Quotulatiousness

March 26, 2015

Tsar Vladimir is merely following the pattern of Philip of Macedon and Napoleon

Filed under: Europe, History, Russia — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

When he’s not droning on about domestic politics, Victor Davis Hanson has interesting historical patterns to point out:

Nothing that Vladimir Putin has done in gobbling up territories of the former Soviet Union is new. In fact, he simply apes every tyrant’s time-honored four-step plan of aggression.

From Philip of Macedon to Napoleon, aggressors did not necessarily have a grand timetable for creating an empire. Instead, they went at it ad hoc. They took as much as they could at any given time; then backed away for a bit, if they sensed strong opposition was building — only to go back on the offensive when vigilance waned.

Hitler did not realistically believe in 1936 that he would within five years create an empire from the Atlantic to the Volga. Instead, he started out by moving incrementally — in the Rhineland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia — testing where he might grab land without a war, always both surprised at the ease of his success and full of contempt for the appeasers who had so empowered him.

So too Putin. Once the Obama administration had reset the mild punishments of the Bush administration for carving out parts of Ossetia, Putin went back on the move. Obama’s reset was a green light for Putin. Who in the real world of serious diplomacy shows up in Geneva with a red plastic toy reset button, complete with a mistranslated Russian label? When Putin soon sized up the Obama administration’s appeasement around the globe — from fake red lines for Syria, to a scramble out of Iraq, to chaos in Libya — he moved into Crimea. And then he waited.

Western sermons followed; outrage grew. Then the Western hysterics predictably passed, as popular attention went back to the Kardashians and Miley Cyrus’s metamorphosis from Disney girl to vamp. After a bit of digestion, Putin was ready for his next Anschluss. He repeated the formula in Ukraine: a persecuted Russian-speaking minority, an anti-Russian illiberal government, civil unrest, denial of a just and much-needed new plebiscite, a need for paramilitaries to help out their brethren, a Russian army standing nearby just in case, a few bombers buzzing the West, and magnanimous promises to leave crumbs for the victims.

Adolf Hitler in World War 1 I Portrait

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: — Nicholas @ 03:00

Published on 23 Mar 2015

Adolf Hitler later said about his experience on the Western Front that it was the happiest time of his life. His time on the front and at home influenced his understanding of society and nation, the military gave his life structure for the first time in his life. Indy tells you everything about the early life of the man who later would become the Führer.

The moral superiority of those who point out things we should feel guilty about

Filed under: Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Theodore Dalrymple on those snooty types who can spot at great distances things for which “we” (meaning you and me, but not the speaker) need to admit our culpability:

Self-blame is no doubt salutary when one is truly blameworthy, but there is also a kind of self-blame that is exaggerated, insincere, grandiose, and exhibitionistic. It is also abstract and collective rather than individual; it is the kind of self-blame that intellectuals specialize in expressing on others’ behalf and which requires no painful or difficult personal reform or change.

Whenever anything terrible happens, or rather is done, in the world, “we” are somehow to blame for it, not the merely apparent perpetrators. The root cause is always in us, the us in question being our biological, cultural, or political ancestors, but never me in particular. We are responsible, but I am not. We have done something to make them behave badly, and if it were not for us the world would be a peaceful, happy place. And to be ultimately responsible for all the evil in the world is at least flattering to one’s sense of self-importance, the defense of which motivates an important part of many people’s intellectual activity.

The kind of guilt I have described is designed to demonstrate the superior moral sensibility of those who express it. “I am not like the mass,” that person tells himself, “who see only appearances. I, by contrast, make no hasty censorious judgments and suffer no vulgar prejudices, and see through to the moral reality of things with my gimlet or X-ray intellect.” And in the process, he displays his superiority for others of like mind to see and approve; for they are the Brahmin caste of moral philosophy to which he wants to belong.

QotD: Picking sides in historical struggles

Filed under: History, Liberty, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

All laws and regulations have unforeseen consequences. That usually means unintended damage, but there’s no law of history that says every unplanned outcome is pernicious.

If you’re an advocate of a free society — one in which all arrangements are voluntary and there is the least coercive interference from governments or other thugs — history will present you with an unending series of conundrums. Whom do you side with in the Protestant Reformation, for example? The Catholic Church banned books and tortured scholars, and their official structure is one of hierarchy and authority. Easy enemy, right? Clear-cut bad guy. But the Church had kept the State in check for centuries — and vice versa, permitting seeds of freedom to root and flourish in the gaps between power centers. Whereas the Protestant states tended to be more authoritarian than the Catholic ones, with Luther and Calvin (not to mention the Anglicans) advocating orthodoxy through force. There’s a reason all those Northern princes embraced the Reformation: they wanted a cozier partnership of church and state.

This is certainly not the history I was taught in my Protestant private schools.

Similarly, most of us were schooled to side with the Union in the Civil War, to see Lincoln as a savior and the Confederacy as pure evil. But as much as the war may have resulted, however accidentally, in emancipating slaves, it also obliterated civil liberties, centralized power, strengthened central banking and fiat currencies and — to borrow from Jeffrey Rogers Hummel’s great book title — enslaved free men.

“Father Abraham,” as the pietists called him after his assassination, was a tyrant whose primary goal was always what he actually achieved: central power over an involuntary union. Recasting this guy as an abolitionist hero is one of the many perverse legacies of America’s official history. But it’s a mistake to simply reverse the Establishment’s verdict and claim that the Confederacy was heroic. Plenty of Johnny Rebs were fighting a righteous battle against what they rightly deemed to be foreign invaders, but even if you ignore the little problem of the South’s “peculiar institution,” the Confederate government was no more liberal than its Northern rival. “While the Civil War saw the triumph in the North of Republican neo-mercantilism,” writes Hummel, “it saw the emergence in the South of full-blown State socialism.”

Reading history without taking sides may fit some scholarly ideal (actually, it seems to be a journalistic ideal created by the Progressive Movement to masquerade their views as the only unbiased ones), but it is not a realistic option. We cannot do value-free history. If we try, we instead hide or repress our biases, which makes them a greater threat to intellectual integrity.

Neither can we say, “a plague on both their houses,” and retreat to the realm of pure theory, libertarian or otherwise. We have to live in the real world, and even if we are not activists or revolutionaries, the same intellectual integrity that must reject “neutrality” also requires that we occasionally explore the question of second-best or least-evil options.

BK Marcus, “When evil institutions do good things”, Libertarian Standard, 2014-06-12.

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