Should 'we' rescue art from the modern intoxication with ugliness?

Beauty and Desecration
by Roger Scruton

The West’s great landscape painters
like the eighteenth-century Italian
 Francesco Guardi, capture the
 intimations of the eternal in the transient.

At any time between 1750 and 1930, if you had asked an educated person to describe the goal of poetry, art, or music, “beauty” would have been the answer. And if you had asked what the point of that was, you would have learned that beauty is a value, as important in its way as truth and goodness, and indeed hardly distinguishable from them. Philosophers of the Enlightenment saw beauty as a way in which lasting moral and spiritual values acquire sensuous form. And no Romantic painter, musician, or writer would have denied that beauty was the final purpose of his art.
At some time during the aftermath of modernism, beauty ceased to receive those tributes. Art increasingly aimed to disturb, subvert, or transgress moral certainties, and it was not beauty but originality—however achieved and at whatever moral cost—that won the prizes. Indeed, there arose a widespread suspicion of beauty as next in line to kitsch—something too sweet and inoffensive for the serious modern artist to pursue. In a seminal essay—“Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” published in Partisan Review in 1939—critic Clement Greenberg starkly contrasted the avant-garde of his day with the figurative painting that competed with it, dismissing the latter (not just Norman Rockwell, but greats like Edward Hopper) as derivative and without lasting significance. The avant-garde, for Greenberg, promoted the disturbing and the provocative over the soothing and the decorative, and that was why we should admire it.
The value of abstract art, Greenberg claimed, lay not in beauty but in expression. This emphasis on expression was a legacy of the Romantic movement; but now it was joined by the conviction that the artist is outside bourgeois society, defined in opposition to it, so that artistic self-expression is at the same time a transgression of ordinary moral norms. We find this posture overtly adopted in the art of Austria and Germany between the wars—for example, in the paintings and drawings of Georg Grosz, in Alban Berg’s opera Lulu (a loving portrait of a woman whose only discernible goal is moral chaos), and in the seedy novels of Heinrich Mann. And the cult of transgression is a leading theme of the postwar literature of France—from the writings of Georges Bataille, Jean Genet, and Jean-Paul Sartre to the bleak emptiness of the nouveau roman.
Of course, there were great artists who tried to rescue beauty from the perceived disruption of modern society—as T. S. Eliot tried to recompose, in Four Quartets, the fragments he had grieved over in The Waste Land. And there were others, particularly in America, who refused to see the sordid and the transgressive as the truth of the modern world. For artists like Hopper, Samuel Barber, and Wallace Stevens, ostentatious transgression was mere sentimentality, a cheap way to stimulate an audience, and a betrayal of the sacred task of art, which is to magnify life as it is and to reveal its beauty—as Stevens reveals the beauty of “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” and Barber that of Knoxville: Summer of 1915. But somehow those great life-affirmers lost their position at the forefront of modern culture. So far as the critics and the wider culture were concerned, the pursuit of beauty was at the margins of the artistic enterprise.

'...no régime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones'

by Yuri Maltzev
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, writer, Nobel Prize winner, and the most famous Soviet dissident died at the age of 89 in his home near Moscow.

He lived a long and hard life, but he died the way that he wanted to: "He wanted to die in the summer — and he died in the summer," his wife Natalya said. "He wanted to die at home — and he died at home. In general I should say that Aleksandr Isayevich lived a difficult but happy life."

His entire life was a victory over the most improbable. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born on December 11, 1918 in Kislovodsk in Southern Russia, half a year after his father died in a hunting accident. He managed to get a Soviet university education despite the fact that his mother Taisiya came from one of the richest families of Southern Russia and his father Isaakiy was an officer in the tsar's army.

Aleksandr was raised by his mother in abject poverty as his earliest years coincided with war communism and its abolition of private property (making economic calculation impossible); what followed was mass starvation and destruction. His family was no exception — their property was confiscated and later destroyed by central planners.

Solzhenitsyn stated in his autobiographical series of novels The Red Wheel that his mother was fighting for survival and they had to keep his father's background in the old Imperial Army a secret. Taisiya was well educated and openly encouraged her son's literary and scientific interests, while also secretly raising him in the Christian faith. He studied physics and mathematics at Rostov University before becoming a Soviet army officer after Hitler invaded Russia in 1941.

He was commissioned as a Soviet artillery officer during the Second World War despite the fact that he had previously been rejected due to poor health. A successful artillery captain, he was arrested by the secret police in 1945 for disrespectful remarks about Stalin in a letter to a friend.

Despite his eight-year sentence for hard labor (which was nearly a death sentence in Stalin's dreadful Gulag system), he managed to stay near Moscow in the government research facility for imprisoned scientists. Eventually he was transferred to the special Ekibastuz camp in Kazakhstan. In the Tashkent medical ward a malignant tumor was removed from his stomach in 1954, and he survived the tumor and the surgery against all odds.

After release from the Gulag in 1956, Solzhenitsyn returned to Central Russia, worked as a math teacher and began to write his powerful prose. "During all the years until 1961, not only was I convinced that I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared that this would become known," he said in his autobiography. "Finally, at the age of 42, this secret authorship began to wear me down."

Longing for Dictatorship

by Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.
Politics brings out the worst in everyone, which is one good reason to completely depoliticize society. This way we can all busy ourselves in productive work or leisure, instead of wasting vast time watching these clowns on television promise the impossible to us.

What we are being offered on television is two flavors of dictatorship. One party imagines Athens, with fairness and justice for all, international brotherhood and sisterhood, a world free of hate and discrimination in which all wealth is shared and no wealth is made at the expense of nature.

Of course, this is an Athens of their own invention, since the original's culture and accomplishments depended on free trade, private ownership, sound money, and low taxes. What the Democrats are offering is a monstrously larger state that assumes control of all property, the crushing of private initiative, and an end to economic freedom.

Note that they don't talk about this. But that is the core of all their plans for fairness and justice: an increased use of violence in society, and an increased centralization of political power. Often the person who recommends this path imagines that he will be the dictator, and that his plans alone will prevail.

They don't consider that the state they advocate is also wholly capable of doing things that they do not like, like crushing civil liberties and starting wars all over the world. Note that the Left's critique of Bush's big government is not that it is crushing liberty; rather, they believe that government power is being used for the wrong purposes.

Another problem with these people: they can't stand capitalism. They resent the commercial society. They have not come to terms with the fact that without capitalism, most of the human race would starve to death.

Why do they hate it?

Because wealth under capitalism will always be unequally distributed.

They favor a different form of dictatorship.

The Galbraith Revival. Again.

The aristocratic economist’s big-government ideas are back in vogue.

by Theodore Dalrymple
A Canadian university recently asked me to deliver its annual John Kenneth Galbraith Lecture, named for the economist who for much of my youth was the most famous member of his profession in the world. His books sold by the million and were available everywhere in cheap paperback editions; titles such as American Capitalism and The Affluent Society were known to almost all educated people. A teacher at Princeton, Cambridge, and Harvard, he was the editor for a time of Fortune and the American ambassador to India. He was also the first economist to be widely known on television, not least through his sparring with William F. Buckley, Jr. (a close personal friend). His omnipresence as the voice of economics was both the result and the cause of a whole climate of opinion.

As is commonly the way, a reaction set in. Galbraith, who lived from 1908 to 2006, grew not only old, but old hat. His Keynesianism appeared outmoded in an era of unprecedented growth and prosperity apparently brought about by adherence to economic theories very different from his. No one believed any longer that demand management—the governmental regulation and, if necessary, provision of the demand for goods and services within the whole economy—was the way to combine prosperity with social justice. Rather, the market’s invisible hand and unconscious wisdom would lead us into the sunny uplands of expanding wealth and diminishing poverty.

But recently, there has been a reaction to the reaction. No sooner had Lehman Brothers collapsed than the printing presses started to roll out copies of Galbraith’s book on the debacle of 1929, The Great Crash. In fact, it couldn’t be printed fast enough, paperback books being affordable even in times of crisis. Galbraith was the hero of a recent PBS documentary extolling the value of big government. And demand management à la Galbraith is now back with a vengeance, of course. If the improvidently indebted but now impecunious private citizen won’t spend and thereby expand economic activity, the improvidently indebted but infinitely expandable government will do it for him.

At the beginning of a lecture named for a past notable, it is customary to extol him, even if the lecturer cannot entirely subscribe to the ideas of that notable; and this, it seems to me, is a civilized custom. Few people (save out-and-out monsters, of whom there are few) are entirely without saving graces, and, a fortiori, this applies to those who achieve eminence in a respectable field. It is surely an excellent moral exercise to dwell, at least for a time, on the sterling qualities of those with whom we disagree.

What, then, did I find to praise in Galbraith? In the first place, his personal example, which is encouraging for someone like me who has entered the later stages of his life. Galbraith wrote The Economics of Innocent Fraud when he was 96. That was the last of the approximately 50 books that he wrote, and he wrote them clearly, never giving the impression of wanting to be thought clever because of the difficulty of what he had to say. He did not believe that understanding economic reality required arcane mathematical formulas. His explanations of many economic phenomena came richly laced with commonsense psychology, which is to say that he did not lose sight of the fact that economics is, at base, a humanity. He repeatedly stated that one or two simple principles were not sufficient to understand the shifting nature of reality, which required flexibility of mind rather than rigid adherence to abstractions.

In particular, Galbraith did not believe in the simpleminded classical economic model in which a large number of individual actors compete with perfect autonomy in a marketplace, succeeding or failing according to their ability to satisfy customers’ wishes. This model, said Galbraith, broke down because of the sheer complexity of modern economic existence, in which markets are often rigged or regulated. If the classical model was ever right, that time is long past.

Sober Statism

Like two drowning sailors hanging onto one another in order to postpone the inevitable, overstretched banks thus accumulate the debt of insolvent governments to keep the façade of solvency up.

Detlev Schlichter

"no one is responsible for his own genes."

The End of Evil

By Christopher Orlet 

In Waterloo, Illinois a man stands accused of strangling to death his wife and two small children. The accused, Chris Coleman, worked as a bodyguard for the televangelist Joyce Meyer. After work, he was diddling his wife's best friend. Prosecutors say rather than filing for divorce and risk losing his job, Coleman murdered his wife and two sons.

Entered into evidence was a selection of animal strangulation videos Coleman enjoyed watching. (I suppose the "Tootin' Bathtub Baby Cousins" YouTube sensation just didn't do it for him anymore.)

For an expert witness, the defense could do worse than recruit Simon Baron-Cohen, author of   Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty. While the casual observer would insist that Chris Coleman is merely evil, Baron-Cohen would contend that the sick videos prove Coleman suffers from a disability, i.e., a severe lack of empathy. Naturally, a man with "eroded empathy" cannot be found guilty of homicide. He may, however, be treated. Perhaps with a combination of hormone injections, gene therapy, and counseling.

In fact, Baron-Cohen would like us to do away with the concept of evil altogether.

The Cambridge don finds the whole idea of evil unhelpful. What's more, it is simplistic and unscientific. It smacks of the Bible and ancient superstitions. And it tells us nothing. Why is one evil? Again, it comes down to the inability to empathize or to identify with others.

To this end, Baron-Cohen has devised six degrees of empathy. His empathy spectrum would award a six to someone like Bill Clinton, who claimed to be able to feel the pain of an entire nation, and a zero to the husband who honestly answers his wife's query about whether her jeans makes her butt look big. At the peak of the bell curve stands your Average Empathy Joe who tears up at Schindler's List, but remains dry-eyed if not slightly nauseous during the Titanic.

In Memoriam

By Joe Sobran

To my shock, dismay, and grief, a leading Shakespeare scholar recently referred to “neo-Marxists” in the English departments of our universities. He wasn’t criticizing such scholars; on the contrary, he called them “men and women of the greatest independence of mind.” 

Funny how you can exempt yourself from the crimes of Marxism by adding the prefix neo. A neo-Nazi isn’t usually regarded as a higher life form than a regular old Nazi, but a neo-Marxist is supposed to be unrelated to the folks who gave the world the gulag, the reeducation camp, and the vast bone yards of Siberia, China, and Cambodia. 

What’s more, the original Marx is being honored with a fancy new edition of The Communist Manifesto, which is now 150 years old. 

So Marx is good, and neo-Marxists are good. It was just the people who ruled countries in the name of Marx who were bad, you see. They “betrayed” Marx — Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Pol Pot, and the rest of those brutes. 

Has there anything about Marx’s ideas that made them especially susceptible to “betrayal”? This is the question you’re not supposed to ask, because the answer is so obvious. When an idea is “betrayed” every single time it’s put into practice, the fault doesn’t lie with the practitioners alone. 

There has never been a humane communist regime. Marxism is inherently totalitarian. It recognizes no moral limits on the state. It’s the most convenient ideology for aspiring tyrants; it also retains its appeal for intellectuals, who have proved equally skillful at rationalizing abuses of power and at exculpating themselves. 

If the tyrants had really “betrayed” Marx, you’d expect the true-blue Marxists to be nervously vigilant against pseudo-Marxist despots. But they never are. They are always willing to trust every new ruler who acts in the holy name of Marxism. 

Joe Sobran - The Reluctant Anarchist

My arrival (very recently) at philosophical anarchism has disturbed some of my conservative and Christian friends. In fact, it surprises me, going as it does against my own inclinations. 
As a child I acquired a deep respect for authority and a horror of chaos. In my case the two things were blended by the uncertainty of my existence after my parents divorced and I bounced from one home to another for several years, often living with strangers. A stable authority was something I yearned for. 
Meanwhile, my public-school education imbued me with the sort of patriotism encouraged in all children in those days. I grew up feeling that if there was one thing I could trust and rely on, it was my government. I knew it was strong and benign, even if I didn’t know much else about it. The idea that some people — Communists, for example — might want to overthrow the government filled me with horror. 
G.K. Chesterton, with his usual gentle audacity, once criticized Rudyard Kipling for his “lack of patriotism.” Since Kipling was renowned for glorifying the British Empire, this might have seemed one of Chesterton’s “paradoxes”; but it was no such thing, except in the sense that it denied what most readers thought was obvious and incontrovertible.

Chesterton, himself a “Little Englander” and opponent of empire, explained what was wrong with Kipling’s view: “He admires England, but he does not love her; for we admire things with reasons, but love them without reason. He admires England because she is strong, not because she is English.” Which implies there would be nothing to love her for if she were weak. 
Of course Chesterton was right. You love your country as you love your mother — simply because it is yours, not because of its superiority to others, particularly superiority of power. 

The world is officially nuts

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany recently remarked on the death of mass murderer Osama bin Laden saying was “glad” he’d been killed.

That prompted the following from a German judge:

But Hamburg judge Heinz Uthmann went even further. He alleges that the chancellor’s statement was nothing short of illegal, and filed a criminal complaint against Merkel midweek, the daily Hamburger Morgenpost reported Friday.

“I am a law-abiding citizen and as a judge, sworn to justice and law,” the 54-year-old told the paper, adding that Merkel’s words were “tacky and undignified.”

In his two-page document, Uthmann, a judge for 21 years, cites section 140 of the German Criminal Code, which forbids the “rewarding and approving” of crimes. In this case, Merkel endorsed a “homicide,” Uthmann claimed. The violation is punishable by up to three years’ imprisonment or a fine.

“For the daughter of a Christian pastor, the comment is astonishing and at odds with the values of human dignity, charity and the rule of law,” Uthmann told the newspaper.

Of course the judge is assuming it’s a “homicide” (certainly no proof exists that’s the case) and thus a criminal act. In fact, the Geneva Conventions will clearly show otherwise. Obviously he files his complaint with nothing more than his opinion as a basis.

So you say, it’s one extremist view, why get excited about it?

While the judge’s reaction may seem extreme, his sentiments are apparently shared by 64 percent of the German population. That was the proportion of Germans who said bin Laden’s death was “no reason to rejoice” in a poll published by broadcaster ARD on Friday.

Germany – never a bastion of human rights or individual freedoms – continues to live up to its past with a new extremist but pacifist twist. This is an example of absurdity masquerading as reason, extremism as normalcy and stupidity as compassion.

Everyone who loves freedom and hates mass murderers should be “glad” Osama bin Laden has been killed. He was a monster, just like one which once ruled the land this puffed up pratt Uthman lives in. As much as Germans claim to have been “disgusted” with the “jubilation” over OBL’s death, nonsense like this does them no favor. The disgust on this side of the Atlantic for a country that assaults free speech and protects the memory of a mass murderer by going after those who express satisfaction at his demise isn’t one that I or most anyone here would ever care to live in.

The 'Jockey' era in Havana

By Ivan Garica:

After preparing a very cold tamarind juice, she sits on the sofa. “Go play, I want to talk about things a little girl shouldn’t hear,” she tells her 11-year-old daughter.

An enormous cat, old and almost blind, by instinct, with one jump makes itself comfortable on its owner’s lap. While she strokes the feline, Yolanda, 46, begins to tell her story about being a hardened whore.

“In the mid-’80?s, after quitting school after an abortion for an unwanted pregnancy, I went with a group of friends to hang out on the malecón. We used to bring a bottle of rum, and several of us decided to get dollars from the tourists.”

It was precisely in that epoch that the term “jinetero” (“jockey”, literally) was born. The first “jineteros” of Fidel Castro’s revolution were young people in search of the dollar, then prohibited by Cuban law.

“Our business was to get fulas (dollars). Later, Africans who were studying in Cuba got us a lot of stuff. Jeans, tennis shoes and shorts, that we sold on the black market. A good business. Earnings tripled, but it was risky. If the police caught you, you could spend four years behind bars.”

At that time, she was a curvy mulatta who could stop traffic. “When I walked by, all the men would turn their heads and foreigners would proposition me. I just wanted to have fun, dance and eat in restaurants forbidden to Cubans. Having hard currency was prohibited by law, the same as staying in or hanging around tourist hotels,” remembers Yolanda.

Is Hugo Chavez an idiot?

By William J. Dobson

When I was in Moscow last year, I paid a visit to Boris Nemtsov, one of the leading figures of the Russian opposition. Naturally, I had come to Nemtsov to discuss Russian politics. But the conversation quickly turned to, of all things, Venezuelan economics.

Nemtsov has no love for Vladimir Putin and his regime. The Russian government has arrested him and thrown him in prison, and it strangles the political movement he leads. But Nemtsov saw one bright side: At least he didn’t have to live under the economic policies of Hugo Chavez. “Putinism will survive if oil prices are huge. Frankly, it is the same with Hugo Chavez, but Hugo is more stupid than Putin. Chavez nationalizes industries. He establishes price controls. Putin looks cleverer. He doesn’t touch the real economy much . . . he doesn’t touch small, average businesses,” Nemtsov told me. “Economically, he looks closer to Chinese authoritarians than to Hugo. Because Hugo has no ideas about the economy at all. He is a real idiot.”

Ouch. Harsh words. But then again, Nemtsov has the numbers to prove it. Venezuela was the only country in South America to see its economy shrink last year. By many reports, it now suffers from the world’s highest inflation. In 2010, Venezuela was the only South American country to have a negative balance of foreign investment. (It dropped by $1.4 billion.) The International Labor Organization says that Venezuela wasone of only five countries in the region to see job growth fall. (The others were Barbados, Jamaica, Honduras, and Trinidad and Tobago.)Power outages, rolling blackouts, and water shortages have become common as state infrastructure crumbles. And, in perhaps the most stunning achievement, the state-owned oil company has reported falling profits — even as oil prices rise.

The West’s very own celeb terrorist

Whether he was droning on about climate change or consumption, OBL’s ‘ideas’ were born and bred in the West.

by Bill Durodié 

Soon after the death of Osama bin Laden had been announced to the world, 72-year-old Muslim cleric Abu Bakar Bashir – the purported spiritual leader of the Islamist militant group Jemaah Islamiyah – issued a statement from his jail cell in Indonesia, where he faces trial for allegedly funding and organising terrorist camps. The statement, to the effect that ‘Osama’s death will not make al-Qaeda dead’, was designed to instill a sense of foreboding across south-east Asia.

But like all nobodies who hide their own uncertainties and weaknesses behind the words and deeds of supposed somebodies – in this case, behind the dread of al-Qaeda – Bashir simultaneously revealed his own lack of substance. This was apt, because bin Laden himself was always fond of citing Western commentators, academics and diplomats in seeking to legitimise his ostensible cause.

Sounding like any other contemporary critic of American policy, bin Laden droned on about a rag-bag of causes at different times: he lambasted the US for not signing up to the Kyoto treaty to control greenhouse gases; accused Washington of being controlled by a Jewish lobby; suddenly became concerned about Palestine after 9/11; suggested that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were simply money-making ventures for large US corporations; and even had the gall – for one in thrall to the Taliban – to argue that Western advertising exploited women.

''The 24-year-old Australian Ramazan ‘Ramzy’ Acar'' ??? Yea, right

The Facebook message was brief and chilling - ‘Bout 2 kill ma kid’.

It was posted by 24-year-old Australian Ramazan ‘Ramzy’ Acar before he plunged a huge Ninja-style knife into the body of his two-year-old daughter Yazmina.

As the girl lay dying, Acar posted another message, directed at the child’s mother, Rachelle D’Argent:
‘It’s ova - I did it.'

Chilling: Ramazan 'Ramzy' Acar allegedly posted the messages on Facebook before and after killing his two-year-old daughter

Then he posted another vengeful Facebook message to Miss D’Argent, from whom he was separated, reading:
‘Pay back, u slut.’

Sickening details of the murder of Yazmina were revealed in the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court today as Acar - wearing an oversize dark suit, white shirt and tie - stared indifferently from the dock.

Glaring back at him were Miss D’Argent, her friends and family.

When he was asked if he pleaded guilty or not guilty to murder, Acar replied in a clear voice: ‘Guilty.’

The court heard that he and Miss D’Argent were estranged and that their daughter - known as Mimi - died after he picked her up from her mother last November.

He said he was going to take her to a milk bar to buy her a surprise - but instead he stabbed her a number of times before dumping her body in a park. His cruel Facebook messages were read later by his estranged partner.

Miss D’Argent wept as she listened to the brief evidence.

Our betters

United Nations Death Panel

Editorial of The New York Sun

One of the most startling news stories of the season is the dispatch on page one of yesterday’s the New York Times warning that there might be too many Africans. This came in an account of a new forecast on world population issued by the United Nations, which is now projecting that a global population that the Times reports was “long expected to stabilize just above nine billion in the middle of the century” will “keep growing and may hit 10.1 billion by the year 2100.” It predicts that the population of Africa could triple in this century to 3.6 billion — “a sobering forecast for a continent already struggling to provide food and water for its people.”

What in the world does the Times have against the Africans? Population density on the African continent, after all, is, at 65 persons a square mile, one of the lowest on the planet, according to About.com, whose figure we cite because About is issued by another unit of the New York Times Company. It reports that South America has 73 people a square mile, Europe 134, and Asia 203. It makes one wonder why the Times would begrudge the Africans the prospects for growth that are reported by the United Nations. If the continent is “already struggling to provide food and water for its people,” after all, maybe the reason is that it has not too many people but too few.
The error in the Times story is an example of how even the most intelligent of analysts can get into trouble on the population story. One famous example was a dispatch issued in August 2001 by the magazine Nature, which published a forecast that the 21^st century would be the one in which the number of people on the planet would likely stop growing. The authors — Wolfgang Lutz, Warren Sanderson, and Sergei Scherboy — reckoned there was “around an 85% chance that the world’s population will stop growing before the end of the century.” The triumvirate concluded that “the prospect of an end to world population growth is welcome news for efforts towards sustainable development.”

An Empire of Autocrats, Aristocrats, and Uniformed Thugs Begins to Totter

By Alfred W. McCoy and Brett Reilly

In one of history’s lucky accidents, the juxtaposition of two extraordinary events has stripped the architecture of American global power bare for all to see. Last November, WikiLeaks splashed snippets from U.S. embassy cables, loaded with scurrilous comments about national leaders from Argentina to Zimbabwe, on the front pages of newspapers worldwide. Then just a few weeks later, the Middle East erupted in pro-democracy protests against the region’s autocratic leaders, many of whom were close U.S. allies whose foibles had been so conveniently detailed in those same diplomatic cables.Suddenly, it was possible to see the foundations of a U.S. world order that rested significantly on national leaders who serve Washington as loyal “subordinate elites” and who are, in reality, a motley collection of autocrats, aristocrats, and uniformed thugs. Visible as well was the larger logic of otherwise inexplicable U.S. foreign policy choices over the past half-century.Why would the CIA risk controversy in 1965, at the height of the Cold War, by overthrowing an accepted leader like Sukarno in Indonesia or encouraging the assassination of the Catholic autocrat Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon in 1963? The answer -- and thanks to WikiLeaks and the “Arab spring,” this is now so much clearer -- is that both were Washington’s chosen subordinates until each became insubordinate and expendable.

Another take on OBL

by Brendan O’Neill 

We’ve had VE Day and VJ Day – is VOBL Day next? Reading the excitable political commentary on the death of Osama bin Laden, I wouldn’t be surprised. The killing of the head of al-Qaeda has been treated as if it were a momentous occasion on a par with the Allies’ defeat of Germany and Japan in the Second World War. Some reports even point out that Hitler’s death was likewise announced on 1 May, while newspaper headlines tell us this is ‘A great day in American history’. Perhaps VOBL Day will become a national holiday across the West, when people will gather to recall and celebrate the assassination of ‘the world’s most evil man’ (in the words of the Sun) and the fact that our children can now sleep peacefully in their beds.

There is an extraordinary disconnect between the response to bin Laden’s death and the circumstances in which the death occurred. And it’s a disconnect no one seems willing to face up to. The death has been celebrated as nothing less than an historic turning point for humanity, inviting solemn-cum-joyous statements from everyone from Barack Obama to Ban Ki-moon to Silvio Berlusconi, who wax lyrical about the world now being a ‘safer and better place’. Yet all that really happened in Pakistan is that a small group of American soldiers shot and killed an ageing, sickly man in a mansion, who was the nominal head of a small and increasingly fractured terrorist organisation and whose political isolation from the Arab masses had only recently been brilliantly illustrated by the Arab uprisings. The headlines should read ‘Has-been jihadist dead’; instead they say ‘World rejoices’.

The Great Horse-Manure Crisis of 1894

By Stephen Davies

We commonly read or hear reports to the effect that “If trend  X continues, the result will be disaster.” The subject can be almost anything, but the pattern of these stories is identical. These reports take a current trend and extrapolate it into the future as the basis for their gloomy prognostications. The conclusion is, to quote a character from a famous British sitcom, “We’re doomed, I tell you. We’re doomed!” Unless, that is, we mend our ways according to the author’s prescription. This almost invariably involves restrictions on personal liberty.

These prophets of doom rely on one thing—that their audience will not check the record of such predictions. In fact, the history of prophecy is one of failure and oversight. Many predictions (usually of doom) have not come to pass, while other things have happened that nobody foresaw. Even brief research will turn up numerous examples of both, such as the many predictions in the 1930s—about a decade before the baby boom began—that the populations of most Western countries were about to enter a terminal decline. In other cases, people have made predictions that have turned out to be laughably overmodest, such as the nineteenth-century editor’s much-ridiculed forecast that by 1950 every town in America would have a telephone, or Bill Gates’s remark a few years ago that 64 kilobytes of memory is enough for anyone.

The fundamental problem with most predictions of this kind, and particularly the gloomy ones, is that they make a critical, false assumption: that things will go on as they are. This assumption in turn comes from overlooking one of the basic insights of economics: that people respond to incentives. In a system of free exchange, people receive all kinds of signals that lead them to solve problems. The prophets of doom come to their despondent conclusions because in their world, nobody has any kind of creativity or independence of thought—except for themselves of course.

A classic example of this is a problem that was getting steadily worse about a hundred years ago, so much so that it drove most observers to despair. This was the great horse-manure crisis.

Nineteenth-century cities depended on thousands of horses for their daily functioning. All transport, whether of goods or people, was drawn by horses. London in 1900 had 11,000 cabs, all horse-powered. There were also several thousand buses, each of which required 12 horses per day, a total of more than 50,000 horses. In addition, there were countless carts, drays, and wains, all working constantly to deliver the goods needed by the rapidly growing population of what was then the largest city in the world. Similar figures could be produced for any great city of the time.*

The problem of course was that all these horses produced huge amounts of manure. A horse will on average produce between 15 and 35 pounds of manure per day. Consequently, the streets of nineteenth-century cities were covered by horse manure. This in turn attracted huge numbers of flies, and the dried and ground-up manure was blown everywhere. In New York in 1900, the population of 100,000 horses produced 2.5 million pounds of horse manure per day, which all had to be swept up and disposed of. (See Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1999]).