Current Views

HOLY WAR

Robert Greer Cohn — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 17:14:34 +0000

   Madeleine Albright’s denial that we are in a holy war ignores the plain fact that our enemies have openly declared one against the West. Either we resist that in kind, with a comparable faith-based conviction and effort or we will be overrun as Europe already alarmingly is, finally converted or beheaded.
   Albright describes herself as a “problem-solver.” Sinclair Lewis (“There are no Solutions”) and Leo Strauss (“You can solve limited problems but not infinite ones”) illuminate the shallow petty-mindedness of her brand of liberalism, utterly lacking in “moral imagination” and the “tragic sense” (Lionel Trilling).
   The surviving SS who want, avowedly, to kill all remaining Jews, like Hamas and powerful Iranians, are not a “problem”—they are a catastrophe, like a mutated virus such as pandemic flu, calling for total resistance as in Hitlerian Europe and a looming Islamo-fascist “Eurabian” Caliphate.

HANSON'S SHALLOW VIEW OF OUR LEFT

Robert Greer Cohn — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 17:13:12 +0000

   In the crisis moment of war, people with differing gripes against an enemy (like Germany before World War II) converge in a unified attitude of hostility and single-minded acts of war.
   Similarly, the threat to us from Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda and from Saddam Hussein’s more-secular racist imperialistic aims (closer to Hitler’s, whom he admired) also converged, whether they coordinated their efforts or not (historians will spell that out).
   Also: the hatred of faith on the part of modern secular-rationalists (defended by Hanson in a critique of D’Souza) converges with the hatred of Jews on the part of Christian anti-Semites, ingrained since the initial demonization beginning two millennia ago, as Vatican II acknowledges. Comparable radical Muslim (Arab) hatred of the Jews arose earlier (as in Genesis: Ishmael) and grew in modern times.
   The secular-rationalists who dominate campus and media thought (engineering, liberal social engineering) would never admit the anti-Semitic bent in their mindset, but the converging reality is there.
   Israel is blamed on shallower, more superficial, civic-rational, one-worldist, secular grounds which mask the underlying existential drama between faiths externally and, internally, between faith and anti-faith.

WHAT FUTURE

Robert Greer Cohn — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 16:48:59 +0000

Those who say “Let’s leave and let the Iraqis defend their own country” totally miss the main point of our being there: to defeat and defang a fanatic and dangerous enemy bent on destroying us, as we victoriously did in World War II. We haven’t yet gotten that serious as a nation. It’s high time we did. The enemy isn’t quitting. Too many of us are. What future is there in that?

UGLY INCIDENTALS

Robert Greer Cohn — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 16:09:52 +0000

   Those, like Steny Hoyer, who want to cut and run from Iraq because they hadn’t bargained for a civil war there when they voted to go in, are like a climber on Mount Hood who wants down because he hadn’t figured on cold winds or snow.
   Those are ugly incidentals, backdrop. The point remains that a good soldier fights his way to the top regardless. The civil war is a problem only if the contestants turn on us. If they just kill each other, they do our work for us, in terms of actual fighting.
   True, stabilization is made harder by the internal civil strife. But that never should have been a short-term goal, rather, one achievable only after a “long, hard slog” as our leaders at one time honestly put it—there was never a chance for Iraq and environs to be other than a quagmire, like every serious war we ever fought: the price of survival.

RESURRECTION

Robert Greer Cohn — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 16:05:21 +0000

   Global warming is, no doubt, a physical fact and we may be able to do little about it, as some leading climatologists aver, but the spiritual fact of global freezing of heart is far more threatening, and that is in human power to reverse.
   It’s called rebirth—resurrection—and we celebrate it every year on Passover/Easter, when spring light rises toward summer ripeness. The pagan physicality of nature is at one with childish faith in the grassy Easter baskets we brought home from kindergarten, with glowing jelly beans and a semblance of bunny, and the grown-up sacred faith of Jews and Christians was originally (and remains the same) at one in the Last Supper, a Pesach Seder celebrating the escape from death-like slavery in Egypt together with a fresh version of it delivering us from evil with a renascent impulse to live.
   Mary, Jesus, Paul were nothing if not Judeo-Christians. Foolish, selfish bigots denied the union and continuity and still do. There are fierce new attacks on faith itself on all sides, and widespread evasions of reality in ingenious, arrogant gadget-ridden electronic and ideologized modernity, a worse inner danger than rampaging Islam externally. The global warming campaign is itself part of the evasion, diverting us from the solemn double duty of facing the enemy within and without. “The devil has power to assume a pleasing shape.” But “a little child shall lead us.”

RESPONSE TO BUCHANAN

Robert Greer Cohn — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 16:02:06 +0000

   Patrick J. Buchanan’s welcome salute (April 3) to Nicolas Sarkozy for his (French) nationalism vs. European-union transnationalism—free market, globalizing—is philosophically vertical (deep, faith-based, intuitive, cultural, and patriotic) vs. horizontal (commercial, rationalistic, legalistic).
   So his formula: “The struggle that succeeds the Cold War may [be]…horizontal, between patriots of all nations and transitional elites” is defective: as we noted, it is not horizontal and polar but (cross-patterned) dimensional.
   The long-building sacred/secular tension in the Western world is parallel, and closely related, and largely divides us from Europe in the war for Western survival, and also divides America internally, even within the parties.
   The overlapping titanic struggle with jihad is different: our (essentially traditional, Judeo-Christian) healthy, tolerant, cross-balance of piety and practical life (as in Aquinas’ faith/reason) versus their prevailingly unidimensional, fanatic, intolerant, radical-Islamic religion.

A MOMENT OF TRUTH

Robert Greer Cohn — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 15:57:12 +0000

   Frederick W. Kagan, a distinguished military historian who taught at West Point, warns us in articles and on television, that there is no “third way” in Iraq, no new “smart” bipartisan “change of course”: it’s victory or catastrophic defeat.
   John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Henry Kissinger, Newt Gingrich, Bernard Lewis, are among leading figures who essentially agree, including not a few Democrats, now that the elections are over, e.g. Senator Charles Schumer.
   Kagan partly faults President Bush for certain mistakes: excessive optimism about Iraqification, Iraqi character and early success; his lack of focus on building an army adequate to the huge task of combating Islamo-fascist jihad worldwide. But he rightly sees the weak spirit of America, as compared to our morale in World War II, as far more dangerous to our victory and survival.
   Big-picture-wise, one remembers the debacle in France (where I fought): the rapid collapse of the army, the ninety percent support of Vichy (which surprised even the Germans by their cruelty to Jewish children).

FIXED IDEAS IN LITTLE MINDS

Robert Greer Cohn — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 15:53:30 +0000

   The core of Platonic and Aristotelian thought is “foursquare…decorous” (Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, Ch. 10), i.e. it goes beyond the unidimensional “golden mean” balance to a bidimensional higher version of it, as in the concept of “equity” (Book V, Ch. 10), which is a (transverse, perpendicular) “correction of legal justice” which he calls “flat,” whence, “wisdom” which “must be intuitive wisdom combined with scientific knowledge” (Book VI, Ch. 7). This pattern is parallel to Buddhist mandela and the eternal cross at the heart of all superior Western thought, including Descartes, Pascal, Mallarmé, Einstein, Jakobson, et al.
   Accordingly, the political thought of Plato and Aristotle and all their great successors (Hobbes, Machiavelli—in the Discourses—Spinoza, Montesquieu, Leo Strauss) favors the cross-patterned higher balance of a republic. Whence Aristotle’s warning against “excessive democracy” in his Politics; he even left room for a “godlike leader” in the transverse direction, but the norm was to balance. Plato too, in The Republic, showed how bad democracy could become (Book VI). It is tragic and funny, Plato at his best.
   Alas, the stunted thought of modernity has lost that depth and suppleness, and fetishizes (horizontal) populism. But, like the very corrupt Greek city-states (as deplored by Jacob Burckhardt), modern populism in our big cities—New York, Chicago, Kansas City—could stink. It certainly did in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, now Iran, Palestine, etc. Rigid ideas, and ideology, are the hallmark of an inferior mind.
    Doctrinaires like Barry Lynn, Garry Wills, John Rawls come to mind, with all those, including George Will, who think that the Enlightenment was more important than sacred morality in abolishing slavery. Indeed, the whole of modern justice and the nation-basic born equality embodied in our Declaration of Independence goes back to mankind “in the image of God,” in Genesis. Jefferson himself, on his Memorial Monument, insisted on this divine gift, and added that if our nation forgot that, it was doomed. He was so right! Harvard Law School recognized this in its motto: Sub deo et sub lege. But look what it, and we, became… That Jefferson is ignored.
   Renaissance humanism, likewise, at its best, as in Leonardo and Botticelli, was not flatly humanistic, but closer to the inspired humanism of Erasmus. In his Treatise on Art, Leonardo preferred his painting to all his other works because “it is related to God.” Botticelli agreed.
   Tocqueville warned about the quality of American democracy, feared that mass conventionality would lower the culture and that the mass would vote for handouts and break the government bank. He was prophetic.
   Flaubert’s “dictionary of received ideas” showed a like concern, as did Orwell’s “groupthink,” Ortega y Gasset’s “revolt of the masses.” Jeane Kirkpatrick turned against doctrinaire liberalism in mid-career when she realized (like Aristotle) that a given strong leader, though authoritarian, could be more virtuous than, say, a corrupt socialist system like Stalinist communism or fascism. Montesquieu, in The Spirit of the Laws, insisted on the substantive “virtue” supporting the formal governing scheme.
   In short, character is what counts most; quality trumps the quantitative. President Bush, who is lucid and courageous in facing a total threat to us, is marred by a wooden belief in the universality of desire and capacity for good democracy. That was his worst blunder in Iraq. But the blunder, the woodenness of secular rationalistic ideology, is what is truly universal in the West now, along with an insane belief in material Progress (as opposed to Edenic hope), robotics, gadgets, as we are “dying of improvements,” very visibly—with the death of childhood, patient mothering, slim bodies, simple heart, including the courage to fight for survival.

PRAGER'S FLAW

Robert Greer Cohn — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 15:52:34 +0000

    Dennis Prager is a national asset right up there with Charles Krauthammer and very few others. But I wish he’d get the heart/mind relationship straight. The liberals buy into rational-secular constructs (ideology) in the Enlightenment, French-Revolutionary, totalitarian and neo-Marxist (e.g. technology-fetishizing Nazism and Soviet Communism) mold far more than genuine faith-based heart à la Judeo-Christianity.
    Collectively, electronic gadgets, such as Internet, are the shining artificial spider-web luring our children to perdition like trapped flies (42% see extreme porn). Give me old-fashioned valentine sentimentality any day.
   I use some gadgets too, but it’s the whole skewing of the culture, over millenia, that has made us a sick and dying (God knows obese) culture; can’t he see that? It’s the dosage, the proportion that counts, and ours is totally out of whack and directly threatens our survival, individually and as a “weak enemy” (Bernard Lewis) society, lacking “heart” for the fight.

A RACE TO THE BOTTOM

Robert Greer Cohn — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 15:51:43 +0000

   There have long been “race to the top” competitions: war (jousting, sword-play), Greek Olympics, “holier than thou” religious strife, “conspicuous consumption” (Veblen), “struggles of generosity” (Alphonse and Gaston). And there are reverse “races to the bottom” in sinning “cities of the plain.” “Emptier than thou” amusingly characterized nay-saying deconstruction and helped kill it off (except on campuses).
   Ta-ra! We are witnessing a country-wide contest of “more anti-war than thou.” Barack Obama and John Edwards skadaddled earlier and more fervently than Hillary Clinton or Chuck Hagel from a war for survival of the West…
   We need a Molière or Voltaire.