When my editor told me that I could write about anything I wanted in my first column so long as it was Chardonnay, I thought briefly about killing her. In the years since Chardonnay has become a virtual brand name I’ve grown sick to death of hearing my waiter say, “We have a nice Chardonnay”. The “house” chard in most restaurants usually tastes like some laboratory synthesis of lemon and sugar. If on the other hand, you order off the top of the list, you may get something that tastes like five pounds of melted butter churned in fresh-cut oak.
Jay McInerney, Bacchus & Me: Adventures in the Wine Cellar, 2002.
March 2, 2025
QotD: Chardonnay
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February 9, 2025
A “certain niche Canadian’s” prophetic look at Western demography
Mark Steyn reminds us that it’s twenty years since he published America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, which has become more and more accurate every year:
~As some readers may be aware, next year marks the twentieth anniversary of a certain “niche Canadian”‘s boffo international bestseller on demography. So the other day I was musing on whether it was too soon to mark the occasion — only to find I’d been beaten to the punch by the Nigerian media bigfoot Azu Ishiekwene:
It’s nearly 20 years since Mark Steyn wrote a non-fiction book, America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It.
Steyn, a Canadian newspaper columnist, could not have known that the kicker of this book title, which extolled America as the last bastion of civilisation as we know it, would become the metaphor for a wrecking ball.
Steyn thought demographic shifts, cultural decline, and Islam would ruin Western civilisation. The only redeeming grace was American exceptionalism. Nineteen years after his book, America Alone is remembered not for the threats Steyn feared or the grace of American exceptionalism but for an erratic president almost alone in his insanity.
The joke is on Steyn.
Oh, well. It was good while it lasted — which wasn’t as long as it should have, thanks to the dirty stinkin’ rotten corrupt American “justice” system (see below).
~But I thank Mr Ishiekwene for reminding me of the twin theses of my book: on the one hand, “demographic shifts, cultural decline, and Islam” and, on the other, “American exceptionalism”. The first half is undeniable: At one point last year, there were no Anglo-Celtic heads of government anywhere in the British Isles except for Northern Ireland. Nobody even talks about “demographic shifts”, with even “conservative” politicians preferring to focus on “British values” or “French values” or “[Your Country Here] values”, even as those “values”, not least freedom of speech, are remorselessly surrendered. The UK’s “Deputy Prime Minister”, Angela Rayner, is proposing as the state’s reaction to the Southport stabbings, about which the most intemperate Tweeters were less inaccurate than the state propaganda, to restrict free expression even further. Islam? In Britain, Germany, France, the Netherlands, we would rather our children be stabbed and gang-raped than do anything about it, especially if it risks being damned as “Islamophobic”. The delightful Ms Rayner, who once boasted about flashing her soi-disant “ginger growler” across the Commons to Boris Johnson at Question Time, will be keeping it under wraps in the years ahead.
~As for the second part of my book’s arguments — “American exceptionalism” — well, it’s been a rough twenty years. But, to cast Azu Mr Ishiekwene’s contempt for an “an erratic president almost alone in his insanity” in a more generous light, the last three weeks have been a useful reminder that America is still different — or, at any rate, retains the capacity to be different. In his first days in office Trump 47 yanked the US from the World “Health” Organisation and the Paris “climate” accord and the UN “Human Rights” Council. If I have been insufficient in my praise for this energy, it is only because I held out hopes that a man “alone in his insanity” might have simply nuked the WHO. But, such disappointments aside, in Britain (and in the EU it has yet to leave in any meaningful sense), no such decisive acts in the here-and-now can even be contemplated.
And just because I’ve been including a fair bit of USAID-related stuff this week, he comments on Elon Musk’s epic sidequests investigations into US government waste and corruption:
~That’s the good news — and it’s very heartening. The bad news is that almost everything the national government (it is no longer really “federal”) of the United States touches is a racket.
The United States Agency for International Development is so-called in order that gullible rubes who listen to NPR think that it’s something to do with helping starving children in Africa. The cynical rubes who follow Conservative Inc think it’s something to do with helping African dictators’ Swiss bank accounts and endlessly regurgitate the old line about “international aid” taking money from poor people in rich countries to give to rich people in poor countries. But this is the cynicism of the terminally naïve and does a great injustice to the average blood-drenched Somali warlord. As Elon Musk has pointed out, ninety per cent of USAid funds are disbursed in the Washington, DC area. Opponents of that line say, ah, yes, but that’s misleading because some of it then gets passed on outside the Beltway eventually to reach some emaciated Congolese laddie.
Well, I would doubt it. There is no legitimate reason for Bill Kristol and Mona Charen to be receiving any funds from an agency for “international development” — and they surely know it. The least we should expect from them is that they come by their Never Trumpery honestly.
But I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that that 90-10 ratio is pretty standard. The US armed forces account for forty per cent of the planet’s total military spending. Does ninety per cent of that also get disbursed in the District of Columbia? On Thoroughly Modern Milley’s ribbon budget? It’s as good an explanation as any for the failure to win anything since VJ Day. The rube right’s antipathy to foreigners shouldn’t blind us to the fact that the overwhelming majority of the corruption is domestic — and it’s a very bipartisan sewer.
So I wish Trump, Musk et al the best of luck. But, notwithstanding that every rinky-dink District Court judge seems to be labouring under the misapprehension that he’s head of the executive branch of government, Trump has spent the last three weeks doing things. There is no sign that that is even possible in the rest of the west, where the Dutch model seems to prevail: Geert Wilders wins the election, but then gets neutered.
So, in a sense, Azu Ishiekwene is right. There is a yawning chasm between Trump and the poseur attitude-flaunting rest of the west. And yet Mr Ishiekwene is wrong on this: an erratic president is not almost alone in his insanity. In case you haven’t noticed, Panama won’t be renewing its Chinese deal on the Belt & Road Initiative, and El Salvador is happy to gaol anybody Trump sends them. It turns out that the quickest way to solve any international dispute is to threaten the recalcitrant with twenty-five per cent tariffs starting at midnight. If the forty-seventh president doesn’t seem interested in “winning hearts and minds”, it’s because he’s found something more effective.
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QotD: Rosé Wine
Jay McInerney, Bacchus & Me: Adventures in the Wine Cellar, 2002.
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January 30, 2025
QotD: Michael Moore
But most folks are nicer than that.
And so you can’t help noticing that, for a champion of the little guy, he goes to an awful lot of time and effort to make the little guy look like a chump. Moore has no interest in digging deep into his subjects when all the fun’s to be had on the surface of American life — the squeaky receptionists, the bored security guards, the bland PR women, the squaresville company guy in the suit, the State Police trooper with the infelicitous phrasing, the bozo in the pool hall … His vision of America as a wasteland of gun kooks, conspiracy theorists and perky brain-fried mall clerks will doubtless have them rolling in the aisles in Paris this weekend. In my corner of New Hampshire, there were only four other moviegoers in the theater. But Moore, a great favorite with the BBC, now does his shtick with an eye to the non-American market.
Mark Steyn, “Bowling for Columbine”, Steyn Online, 2002-11-30.
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January 18, 2025
QotD: On Auguste Rodin’s Fallen Caryatid
“For three thousand years architects designed buildings with columns shaped as female figures. At last Rodin pointed out that this was work too heavy for a girl. He didn’t say, ‘Look, you jerks, if you must do this, make it a brawny male figure’. No, he showed it. This poor little caryatid has fallen under the load. She’s a good girl — look at her face. Serious, unhappy at her failure, not blaming anyone, not even the gods … and still trying to shoulder her load, after she’s crumpled under it.
“But she’s more than good art denouncing bad art; she’s a symbol for every woman who ever shouldered a load too heavy. But not alone women — this symbol means every man and woman who ever sweated out life in uncomplaining fortitude, until they crumpled under their loads. It’s courage, […] and victory.”
“‘Victory’?”
“Victory in defeat; there is none higher. She didn’t give up […] she’s still trying to lift that stone after it has crushed her. She’s a father working while cancer eats away his insides, to bring home one more pay check. She’s a twelve-year old trying to mother her brothers and sisters because Mama had to go to Heaven. She’s a switchboard operator sticking to her post while smoke chokes her and fire cuts off her escape. She’s all the unsung heroes who couldn’t make it but never quit.
Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land, 1961.
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January 13, 2025
The “Thucydides Trap”
At History Does You, Secretary of Defense Rock provides a handy explanation of the term “the Thucydides Trap”:
In the world of international relations, few concepts have captured as much attention — and sparked as much debate — as the “Thucydides Trap”. Brought to prominence by Harvard political scientist Graham Allison, the term suggests that conflict is almost inevitable when a rising power threatens to displace an established one, a dynamic often invoked to frame the strategic rivalry between the United States and China. Lauded as a National Bestseller and praised by figures like Henry Kissinger and Joe Biden, Allison’s Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? has become a staple of policy discussions and academic syllabi. Yet beneath the widespread acclaim lies a deeply flawed analysis, one that risks oversimplifying history and perpetuating a fatalistic narrative that could shape policy in dangerous ways. Far from an inescapable destiny, the lessons of history and the nuances of modern geopolitics suggest that the so-called “trap” may be more myth than inevitability.
The term “Thucydides Trap” is derived from a passage in the ancient Greek historian Thucydides’ work History of the Peloponnesian War, where he explained the causes of the conflict between Athens (the rising power) and Sparta (the ruling power) in the 4th century BC. Thucydides famously wrote
It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.
Allison defines the “Thucydides Trap” as “the severe structural stress caused when a rising power threatens to upend a ruling one”.1 More articles by Allison using this term previously appeared in Foreign Policy and The Atlantic. The book, published in 2017, was a huge hit, being named a notable book of the year by the New York Times and Financial Times while also receiving widespread bipartisan acclaim from current and past policymakers. Historian Niall Ferguson described it as a “must-read in Washington and Beijing”.2 Senator Sam Nunn wrote, “If any book can stop a World War, it is this one”.3 A brief search on Google Scholar reveals the term “Thucydides Trap” has been cited or used nearly 19,000 times. In 2015, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull even publicly urged President Xi and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang to avoid “falling into the Thucydides Trap”.4 One analyst observed that the term had become the “new cachet as a sage of U.S.-China relations”.5 The term has become so prominent that it is almost guaranteed to appear in any introductory international politics course when discussing U.S.-China relations.
Allison wrote in his essay “The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. and China Headed for War?” in The Atlantic published in 2015, “On the current trajectory, war between the United States and China in the decades ahead is not just possible, but much more likely than recognized at the moment” forewarning, “judging by the historical record, war is more likely than not”.6 A straightforward analysis of the 16 cases in the book and previous essays might indicate that, based on historical precedent, there is approximately a 75 percent likelihood of the United States and China engaging in war within the next several decades. Adding the additional cases from the Thucydides Trap Website would still leave a 66 percent chance, more likely than not, that two nuclear-armed superpowers will go to war with one another, a horrifying and unprecedented proposition.7
With such alarm, it’s no surprise that the concept gained such widespread attention. The term is simple to understand and in under 300 pages, Allison delivers a sweeping historical narrative, drawing striking parallels between events from ancient Greece to the present day.8 International Relations as a field often struggles to break through in the public discourse, but Destined for War broke through, making a broad impact on academic and popular discourse.
1. Graham Allison, Destined For War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), 29.
2. Ibid., iii.
3. Ibid., vi.
4. Quoted by Alan Greeley Misenheimer, Thucydides’ Other “Traps”: The United States, China, and the Prospect of “Inevitable” War (Washington: National Defense University, 2019), 8.
5. Misenheiemer, 1.
6. “Thucydides’s Trap Case File” Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School, accessed December 31, 2024
7. Graham Allison, “The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. and China Headed for War?” The Atlantic, September 24, 2015.
8. Misenheimer details what Thucydides actually said about the origins of the Peloponnesian War, 10-17.
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January 5, 2025
German democracy hanging by a thread after vicious attacks by Elon Musk
German politicians are growing ever more desperate as evildoers like Elon Musk continue to undermine the political stage by calling for antidemocratic things like free speech:
Alice Weidel, the federal leader of Germany’s “far-right” AfD, has approximately the same policy prescriptions as Donald Trump. Chiefly they are to return to the bourgeois habits that used to make free market states prosperous. But she subscribes to these in mainland Europe, which has been easily spooked since the Nazis offered policies that were not bourgeois.
“Humankind cannot bear very much reality,” as the far-right poet, T. S. Eliot, wrote in Burnt Norton, now the better part of a century ago. (He was arguably plagiarizing the far-right German poet, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.)
One could recommend that my readers look her up on YouBoob, or better search for print, and form their own opinion on this Frau Weidel. (Who speaks English, and Chinese, fluently.)
Compare her, for instance, to the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, who rose to power as the prosecutor protecting Muslim “grooming gangs”, and now puts people in gaol who protest on behalf of their rape and murder victims. The idea that Mr Starmer should have a rôle in the government of a civilized country, is as absurd as the idea that the 14-year-old narcissist who has ruled Canada, or the 82-year-old senescent who has ruled the United States, are respectable members of the human race.
And closer to the scene of crisis, eugyppius reports on the latest Muskian outrage against peace-loving German politicians:
For days, the German establishment have been in an absolute uproar over Elon Musk’s profoundly antidemocratic election interference. You cannot turn on the television or open any newspaper without enduring all manner of wailing about the grave danger Musk poses to German democracy.
The naive and the simpleminded will say that all of this is crazy and that the Federal Republic has become an open-air insane asylum – a strange playground of political hysterics the likes of which the Western world has never seen before. That is because they don’t understand what’s at stake here. Musk did not just say the odd nice thing about Alternative für Deutschland, oh no. He also said various German politicians were fools and traitors, he called for resignations and he published an untoward newspaper editorial. It is amazing the German democracy has not yet collapsed in the face of this unrelenting campaign, and still the absolute madman shows no signs of stopping.
Elon Musk’s frontal assault on the German constitution began on 7 November, when he tweeted four antidemocratic words – “Olaf ist ein Narr” (“Olaf [Scholz] is a fool”) – in response to news that the German government had collapsed. Three days later, he tweeted the same thing about Green Economics Minister and chancellor candidate Robert Habeck, after Habeck gave a speech calling for widespread internet censorship.
Thereafter, all was quiet for a time. German democrats allowed themselves to hope these were but isolated indiscretions and that Musk would allow them to get back to their arcane business of promoting feminism abroad, changing the weather and eliminating “the extreme right”. Lamentably, the peace turned out to be a false one. Musk renewed his campaign against democracy with a vengeance on 20 December, tweeting in the wake of the Magdeburg Christmas market attack that “Scholz should resign immediately” and that he is an “incompetent fool”. That very same day, Musk tweeted for the first time that “Only the AfD can save Germany”, a sentiment he repeated also on 21 December and on 22 December, delighted at the nationwide freakout his casual remarks had incited.
In the course of this freakout, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier hinted darkly that “outside influence” constitutes “a danger for democracy”:
Outside influence is a danger for democracy – whether it is covert, as was recently apparent in the elections in Romania, or open and blatant, as is currently being practised with particular intensity on the platform X. I strongly oppose all external attempts at influence. The decision on the election is made solely by the eligible citizens in Germany.
The indefatigable Naomi Seibt, who appears to be Musk’s primary informant about German politics, brought these remarks to the evil fascist billionaire’s attention, and he promptly responded that “Steinmeier is an anti-democratic tyrant”. Musk then delivered his coup-de-grace the next day, with an editorial in Welt am Sonntag – the most devastating piece of political prose that Germany has witnessed since Hitler penned Mein Kampf.
By my count, Musk may have directed as many as 700 words against the noble if surprisingly rickety edifice of German democracy – an assault few political systems could withstand. The self-appointed guardians of our liberal order accordingly declared a five-alarm fire, and they have betaken themselves to their keyboards to defend what remains of our free and eminently democratic political system, where anybody can say anything he likes and vote for any party he wishes, so long as what he likes and those for whom he votes have nothing to do with major political parties supported by millions of Germans like Alternative für Deutschland.
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December 25, 2024
Drinker’s Christmas Crackers – It’s a Wonderful Life
The Critical Drinker
Published 17 Dec 2020Join me as I review what may be the ultimate Christmas movie — the 1946 classic starring James Stewart and Donna Reed … It’s a Wonderful Life.
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December 22, 2024
QotD: “Sparta Is Terrible and You Are Terrible for Liking Sparta”
In the immediate moment of August, 2019 I opted to write the series – as I note at the beginning – in response to two dueling articles in TNR and a subsequent (now lost to the ages and only imperfectly preserved by WordPress’ tweet embedding function) Twitter debate between Nick Burns (the author of the pro-Sparta side of that duel) and myself. In practice however the basic shape of this critique had been brewing for a lot longer; it formed out of my own frustrations with seeing how Sparta was frequently taught to undergraduates: students tended to be given Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus (or had it described to them) with very little in the way of useful apparatus to either question his statements or – perhaps more importantly – extrapolate out the necessary conclusions if those statements were accepted. Students tended to walk away with a hazy, utopian feel about Sparta, rather than anything that resembled either of the two main scholarly “camps” about the polis (which we’ll return to in a moment).
That hazy vision in turn was continually reflected and reified in the popular image of Sparta – precisely the version of Sparta that Nick Burns was mobilizing in his essay. That’s no surprise, as the Sparta of the undergraduate material becomes what is taught when those undergrads become high school teachers, which in turn becomes the Sparta that shows up in the works of Frank Miller, Steven Pressfield and Zack Snyder. It is a reading of the sources that is at once both gullible and incomplete, accepting all of the praise without for a moment thinking about the implications; for the sake of simplicity I’m going to refer to this vision of Sparta subsequently as the “Pressfield camp”, after Steven Pressfield, the author of Gates of Fire (1998). It has always been striking to me that for everything we are told about Spartan values and society, the actual spartiates would have despised nearly all of their boosters with sole exception of the praise they got from southern enslaver-planter aristocrats in the pre-Civil War United States. If there is one thing I wish I had emphasized more in “This. Isn’t. Sparta.” it would have been to tell the average “Sparta bro” that the Spartans would have held him in contempt.
And so for years I regularly joked with colleagues that I needed to make a syllabus for a course simply entitled, “Sparta Is Terrible and You Are Terrible for Liking Sparta”. Consequently the TNR essays galvanized an effort to lay out what in my head I had framed as “The Indictment Against Sparta”. The series was thus intended to be set against the general public hagiography of Sparta and its intended audience was what I’ve heard termed the “Sparta Bro” – the person for whom the Spartans represent a positive example (indeed, often the pinnacle) of masculine achievement, often explicitly connected to roles in law enforcement, military service and physical fitness (the regularity with which that last thing is included is striking and suggests to me the profound unseriousness of the argument). It was, of course, not intended to make a meaningful contribution to debates within the scholarship on Sparta; that’s been going on a long time, the questions by now are very technical and so all I was doing was selecting the answers I find most persuasive from the last several decades of it (evidently I am willing to draw somewhat further back than some). In that light, I think the series holds up fairly well, though there are some critiques I want to address.
One thing I will say, not that this critique has ever been made, but had I known that fellow UNC-alum Sarah E. Bond had written a very good essay for Eidolon entitled “This is Not Sparta: Why the Modern Romance With Sparta is a Bad One” (2018), I would have tried to come up with a different title for the series to avoid how uncomfortably close I think the two titles land to each other. I might have gone back to my first draft title of “The Indictment Against Sparta” though I suspect the gravitational pull that led to Bond’s title would have pulled in mine as well. In any case, Sarah’s essay takes a different route than mine (with more focus on reception) and is well worth reading.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Retrospective”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-08-19.
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December 14, 2024
Tulsi Gabbard as the Director of National Intelligence
To the left, Gabbard is widely criticized as some sort of Russian pawn, while to many on the right she’s unacceptable as a former Democrat and “girlboss”. Despite this, J.D. Tuccille says President-elect Donald Trump seems quite confident that she’s the right person for the job:
Tulsi Gabbard speaks at the “People’s Rally” in Washington DC on 17 November, 2016.
Photo by Lorie Shaull via Wikimedia Commons.
United States President-elect Donald Trump is standing behind Tulsi Gabbard, his pick to be director of national intelligence. Like several of Trump’s nominees, former Democratic congresswoman Gabbard is controversial in D.C.-insider circles, and understandably so; she’s skeptical of the political establishment, often criticizes foreign policy and was apparently subject to surveillance and put on a terrorist watch list because of her dissident ways. In other words, she’s a rather promising nominee for an incoming administration that wants to completely revamp government institutions that desperately need reform.
Asked this week by NBC’s Kristen Welker if he has confidence in Gabbard despite objections raised in certain circles to her past actions and positions, Trump responded, “I do. I mean, she’s a very respected person.”
Trump was specifically asked about two meetings Gabbard had in 2017 with then-Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Now in exile, al-Assad and his relationships with American politicians shouldn’t be much of a worry anymore, but he plays a part in the official panic over Gabbard’s views on foreign policy.
In 2019, former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton famously called Gabbard a “Russian asset“. Gabbard, a veteran of the Iraq war, aroused Clinton’s ire with her anti-interventionism in foreign policy matters and criticism of the political establishment and its hawkishness during the course of a short-lived campaign for her party’s presidential nomination.
“There are brutal dictators in the world. Assad of Syria is one of them. That does not mean the U.S. should be waging regime-change wars around the world,” Gabbard told CNN in early 2019. Her long-standing fears of Islamist extremism led her to consider al-Assad a less-bad alternative to a potential fundamentalist regime.
Gabbard returned Clinton’s slight by calling her “the queen of warmongers” and the “embodiment of corruption”. It’s unsurprising that the two no longer share a political party.
Gabbard’s dissent from establishment orthodoxy doesn’t stop at military matters. In 2020, she joined with libertarian-leaning Republican Thomas Massie, from Kentucky, to call on the U.S. government to cease its persecution of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Assange ran afoul of the U.S. government when he published leaked documents revealing embarrassing details about official misconduct in Iraq and elsewhere.
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December 12, 2024
QotD: The “natural cycle” of empire
Arguably the evolution of the British Empire into a Commonwealth of 70-odd self-governing nations, many of them with stable democratic governments, who can all get together and play cricket and have Commonwealth Games (and impose sanctions and suspensions on undemocratic members): cannot be considered much of a “collapse” when compared to say the Inca or Aztec civilisations. Nor can post Medieval Europe be considered a “collapsed” version. Even Rome left a series of successor states across Europe – some successful and some not. (Though there was clearly a collapse of economics and general living standards in these successor states.) The fact that the Roman Empire survived in various forms both East – Byzantium – and west – Holy Roman Empire, Catholic Church, Christendom, etc – would also argue somewhat against total collapse. Still the idea has been popular with both publishers and readers.
Yet the “natural cycle” theory has been revisited recently by economic historians in such appalling works on “Imperialism and Collapse”, as The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. [That’s the one where the Paul Kennedy explained how US power “has been declining relatively faster than Russia’s over the last few decades” (p.665) – just before the Berlin Wall came down.]
Nigel Davies, “The Empires of Britain and the United States – Toying with Historical Analogy”, rethinking history, 2009-01-10.
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December 11, 2024
QotD: Simon Leys on George Orwell
What Leys wrote in 1984 in a short book about George Orwell might just as well have been written about him: “In contrast to certified specialists and senior academics, he saw the evidence in front of his eyes; in contrast to wily politicians and fashionable intellectuals, he was not afraid to give it a name; and in contrast to the sociologists and political scientists, he knew how to spell it out in understandable language.”
Leys drew a distinction between simplicity and simplification: Orwell had the first without indulgence in the second. Again, the same might be said of Leys — who, of course, like Orwell, had taken a pseudonym, and with whose work there were many parallels in his own.
But immense as was Leys’s achievement in destroying the ridiculous illusions of Western intellectuals, as Orwell had tried to do before him, it was a task thrust upon him by circumstance rather than one that he would have chosen for himself. He was by nature an aesthete and a man of letters, and I confess that great was my surprise (and pleasurable awe) when I discovered that he was, in addition to being a great sinologist, a great literary essayist.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Rare and Common Sense”, First Things, 2017-11.
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December 5, 2024
QotD: Oscar Wilde
H.L. Mencken, “Portrait of a Tragic Comedian”, The Smart Set, 1916-09.
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November 26, 2024
Orwell is more relevant now than at any time since his death
I’m delighted to find that Andrew Doyle shares my preference for Orwell the essayist over Orwell the novelist:
It is not without justification that Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) have become the keystones of George Orwell’s legacy. Personally, I’ve always favoured his essays, more often quoted than read in full. I recently wrote an article about his essays for the Washington Post, focusing on their relevance to today’s febrile political climate. You can read the article here. I would draw particular attention to the multitude of comments from left-wing readers who are apparently outraged at my argument (actually, Orwell’s argument) that authoritarianism is not specific to any one political tribe. They seem oddly determined to prove the point.
Orwell is unrivalled on the topic of the human instinct for oppressive behaviour, but his essays are far more wide-ranging than that. In these little masterworks, one senses a great thinker testing his own theses, forever fluctuating, refining his views in the very act of writing. The essays span the last two decades of his life, offering us the most direct possible insight into this unique mind.
[…]
I find Orwell’s disquisitions on literature to be among his most rewarding. “All art is propaganda”, he declares in his extended piece on Charles Dickens (1940) [link]. This conviction, flawed as is it, accounts for his determination to focus less on Dickens’s literary merits and more on his class consciousness, which is found wanting. Even better is Orwell’s rebuttal to Tolstoy’s strangely literal-minded reading of Shakespeare (1947’s “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool” [link]), which is so rhetorically deft that it seems to settle the matter for good.
Another impressive essay, “Inside the Whale” (1940) [link], opens with a glowing assessment of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1935) but soon broadens its range to cover many contemporary novelists and their approach to social commentary. The title is a reference to Miller’s remarks on the Biblical tale of Jonah, suggesting that life inside the whale has much to recommend it. Orwell puts it this way:
There you are, in the dark, cushioned space that exactly fits you, with yards of blubber between yourself and reality, able to keep up an attitude of the completest indifference, no matter what happens.
Orwell invites us to imagine that the whale is transparent, and so writers of Miller’s ilk may snuggle contentedly within, observing without interacting, recording snapshots of the world as it bounces by. This kind of inaction is anathema to Orwell, whose every written word seems to be driving towards the enactment of social change.
Orwell’s essays often serve as a cudgel to batter his detractors. He dislikes homosexuals, or those “fashionable pansies” who lack the masculine vigour to take up arms in defence of their country. He displays a similar lack of patience for the imperialistic middle-class “Blimps” and the anti-patriotic left-wing intelligentsia, or indeed anyone who adheres slavishly to any given political ideology. His work bears much of the stamp of the old left; that mix of social conservatism and economic leftism that we see most powerfully expressed in his 1941 essay “The Lion and the Unicorn” [link]. Bad writing is also a recurring bugbear; Orwell’s loathing of cliché and “ready-made metaphors” is one of the reasons his own prose style is so effervescent.
[…]
When Orwell pessimistically refers to “the remaining years of free speech”, one cannot help but be reminded of the increasingly authoritarian tendencies of today’s British government. He expresses irritation that more writers are not wielding their pens in the service of improving society. His own work, by contrast, is what he would term “constructive”, profoundly moral, and purposefully crafted in the hope of actuating real-world change. While other writers resigned themselves to a life inside the whale, Orwell was determined to cut his way out.
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November 14, 2024
Germans are perfectly free to post anything to the internet as long as it doesn’t criticize politicians
Once again, eugyppius helpfully illustrates the broad range of freedoms German citizens enjoy in their online activities and the totally reasonable and not-at-all-insane restrictions to those rights:
It’s been a while since I last wrote about the highly advanced democratic freedoms that we enjoy in Germany. Here in the Federal Republic, the police will never fine you or harass you or raid your house for criticising the government – except, of course, when they do all of these things, because you happened not even to tweet, but merely to retweet, the wrong image.
Stefan Niehoff is a 64 year-old retiree who lives in the small town of Burgpreppach in Lower Franconia. He runs an X account with 1,200 followers, where he occasionally expresses his dissatisfaction with the present state of German politics and with the Greens in particular.
In June 2024, he retweeted this image …
… which appropriates the logo of a popular cosmetic brand to suggest that Robert Habeck, our Green Minister of Economic Affairs, might be a “professional moron”.
Habeck and his associates are notorious for pursuing internet users who share highly illegal content of this nature. They brought Niehoff’s retweet to the attention of authorities, and the Bamberg public prosecutor’s office decided that Niehoff was indeed guilty of a criminal speech offence. The Bamberg District Court then issued an order permitting the police to search Niehoff’s residence and confiscate his electronic devices.
In this order, reproduced by NiUS, the judges explained their rationale as follows:
On the basis of the investigations to date – in particular the screenshots of the posts and the investigations into the user of the X-account “IchbinFeinet” – there exists the following suspicion of a criminal offence:
The accused is the user of the account “IchbinFeinet” on the internet platform X with approx. 901 followers.
At a time that cannot now be determined more precisely, in the days or weeks before 20 June 2024, the accused published an image file using his account that showed a portrait of the Federal Minister of Economic Affairs with the words “professional moron” … in order to defame Robert Habeck in general and to make his work as a member of the federal government more difficult.
The public prosecutor’s office affirms the public interest in criminal prosecution.
This is punishable as defamation directed against persons of political life in accordance with §§ 185, 188 para. 1, 194 StGB. …
The measures ordered are proportionate to the severity of the offence and the strength of the suspicion and are necessary for the investigation …
Armed with this document, Schweinfurt police showed up at Niehoff’s house at 6:14am yesterday morning and took his tablet. Police later told the press that the raid was one in a series of enforcement actions – part of something called “an action day against cybercrime”. By harassing a lot of cybercriminals all at once, police and prosecutors hope to send a message to the people of Germany that they cannot just retweet anything, and that they may only retweet the right things.
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