The Boys of Pointe du Hoc. By Ronald Reagan.

President Ronald Reagan salutes during a ceremony commemorating the 40th anniversary of D-day, the invasion of Europe. Wikimedia.

The Boys of Pointe du Hoc: Remarks at a Ceremony Commemorating the 40th Anniversary of the Normandy Invasion, D-day, June 6, 1984. By Ronald Reagan. The American Presidency Project. Also at Real Clear Politics, Reagan Archives, Mike’s America. Video at YouTube here and here.

President Reagan’s 1984 Normandy Speech. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, June 6, 2013.

The Boys of Pointe du Hoc. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, June 6, 2013.

The Greatest Generation Passing Into History. By Michael Barone. Real Clear Politics, June 6, 2013.








Reagan:

We’re here to mark that day in history when the Allied armies joined in battle to reclaim this continent to liberty. For four long years, much of Europe had been under a terrible shadow. Free nations had fallen, Jews cried out in the camps, millions cried out for liberation. Europe was enslaved and the world prayed for its rescue. Here, in Normandy, the rescue began. Here, the Allies stood and fought against tyranny, in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history.

We stand on a lonely, windswept point on the northern shore of France. The air is soft, but forty years ago at this moment, the air was dense with smoke and the cries of men, and the air was filled with the crack of rifle fire and the roar of cannon. At dawn, on the morning of the 6th of June, 1944, two hundred and twenty-five Rangers jumped off the British landing craft and ran to the bottom of these cliffs.

Their mission was one of the most difficult and daring of the invasion: to climb these sheer and desolate cliffs and take out the enemy guns. The Allies had been told that some of the mightiest of these guns were here, and they would be trained on the beaches to stop the Allied advance.

The Rangers looked up and saw the enemy soldiers at the edge of the cliffs, shooting down at them with machine guns and throwing grenades. And the American Rangers began to climb. They shot rope ladders over the face of these cliffs and began to pull themselves up. When one Ranger fell, another would take his place. When one rope was cut, a Ranger would grab another and begin his climb again. They climbed, shot back, and held their footing. Soon, one by one, the Rangers pulled themselves over the top, and in seizing the firm land at the top of these cliffs, they began to seize back the continent of Europe. Two hundred and twenty-five came here. After two days of fighting, only ninety could still bear arms.

And behind me is a memorial that symbolizes the Ranger daggers that were thrust into the top of these cliffs. And before me are the men who put them there. These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. And these are the heroes who helped end a war. Gentlemen, I look at you and I think of the words of Stephen Spender's poem. You are men who in your “lives fought for life and left the vivid air signed with your honor.”

I think I know what you may be thinking right now – thinking “we were just part of a bigger effort; everyone was brave that day.” Well everyone was. Do you remember the story of Bill Millin of the 51st Highlanders? Forty years ago today, British troops were pinned down near a bridge, waiting desperately for help. Suddenly, they heard the sound of bagpipes, and some thought they were dreaming. Well, they weren’t. They looked up and saw Bill Millin with his bagpipes, leading the reinforcements and ignoring the smack of the bullets into the ground around him.

Lord Lovat was with him – Lord Lovat of Scotland, who calmly announced when he got to the bridge, “Sorry, I’m a few minutes late,” as if he'd been delayed by a traffic jam, when in truth he’d just come from the bloody fighting on Sword Beach, which he and his men had just taken.

There was the impossible valor of the Poles, who threw themselves between the enemy and the rest of Europe as the invasion took hold; and the unsurpassed courage of the Canadians who had already seen the horrors of war on this coast. They knew what awaited them there, but they would not be deterred. And once they hit Juno Beach, they never looked back.

All of these men were part of a roll call of honor with names that spoke of a pride as bright as the colors they bore; The Royal Winnipeg Rifles, Poland’s 24th Lancers, the Royal Scots’ Fusiliers, the Screaming Eagles, the Yeomen of England's armored divisions, the forces of Free France, the Coast Guard’s “Matchbox Fleet,” and you, the American Rangers.

Forty summers have passed since the battle that you fought here. You were young the day you took these cliffs; some of you were hardly more than boys, with the deepest joys of life before you. Yet you risked everything here. Why? Why did you do it? What impelled you to put aside the instinct for self-preservation and risk your lives to take these cliffs? What inspired all the men of the armies that met here? We look at you, and somehow we know the answer. It was faith and belief. It was loyalty and love.

The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead, or on the next. It was the deep knowledge – and pray God we have not lost it – that there is a profound moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest. You were here to liberate, not to conquer, and so you and those others did not doubt your cause. And you were right not to doubt.

You all knew that some things are worth dying for. One’s country is worth dying for, and democracy is worth dying for, because it’s the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man. All of you loved liberty. All of you were willing to fight tyranny, and you knew the people of your countries were behind you.

The Americans who fought here that morning knew word of the invasion was spreading through the darkness back home. They fought – or felt in their hearts, though they couldn’t know in fact, that in Georgia they were filling the churches at 4:00 am. In Kansas they were kneeling on their porches and praying. And in Philadelphia they were ringing the Liberty Bell.

Something else helped the men of D-day; their rock-hard belief that Providence would have a great hand in the events that would unfold here; that God was an ally in this great cause. And so, the night before the invasion, when Colonel Wolverton asked his parachute troops to kneel with him in prayer, he told them: “Do not bow your heads, but look up so you can see God and ask His blessing in what we're about to do.” Also, that night, General Matthew Ridgway on his cot, listening in the darkness for the promise God made to Joshua: “I will not fail thee nor forsake thee.”

These are the things that impelled them; these are the things that shaped the unity of the Allies.

When the war was over, there were lives to be rebuilt and governments to be returned to the people. There were nations to be reborn. Above all, there was a new peace to be assured. These were huge and daunting tasks. But the Allies summoned strength from the faith, belief, loyalty, and love of those who fell here. They rebuilt a new Europe together. There was first a great reconciliation among those who had been enemies, all of whom had suffered so greatly. The United States did its part, creating the Marshall Plan to help rebuild our allies and our former enemies. The Marshall Plan led to the Atlantic alliance – a great alliance that serves to this day as our shield for freedom, for prosperity, and for peace.

In spite of our great efforts and successes, not all that followed the end of the war was happy or planned. Some liberated countries were lost. The great sadness of this loss echoes down to our own time in the streets of Warsaw, Prague, and East Berlin. The Soviet troops that came to the center of this continent did not leave when peace came. They’re still there, uninvited, unwanted, unyielding, almost forty years after the war. Because of this, allied forces still stand on this continent. Today, as forty years ago, our armies are here for only one purpose: to protect and defend democracy. The only territories we hold are memorials like this one and graveyards where our heroes rest.

We in America have learned bitter lessons from two world wars. It is better to be here ready to protect the peace, than to take blind shelter across the sea, rushing to respond only after freedom is lost. We’ve learned that isolationism never was and never will be an acceptable response to tyrannical governments with an expansionist intent. But we try always to be prepared for peace, prepared to deter aggression, prepared to negotiate the reduction of arms, and yes, prepared to reach out again in the spirit of reconciliation. In truth, there is no reconciliation we would welcome more than a reconciliation with the Soviet Union, so, together, we can lessen the risks of war, now and forever.

It’s fitting to remember here the great losses also suffered by the Russian people during World War II. Twenty million perished, a terrible price that testifies to all the world the necessity of ending war. I tell you from my heart that we in the United States do not want war. We want to wipe from the face of the earth the terrible weapons that man now has in his hands. And I tell you, we are ready to seize that beachhead. We look for some sign from the Soviet Union that they are willing to move forward, that they share our desire and love for peace, and that they will give up the ways of conquest. There must be a changing there that will allow us to turn our hope into action.

We will pray forever that someday that changing will come. But for now, particularly today, it is good and fitting to renew our commitment to each other, to our freedom, and to the alliance that protects it.

We’re bound today by what bound us 40 years ago, the same loyalties, traditions, and beliefs. We’re bound by reality. The strength of America's allies is vital to the United States, and the American security guarantee is essential to the continued freedom of Europe’s democracies. We were with you then; we’re with you now. Your hopes are our hopes, and your destiny is our destiny.

Here, in this place where the West held together, let us make a vow to our dead. Let us show them by our actions that we understand what they died for. Let our actions say to them the words for which Matthew Ridgway listened: “I will not fail thee nor forsake thee.”

Strengthened by their courage and heartened by their value [valor] and borne by their memory, let us continue to stand for the ideals for which they lived and died.

Thank you very much, and God bless you all.


Saving Private Ryan: Omaha Beach Scene [1998]. Sandra Prior, May 6, 2012. YouTube. Also here. The first 20 minutes of this film is the most accurate and realistic portrayal of the horror and butchery of June 6, 1944. These men sacrificed their lives so that we, their posterity, could live in freedom.

The Stagnant Mediterranean. By Victor Davis Hanson.

The Stagnant Mediterranean. By Victor Davis Hanson. National Review Online, June 6, 2013.

Hanson:

From the heights of Gibraltar you can see Africa about nine miles away to the south — and gaze eastward on the seemingly endless Mediterranean, which stretches 2,400 miles to Asia. Mare Nostrum, “our sea,” the Romans called the deep blue waters that allowed Rome to unite Asia, Africa, and Europe for half a millennium under a single, prosperous, globalized civilization.

 

Yet the Mediterranean has not always proved to be history’s incubator of great civilizations — Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Florentine, and Venetian. Sometimes the ancient “Pillars of Hercules” at the narrow mouth of the Mediterranean here at Gibraltar marked not so much a gateway to progress and prosperity as a cultural and commercial cul-de-sac.

 

With the rise of the Ottoman Empire, the old city-state powerhouses of Italy and Greece faded from history, as the Mediterranean became more a museum than a catalyst of global change. In contrast, the Reformation and the Enlightenment energized Northern European culture, safely distant from the front line of the exhausting wars with Islam.

 

By the early 17th century, Northern Europeans more easily and safely reached the rich eastern markets of China and India by maritime routes around Africa. The discovery of the New World further shifted wealth and cultural dynamism out of the Mediterranean.

 

For a while the Mediterranean seemed to roar back after World War II. Huge deposits of petroleum and natural gas were found in North Africa. The Suez Canal was a shortcut to the newly opulent and strategically vital Persian Gulf. With the unification of Europe and the ongoing decolonization of Africa and the Middle East, there was the promise of a new, resource-rich, democratic, and commercially interconnected Mediterranean.

 

Not now. The Arab Spring has brought chaos to almost all of North Africa. The bloodbath in Syria threatens to escalate into something like the Spanish Civil War — sucking in Lebanese militias, Iranian mercenaries, Turkey, the Sunni sheikdoms, Israel, and the Palestinians, along with surrogate arms suppliers like China, Europe, Russia, and the United States.

The economies of the Islamic rim of the Mediterranean are in shambles. But then so is the southern flank of the European Union, as Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain haggle for subsidies and loans from an increasingly fed-up Northern Europe. New gas and oil finds in North America, China, and Africa may soon make both Mediterranean supplies and Suez passage to the Persian Gulf irrelevant for a billion energy consumers.

 

A shrinking and aging Europe keeps drawing in young Muslim immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa. They want out of their impoverished Islamic homelands but are being consumed by, rather than enriching, the wealthier European societies that they are drawn to like moths to a flame. The recent rioting in Sweden, the gruesome near-beheading of a soldier in London, and periodic unrest in the French suburbs all remind us that the Mediterranean is not a shared postmodern vacation spot. Instead it is increasingly a stagnant premodern pond of religious, political, and economic tensions.

 

Unrest in the West Bank, Gaza, Cyprus, Syria, Libya, and Egypt could at any moment spark violence that cuts across religious, racial, and political fault lines. Yet otherwise, these tired hotspots are immaterial to a world that from Shanghai, Mumbai, and Seoul to Palo Alto, Houston, London, and Frankfurt is creating vast new wealth, technologies, and consumer goods — without much of a nod to Mediterranean science or innovation.

 

The old strategic fortresses at Cyprus, Crete, Sicily, Malta, and Gibraltar are becoming inconsequential, as the United States pivots to Asia. The Cold War is long over. Europe has all but disarmed. Meanwhile, the societies on the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean are coming apart at the seams.

 

It is hard to find a robust free-market economy anywhere in the Mediterranean world these days. Instead, European socialism, Arab statism, and Islamic terrorism in various ways are retarding commerce and growth. Tourism — with visitors gazing at ancient rather than modern wonders — is more profitable than manufacturing.

 

Will the Mediterranean world rebound again? History is cyclical, not linear, and the region’s favorable climate and opportune geography suggest that it could.

 

But, before we see another Mediterranean renaissance, constitutional government would have to sweep the Muslim world. The fossilized bureaucracy of the European Union would have to radically reform or disappear. A new generation of Michelangelos and Leonardos would have to believe that they could think, say, and write whatever they wished — in a climate of economic confidence, prosperity, and security.

 

Unfortunately, the culture of the Mediterranean is reverting to its stagnant 18th-century past rather than leading the 21st century.

Israel Lives the Joseph Story. By Thomas L. Friedman.

Israel Lives the Joseph Story. By Thomas L. Friedman. New York Times, June 4, 2013.

Friedman:

How would you like to be an Israeli strategist today? Now even Turkey is in turmoil as its people push back on their increasingly autocratic leader. I mean, there goes the neighborhood. The good news for Israel is that in the near term its near neighbors are too internally consumed to think about threatening it. In the long run, though, Israel faces two serious challenges that I’d dub the Stephen Hawking Story and the Joseph Story.

In case you missed it, Hawking, the British physicist, cosmologist and author of “A Brief History of Time,” canceled a planned trip to Israel this month to attend the fifth annual Israeli Presidential Conference. Cambridge University, where Hawking is a professor, said Hawking had told Israelis that he would not be attending “based on advice from Palestinian academics that he should respect the boycott” of Israel because of the West Bank occupation.

“Never has a scientist of this stature boycotted Israel,” Yigal Palmor, of Israel’s Foreign Ministry, declared. I strongly disagree with what Hawking did. Israelis should be challenged not boycotted. (After all, Palestinians are also at fault.) Nevertheless, his action found wide resonance. The Boston Globe said Hawking’s decision was “a reasonable way to express one’s political views. Observers need not agree with Hawking’s position in order to understand and even respect his choice. The movement that Hawking has signed on to aims to place pressure on Israel through peaceful means.”

That was not Al-Ahram. That was The Boston Globe — a reminder that in this age of social networks, populist revolts and superempowered individuals, “international public opinion matters more not less,” notes the Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi, the author of “Imagined Democracies.” And, in Israel’s case, it is creating a powerful surge of international opinion, particularly in Europe and on college campuses, that Israel is a pariah state because of its West Bank occupation. It is not a good trend for Israel. It makes it that much more dependent on America alone for support.

This global trend, though, is coinciding with a complete breakdown in Israel’s regional environment. Israel today is living a version of the Biblical “Joseph Story,” where Joseph endeared himself to the Pharaoh by interpreting his dreams as a warning that seven fat years would be followed by seven lean years and, therefore, Egypt needed to stock up on grain. In Israel’s case, it has enjoyed, relatively speaking, 40 fat years of stable governments around it. Over the last 40 years, a class of Arab leaders took power and managed to combine direct or indirect oil money, with multiple intelligence services, with support from either America or Russia, to ensconce themselves in office for multiple decades. All of these leaders used their iron fists to keep their sectarian conflicts — Sunnis versus Shiites, Christians versus Muslims, and Kurds and Palestinian refugees versus everyone else — in check. They also kept their Islamists underground.

With these iron-fisted leaders being toppled — and true, multisectarian democracies with effective governments yet to emerge in their place — Israel is potentially facing decades of unstable or no governments surrounding it. Only Jordan offers Israel a normal border. In the hinterlands beyond, Israel is looking at dysfunctional states that are either imploding (like Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Bahrain and Libya) or exploding (like Syria).

But here’s what’s worse: These iron-fisted leaders not only suppressed various political forces in their societies but also badly ignored their schools, environments, women’s empowerment and population explosions. Today, all these bills are coming due just when their governments are least able to handle them.

Therefore, the overarching theme for Israeli strategy in the coming years must be “resiliency” — how to maintain a relatively secure environment and thriving economy in a collapsing region.

In my view, that makes resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict more important than ever for three reasons: 1) to reverse the trend of international delegitimization closing in on Israel; 2) to disconnect Israel as much as possible from the regional conflicts around it; and 3) to offer a model.

There is no successful model of democratic governance in the Arab world at present — the Islamists are all failing. But Israel, if it partnered with the current moderate Palestinian leadership in the West Bank, has a chance to create a modern, economically thriving, democratic, secular state where Christians and Muslims would live side by side — next to Jews. That would be a hugely valuable example, especially at a time when the Arab world lacks anything like it. And the world for the most part would not begrudge Israel keeping its forces on the Jordan River — as will be necessary given the instability beyond — if it ceded most of the West Bank and Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem.

Together, Israelis and Palestinians actually have the power to model what a decent, postauthoritarian, multireligious Arab state could look like. Nothing would address both people’s long-term strategic needs better. Too bad their leaders today are not as farsighted as Joseph.


Taking the High Ground. By Thomas L. Friedman. New York Times, June 13, 2004. Also here.

Friedman 2004:

There is no total victory to be had by Israel over Hezbollah or the Palestinians, without total genocide.


Palestinians and the Hands of Time. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, June 5, 2013.

Ya’alon: No real peace without end to Palestinian incitement. Israel Hayom, June 3, 2013.

The End of Palestinian Reform. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, June 3, 2013.

Palestinians: Why Abbas Chose This Prime Minister. By Khaled Abu Toameh. Gatestone Institute, June 3, 2013.

Palestine’s Nothing Man. By Jonathan Schanzer. Foreign Policy, June 4, 2013.

Radical Islam Arrives in Ramallah. By Khaled Abu Toameh. Gatestone Institute, June 5, 2013.

“Racism” or Extinction. By Dan Calic. Ynet News, June 8, 2013.

The Camel’s Hump Blog.

Palestine, Peoples and Borders in the New Middle East. By Ahmad Samih Khalidi. NJBR, June 3, 2013. With related articles.

Zionism and Israel Are Anti-Semitic. By Joseph Massad. NJBR, June 2, 2013 with related articles.

Palestinians Have Suffered . . . at the Hands of Their Leaders. By Jonathan S. Tobin. NJBR, June 10, 2013. Includes articles and video of Jibril Rajoub claiming Palestine from the river to the sea.

The Libertarian Populist Agenda. By Ben Domenech.

The Libertarian Populist Agenda. By Ben Domenech. Real Clear Politics, June 5, 2013.

Three Challenges to Libertarian Populism. By Ben Domenech. Real Clear Politics, June 6, 2013.

Libertarian Populism and Its Limits. By Ross Douthat. New York Times, June 4, 2013.

What “Conservative Reformers” Can Learn From Libertarians. By Peter Suderman. Reason, May 31, 2013.

Conservative reformers should fix the rigged game. By Tim Carney. Washington Examiner, June 4, 2013.

Reformish Conservatives. By Ryan Cooper. Washington Monthly, May/June 2013. Also here.

What Is Reform Conservatism? By Ross Douthat. NJBR, June 2, 2013.

On Conservative Reformers. By Erick Erickson. RedState, June 4, 2013.

U.S. Meritocracy Has Given Way to Aristocracy. By Erick Erickson. NJBR, May 30, 2013. With articles by Ben Domenech and others.


Erickson (Conservative Reformers):

In fact, I dare say this is a problem both parties have these days — the up and coming intellectual voices are voices that have worked little outside think tanks and ideological publications. The saving grace for the conservatives on this front is that they, by virtue of being conservative, at least have an understanding into how human nature actually operates.

Conservatism wins when it is populist and middle class. It does not win when it is academic or technocratic. Those discussing conservative reform in Washington and New York are offering up some intriguing ideas worth considering. And I hate it for them that they, real conservative policy thinkers, have to overcome both the poseurs and the anti-beltway bias, but I would also urge them to consider that the public deeply, deeply distrusts Washington. It is therefore probably not a great sales pitch to figure out how conservatives in Washington can make the case for Washington improving the lives of people who feel Washington and those, regardless of party or ideology, in Washington have helped create an American aristocracy.

Ronald Reagan took the academic ideas of conservatism and tied them to a mid-western understanding of human nature and a life spent touring factories and talking to people within 100 miles of a major American river valley, not just 25 miles of a coast. Conservative reform is going to come from the 50 laboratories of democracy and will be tied to a face and voice that ground them in the real world of Main Street, USA.

The California Captivity of the Democratic Party. By Matthew Continetti.

The California Captivity of the Democratic Party. By Matthew Continetti. Washington Free Beacon, May 31, 2013.

Amnesty Made California a One-Party State. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, June 5, 2013. Audio, Daily Rushbo.

Samantha Power’s Five Worst Statements.

Samantha Power’s Five Worst Statements. Washington Free Beacon. June 5, 2013.

Obama Seeks Conflict With GOP in Appointing Rice, Power. By Alexis Simendinger. Real Clear Politics, June 6, 2013.

O’s cynical picks. By Ralph Peters. New York Post, June 6, 2013.

Beck Twists Statement By Obama Adviser To Portray Her As Anti-Israel. By Terry Krepel. Media Matters for America, March 25, 2011.

Video: Former Obama adviser on invading Israel. By Ed Morrissey. Hot Air, October 5, 2008.

Genocide and U.S. Foreign Policy: Conversation with Samantha Power. Interviewed by Harry Kreisler. Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley, April 29, 2002. Internet Archive. YouTube.




Obama’s Top Adviser Says She Does Not Believe in Imposing a Peace Settlement. By Shmuel Rosner. Haaretz. Miftah.org, February 26, 2008.

Samantha Power’s World View. By Seth Mandel. Commentary, June 6, 2013.

YouTube clip likely to dog Samantha Power’s appointment as U.S. ambassador to UN. By Chemi Shalev. Haaretz, June 5, 2013.

Video of Samantha Power’s 2002 Remarks on Imposing Peace on Israel Could Haunt Her, Israeli Paper Says. By Christine Hauser and Robert Mackey. New York Times, June 5, 2013.

Samantha Power, Obama’s pick as America’s Ambassador to the UN, will fit right in. By Ed Lasky. American Thinker, June 5, 2013.

Power’s “Mea Culpa” Doctrine. By David Feith. Wall Street Journal, June 5, 2013.

Neocons praise Samantha Power pick. By John Hudson. Foreign Policy, June 5, 2013.

A perfect match. By Melanie Phillips. MelaniePhillips.com, June 5, 2013.

Samantha Power, hater of Israel. By Paul Mirengoff. Power Line, June 5, 2013.

Samantha Power, defender of Israel? By Martin Kramer. Sandbox, June 5, 2013.

Speaking truth to Power. By Martin Kramer. Sandbox, March 3, 2008.

Getting through these dark times: Interview with Samantha Power. By Leigh Flayton. Salon, February 18, 2008.

Samantha Power: the Salon interview. By Noah Pollak. Commentary, February 19, 2008.

Samantha Power and Obama’s Foreign PolicyTeam. By Richard Baehr and Ed Lasky. American Thinker, February 19, 2008.

Force Full: Bush’s Illiberal Power. By Samantha Power. The New Republic, March 3, 2003. Also here.

Samantha and Her Subjects. By Jacob Heilbrunn. The National Interest, No. 113 (May/June 2011).

Samantha Power on the limits of “Holocaustization.” By Joshua Keating. Foreign Policy, June 5, 2013.

To Suffer by Comparison? By Samantha Power. Daedalus, Vol. 128, No. 2 (Spring 1999).

Game of Thrones Offers a Complex, Nuanced Critique of Patriarchy. By Amanda Marcotte.

Game of Thrones Offers a Complex, Nuanced Critique of Patriarchy. By Amanda Marcotte. The Raw Story, June 5, 2013.

How the Patriarchy Screwed the Starks. By Rowan Kaiser. The American Prospect, June 3, 2013.

“People want to matter more than they want to live”: Rebecca Goldstein’s Talk at Women in Secularism 2. By Greta Christina. Greta Christina’s Blog, May 21, 2013.

Revolution, on Television and in Real Life. By Michelle Dean. The Nation, June 4, 2013.

More on Game of Thrones here.

Introducing the Grand Old Party to a Brand New Generation. By Alex Smith and Kristen Soltis.

Introducing the Grand Old Party to a Brand New Generation. By Alex Smith and Kristen Soltis. The Daily Caller, June 4, 2013.

Grand Old Party for A Brand New Generation. By Kristen Sotis Anderson et al. College Republican National Committee, June 2013. Video introduction, YouTube.




The O’Reilly Factor: Alex Smith and Kirsten Soltis Anderson | 6/14/13. Video. NationalCRs, June 5, 2013. YouTube.




College Republican National Committee Report Has Grim Findings for GOP. By Jon Favreau. The Daily Beast, June 5, 2013.

College Republican National Committee Report: GOP “Out of Touch” with Young Voters. By Michael Tony. Occupy Democrats, June 3, 2013.

Report: Lack of caring, close-mindedness hurt GOP with young voters. By Ariel Cohen. The Daily Caller, June 3, 2013.

Report: How GOP Lost Young Voters. By Katie Glueck. Politico, June 2, 2013.

Young Voters Give Obama “A” for Effort. By Bethany Mandel. Commentary, June 4, 2013.

No amount of “rebranding” will win back young voters to the Republican party. By Ana Marie Cox. The Guardian, June 5, 2013.

Ian Morris, Historian on a Grand Scale. By Marc Parry.

The Shape of History: Ian Morris, historian on a grand scale. By Marc Parry. The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 25, 2013.

Ian Morris’s Big Idea: Why the West Will Fall Behind. By Ian Morris. The Daily Beast, March 1, 2013.

Social Development. By Ian Morris. Stanford University. IanMorris.org, October 2010. PDF.

Why the West Rules—For Now. Excerpt. By Ian Morris. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010.

Oprah, Harvard, and Inequality. By George Packer.

Oprah, Harvard, and Inequality. By George Packer. The New Yorker, June 4, 2013.

Packer:

Two weeks ago in this space, I wrote about the strange conjunction of America’s ever-widening inclusiveness and ever-growing disparity. Oprah at Harvard is a perfect illustration: her arrival at that summit is improbable and extraordinary, a parable of individual talent meeting social opportunity. She took the occasion to remind her audience of her triumph, and of the blessings that surely come in America today with the right alma mater and the right connections. Her presence was proof that the meritocracy really works, that equal opportunity is real—a reassuring thought in a time and place where social mobility has dwindled and American success stories are more and more likely to be born rather than made.

I don’t think there’s a causal relation between these two essential facts from the past generation: that a poor black girl from the Deep South can grow up to be an empire-builder, and that the gap in income and life chances between Americans with Harvard degrees and Americans without is getting bigger every year. They have happened at the same time, and they pull in opposite directions. One doesn’t necessitate or further the other. But my last column got a critical rejoinder from Samuel Goldman, in the American Conservative. Goldman claims that the two trends are intimately related, and that they’re somehow the doing of post-sixties educated liberals like me, and, perhaps, you, who have gone all in for tolerance, diversity, and lax moral standards while forsaking the troubled working class. It might not even be possible to have Oprah and fairness: “It is hard for a society characterized by ethnic and cultural pluralism to generate the solidarity required for the redistribution of wealth. People are willing, on the whole, to pay high taxes and forgo luxuries to support those they see as like themselves. They are often unwilling to do so for those who look, sound, or act very differently.”

Goldman is conflating a number of things here—among them, the ideal of equality before the law and the reality of a loud, consumerist, gadget-dazzled, indifferent society. Is there something about black enfranchisement, women’s quest for equal pay, and the right of gays to marry that required Americans to start overspending, paying their workers less, and neglecting their children? If so, should we return to segregation, bored housewives, and the closet on the chance that these might restore unions to health and revive public schools? Goldman’s argument is that, beyond a certain level of diversity, a democratic society—that is, one in which equal opportunity means something more than the chance for each of us to have our own TV network—stops being possible. This view takes us back to conservatism of a particular sort—not the universalist creed of the Declaration but the philosophy of the Know Nothings.

On the other hand, there’s this uncomfortable truth, pointed out by Ross Douthat, of the Times: the period of greatest economic equality and social solidarity, the years between the Great Depression and the nineteen-seventies, which I call the Roosevelt Republic, coincided with the doors being firmly shut to immigrants. The decades that came before and after this more secure era—from the Gilded Age to the nineteen-twenties, and the generation since the late seventies, the period of the unwinding—saw those doors swing wide open. Douthat suggests that waves of immigration have created social divisions and competition for jobs at the bottom, both of which have something to do with the fraying of the social contract. If human beings were better, it wouldn’t be so—but they aren’t, so it is. Douthat’s is a more subtle, less partisan argument than Goldman’s, and it poses a problem for liberals who want more equality and more immigration.

My book explores some of these questions in the indirect way of narrative. It makes no explicit arguments supported by statistics, social science, or political theory. There are plenty of good books on inequality, political polarization, institutional instability, the decline of the working class, the economic and social effects of globalization and the Information Age. I didn’t want to write that kind of book; I couldn’t have if I’d tried. I wanted to do something else: create a portrait of the country during years when freedom became maximal and the social contract frayed. I wanted to convey what this condition feels and looks and sounds like, in individuals’ lives, voices, nervous systems.

I saw no need to distribute blame in appropriate portions, in keeping with a political framework. There’s plenty to go around: the characters in “The Unwinding” aren’t helpless victims. They make big mistakes, they get pregnant too young, their marriages break up, they let their businesses collapse, they go broke, they invest their money unwisely, they fill their minds and stomachs with junk, they trust the wrong people, they get themselves fired from jobs they can’t afford to lose, they make bad decisions for their children. One family in particular—the Hartzells, of Tampa, who appear near the end of the book—have had such a hard time that they are currently homeless, with two children, in quite desperate circumstances.

Partly, it’s their own fault. And partly it’s the huge disruptions of recent history: the disappearance of blue-collar jobs, the Walmartization of the economy, the decay of public schools, the collapse of institutional structures that used to support the aspirations of the middle class, the atomization of everyday life where there is no secure living. Those upheavals, in turn, aren’t simply the product of blind forces, like hurricanes and earthquakes. They have happened because Americans have let them happen, sometimes without knowing it, sometimes with deliberate intent. “The Unwinding” has no ideology, but it does subscribe to the view that those with the most power and influence, who have benefitted the most handsomely, bear more responsibility than the Hartzells.

The Unwinding. By George Packer. NJBR, May 20, 2013. With related articles.

Oprah Winfrey Tells Harvard Graduates “Failure is Just Life Trying to Move Us in Another Direction.” By Molly Greenberg. InTheCapital, May 31, 2013.

5 Best Quotes from Oprah Winfrey’s Inspiring Harvard University Commencement Speech. By Vi-An Nguyen. Parade, May 31, 2013.

Oprah Winfrey Harvard Commencement 2013 Speech. Video. Harvard, May 30, 2013. YouTube.



Winfrey:

It doesn’t matter how far you might rise. At some point, you are bound to stumble. If you’re constantly pushing yourself higher and higher, the law of averages, not to mention The Myth of Icarus, predicts that you will at some point fall. And when you do, I want you to remember this: There is no such thing as failure. Failure is just life trying to move us in another direction. Now, when you’re down there in the hole, it looks like failure. When that moment comes, it’s okay to feel bad for a little while. Give yourself time to mourn what you think you may have lost. But then, here’s the key: Learn from every mistake, because every experience, particularly your mistakes, are there to teach you and force you into being more who you are.
. . . .

You will find true success and happiness if you have only one goal. There really is only one, and that is this: To fulfill the highest, most truthful expression of yourself as a human being. You want to max out your humanity by using your energy to lift yourself up, your family, and the people around you. Theologian Howard Thurman said it best. He said, “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

Cartoonist Steve Breen’s Homage to Jacksonian Patriotism.

Pledge of Allegiance. By Steve Breen. Go Comics, September 15, 2010.

The U.S. Should Be In the Dock, Not Bradley Manning. By Owen Jones.

The United States should be in the dock, not Bradley Manning. By Owen Jones. The Independent, June 2, 2013.

Seven Myths About Bradley Manning. By Chase Madar. The Nation, June 3, 2013.

Jones:

There has always been a somewhat Orwellian quality to US foreign policy: “we have always been at war with Islamic fundamentalism”, for example. And yet in the 1980s, US arms were distributed through Pakistan’s secret services to the Afghan mujihadeen: they were freedom-fighters, you see. Then we ended up in a never-ending war in Afghanistan, battling on behalf of a corrupt and undemocratic government, against Islamic fundamentalist elements. Several hundred miles away, the US is proactively backing Syria’s jihadists alongside its Islamist fundamentalist ally, Saudi Arabia. Waves of Islamist fighters were recruited by the calamity of Iraq.

There is nothing patriotic about the poorly scrutinised actions of the US foreign policy elite. Scores of young men or women are sent to be killed or maimed: those who call for bringing them to safety are smeared as “unpatriotic”. US civilians are put at risk of “blowback”, a CIA word for the unintended consequences of foreign interventions. They can even fail disastrously on their own terms. Back in the 1950s, the US helped overthrow Iran’s last democratically-elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, fuelling anti-American sentiment that helped drive the Iranian Revolution.

That is why Manning has done us such a service. He has encouraged us to scrutinise the hidden realities of US power, and consider the dire consequences of decisions shrouded in secrecy. His actions should compel us to build a more open, balanced world, where great powers are less able to throw their poorly understood weight around. It would be a long-term investment: the US is in long-term decline, and autocratic China may take its place, quite possibly using its power more unjustly. Better, then, to challenge this world order now.

I happen to believe the creation of such a world is not a naïve fantasy. It can and must be built. And however your trial goes, you, Mr Manning, will be remembered for your own contribution in building it.

The War Prayer. By Mark Twain.

The War Prayer. By Mark Twain. The Writings of Mark Twain Vol. 29: Europe and Elsewhere. New York. Gabriel Wells, 1923. Also here and here.

War Is Hell and Don’t Forget It. By Allen L. Roland. Tikkun Daily, May 27, 2013.

The War Prayer: Mark Twain. Video. ricshinn, June 26, 2008. YouTube. Epilogue to the PBS 1981 production: A Private History of a Campaign That Failed.

Jacksonians have always understood Twain’s message quite clearly: that praying for the victory of their soldiers means wreaking havoc, death, and destruction on the enemy. Jacksonians have no romantic illusions about war. The Jacksonian way of war calls for using all of America’s economic, technological, and military resources to force the total defeat and unconditional surrender of the enemy. For Jacksonians war is total war, a life-and-death struggle to defend the community and the nation against its enemies and to assert American honor. Jacksonians agree with General Sherman that war is hell. So they have no problem with inflicting massive collateral damage to the enemy’s civilian population, women, and children, turning their lives into a living hell, if that’s what it takes to win.

Palestine, Peoples and Borders in the New Middle East. By Ahmad Samih Khalidi.

Palestine, Peoples and Borders in the New Middle East. By Ahmad Samih Khalidi. London School of Economics, May 30, 2013.

Why Can’t the Palestinians Recognize the Jewish State? By Ahmad Samih Khalidi. Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Summer 2011). Also here.

Israel’s celebration remains a Palestinian catastrophe. By Ahmad Samih Khalidi. The Guardian, May 11, 2008.

Palestinian statehood: Thanks, but no thanks. By Ahmad Samih Khalidi. The Guardian, December 12, 2007.

History is irrelevant: Why Palestinian Arabs can never accept a Jewish state. The Elder of Ziyon, August 30, 2011. [Comments on Khalidi]

Nakba nonsense floods in. The Elder of Ziyon, May 11, 2008. [Comments on Khalidi]

Abbas: PLO Charter Reflects What Palestinians Want. By Evelyn Gordon. Commentary, June 6, 2013.

Muslim scholars assert normalization with Israel is treason. Al-Qassam Brigades, June 3, 2013.

When your neighbor unfurls a Nazi flag. By Abraham Cooper and Howard Brackman. Jerusalem Post, June 2, 2013.


Even if there is a peace settlement, which is doubtful in the near or midterm future, the Israeli and Palestinian historical narratives will not be reconciled, nor can they be. The respective Israeli and Palestinian national identities are based on the historical and moral priority of their own claims to the land, and the illegitimacy of the other’s. Palestinians will always believe that their land was stolen by the Jews, deny the moral legitimacy of a Jewish state, and look to a Judenrein Palestine as their ultimate ideal.

Of course when it comes to the subject of Israel and the Jews it’s rarely possible to be calm, neutral, or objective. For Israel and the Jews push too many hot buttons for too many people – religious, historical, cultural, psychological, and political, positive and negative – for Jews and Gentiles alike.

Professors Are About to Get an Online Education. By Andy Kessler.

Professors Are About to Get an Online Education. By Andy Kessler. Wall Street Journal, June 2, 2013.

Professors Running Scared, MOOC Future is Now. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, June 3, 2013.

An Open Letter to Professor Michael Sandel From the Philosophy Department at San Jose State U. The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 2, 2013.


More on MOOCs here, here, here, and here.

Middle East Genocide. By Ralph Peters.

Middle East genocide. By Ralph Peters. New York Post, June 1, 2013. Also here.

The Arab Collapse. By Ralph Peters. NJBR, May 20, 2013.

The Counterrevolution in Military Affairs. By Ralph Peters. NJBR, January 1, 2013.

Lose the Bible, Lose Your Cultural Heritage. By Ralph Peters. Family Security Matters, May 24, 2012.

The Arab World’s Endless Failures. By Ralph Peters. Family Security Matters, January 26, 2012.

12 Myths of 21st-Century War. By Ralph Peters. The American Legion Magazine, November 2007. Also here.

Ethnic Cleansing Is Better Than Genocide. By Ralph Peters. National Review, August 13, 2007. NJBR, July 9, 2013.

Faith’s civil wars. By Ralph Peters. USA Today, June 24, 2007.

Dream warriors: Our enemies fight for fantasies, not freedom. By Ralph Peters. Armed Forces Journal, May/June 2007. Also here.

Ralph Peters on Gaza. Hannity and Colmes transcript. Real Clear Politics, June 15, 2007. Also here.

In Gaza’s Shadow: Iraq and the Arab Suicide Cult. By Ralph Peters. New York Post, June 14, 2007. Also here.

What to Give Up . . . and What Land to Hold: Israel’s Toughest Choice. By Ralph Peters. New York Post, May 6, 2007. Also here.

Rebels and religion: How fighters become fanatics. By Ralph Peters. Armed Forces Journal, January 2007.

Arabs’ Last Chance. By Ralph Peters. New York Post, August 24, 2006. Also here.

Living, and dying, with suicide bombers. By Ralph Peters. USA Today, January 3, 2006.

New Glory. Ralph Peters interviewed by Jamie Glazov. FrontPageMag, September 7, 2005.

After Words with Ralph Peters. Video. Peters discusses New Glory with Anatol Lieven. C-Span, August 18, 2005.

The Frozen Civilization of the Desert. By Ralph Peters. New Glory: Expanding America’s Global Supremacy, Chapter 15. New York: Sentinel, 2005.

Ralph Peters and John Bolton on the “Middle East genocide” of Christians and Jews. Video. America Live with Megyn Kelly. Fox News, June 3, 2013. YouTube. Also here, here, here, here, and here.




Peters:

We are witnesses to murder, and our governments are accomplices. The relentless destruction of the last remnants of the Middle East’s Judeo-Christian civilization is well under way. And we are silent.

Captives of political correctness, our governments cater to radical immigrant tantrums as our leaders contort the truth to deny the existence of Islamist terrorism. Meanwhile, our Middle Eastern “allies” and foes alike eradicate thousands of years of Jewish and Christian heritage. Our diplomats treat the persecution as a minor embarrassment, best ignored.

The banishments and butchery aren’t new, but the breakdown of the last rotting order in the wake of the “Arab Spring” has empowered psychotic fanatics who do not even value the lives of the faithful, let alone the lives of unbelievers. This is the end-game, the final persecution of Christians clinging to lands they’ve called home for 2,000 years. Except for Israel and the rarest exceptions elsewhere, Jews are already gone from the realms that nurtured them since the early years of their faith.

A thousand years ago, there were more Christians in the Middle East than in Europe, and Jewish communities prospered from the Nile to the Tigris. Even a century ago, more than 20% of the region’s population was Christian, and Jews still adorned Arab cities with their talents.

Today, estimates put the Christian population of the region at under 5% and sinking rapidly — and only that high because of the 9 million Copts who remain, for now, in Egypt.

The birthplace of Christianity, Bethlehem, now has a Muslim majority of as much as 80% — a reversal that coincided with the West’s decision to embrace Palestinian terrorists as “partners for peace.” A few decades ago, Lebanon had a Christian majority. Now, with Christian numbers fading, it’s tugged between Shia Hezbollah and Sunni fanatics.

Slighted by the US occupation — as our government pandered to Muslim hardliners — the Christian population of Iraq has fallen by two-thirds over 10 years. And the most ferocious elements in the Syrian insurgency see no place for Christians in Syria’s future. Even Jordan, struggling to appease its own Islamists, has cracked down on Christian activities.

The Jews, of course, are already long gone.

But the stones of ruined churches cry out, and vanished synagogues haunt decayed Arab neighborhoods.

If you read the New Testament or study the formative centuries of Christianity, there are few references to western cities other than Rome. The names that dot the Epistles of St. Paul and histories of the church are now in Muslim hands: Alexandria, Damascus, Tarsus, Carthage, Ephesus, Nicaea, Constantinople and so many others. Even Mecca and Medina had thriving Christian and Jewish quarters before the first jihads.

But all they possess does not suffice for Islamist fanatics. Israel must be blotted from the earth, and the last Christians must be driven out.

This is an old, old story, nearing its end. We shroud it in lies to excuse ourselves from taking a stand, even accepting the preposterous Arab claim that Muslim failures today are the fault of the Crusades, a brief interlude when Christians occupied a coastal strip hardly larger than Israel. In fact, it was the Mongols, then the Muslim Turks, who shattered Arab civilization. And as for conquests, Muslims occupied Spain in all or part for 800 years — and brutalized the Balkans for half a millennium. The Crusades were hardly a burp.

We also accept extravagant claims that “civilized” Arabs rescued the classical texts that formed our civilization. That’s utter nonsense. The Arab hordes that burst out of barren Arabia in the 7th century were composed of illiterates. Conquering at a time when the warring Byzantine and Persian empires had exhausted themselves, the new rulers found that tribal practices didn’t suffice to run provinces. So they took over the existing bureaucracies, staffed by Greek-speaking Christians and Jews. It was those officials who saved the Greek classics for Europe’s future Renaissance — and their descendants designed Islam’s greatest monuments.

Yes, some Arab rulers came to value learning — but the Arab world never produced a Homer, Plato, Sophocles or Thucydides whose appeal transcended their culture.

Islam was a religion spread by war. It was only a “religion of peace” where it had conquered. True, Islam sometimes proved more tolerant of minorities than Europeans, but that was at the zenith of the faith’s power.

There’s yet another illusion of ours — that Islam is gaining strength. Islam is on the ropes. What we’ve seen in the pogroms and outright genocides over the last 150 years has been the spleen of a once-triumphant faith whose practices and values can’t compete in the modern age.

Consider today’s Middle East, apart from Israel. Despite the massive influx of oil wealth, there isn’t one world-class university. Nothing of quality or technological complexity is manufactured between Morocco and Pakistan. Not even Saudi Arabia has first-rate health-care. Research is nil. Patent applications are statistically zero. Women are regarded as lesser beings, wasting half of the region’s human capital. Not one Arab society’s a meritocracy. And corruption cripples all.

A handful of glitzy hotels and shopping centers do not make a civilization (especially when the merchandise is all imported). Should Islamist fanatics succeed in driving all minorities from the region, they’d be left with a human wasteland of comprehensive failure, seething with hatred and uncontainable violence. The self-segregation of the Islamic heartlands would be a tragedy for humanity — but, above all, for Muslims.

Birth rates are a red herring. More mouths to feed are not magic sources of strength in lands of scarcity and poverty. The Middle East is self-destructive, morally brittle and falling ever further behind a world that’s charging ahead. Islamists can’t even get terrorism right — today, we’re terrorizing the terrorists. So they turn on the weak in their midst, the last minorities.

The initial wave of destruction and slaughter began almost a millennium ago, when the Muslim world first felt itself under threat. But, more recently, as the West shot to power (thanks to science, learning, hard work, religious tolerance and organization), the creaking Ottoman Empire could not shake off its centuries-old stupor to keep up.

Enraged by failure, the Ottomans turned on their most-productive minorities — whose successes outraged yesteryear’s fanatics. Beginning in the 1880s and accelerating in the 1890s, pogroms against Armenian Christians stunned Western witnesses. But European leaders turned a blind eye, just as we do today. So during the First World War, the Young Turks who had seized power decided to finish the job.

It was genocide. At least a million Armenians — perhaps twice that number — were systematically exterminated . . . although not without being tortured, raped, starved and death-marched first. The scale of the butchery was such that it obscured other, concurrent genocides, most notably that of Assyrian Christians at the hands of Turks and other Muslims. Estimates of Assyrian deaths run from just under 300,000 to one million.

Nor did the slaughters stop there. In British-created Iraq, massacres of Christians recurred from 1933 to 1961.

City names we know from our recent wars, such as Mosul, Basra or Tikrit (Saddam’s home town), once were centers of Christian culture, with bishops, cathedrals and monasteries famous for learning.

Gone. And the last pale ghosts, those Christians holding on to homes their blood knew for 20 centuries, are soon to go. Meanwhile, our president assures us that “Islam’s a religion of peace.”

Mr. President, go to Iraq and speak those words in the bomb-torn churches amid desecrated graves.

Mr. President, go to Egypt and explain to the brutalized Copts why your embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood government’s good for them.

Then go to Israel, Mr. President, where Christians worship freely, and tell the Israelis they should “return Palestinian land” after Muslims seized the homes that sheltered Jews for 3,000 years.

Explain to Jews why their temples were profaned and obliterated by the adherents of that “religion of peace.”

Of course, the real tragedy for the Arabs in the last century wasn’t the Naqba, Israel’s close-run struggle to survive attacks by an arc of Arab armies. The tragedy was that the most-backward, intolerant and indolent Arabs, primitive tribesmen, got most of the oil wealth and used it to spread their Wahhabi cult throughout the Islamic world. The intellectuals in the great Arab cities never had a chance.

My wife and I spent our honeymoon on a long bus trip through Turkey, a country for which I have great, if frustrated, affection. All went fine amid splendid hospitality . . . until we reached the east. Along the roadsides in what had been Armenia (the first Christian kingdom, by the way) desolate villages, razed to their foundations, scarred the landscape between drab modern towns. When asked what those ruins were, a Turk would avert his eyes and mutter, “Abandoned.”

Those villages weren’t abandoned. They were the site of the last century’s first great genocide. No one stood up for those inconvenient Christians.

And no one’s standing up for the Middle East’s tormented Christians now, or for the last handful of Jews left beyond Israel.

Even the dust cries for justice, and we look away.

Erika Brannock, Last Marathon Bombing Victim, Leaves Boston Hospital. By Bella English.

Erika Brannock, last Marathon bombing victim, leaves Boston hospital. By Bella English. Boston Globe, June 3, 2013.

Nicole Brannock Gross, Victim in Iconic Boston Bombing Photo, Tells Her Story For First Time. NJBR, May 30, 2013.

Erika Brannock is being released Monday, June 3, from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. She is the last bombing victim to go home and will return to Maryland. She lost her left leg in the first Boston Marathon bombing April 15. She made her way around her floor where get well cards line the hallway. Globe staff photo by John Tlumacki.



Spare the Risk, Spoil the Child. By Walter Russell Mead.

Spare the Risk, Spoil the Child. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, June 3, 2013.

Risk-Averse Culture Infects U.S. Workers, Entrepreneurs. By Ben Casselman. Wall Street Journal, June 2, 2013.

Is America’s Entrepreneurial Spirit In Trouble? By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, May 3, 2013.