The first is by Benny Morris, an Israeli historian who was among the first in his time to cast a skeptical eye on Israel’s founding myths. Its title is 1948, A History of the First Arab-Israeli War. Morris, who has served in the Israeli army and has distinguished himself in battle, is no wimp. He’s courageous. The Israelis, according to him, committed far more atrocities than the Arabs in 1948, but did not practice ethnic-cleansing as we know it. Well, perhaps not, but as he clearly states, the massacre of Palestinian civilians in Deir Yassin had the same effect. Apocalyptic Arab broadcasts induced a flight that turned into a Palestinian exodus of 700,000 souls. But the real worth of the book is in the quotes. For example, David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first president admitted that were he “[a]n Arab leader, I, too, would wage perpetual war with Israel.” (If Alan Dershowitz heard that I am sure he would accuse Ben Gurion of “anti-Semitism.”) Morris states his facts coldly and to hell with the consequences.

The Jews lived in the now called land of Israel between 1200 B.C. and the second century A.D. After the Roman invasion and the Jewish expulsion, the Palestinians lived in Judea and Samaria and Galilee until the 20th century, along with some 25,000 Jews. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, and under the British Mandate, the Jewish influx began and went into overdrive following the Second World War. This, in brief, was the background until the birth of Israel.

Bravo Benny for writing the awful truth. Which is that European Jews stole Palestinian land and forced the locals out. The rest, as they say, is well known history, written by the victors.

Now for the second book, Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke. It is a fascinating and disturbing book, “a meticulously curated catalogue of text.” Relying on primary sources, diaries, documents, newspaper reports and public speeches, Baker has assembled proof that the “good war” was triggered as much by the western allies as it was by Hitler and his henchmen. Wow! (This should get Abe Foxman frothing at the mouth). Churchill is presented by his own pen and speeches as infantile, capricious, egomaniacal and a ruthless warmonger who was careless with the lives of his own civilians and enemy ones alike, a man intoxicated by his own rhetoric. Does Baker indulge in moral equivalence between Hitler and Churchill? Yes and no. He indulges more in moral comparison. The pathology of violence is what he hones in on. Both sides, long before the murders of the Jews began, had decided that complete destruction of their enemy was in order. By reading Churchill’s speeches and dictates, he appears just as unhinged as the German nutcase.

The Allies took the lead in bombarment and blockade. Only one in five British bombers hit their military targets, in fact, “within 75 square miles...” so targets were selected to hit civilians rather than be wasted. Was it a war to prevent the persecution of the Jews? It was not. Jewish refugees were not welcome anywhere, and as things got worse for the Germans, they got exponentially worse for the Jews. Rations in the ghettos plummeted and Jewish families were evicted from their homes to make way for Aryans who had lost their homes in the bombing. Finally, Baker offers undeniable evidence that the prosecution of the war by the Allies was as bestial as that by the Nazis, and at times a good deal worse. Again, all I can say is WOW!

Pat Buchanan’s Churchill, Hitler, and The Unnecessary War—How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World makes as strong a case as Baker but includes both world wars. The deaths of 50 million Europeans were certainly unnecessary, according to my friend Pat, and he goes about proving his case like the great detective-historian he is. The difference between Buchanan and other historians is a major one. Pat is not afraid to challenge the status quo. No modern historian dares challenge Churchill, Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Buchanan illustrates the madness that gripped Versailles, a vengeful spirit that alienated America, mutilated Germany and worked only to enlarge the British Empire by a million square miles. (Oh yes, I almost forgot, a treaty that made Wilson’s 14 points a joke).

When Britain honored a useless treaty with brave Poland, a country which the British had no intention of helping—and no means to do so even if they could—the war was on, a war that Churchill and Roosevelt were eager to fight no matter the consequences. In his closing chapters Pat Buchanan warns that the United States is now in the same position and pursuing the same goals that brought down the British Empire. We are vastly overextended, have alienated all our friends and united our enemies, and we have committed to defend nations that have nothing to do with our vital interests.

All I can say is bravo to the three authors, bravo for courage, bravo for honesty, and bravo for putting emotion aside and sticking to the distaseful facts. Buy and read these three books and the next time you’re discussing history, make yourself unpopular but right.

The Spanish Sahara hangs below Morocco where the Sahara meets the Atlantic like a crumbling brick wall. It was about the least desirable chunk of coastal Africa around, with no water to speak of and a tiny population, which is why the Spanish got it. By the time the European powers were ready to divide up Africa in the late nineteenth century, Spain had long since lost its glory and tended to get the scraps and leftovers.

But one thing we’ve learned over the last century is that on this crowded, hungry planet, there’s no such thing as worthless land. Spanish Sahara has proven that: in the 30 years it’s belonged to Morocco, big money has been made from the fishing off the coast and the huge phosphate mine at Bou Craa, a hundred miles inland.

That’s why the Moroccan King Hassan II, a wily old sultan with friends in the CIA, decided it was worth his while to ship all those loyal subjects down to Morocco’s southern border, hand out little green flags for the cameras, and send them across the border toward those Spanish troops.

The Moroccans had to think outside the traditional military-conquest box, for the simple reason that Morocco’s armed forces are pathetic. They’re so bad their only contributions to military history have been in the “slapstick comedy” department. For instance, the Minister of Defense once tried to have fighters from the Moroccan Air Force kill Hassan II by shooting down his Boeing 727 as it came home from a foreign trip. They failed. Seriously: jet fighters failed to intercept and destroy a big, fat, slow civilian airliner even when they knew its exact flight path. A military like that pretty much has to resort to unarmed conquest, because its chances in a fair fight are zero.

Of course the Moroccans had the advantage of facing a weak, dispirited colonial Spain just at the moment the Spanish dictator, General Franco, finally got around to dying. If you’re old enough to recall those early SNL seasons, you probably remember Chevy Chase’s running joke, “This just in: General Franco still dead!” The reason that joke worked is that it took the old General a long time to die, and that meant that greedy up-and-coming regional powers like Morocco had plenty of time to plan ways of getting their hands on former Spanish colonies.

It may not have been very exciting for combat fans, but it was an extremely effective invasion. The Spanish troops didn’t fire a shot. The marchers walked over the border, got sand in their shoes, shouted about how this sacred patch of waterless, flat desert was now an integral part of the Kingdom of Morocco, and went back home. And since then, the Spanish Sahara has been dominated by Morocco, although the local guerrilla army, POLISARIO, gave them some serious problems for a while.

What makes this weird episode my nominee for “Most Significant Battle of the Era” is that it showed the new way of winning disputed territory. If there’s one thing that we should have learned over the past hundred years, it’s that traditional armed conquests are getting less and less effective. This is one of the most surprising twists in all military history. All through the nineteenth century, the European powers, led by the British and French, took the land they wanted on the grounds that they had better military technology, transport and organization. Locals who disputed that notion tended to disappear as casualties of inevitable progress. And that was just an updated version of what had been happening all over the world for thousands of years: bigger, stronger tribes displace and wiped out weaker tribes whenever they could. That was the norm, even in pre-contact North America, where the Navajo were displacing the Ute in the American Southwest long before the white guys showed up.

Now, even though the balance in conventional warfare is if anything tilting further toward the first world, the technologically advanced and organized countries are in retreat, and the former victims are pushing back, not just claiming their old territories but infiltrating the former colonizers’ countries. What matters now is morale, national will. The Spanish didn’t have it, and the Moroccans did. So even though the Spanish troops could have wiped out those unarmed marchers, they failed to open fire. Weapons are only weapons if you’re willing to use them. A technologically advanced army without the will to fire is no army at all.

Only us dedicated war nerds seem to realize how weird this is, how totally unprecedented in military history. Until the 20th century, the problem wasn’t usually getting militarily superior forces to open fire—it was getting them to stop before the weaker tribe, army or country was totally wiped out. I don’t know of a single case, before the 20th century, of a militarily superior tribe or nation lacking the will to defend its territory, or for that matter, take the territory of weaker neighbors.

The 20th century was the big turning point. New powers like Germany and Japan tried to imitate the older colonial powers of the 19th century and suffered total, disastrous defeat, even though they usually prevailed on the battlefield. That’s the weird lesson of the two world wars: military superiority in the narrow sense just doesn’t cut it any more. Despite the total battlefield dominance of the Wehrmacht (and to a lesser extent the Imperial Japanese forces), Germany and Japan ended the war not just without additional territory but with their home territories in ruins, their cultures gelded, their birthrates for generations to come among the lowest in the world.

Even the older colonial powers, Britain and France, finished the century in big trouble, without the will to resist the new kind of unarmed invasion by immigrants from the colonies they’d once ruled. We’re at a very strange moment militarily: our weapons still work but our will is gone.

The colonies that were established earliest are the most successful. For example, northern North America, now the U.S. and Canada, passed into permanent possession of the European settlers (or so it seemed, until recently). Two things determined this: first, they were settled in the 17th and 18th century, before conscience set in, and because most of the native population had been relatively tiny groups of hunter-gatherers (which also holds true for Australia, though it was settled much later). Everywhere else—in Latin America, Africa, Asia—the locals have been pushing back the colonizers without coming close to what old-style military theorists would call military superiority. That’s what we’re seeing now in South Africa, and more slowly in Europe and the southern United States. In other places, especially those colonized by the French (who were never as good at it as the Brits), huge colonial populations were totally eliminated, like the million-plus French residents of Algeria.

So there’s a shocking lesson that military buffs have been slow to face: military superiority doesn’t matter nearly as much right now as birthrate and sheer ruthless will.

Ah, birth rate—funny how it’s become such a taboo subject for both Left and Right. The Lefties wouldn’t dream of telling third-world people to limit their baby-making, and most right wingers can’t bring themselves to endorse birth control even if it could slow the destruction of their own countries.

So birth rate is a weapon without a counter-weapon right now. So it tends to win. The Moroccans made it clear that the Green March was all about birth rate. The number of “volunteers” they sent to the border was 350,000, exactly the number of births per year in Morocco. So this was basically a ”Lebensraum” argument like the one the Germans tried earlier in the century. You might have heard about that one, a little dust-up called the Eastern Front. And you might be saying right now that if any policy ever failed decisively, it was the Nazis’ attempt to elbow themselves a little living space from Stalin. Which is totally true. But the Nazis tried it the old-fashioned way, with armed conquest.

To succeed in the post-1918 world, the world Woodrow Wilson dreamed up where “small nations” have rights even if they can’t defend them, you need to use slower, less obviously military methods, like birthrate and immigration. Immigration and birth rate actually have one of those “synergistic relationships” New Agers like to yammer about, because immigrant families tend to have more kids than they would have had if they’d stayed home—and the base rate for their home countries is usually way, way more than the locals have in the rich countries they move to.

The classic example of this kind of slow conquest is Kosovo. The Serbs could always defeat the Albanians on the battlefield, even when outnumbered, but the Albanians had a huge advantage in the most important military production of all—babies. According to the BBC, the birthrate of Kosovo Albanians 50 years ago was an amazing 8.5 children per woman.

The Serb/Albanian conflict offers damn near perfect lab conditions to prove my case that birth rate trumps military prowess these days, because the Serbs always beat the Albanians in battle, yet they’ve lost their homeland, Kosovo. Here again, we can blame Woodrow Wilson and his talk about “rights.” In places where tribes hate each other, a tribe that outbreeds its rival will become the majority, even if it can’t fight. So, after generations of skulking at home making babies, letting the Serbs do the fighting, the Albanians finally became the majority in Kosovo and therefore the official “good guys,” being oppressed by the official “bad guys,” the Serbs. At least that’s the way the naïve American Wilsonian types like Clinton saw it. So when the Serbs fought back against an Albanian rebellion in Kosovo, and dared to beat the Albanians, Clinton decided to bomb the Serbs into letting go of Kosovo, the ancient heartland of a Christian nation that had spent its blood holding off the Turks for hundreds of years.

The Kosovo Albanians proved that military skill doesn’t matter, because they tried and failed to conquer Kosovo the old-fashioned way: armed rebellion by the Kosovo Liberation Army. It was a wipeout: local Serb militias, a bunch of tired middle-aged part-timers and cops, crushed the KLA. What happened next is a beautiful illustration of the way losers win these days: the Albanians took the bodies of KLA men who’d been killed in battle, stripped all weapons and ammo from them, and showed them to gullible Western reporters as victims of a Serb “massacre.” It was a massacre, all right, but only because the KLA couldn’t fight worth a damn. Alive and armed, they were a joke; dead and disarmed, they helped win Kosovo by making their side the “victims,” which led directly to U.S. military intervention.

To win the way the Albanians won in Kosovo, you need to make a lot of babies. It’s that simple. And to see how it works, you have to drop the namby-pamby liberal idea that people only have babies out of “love.” In lots of places on this planet, baby-making is a form of weapons production.

In some places, it’s open policy. For example, in Palestine there’s an all-out birthrate war going on between the Palestinians and the Israelis. And one of the most frustrating things about this kind of struggle, from the Israeli perspective, is that the worse you make life for the people in the occupied zones, the more kids they have. The Gaza Strip, for instance, has one of the highest fertility rates in the world outside Africa, at
5.6 kids per woman.

The rate for Israeli overall is about 2.8 children per woman, high for a rich country. But the most amazing rates anywhere, even higher than for the Gaza Palestinians, are in the most extreme Zionist groups, the Haredi “ultra-orthodox” Jews. Until recently they averaged eight or nine children per woman. There was actually a
big panic in the Israeli settler press when news hit that their rate had dropped to a mere 7.7 kids per woman.
That’s actually higher than the rate for Mali (7.38 per woman), which has the highest birthrate in the world.

The settlers don’t hide the fact that they’re producing as many kids as they can in order to change the demographics of “Greater Israel” in their favor—above all to make sure the Palestinians never become the majority.

What’s interesting is that there were plenty of voices in the ultra-Orthodox community in favor of using Israel’s military superiority to settle the problem the old-fashioned way, by expelling or wiping out the Palestinians. Those people lost out; their leader, Meir Kahane, was assassinated by an Egyptian cabbie in New York, but he’d lost the debate long before he died. You just can’t get away with those methods these days, not even with every born-again Baptist Zionist in Texas backing you to the hilt.

If you want an example closer to home, just go to Northern Ireland where the Protestant majority the border was designed to maintain has been getting smaller and smaller, thanks to the higher birthrate among Catholics. As of 2001, the Catholics were about
46% of the population, up from 35% in 1961.

But as the dreaded “Catholic Majority” date approaches, a funny thing is happening up in Ulster: the Catholic birth rate is slowing down even faster than the Protestant rate. This always happens when a tribe breaks out of its slums into the middle class. This illustrates one of the real brain-twisters of contemporary demographic struggle: if you really hate the enemy tribe, the best thing you could do would be to make them rich. Rich people don’t have nearly as many kids. Of course there are exceptions like the Ultra-Orthodox Israelis, who are fairly well-off and just dedicated to making as many kids as possible, but generally, money distracts people from starting big families. So the old methods of keeping down the enemy tribe are usually counterproductive. If the Ulster hotheads like Ian Paisley had had their way and kept the Catholics down in the slums, their birthrate over the past 30 years would have been much higher and they’d be ready to stage a Kosovo-style “majority rule” coup like the Albanians did against the Serbs, complete with the USAF blowing up every television tower in Belfast like we did to the ones in Belgrade, just to teach those Serbs a lesson: “No TV till you let your little Albanian brother have Kosovo!”

Makin’em rich is the only way you’re going to settle the kind of conquest-by-immigration we’re seeing now in Europe and North America. Nobody will even say honestly how many illegal immigrants there are in the U.S. right now, but just from what I see driving to work, I’m inclined to go with the higher estimates, something up to 20 million people who snuck in from Mexico and points south looking for work.

As far as I know, nobody’s claiming the Latino immigrants decided to have a lot of kids as a way of reconquering Texas and California, the way the Israeli settlers are doing. They had a lot of kids because they were peasants and that’s what peasants do. La reconquista, if it happens, will be an unforeseen result of rising birth rates and falling death rates for countries like Mexico that are just moving up from the third world to, say, the second-and-a-halfth.

By 1970, Mexico was at that dangerous stage where there’s just enough basic medical care to keep people alive, so death rates are falling sharply, but people are still poor enough to want a lot of kids. Between 1970 and 2000, the Mexican population doubled, from 48 million to 98 million. So on one side of the Rio Grande you had a lot of young poor people, and on the other, a lot of money and companies eager for cheap labor. And a muddy little creek like the Rio Grande wasn’t nearly wide enough to keep those two groups apart.

As the population of Mexico increased and the living standard rose, the fertility rate actually went into an amazing dive, to the point that the rate for Mexican women now is only 2.39 kids per woman, just two places up from Israel’s 2.38.

And the only thing that’s brought the Latino birthrate down—in their home countries, not among the ones who immigrated to the U.S.—is getting enough money that peasant families start thinking of themselves as consumers, and get more excited about buying a new truck or a flat-screen TV than having little José.

This is all pretty slow to unfold, compared to traditional military conquest. Birth rate takes decades to have an effect; the Albanian victory in Kosovo is the result of birth rates from the mid-20th century. And in some parts of the world, like the US and Europe, immigrants have a history of being absorbed by the locals rather than sticking to the old tribal hatreds in the style of the Balkans and the Middle East. It’s a cultural deal, after all, not racial. Studies of the U.S. Hispanic population show that within a generation or two, most American Hispanics are ranting about policing the borders and keeping those damn immigrants out of the country. What’s really weird—and I can testify to this from my own experiences growing up—is when the local culture infiltrates the immigrants, like the fact that Mexicans in the U.S. are deserting the Catholics and becoming born-again Protestants. Go to any of the younger, feister churchers in the U.S. like the Church of the Nazarene and you’ll see lots of Mexican families with plenty of kids, singing old Scottish hymns in Tex-Mex English. In fact, I ran into a really hilarious article by a U.S. Baptist writer who worried that the Baptist birthrate is going down while the Nazarenes are having babies at a rate of three-plus per woman. So the nightmare scenario that anti-immigrant bloggers are always predicting, where the U.S. turns into one giant Mexico, might end up being true in what you might call “racial” terms—I mean, your second-grade class photo might be two-thirds Hispanic—but those Hispanic faces would have absorbed a whole born-again American world picture that actually comes from the Scots-Irish who settled the American south hundreds of years ago.

This is one point where people’s anxiety over these slow, demographic conquests splits according to their real fears: do you just not want to see that kind of face when you go outside, or do you not want to import the culture of the immigrants’ home country? The whole debate right now is so censored, so totally dishonest on both sides, that nobody will come clean about which it is. I suspect for some people it’s the faces: they want the faces on their street to be the same shape and color they were when they were growing up. If that’s what you want, then no matter where you are, I can guarantee that if you’re rich enough to worry about things like this (as opposed to where your next meal’s coming from), then yup, you definitely have grounds for worry. People move around to where the food is, the money, the good grazing, the jobs. The Germanic tribes who moved in on Europe a couple millennia back took a more reasonable view; they called wars “the movements of the peoples.” The Huns push the Goths off the steppe, and boom! Next thing you know, the Goths are wiping out a Roman army at Adrianople.

The faces are going to change. We are in a new military-historical era, in which the only states with the sheer will to resist slow “conquest” by immigration were the Stalinist states. Of course they didn’t have much of a problem there anyway—not too many immigrants trying to sneak into North Korea or the old USSR—but even if they had faced real demographic challenge, they had the will to open fire. The Berlin Wall is a nasty case in point, where the will was used to stop people leaving.

But those Stalinist states are not exactly a growth industry these days, and no liberal democratic state has the will to shoot down unarmed people trying to get in (or out, for that matter). Even the Israelis, who are maybe the fiercest first-worlders on demographic issues, thanks to their “moral certainty” from the Holocaust, don’t shoot the poor Africans who cross to Beersheba for jobs in the cafes. They just send them back to Sudan to be shot there.

So the movement of the peoples, the slow demographic wars, are going to go on. We just don’t have a counter-move, except maybe bombarding poor people with money to stay home. Basically, no matter where you are, the complexions and the features you see on the streets are going to change. If it’s any consolation to face-fascists, you Europeans got your licks in first, so to speak. Not many African-Americans around with pure African blood; not many Mexican Indians without some Spanish in them. Us westerners had our fun—well, not me personally, but probably some lucky ancestor. So now the faces blend the other way; it’s not the end of the world. 

For most people the real worry, if they were allowed to even say it out loud, is culture: if you’re French, you really don’t want Paris turning into Kinshasa, because let’s be honest, Kinshasa is a Hellhole. If you’re English, you don’t want London turning into Karachi, because Karachi is a nightmare. If you’re American, you don’t want Houston—oh Hell, ever been to Houston? If you have half a brain, you don’t want Houston at all, the lousy sweatbox. But I was going to say, you don’t want your U.S. hometown turning into Honduras, because it’s nothing but poverty, heat and parasites.

The thing is, most of the people who invaded from those places tend to agree with you. That’s why they moved in the first place. Nobody knows what a Hellhole the Congo is like a Congolese. I read somewhere that on the Congo riverboats, they have these slang terms for the different decks. The first-class deck they call “Europe.” The second-class deck is “China,” meaning not that great, but livable. The third-class deck is “Congo,” and nobody wants to be there, least of all the Congolese.

What that means is that immigrants in some situations—not Kosovo, not Palestine, but some—are the biggest fans of anti-immigrant politicians. I would bet you that a lot of French people from North Africa voted for le Pen: “Yes! Get those dirty Arabs out!” What those people want above all is to shrug off where they came from. I’ve seen it too many times growing up with Mexicans: five years after they come north from Guadalajara they’ve got the big truck with Republican bumper stickers on it. Sure, they have a lot of kids, but that’s what immigrants always do. It’ll stop in the next generation, they’ll turn into nice kid-less selfish yuppies. The only Mexicans I ever met who really got all nostalgic about the old country were second-generation college brats, who’d never been there.

So to assess your situation in terms of the new conquests, you have to decide whether you’re in a Kosovo—two tribes hating each other forever, turning out babies as weapons—or that Congolese riverboat, where nobody wants it too “authentic” if they can help it. There’s a lot of blurring and overlap between those two models, sure. Take Northern Ireland: a lot of yelling, a lot of noisy tribal hate, but I just don’t think they have it in them to be another Kosovo. Too interested in TV and cars.

That’s what’s funny about the debate right now: the diehards in the U.S. and Europe wish we had the old ruthless will to seal the borders, but the “weakness” of the advanced countries generally works pretty well to turn the immigrants into immigrant-hating locals in a generation or two. The old model, bayonets on the border, isn’t even in the running. Time to face that fact. So the faces will change.

If you can handle these new faces, you’re likely to be surprised to see your “weak” American or European culture win out, slowly, un-gloriously but surely, and you may live long enough to see a whole new crop of pols who look like they just came from Karachi or Kinshasa until you turn the sound on and hear them ranting about how we need to get rid of all these damn immigrants.

Gary Brecher writes “The War Nerd” column in The eXile, the English-language bi-weekly based in Moscow.

Under Consideration: Bill Kauffman, Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Anti-War Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism, Metropolitan Book (2008), 304 pages.

Winston Churchill once described the Soviet Union as the only country in the world with an unpredictable past. It was an impressive racket, really, in which the official version of history changed in accordance with the political demands of the present. If something in the past discomfited the regime and its propaganda, then it never happened, or happened quite differently.

In our own country, teachers and ordinary citizens alike are expected to conform to the Official Version of our history. Book publishers, to be sure, do not conspire behind closed doors to come up with ways to enslave the American people to their government. But suppose they did, and American history textbooks were written for the express purpose of turning American students into zombies who mindlessly repeated government propaganda and believed the state existed to protect the common good. How would the books be any different?

For a maverick historian, though, an ossified Official History has a silver lining: he can make a career out of exposing and correcting it, or filling in the gaps that court historians choose to ignore. Until Bill Watkins’ 2004 volume Reclaiming the American Revolution, for instance, there had not been a single book on the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 in a hundred years—as scores of studies of every bit of useless trivia lined the shelves.

Bill Kauffman has filled another such gap in delightful and dramatic style with Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Anti-War Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism. Kauffman’s book joins only a handful of titles on this interesting and important subject, including Justin Raimondo’s excellent Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (which is being re-released with additional material this month), Justus Doenecke’s Not to the Swift: The Old Isolationists in the Cold War Era, and Ronald Radosh’s Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism. (Radosh, now a neoconservative, has doubtless repudiated this useful book, which is further indication of its worth.)

The figures and organizations Kauffman profiles do not fit into the received version of American history, in which only “leftists” who “hate America” might object to spending trillions of dollars feeding imperial ambition. The conservative John Randolph of Roanoke, who opposed the War of 1812, and Alexander Stephens, the Confederate vice president who had earlier opposed war with Mexico, are just two of the people discussed in Ain’t My America who refuse to fit themselves into the proper categories.

A strange omission from this book is the War Between the States, for if violently suppressing the peaceful secession of sovereign states does not smack of imperialism—especially in the context of the nation-building nineteenth century—then nothing does. The depiction of that war as glorious and righteous is a central ingredient in the current regime’s flattering portrayal of itself, and in the civic religion taught in the institutions of propaganda to which some still entrust their young. Robert E. Lee made the connection explicit, predicting that the “consolidation of the states into one vast republic” would produce an entity that was “sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home.” This should have been perfect grist for Kauffman’s mill.

The cross-ideological American Anti-Imperialist League, formed in the wake of the American acquisition of (among other territory) the Philippines following the Spanish-American War, is right up Kauffman’s alley. He gives us lively vignettes of its more colorful figures, such as the laissez-faire businessman Edward Atkinson, who asked the War Department for some addresses so he could send his antiwar pamphlets to the troops. Now once in a while the anti-imperialists are taken to task for their alleged lack of racial enlightenment (the pro-war forces, of course, being their usual models of toleration). This description of the anti-imperialists is not even accurate in the first place; Moorfield Storey, a leader of the NAACP, is one of many obvious counter-examples. But Kauffman, who is able to put such matters into perspective, suggests that mass murder may actually be a worse crime than racial insensitivity: “If neither side distinguished itself by the elevated moral standards of the twenty-first century, when all men are brothers and peace rules our planet, at least the anti-imperialists wanted to leave the Filipinos alone rather than conquer and slaughter them.”

Along the same lines Kauffman cites Sen. James K. Vardaman of Mississippi, who like most Americans at the time believed neither in integration nor racial equality but who sacrificed his career for the cause of peace as Woodrow Wilson was pushing his country into the Great War. His friends tried in vain to persuade him to support the president, but he would not budge. Losing his Senate seat was as nothing, he said, compared to the lives and liberties that Americans would lose if the country entered the war. In 1918 he was defeated for re-election by Democrat Pat Harrison—who, by the way, was pro-war and pro-segregation. (Wilson himself was not exactly known as a champion of the oppressed black man, but is still ranked among the “near great” presidents; taking the country to war evidently covers a multitude of sins.)

Vardaman, says Kauffman, “understood that standing athwart the empire would destroy his career.” How easy it would have been “to trim, to temporize, to dissemble, to quietly slip out of the peace camp and vote for Death. But to his eternal credit, he did not.” As he left the Senate, Vardaman called on the nations of the world to abolish conscription and to establish national referenda to decide on war.

That latter suggestion would reappear in the 1930s in the form of the Ludlow Amendment, a proposed constitutional amendment that would have required just such a referendum in the United States. I once favored that solution as a way to keep the war machine in check, and I suspect Kauffman does as well. I was talked out of it by the argument that if a war should actually be approved by such a vote (and in the weeks leading up to it the machinery of propaganda would whir like never before), the referendum would then become a potent rhetorical weapon in favor of the war. The war would have all the sanction it could need; and we’d never hear the end of all the people-have-spokens. The Ludlow Amendment, I suspect, would have been just another casualty of Donald Livingston’s observation that most efforts to limit the central government’s power usually wind up increasing it.

But if that proposal held more potential peril than promise, opponents of the warfare state in the 1930s possessed equal parts cleverness, cynicism, and dark humor. Kauffman reminds us of the Veterans of Future Wars, a group organized at Princeton University in 1936 that went on to boast 584 chapters around the country. Then there was the Association of Gold Star Mothers of Future Veterans, born at Vassar College, as well as the Foreign Correspondents of Future Wars, established at the City College of New York. This latter group proposed “to establish training courses for members of the association in the writing of atrocity stories and garbled war dispatches for patriotic purposes.” If only our own opposition to war and propaganda could be half as inspired.

Thanks to Ron Paul’s campaign the term “Taft Republican” is being tossed around once again, and Kauffman reintroduces us to the Ohio senator. Taft, known in his day as Mr. Republican, declared on the Senate floor in January 1951 that “the principal purpose of the foreign policy of the United States is to maintain the liberty of our people. … Its purpose is not to reform the entire world or spread sweetness and light and economic prosperity to peoples who have lived and worked out their own salvation for centuries, according to their customs, and to the best of their abilities.” Taft identified the second goal of American foreign policy as peace. Writes Kauffman: “Liberty and peace; with those two words, [Taft] had placed himself as far outside postwar discourse as one could reasonably stand.”

We are also treated to a sympathetic account of the anti-militarist side of Russell Kirk, whose seminal work The Conservative Mind became a revered text in the conservative canon. Among other things, Kirk was a staunch opponent of the first Persian Gulf War, writing privately to a friend that George H.W. Bush should be strung up on the White House lawn for war crimes. His lectures at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s decrying war and militarism were allowed, no doubt, only because the aging Kirk was considered too iconic not to be granted respect. Those speeches would never be permitted today, it hardly need be said, with war and bankruptcy now the most urgent conservative goals.

Kirk, who had earlier dismissed libertarians as “chirping sectaries,” praised them in the 1990s for having an “understanding of foreign policy that the elder Robert Taft represented.” That was a position he had long respected. In his 1951 biography of Randolph of Roanoke, Kirk spoke sympathetically of his subject’s aversion to war and expansionism, for men of “sturdy conservative convictions…were naturally lovers of tranquility and foes of aggression.” Skepticism of global intervention can also be found in 1954’s A Program for Conservatives, a fact the conservative establishment does not typically go out of its way to point out.

For whatever reason, Ron Paul barely registers in Ain’t My America—perhaps because, compared to the others featured here, he is already relatively well known. Kauffman instead interviews Congressman Jimmy Duncan (R-TN), who agrees with the Texas congressman that there was nothing conservative about the Iraq war. Duncan also has the crazy idea that the U.S. government might engage in too much military spending: “My goodness, we’re spending as much as all other countries of the world combined on defense spending—and they always want more.” This alone makes Duncan a “liberal,” according to the automatons.

Kauffman’s writing style is a perfect medium for transmitting the flavor of these times and the character of these men. The old republic practically courses through his veins, and the words flow effortlessly from his pen—even if they happen to be words like amaranthine, mephitic, esurient, and nepenthe. At times an understandable exasperation comes through. Thus: “War effaces and perverts everything that traditionalist conservatives profess. Every damn thing, from motherhood to the country church. And yet postwar conservatives, and especially the scowling ninnies of the Bush Right, revere war above all other values. It trumps the First Amendment; it razes the home; it decks the decalogue. And they don’t care.”

Nor do most Americans, if their voting patterns and apathy are any indication. “The American Century, alas, did not belong to the likes of Moorfield Storey, Murray Rothbard, or Russell Kirk,” Kauffman laments. “But the American soul does.”

I agree, or at least I want to. Ours is a great anti-colonial tradition, and our founders cautioned us about the perils of war and entangling alliances. Charles Pinckney warned his countrymen that global ambition was incompatible with republicanism. And the feisty individualism, the aversion to propaganda, and the plain-speaking common sense of the conservatives who populate Bill Kauffman’s book have a distinctly American flavor.

Yet one nagging argument just won’t go away: if this truly is the American soul, someone must have forgotten to tell the American people. William James, aghast at the colonial occupation of the Philippines that followed the Spanish-American War, declared that the U.S. had “puked up its ancient soul…in five minutes.” That soul, such as it is, has been sold time and again. And not to particularly high bidders, either: what people possessed of an antiwar, anti-imperial soul, that wishes only to do justice and pursue the ordinary things of life, could have been led into an immoral absurdity like the Iraq war?

With very rare exceptions, Kauffman observes, the American people have never really been presented with a choice for or against the empire. All too true – but are the people really blameless here? Some of their stupid electoral decisions may be the result of an ignorance for which they are not entirely responsible, but what remotely educated or even half-conscious living being could consider John McCain a fit candidate for anything?

I’m not entirely sure why the old America is so unpopular, though part of the reason is that few Americans have been allowed to discover it. When they do, many want to recover it. That’s why, if I were looking to transform a neoconservative into a normal human being, Ain’t My America would be one of the first books I’d hand him in my proselytizing mission.

Thomas E. Woods, Jr., is the New York Times bestselling author of seven books, including 33 Questions About American History You’re Not Supposed to Ask and, most recently, Sacred Then and Sacred Now: The Return of the Old Latin Mass.

That’s what you’d think, from reading the statements of open-borders activists alongside the complaints of restrictionist ex-Catholics like Tom Tancredo.

In fact, the current argument is much more complicated, and reflects millennia of tension between the notion of national sovereignty and the universal claims of Christian faith and morals. First, let’s dispose of the nonsense about an absolute “separation of Church and State.” Such an idea is simply anti-Christian (anti-Catholic, anti-Orthodox, and anti-Protestant). To the degree that any of our country’s framers supported this principle (and historians disagree), they did so because they were Deists, who saw God as a distant lab technician watching us like rats in a maze. And they were wrong, so it’s our duty to fix their mistake—while retaining the freedom of conscience upon which our mostly Protestant Founders insisted. “Separation of Church and State,” as it’s currently used, is a mindless piece of rhetoric meant to confuse people, to present the fake alternative of a godless technocracy or the Spanish Inquisition.

If the Church is to be anything more than a hapless, harmless chaplaincy which throws holy water over the latest whim of the State, it’s sometimes going to have to challenge the claims of kings and presidents. Most paleocons were happy when Pope John Paul and Pope Benedict rejected American wars against Iraq—just as neocons were testily dismissive. Now the papal Prada is on the other foot. Or is it?

From certain media reports and a few careless statements by bishops, you might really think that the Catholic Church is rejecting its complex, long-time teaching that a given State must balance the interests of civic order and the Common Good against the claims of compassion. (For a splendid history of how the official teaching developed, see Chilton Williamson here.) Whatever you read in the media, whatever reporters try to glean between the lines of a particular speech made by good Pope Benedict for a particular occasion, the official stance of the Catholic Church on the immigration issue can be found—who would have thought?—in its current Catechism. The key passage is the following:

“2241 The more prosperous nations are obliged, to the extent they are able, to welcome the foreigner in search of the security and the means of livelihood which he cannot find in his country of origin. Public authorities should see to it that the natural right is respected that places a guest under the protection of those who receive him.

Political authorities, for the sake of the common good for which they are responsible, may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions, especially with regard to the immigrants’ duties toward their country of adoption. Immigrants are obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws and to assist in carrying civic burdens.”

Real incendiary stuff. Is there anybody out there who’d care to assert the contrary, that even when we are able—without destroying the wages of our native working class, or endangering our sovereignty—to welcome needy poor people who in fact “respect with gratitude” our heritage, obey our laws, and “assist in carrying civic burdens,” we still shouldn’t accept any immigrants? There might be a few folks out there who simply want to see America shrunk down to 100 million childless ex-Methodists, stoically driving their hybrids to spend Sunday mornings solemnly watching birds. Apart from them, I doubt there are too many people who want zero immigration, who oppose it on principle. The argument isn’t about them—and it only serves the cause of open-borders activists to pretend that they represent a serious contingent in the debate.

However, the same can’t be said about the true believers on the other side of this chasm. There really are thousands of fervent activists out there who are trying to seize the Church’s chasuble and drape it over a position that goes way, way beyond anything the Church has taught—or ever would teach. If you boil down the actions of certain American bishops (and their well-paid lobbyists) on the subject of immigration, and note their opposition to any attempt by Americans to impose some rational, prudent control over the annual influx of some 2 million people (half illegal) into our country, you come up with quite an extreme proposition:

That poor people in any country have an unlimited right to better their lot by migrating to the nearest rich country, whose citizens have no right to stop them. Indeed, the citizens of a richer country have no moral claims or legitimate self-interest, their nation has no meaningful sovereignty, and they have essentially no rights. When you strip away all the weasel-words and manipulative rhetoric, this is precisely what “pro-immigrant” groups believe and teach—that the underdog is always and everywhere right.

Clearly the Church will never teach this, because it is rank heresy. Sure, sovereignty is not absolute—any more than are property rights. A starving man with no other options may steal a loaf of bread, St. Thomas teaches; just so, a Jew would be justified in sneaking from Hitler’s Germany into Switzerland. That doesn’t justify looters stealing car stereos, or my forging a passport so I can improve my standard of living by moving to Zurich. (Much as I’d like to.) It’s a juvenile mind that rejects a moral principle such as property rights or sovereignty just because it admits exceptions. (Indeed, in denouncing the Treaty of Westphalia, the Church rejected the modern notion of absolute State sovereignty—and rightly so, unless you think that the government owns us, body and soul.)

Even if one assumed that the Church had no interest in moral consistency, there are solid pragmatic reasons why no pope would ever enunciate open borders as a principle: popes live in Italy, and the Vatican is staffed by Italians. Accepting the open-borders axiom would oblige Italy to accept the entire population of North Africa, much of which is eager to relocate a few hundred miles to the North. (Indeed, Vatican City would have to accept any gypsy or Moslem who applied for citizenship….) Is the Vatican really interested in turning Italy into an Islamic state? I rather doubt it. So those on the Catholic Left (or in the pocket of the cheap-labor lobby) who await a papal denunciation of border control
had better not hold their breath.

Of course, the Church could conceivably teach that only Americans are forbidden to close their borders, while Italians and Poles and Mexicans have the right to defend their national sovereignty…. Indeed, this is implicitly what many Americans, addled by neocon notions of a “propositional country” seem to believe. But I don’t think the cleverest Jesuit could whip up a theological argument for this.

All of this is not to say there are not conflicts, and will not be painful tensions, between the particular interests of one’s sovereign nation and the policy of a given pope. Historically, popes have opposed:

• the unification of Italy
• the revolt of the Poles against the Tsar
• the Irish rebellions against Great Britain
• the revolts of Spain’s colonies against the Crown, and
• Lincoln’s use of force against the Confederacy.

In each of these cases, many good Catholics who also loved their countries had tormented consciences, and agonized between their patria and the papacy. It’s conceivable that such a conflict could arise again, this time affecting Americans. (And it would probably end up in a compromise like the Treaty of the Lateran in 1921 1929—which leaves Italians free to venerate, in different ways, both Garibaldi and the Blessed Pius IX.)

But it isn’t happening now. Indeed, I’d like to step back from my Machiavellian analysis of history, and point to the wise words which the good Pope Benedict actually uttered on the subject at hand.

“It seems to me that we have to distinguish between measures to be taken immediately, and longer-term solutions. The fundamental solution [would be] that there is no longer any need to immigrate, that there are sufficient opportunities for work and a sufficient social fabric that no one any longer feels the need to immigrate. We all have to work for this objective, that social development is sufficient so that citizens are able to contribute to their own future.

In the short term, it’s very important above all to help the families. This is the primary objective, to ensure that families are protected, not destroyed. Whatever can be done, must be done. Naturally, we have to do whatever’s possible against economic insecurity, against all the forms of violence, so that they can have a worthy life.”

The voice of the Vicar of Christ is also that of a sophisticated student of history, whose compassion for the needy is not tempered but complicated by a deeply rooted prudence—which for statesmen as for streetsweepers is the governing natural virtue.

John Zmirak is author of the new graphic novel The Grand Inquisitor.

Italy and Spain are two frontline states on Europe’s southern border. They are being overrun by millions (no exaggeration) of immigrants, many of whom cross the straits in boats from the African shore of the Mediterranean. Three years ago Spain (40 million inhabitants) announced a collective amnesty for a staggering 800,000 undocumented aliens, despite having already offered six other amnesties in the past 15 years. Two years ago, Italy (58 million inhabitants) amnestied 500,000 illegal immigrants, having already offered five similar regularizations between 1988 and 2006. And still the immigrants keep coming. Immigration, however, is not the “big question of national identity” The Economist is referring to.

Obviously, economics is mostly on The Economist’s mind. Consequently, economic reform is what the above editorials mainly dealt with, though in Spain’s case the magazine also mentioned the “national identity” question in a reference to the seats won by regionalist and separatist parties from Catalonia and the Basque country. These parties kept Mr Zapatero from an absolute majority in the Spanish parliament. Hence, he will have to accommodate them in some way.

Strangely–though tellingly for a magazine which, like The Economist, is representative of Europe’s mainstream media—the editorial on Italy did not mention the astonishing electoral success of the Lega Nord, a constituent of Mr. Berlusconi’s right-wing alliance.

Like the parties in Catalonia and the Basque country, the Northern League (full name: Lega Nord per l’Indipendenza della Padania—Northern League for the Independence of Padania) is a regionalist, indeed separatist, party. Padania, in case you have never heard of it, does not exist as a nation; it is the collective name that the League uses to denote the various regions of northern Italy (such as Lombardy, Piedmont, Venice, Tuscany, South Tyrol, and others). The League is made up of several parties (including the Lega Lombarda, the Liga Veneta, the Alleanza Toscana) that want to restore to their regions the sovereignty that they enjoyed prior to the formation of the Italian State in the 19th century.

The success of the Northern League was the pivotal element in the victory of Mr. Berlusconi’s alliance. It enabled him to win an absolute majority in the Italian parliament. The League completely wiped away the left in the north. It doubled in size and won a stunning 8.3% of the national vote, sending 60 deputies (+37) and 26 senators (+13) to Rome. In some northern regions, it had the support of up to 50% of the electorate. This remarkable result, however, was not worth the consideration of The Economist, or of the rest of the European media. As they did not report on the League’s victory, they did not need to explain to their readers why the party had done so extraordinary well. Indeed, the international media preferred to lament the return of “the jester” rather than point out that the Northern League won so massively because of its forceful anti-immigration platform.

On Monday (21 April), the leftist Milanese newspaper Corriere della Sera wrote, “Fear boosted the Northern League’s vote, doubling and tripling its haul in front-line towns where local prosperity is undermined by thefts and burglaries. Unpunished crimes generate anger and people lose trust.” It is telling that even this leftist newspaper talks about “front-line” towns–-as if a war is going on—to describe the blue-collar areas around Milan where immigrants are making life unbearable for indigenous workers who no longer feel at home in their own neighborhoods. Roberto Mura, the League’s secretary for the district of Pavia and the mayor of San Genesio, 25 kilometers south of Milan, told the Corriere: “We struggle to shake off […] the image of the rough and ready, apolitical racist League militant. […] I know we’ve got to live with immigration, but the rules have to be respected. The League has been saying so for fifteen years. We’re now reaping the reward for the coherence and clarity of our project to defend the territory.”

As Mr Mura points out, the “apolitical” Northern League is in politics not for the sake of politics itself, but to “defend the territory.” There is something remarkable going on here, though it will never hit the mainstream media because the latter do not want to see it:

The most successful anti-immigration parties in Europe are regionalist/secessionist parties. They are “apolitical” because they do not particularly like politics. Their militants, members and voters do not like the state, they want to be left alone. They defend local communities that want to run their own affairs. They are parties of the land and the community, rather than the state. They are, as the media and the political establishment derisively call them, “populists.”

Milan, the capital of Lombardy, is 700 kilometers (430 miles) to the south of Brussels, the seat of the European Union, that supranational European superstate in the making which already accounts for 75% of the legislation in its 27 member states. The League is as opposed to Brussels as it is to Rome: it’s regionalist, restrictionist, and “Eurosceptic,” meaning that it doesn’t much like supranational mingling in local affairs.

Let us now travel from Milan to Brussels. First we must cross the Lombardian border into Switzerland, then we cross the Alps in order to reach the valley of the Rhine River. We follow the Rhine, which constitutes the border between France and Germany, until we arrive in the Low Countries, in particular in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking northern part of Belgium, where Brussels is situated. There, we can visit the buildings of the European and the Belgian parliaments but also those of the Flemish Regional Parliament.

The largest party in the latter parliament is the Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) party. It represents a quarter of the Flemish electorate and is considered one of the most professional and successful of Europe’s patriotic parties. It is remarkably similar to the Lega Nord. It is separatist, in favor of restricting immigration and Eurosceptic.

The VB was founded in 1978 by Flemish nationalists aiming for the independence of Flanders. The Flemish provinces are the historic southern, Catholic half of the Netherlands. In fact, the Flemish provinces belonged to the Netherlands until the International Powers gave them to the newly created French-dominated state of Belgium in 1831. From the start, the VB warned against immigration by people from a culture entirely alien to that of Flanders; indeed, the VB was the first party to address the issue. It still demands that immigrants assimilate and, hence, that their numbers remain low enough to assure that this is possible. The party’s position is also that immigration from countries with a culture closer to that of Flanders should be given preference, but they have to adapt to the locals and learn the language of the Flemings, Dutch.

The VB is critical of immigration for exactly the same reason why it demands Flemish independence: because it wants to preserve Flemish national identity. As Frank Vanhecke, the then VB leader, wrote in The Flemish Republic in July 2003: “We defend the Flemish national identity, against the Belgian state as well as against immigrants who abuse our hospitality to wage an anti-Western war in Flanders. The VB is a party of Flemish patriots, prepared to defend Flanders’ culture and traditions, its values and, above all, its freedom.”

The Flemish provinces experienced their heyday in the Middle Ages, when the Netherlands was a confederate cluster of autonomous provinces. The provinces were dominated by powerful cities, such as Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp and Brussels, who made it quite clear to the nominal dynastic ruler that he had to leave the burghers in peace or face rebellion. In northern Italy, the situation was almost similar, with powerful city-states running their own affairs. And so it was all along the 700 kilometers that we have just traveled. The cities along the Rhein, such as Cologne and Strasbourg, enjoyed considerable autonomy, while Switzerland was a confederation of tiny, sovereign republics of Alpine farmers. This was not a coincidence. In fact, these regions have a common history that goes back to the time when Charlemagne’s empire was divided, almost 1,200 years ago.

Charlemagne, king of the Franks, a Germanic tribe, conquered most of continental Western Europe and was crowned Emperor in 800 AD. He was the first ruler France and Germany had in common. His son, Louis the Pious, was the last. In 843, the Carolingian empire was divided. Charlemagne’s grandsons, Charles the Bald and Louis the German, became the first kings of, respectively, France (West Francia) and Germany (East Francia). There was, however, a third brother, Lothar, the eldest. He inherited the lands that lay between those of his brothers: Middle Francia.

Lothar’s kingdom was named after him: Lotharii Regnum or Lorraine. Today, Lorraine is the name of a province in the east of France. It is the province where Joan of Arc, France’s national heroine came from. However, contemporary Lorraine is only a tiny part of the Lorraine of old. In Lothar’s time, Lorraine comprised all the countries that lie between France and Germany today—the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg and Switzerland—plus the eastern part of present-day France, the western part of Germany and the northern half of Italy.

When Lothar’s son died without offspring in 875, the middle territories were divided between Charles the Bald and Louis the German. However, as these regions lay on the periphery of their heartlands, generations of kings of France and Germany were never able to establish a firm rule over them. The result was that throughout the Middle Ages, and for some up to the 18th century and even today, the lands of Lothar, Old Lorraine, were made up of self-governing republics of farmers, independent counties controlled by burghers or city republics.

Self-governing, with little interference from greedy princes, their tax controllers and meddling civil servants, these lands became very prosperous. Capitalism has its origins here. This whole axis from Amsterdam in the north to Siena in the south developed into the economic spine of Europe. The former Carolingian Middle Lands saw not only the birth of capitalism but also of limited government. A decentralized political culture developed where the burghers governed themselves without caring much about faraway rulers.

Later, and gradually, French and German monarchs succeeded in bringing most of the regions of the ancient Middle-Frankish realm under their control. The kings of France and Prussia succeeded in subduing their part of the Rhen region. The French Revolution swept away all the existing self-governing systems, and after the fall of Napoleon only Switzerland returned to its old constitutional order. To a large extent, however, the spirit of Old Lorraine lives on today in the lands of the former Middle Kingdom where citizens are still influenced by centuries of independence, self-reliance and adherence to a local identity that opposes centralizing authorities in far-away capitals.

In Switzerland, the only remaining sovereign part of Old Lorraine (at least until Flanders and Padania regain their independence), these feelings are so strong that the country stubbornly refuses to become a member of the European Union. Switzerland itself is a regionalist nation, made up of 26 provinces (cantons) that to a very large extent rule themselves. The country has strict immigration laws and the Swiss want to make these even stricter. The last elections, in November 2007, were won by the Schweizerische Volkspartei (Swiss People’s Party, SVP), which with 29% of the votes reinforced its position as the biggest party in the country. The international media describe the SVP as “far-right,” “populist,” “xenophobic” and “intolerant.” Like the Vlaams Belang and the Lega Nord, the SVP is localist. It combines a strong attachment to local communities with a clear affirmation of the right of these communities to “defend the territory” and preserve their own, traditional, ethnic identity.

Most of the regionalist parties in Europe, such as those in the Basque country, Scotland and elsewhere, are leftist. Except along the “spine of Europe.” These parties are the most successful of the parties of the European right. They have a localist quality, and yet they are fighting to protect the Christian, Western heritage of the continent as a whole. The SVP is currently campaigning for a referendum, on 1 June, to “stop mass naturalization” of immigrants. Italy’s new Interior Minister, Roberto Maroni, comes from the Northern League and has announced “tough measures against clandestine immigration.” The VB, under constant harassment by the Belgian authorities, is working on a project to export its model to neighboring countries. Last January, the party established an international network called “Cities against Islamization,” in which it has aligned itself with local parties in cities along the Rhine—Pro Köln (Pro Cologne) from Cologne in the German Rhineland and Alsace d’Abord (Alsace First) from Strassbourg, the capital of Alsace, the French Rhine province. Like the VB, these parties defend local interests and oppose Islamization.

While France succumbs to North Africans and Germany to Turks, the parties from Old Lorraine, the spine of Europe, are preparing to fight for the preservation of their own identity. Owing to the massive immigration by people from an entirely different culture, many ordinary Europeans no longer feel at home in their own countries. Home is that cosy, often small, place where people feel safe among those whom they know and trust. The fight for the preservation of Europe is a fight for one’s own home, village, town, city, provence. That is why it is a localist issue.

Resistance to Islamization is not a matter of ideology, as one prominent American “anti-Jihadist” seems to think. The successful resistance in Europe has a provincial and an ethnic basis. It is about the right of the Europeans to hand their traditions, their identity, their cultural heritage down to their children so that the latter can continue to enjoy Europe’s ancient freedoms. The spirit of Old Lorraine has survived for 1,200 years. “Populist” parties in Flanders, Switzerland, Lombardia, Cologne and Alsace and other regions along the spine of Europe are popular for the simple reason that they are not prepared to let twelve centuries of capitalist self-reliance, self-governance and limited government fade away simply because foreigners are moving in with a spirit adapted to Arabian desert life.

“It is the wrong way to fight the global jihad,” writes the American anti-Islamist. “To form one group for indigenous Europeans, as has been done in several countries, reduces virtually every issue to the one non-negotiable issue of race and ethnicity, discourages cooperation, and thus encourages Balkanization, works against the idea of representative government, and obscures the common values of Judeo-Christian civilization that are shared by people of many races and ethnicities.”

Ethnicity, however, is not by definition a racial concept; it is a cultural one. Ethnicity is about the spirit, the culture that we share. For the above parties this culture is precisely the culture of limited government, of the common values of Western civilization, the adherence to home. Is all this bad because it is indigenous rather than ideological?

Paul Belien is a Flemish journalist and founder of The Brussels Journal, Europe’s leading conservative website. His wife is a member of the Belgian parliament for Vlaams Belang.

Anyone who has read the history of the debates over Lincoln’s legacy—I recommend Merrill D. Peterson’s Lincoln In American Memory—knows that there is nothing new about the attempts of various ideologues to project revisionist meanings upon his name and historical record. As David Donald once observed, Lincoln is “everybody’s grandfather.” Almost immediately after the president’s assassination, Americans have been scrambling to join the president’s burgeoning family of descendants. William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner and biographer, alienated many a pastor in America with his suggestion that the president had never sincerely accepted the tenets of Christianity. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, “robber baron” capitalists and socialistic populists predictably clashed over which side Lincoln might have taken in their class war: the business elite represented Abe as a devotee of laissez-faire while the leftist progressives enlisted the president in their struggle against the new “slavery” of child labor and low wages. While the radical abolitionist Frederick Douglas was confident, at least in his old age, that Lincoln had been a supporter of racial equality, the white supremacist Thomas Dixon (whose novel The Clansman inspired D. W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation”) was equally convinced that the president was an enemy of racial mixing. 

It was only with the American decision to enter World War One, however, that we see the first steps towards the refashioning of Lincoln as an enemy of global tyranny.  (Even the architects of the Spanish-American War almost twenty years earlier had not invoked Lincoln’s memory with such intensity.) As Richard Gamble has documented in The War for Righteousness, millions of Protestant progressives justified President’s Wilson war on behalf of democracy on the grounds that the struggle against Wilhelmine Germany was simply a global version of the fight against Dixie slavery. They called upon the spirit of Honest Abe to lead American Christians into triumph over the German “pagans” (apparently Lutherans qualified for such a title.) Yet this first attempt to portray Lincoln as a global democrat bogged down in the face of disillusionment over the heavy loss of American lives and Wilson’s failure to apply his own principles of democracy in the aftermath of the disastrous Versailles Treaty, which set the stage for World War Two. Irving Babbitt, that well-respected conservative, refused to accept any parallel between the statesmanlike presidency of Lincoln and the imperial presidency of Wilson.

Even attempts to invoke Lincoln during the war against Nazi Germany did not fully crystallize into his image as a global democrat. While Carl Sandburg, the famous biographer of Lincoln, persuaded FDR to invoke the image of Lincoln, Roosevelt prudently avoided excessive analogies between the Civil War and the war against Hitler, which could have cost the Democrats millions of votes in Dixie. It is only in the Cold War period that we find the successful re-creation of Lincoln as a democratic universalist—an image so successful that even Lincoln’s enemies have bought into it.

With the publication of Harry Jaffa’s Crisis Of The House Divided: An Interpretation Of The Issues In The Lincoln-Douglas Debates in 1959, the stage was set for a bold attempt to represent the president as a dedicated builder of democracy everywhere. Jaffa, a brilliant student of the political philosopher Leo Strauss, has argued for over forty years that Lincoln’s aims were universal in nature. (The sequel to this book, A New Birth Of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln And The Coming Of The Civil War, was published in 2000.) For Lincoln was the first president to understand that the great American experiment would not survive unless the republic spread democracy far and wide. Jaffa conflated the self-interest of the nation with this ideological experiment, which he unabashedly admitted was a “messianic” one. The American South, in Jaffa’s view, was simply a home-grown version of Nazism. Of course, prominent neoconservatives (like Robert Kagan and Richard Brookhiser) make similar claims that Lincoln stood for “universal human equality,” anytime, anywhere. Indeed, it is now a neoconservative credo that Lincoln would support an “end” to tyranny everywhere, as President Bush’s Second Inaugural Address made clear. Yet Jaffa has been the most determined fashioner of a Lincoln who looked forward to the day when the American eagle would spread its wings to liberate the darkest tyrannies of the world, just as it once did on the fields of Gettysburg. A “new birth of freedom” would now echo throughout the world, since America’s values are the world’s values. The Lincoln biographer Allen Guelzo has praised Jaffa’s Crisis as the greatest book ever written on Lincoln in the twentieth century. Undoubtedly, cosmopolitan elites who favor a more globalist role for America desire an image of Lincoln as the “last and greatest founding father” (in David Gelernter’s term) who would support endless expansionism in the cause of liberty.

Conservatives from the late 1950s onwards, who opposed Lincoln as a tyrannical enemy of Southern self-determination and a creator of the “Imperial” presidency, have not necessarily disputed all the details of Jaffa’s portrayal of Lincoln. They obviously never shared Jaffa’s idolatrous view that Abe was a “god-like” statesman who needed to crush the South in order to advance the cause of liberty, but they have never questioned his more serious view that Lincoln was a democratic imperialist. In the days when National Review still represented traditional American conservatism, two stalwart contributors to the magazine in the 1950s and 1960s, Willmoore Kendall and Frank Meyer, accepted the basic accuracy of Jaffa’s portrayal while they hotly disputed the benefits of this legacy. Although Kendall and Meyer blamed Lincoln for creating a “Caesarist” dictatorship over the republic, they did not challenge Jaffa’s view that the president had a global ambition to spread equality across all of creation. (Among the early contributors to National Review, only Richard Weaver praised Lincoln as a true statesman.) Mel Bradford, who often debated with Jaffa, agreed with his longtime opponent that Lincoln’s “gnostic” love of equality logically leads to endless revolutions at home and interventions abroad. Richard Gamble, in critiquing the logic of Irving Babbitt’s praise of Lincoln as a prudent statesman, apparently agrees with Jaffa that Lincoln fully intended to impose the Declaration of Independence on the rest of the world, just as he had upon the Confederacy. With the exceptions of Sam Francis and Paul Gottfried (neither of whom is a fan of Lincoln), I can’t think of other paleos in recent memory who resist this Jaffaite portrait of the “globalizing democrat” Abe. 

Perhaps most famously, the paleoconservative historian Thomas DiLorenzo has eagerly accepted Jaffa’s terms of discourse while disputing its moral implications. DiLorenzo draws a straight line between Lincoln’s “imperial” presidency and every single intervention in the name of “democracy” that followed the Civil War. (Ron Paul got in hot water with the neocons in late 2007 for admitting on “Meet the Press” that he sympathized with DiLorenzo’s portrait of Lincoln.) In his most recent work, Lincoln Unmasked, DiLorenzo asserts that the president’s unprecedented suppression of antiwar dissent during his presidency has rightly inspired his neoconservative admirers to clamp down on civil liberties during the “war on terror.” This image of Lincoln is useful to DiLorenzo, for it allows him to put the responsibility for all American empire-building on Abe’s shoulders alone. Yet pre-Lincoln America was not utterly devoid of tendencies towards centralized power. DiLorenzo’s hero, Thomas Jefferson, was not particularly shy about suppressing dissent during his presidency (as Leonard Levy has shown ). If Barry Shain is correct, a “conservative” founder like Madison was not loath to justify the growth of the federal government at the expense of the states.  In short, Lincoln was not the first architect of Leviathan in America; indeed, special war-time presidential powers quickly expired after the end of hostilities and it took a whole half century to restore these (during the Wilson presidency), as Irving Babbitt observed in his Democracy and Leadership.

Anybody who reads Lincoln carefully will find it very difficult to tease out of his many speeches a consistent message of democratic universalism. As a child of the Second Great Awakening, Lincoln was profoundly influenced by faith traditions that emphasized the intractable depravity of man. To be sure, Lincoln occasionally entertained hopes that Americans could put aside their differences over slavery in a peaceful manner. As a Calvinist, however, who understood God as an impersonal taskmaster, Lincoln could not believe that all human beings desire freedom and just leave it at that. For the president also recognized (famously, in his Peoria speech of 1854) that it is just as likely that humanity loves slavery, too. If we human beings desire freedom, it tends to be for ourselves alone. In disputing the “self-evident” nature of the Declaration, Lincoln was expressing the view (again, borne of Calvinist realism) that it is all too human to doubt the equality of all human beings. (This skepticism on the president’s part probably explains why he thought mass colonization of the freed slaves to Africa or Central America was the only way to prevent the racial violence which would characterize the Reconstruction period.) There is nothing particularly rational about Christian love, despite the lip-service which both the Yanks and the Rebs paid to this credo. In short, Lincoln’s realistic view about human nature hardly qualifies him as a democratic globalist who wants to liberate the republican lurking in the hearts of people around the world. Perhaps only Straussians who portray Lincoln as “Christian” simply in a Machiavellian sense could have missed the sincerely felt Calvinism in this president’s thought. 

In accepting the neocon image of Lincoln as a democratic universalist, paleos have made the task of their enemies that much easier. For the president has now been baptized as their hero, whom they can call upon when the circumstances demand it. Why have so few paleoconservative historians at least defended Lincoln’s “realistic” actions in the arena of foreign policy? I am not suggesting that paleos indulge in the occultist art of presidential hagiography. Nevertheless, every time a neocon commentator repeats mantras about “new births of freedom” which in reality call for new wars in the name of Lincoln, it is easy to cite situations when he was prepared to live with political arrangements which fell short of republican standards. In his First Inaugural Address, the president offered the South promises to enforce the Fugitive Slave laws and protect existing slavery with a constitutional amendment (obviously these proposals were rebuffed). After the Trent affair of 1861 provoked angry calls, particularly from most of his cabinet, for a war with Britain, Lincoln wisely refused to give into these forces, especially the pressure to invade Canada. (John A. MacDonald, a good Burkean Tory who later became Canada’s first prime minister, was very grateful to the president for his prudence and restraint in this matter.) When the Poles rebelled against Czarist Russia in 1863, Secretary of State William Seward, acting on the president’s wishes, assured the Russians that America would not interfere in this conflict (funny how neocons today omit this fact as they extend NATO’s influence ever closer to Russia’s borders). 

I don’t doubt that neos and paleos will always play politics with Lincoln’s legacy. It may not be very dramatic or glamorous to portray Lincoln as a tough-minded realist, instead of a proto-Bush Republican, but perhaps America could enjoy a little less excitement after five long years of failed democracy-building. 

In his speech, Powell warned of the dramatic and tragic results which mass immigration from the undeveloped world was going to have on Britain. He referred to the Roman poet Virgil, who has the Sybil prophetize, in Book 6 of the Aeneid, “the River Tiber foaming with much blood.”

Powell was a leading member of the British Conservatives. He was the shadow defense secretary, a former minister of health, and during the Second World War had been the only British soldier to rise from private to brigadier, and the army’s youngest brigadier at that. Despite his credentials Edward Heath, the shadow prime minister, sacked him the day after the speech. Heath considered the speech to be “racialist in tone.”

Of course it was not. The speech was merely politically incorrect at a time when political correctness was beginning to smother public debate. Moreover, Powell confronted his colleagues with the responsibility to address “future grave but, with effort now, avoidable evils”—a duty which most politicians, as Powell realized well enough, “knowingly shirk.”

Powell said that Britain, by allowing in thousands of immigrants from an entirely different culture, was “heaping up its own funeral pyre.” He warned that by the year 2000, there would be five million to seven million immigrants and their descendants in Britain, around one tenth of the population: “Whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population,” he warned. And he was right. In fact, the situation is worse than Powell predicted.

Though, as an official report published last month by the British House of Lords states, the data about the stock of immigrants in the United Kingdom “are seriously inadequate,” the British government estimates that there are almost half a million migrants residing illegally in Britain while 9.3% of the legal UK population (a 2003 figure) are foreign-born. The latter figure increases to 10.3% if one includes the under 16 UK-born children of immigrants, meaning all children where both parents are foreign-born and half of the number of children with just one parent foreign born. There is no figure available for the total number of second-generation children in Britain, but it is possible to provide a reliable, moderate estimate. The current percentages of foreign-born population who are aged 45-64, 65-74, 75-84, and 85+ are 9.8, 8.4, 7.8 and 6.5% respectively. If one assumes that they have a similar number of children to the UK-born and if half of their children are born in the UK (which is roughly the current figure), then the UK-born adult children of migrants constitute about 4% of the adult population. This increases the overall population of migrants and their descendants to around 13.5%.

Powell was right in another observation as well. In his speech he referred to voters from his working class constituency. He mentions a “middle-aged working man” who had told him that if he had the means he would move abroad. The blue-collar worker no longer felt at home in his own country. He told Powell that he hoped that his children would manage to get out.

The working-class neighborhoods were the first to experience the realities of the multicultural society. The victims in European society, said Powell, are not the immigrants but “those among whom they have come and are still coming.”

“They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated; at work they found that employers hesitated to apply to the immigrant worker the standards of discipline and competence required of the native-born worker; they began to hear, as time went by, more and more voices which told them that they were now the unwanted. They now learn that a one-way privilege is to be established by act of parliament; a law which cannot, and is not intended to, operate to protect them or redress their grievances is to be enacted to give the stranger, the disgruntled and the agent-provocateur the power to pillory them for their private actions.”

Powell’s speech provides tragic anecdotes from a woman old-age pensioner, the only white person left in her street. Her life was made unbearable by the barbarians who took over her living environment. Forty years later, similar stories are all too familiar, all over Europe. As a result the indigenous workers have all deserted the parties of the Left and vote for the anti-immigrant Right. As Umberto Bossi, the jubilant leader of the Italian anti-immigrant Lega Nord, said this week, following the eradication of the Communists and Greens in last Sunday’s Italian general elections: “The workers don’t vote for the Left any more. The Northern League is the new workers’ party.”

Bossi’s triumph is the tragedy of the common man, betrayed by his own politicians on the left. Meanwhile these treacherous politicians have found a new electoral base amongst the ever-swelling number of immigrants who have been enfranchised. As Filip Dewinter, the leader of the anti-immigrant Vlaams Belang in Belgium, recognized well enough when talking about the situation in a major town like Antwerp: “The number of potential voters for our party is declining year by year. […] In ten years’ time the number of “new Belgians” in Antwerp—half of whom are Moroccans—has doubled. [...] If the number of foreigners in Antwerp continues to grow by 1.5% a year, as it is doing now, then in twenty years from now there will be more people of foreign than of indigenous extraction in this city.” The population replacement is leading to a voter replacement.

Powell also pointed out that the problem with non-white immigration in Europe cannot be compared to that of the “Negro population of the United States.” He did not mention, however, that the huge difference between non-whites who cause no problems and those who do is that the latter are mostly Muslims. Powell does not address the problem of Islam at all. This is the only aspect of the speech that makes it sound somewhat odd to modern listeners, thereby revealing that it could not have been written today. Powell’s failure to address the fundamental issue of Islamization, however, is hardly surprising. Muslims are admonished by Islam not to assert themselves too openly until their numbers have grown sufficiently. When Powell enunciated his speech forty years ago, the followers of Muhammad still kept quiet, while today it is they who decide what one is allowed to publish in Europe, what one is allowed to eat, how one has to dress and behave, and when one is allowed to swim at the public swimming pool.

Despite the fact that Enoch Powell’s prediction of the future population figures was correct, despite his accurate perception of the worries and fears of the working class, and although he cannot be accused of “Islamophobia,” his speech is still considered beyond the bounds today. Indeed, so much so that when Nigel Hastilow, a Conservative candidate for parliament wrote in an op-ed piece last November, “Enoch Powell was right,” David Cameron, the current shadow prime minister and leader of the Conservative Party, acted exactly as Ted Heath did forty years ago. He immediately sacked Hastilow.

The reason why Powell’s speech is still a taboo today is undoubtedly the solution he proposed for saving Britain: Get the immigrants to leave again. “Stopping further inflow and promoting the maximum outflow” of aliens, he said, was the only solution to the problem. This is the big taboo topic in Europe, although everyone knows that here, too, Powell was right. “If all immigration ended tomorrow,” Powell pointed out, “the rate of growth of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population would be substantially reduced, but the prospective size of this element in the population would still leave the basic character of the national danger unaffected. This can only be tackled while a considerable proportion of the total still comprises persons who entered this country during the last ten years or so.” Hence, he added, “the urgency of implementing […] the encouragement of re-emigration.”

Powell hoped the aliens would leave voluntary:

“Nobody can make an estimate of the numbers which, with generous assistance, would choose either to return to their countries of origin or to go to other countries anxious to receive the manpower and the skills they represent. Nobody knows, because no such policy has yet been attempted. I can only say that, even at present, immigrants in my own constituency from time to time come to me, asking if I can find them assistance to return home. If such a policy were adopted and pursued with the determination which the gravity of the alternative justifies, the resultant outflow could appreciably alter the prospects.”

It is obvious, however, that if the aliens do not want to leave voluntarily, Europe will have to make them leave. Europe can only save itself if it has the courage to consider deportation. Unfortunately, it did not have the courage to do so 40 years ago. Tragically, it does not even wish to consider it today. If Europe does not find this courage soon it will be too late. Forty years have been lost. The funeral pyre has been lit. The fire is burning. Powell referred to Virgil’s Sybil and her prophecy. Unfortunately, he himself resembles Cassandra. She had the gift of prescience but, cursed by the gods, no one ever took heed of her predictions.

Joe Stiglitz has argued that the cost is $3 trillion and climbing. I might, along with some others, think that there’s more than a fair share of kitchen sinks being thrown into that, but it does at least give us a ballpark number to work with. So who back before it all kicked off gave us an estimate that accords with our post facto accounting?

Of all that did, indeed, try to add up the costs, the only one who gave us a figure even remotely comparable was William Nordhaus. The full paper and details are here, an overview here.

The unfavorable case is a collage of potential unfavorable outcomes rather than a single scenario. It shows the array of costs that might be incurred if the war drags on, occupation is lengthy, nation-building is costly, the war destroys a large part of Iraq’s oil infrastructure, and there are both lingering military and political resistance to the U.S. occupation, and major adverse psychological reactions to the conflict. Putting the different adverse effects together adds up to $1.6 trillion, most of which come outside of the direct military costs.

Really rather prescient, don’t you think, because the Congressional Budget Office seems to be saying, under circumstances very similar to those Nordhaus assumes, that the direct costs of the war will be between $1.2 trillion and $1.7 trillion.

Now the purpose of reminding people of this is not simply to point to varied neocons and shout about how wrong they were (fun though that activity can be). Rather, to emphasise the point that prediction really is a difficult business, so much so that only one person was anywhere near getting it right about the costs of the big adventure—and he got it in print no less (claiming you knew but didn’t say, doesn’t, I’m afraid, count).

The point is, rather, to suggest that if Nordhaus has indeed been that one good predictor on one subject, perhaps we should be paying especial attention to his predictions on other matters as well? Like, for example, the area where his reputation really comes from, the predictions about the costs both of climate change and attempts to mitigate it through reductions in emissions. The full paper is here and at 253 pages (including notes and references), it isn’t light reading I’m afraid.

The background logic to the argument is very simple: that climate change is happening, that we’re causing it and perhaps we ought to do something about it is assumed. The figures come from the IPCC reports and thus reflect the scientific consensus (please note, these are the assumptions within which this debate is taking place. Whether they are all true is another matter, quite outside the scope of this discussion. What is at issue, if they are true, is what should we be doing?

Now please do understand that for our purposes here, I’m swallowing all the Kool-Aid. The IPCC is correct, Al Gore’s only slightly over-hyping matters, and it’s not whether we do something, it’s what do we do?

There’s two things that we really still don’t know (again, we’re following the conventional narrative here): the first is what is climate sensitivity. This is what temperature rise can we expect from a doubling of atmospheric CO2? Something that most outside the details of the debate don’t know is that the actual warming from CO2 itself isn’t in fact something we’re very worried about.The IPCC thinks that it would, directly, lead to a rise in temperature of some 1 degree C. No, we’re really not worried about that: but we are worried about second order effects. Will a 1 degree rise lead to less ice and thus less reflection of energy back into space thus increasing the warming? That would be a positive feedback. Or will higher temperatures lead to more plant growth, which when they die and rot leave some of their carbon content as humus (no, humous is the food from our Glorious Proprietor’s homeland) in the soil thus reducing CO2 levels in the atmosphere again? Thus a negative feedback?

What we do know is that there are both negative and positive feedbacks and what we really don’t know, but rather wish we did, is what is the cumulative effect of them all? Current estimates (within, again, our mainstream) range from the low end of the IPCC estimate of 2 degrees C, through a clever piece of Bayesian logic giving us 3 degrees up to James Hansen’s latest “prepaper” (that is, not peer reviewed as yet) offering 6 degrees. Really, at this stage of the game, you pays your money and you takes your choice.

The second thing we really don’t as yet all agree upon (although I would say that the science is probably clearer than the climate sensitivity part, even if that science is economics) is what exactly it is that we should do about it all: and the disagreement here depends upon the costs and benefits of the various possible courses of action.

Clearly, if the damage is going to be X, then we don’t want to cause more damage than X to avert it. Yes, economists do put a $ sign in front of X, because they do indeed reduce everything to a financial number, so as to be able to compare things, one with another. The value of polar bears, of Bangladesh, of floods and famines, the Stern Review even included the possibility that we’re all wiped out by an asteroid on Thursday week. So we end up with a number for the damage done by climate change. We clearly do not want to pay more than that number to avoid said damage. That would be the cutting of the nose to spite the face thing, not a sensible move. 

The basic idea then, one shared by all of the people discussing what we should do—yes, Al Gore, the signatories to Kyoto, the people discussing post-Kyoto actions and so on is—if the damage is going to be $40 trillion then we should be willing to spend up to, but no more than, $40 trillion to avert said damage. If $20 trillion then up to $20 trillion and so on. This is a simplification, yes (there are things like discount rate to complicate matters, but I’m ignoring them here to keep things simpler) but it is the basis upon which we are trying to make our decision about what we do.
So what is suggested is this (from Nordhaus):

The first major point is that an ideal efficient climate-change policy would be relatively inexpensive and have a substantial impact on long-run climate change. This policy, which we have labeled the “optimal” one, sets emissions reductions to maximize the economic welfare of humans. The net present-value benefit of the optimal policy is $3.4 trillion. Our estimate is that the present value of global abatement costs for the optimal policy would be around $2.2 trillion, which represents 0.11 percent of discounted world income.

That is, in slightly more detail, that we should simply impose a carbon tax of around $7 per tonne CO2. If we go much higher than that then we’ll be causing more damage than the climate change itself will do. Further, we get a very gloomy reading of the more extensive proposals from some others:

Clearly, meeting these ambitious objectives would require sharp emissions reductions, but the timing induced by excessively early reductions makes the policies much more expensive than necessary. For example, the Gore and Stern proposals have net costs of $17 trillion to $22 trillion relative to no controls – they are more costly than nothing. The emissions target of the German proposal is close to that of the Stern Review analysis, and the cost penalty is likely to be similar.

That Stern’s and Gore’s proposals will cost more than doing nothing at all is certainly a surprising statement. But what if it is actually true?

Now no, I’m not insisting that Nordhaus is correct here in each and every particular. Nor am I claiming that Stern and Gore with their proposals will impoverish us and our descendants to no very good purpose. Only that we’ve got a number of people here making those very difficult predictions about the future.

And only one of them has a track record of actually being correct on previously made such predictions about that very difficult future.

So why aren’t we and policy makers paying more attention to his predictions?

Just to hammer this point home: we’ve got the Republican (yes, I know, he says he doesn’t know very much about economics but really....) nominee saying, “If Global Warming is happening, then action taken now is necessary; if it’s not, then action will make us more efficient anyway,” or muttering something to this effect. Which is, unfortunately, drivel. It’s terribly simple to make us more efficient: simply bulldoze all cars that do less than 40 mpg. When stated like that, it’s obvious that the cost will be higher than any benefit that we might get from it. The aim isn’t to make us more efficient, it’s to make us as efficient as possible without the move to said efficiency costing more than any benefits we get from the move. Yes, certainly, a world not dependent upon fossil fuels would indeed be a nice thing to have, as would a pony in every Christmas stocking: we could tell a number of odious political regimes to go hang for example. Yes, more efficient use of what energy we have would also be a lovely and desirable thing: but as above, the really important question is how much is it going to cost us to have those things?

And if the costs are going to be higher than the benefits, then we’re simply making ouselves and our descendants poorer for no clearly and obviously good reason. Another way of describing such actions is “dumb”.

All of which is really rather why I’d like to see people taking more note of the Nordhaus calculations on the costs of mitigating climate change: he is, after all, the only person out there with a track record of successful predictions about the costs and benefits of future actions.

Barack Obama is the identikit Democratic presidential candidate. He has Jack Kennedy’s youthful charisma, Jimmy Carter’s reputation as the fresh-start outsider, and Michael “son of Greek immigrants” Dukakis’s American success story. Hillary Clinton merely has her husband’s last name. Her opponent has his charisma and his “hope.” Obama’s New Hope is not only hopelessly nostalgic of the “hope” cult surrounding the last successful Democratic presidential aspirant—who providentially hailed from a place called “Hope”—but it also harkens back to the Madison Avenue-style slogans that spearheaded the campaigns of all of the 20th century’s most successful liberal presidents. Is it hard to imagine the New Hope becoming the amorphous label for Obama’s program as the Square Deal, New Freedom, New Deal, Fair Deal, New Frontier, and Great Society became for the programs of his forerunners?

If Obama’s resemblance to the ghosts of Democrats past is mostly superficial, if tellingly derivative, the ideology underlying his personality-driven candidacy substantively traces its ancestry to past Lefts. There is nothing new about Obama’s ideas, especially the tired gimmick of repackaging old ideas as “new.”

Barack Obama was born into the Left. He describes his late mother as “a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position paper liberalism.” The young Barack pursued an activism consistent with the politics he inherited. The gratitude the biracial Obama expressed in his 2004 keynote address at the Democratic National Convention “for the diversity of my heritage” could just as easily apply to his politics as it does to his ethnicity. Barack Obama is the product of many Lefts.

“To avoid being mistaken for a sellout,” Obama writes in Dreams from My Father of his days at Occidental College, “I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy.” After passing through this obligatory poseur phase, Obama evidenced a stronger commitment to the Left. In New York City, where Obama transferred to Columbia University after two years at Occidental, he worked for the Naderite NYPIRG and attended socialist conferences at Cooper Union.

The hyperpoliticized Obama appearing in the 1995 memoir disappears in the Obama running for president. Similarly, Obama, until the Reverend Wright affair, seemed to transcend race. The race-obsessed picture that Obama paints of himself in Dreams from My Father clashes with the anti-Al Sharpton that Obama plays on the campaign trail. The presence of an Afrocentric white mother, the absence of an African father, and growing up amidst a surrounding culture of Indonesians, Hawaiians, and whites heightened Obama’s racial consciousness. He writes of the impact that The Autobiography of Malcolm X had upon him, purchasing copies of the Nation of Islam’s Final Call newspaper, and finding Reverend Jermemiah Wright’s “Black Values System”—a separatist document—a “sensible, heartfelt list.”

But candidate Obama doesn’t own his past, even though it might prove to own him. To become President Obama, Senator Obama necessarily sidesteps that history. His amnesic makeover is the story of the Left in microcosm.

“We have in America a fast-growing number of cultivated young people who have no recognized outlet for their active faculties,” Jane Addams, co-founder of Chicago’s Hull House, lamented one hundred years ago. “They hear constantly of the great social maladjustment, but no way is provided for them to change it, and their uselessness hangs about them heavily.” Did the urban poor need the domestic missionaries or did the domestic missionaries need the urban poor?

One of those “cultivated young people” without an “outlet for their active faculties” that came to Chicago in the 1980s, as Addams had come to it in the 1880s, was Barack Obama. Educated at the best private school in Hawaii, and in the Ivy League at Columbia, Obama arrived in Chicago as a missionary from a world quite distant from the city’s South Side.

In the 1890s, Hull House became the day care, battered-woman’s center, clinic, literacy class, and homeless shelter for the immigrant-rich neighborhood surrounding Halstead Street. The direction away from activism (voluntary work for the community’s benefit) and toward passivism (demands that distant public officials solve the community’s problems) that Hull House initiated paved the way for the community organizing in which Obama later immersed himself. A Force Left took the reins from a Freedom Left at Hull House, deeming community organizing so noble that citizens should be forced to subsidize it instead of lauded for volunteering for it. Addams confessed in Twenty Years at Hull House, “One of the first lessons we learned at Hull-House was that private beneficence is totally inadequate to deal with the vast numbers of the city’s disinherited.”

That is the legacy Obama inherited from earlier waves of Chicago community agitators. From its founding nearly 120 years ago, Hull House established Chicago as a hotbed of passivism rather than activism. It was here in the 1930s that Saul Alinsky “rubbed raw the sores of discontent” and discovered many of his “rules for radicals.” In the 1960s, Students for a Democratic Society’s Jobs or Income Now (JOIN) embarked upon an interracial movement of the poor in Uptown. A few years later, Jesse Jackson’s Operation Push tweaked Addams’s formula of shaking down the government to include big business as well. The helping hand that Hull House initially extended became a hand extended for its helping.

When Barack Obama entered Chicago community agitation as part of the Calumet Community Religious Conference, the group was in the midst of celebrating what Obama dubs “its first significant victory”—a helping of $500,000 from the state legislature for a job placement program. Though there would be community cleanups and neighborhood watches, the CCRC described in Obama’s memoirs forces the government to remove asbestos from subsidized housing, files lawsuits against the city, and wins concessions from alderman for better city services. In other words, Obama, like Hull House’s Addams, confused activism with lobbying for government give-outs. Public perceptions, likewise, confused the apposite roles of sacrifice in the activist for the demands of sacrifice in the passivist. 

After building up credibility in Chicago, Obama took a three-year sojourn at Harvard Law, and then returned to Illinois and ultimately won election to the state senate in 1996. The friends the young legislator made in his political climb are the dregs of American political life. Though the Friends of Barack (FOBs) helped propel Obama’s career in state politics, they may be his undoing come November. 

“Kill all the rich people,” philosophized Weatherman Bill Ayers in 1969. “Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at.”

For sheer idiocy, Ayers’s comment is hard to beat. But later that year fellow Weatherman and future wife Bernardine Dohrn outdid him. Waxing about the Manson Family to attendees of a Weatherman “war party” in Flint, Michigan, radical sex-symbol Dohrn pronounced: “Dig it: first they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach. Wild!”

The couple spent the early 1970s bombing government and business targets. They emerged from the underground in the 1980s. In the 1990s, they reinvented themselves as academics and then delved into Democratic Party politics in Chicago, where they backed a local politician named Barack Obama.

In 1995, the first couple of 60s extremism hosted Obama’s political coming out party at their Chicago home. They raised money for the would-be state senator and introduced him to the players in the left-of-liberal Windy City enclave of Hyde Park. Ayers identifies Obama as a “neighbor,” but clearly the relationship is more than that. Neither the Obamas nor Dorhn and Ayers have much to say about the nature and extent of the relationship in this election year. What the public record says is disturbing.

In 1997, Michelle Obama organized a University of Chicago forum on Ayers’ book, A Kind and Just Parent: Children of Juvenile Court, in which Mr. Obama also spoke. “This panel gives students a chance to hear about the juvenile justice system not only on a theoretical level, but from the people who have experienced it,” Michelle Obama, then working for the university, claimed. The following month, Barack Obama name-dropped Ayers’s book in the Chicago Tribune. “A searing and timely account of the juvenile court system,” he judged, “and the courageous individuals who rescue hope from despair.”

From 1999 to 2002, Obama and Ayers served as trustees for the Woods Fund, a cash cow milked by the Chicago Left. As Obama sat on the Woods Fund board with the former Weatherman, Ayers conceded in his memoir that, even decades removed from Weatherman, “I can’t imagine dismissing the possibility” of setting off more bombs. But, Ayers insists, he and wife Dohrn were never terrorists. “Terrorists intimidate, while we aimed only to educate.” Despite the juxtaposition of Ayers’s ill-timed self-serving memoir with 9/11, Obama again joined Ayers and Dohrn in speaking at an academic conference months later. At the same time, Ayers contributed to Obama’s state senate campaign.

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright has emerged as the most damaging of the FOBs. Unlike “neighbors” Ayers and Dohrn, Wright cannot be passed off as a casual acquaintance. He married the Obamas, baptized their daughters, and served as the family’s pastor. He even coined the phrase “the audacity of hope,” the title of Obama’s second book.

Labeled by the senator as an adherent of the social gospel, Wright seems more social than gospel—denouncing gay-marriage bans from the pulpit, touting the dangers of global warming in the church bulletin, and making pilgrimages to Libya with Louis Farrakhan to meet with Muammar Qaddafi. Certainly Obama was channeling Wright, and perhaps such secular millennialists as Robert Owen and John Reed, when he exuberantly told a South Carolina megachurch last fall, “We’re going to keep on praising together. I am confident that we can create a Kingdom right here on Earth.” Wright harkens back to a long forgotten Christian Left, hubristically deluded into thinking that the millennium would result from man’s political agency. At the same time, he fits in with the secularized 9/12 Left that imagines America behind a myriad problems—global warming, Third-World debt, 9/11 itself. It’s telling that Obama joined not a traditional church, but a politicized faith united more by race than by religion, too transfixed on the here to pay mind to the hereafter.

It’s also telling that Obama remained in the pews for two decades. “The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no. God damn America,” Wright infamously preached. Whether Obama heard that particular Sunday morning sermon seems an irrelevant question given Wright’s multitudinous off-the-wall altar outbursts. The Sunday after 9/11, Reverend Wright blamed the United States for the attacks: “We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now