It is not poverty, but time on their hands to brood, that has produced all sorts of fanaticisms. Many of the leaders of these fanaticisms have come from wealthy families, like Osama bin Laden today and like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the 19th century. The poor can seldom spare the time or resources for such things.
What have Americans done to arouse such people? We have succeeded. No, our foreign policies have not always been flawless or even always consistent—but neither have anyone else's. Still, it is not what we have done wrong that provokes their wrath. It is what we have done right, leading us to surpass them.
Nothing is easier than to blame those who lead for the problems of those who lag. “Exploitation” theories have flourished around the world, in defiance of mountains of evidence, because they say that the rich are rich because the poor are poor. It is a psychological coup, even when it is economic nonsense.
Too many Americans fall for such ideological visions. Not most, but too many. Even in the wake of the terrible catastrophe of September 11th, and with the prospect of still more such lethal attacks looming ahead, they cannot resist an opportunity to try to be morally one-up on their fellow Americans by suggesting that our misbehavior must have provoked these attacks. They simply cannot bring themselves to confront the reality of deliberate evil.
Two World Wars were launched in the 20th century by countries seeking to find “a place in the sun”—that is, for ego. Rationalistic excuses cannot hide that brutal reality.
Two centuries ago, Edmund Burke said: “There is no safety for honest men except by believing all possible evil of evil men.” If we haven't learned that lesson now, what will it take for us to learn it?
Incidentally, has anyone considered that, if pilots had not been forbidden to carry guns, there might be thousands of Americans still alive today and the World Trade Center still standing?
PANDERING TO THE ANOINTED
In politically correct California, there are two things you must believe in, if you want to be regarded as a decent human being—“open spaces” and “affordable housing.” The fact that these two things contradict each other is of interest only to those who are old-fashioned enough to take logic and evidence seriously.
Economists may talk about how supply and demand determine prices. But, in California, there is not the slightest discussion of the very possibility that reducing the supply of land by taking it off the market drives up the price of the remaining land and the housing built on it.
Here, on the left coast, high prices are considered inexplicable or explicable only by “greed” on the part of landlords. Presumably, other landlords in other places are just nicer people.
One of the reasons housing is not affordable in many parts of California is that there are so many people devoted to keeping it from being built. An absolutely stereotypical specimen of this mind-set is a middle-aged hippie and Berkeley dropout who has devoted himself to “saving” something called “San Bruno Mountain.”
Only if you call a hill 1,300 feet high a mountain does even the word make sense. Moreover this is not some rural Walden. It is a hill next to the baseball park where the San Francisco Giants played for years.
Like other things, this hill can be used for many different purposes. When other people use it for what they want, that is called “destroying” San Bruno. When the Berkeley hippies of the world use it for what they want to, that is called “saving” it.
Now that we know the local language, we can understand why the San Francisco Chronicle lavishes praises on the San Bruno activist “in his black plastic sandals” for saving “his beloved San Bruno Mountain.” Of course, if this really was his mountain—or even hill—there would be no story. What someone does with his own property is of little interest or concern to anyone else.
The reason there is a story is that this hill does not belong to the hippie activist at all. He simply arrogates to himself the right to obstruct other people from building on it, whether by chaining himself to a construction fence, organizing other activists or propagandizing school children who are brought there by their teachers to learn political correctness from a local guru, instead of spending their time on anything so mundane as reading, writing and arithmetic.
Meanwhile, a few miles to the west, there are nearly 1,500 acres of rolling land that San Francisco has acquired from the federal government after a military base was closed there. That is nearly twice the size of Central Park. Surely this could add a vast amount of housing to the city's supply and ease the strains that have everyone wringing his hands over a lack of affordable housing.
Not on your life. No way is this vast stretch of real estate to be allowed to fall into the grubby hands of developers, who would build housing for the unwashed masses. It too has to be preserved for the benefit of the nobler sorts.
One set of these precious people favored by the political powers that be call themselves the San Francisco Film Centre. Note that it is not movies but “film” and that the American way of spelling “center” is not good enough for them.
How did they get onto this land? The San Francisco Chronicle explains: “A seven-member panel of business, community and government leaders, appointed by the Clinton administration, reviews proposals from prospective tenants and decides who gets to occupy the converted historic buildings.”
In other words, the old collectivist way of doing things, which has failed repeatedly on every inhabited continent and among people of every race and creed, is to be used to dispose of this land. The operation is supposed to “achieve financial self-sufficiency by 2013.”
Can you imagine an area twice the size of Central Park taking more than a decade to get out of the red, in a city dying for more housing? Not if it were put on the market and the buyers were free to construct apartment buildings.
If this were just the usual story of political favoritism and corruption, that would be one thing. But this is the deeper corruption of people whose self-indulgence and ego trips are portrayed as some kind of noble concern for higher things.
GREEN BIGOTS VERSUS HUMAN BEINGS
The red-legged frog is only the latest of many supposedly endangered species whose habitats may be kept off-limits to human beings, even if that means stopping the building of much-needed housing. We have grown so used to having the interests of millions of human beings sacrificed for some allegedly endangered species that we no longer stop and think about how outrageous that is.
Too often we even buy the notion that the shrill and self-righteous people who push this stuff are some kind of noble crusaders, thinking only of the higher things, instead of as the selfish and arrogant bigots and bullies that they are.
The essence of bigotry is claiming for yourself rights that you would deny to others. The green bigots who call themselves environmentalists do this all the time. They also lie a lot, as self-anointed idealists often do.
Some species that have been said to be endangered have turned out to be very abundant and other creatures that may in fact be endangered are not species. Frogs are a species, but every conceivable variant of a frog is not a species.
How many people have ever seen a red-legged frog? Or even want to see a red-legged frog? The green bigots may be horrified that there are people who don't have the slightest interest in red-legged frogs. But those people are just as much American citizens as any life-long member of the Sierra Club and are entitled to equal rights under the Constitution. There is neither a legal nor a moral reason to over-ride what they want because the green bigots want something else.
Like others who seek special privileges, the green bigots claim to be speaking for others—“future generations,” for example. But this is just shifting the argument to a different venue, without changing it in the slightest. Those people who don't give a darn about red-legged frogs are going to have future descendants, just as much as the environmental extremists will. What the green bigots really want is for future generations of green bigots to be able to over-ride future gener
ations of other people who do not share their views.
Fuzzy words and apocalyptic visions are stock in trade for the green bigots, who are forever referring to “fragile” environments—but with no definition of “fragile,” much less any evidence to fit a definition. I should be so “fragile” that I could survive thousands of years of earthquakes, forest fires and mountainous glaciers rolling over me.
What some consider to be idealism could more accurately be called self-exaltation. What could be more exalting than to take on the God-like role of adjudicating between animals and people? You cannot be a judge handing down edicts for others unless you are placing yourself above those others. We know how judges are appointed or elected. But who elected the green bigots to play God?
Election is the last thing they have in mind. Instead, they infiltrate coastal commissions, zoning boards and other federal, state and local bureaucracies, from which they can impose their edicts on others, without being accountable for the consequences. A large part of the blame for California's electricity crisis is due to green bigots who have conducted a scorched earth policy against anyone trying to build power-generating plants there.
A new cult of pagan nature worship has sprung up, in which the slightest inconvenience to any toad or bug is enough to call a halt to even the most urgent human needs. A new mythology has been created, in which wildlife can only survive in their original habits. Spotted owls supposedly can live only in “old growth” forests, though there must have been a time when the old growth trees were new growth trees. Surely they have not been there since the dawn of time or even throughout the whole history of spotted owls.
When you see birds nesting in metropolitan skyscrapers, you have to acknowledge that wild creatures do have some adaptability—unless you think these are “old growth” skyscrapers. Species could not have survived the evolutionary changes of the earth if they didn't have some adaptability. But now, everything is to be frozen where it is by the green bigots—and at unlimited costs to others.
Nature worship is fine for those who want it. I have nothing against faith-based organizations. But a theocracy imposing its will on others is something else, even when it is a theocracy of nature-worshippers.
ANOTHER OUTRAGE
Nothing is an outrage when the reigning fad is being non-judgmental. So perhaps it is not surprising that there has been no nationwide chorus of condemnation of Bill Clinton's anti-American speech at Georgetown University. According to the former president, America is “paying a price today” for slavery in the past and for the fact that “native Americans were dispossessed and killed.”
Can you name a country, anywhere in the world, where there has never been slavery? Can you name a country, anywhere in the world, where land has not changed hands as a result of military conquest?
It is a painful commentary on human beings that there are no such countries. But it is hogwash to single out the United States for sins that have afflicted the entire human race.
And to say that Americans are paying a price today because of those sins is grotesque. Nobody in the World Trade Center owned any slaves or killed any Indians. This pushing of collective guilt, inherited from centuries past, is a shameless hustle that insults our intelligence.
All around the world, there are cities that have had different names at different periods of history because they were conquered again and again by different invaders. Istanbul was Constantinople before it was conquered, Bratislava was Pressburg, New York was New Amsterdam—and so on and on.
Just for the record, slavery was abolished throughout Western civilization more than a century before it was abolished in the Islamic world—for it is not completely abolished in the Islamic world to this very moment. But double standards are at the heart of the hustle. Nobody else is going to cough up the money that the hustlers want from the United States.
Clinton wants us to pay for the education of children in other countries because it is “a lot cheaper than going to war.” This kind of talk is considered Deep Stuff by shallow people.
According to Clinton, Americans “have to get rid of our arrogant self-righteousness so that we don't claim for ourselves things we deny to others.” If other people don't have what we have, does that mean that we denied it to them?
Are people around the world to be encouraged to look to us as their sugar daddy, instead of looking to themselves to do the things that have lifted other countries from poverty to prosperity? The whole world was once poorer than today's Third World and there was nobody to give them foreign aid.
We should also forgive Third World debt, according to Clinton.
What this means, in plain English, is that American taxpayers should be lied to when they are told that their money is being lent overseas, because no one should expect the loans to be repaid. It also means that no one should expect adult responsibility from Third World rulers, who live lavishly, build monuments to themselves and stash money in Swiss bank accounts.
The vast sums of money that can be borrowed legitimately from private lenders in international financial markets make it wholly unnecessary for Third World governments to “borrow” from the U.S. government in the first place. The difference is that private borrowing requires adult responsibility and investing the money in something that is going to actually produce some tangible benefits for people other than rulers and bureaucrats.
Not content with playing the slavery card and the conquest card, Clinton went back centuries before there was a United States to regale the Georgetown students with the atrocities of the Crusaders against the Moslems, saying “we are still paying for it.” Were there no atrocities the other way? Or among people on every inhabited continent, for centuries on end? But again, there is a double standard, of which the Blame America First ideology is just one example.
Bill Clinton closed by saying that the issue revolves around “the nature of truth.” Who would have thought that he was an expert on truth? Incidentally, as has often happened, he arrived 45 minutes late, keeping a thousand people waiting. But that was only the beginning of his irresponsibility.
THE BEST OF THE CENTURY
Who was the best leader of the 20th century? My nomination goes to Winston Churchill. If one man ever pulled a whole nation through a crisis which threatened its very existence, that man was Churchill, prime minister of Britain during the dark days of the Nazi blitz in 1940, when London was bombed night after night and a German invasion force was assembled on the other side of the English Channel. Most people did not expect Britain to survive.
It is hard to convey to a new generation today how close Britain came to annihilation and how close Hitler came to becoming master of the whole continent of Europe. Imagine now this monster, with all the immense resources of the continent at his disposal and in control of the huge British navy, while his Japanese allies were in control of the richest natural resources in the conquered countries of Southeast Asia.
How long would the position of the United States have been tenable, with no allies and with the most formidable military forces ever assembled arrayed against us? By now, Americans might be speaking German—except for those of us who would not be speaking at all, because we would have gone up in smoke in Hitler's extermination camps.
This was more than just another war. The Nazi ideology was, as Time magazine put it, “a revolution against the human soul,” conceived by Hitler “in conscious contempt for the life, dignity and freedom of individual man.” Nothing that we could call civilization would have survived the triumph of this barbaric creed, armed with the weapons of modern science.
After an unbroken string of devastating military triumphs—over-running France in a matter of weeks and other countries in a matter of days—the Nazis were finally stopped only by the British refusal to surrender in the face of overwhelming odds.
That was what Churchill will be remembered for. Unlike the French, who declared Paris an open city, rather than see its historic treasures bombed, Churchill said, “It is
better that London should lie in ruins and ashes than that we should surrender.”
The inspiration of this great man not only saved Britain, the disruption of the Nazi timetable for conquest bought time for a woefully unprepared United States to finally begin building up its military defenses. It is enough of a claim to historic greatness for a man to have saved his own country. Churchill may have saved civilization.
After the Nazis and their Japanese allies were finally vanquished, there remained the long and unprecedentedly dangerous Cold War with the Communists internationally. Moreover, within Western democracies themselves, the welfare state and socialism—beautiful in theory and poisonous in practice—were stifling growth and producing double-digit inflation and double-digit unemployment at the same time, with accompanying social degeneration and demoralization.
Two leaders turned this around—Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Britain and President of the United States Ronald Reagan. They triumphed both domestically and internationally over forces that many thought could not be defeated even singly, much less together.
Who would have dreamed that socialist Britain would begin selling whole government-run industries back to private enterprise?
Who would have thought that the death grip of the British labor unions on the economy could be broken?
Ronald Reagan not only turned around the decline of the American economy, he defied the conventional wisdom by basing his foreign policy on a military buildup, designed to force the Soviet Union to change its foreign policy and end the arms race. Reagan even predicted that we were seeing the last days of this evil empire.
Few believed him and many scoffed. But he succeeded where a whole succession of other presidents had failed.
These were clearly the three greatest leaders of this century. It is painful to imagine what the world would be like today without them.
Controversial Essays Page 11