David Priestland: Merchant Ideology Has Come to Dominate the Political Class.

David Priestland: “Merchant ideology has come to dominate the political class.” Video. The Guardian, September 3, 2012. YouTube.

Historian David Priestland is interviewed about his latest book, Merchant, Soldier, Sage, in which he argues that history can be seen as a series of battles between four distinct groups: merchants, warriors, sages and workers. When one group becomes dominant, he says, a crisis is never far away.

Whatever happened to responsible capitalism? By David Priestland. The Guardian, September 23, 2012.

Popular history has been conquered by a complacent liberalism. By David Priestland. New Statesman, November 1, 2012.

Review of David Priestland: Merchant, Soldier, Sage: A History of the World in Three Castes. New York: The Penguin Press, 2013, 343 pp. By Richard J. Evans. The Guardian, August 22, 2012.

A history of power: The mighty coin. Review of David Priestland: Merchant, Soldier, Sage. The Economist, September 1, 2012.

Review of David Priestland: Merchant, Soldier, Sage. By T.H. Barrett. The Independent, September 15, 2012.

Review of David Priestland: Merchant, Soldier, Sage. By Richard Bosworth. Times Higher Education, September 20, 2012.

Route to conflict? David Priestland’s Merchant, Soldier, Sage. By David Blackburn. The Spectator, October 19, 2012.

Priestland contends perpetual power struggle in Merchant, Soldier, Sage. By Matthew Price. The National, October 25, 2012.

Review of David Cannadine, The Undivided Past: Humanity Beyond Our Differences. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013, 352 pp. By David Priestland. The Guardian, April 11, 2013.

British Conservatism’s Void of Ideas. By David Selbourne.

Into the new blue void. By David Selbourne. New Statesman, April 9, 2013. Also find it here.

Toryism no longer has a distinct core of belief. The Conservative Party does not know what it wants or what it should be. How has this happened?

Leader: Bending the arc of history towards freedom and justice. New Statesman, April 12, 2013.

Archie Bunker on Gun Control and Manhood.

Archie Bunker, created by Norman Lear for the 1970s TV show All in the Family, is the classic liberal caricature of a Jacksonian as boobus americanus. Yet Archie shows an instinctive understanding of the Jacksonian concept of masculinity and its connection to gun ownership. Here in his inimitable way, Archie (Carroll O’Connor) explains his objection to gun control on grounds of Jacksonian manhood to his son-in-law Mike, aka “Meathead” (Rob Reiner), referencing Jacksonian film icons John Wayne, Gary Cooper, and Clint “Westwood.” This scene, which starts at 5:46 in the video, is from Season 3, Episode 1, “Archie and the Editorial,” first shown on September 16, 1972.

TV: Only by enforcing even tougher gun laws can the tide of violence and death be halted. Guns must go, before more of them go off.

Archie: Well that’s where you’re going buddy boy, off!

Meathead: Hey, what are you doing that for? I wanted to hear what he had to say there.

Archie: He’s a fairy like all them gun control guys.

Meathead: I’m for gun control.

Archie: Tell it to her, maybe she’ll get the marriage annulled.

Gloria: Daddy!

Meathead: Archie, what do guns have to do with maleness?

Archie: What do guns have to do with maleness? Duke Wayne buddy!

Meathead: What?

Archie: Clint Westwood there buddy.

Meathead: What are you talking about!?

Archie: Gary Cooper, Sergeant York. I could go on and on and on, but it’d do do no good because talking to you is like casting pearls into wine.

Meathead: Huh?

Archie: Tell that to old lady Heidgeger down the street no guns. She’d have been glad to have a rod when her two burglars bust in on her last week, huh Edith.

Meathead: Archie, how do you expect an 88-year old woman to go around carrying a gun.

Archie: I don’t know. She can carry it in her elastic stocking next to her very close friend. All I know is as an American it’s my right to pack a rod!


NRA Gun Control Arguments Predicted by “All in the Family” (Video). By Seth Abramovitch. The Hollywood Reporter, December 21, 2012.

All in the Family: Archie and the Editorial Part 1. LaughVids2, January 27, 2012. YouTube.



All in the Family. Archie and the Editorial Part 2. LaughVids2, January 27, 2012. YouTube. Complete episode in one video here.

Margaret Thatcher, The Class Warrior Who Set Britain Free. By Janet Daley.

June 5, 2012. British police lead flag waving crowds lining the monarch’s route from the Houses of Parliament to Buckingham Palace to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in London. John MacDougall / AFP/Getty Images. What Thatcherism did was offer modern property-owning capitalism – with all the personal liberation that it implies – to the mass of the population.

Margaret Thatcher: Britain was set free by this class warrior. By Janet Daley. The Telegraph, April 13, 2013.

Thatcher brought a dose of Jacksonian populism to elitist Britain. She sought to remake Britain in the image of Jacksonian America.

American politics has caught the British disease. By Janet Daley. The Telegraph, July 17, 2010.

Margaret Thatcher’s Revolution. By David Ignatius. Washington Post, April 8, 2013. Also at Real Clear Politics.

Thatcher and Entrenched Interests. By Robert W. Merry. The National Interest, April 11, 2013.

How Should We Rank Margaret Thatcher? By David Cannadine. New York Times, April 13, 2013.

Thatcher Put the “Great” Back  in Great Britain. By Jack Kelly. Real Clear Politics, April 14, 2013.

Daley (Thatcher):

Everybody has his own candidate for the most important legacy of Margaret Thatcher’s time in office. Was it the reform of trade union power, the rescue of the economy from apparently terminal decline, or the release of industry from state ownership? Well, no, actually. I would make the case that while all of those things were tumultuous in their significance, they could all (God help us) be reversed. Some future government that was sufficiently benighted might legislate to remove the right of trade union members to vote on strike action. It might even seize the levers of economic activity and return vast areas of commercial life to the state.

But it would be humanly impossible to overturn the revolution in social attitudes that she brought about. And by social attitudes I mean, of course, attitudes to class. It is very difficult to explain to people under the age of 40 what this change has meant. The best way to encapsulate it is with a startling quote from the estimable Sir Jonathan Miller that has risen over this past week – like a grotesque apparition from the historic past – to remind us of what we once were like. The good doctor (as he then was) said that he hated Mrs Thatcher (as she then was) for her “odious gentility and sentimental, saccharine patriotism, catering to the worst elements of commuter idiocy.”

The greatest and most irreversible testimony to Thatcherism is that no one in public life (perhaps no one in his right mind) would today utter a statement of such shameless snobbery – such egregious, unvarnished hatred for that vast swath of the population who are now the object of every political leader’s admiration.

The “idiot commuters” whom Dr Miller loathed are none other than Ed Miliband’s “strivers” and David Cameron’s “people who work hard and want to get on.” Immediately before that, they were Gordon Brown’s “hard-working families” and even earlier – in the immediate wake of the Thatcher social revolution – they were the aspirational working classes whom Tony Blair had discovered were the lost Labour constituency.

But, as I say, it is hard to recall a time when public discourse was dominated by the unapologetic patrician elitism of public intellectuals who detested petit bourgeois virtues and particularly derided the sort of individual ambition that Thatcherism lauded. Somehow, there seemed to be no sense of absurdity in hearing people who espoused equality in one breath sounding like one of Jane Austen’s aristocrats ridiculing people whose money came from “trade” in the next.

There was a peculiar other-worldliness about this condescension that helped to undo it: a rather bizarre form of conceit which failed to recognise that even people you might have met and worked with could be part of that loathed army of idiots – or might, at least, regard it with affection and understanding.

At the time of Dr Miller’s widely quoted remarks in which he likened Thatcherism and its supporters to “typhoid”, a BBC television arts producer I knew who had grown up in a lower-middle-class family said: “Hey, that’s my mum and dad he’s talking about.” But presumably it never occurred to the Left-wing aristocracy that anyone in their own professional circle might himself have risen from the respectable working class or the truly accursed one just a notch above it. That would be because the idea of “rising” at all was faintly ridiculous and contemptible.

The very people who (most of the time) advocated educational opportunity and social freedom were driven to the most repugnant, frenzied abuse by, for example, the idea of working-class people being allowed to purchase the council houses they lived in, or being encouraged to start up businesses, or – especially this – moving right up and away from their class roots.

The romanticising of working-class life, with all its defeatism and passivity, was shocking to me when I first arrived here from the United States in the Sixties. This was paternalism at its least benign: a kind of sub-Marxist notion of class loyalty that ran deep in the Labour movement was used to bury people’s feet in the cultural concrete of their origins. It was not just risky or foolhardy to aspire to something more: it was positively wrong, a betrayal of your forebears.

Even more personally, the desire for self-improvement was a repudiation of your parents and neighbours. The Miliband “strivers” and the Cameron people “who work hard and want to get on” were not the heroes of pre‑Thatcher British politics. To Old Labour they were selfish class traitors. To the intellectual aristocracy, they were vulgar and ridiculous.

You may wonder why this vaguely feudal concept of social order came so naturally to those who surely must have thought of themselves as progressive. What struck me at the time was that Britain had somehow leapt straight from the 19th century into late Marxism. So the only acceptable advancement for working people could be through collective progress: they could move forward as a class, seizing political and economic power together, or they could stay where they were, nursing their shared grievances.

This was why “individualism” (or “selfish individualism”, as it was always known) had to be so comprehensively denounced. The achievements and successes of any one person were not just a pointless distraction: they actually robbed the proletariat of its potential for mass action. Separating out individuals for reward on the basis of merit or industriousness remains anathema to most trades unions, which is why they resist differentials of pay on the basis of results (“performance-related pay”).

What Thatcherism did was offer modern property-owning capitalism – with all the personal liberation that it implies – to the mass of the population. The vitriolic argument that began then about individual rights as opposed to collective ones is not finished. Nor has the critical question about wealth distribution been answered definitively: is it wrong that some people should be wealthier than others, even if virtually everybody has become wealthier than they were?

But the central radical idea of Thatcherism’s social philosophy would never be beaten back: everyone should have a right to progress as far from his beginnings as his talent and ambition can take him, and no one – not least the state or its agencies – should despise him for the attempt. In fact, it is one of the chief functions of government to do everything in its power to clear the obstacles to that progress, whether that involves dismantling the power of trades unions, reducing the cost of living or increasing the freedom to make private choices.

At the heart of this is respect: respect for the kind of ordinary life that Margaret Thatcher had known and that it would never have occurred to her to hold in contempt.

The Original Affluent Society. By Marshall Sahlins.

The Original Affluent Society. By Marshall Sahlins. Originally published in 1974. Reprinted in Marshall Sahlins, Culture in Practice: Selected Essays. New York: Zone Books, 2000. Also find it here and here.

The Human Motivational Complex: Evolutionary Theory and the Causes of Hunter-Gatherer Fighting. Part I. Part II. By Azar Gat. Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 73, Nos. 1 and 2 (January, April 2000).

Margaret Thatcher Saved Britain From Socialism. By Mark Steyn.

Mrs. Thatcher’s Losing Victory. By Mark Steyn. National Review Online, April 12, 2013.

This lovefest for Margaret Thatcher spells trouble for David Cameron. By Jonathan Freedland. The Guardian, April 12, 2013.

Thatcher’s legacy is Britain’s isolation. By Anne-Marie Slaughter. Financial Times, April 12, 2013.

Is My Marriage That Different From My Grandparents’ Marriage?

Is My Marriage That Different From My Grandparents’ Marriage? By Conor Friedersdorf. The Atlantic, March 29, 2013.

What 4 Decades of Marriage Taught a Grateful Husband. By Conor Friedersdorf. The Atlantic, April 5, 2013.

After 6 Decades of Marriage, No More Sex But Plenty of Intimacy. By Conor Friedersdorf. The Atlantic, April 8, 2013.

Till Divorce Do Us Part: Being Married Briefly Can Be a Blessing. By Conor Friedersdorf. The Atlantic, April 11, 2013.

The Case for Getting Married Young. By Karen Swallow Prior. The Atlantic, March 22, 2013.

You Can Be Too Beautiful. By James Hamblin.

You Can Be Too Beautiful. By James Hamblin. The Atlantic, February 20, 2013.

Human female orgasm and mate fluctuating asymmetry. By Randy Thornhill, Steven W. Gangestad, and Randall Comer. Animal Behaviour, Vol 50, No. 6 (1995).

Social preferences based on sexual attractiveness: a female strategy to reduce male sexual attention. By Josefine B. Brask, Darren P. Croft, Katharine Thompson, Torben Dabelsteen, and Safi K. Darden. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, December 7, 2011.

Elizabeth Wurtzel Refuses to Grow Up.

 

 

I Refuse to Be a Grown-Up. Secrets to looking young at 45. By Elizabeth Wurtzel. The Atlantic, April 11, 2013.

Elizabeth Wurtzel Confronts Her One-Night Stand of a Life. By Elizabeth Wurtzel. New York Magazine, January 6, 2013.

What Would Hannah Horvath Make of Elizabeth Wurtzel? By Meghan Daum. The New Yorker, January 11, 2013.

Looking Better at 45 Than 25. By Elizabeth Wurtzel. Harper’s Bazaar.

Postcard. Associated Publicity Bureau, 1930-45. Boston Public Library.

One More Reason Why Mideast Peace Won’t Happen. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

One More Reason Why Peace Won’t Happen. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, April 12, 2013.

A Day at the Museum. By Bat Ye’or. Translated from the French by Jean Szlamowicz. Jihad Watch, April 12, 2013.

Tobin:

Anyone who regularly follows the translations of the Palestinian media available on Palestinian Media Watch (www.palwatch.org) or www.Memri.org understands that the blithe talk about the possibility of Middle East peace that is heard on the left is utterly unrealistic. But keeping one’s finger on the pulse of a Palestinian culture that continues to foment hatred of Jews and Israel isn’t the only indicator of just how deep this animus runs in Arab culture. Just as informative is a look at the cultures of the two Arab countries that have already made peace with Israel: Egypt and Jordan. The potent anti-Semitism of the Muslim Brotherhood as well as the prejudice that runs throughout the culture of the largest Arab nation is well documented. But the situation in Jordan is less well known.

Jordan’s reputation as a moderate Arab nation stems mostly from the attitude of former King Hussein and his successor King Abdullah. Like his father, the Jordanian monarch is well spoken in English, charming and, despite the criticisms he lobs across the border at Israel in order to maintain his standing as an Arab leader, very much uninterested in conflict with the Jewish state. But his people and even those in his government are a very different manner.

As the Jerusalem Post reports, 110 out of 120 members of the Jordanian parliament have endorsed a petition calling for the release of the former soldier who murdered seven Jewish children in 1997. The shocking incident at the Island of Peace along the border between Israel and Jordan prompted King Hussein to personally apologize to the families of the victims for what he considered a blot on the honor of both his country and its armed services. But to the overwhelming majority of Jordanians, he appears to be a hero. If that doesn’t tell you something about how difficult it is to imagine the end of the Middle East conflict, you aren’t paying attention.

The details of the Island of Peace shooting were horrific. Ahmed Daqamseh, one of the Jordanian soldiers on duty at the site that day, turned his gun on a group of visiting Israeli schoolgirls, killing seven and injuring five. The death toll was limited only by the fact that his gun jammed. He was spared a death sentence because a tribunal ruled that he was mentally unstable. But the elevation of his former defense attorney, Hussein Mjali, to the post of minister of justice in 2011 gave new life to the campaign to spring the killer.

Unlike other such causes to free long-imprisoned figures, this effort isn’t based on any ideas about a miscarriage of justice or an overly harsh sentence. It is, instead, based on the abhorrence with which Israel and Jews in general are viewed in Jordanian society. Daqamseh is unrepentant about his crime and that appears to make him popular. Part of this can be traced to the fact that the majority of Jordanians are Palestinians who are generally marginalized in a government run by and for the Hashemite ruling family. But it must also be traced to a general current of Jew-hatred that grips the Arab and Muslim worlds. It is only that feeling that can explain the desire of so many in Jordan to treat a madman who went on a rampage killing little girls as a hero or imprisoned martyr.

The problem between Israel and its neighbors has never really been the location of borders, settlements or the severity of its measures of self-defense. It’s about the unwillingness of a critical mass of Palestinians and Arabs in general to tolerate Jewish sovereignty over any portion, no matter how small, over part of the Middle East. The hate that leads serious people to demand freedom for a mass killer of children is the same factor that makes true peace unlikely in the foreseeable future. This is regrettable, but those who wish to claim any insight into the politics that drive the Middle East conflict cannot ignore it.

Johnny Rotten Assert His Patriarchal Power Over a Female Interviewer. By Ethan Sacks.

Sex Pistols frontman Johnny Rotten tells female interviewer to “shut up” when a man is talking. By Ethan Sacks. New York Daily News, April 12, 2013.

“A flat-out sexist, misogynist pig”: Johnny Rotten criticised after astonishing verbal assault on TV presenter. By Charlie Cooper. Independent-Ireland, April 9, 2013.

“Sexist, misogynist pig”: Project interview takes Rotten turn. By Michael Idato. The Age, April 10, 2013.

Johnny Rotten Interview on The Project (2013) - Australia. RoveOnlineClips, April 9, 2013. YouTube.

Research and Publishing in the Digital Age.

Research and Publishing in the Digital Age. Video. Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting, April 11, 2013. Posted by David Austin Walsh. History News Network, April 12, 2013. YouTube.

The Hazards of Optimism in the Arab Spring. By Walter Laqueur.

Reality Check: The Hazards of Optimism. By Walter Laqueur. World Affairs, March/April 2013. Also find it here.

The False Scholarship of Edward Said. By Joshua Muravchik.

Enough Said: The False Scholarship of Edward Said. By Joshua Muravchik. World Affairs, March/April 2013. Also find it here.

The New Sectarianism: The Arab Uprisings and the Rebirth of the Shi‘a-Sunni Divide.

The New Sectarianism: The Arab Uprisings and the Rebirth of the Shi‘a-Sunni Divide. By Geneive Abdo. Brookings, April 10, 2013. PDF.

In Syria, an Alternative Iraq. By Abe Greenwald. Commentary, April 12, 2013.

Historian Robert Caro: Today’s Conservative Media “Quite Horrible” And Venomous. By Joe Strupp.

Historian Robert Caro: Today’s Conservative Media “Quite Horrible” And Venomous. By Joe Strupp. Media Matters for America, April 1, 2013.

MSNBC’s PoliticsNation Highlights Historian Robert Caro’s Criticism Of Today’s “Quite Horrible” Conservative Media. Media Matters for America, April 2, 2013.

How Ancient Religions Can Help Us Transcend the Civilization of Greedy Money. By Ulrich Duchrow.

Aristotle warned about the dangerous illusions created by the accumulation of money, but he and other Greek philosophers also laid the groundwork for the reductionist rationality associated with capitalism. Aristotle and Plato appear at the heart of this painting, Raphael’s School of Athens.

How Ancient Religions Can Help Us Transcend the Civilization of Greedy Money. By Ulrich Duchrow. Tikkun, Spring 2013.

Fareed Zakaria’s Mideast Fictions.

No Accountability for Zakaria’s Fiction. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, April 8, 2013.

Fred Hiatt, Editorial Page Editor of The Washington Post, Goes to Bat for Fareed Zakaria, Plagiarizer and Liar. By Jeffrey Grossman. JG, Caesaria, April 6, 2013.

Obama appeals to Israel’s conscience. By Fareed Zakaria. Washington Post, March 27, 2013.

Does Israel Understand the Mideast Code of Honor? By Mitch Ginsburg.

The Middle East’s code of honor: Does Israel understand it? By Mitch Ginsburg. The Times of Israel, April 10, 2013.

Israel should be a start-up nation - for civilization and values. By Danny Schiff. Haaretz, April 10, 2013. 

The Moral Foundations of Society. By Margaret Thatcher.

The Moral Foundations of Society. By Margaret Thatcher. Imprimis, Vol. 24, No. 3 (March 1995). PDF.

Thatcher:

The Moral Foundations of the American Founding

History has taught us that freedom cannot long survive unless it is based on moral foundations. The American founding bears ample witness to this fact. America has become the most powerful nation in history, yet she uses her power not for territorial expansion but to perpetuate freedom and justice throughout the world.

For over two centuries, Americans have held fast to their belief in freedom for all men—a belief that springs from their spiritual heritage. John Adams, second president of the United States, wrote in 1789, “Our Constitution was designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.” That was an astonishing thing to say, but it was true.

What kind of people built America and thus prompted Adams to make such a statement? Sadly, too many people, especially young people, have a hard time answering that question. They know little of their own history (This is also true in Great Britain.) But America’s is a very distinguished history, nonetheless, and it has important lessons to teach us regarding the necessity of moral foundations.

John Winthrop, who led the Great Migration to America in the early 17th century and who helped found the Massachusetts Bay Colony, declared, “We shall be as a City upon a Hill.” On the voyage to the New World, he told the members of his company that they must rise to their responsibilities and learn to live as God intended men should live: in charity, love, and cooperation with one another. Most of the early founders affirmed the colonists were infused with the same spirit, and they tried to live in accord with a Biblical ethic. They felt they weren’t able to do so in Great Britain or elsewhere in Europe. Some of them were Protestant, and some were Catholic; it didn’t matter. What mattered was that they did not feel they had the liberty to worship freely and, therefore, to live freely, at home. With enormous courage, the first American colonists set out on a perilous journey to an unknown land—without government subsidies and not in order to amass fortunes but to fulfill their faith.

Christianity is based on the belief in a single God as evolved from Judaism. Most important of all, the faith of America’s founders affirmed the sanctity of each individual. Every human life—man or woman, child or adult, commoner or aristocrat, rich or poor—was equal in the eyes of the Lord. It also affirmed the responsibility of each individual.

This was not a faith that allowed people to do whatever they wished, regardless of the consequences. The Ten Commandments, the injunction of Moses (“Look after your neighbor as yourself”), the Sermon on the Mount, and the Golden Rule made Americans feel precious—and also accountable—for the way in which they used their God-given talents. Thus they shared a deep sense of obligation to one another. And, as the years passed, they not only formed strong communities but devised laws that would protect individual freedom—laws that would eventually be enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

. . . . . . . . . .

The Moral Foundations of Democracy

Democracy is never mentioned in the Bible. When people are gathered together, whether as families, communities or nations, their purpose is not to ascertain the will of the majority, but the will of the Holy Spirit. Nevertheless, I am an enthusiast of democracy because it is about more than the will of the majority. If it were only about the will of the majority, it would be the right of the majority to oppress the minority. The American Declaration of Independence and Constitution make it clear that this is not the case. There are certain rights which are human rights and which no government can displace. And when it comes to how you Americans exercise your rights under democracy, your hearts seem to be touched by something greater than yourselves. Your role in democracy does not end when you cast your vote in an election. It applies daily; the standards and values that are the moral foundations of society are also the foundations of your lives.

Democracy is essential to preserving freedom. As Lord Acton reminded us, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” If no individual can be trusted with power indefinitely, it is even more true that no government can be. It has to be checked, and the best way of doing so is through the will of the majority, bearing in mind that this will can never be a substitute for individual human rights.

I am often asked whether I think there will be a single international democracy, known as a “new world order.” Though many of us may yearn for one, I do not believe it will ever arrive. We are misleading ourselves about human nature when we say, “Surely we’re too civilized, too reasonable, ever to go to war again,” or, “We can rely on our governments to get together and reconcile our differences.” Tyrants are not moved by idealism. They are moved by naked ambition. Idealism did not stop Hitler; it did not stop Stalin. Our best hope as sovereign nations is to maintain strong defenses. Indeed, that has been one of the most important moral as well as geopolitical lessons of the 20th century. Dictators are encouraged by weakness; they are stopped by strength. By strength, of course, I do not merely mean military might but the resolve to use that might against evil.

The West did show sufficient resolve against Iraq during the Persian Gulf War. But we failed bitterly in Bosnia. In this case, instead of showing resolve, we preferred “diplomacy” and “consensus.” As a result, a quarter of a million people were massacred. This was a horror that I, for one, never expected to see again in my lifetime. But it happened. Who knows what tragedies the future holds if we do not learn from the repeated lessons of history? The price of freedom is still, and always will be, eternal vigilance.

Free societies demand more care and devotion than any others. They are, moreover, the only societies with moral foundations, and those foundations are evident in their political, economic, legal, cultural, and, most importantly, spiritual life.

We who are living in the West today are fortunate. Freedom has been bequeathed to us. We have not had to carve it out of nothing; we have not had to pay for it with our lives. Others before us have done so. But it would be a grave mistake to think that freedom requires nothing of us. Each of us has to earn freedom anew in order to possess it. We do so not just for our own sake, but for the sake of our children, so that they may build a better future that will sustain over the wider world the responsibilities and blessings of freedom.

The Iraq War and the Arab Spring. By Max Boot.

The Iraq War and the Arab Spring. By Max Boot. Commentary, April 8, 2013.

The Arab Spring Started in Iraq. By Kanan Makiya. New York Times, April 6, 2013.

Did We Get the Muslim Brotherhood Wrong? By Marc Lynch.

Did We Get the Muslim Brotherhood Wrong? By Marc Lynch. Foreign Policy, April 10, 2013.

The U.S. and the Murders at the Cathedral. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, April 8, 2013.

Tired of the Brotherhood, Egyptians Want the Military Back—but Only Temporarily. By Eric Trager. The Atlantic, April 10, 2013.

Margaret Thatcher: “There is No Such Thing as Society.”

Interview for Woman’s Own (“no such thing as society”), September 23, 1987. Margaret Thatcher Foundation. Also find it here and here.

“No such thing as society”: what it means for today’s welfare debate. By Isabel Hardman. The Spectator, April 9, 2013.

Thatcher:

I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!” or “I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!” “I am homeless, the Government must house me!” and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations, because there is no such thing as an entitlement unless someone has first met an obligation and it is, I think, one of the tragedies in which many of the benefits we give, which were meant to reassure people that if they were sick or ill there was a safety net and there was help, that many of the benefits which were meant to help people who were unfortunate—“It is all right. We joined together and we have these insurance schemes to look after it”. That was the objective, but somehow there are some people who have been manipulating the system and so some of those help and benefits that were meant to say to people: “All right, if you cannot get a job, you shall have a basic standard of living!” but when people come and say: “But what is the point of working? I can get as much on the dole!” You say: “Look” It is not from the dole. It is your neighbour who is supplying it and if you can earn your own living then really you have a duty to do it and you will feel very much better!”

There is also something else I should say to them: “If that does not give you a basic standard, you know, there are ways in which we top up the standard. You can get your housing benefit.”

But it went too far. If children have a problem, it is society that is at fault. There is no such thing as society. There is living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate. And the worst things we have in life, in my view, are where children who are a great privilege and a trust—they are the fundamental great trust, but they do not ask to come into the world, we bring them into the world, they are a miracle, there is nothing like the miracle of life—we have these little innocents and the worst crime in life is when those children, who would naturally have the right to look to their parents for help, for comfort, not only just for the food and shelter but for the time, for the understanding, turn round and not only is that help not forthcoming, but they get either neglect or worse than that, cruelty.

How do you set about teaching a child religion at school, God is like a father, and she thinks “like someone who has been cruel to them?” It is those children you cannot . . . you just have to try to say they can only learn from school or we as their neighbour have to try in some way to compensate. This is why my foremost charity has always been the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, because over a century ago when it was started, it was hoped that the need for it would dwindle to nothing and over a hundred years later the need for it is greater, because we now realise that the great problems in life are not those of housing and food and standard of living. When we have got all of those, when we have got reasonable housing when you compare us with other countries, when you have got a reasonable standard of living and you have got no-one who is hungry or need be hungry, when you have got an education system that teaches everyone—not as good as we would wish—you are left with what? You are left with the problems of human nature, and a child who has not had what we and many of your readers would regard as their birthright—a good home—it is those that we have to get out and help, and you know, it is not only a question of money as everyone will tell you; not your background in society. It is a question of human nature and for those children it is difficult to say: “You are responsible for your behaviour!” because they just have not had a chance and so I think that is one of the biggest problems and I think it is the greatest sin.

The GOP Needs to Talk About Bush: Part One. By Walter Russell Mead.

The GOP Needs To Talk About Bush: Part One. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, April 11, 2013.

How Vladimir Putin Beat FEMEN. By Matt Gurney.

A topless demonstrator with a message on her back walks towards Russian President Vladimir Putin (left) and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, right, during their visit of the Hanover industrial Fair Monday. JOCHEN LUEBKE/AFP/Getty Images.

How Vladimir Putin Beat FEMEN. By Matt Gurney. National Post, April 11, 2013.

Gurney:

It’s certainly true that under Putin, Russia has slid backward into autocracy, and Putin has serious human rights abuses to answer for. He is an entirely legitimate, even deserving, target of protest. But Shevchenko is more right than she knows when she huffs that no leader of a European country would react the way that he did. And that’s the problem with FEMEN: Its shock tactics work best in politically correct countries where they’re least needed. Polite, civilized societies may be unsettled by angry slogans written across bare breasts, but in the countries where human rights are weakest and women most oppressed, the whole thing comes across as an amusing absurdity, at best.

Whatever power FEMEN had was invested it in by the politically correct discomfort of Western leaders when presented with anything controversial or, especially, sexual. That’s not going to work on Putin, a guy who poses for pictures (while topless himself, no less) of animals he shot, to show off to his own people how macho he is. Indeed, Putin has now given voice to what a lot of people probably feel inside — even though FEMEN often targets worthy causes with their protests, their tactics are, well, silly. They don’t help their cause by getting naked, and can actually hurt it. Putin has laughed at them, and that’s made him more powerful.


“I liked it”: Putin takes a different view protesters after being confronted by angry topless activists in Germany. AP. National Post, April 8, 2013.

The feeling isn’t mutual: Topless protester hits out at “bastard” Putin after Russian president’s ogling. National Post, April 9, 2013.

Vladimir Putin topless protest: Femen activist speaks out. By Jeevan Vasagar. The Telegraph, April 9, 2013.

Put Your Shirts Back On, Ladies: The case against Femen. By Naheed Mustafa. Foreign Policy, April 8, 2013.

Femen attacks Putin in Hannover. Video. Russia Today, April 8, 2013. YouTube.

More on Femen here, here, and here.