Jeremayakovka

Dwight D. Eisenhower, Infidel Crusader in Europe

As you can read below, political convenience rendered certain aspects of General Eisenhower's Orders of the Day for June 6, 1944 problematic. For example, that Soviet forces were "brothers-in-arms" and that the defeat of the Reich would guarantee a "free world." (Freer, yes, but hardly free.)

Unmistakable, however, is the Christian imagery of the Crusades in which Ike placed this unprecedented military campaign:
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Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force!

You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.

Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely.

But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man-to-man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!

I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty, and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory!

Good Luck! And let us all beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.

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No doubt the Prophet was "humiliated" and "insulted" by this awesome military campaign to liberate Europe from Nazi tyranny. One shudders to think how he feels about efforts to root out Muslim colonization of Europe today....

Christianity and Culture and War

Continuing to track down sources of recent reads, this week I acquired a copy of  T. S. Eliot's Christianity and Culture (1948). The collection of lectures and essays is referenced in Pat Buchanan's The Decline of the West (2000) (see previous post), also Robert Bork's Slouching Towards Gomorrah (1996).

Eliot's abiding concern here is to make Christianity central to Western nations during the modernist era. He does not intend any "social justice" agenda. He does not advocate a faith that would conform to conditions created by modernization -- technology, political liberalism, and "the mob." This last phrase (Eliot's word choice) is similar to what Ortega y Gasset scrutinized in The Revolt of the Masses (1930). Eliot affirms, rather, a particular and enduring power for Christianity. Yet it's not a preacher's sermon, elaborating on scripture. Nor is it the feminist critique of pacifism that is Virgnia Woolf's Three Guineas (1938), nor the decadent road recits, of Greece and America (respectively), that are Henry Miller's The Colossus of Maroussi (1941) and The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945). 

The first half of the book, "The Idea of Christianity," was originally a series of lectures he delivered in early 1939. They conclude with remarks referencing the Czechoslovakia crisis Hitler had provoked the previous year, the one "resolved" by the now infamous Munich Agreement and Chamberlain's fallacious declaration of "Peace in our time."
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The term "democracy," as I have said again and again, does not contain enough positive content to stand alone against the forces that you dislike -- it can easily be transformed by them. If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God) you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.

I believe that there must be many persons, like myself, who were deeply shaken by the events of September 1938, in a way from which one does not recover; persons to whom that month brought a profounder realisation of a general plight. It was not a disturbance of the understanding: the events themselves were not surprising. Nor, as became increasingly evident, was our distress due merely to disagreement with policy and behaviour of the moment. The feeling which was new and unexpected was a feeling of humiliation, which seemed to demand an act of personal contrition, of humility, repentance, and amendment; what had happened was something in which one was deeply implicated and responsible. It was not, I repeat, a criticism of the government, but a doubt of the validity of a civilisation. We could not match conviction with conviction, we had no ideas with which we could either meet or oppose the ideas opposed to us. Was our society, which had always been so assured of its superiority and rectitude, so confident of its unexamined premises, assembled round anything more permanent than a congeries of banks, insurance companies and industries, and had it any beliefs more essential than a belief in compound interest and the maintenance of dividends? Such thoughts as these formed the starting point, and must remain the excuse, for saying what I have to say.
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Note well, from Eliot's postscript to this (dated September 6, 1939):
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[T]he possibility of war, which has now been realised, was always present to my mind.

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A Cassandra in Europe

* Updated (11/26) *

Gay expat critic, poet, and journalist Bruce Bawer appears to have recently launched a blog, Memo From Europe. The initial posts display political and cultural commentary, plus the occasional undying reminiscence. Check it out. If you like it, let him know.

* Update * Bruce emails that Memo From Europe has been up and running for some time. Here are links to MFE's archives from earlier in 2007 and from 2006. We should all feel fortunate that Bruce has a presence on the Internet (where I learned about him). The unique, erudite, and timely perspective of a gay American in Norway would have made Henry James and Orianna Fallaci equally proud.

His most current title is the National Book Award-nominated While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying The West From Within. Other notable works include Beyond Queer: Challenging Gay Left Orthodoxy (editor) and A Place At The Table. He's also written the best demystification of Edward Said I've yet come across.

As American Thanksgiving Approaches, Think About The Islamic Colonization of Europe

From "Fjordman's Farewell to Little Green Footballs":

The [European Union’s] policy of deliberately Islamizing the European continent represents one of the greatest betrayals in the history of Western civilization. There is no other continent on the planet today where the indigenous peoples are being systematically deprived of their heritage, displaced in their own cities and subject to violence and abuse with the active involvement of their own authorities, yet where this is celebrated as a good thing in the media....

Later in the same post:

Islam isn’t reformable. The only possible solution then, apart from a global war to the death which nobody wants, is to separate ourselves from the Islamic world as much as possible. And by “we” I mean non-Muslims in general, not just Westerners. This entails completely and permanently stopping Muslim immigration in any form. However, in the USA, Canada and Australia, and certainly in Europe, simply stopping Muslim immigration is no longer enough. Some of the Muslims who are already here need to be expelled. There is no way around this. No, I have never suggested expelling all of them, but the most hardcore ones who push for implementing sharia laws here need to be deported, yes.

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A related discussion underway across the Atlantic: In NYRB Ian Buruma critiques Norman Podhoretz and World War IV.

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And some Norweigian backbone:

As Europe’s Islamization proceeds apace, the gap widens between ordinary folks’ growing recognition of the outrages that are going on all around them and the movers and shakers’ cynical insistence on pretending that everything’s just hunky-dory....

Fortuyn’s murder should have put an end to the character assassinations of the advocates of freedom. Nope. Instead they’ve only grown more sophisticated.

Leftist Fascism Awareness During Islamo Fascism Awareness Week - Proud Danish Activists Targeted

There's the Left for you.

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Read the account posted at Stop the Islamization of Europe.

Click here for more info on Islamo Fascism Awareness Week.

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Related: Matthias Küntzel's Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism, and the Roots of 9/11 (click link to order), now available in English, beginning November 1. Review posted at Telos Press.

"June the 30th, 1934"

From a previously obscure short story by Malcolm Lowry, "June the 30th, 1934," just published in the collection, The Voyage That Never Ends (Michael Hofmann, ed.):

"I stopped for a while at Crete on the way home," Goodyear said at length, thoughtfully. "A fascinating island! Many thousands of years ago they had a civilization strikingly like our own. A sporting people, but not religious. At Cnossos, which might be compared to London, they'd reached a position where they thought the human intellect, by itself, could solve all their problems. Perhaps Adam made the same mistake! Anyhow, the barbarians came, who really had a God -- an evil God but still one which was unanimously worshipped, the God of War that is -- who was all their culture rolled into one, and it was all up with the Cretans!..."

In a century whose greatest scientific achievement and marvel was to put a man on the moon, Malcolm Lowry, plumbed, as an artist, some of its most profound depths. He wrote in, of, and for the midcentury exclusively, but that was in so many ways the 20th Christian Century's pivot.... He was the last in a line of desperate, daring boys -- Melville and Conrad, especially; also, Traven -- who run off to sea to find (lose) themselves, in turn finding (losing) everything else, who survive, for a time, to tell the tale, for all time.

History, which often is scarcely more than high-brow hindsight (forgive me, Clio) or (in its postmodern variant) speculation, teaches us that pacifism -- both its pragmatic variant, by which war is believed to be rendered avoidable by negotiation or by appeal, and its cynical variant, by which "peace" is war by other means -- was high on the intellectual agenda during the 1930s. This was especially true in arts and letters.  This book by Virginia Woolf, which in many ways remains the touchstone for today's high-brow "antiwar" feminist pacifism, testifies to the former. The books by this bastard testify to the latter.

What's so good about Lowry is that, unlike so many "engaged" or "committed" writers (for the most part, now long forgotten), although concerned like any normal soul with the possibility of peace, he had no particular party line to parrot and propagate, no agenda to enact. His faithfulness was to observe Europe's frenetically disintegrating civilization. It's a faith that was, is, frightening, hair-raising, pulse-quickening. For the story of a civilization, our civilization, on the verge of having a nervous breakdown, read Malcolm Lowry.

Time For Some Jewish Resistance - "The Partisan," Performed By Leonard Cohen

To be victorious in the long run you need a tradition of fighting, you need myths and martyrs' haloes -- otherwise national character will fall into decay.
-- Edward Kuznetsov

Leonard Cohen, the most famous renderer of "The Partisan," performs live this originally Russian-French ballad of survival behind Nazi lines. He sings in English and French, with the video offering Spanish subtitles. Many songs of anti-Nazi resistance songs have been sung -- in Yiddish and in Russian, especially. This one's a treat for lovers of Romance languages everywhere.

That might be John Bilezikjian on the oud (I'm pretty sure that's an oud), I'm not sure. (He's one of the outstanding personnel on Field Commander Cohen).

"The Partisan": words by Emmanuel D'Astier de la Vigerie [link in French only], music by Anna Marly. Described in her obituary as "the troubadour of the French Resistance," Marly was the daughter of deposed Russian aristocrats (pictured below).

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For French & Yiddish songs, try Sarah Gorby's The Unforgettable Songs of the Ghetto [Gorby link in Russian only].

English version of the original "Chant des Partisans":

My friend, do you hear the dark flight of the crows over our plains?
My friend, do you hear the dulled cries of our countries in chains?

Oh, friends, do you hear, workers, farmers, in your ears alarm bells ringing?
Tonight all our tears will be turned to tongues of flame in our blood singing!

Climb up the from mine, out from hiding the pines, all you comrades,
Take out from the hay all your guns, your munitions and your grenades;

Hey you, assassins, with your bullets and your knives, kill tonight!
Hey you, saboteurs, be careful with your burden, dynamite!

We are the ones who break the jail bars in two for our brothers,
hunger drives, hate pursues, misery binds us to one another.

There are countries where people sleep without a care and lie dreaming.
But here, do you see, we march on, we kill on, we die screaming.

But here, each one knows what he wants, what he does with his choice;
My friend, if you fall, from the shadows on the wall, another steps into your place.

Tomorrow, black blood shall dry out in the sunlight on the streets.
But sing, companions, freedom hears us in the night still so sweet.

My friend, do you hear the dark flight of the crows over our plains?
My friend, do you hear the dulled cries of our countries in chains?

Pim Pied

In a follow-up to the gay radical assault on Anita Bryant post of August 28, here's a video of a 21st Century twist on that tactic: a shit-filled cream pie hurled at gay, Dutch politician and patriot Pim Fortuyn. Fortuyn, a firm opponent of Muslim immigration and the Islamicization of Europe, would eventually be assassinated by a fanatic leftist in 2002.
(H/T What Would Charles Martel Do?)

(If the video doesn't work properly, try this link on "The Myth of Liberal Tolerance." Am workin' on the vid....)

Love In The Time Of Necrophilia

Even if a husband lives ... two hundred fucking years ... he's never going to be able to discover his wife's real nature.

Welcome to "an Atlas lovers art thread" (Thanks, Pamela):

Better in many ways than his iconic turn in Apocalypse Now, but to many Americans less relevant probably, is Brando's tour de force in The Last Tango in Paris. Here's even more Brando, by quality and quantity, than in The Godfather. "This is one of those performances that goes beyond acting into something more confrontational." It goes without saying that the above scene hits harder if you're watching the whole flick.

The Last Tango in Paris is not about sex per se, no matter how famous (or infamous), no matter how startling, how unprecedented those scenes. It's about the infiltrating onset of decay -- the decay of ideas and possibilities, of desires and affections, all sheltering but festering lustfully still in a mind housed agonizingly in the flesh. It's about the decay of that flesh -- flesh livid and vivid, alluring and onerous, porous and odorous, yielding and unyielding. Whether stumbling, agog with helpless wonder and hesitant trust, upon life's fullest vigor, or contemplating with bracing bewilderment and piercing bitterness its incrementally impending exit, The Last Tango in Paris is decay by degrees. It is decay on the installment plan.... Not coincidentally, the film also sifts the diminishing returns of the barbed shards of shattered historical expectations -- revolutionary, colonial, decolonial. (Note well, apart from this clip, a certain earlier monologue, plus two later dialogues.)

The vigor of The Last Tango in Paris is a vigor mortis, its love a love in the time of necrophilia.

While Greece Burns

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...................................................Ode on a Grecian Urn
...................................................-- by John Keats (more here)
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Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
    Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thou express
    A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunt about thy shape
    Of deities or mortals, or of both,
        In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
    What men or gods are these?  What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit?  What struggle to escape?
        What pipes and timbrels?  What wild ecstasy?


Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
    Are sweeter: therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
    Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
    Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
        Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal - yet, do not grieve;
        She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
    For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
    Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
    For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
    For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
        For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
    That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
        A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
    To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
    And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
    Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
        Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
    Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
        Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

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O Attic shape!  Fair attitude! with brede
    Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
    Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
    When old age shall this generation waste,
        Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
    Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all
        Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
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Russian Revolutionary Suicide

Truth ... I love much.
-- final words attributed to a dying Christian pacifist and aristocrat,
Count Leo Tolstoy (1910)
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* Update (8/23) * Comments on and from Fausta's podcast with Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch and with "Siggy" of Sigmund, Carl, and Alfred.

* Update (8/24) * We are interested in knowing the thoughts of the suicide murderer just before he detonates the explosive belt.
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The tactic of suicide (homicide) bombing is not exclusively Islamic. Nearly all of us are familiar with Japanese kamikazes from World War II and, some of us, with other contemporary practitioners like the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka who in 1999 famously assassinated Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi by this tactic.

More obscure and, because it grew out of Western values and Western philosophy, more haunting (therefore more familiar) and more tragic (because the character flaws leading to it are our own, are our inheritance), is that suicide bombing, or an impulse to it, made at least one appearance among anti-Tsarist militants in pre-Bolshevik Russia. Whatever the totalitarian theories that arose in modern history -- about underground parties, managerial distinctions between agitation and propaganda, "the art of insurrection," etc. -- there was also in the Western tradition, as product or by-product, an impulse to suicide on behalf of (even intrinsic to the adherence to) a cause.

Fortunately (if that is the proper adjective for it), when the taking of no other life is at issue, suicide as a soul's clarion call to a wayward society enjoys (if that's the proper verb for it) status as one of the most passionate, ultimate statements possible. Consider the examples of Thich Quang Duc, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk setting himself ablaze in the 1960s, of Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima committing seppuku in 1970, and of vicar Roland Weisselberg setting himself afire last year to lament loudly Europe's spiritual capitulation to secularism and Islamization.

Scarcely known is that an impulse to suicide bombing revealed itself in Russia in 1907. As Whittaker Chambers relates to William F. Buckley in a letter dated August 30, 1954:

One night, a fashionably dressed young woman called at the Central Prison in Petersburg and asked to speak with the commandant, Maximovsky. This was Ragozinikova, who had come to protest the government's policy [as Chambers mentions elsewhere, "systematically beating its political prisoners" (whatever "systematically" means, exactly)]. Inside the bodice of her dress were sewed thirteen pounds of dynamite and a detonator. When Maximovsky appeared, she shot him with her revolver and killed him. The dynamite was for another purpose. After the murder of Maximovsky, Ragozinikova asked the police to interrogate her at the headquarters of the Okhrana. She meant to blow it up together with herself; she had not known any other way to penetrate it. But she was searched and the dynamite discovered. She was sentenced to be hanged [an appropriate sentence, btw]. Awaiting execution, she wrote her family: Death itself is nothing.... Frightful only is the thought of dying without having achieved what I could have done.... How good it is to love people. How much strength one gains from such love. When she was hanged, Ragozinikovka was twenty years old.
-- from Odyssey of a Friend, published privately by The National Review, 1969, p. 77.

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* Updates *

Fausta's recent podcast with Robert Spencer, author of Religion of Peace?: Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn't, makes a point to not confuse the values of Judeo-Christianity with those of Islam. More precisely, to not confuse their ability (or inability) to proffer values, and for a civilization, as a consequence of those values, to develop, to innovate, to progress. In terms of that Russian revolutionary lore quoted above, consider that the impulse to sacrifice other's lives and, if necessary, one's life for a cause -- to presume to become, as Camus phrased it, one of "the just" -- has different sources, impulses, motivations than those which compel jihadist shahid ("martyrs") to their deeds and their ends.

Writes "Siggy": Robert Spencer also reiterates another unequivocal truth. It is the evolution of religion and the evolution of a believers relationship (or non relationship) with his or her faith that has powered human development. It is an absolute truth that modern society cannot exist alongside backward religious expressions. That is why nations predicated on a free and democratic Judeo-Christian ethics are producing nations and why virtually all of the Arab world are only capable of consumption. It is also an unequivocal truth that producing nations and societies are very different than consuming nations.

An Ally of Civilization

It's official -- AWOL Civilization, whose blogger Gary Wolf attended last weekend's Blog Fest West, has named me an ally. A modest but distinct honor, and one to which duties attend. People like us have to prove that not only is beauty truth and truth beauty, but that power -- that is, the most mortals can know of it, the most they can exercise it -- derives from both of them.

AWOL Civ's banner calls to mind a lyric from Don MacLean's paean to Van Gogh, Vincent, this world was never meant for one as beautiful as you (below). But frankly, we have to do one better than Don MacLean. I hope this feeds you, Gentle Reader.

Now go feed Gary's beast.
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A Roman Thought For All Time

At home there was peace and an abundance of wealth, which mortal men deem the chiefest of blessings. Yet there were citizens who from sheer perversity were bent upon their own ruin and that of their country.
-- Sallust,  The War With Catiline

Into The Heart Of Primo Levi's Darkness

* Updated*

This post is a minor reflection offered in anticipation of the Fourth Annual Ariel Avrech ZT'L Yahrtzeit Lecture, to be delivered this Sunday at Young Israel of Century City (Los Angeles, CA). Professor David Shatz will be speaking on "Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik and the Problem of Evil." I'll be there.

Update (06/19): Ralphie posts his summary of Prof. Shatz's lecture at Kerckhoff Coffeehouse.
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By his indispensable works Survival in Auschwitz, The Reawakening, The Drowned and The Saved (and many more), Italian Jew Primo Levi ranks in the forefront of those who attempted to give literary expression to that ring of Hell on Earth known as Auschwitz. Levi was by trade a chemist who came of age, if not without a literary temperament, then apparently without literary ambitions. Yet through a dreadful and formidable combination of fate, history, and willpower Primo Levi, the nice Jewish boy from Turin, eventually became, as he is known today to millions, "Primo Levi" -- the world-class memoirist, novelist, poet, and essayist.
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Like most Jewish concentration camp survivors of a literary bent, Levi was far from a literal believer. Instead he essayed, for better or for worse, to recover traces of revealed truth through his own historical, and scientific investigations. His empirical method attempted to sketch (literally) an enlightened schema over the darkest reality of the univers concentrationnaire. This schema appears as the frontispiece to Myriam Anissimov's Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist: between two poles of experience -- "Job" and "Black Holes" -- stretch (or rather, bulge) four literary contuinua: "salvation through humor," "man suffers unjustly," "man's stature," and "salvation through understanding." Several writers or personalities populate each continuum -- for example, Shalom Aleichem (humor), Paul Celan (suffering), Joseph Conrad (stature), and Charles Darwin (understanding).

What sticks in my throat most, Gentle Reader, about Primo Levi is the poetic legacy he bequeathed in "Almanac." It's the last piece he published during his lifetime, dating from January 1987, a few months before he died under mysterious circumstances (either by accident or by suicide). Ms. Anissimov describes it, almost pithtily, as a farewell to the world, a farewell in the form of a prophecy, proclaimed by a follower of the Enlightenment who detested both prophets and their prophecies. "Almanac" strikes me as the admission -- by a rationalist, a scientist, a humanist -- of the eternal presence of evil, of man's agency in propagating evil.
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Almanac
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The indifferent rivers
Will keep on flowing to the sea
Or ruinously overflowing dikes,
Ancient handiwork of determined men.
The glaciers will continue to grate,
Smoothing what lies beneath them,
Or suddenly fall headlong,
Cutting short fir trees' lives.
The sea, captive between
Two continents, will go on struggling,
Always miserly with its riches.
Sun, stars, planets and comets
Will continue on their course.
Earth too will fear the immutable
Laws of the universe.
Not us. We, rebellious offspring
With great brainpower, little sense,
Will destroy, defile,
Always more feverishly.
Very soon we will extend the desert
Into the Amazon forests,
Into the living heart of our cities,
Into our very hearts.

- from Collected Poems

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This oblique measure of moral honesty, of the Timeless shooting (seeping) through the Temporal may be Levi's truest, if inadvertent, literary legacy.

Israel, The "Peculiar Heart" of Europe

If the Jews, even after Europe so tragically failed them, nonetheless kept faith with that European cosmopolitanism, Israel, their little homeland finally regained, strikes me as the true heart of Europe--a peculiar heart located outside the body.
- Milan Kundera, remarks while accepting the 1985 Jerusalem Prize

The 1950 Nobel Prize Ceremonies - It Just Doesn't Get Any More Pompous Than These Circumstances

Had Ingmar Bergman never made it as a director, he might have ended up making rent through cheesy side work like what you see in the video (below). Solemn, self-important, and self-satisfied as only the face of Old Europe peeking out from behind its (soon to be post)modernist, excessively secular mask could ever be, here's a Swedish newsreel of the penguin-suited, stuffed-shirted ceremonies that bestowed the Nobel Prizes of 1950. Note the massive formal banquet in the 9th and final minute. I don't know about you, Gentle Reader, but given the nearness in time of the Nazi era, I must confess a Riefenstahlesque frisson at the sight of those rows of uniformed diners. A lonely thought, perhaps, but one in which I trust I'm not alone....
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Our boy Bill accepts his prize at 6:45. Rumor has it the down home romancier got deep into his cups before making one of the most exhortatory Nobel acceptance speeches ever. Hell, I would too were I being recognized for a lifetime of tackling the great reducing topics of adultery, incest, and lynching ... of broken promises and prison breaks ... of living with the dead and of surviving living ... all enmeshed in a regional American context, glossed with tsunamic linguistic force gleaned from the Judeo-Christian tradition. O Bill, you were our man at the 1950 awards ceremonies: a Marshall Plan of the mind from Mississippi....
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It's hard to watch this short and not start to grasp what Ingmar Bergman had to get away from in order to get to in, say, his first feature, Ode to Joy (1950, left), about the drama behind a classical musician's struggle to rediscover meaning after enormous personal tragedy -- or somewhat later in Through a Glass Darkly (1961, right), with its play-within-a-play and novelist/father-daughter & novelist/father-son subplots. Like certain European writers of that  burgeoning decade (think Albert Camus and Kateb Yacine) Bergman may well have been shouldering, in cinema, the import of Faulkner on the European mind. Of necessity, this would have entailed sidestepping the phenomenon of Faulkner....
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I don't hate the Nobel Prize! I don't hate it! I don't hate it! I don't....
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Who Is Naser Khader?

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Gates of Vienna must be your lucky stars because you can thank them for informing you (because PBS won't) as to why Naser Khader deserves not just your curiosity but your friendship. (via Fausta).

Liberalism Delenda Est

* Updated and Expanded * (Jump into the Comments section, folks!)

[This post is a follow-up to "When In Sparta Do As A Spartan"; if you like this, you might love that.]

In the comments to the previous post a reader asks what I mean by "destroy an idea." As if there is something untrustworthy or dangerous about refuting -- beyond riposte and beyond reproach, where possible -- an idea. "Destroy an idea" has nothing to do with censoring thought or speech, but everything to do, whether in private discussion or public debate, with exercising thought and speech competently and morally.

For example, in an email a different reader told me he'd attended a lecture on the Roosevelt Administration's policy of not allowing mass immigration of Jews into the United States before World War II. This can be an anxious subject, of course, especially if you have or had (as I did) European Jewish kin who were slaughtered in World War II. He didn't pick my brain, but it turns out the subject is one I've thought about, sometimes been disturbed about, over the years.

The best single source on it I know of is David Wyman's The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945. I came across it when I was a very young adult trying to draw conclusions about the United States' general worth or reliability. The "conclusions" I drew then led to anxiety and mistrust toward American power and American purpose. Stuck inside this Jewish refugee issue, I'd refused to weigh more complex and obvious factors: namely, America's subsequent support for the State of Israel. Instead of free thinking I'd settled for fear and trembling. The first is the essence of a confident and truly liberal education; the second, a temperamental foundation of the postmodern mindset. Before too long fear and trembling led precipitously to taking intellectual refuge in the very desperate hope of revolutionary commitment. I went to the extreme Left. Some, disturbed by the very same issues, go to the extreme Right, like former Meir Kahane devotee, the Israeli journalist and New Republic Editor Yossi Klein Halevi. (Today, like me, he is closer to the center.) A minor detail at the time, but one not lost on me, is that one of the lifetime Jewish communist cultists who influenced me was also familiar with Wyman's book. (Similar to the Russian Bolshevik movement, very many of the American communists I knew were Jewish, a fact from which we constantly drew righteous solace for our otherwise stubborn and self-selecting self-righteousness.) As a result, I felt confirmed in my mistrust of America and more confident in the political direction she provided. This may sound trivial, but when you're 20, as I was -- and in the absence of more fully formed, discriminating values -- such a detail can be pivotal.

Back to the reader who'd attended a recent lecture on the subject. He didn't offer me any details of its content nor his reactions to it nor whether there had been a Q&A session. But I do know that the reader is a lifelong Democrat who thinks rather favorably of  Howard Dean. (Howard Dean, who in public has sported a Palestinian keffiyeh and who during his presidential campaign met and was photographed (all smiles) with one of the most prominent politicians of my former Marxist group.) So I felt adequately informed and obligated to set out not just to destroy, but to pre-emptively destroy, any America-doubting anxiety the lecture might have either instilled in or elicited from this reader. This is what I wrote:

Here are the essential points on the subject I would impart to anyone: In a time of widespread antisemitism around the world (including in America), it was a heartbreaking and tragic historical episode. BUT -- had Western European powers, the Soviet Union, and America braved Hitler's rise to power --had they braved it and denied it instead of enabled it [*] -- there would never have been a mass exodus of refugees to worry about. Assimilated liberal Jews were, in fact, among the appeasers (such as Leonard Woolf, Virginia's husband). So the moral and political onus is widespread and by no means merely a stain on the reputation of the Roosevelt Administration(s). Further, the three generations since World War II have seen the most far-reaching social, economic, and political (and military) gains ever for American and Israeli Jewry. G-d bless America! and G-d curse the appeasers of evil!

A severe, lazy, and fatal flaw of contemporary liberal culture (including scholarship) is to revisit those tragic historical episodes in a way that generates pseudo-intellectual fodder for those who TODAY despise American values and American power and who TODAY appease America's and Israel's GENOCIDAL enemies (witness, Pelosi's headscarved, near-treasonous trip to Syria). It allows them to believe that because American institutions in the past were less than providential (in an almost Biblical sense) that they do not deserve our proud, fierce, and abiding loyalty. That lady in New York harbor is the Statue of Liberty, not the Statue of Exodus or of Utopia. Had I attended that lecture I would have lit into the speaker or any commenters who would not have made that point clear. Why? Because for its continuous complicity in the last century's most monstrous historical crimes, modern liberals have conceded whatever moral high ground they possibly ever had.

Liberalism delenda est ("Liberalism must be destroyed"). It's what the Romans said -- and did -- about Carthage.

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[*]: The simplistic, Marxism-derived version of the rivalry between Germany's Nazis and Communist Parties is that Germany's industrial classes cynically, aloofly, and deludedly preferred Nazi ascent in order to purge the nation of "those rabble-rousing (but nonetheless promising)" Communists and thus -- in an archaically conservative sense that would appeal to old money -- restore order. This now is almost conventional American cultural wisdom, as a single line of dialogue in Bob Fosse's "dystopian", (allegedly) anti-escapist Cabaret conveys quite economically (it's Max speaking from his limousine).

That history is more complex. While Communists ended up being among the Nazis' first political victims (among the very first concentration camp inmates, tagged with a red triangle, etc.), the German Communist Party -- under orders from Moscow -- for a time actually allied with the Nazi Party. This is merely the subterfuge routinely practiced by every totalitarian political movement -- the agenda behind the agenda, etc. -- whether Nazi or Communist, Hezbollah or Hamas, or even Democratic. (Fans of The Manchurian Candidate, take note!) See, e.g., the entries here on the Nazi-Communist alliance in Germany's 1931 elections.

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Here is what I mean by "destroy an idea" or, as I wrote yesterday:

Destroy not their persons, of course, but their ideas and their justifications for their ideas. Destroy utterly their concepts and let the people -- if they can, if they have the will -- build new ideas and justifications from their dusty intellectual rubble. But first those ideas and justifications really must be pounded into rubble.

True Whit

Today, April 1st, is the birthday of Whittaker Chambers, a man who deserves to be commemorated -- and studied -- as nothing less than the spiritual father of modern American conservatism.

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Chambers's confessional autobiography Witness is a modern classic and should be required reading in college level American history cirricula, as well as in courses on the history of Christianity in America. The title derives, first, from him being the federal government's most authoritative witness during Congress's investigations of Communist spies and sympathizers within the federal government during and after World War II. These investigations, conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), were meticulous, overdue, and -- as a republic's exercise in the preservation of the integrity of its highest institutions -- above all honorable. As a result, one of HUAC's members, the young Congressman Richard Nixon (R-CA), was catapulted into the nati0nal spotlight, going on twice to land the vice-presidential nomination of the Republican Party's victorious national tickets of 1952 and 1956. (Click here for a short list of some of America's unsung HUAC heroes.)
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The most wrangling (and partisan) consequence of HUAC's anti-Communist investigations was the Alger Hiss perjury trials of 1948-50. In these Chambers's testimony was pitted repeatedly against that of his former Communist Party "comrade" Alger Hiss. With degrees from Johns Hopkins and Harvard, Hiss enjoyed a stellar, if behind the scenes, career in government. Since the 1930s he had held several high-ranking posts within the State Department and after World War II was a founder of The United Nations. At first it seemed that Chambers, a college dropout and self-confessed political subversive, couldn't hold a candle to the career public servant. Yet Hiss's eventual conviction in a court of law -- on charges of perjury, not treason (and therefore subject to a risibly soft sentence) -- vindicated Chambers's HUAC testimony. The court of public opinion, on the other hand, would remain sharply divided for decades, with Hiss being hailed as a hero for the rest of his life, and even afterwards, by nearly all liberals and leftists. Post-Soviet archival discoveries of the 1990s prove beyond considerable doubt that Hiss had spied for the Soviet Union and against the United States of America.
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It should be noted that Nixon facilitated Chambers's HUAC testimony years before the Army-McCarthy hearings. Therefore the two should not be confused. The latter (often referred to as "a witch hunt") were conducted in the Senate at the strenuous behest of Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI). They both of course shared important traits, but were and remain separate investigations. Their differences, in fact, were not lost on Chambers who, after publishing the account of his life, his HUAC testimony, and the Hiss trials in Witness, confided privately to William F. Buckley that he sensed McCarthy's theatrical tactics would, on balance, hurt the American anti-Communist movement. Above all, what the House and Senate investigative committees shared was to soldier on in the face of what was probably the most orchestrated obstruction and obfuscation ever brought to bear against the pursuit -- by the elected officials of a representative democracy -- of the unvarnished truth concerning native agents and abettors hard at work in the service of that democracy's sworn, mortal enemy. The obfuscation continues to this day: in the media, academia, professional letters, and popular culture.
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Alger Hiss had been an advisor to President Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference of early 1945. Whatever else it accomplished, Yalta is notorious for being where the liberal democratic West ceded influence over Eastern Europe to Communist tyranny. Yet during this time, as the American-Soviet alliance was drawing to a close, Chambers had become America's truest and highest-placed anti-Communist journalist. With a resume that included having written for and edited the Communist Party USA's leading journal New Masses, Chambers in 1939 had been brought on to the editorial board of Time magazine. There he quickly and habitually found himself at odds with a staff that was largely conciliatory towards the Soviet Union. Haunted by his past but undaunted by his present, he toiled to a tune he'd heard from a German ex-Communist: Hit them hard! This he did. Chambers emphatically lamented the Yalta Conference in his penetrating, prophetic essay, "Ghosts on the Roof." "Ghosts" broke the mould for editorial commentary when it appeared in Time's March 5, 1945 issue. In haunting tones it posited that the undead ghosts of Russia's assassinated Romanovs had gathered at Yalta to note, with wry brooding from beyond unmarked graves, the achievement by Soviet power of the fallen dynasty's own, long-coveted ambitions -- imperial domination over as broad a swath of humanity as possible.

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Decades later, when Harvard historian Richard Pipes set out (in his hefty study of the first years of Communist state power) to shift the public's understanding of those years from one of a popular revolution to one of a coup d'etat, he was granting, if only indirectly, an academic imprimatur to Chambers's long under-appreciated -- indeed, often scorned -- voice in the wilderness.
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Amazing Race: "A Grandson of Slaves Crushed the Aryan Ego"

I regret for the moment not polishing posts on hot topics such as CPAC, Ann Coulter's skillful use of the word "faggot", Obama vs. Hillary, and more. This weekend is pulling me in more than one direction.

In the meantime, check out this video compilation of Jesse Owens's awesome feats at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. He and Joe Louis were America's greatest sports champions in the international arenas in the years preceding World War II.

(btw, The final minute isn't related to the rest of the video.)

The West On The Ropes

We never won the Cold War as decisively as we should have....
-- from Fjordman's "Political Correctness -- The Revenge of Marxism"

The Power of the English Speaking Peoples Since 1900

My book does not consider British imperialism to have been a Bad Thing, argues that the Versailles Treaty was not harsh enough on Germany, defends the bombing of Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and considers the United States to have been a great force for good in the world since 1900.

Find this and further elaborating statements by the author of A History of the English Speaking Peoples Since 1900 a new, provocative work of history by clicking here.

Bawer Book Nominated

Bruce Bawer's While Europe Slept is nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Quoting from the New York Times piece on this, Bawer has written that “Europe is at a Weimar moment,” and that “by appeasing a totalitarian ideology” it “was imperiling its liberty.” “Political correctness”, he writes, is keeping Europeans from defending themselves, resulting in Europe’s “self-destructive passivity, its softness towards tyranny, its reflexive inclination to appease.”

To the New York Times, however, the nomination, not Muslim immigration is controversial. It also attempts to mute Bawer's message by not spelling out its full title: While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West From Within. Typical. More on Bawer and his book at Frontpage Magazine.

She Wasn't An Angel, But ....

Oh, no. One of JMK's muses is dead.

A casual mention last night of the melancholic, romantic German art-house hit film Wings of Desire (1987) led to my discovery that the lead actress, Solveig Dommartin, died last month of a heart attack at age 45.

I saw Wings of Desire twice in one week around the time it was first released, when I was still a teenager at age 18 going on 100. Her performance was a fleshy touchstone that set off intangible sparks. The credo of romantic love -- which Marion (Solveig's character) recounts to Damiel in the underground bar after the Nick Cave set -- became my own.

From an interview she gave:

It's the beauty of the heartfelt truth that enables you to move forward, and live and make of each day a new miracle and make a wonder of life itself. And for me, that's pretty much what Wings of Desire is about.

In addition, Wings of Desire bolstered my mournful, shepherding attitude towards Germany and things German (and towards Eur0pe, generally). I'd already had this mournful, shepherding attitude and have never lost it. It has been tested, but never toppled. (Note, for example, that this blog's essential colors are the German national colors.)

The obit said she died of a "heart attack," but who knows what really happened...? I'm still in shock, obviously.

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Here's the bar scene.

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Their last loneliness: the hypnotizing scene shortly before they hook up, during the performance of Nick Cave's "Six Bells Chime."

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What he fell in love with: the burlesque gymnastics of that despairing daring young woman on the flying trapeze.

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I know now what no angel has ever known. --Damiel

Answering Anti-Semitism in the UK

Melanie Phillips has been blogging a series about "The War Against the West." Her latest entry hits back at those who attempt to steal past Jewish victimhood in order to claim that modern-day Muslims in the UK are victims of racism -- while modern-day Jews in the UK are under attack as never before (and UK Muslims approve of it in staggering numbers):

There is also no comparison between a Jewish community which has always been painfully loyal to Britain and a Muslim community where up to 16 per cent support terrorism against the UK. The comparison becomes even more odious given the fact that — as the CST statistics reveal —British Jews are actually under threat from part of the Muslim community, where anti-Jewish prejudice is running at an alarming level. Last year, an opinion poll in the Times revealed that a horrifying 37 per cent of Muslims polled believed that that the Jewish community in Britain was a legitimate target’; 53% believed British Jews had 'too much influence over the direction of UK foreign policy', and no fewer than 46% thought the Jewish community was 'in league with Freemasons to control the media and politics'.

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Islam hates Jews so blindly and so ferociously, it even hates Jews for their victimization! There's no logic at work here, only indoctrination. Just ask Isaac.

Where else would you hear about this if not for the internet?

See also her other recent blog series, "Vignettes of the New Barbarism," and of course her book Londonistan. 

Donald Duck in the Third Reich

Some say history is like a river.... Someone (Marx, I think) said history staggers like a drunkard on a horse.... Here, starkly borrowing a motif from Chaplin's Modern Times, history is Donald Duck slaving away in a Nazi armaments factory. It's good all the way through, and has a sweet, great, old-school ending.

Is dis Nazi land so good? Would you leave it if you could?

("Der Fuehrer's Face" (1943))

Tasso Delivered

Torquato Tasso is best and rightly known as the author of Jerusalem Delivered (La Gerusalemme liberata) (1574), a prodigiously influential epic poem of the first Christian crusade against Muslim domination of the Holy Land. JMK highly recommends Jerusalem Delivered to counter-jihadists anywhere and everywhere.

Not long after completing the epic, however, Tasso was made to endure seven years' wrenching, solitary incarceration for offences rendered to (or perhaps merely perceived by) the Duke of Ferrara. The causes are the usual stormy stuff -- banished romance, drawn weapons, vindictive nobles, madness feigned or actual (more on all of it here). The results... the results of the confinement resonate with a startling pathos, insofar as the poet persevered in his output during those dreary years. He even composed laudatory sonnets to the very duke who held the power of Tasso's release (and who of course firmly refused it).

Those seven years have proven influential in their own right down through the ages. For example, after spending a day in Ferrara, Lord Byron composed "The Lament of Tasso," which JMK recommends as well.

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Tasso in the Hospital of St. Anne Ferrara, by Delacroix

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"The Lament of Tasso" is a funny title, since the 200+-line poem is melancholic or rueful only in parts. Actually, it's riven with stirring affirmations -- of the calling of poetry and of the poet's legendary devotion to Leonora -- which on the whole proffer a lucid, balanced, and inspiring defiance. Byron's executed intent here is on the candle and its light, not on the darkness and its shadows. Delacroix seems to think so, too, n'est-ce pas?

I'll leave it to you, Gentle Reader, to take up "The Lament of Tasso" and La Gerusalemme liberata as you will. But, to whet an appetite:

                                      .... I stoop not to despair;
For I have battled with mine agony,
and made me wings wherewith to overfly
The narrow circus of my dungeon wall,
And freed the Holy Sepulchre from thrall;
And revell'd among men and things divine,
And pour'd my spirit over Palestine,
In honour of the sacred war for Him,
The God who was on earth and is in heaven,
For he has strengthen'd me in heart and limb.
That through this sufferance I might be forgiven,
I have employ'd my penance to record
How Salem's shrine was won and how adored.

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A note on "The Lament of Tasso," from Byron's Complete Works (Vol. 2) (8 vols., Philadelphia: E.L. Carey & A. Hart, 1839 -- stiff-bound and gilt-edged, they populate JMK's personal library):

In a moment of dissatisfaction with himself, or during some melancholy mood, when his soul felt the worthlessness of fame and glory, Lord Byron told the world that his muse should, for a long season, shroud herself in solitude; and every true lover of genius lamented that her music was to cease....

Victor Hanson and My Public Shame

* Update (01/2007) * Welcome, Zombietime readers! If you value this post, you will probably also relish my 9/11 tribute, my Halloween costume, and my Oriana Fallaci and Whittaker Chambers tributes. Thank you for visiting. Your feedback is welcome.

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Gentle Reader, I (almost) apologize for referencing him so often on this blog. It's just that I am loyal to the man. Loyalty stems from gratitude, and Victor Hanson has given JMK much to be grateful for. A powerful article by him appears today, called "Losing the Enlightenment."   

I first heard of Victor Hanson thanks to the Internet, from one of my first virtual inspirations, the Brooklyn-based, truly Judeophilic blog Fightin' With Grabes. "Who is this guy," I wondered, with wonder and a little jealousy, "who writes so confidently and so economically about ancient Western values?"

I wasn't comfortable with conservative thinking at the time, but a few years ago when I noticed Who Killed Homer? on a remainder table in a Berkeley bookstore I snatched it up. Co-authored with John Heath, it's a post-mortem analysis of post-modern Classical education at the American university. I'd had a worthy introduction to the Classics as an adolescent (three years of high school Latin), but had foolishly neglected them during early adulthood. WKH? single-handedly revived my interest in them -- an interest that had suffered in part, as I learned, from its emasculation by the university itself.

Perhaps the most fortifying component of all of Hanson's writing and thinking is his frequent references to "public shame." A time-honored value among the ancient Greeks, public shame has been waylaid by a contemporary individualism that is often micromanaged beyond belief and beyond even recognition. In my case, the phrase expresses a civic sentiment, or attitude, that arose during long reflections in the aftermath of renouncing a sworn Communist militancy. For saying "goodbye to all that" doesn't cut it when reckoning with such treasonous allegiance. Virtue and honor have to be learned and earned once again (or for the first time). Acknowledging a sense of public shame has been instructive and therapeutic in this new, ex- and anti-communist, patriotic mission. Hence the better part of my gratitude to Professor Hanson, and my loyalty.

Marxist art critic John Berger, whom I regard as humane (though drastically misguided politically), once wrote that "madness is revolutionary freedom confined to the self." The book in which that phrase appears had been recommended by an art instructor during the incipient radicalization of my early undergraduate years at UC Berkeley. It caught my attention then for a reason. For those years were blowing whiffs of such mad experience my way. That experience was comprised in no small part of an excited compassion towards groups whom I had heard of but of whom I had little or no firsthand experience -- the homeless, say, and people with AIDS, and Palestinians (and Jews, too, but dead European ones sooner than live Israeli ones...). This excited compassion sought, demanded an outlet. It could not be confined to the self. So the whiff became a mist, the mist condensed, and soon enough it hardened into an icy compulsion -- to enter the arena of committed, Marxist politics. Excited compassion had become excited passion. It could be neither dissuaded nor attenuated but, like an out of control fire, just be allowed to burn itself out as I watched -- helpless, fascinated, and consumed. Such is the passion for "social change" or "social justice" that, I intimated, would lead either to some (any) kind of revolution or, if left unrealized, even a species of madness. It was the pretty and precarious passion (not yet beauty and not yet potency) of a so ardent youth. At the time I hadn't studied enough history to know that even if such passion did tilt in the direction of revolution, that that would necessarily lead to its own species of madness as well.

Yet I contend that the unguaranteed outcome of Berger's meditated bon mot holds true for those of us who, persevering after excited passion has burned out, seek ex-revolutionary freedom. Extricating oneself, first, from the revolutionary commitment, and then, from the revolutionary worldview, entails moral and spiritual engagement. A whole soul is at stake. (For a poetic example, see my "Miserere" from earlier this year.) Should this engagement fail, then a kind of madness, or something slightly milder -- a kind of moral and civic idiocy -- will set in. (For a live example, just strike up a political conversation with any middle-aged habitué of any offbeat cafe.) Because an underground man cannot simply will himself into becoming an aboveground man. His will, he has learned, is far too untrustworthy; his will may be necessary, but it is not sufficient for leading an upright life.

Securing ex-revolutionary freedom is, ultimately, not just a matter of individual opinion or disposition or even party affiliation. It is a public matter, necessitating public sentiments, public expressions, and public commitments before it may become settled. If it ever becomes settled. This public matter necessitates a strong sense of public shame, a standard without which there can be no definite or confident sense of public pride. For these it is to Victor Hanson, more than to any other contemporary conservative writer, that I turn and return.

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So, Gentle Reader, perhaps you will read his latest article -- a tenacious reckoning laced with just a shade of mourning -- with a deeper appreciation than you might at first have anticipated. It begins:

Our current crisis is not yet a catastrophe, but a real loss of confidence of the spirit. The hard-won effort of the Western Enlightenment of some 2,500 years that, along with Judeo-Christian benevolence, is the foundation of our material progress, common decency, and scientific excellence, is at risk in this new millennium....

Try to read it without feeling ashamed.

Islamic Russia

One of the most "advanced" European nations, which suffers from perhaps the very worst health and demographic trends (AIDS, heart disease, alcholism; miniscule birthrate), is ripe for Islamic takeover:

Russia is going through a religious transformation that will be of even greater consequence for the international community than the collapse of the Soviet Union....

Newsweek Puts on the Veil

First, let's get on the same page in this debate, beginning with who I am: a young, professional, well-educated and "well integrated" British woman who chooses to wear her faith—in my case, the headscarf—on her sleeve.... Driven by a strong sense of social justice and wanting to reconnect with my spirituality, I "found" Islam at university, where I was a campus activist. My decision to wear the headscarf, the higab, at first had more to do with defining identity and a brash confidence about who I was and what values guided me. In time, it came to express my devotion as well. I will probably never wear a face veil, the nijab; frankly, it makes me uncomfortable. But in the best Voltairean spirit, I will fight and defend the right of Muslim women to wear what they want to wear.

Fareena Alam's cover story in the current Newsweek (International Edition) omits the above-inserted lesser photogenic image of her in favor of this bonier and lighter-skinned foursome. That noted, she writes assertively that the Muslim headscarf is both authentic and appropriate in contemporary Europe. "[T]he point is engagement—gab, not garb," writes Newsweek's guest author, who is also  Editor of the Muslim-themed Q-News. (More on Q-News at the end of this post.)

All right, then. Ms. Alam's understanding of "engagement" is explicitly at odds with JMK's most favored authors and opinion-makers -- Melanie Phillips, Mark Steyn, Michelle Malkin, Claire Berlinski -- for starters -- who regularly sound the tocsin about the rise of militant Islam in a Europe that, culturally and demographically, is in terminal decline.

Ms. Alam mentions in passing that she "'found' [her quotes] Islam at university, where [she] was a campus activist." That's her first stumbling block. In the interest of truth and fairness, I strongly wish that she would have mentioned just what, precisely, she was an activist on behalf of (or against). That clearly was a formative time for her, one which contributed directly to the professional and political choices she is making today. Was she denouncing Islamic terror? This inquiring mind wants to know.

Speaking to current geopolitical climate, she makes no bones about where she stands now:

Many British Muslims, especially, are like me: young, politicized and socially active, angry about the Iraq debacle and the so-called war on terror.

And she is confident that not only does Islam have a place at the table now, but it is poised to set the table in the generations ahead:

[S]ooner or later, it is almost inevitable that a European Islam will emerge—inspired by 1,400 years of heritage, but authentic and culturally relevant to us in Europe today.

Well, "1,400 years of heritage" clearly omits the open warfare that preoccupied much of Christian Europe on and off for 1,000 years. 

Ms. Alam might possibly be a truly independent voice for vigorous, spirited debate both within Islam and among Islam and the Judeo-Christian West. This short profile of her rise at Q-News is worth reading:

One of the imams from up north called and said "the downfall of Q-News will be brought about by the women [including Ms. Alam] you have placed in leadership positions," she recalls. "[Editor-in-Chief] Fuad [Nahdi] said to him: ‘If you can find me 200 bearded smelly men like you who will do the job these two women do then I would accept your point!" recalls Alam…. Issues which don't often get an airing - such as mental health problems, teenage pregnancy and sexuality - have all been tackled in the pages of Q-News.

God Bless Roland Weisselberg's (Tortured) Soul

This quickly lifted from Atlas Shrugs:

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Wow. Lutheran Vicar Roland Weisselberg immolated himself in Erfurt, Germany to protest and warn of Europe's surrender to Islam....

I suppose it is both a sin and anti-Christian to "martyr oneself," but if Nobel Peace Prize recipient Mother "Missionary Position" Theresa can be fast-tracked for sainthood, then surely the counter-jihadists can elucidate the story of this man's death and -- to transpose a cliche that has been employed about the Holocaust -- sift diamonds from these ashes?

Yes, it's a crying shame that suicides can't or won't muster the spiritual resolve to prevail over their inner turmoil. In Vicar Weisselberg's case, this is one hell of an admonition of the larger Christian martyrdom Europe has been and will continue to undergo. If it is anti-Christian to call it martyrdom, at a minimum it brings to mind Christian martyrdoms of the early Roman Empire, of the  Nazi Reich, and now of Europe during Islam's aggressive, expansive, and implacable expansion into her borders. It also brings to mind Whittaker Chambers's conviction that Western Civilization is sick beyond saving, but nonetheless must be fought for.

God bless Vicar Weisselberg's (tortured) soul, wherever that soul may be.

Onward Christian soldiers!

Riots in France an Imperfect Jihadist Storm

A recent and delicious satire at The People's Cube rewrites an AP version of the ongoing French riots. 

Where AP writes:
Hundreds of youths from the poor, immigrant suburbs that erupted in riots last year marched through Paris Wednesday to present a collection of 20,000 complaints to lawmakers and urge the disenfranchised to make themselves heard with a vote, not violence ....

PC rewrites:
Mobs of Muslim ingrates who should be in jail after last year's uproar, had the nerve to march through Paris today with a list of 20,000 complaints. Isn't it nice to come to someone else's country, live off its dwindling wealth, and march the streets with 20,000 complaints about it?...

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I strongly appreciate PC's un-PC rewrite of the news item, but to it I also add that the problems facing the French state are greater and graver than, I think, any of us would like to admit. For example, merely locking up tens of thousands of violent youths would continue putting off a constructive confrontation with the issue or, at most, be but a first step.

I see these riots as operating in a vacuum of French civic authority, with the clear and present danger that they are -- to an exponentially increasing extent -- becoming an organized Islamic "perfect storm." Just such a perfect storm is what the slick, determined imams and terrorist recruiters who loathe their host country hope and aim for. In the blogosphere, of course, it's only the "counter-jihadists" who are calling a jihadist spade a spade; so, OK, we've called that a spade. Now what? For the dynamic of thousands of youths rampaging anarchistically, even if there exists (as I'm convinced) some degree of coordination and calculation, is violence of a different order than that of 19 individuals, some highly educated and multilingual, who trained for years on several continents to hijack jet planes for a spectacular suicide mission.

The bottom line is that the French state has to step in and restore order at all costs immediately. That is the only possible first step towards a constructive solution. Can the French bourgeoisie be so spiritually enervated and economically insulated that it simply hopes "to get back to the way things were"?  That is very, very dangerous.  Letting the riots simmer down on their own would be like wounded prey swatting off attacking hounds, but still lying exposed for the next attack. These rioting youths and jihadist organizers smell and taste blood (literal and metaphoric) and they'll want more -- tomorrow, the next day, and next year. To get back to my original metaphor, these riots are an imperfect storm that's getting more and more perfect by the day.

Agence France Press Scoop: Attack of the Killer Mushrooms!

Wow.... I don't mind that this is some kind of news item.... And I understand that, barring big crises, the weekend is a good time for news sources to float a puff piece. But as a big crisis breaks out in France and neighboring countries, Agence France Press transmits this?!

"Poisonous Mushrooms Leave Three Seriously Ill in France"

French "Intifada" Planned, According to French Intelligence Sources

Pajamas Media's Richard Miniter interviews Paul Belien, Belgian lawyer and journalist and one of the West's most reliable European allies (from that most appropriately named blog, No Pasaran!):

Take note, take heed, take action!

Related:
* Bookmark Belien's online news source, The Brussels Journal, now.
* European authors urge young Europeans to emigrate. "We are watching the world of yesterday," says one. "I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it," says another. Read, swallow, and digest these lamentable truths at The Brussels Journal. 

* Update 10/28: Looks like a Dutch (or greater European) "intifada" as well.

A Man

Here or there, they would eliminate you in the end. And not for what you wanted to do, armed resistance on the mountains, attacks on the barracks, radio stations to stir the people to revolt, but for what you were, for your singularity, the rebel poet, free of any restraint, any pattern, any taboo, even from the concept of licit and illicit, because of your uniqueness as solitary hero, clinging to the chimeras of the dream, the imagination. The rebel poet, the solitary hero, is an individual without followers: he doesn't sweep the masses into the streets, he doesn't provoke revolutions. But he paves the way for them. Even if he doesn't achieve anything immediate and practical, even if he expresses himself through acts of bravado or madness, even if he is despised and rejected, he stirs the waters of the silent, stagnant pond, he weakens the dams of repressive conformity, he saps the crushing power. Whatever he says or undertakes, even an interrupted sentence, a failed enterprise, becomes a seed destined to blossom, a perfume that hangs in the air, an example for the other plants in the forest, for us who haven't his courage, his clairvoyance and his genius. And the pond knows it, the Power knows that he is its real enemy, the real danger to be liquidated. It even knows that he cannot be replaced or copied: the history of the world has given us clear proof that when one leader dies another is invented, when one man of action dies another is found. But when a poet is dead, a hero is eliminated, there is a void that cannot be filled, and you have to wait until the gods resurrect him. The gods know where, the gods know when.

-- from A Man, by Oriana Fallaci

The Eurabian Civil War in France

The Belmont Club says what needs to be said right now about unruly France:

If even conservatives can develop a political ideology, nothing in principle prevents French youth in the banlieus from developing one of their own. Or prevents them from adopting a proven, culturally familiar ideology which has already survived for longer than European civilization. Why should car-burnings fueled by alienation and joblessness not, at some point, become fueled by ideological Islamism? After all Islamism does have secret organizing cells; a common handbook and training camps. The current attacks on French police may or may not be driven by an ideology, but they certainly can be in the future.

I tacked this link to Belmont inside a recent post, but on second thought now I urge everyone to go read it for himself, in full. For example:

“The thing that has changed over the past month is that they now want to kill us,” said Bruno Beschizza, the leader of Synergie, a union to which 40 per cent of officers belong. Action Police, a hardline union, said: “We are in a civil war, orchestrated by radical Islamists.”

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According to this news item referenced at No Pasaràn!, yesterday a gang of 30 torched a bus in broad daylight in Grigny, France. Hmm, where have we heard of a bus attack sparking a Middle Eastern civil war before? At least this gang evacuated the passengers first. But don't take heart. In this Eurabian civil war, the war is not between rival factions, but between rival societies -- a pompous, rotting French one and an emboldened, enraged, and implacable Islamic one. As you read this the criminal conflagrations are being exacerbated and exploited by Islamic gauleiters in Europe and beyond. How will Gallic Frenchmen, historic Europeans, and other (nominal) Westerners seize this moment?

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Update 10/23: Read and see direct reportage, including footage of French teenagers firing rockets in the streets (via Atlas Shrugs).

"Hurricane Mohammed" Costs French Insurers 160,000,000 Euros

*** Updated ***

A French newspaper reports that last year's nationwide (chiefly Muslim) riots -- which spread like wildfire throughout France, laying waste to dozens of public buildings and businesses and 9,000 cars, trucks, and busses -- cost insurers 160,000,000 Euros (more than US$200,ooo,ooo). $200,000,000 for a nation whose GDP is approximately that of California!  That's a huge bill to pay. Maybe it's time to think of such riots -- past, present, and future -- as "Hurricane Mohammed."

The interested insurance companies are holding the government responsible, which is a natural and necessary direction in which to point fingers. A generation and more of a plainly failed immigration policies has saddled France with a predominantly Muslim underclass that appears permanent and permanently unruly. Can the same French government be trusted to transform France's ethnic tinderboxes into anything socially useful? Barely. In the meantime, we know, radical Islam worked wonders on the mind of one of France's native sons. How many more is it working on right now? Who in the end will save France from its demographic rot (and in turn save the rest of the West from this French rot)?

This past Easter JMK asked, Is Paris Praying? One year after the riots we ask, What price Muslim immigration? What cost? and What benefit? Or as V.I. Lenin would ask, Cui bono? (Who benefits?) Because we know that radical imams, like all implacable, warring enemies, ask themselves that question all the time....

And don't look now, but Hurricane Mohammed is back with ever-mounting costs:

An average of 112 cars a day have been torched across France so far this year and there have been 15 attacks a day on police and emergency services. Nearly 3,000 police officers have been injured in clashes this year.

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*** Update ***

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French police officers tell their government: "What are we, chopped foie gras?"

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Update 10/22: The Belmont Club takes a hard look at the situation:

“The thing that has changed over the past month is that they now want to kill us,” said Bruno Beschizza, the leader of Synergie, a union to which 40 per cent of officers belong. Action Police, a hardline union, said: “We are in a civil war, orchestrated by radical Islamists.”

Two Petitions for Robert Redeker

*** Updated ***

At least two petitions are now circulating on behalf of distinguished French philosophy professor Robert Redeker. You may recall that he has been targeted for death by a savage Muslim fatwa because his September 19 op-ed in Le Figaro roundly condemned Islam for its inherent violence, for refusing to renounce and reform its violence, and for laying siege to the democratic West in our time (not unlike Communism did in the 20th Century). The governments of Tunisia and Egypt even banned that day's issue of Le Figaro. Few Europeans, few Frenchmen, and few academics are as brave as Professor Redeker; but now, for having freely expressed his opinion he and his family are in hiding in their own country!

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REDEKER ASKS ....
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"In the face of Islamist intimidations, what is the free world to do?" is a lucid piece of commentary that all concerned citizens of Western nations, non-Muslims and concerned Muslims alike, should read closely. In it Redeker speaks truth to Islamic savagery. Deploring "an Islamization of the French spirit," he condemns:

... Islam's attempt to suppress what is most valuable in the West and which Muslim countries don't have: freedoms of thought and expression....

Islam tries to force Europe to yield to its vision of man....

Islam arises, like the image of late Communism, as an alternative to the Western world. Following the example of the Communism of old, Islam, by aiming to conquer the spirit, strikes a sensitive cord. It boasts a legitimacy which disturbs the Western conscience, always sensitive to others: to be the voice of the poor of planet. Yesterday the voice of the poor claimed to come from Moscow, today it would come from Mecca!...

Like Communism, Islam regards as soft the generosity, broadmindedness, and tolerance; and women's freedom, liberty of mores, and democratic values are considered marks of decline.

These are weaknesses that it wants to exploit with the help of "useful idiots" with good consciences filled with finer feelings, in order to impose the Koranic order on the Western world itself....

Violence instigator, ruthless war chief, plunderer, massacrer of Jews, polygamist: such is the image of Muhammed in the Koran.

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The entire article appears in English at Fausta's blog where I gratefully cut and pasted these excerpts. Le Figaro condemned with "utmost vigor the serious infringements to freedom of thought and freedom of expression that this affair has caused"; but then it backpedaled. Even the New York Times reported the story. More in French and Italian.

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JMK ANSWERS ....

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If you agree that the fatwa against Redeker's and his family's lives are deplorable affronts to civil society, JMK urges you to read and sign the online petitions now circulating on their behalf:

Here's one which begins, "There have been death threats against a courageous professor of philosophy, Robert Redeker, and his family (he must change his home every night, under the aegis of a special services of the anti-terror police)...." And another aptly titled, "Whole-hearted support for Robert Redeker and against barbarism." Note: when signing remember that "Nom" asks for your last name and "Prenom" asks for your first name.

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*** Update ***

According to TeleFrance1's web site, a 25 year-old Muslim man from Orleans was arrested and released after it was determined he sent a death threat to Professor Redeker by email. It has not been determined whether he has direct links to terrorist organisations and therefore authorities (including the editorial authority of TF1) are considering this as a "hate" crime instead of terrorist threat. This Muslim individual also sent a threatening email to an American history professor whose name has not been disclosed.

France Increasingly a Deathtrap for Jews

Arnaud de Borchgrave reporting on France (via the Washington Times):

Anti-Semitic incidents have proliferated in France in recent times, but the news seldom makes it across the Atlantic and when it does, it must still fight to be heard above the constant melodrama of constant trivia. A Jewish sports club in Toulouse attacked with Molotov cocktails; in Bondy, 15 men beat up members of a Jewish soccer team with metal bars and sticks; a bus that takes Jewish children to school in Aubervilliers attacked three times in the last 14 months; synagogues in Strasbourg and Marseilles and a Jewish school in Creteil firebombed in recent weeks; in Toulouse, a gunman opened fire -- all ignored in mainstream U.S. media.
    The metropolitan Paris police tabulated 10 to 12 anti-Jewish incidents per day in the last 30 days throughout the country.

Click over to read Mr. de Borchgrave's "Gallic Intifada."

Plus, related: Nidra Poller reports from France and New York, with some harsh words for le Em-Ess-Em (France's MSM, or mainstream media).

Suicide Girls

No! Not the exhibitionist, underage, quasi goth-chick web site (although, truth be told, one of its members did link back to JMK's Lesbollah post). No, not those suicide girls. Rather these suicide girls: Muslim girls in Europe killing themselves to uphold some sense of family "honor."

Steadfast Muslims insist the veil bestows "liberation" on its women. Counter-jihadis and Salman Rushdie say that "veils suck." Meanwhile as the debate rightfully rages, the news from Sweden state[s] that 3 out of 5 young Muslim women who turn to the authorities and private support groups have felt pressure [from family members] to commit suicide....

More from von S. at Infidel Bloggers Alliance.

A Good German Commemorates a Good Frenchman

German blogger Gudrun Eussner features a summary of the life and noble efforts of French Louis Torcatis, a lieutenant colonel in the French underground resistance to Nazi rule. Nom de guerre: "Bouloc." Killed by Nazi Germans and French collaborators a few weeks before the D-Day invasion.  Posthumously decorated by the French government. Schools are named after him near Peripignan, where he is buried. More on Torcatis (in French) here and here. If you can read German, you'll relish Gudrun's entire page (or translate the site for free here).

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Louis Torcatis, 1904-1944, French freedom fighter

Update, A Good American Commemorates a Good German:

Lew from Right in a Left World tips JMK to John Rabe, "The Good Man of Nanking," a German national who, during Japan's occupation of northern China, helped save untold thousands of Chinese lives and bodies.

Workers of the Word, Unite (Against Terrorism)!

British blog Harry's Place offers videos by Leftist David Aaronovitch which isolate and excoriate the "We are all Hizbullah" and related memes that have thoroughly degraded, corrupted, and discredited ab ovo the so-called antiwar movement. To borrow the bloated, humanist-universalist-speak of Leftists, JMK says: that's one great leap for a man, one small step for mankind.

British Recommendations for Observing Ramadan Fast Make Me Want to Throw Up

Ever get the feeling the West is being sandwiched by Islam?

In an attempt to make Ramadan more palatable for Muslims in Great Britain, a state-funded organization has produced a booklet that artificially sweetens the holiday by quoting the Koran directly, with uplifting elaboration, and referring to Mohammed as "the blessed Prophet" and "peas peace be upon him."

Sufferin' succotash! Looks like the only way to enjoy a healthy diet of religious tolerance is to hold the Mohammed.

Riots Sprout in Brussels During Ramadan

“What should be noticed about the riots is that they start after sunset. Besides the fact that they start after dark, it also gives the rioters enough time to break their fast and enjoy the traditional family meal. Sunset is around 7:30pm.” Tuesday’s and Monday’s riots began around 8:30pm.

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The original article has many links for further reading.
So, too, does Michelle Malkin's post on the subject (where I found this article).
I salute Abdul at Freedom's Zone for his savory commentary.

Arrivederci, Fallaci, Fare Thee Well

Now that you were dead, they would listen to you.
-- Oriana Fallaci, A Man

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They called her aggressive, abrasive -- racist, even. Her mind was the fierce, gifted offspring of a most felicitous marriage of reason and emotion: each book an assault on the citadel of postmodern European presumption, each sentence a cavalry charge. Were we to conduct an intellectual autopsy on Oriana Fallaci, were we to behold her brain we would have to compare it to a cannonball; her sex we would have to compare to its etymological source, to a sword's or dagger's sheath.

One of the boldest of contemporary voices of a dying (or rather, long dead) Europe, she was a ferociously indignant echo of what had once been the most harmonious chorus of civilization. Ever. This was a civilization that in the 500-year aftermath of its glorious Renaissance could devise only more and more grotesque ways of betraying its own promise: the Inquisition, the Hundred Years' War, the Jacobin Terror, the Napoleonic Campaigns, the Scramble for Africa, the Great War and its eventual issue, the Great Dictators, each of whom -- the German and the Russian -- bequeathed to posterity (to us) totalized, collectivized, industrialized state murder.

But indignation assures that one's pessimism will never be overwhelming, never quite enervating. Reading Fallaci I sense thrust together the split scream of Antonin Artaud and the unified sublimity of Friedrich Schiller. I hear the cri de coeur from a cryptic public address Artaud gave upon his release from incarceration in an insane asylum -- eight mean, mostly war years during which he incurred dozens of electroshock sessions and the loss of his teeth and much of his hair, but also during which he wrote fully half of his 24 volumes of Collected Works -- the cri de coeur, C'est un vrai désespéré qui vous parle! ("This is a truly desperate man who speaks to you!"). Reading Fallaci I sense that bitter but proud solicitation blended with the admonishing, transcendent aspiration of Schiller's "Ode to Joy" which Beethoven adapted for the finale of his 9th Symphony, after he himself had gone deaf:

O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!                   Oh friends, not these sounds!
Sondern lasst uns angenehmere            Let us raise our voices in more
anstimmen, und freudenvollere!           pleasing and more joyful sounds!

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That, to me, is the force of Fallaci's reason. That her mere body, wracked of late with cancer, has perished means little compared to the relentlessness with which in her late years she chastised a dead Europe and exhorted its despised but would-be savoir step-children, America and Israel, to carry on the fight -- our fight -- for civilization worthy of the name. Fallaci was a restless, rambunctious rebuke to all of our intellectuals who have gone deaf, dumb and/or blind in the face of the calamitous threat of Islam.

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Arrivederci, Fallaci. Fare thee well.

(H/T to Asher for the wee-hour heads up on this one.)

* Updated with new links *

Some further tributes:

Iraqi Bloggers Central has the definitive round-up
Stefania
Debbie Schlussel
Michael Ledeen
David Horowitz
Michelle Malkin
Robert Spencer
Judith Weiss
ZionistYoungster
Stop the ACLU.
Gates of Vienna
The Anti-Jihad Pundit

Read the comments at ¡No Pasarán!
A 2002 review of Fallaci's The Rage and The Pride

*New! (9/18)*: Daniel Pipes's informative summary of her career
Say goodbye to Oriana: video footage from her funeral.

* Three galleries of photos * (this one's my favorite):

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Dear Europe

Dear Europe, your lunch break is too long and you are now extending it into a siesta. There is a war outside and you are going to be part of it. The sooner you act, the fewer victims will die, both in Europe and in the Muslim world. Appeasement is not an option and neither is hesitation. You are guaranteed to be on the winning side, for the sake of civilization and also for the sake of millions of honest innocent Muslims, who will eventually pay the highest price for the madness of their leaders. But you cannot win while in denial and certainly not before you open your eyes. What more should happen before you wake up?

- Prof. Haim Harari, Introduction to the Italian edition (forthcoming) of A View from the Eye of the Storm - Terror and Reason in the Middle East

(H/T Melanie Philips)

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* * *

Welcome ¡No Pasarán! readers (and thanks to U*2 for generously linking).  Feel free to tool around the "Main" page -- there's lots of material....  Your critical feedback is always appreciated. Thanks!  - JMK

Bienvenue aux lecteurs de ¡No Pasarán! (et merci à U*2 pour le lien généreux). Veuillez jeter un coup d'œil sur la "Main page" -- il y a beaucoup de matériels.... J'apprécie toujours vos réactions. Merci! - JMK

Europeans for Terror Gather in Italy

"To Revolt is Necessary" screams the slogan atop the Anti-Imperialist Camp's web site.  This site is an informational, tactical, financial, and logistical crossroads for European terrorist enablers and their international allies.  Even more than most extreme Left sites, AIC is laden with articles, pictures, and links to other organizations.  It is professionally designed and quite interactive.

Currently near the top of the right sidebar is a thumbnail link to the six-day conference, "Resistance (and Intelligence)." Kicking off today, it looks to be not just a Who's Who of every major terrorist, anti-Western, Islamic and anti-semitic war but also a How and a Why to support them.

Just look at certain offerings:

"Palestine: The Liberation Movement Since Hamas's Victory"
"Chavez's Proposal"
"Lebanon: Theory and Practice of Hezbollah"
"The Holocaust Industry: How it Justifies the Zionist Genocide in Palestine"
"Afghanistan: Roots, Dynamics, and Perspectives of the Guerilla War"

If any international visitors have opinions and impressions to contribute, I would appreciate them.

(H/T: Stefania)

The Light of a Black Sun

Sultan Knish (another blogger at home in a black background!) posits his take on the declining West.  My short response: I agree. 

Very few minds are capable of thinking civilizationally, that is, with a perfect moral, philosophic, cultural, and historical pitch -- with an ability to stare into the light of a black sun.  Holderlin, Nietzsche, Artaud, Wittgenstein, Chambers come to mind.  Such train of thought is perhaps a holdover from those fruitless years, both wild and meandering, when I pondered certain shooting stars of the academic Left -- Adorno, Derrida, Said (for starters), none of whom, during my flirtation with the Academy, their critiques' seductions notwithstanding, completely purged my melancholy, interrogative temperament.

So, grasping ever tightly the dagger within my mind's cloaking folds, I refer you, Gentle Reader, to SK's "The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization":

Neither the right nor the left is actually offering a vision of a future for America, all they're doing is wrangling over the terms of its dismantling....
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Book Marks

* Update (9/13) *: Welcome, Alarming News readers and thanks, Karol, for tagging me!  You provide the needed motivation for me to properly finish this annotated list. Hope you like the fare.

Oh, boy.  Blog-buddy Irina has "tagged" me to provide unique answers to "the book meme," that is, about books that stand out in my experience. Where to start? There are so many that didn't make my list.  There is so much to say about the ones that did.

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1.    One book that changed your life
        Whittaker Chambers, Witness

        * Update (04/2007) * Please, Gentle Reader, read my post of April 1, 2007 commemorating Chambers's 106th birthday, "True Whit - Part One (Homo Rei Publicae)".
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2.    One book you have read more than once
        Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

        Anna Karenina may be the wiser and more economically written of Tolstoy's two (two!) magna opera, but nothing I've yet come across knocks War and Peace out of the top slot for must-read modern books (as opposed to #3, below). Although, granted, I haven't undertaken Proust's Remembrance….

        While we were teenagers, a friend set out to read War and Peace before we graduated high school.  Unfortunately I mistook his aloof determination for a species of arrogance. My mistake. For what I discovered about 10 years later, when I finally picked it up in a college lit. course, is that War and Peace is concerned with vital questions every man should concern himself with when he's a very young man: whether to devote one's best efforts to mysticism or mundane affairs, why and how to perform military service, and when, whom, and how to marry. I read it again within a year (this time intimately familiar with the characters) and found it at least twice as engaging, entertaining, and elevating.

        Choicest Quote (from Pierre's diary):

        Human sciences dissect everything in order to comprehend it, kill everything in order to examine it.
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        btw, At the semester's end, on the instructor's evaluation form -- brackets and all --  I wrote, "[Comparative Literature] dissects everything in order to comprehend it, kills everything in order to examine it." Heh.

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3.    One book you would want on a desert island
        (tie) The Holy Bible (King James Version)
        The Koren Bible

        Why? Simply because either one assures that, although deserted, I am not alone.

        Choicest quote:

        Then I said, "Ah, Lord God! Behold, I cannot speak! For I am only a youth." And the Lord said to me, "Do not say, 'I am only a youth,' for to all to whom I send you you shall go, and whatever I command you you shall speak.  Be not afraid of them. For I am with you to deliver you," says the Lord. (Jeremiah 1:6-8)

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4.    One book that made you laugh
        Honoré de Balzac, The Duchess of Langeais

        This novella, little known among English readers, has few comic moments.  It's a romantic melodrama with many a lesson on how to avoid -- or survive -- what in the American idiom we call, “Good Lovin' Gone Bad.” But one section of it made me cackle like a loon, like someone who is, let's just say, still bitter after all these years.

        Choicest Quote:

        Religion, Love, and Music, aren't they the three-fold expression of the same fact: the need for expansion out of which is wrought every noble soul?

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5.    One book that made you cry
        William Styron, Sophie's Choice

        This isn't the only novel to embrace the twin inheritances of American innocence and Holocaust memory (e.g., The Devil's Arithmetic (novel; movie) and From a Sealed Room come to mind), but Styron's masterpiece is and will remain for years to come the genre's standard.

        That said, I admit a sentimental interest in an appreciative reckoning with all of Styron's œuvre, and in particular with Sophie's Choice. The narrator and plot approximate my mother's fresh arrival from the Protestant heartland to New York City and her own rough introduction to certain aspects of New York Jewish society.  Thus for me Sophie's Choice snatches from oblivion details of a bygone New York which otherwise I'd only heard tell of -- heard in fact around the time Styron was conjuring his novel -- at my mama's knee. In addition, he wrote another of his novels just a couple of blocks from where I grew up.  And for reasons I won't go into here, an Emily Dickinson poem he inserts near the end of Sophie's Choice served as a most apt tribute to my grandmother at her interment.

        I had the temerity once to track Styron down by telephone. You have an idea why, Gentle Reader, but don't ask me how! It was entirely legal, if (despite being handled with discretion) not quite ethical. Burdened with a need to confide certain thoughts to him and to try to elicit some (any) response, my only calculation was to get his address so I could mail him a letter. Little did I know that he would answer his own phone! The astonishment nearly took my breath away. Clueless as to this stranger's motives, Styron was naturally on guard. I sensed a degree of reticence in him so encompassing that no matter how much I professed my most unprofessional interest in placing the call, my intrusion into his domestic solitude seemed to me to leave him traceably wounded!  I was thrilled and mortified all at once, while he was, I fear, mostly mortified. After a brief introduction I cut to the quick and asked him if I could send him the letter I'd written.

        He said Yes. I said Thank You and Goodbye.

        I sent it. He didn’t reply.

        Despite subsequent raw disappointment, I knew that that was as it should be.  For me -- and for you, Gentle Reader -- let it serve as a lesson in the high degree of delicacy decency dictates when approaching an author whose work impacts you. And, frankly, a lesson in the slim chances that one’s gesture will amount to anything more than a cursory one.

        Over time I’ve become more exacting of my erstwhile idol (and of myself, too, let's hope!). For example, that he's placed his Albert Camus-derived opposition to the death penalty in the service of appealing the murder conviction of racist, anti-American cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal I find unconscionable. Still, Styron imposed on himself almost Flaubertian standards for his rich short story trilogy, A Tidewater Morning. I once read that his ultimate project is a novel set in WWII in the Pacific (where he served during that conflict). As with Sophie's Choice and the short stories, he intends to revisit a pivotal time from his youth. I've also read that his health has declined sharply in recent years.  For the duration of his remaining tasks, whose struggles are but the accumulated riches of love and loyalty, I wish him and his family all strength and comfort.

        Choicest Quote:   "What's Owswitch?"
       
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6.    One book you wish had been written
        (tie) Albert Camus, Islam's Existential Threat To the West (2002)
        Abraham Lincoln, My Country at 100, My Life at 67 (1876)

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[6a. One book you wish you had written (as I initially misread #6)]
        Charles Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil

        Dandified bohemians and ruthless revolutionaries are entirely at cross-purposes except for one profound, shared trait: each embrace and employ evil and in turn become enmeshed in it. Baudelaire's mighty verses conjure evil's power, corruption, and cruelty -- and its fascinating, terrible beauty.

        Knowing, as I do, a bit about bohemians and more than a bit about revolutionaries, I will say that no poet renders vivid more than does Baudelaire what I had become enmeshed in -- had become -- in the course of that most seductive and elusive (and illusory) radical attachment. Whittaker Chambers's Witness (of #1, above) is a testament of one man's agonized return from the spiritual brink to which Communism leads men; Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil is, for me, a vision of the brink itself.

        Choicest quote:

        Les sanglots des martyrs et des suppliciés
        Sont une symphonie enivrante sans doute,
        Puisque, malgré le sang que leur volupté coûte,
        Les cieux ne s'en sont point encore rassasiés!
        -- from "Le Reniement de Saint Pierre"

        (The sobs of martyrs and tortured men
        Make an intoxicating symphony, for sure,
        For despite the cost in blood of such pleasure,
        The heavens haven't yet had their fill of them!
        -- from "The Denial of Saint Peter"; trans. by JMK)

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7.    One book you wish had never been written
        V. I. Lenin, What is to Be Done?

Had there never been What Is To Be Done?, there would never have been a Bolshevik revolution in Russia -- and maybe never anywhere else. Q.E.D.

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8.    One book you're currently reading
        (concurrently) Allegra Goodman, Kaaterskill Falls
       The Book of Elijah
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9.    One book you've been meaning to read
        Adin Rabbi Steinsaltz, The Talmud, The Steinsaltz Edition: A Reference Guide
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Five other blogs "tagged" to answer "the book meme":

Dreams Into Lightning (Asher)
[Talk about provocative and engaging answers.  Go see for yourself!]

Roncesvalles (The Editrix)
[The voice of Germany in the West's 21st Century fight for survival.  A must-read blog!]

Pearlies of Wisdom (Pearl)
[Pearl has respectfully declined, but you should go read her blog anyway!]

Mad Zionist (MZ)
[His answers are in the Comments, below]

Crossing the Rubicon2 (Gail)
[Gail's thoughtful, tasteful posting makes her a "go-to" site to find out whether news is good for the Jews.  Soon we'll get to see another side of her.]

Free Thoughts (Stefania)
[One of the b-sphere's most energetic, dedicated bloggers she at first declined, but then said she's in.  I can't wait for her answers.  Now, that's Italian!  (Update (8/21) - Stefania's answers are in! see Comment #23)]

Quote of the Day

Everybody in the U.N. advocates their own national interest.  The only difference is that the United States is the only one that's criticized for it.

-- John Bolton, in a ten-minute televised interview on Hannity & Colmes
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America's U.N. Ambassador clarifies the United States' position on Israel's defensive counter-attack and on Syria, Iran, and North Korea. He describes Israel as going after the "root causes" of terrorism. I like it.