Can they both loose ?

How the burqa became a symbol of freedom

by Josie Appleton 

In a speech defending his ban on full-face veils, French president Nicolas Sarkozy lamented that such face coverings keep women ‘isolated from social life’ and ‘deprived of personality’. Since the ban came into force on 11 April, dozens of these supposedly isolated and deprived women have taken to the streets in rather assertive acts of protest.

On 11 April itself, several niqab-clad women staged protests outside Notre Dame and other key Parisian monuments (one appeared to be resisting arrest). A couple of weeks later, a young veiled woman stood in front of the National Assembly, in a protest that was also a provocation for a fine (which she was annoyed she didn’t get).

According to the minister of the interior, ‘27 or 28’ women have been punished for wearing the face-veil so far. These are not all Saudi Arabian visitors or deferential Muslim wives – a woman fined in Nice a few days ago was both a convert and a single mother.

These fines are sparking spontaneous scuffles and support for the women concerned. A teacher from a private Muslim school in Toulouse was stopped and fined €150 for wearing her niqab; when a technician started filming the scene he was promptly arrested, and a spontaneous demoformed outside the police station demanding his release.

Now a new battle line has formed in schools, with headscarf-wearing mothers protesting against their exclusion from accompanying their children on school trips. These mothers wear a simple headscarf rather than a niqab, yet an increasing number of schools judge that their headwear makes them unfit ‘representatives’. On 2 May, reported Le Monde, a group of mothers rallied outside a school in Montreuil, ‘not defending a religious cause but fighting against injustice’.

It is striking that these protesters put their case in terms of Republican values, such as liberty. The main Muslim organisation opposing the burqa ban is called ‘Hands Off My Constitution’, and the mothers defending their right to wear veils on school trips call themselves ‘Mothers All Equal’. In these face-offs between veiled women and police, it seems, the line between the state and public freedoms is being contested.

To English eyes, these are strange scenes indeed. There is no UK government legislation on the veil, and while teachers can wear the headscarf, mothers (and many employees) can wear the niqab without raising many eyebrows. It is the peculiar severity of the French state’s attack on the veil – in the country with the largest Muslim population in Europe – that has turned Islamic headwear into such a key libertarian issue.

The French war on headscarves started in 2004, with a ban on pupils wearing headscarves to school. As the French sociologist Olivier Roy observes in his book Secularism Confronts Islam, there was a particular focus on the Islamic headscarf, which was seen as causing problems that the Sikh turban and Jewish skullcap did not. This was less to do with the inherent qualities of the headscarf, than the way it became an emblem for the French state, as a kind of anti-Republican symbol. Politicians of all parties lined up to support the ban in 2003, waxing lyrical about how the law would establish the ‘permanence of our values’ and be ‘constitutive of our collective history’, a ‘principle factor of the moral or spiritual unity of our nation’, a ‘founding principle of our republic’ and so on and so on (1). Suppressing the headscarf became the supreme Republican act, the primary way in which law-makers could make a grand statement of principle.

Incentives for Failure

Welfare’s Next Vietnam

by Heather Mac Donald

Disability will soon surpass AFDC and become the nation’s second-biggest welfare program. It is producing AFDC-sized problems too.

By decade's end, the public may well discover that the great welfare reform debate of 1995 addressed only half the problem. The Rivera family of Boston illustrates why. Eulalia Rivera came from Puerto Rico in 1968 and proceeded to raise a welfare dynasty. Her 16 surviving children (the 17th was shot) and their 89 progeny collect $750,000 to $1 million a year in government benefits. Their main form of support, however, is not AFDC, the program for single mothers and children that has been targeted for reform: it is federal disability payments. 

Not that the Riveras suffer from crippling physical illnesses or injuries. Most of the family's disabled members collect benefits for their "nerves." As Eulalia's son Juan, a divorced father of five, told theBoston Globe: "I have a nervous condition. . . . There is no way I could work." He pointed to his hands, which were shaking. "Look at this," he said: "I'm having an attack right now."

The Riveras represent the future of public assistance. While AFDC costs have grown 23 percent since 1980, the costs of the federal government's two disability programs have more than doubled. By 1998, they will reach $80 billion a year. In 1993, they already enrolled a total of 8.2 million Americans—more than 3 percent of the population. Disability for the poor is the nation's fastest-growing welfare program, about to surpass both AFDC and food stamps as the main form of support for the non-working poor. Workers' disability is ballooning as well: the Social Security disability trust fund will go bankrupt in 1995 and will be bailed out with money from the Social Security retirement fund.

Preserving Freedom

Paranoia Is Good for You

by Wendy McElroy

"I Lived. I Died. Now Mind Your Own Business." — that's how I want my tombstone to read.

What do I have to hide? Everything! Which is to say, every thing you demand to know from me is something I don't want to tell you.

Privacy is the single most effective means of preserving freedom against an encroaching state. Privacy rests on the assumption that — in the absence of specific evidence of wrongdoing — an individual has a right to shut his front door and tell other people (including the government) to mind their own damned business. This is a presumption of innocence. It is also the bedrock of civil society.

The act of slamming your front door expresses the key distinction between the private and public spheres. The private sphere consists of the areas of life in which an individual exercises authority and into which the government or other uninvited parties cannot properly intrude; traditionally, the home or family is offered as a prime example of the private sphere. Thus, historically, privacy has stood as a bulwark between the individual and government, between freedom and social control.

No wonder privacy is under vicious and sustained attack.

Totalitarianism requires total information, and today's government is intent on achieving the complete identification of everyone, like taking an inventory of belongings to be taxed and controlled: national ID, biometrics, "your papers please!"

At every juncture, it seems, we are being asked to fill out a form, to answer invasive questions, to submit our bags for a search, to shut up or speak out on command, and to raise our arms to be wanded while we're at it.

In his book Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, James C. Scott commented on the role played by one form of inventory — census data — in the rise of the modern state:

How Assimilation Works

—and how multiculturalism has wrecked it in California

BRUCE S. THORNTON

California is a concentrated example of the time-honored idea that America is an immigrant nation. From its beginnings as a territory through the twentieth century, California comprised a riotous variety of ethnic groups, nationalities, and religions. The whole world, it seemed, was coming and contributing to the state’s ethnic tapestry: Mexicans, Irish, Australians, South Sea Islanders, Italians, Basques, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Armenians, Volga Germans, Filipinos, Hmong, Laotians, Punjabis, Vietnamese. And for a long time, immigration worked, because everyone was expected to assimilate, more or less, to the American paradigm.

For an example of how that assimilation took place, consider the rural San Joaquin Valley, where I grew up. Since it offered plenty of opportunities to own farmland and to find agricultural work, the valley became a place where the theory of assimilation met the practice. Assimilation didn’t mean that an immigrant had to discard his native culture or language. Indeed, most immigrants took pride in their origins, as evidenced by fraternal organizations, religious guilds, holidays, festivals, recipes, native costumes, and scores of other ways of honoring their homelands. Some, like my Italian grandmother, kept their native tongues and never became fluent in English. Some, like my wife’s Volga German grandfather, never even became citizens. Yet whatever the degree of assimilation, most accepted a fundamental truth: that whatever affection they had for their homes, for their native tongue, or for their old ways and customs, those cultures had in some significant way failed them. Thus they had made a difficult, costly choice: to become Americans. If America’s core principles—such as individual rights, freedom of speech, the rule of law, and religious tolerance—conflicted with those of the old country, then the latter had to be modified or abandoned.

Non-trials

Ivan Demjanjuk, is this not a man too?

by Angus Kennedy

This is not the first time that Demjanjuk has been found guilty of Nazi war crimes. Convicted in Israel in 1988 for having been the infamous prisoner/guard ‘Ivan the Terrible’ at Treblinka, another of the Operation Reinhard extermination camps in eastern Poland, he was sentenced to death but released five years later when new KGB evidence showed it to be a case of mistaken identity. The Israeli court acted with the utmost legal scruple: freeing him on grounds of reasonable doubt despite his having been identified as Ivan the Terrible by survivors.

Demjanjuk returned to the US where, almost immediately, new charges were levelled against him – this time of having been a guard at Sobibor and Majdanek camps – and, after losing his US citizenship, he was finally extradited to Germany in late 2009 to face trial there.

Demjanjuk is the lowest-ranking person to be tried in Germany for Nazi war crimes. A Ukrainian born in 1920, he had fought for the Red Army, was taken prisoner by the Germans in the Crimea and held in a Nazi camp. He then volunteered for the SS to escape it. The key piece of evidence against him was an ID card from the 1940s showing that he had been at the Trawniki SS forced labour camp where the SS trained Ukrainian volunteers as guards. He ended up in 1943 in Sobibor, an extermination camp where 250,000 Jews were gassed; the vast majority of them were killed immediately on arrival and maybe fewer than 100 people survived.

The Ukrainian volunteers, known as Hiwis, are well known to have behaved sadistically and undoubtedly murdered Jews themselves. As Demjanjuk’s judge, Ralph Alt, said: ‘Every Trawniki man knew that he was part of a well-oiled and smoothly operating apparatus that had no other goal than systematically murdering Jews… the accused was part of that extermination machinery… His participation in the killing process included the unloading of the wagons, forcing the prisoners to undress and accompanying them to the gas chambers.’

Untold stories

Unless candour prevails, reconciliation remains elusive

Seventeen years after the death of apartheid, we hear a lot – maybe even too much – about coming clean; about acknowledging collective white guilt for the crimes of apartheid and the lingering misery of black South Africans. It weighs on the collective black soul, and it means a black vote for the DA is not out of faith and trust in that party, but as a wake-up call to the ANC.

by Xhanti Payi

I was 15 when Winnie Mandela appeared before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1997 to answer to charges of murder and torture, among others.  I remember the day well. It was big news, and the media were everywhere.  It must have been a tough and humbling, if not humiliating day for her. 

In the end, with witness after witness having accused her taking part in kidnapping, torture and murder - and Winnie denying all as fabrication - Archbishop Desmond Tutu tearfully pleaded with her, ''You are a great person and you don't know how your greatness would be enhanced if you were to say: 'Sorry. Things went wrong, forgive me.' I beg you.''

I believe it was necessary for Winnie Mandela, a leader and a champion among the people, to admit that under her hand, and many times in her name, horrible things had been done to people. Those words were necessary for the people affected to have their loss acknowledged by someone who always had more power than them. The mother of the nation, with a great deal of support from the masses, was there in her classic self. Dressed in a floral suit, with a pearl necklace and glittering spectacles, she would hold her stern posture which she had maintained through the trials of apartheid, upright and innocent of the accusations which she said were “ludicrous”.  She was the embodiment of power even as she embraced the woman whose son had been killed.

So, she conceded, ''I am saying it is true, things went horribly wrong. I fully agree with that. And for that part of those painful years, when things went horribly wrong, and we were aware of the factors that led to that, for that, I am deeply sorry.''

The Night Watchman

"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."

- Tacitus

Newspeak

Illegal Immigrants Get Affirmative Action

By Maxim Lott

This week, Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley signed a bill to require the state's public universities to give undocumented aliens -- generally illegal -- in-state tuition privileges.

The bill, known as the Dream Act, is already the law in ten other states, including California, New York, Texas and Illinois.

But critics argue that the bill will give illegal aliens better treatment than Americans and legal immigrants -- thanks to existing diversity policies at universities.

University of Maryland (College Park) computer science Prof. James Purtilo told FoxNews.com that, during his time as an associate dean, he frequently saw admission officers favor students because of their “undocumented” status.

"They favor students with special circumstances. 'Undocumented alien' would be one of these special circumstances... They help fill out the diversity picture for the admissions office."

"It was just the norm," Purtillo added, "that obviously we need more of these students [undocumented aliens]… 'this student has a real story to tell' would be a common thing the admissions officers would say. Or that 'they're enriching the College Park experience.'"

University of Maryland spokesman Millree Williams said because admissions staff were either busy with commencement ceremonies or on vacation, he was unable to answer questions about the university’s affirmative action policies as of Tuesday morning.

The eternal story

OBAMA TURNS HIS SIGHTS TO ISRAEL

 By David Harsanyi

Word is that President Obama will deliver a comprehensive speech on the Middle East any day now. And as you know, there’s nothing — and I mean nothing — Americans want to talk about more during a prolonged economic downturn than Palestinian statehood. Hey, the White House might not be able to sign a budget, but it’s going to fix 2,000 years of strife halfway around the globe. You just watch.

According to a Bloomberg report, Obama will urge Israel to halt West Bank settlement expansion and return to the 1967 “borders.” (There were never any 1967 borders, but that’s another story.) If this is true, the president of the United States will be asking an ally — though he probably bristles at such a narrow-minded concept — to accept a Judenfrei West Bank, washed of all aggressive settlers, prosperity and progress. The president, if the report is true, will be asking the Jews to surrender the old city of Jerusalem and place it under new management. Hamas-Fatah management.

Why, one wonders, wouldn’t Israelis jump all over such a fabulous offer?

It‘s not that Hamas is a belligerent terrorist organization that won’t accept the existence of Israel — the Jews are blessed with similar neighbors in Syria, Hezbollahstan and soon-to-be Muslim Brotherhood Land. It‘s that no treaty with Hamas is worth the parchment paper it’s scribbled on. Obama would never send a treaty with Hamas to the Senate, so why would we expect Israel to enter into one?

The Arabs, though, will also demand the ‘right of return’ for refugees. In truth, whether the Israeli government leans left or right, the probability of any return of “refugees” is as remote as the chance of my “returning” to a ghetto in autonomous Transylvania.

Crocodile Dundee in Detroit

Lottery millionaire charged in Detroit landlord's killing

Steve Pardo and Mike Wilkinson / / The Detroit News

Three months ago, Freddie Young became a lottery millionaire.

Today, the 62-year-old Detroiter is residing not in a luxury home but in a jail cell, accused of gunning down the owner of an apartment complex for evicting his daughter.

Young was one of 13 people in the P1 Gold Lottery Club — a group of postal workers and retirees who landed a $46.5million Mega Millions jackpot in February, Detroit police confirmed.

He allegedly confronted Greg McNicol, a 45-year-old Australian who was renovating a 10-unit apartment complex on Beniteau — not far from Young's home on Traverse. McNicol was arguing with Young's daughter, Ayana, 20, over nonpayment of rent.

Apartment resident Florida Benton said McNicol was more than a landlord — he was a person with a good heart who lived in the "worst apartment" in the complex while he made repairs on the other units.

She wonders why a newly minted millionaire would allegedly get so worked up over unpaid rent in a run-down complex.

"My question is: If (Young) had that type of money, what was his daughter still doing here?" Benton said. "It is just as easy to put someone in a new residence tomorrow as it is to come down here and shoot someone in cold blood."

Young faces a May 26 preliminary examination on charges of first-degree murder and using a firearm while committing a felony. He faces up to life in prison, without the possibility of parole, if convicted on the murder charge.

Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy issued a statement about the incident and McNicol.

"By all accounts, he was a landlord hoping to have a positive impact in the community," the prosecutor said. "This is extremely discouraging and I sincerely hope that this does not have a chilling effect for others who want to do business in the city of Detroit."

Food stamp nation

Food Stamp Millionaires

by Ralph Alter

If you have any uncertainty regarding the responsibility for the nearly bankrupt status of the state of Michigan and its cultural and philosophical epicenter, Detroit, take a gander at the state's food stamp program. Sarah Jones at politicususa provides a self-pitying screed suggesting that Michigan governor Snyder is responsible for the fact that some college professors are on food stamps. She provides as an example, Dr. Mike Evans and Kenlea Pebbles, married Central Michigan University professors with two children. The Evans-Pebbles earn a salary of "under $40,000 a year."

Due to the Evans-Pebbles family's poor choice of vocation and inadequate family planning:

Their two children...qualify for reduced price school lunches, MI Child health insurance, and other tax-subsidized services.

One might think that a person capable of earning a doctorate might be able to support himself and his family without leaning on the taxpayers to carry part of his load. Not in Michigan. Just imagine the retirement benefits accruing to this family a decade or so from now.

But you don't have to be a struggling college professor, slaving over student papers 20 hours a week to provide for the kids to get Michigan food stamp freebies. No, the porous safety net established by the liberal hacks that have brought Michigan to the sorry state it's in today doesn't even keep the really big fish from slipping through.

Leroy Fick of Bay County admitted he still swipes his electronic (food stamp) card a year after winning a ($2 million) jackpot on "Make Me Rich," (Michigan's TV lottery show.)

Fick says the Department of Human Services told him he could continue to use the card, which is paid with tax dollars.

One has to wonder at what income level a person no longer qualifies for food-stamp assistance in Michigan. Food stamp nation indeed.

Leap in Void

Environmentalist Schizophrenia

by Gary Jason

Several recent noteworthy articles sharply illuminate the increasingly schizophrenic environmentalist worldview.
The first is an amazing cri de coeur from one of Britain's most famous environmentalists, George Monbiot.  In it he frankly admits that the environmentalist movement is in a quandary.  Take the issue of nuclear power.  Enviros typically hate it, but they refuse to deal with the fact that the only alternative is -- fossil fuels!  (Yes, wind and solar power help a tiny bit, but neither can be scaled up to supply the requisite energy in the foreseeable future, and they need to be subsidized at an enormous level.)
Monbiot rightly notes that the enviros have an inconsistent worldview.  On the one hand, they want a decarbonized economy to reduce pollution and save the landscape, but this can be done only by business and government building projects, and the enviros resist both government and business development.
To those enviros who dream of dramatic reductions in what we gluttonous materialists produce and consume, Monbiot notes that the enviros don't really tell us what is essential to living reasonably and what is not.  He says, "An honest environmentalism needs to explain needs to explain which products should continue to be manufactured and which should not be, and what the energy sources for these manufactures should be."  Curiously, it doesn't occur to Monbiot that the phrase "an honest environmentalism" is an oxymoron if ever there was one.
Then there are enviros who predict (nay, yearn for!) an imminent economic collapse because we are running out of fossil fuels.  They feel that such a collapse will both punish wicked humanity and cut the number of homo sapiens down to size.  (Some enviros have put their dream number of people on the planet at 400,000 -- meaning that their dream is the nightmare scenario in which 99.99% of all humans just die.)

Branded Men and big losers

by Alexander Boot

One of modernity’s toxic effects is that words now mean whatever we want them to mean. They cease being a means of communication and become an instrument of power. Lewis Carroll realized this fact:

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean different things.’

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master—that’s all.’

Modern politicians and “brand builders” both use language in that unreal way—the former to gain power over the electorate, the latter over the market. And the unreality starts with the word “brand.”

“Brand,” with its “personality” matched to the “market profile,” is a modern invention. Branding has little to do with product characteristics because the public has been house-trained to think in terms of brands, not products. A pub-crawler selects a brand of lager not because it’s necessarily the best, but because the “brand builders” have activated the correct response mechanisms. What those mechanisms are differs from brand to brand, but only superficially. What matters aren’t semantics but semiotics; not substance but form; not reality but make-believe.

Sex & Money

The Dirty Old Man and the IMF

by Patrick J. Buchanan 

Saturday was a bad day for the New World Order.

New York police boarded the first-class cabin of an Air France jet bound for Paris to collar Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund, a Grand Master of the Universe and the Socialist Party’s hope to defeat President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2012.

Strauss-Kahn, or DSK as he is known, was hauled back to New York and identified in a police lineup by an African maid at the Sofitel hotel as the man who emerged stark naked from the bathroom of his $3,000-a-night suite and tried to rape her.

DSK’s political allies are howling entrapment. Yet his rap sheet is long. Called the Great Seducer, he was charged with the sexual harassment of a co-worker at the IMF and accused by a young French novelist of behaving like a “rutting chimpanzee” and trying to rape her when she contacted him about a book she was writing in 2002.

The novelist, Tristan Banon, now 31, is a goddaughter to DSK’s second wife. She took a lawyer’s advice not to file charges then. But, says The Guardian, Banon is about to file them now.

“Time to shut down the IMF and get back what’s left of our gold.”

Monday, The New York Times wrote, “As the impact of Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s predicament hit home, others, including some in the news media, began to reveal accounts, long suppressed or anonymous, of what they called Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s previously predatory behavior toward women and his aggressive sexual pursuit of them, from students and journalists to subordinates.”

What is this satyr doing running the IMF? How was a man of his Eurotrash reputation approved by the United States government? Such conduct may be pooh-poohed over the pond, but has our country dropped that low?

They've already given.

by Walter Williams

The liberal vision of government is easily understood and makes perfect sense if one acknowledges their misunderstanding and implied assumptions about the sources of income. Their vision helps explain the language they use and policies they support, such as income redistribution and calls for the rich to give something back.

Suppose the true source of income was a gigantic pile of money meant to be shared equally amongst Americans. The reason some people have more money than others is because they got to the pile first and greedily took an unfair share. That being the case, justice requires that the rich give something back, and if they won't do so voluntarily, Congress should confiscate their ill-gotten gains and return them to their rightful owners.

A competing liberal implied assumption about the sources of income is that income is distributed, as in distribution of income. There might be a dealer of dollars. The reason why some people have more dollars than others is because the dollar dealer is a racist, a sexist, a multinationalist or a conservative. The only right thing to do, for those to whom the dollar dealer unfairly dealt too many dollars, is to give back their ill-gotten gains. If they refuse to do so, then it's the job of Congress to use their agents at the IRS to confiscate their ill-gotten gains and return them to their rightful owners. In a word, there must be a re-dealing of the dollars or what some people call income redistribution.

Death and taxes

Slaves to Words

by Thomas Sowell

We could definitely use another Abraham Lincoln to emancipate us all from being slaves to words. In the midst of a historic financial crisis of unprecedented government spending, and a national debt that outstrips even the debt accumulated by the reckless government spending of previous administration, we are still enthralled by words and ignoring realities.

President Barack Obama's constant talk about "millionaires and billionaires" needing to pay higher taxes would be a bad joke, if the consequences were not so serious. Even if the income tax rate were raised to 100 percent on millionaires and billionaires, it would still not cover the trillions of dollars the government is spending.

More fundamentally, tax rates— whatever they are— are just words on paper. Only the hard cash that comes in can cover government spending. History has shown repeatedly, under administrations of both political parties, that there is no automatic correlation between tax rates and tax revenues.

When the tax rate on the highest incomes was 73 percent in 1921, that brought in less tax revenue than after the tax rate was cut to 24 percent in 1925. Why? Because high tax rates that people don't actually pay do not bring in as much hard cash as lower tax rates that they do pay. That's not rocket science.

Then and now, people with the highest incomes have had the greatest flexibility as to where they will put their money. Buying tax-exempt bonds is just one of the many ways that "millionaires and billionaires" avoid paying hard cash to the government, no matter how high the tax rates go.

Eco-fascists and crony capitalists on steroids

Big Government's Latest Gift: The $50 Light Bulb

by Dave Blount

Through taxation, regulation, and inflation, Big Government makes everything we buy more expensive, dramatically reducing the standard of living we would have were this still a free country. The reason we haven't rebelled is that this effect is normally almost invisible, like the fortunes the State bleeds from our paychecks. But the impending light bulb ban pushed through Congress by eco-fascists and crony capitalists like GE brings statism's effect on prices out in the open with $50 eco-bulbs:

Two leading makers of lighting products are showcasing LED bulbs that are bright enough to replace energy-guzzling 100-watt light bulbs set to disappear from stores in January.

Their demonstrations at the LightFair trade show in Philadelphia this week mean that brighter LED bulbs will likely go on sale next year, but after a government ban takes effect.

The new bulbs will also be expensive — about $50 each — so the development may not prevent consumers from hoarding traditional bulbs.

Our socialist rulers constantly remind us how much they care about the poor. Yet if it weren't for them, far fewer of us would be poor. Those who are will find themselves sitting in the dark when bureaucrats have priced lighting out of their reach.

ENTITLEMENT SENSE

By Mark Steyn

I like to think that upon arrival in this great republic I assimilated pretty quickly. Within four or five months, I was saying “zee” and driving on the right more often than not. But it took me longer to get the hang of the word “entitlement.” You don’t hear it in political discussions in most of the rest of the West, even in Canada. There’s talk of “social programs” and “benefits” and “welfare,” but not of “entitlements.” I knew the term only in its psychological use — “sense of entitlement” — in discussions of narcissistic personality disorder and whatnot.

Once I’d been apprised of its political definition, I liked it even less. “Entitlements” are unrepublican: They are contemptuous of the most basic principle of responsible government — that a parliament cannot bind its successor. Which is what entitlements do, to catastrophic effect. Recently, in the London Telegraph, Liam Halligan bemoaned the way commentators focus on America’s $14 trillion of debt — i.e., the “debt ceiling” debt — without factoring in the entitlement liabilities of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. That makes America’s real debt some $75 trillion, or five times GDP. Our own Kevin D. Williamson puts the FDR/LBJ entitlement liabilities a little north of $100 trillion. Once you add in state and municipal debt, you need to add a zero to that reassuringly familiar $14 trillion hole. The real hole goes ten times deeper: $140 trillion — or about twice as much as America’s total “worth.”

The inevitable end of Empires

Dostoevsky was in favor of military intervention in the Balkans, Tolstoy opposed to it. 

by James Warner

A little background – in the summer of 1875, Orthodox Christians in Herzogovina revolted against their Ottoman overlords. In 1876, the Slav principalities of Serbia and Montenegro declared war on Turkey, and there was an uprising in Bulgaria. In Russia, there was fervent support for the Serbian cause. Russians voluntarily sent money and medical supplies to the Orthodox Slavs, and many Russian volunteers went to the Balkans to fight. Russian newspapers took up the Serb cause, as is reflected in this fictional discussion between Koznyshev and Prince Shcherbatsky from Tolstoy's novel Anna Karennina:

"All the most diverse sections of the educated public, hostile before, are merged in one.  Every division is at an end, all the public organs say the same thing over and over again, all feel the mighty torrent that has overtaken them and is carrying them in one direction."
"Yes, all the newspapers do say the same thing", said the prince. "That's true.  But so it is the same thing that all the frogs croak before a storm. One can hear nothing for them."

From the summer of 1876 to the spring of 1877, there was heated public debate in Russia over whether to engage in the conflict in the Balkans. Fyodor Dostoevsky was passionately in favor of military intervention, for humanitarian and patriotic reasons – Leo Tolstoy, although not yet a fully-fledged pacifist, could not see the point of Russia getting involved.
Dostoevsky was in tune with the popular mood. His serialised publication A Writer’s Diary, which ran around this time, often reminds me of the U.S. “war blogs” of 2002-3. It’s fascinating how Dostoevsky’s various motivations for supporting the war merge and reinforce each other. His most laudable motive is his acute empathy with suffering, the sense of humanitarian urgency he has about putting an end to atrocities committed by the Turks. But he segues easily from reporting horrific massacres to fantasizing about a Russian conquest of Constantinople, the center of Orthodox Christianity. Dostoevsky admires Russian heroes and despises foreign diplomats, and condemns those who “rattle on about the damage that war can cause in an economic sense.” He is sublimely confident the Serbs will welcome Russian intervention, and that those who don’t are an unrepresentative class out of touch with their own people. He has no sense that atrocities are occurring on both sides.
Dostoesvsky feels that a national malaise has been conquered in Russia, and that the extent of popular support for the Serbs is proof of the spiritual superiority of the people to the intelligentsia. He is angry with those Russians who feel sympathy for the Turks. He is completely certain of victory and of being on the side of history, and has suggestions about what to do once the Ottoman Empire is completely crushed. He is convinced of his own country's exceptionalism, that the pro-war movement “in its self-sacrificing nature and disinterestedness, in its pious religious thirst to suffer for a righteous cause, is almost without precedent among other nations.” and has a hard time crediting the good faith of anyone who sees things differently. Sometimes he talks in terms of a “crusade,” and indulges the apocalyptic dream of a final war between Christianity and Islam.
In England, the leader of the Opposition, William Gladstone, was appalled by Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria and thought England should help drive the Turks out of that country -- but the Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, in a spirit of realpolitik, maintained the official British policy of siding with Turkey against Russia. That Disraeli was a Jew provided Dostoevsky with some scope for conspiracy theorizing.