest historical consequence. Bush will have earlier issued a statement that, at this dangerous juncture in history, there can be no hint of a partisan divide on our nations' approach to the problem of terrorism; and that it is...

"This is the culture in which we live… The world is ruled by force. The only way we can put a permanent end to terrorism is to stop participating in it… This is the first time the guns have been pointed the other way." – Noam Chomsky, discussing the events of 9/11/01. Noam Chomsky has endorsed, however reluctantly, John Kerry. This is an endorsement from the man who, on hearing about 9/11, attempted to put it in perspective for the American people by arguing that President Clinton had murdered many times more people in his response to the Al Qaeda...