From Human Events:
Congress Says ‘No’ to Licenses for Illegal Aliens
The REAL ID Act passed by Congress this week does primarily three things:
1) it over-rides environmental laws to allow the closing of a three-mile gap in a border fence near San Diego;
2) it allows immigration judges to assess the credibility of asylum seekers; and
3) it instructs federal agencies not to accept as legal IDs for federal purposes the driver’s licenses of states that give identical driver’s licenses to illegal aliens and legal U.S. residents.
Under the law, states could issue a special type of driver’s license to illegal aliens and still have their primary type of license (reserved for people legally in the U.S.) accepted by the federal government.
But as soon as the law passed, critics argued it would make American highways more dangerous. “They charge that it would create a large group of unlicensed, uninsured motorists because millions of undocumented workers would not be able to obtain legal driver’s licenses,” reported the Chicago Tribune.
This not only ignores the facts of the REAL ID Act, it also assumes that any attempt to enforce U.S. laws on people who have entered the U.S. illegally is futile because no matter what laws we make the illegal aliens will break them.
These critics implicitly advocate carving out a zone of lawlessness within the United States as a sanctuary for illegal aliens. Up until now, of course, that has pretty much been the de facto policy of the federal government. But it is an indefensible policy, particularly in the midst of a war against terrorists.
Other criticisms of the act were equally irrational, if more disingenuous.
The National Council of La Raza, for example, demagogically suggested the law was “anti-immigrant” as opposed to anti-immigration-law breaker. “This is clearly an anti-immigrant bill that’s going to have a very harmful impact on the Latino community and all immigrant communities,” Michele Waslin, La Raza’s director of immigration policy research told the Associated Press. “It doesn’t make us one iota safer. Not a single immigrant is going to be returned to his or her home country if they’re denied a driver’s license.”
Republican Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, vice chairman of the National Governors Association, argued the law was an unfair mandate on states. “[I]f more than half of the governors agree we’re not going down without a fight on this, Congress will have to consider changing” the rules, he told the AP.
The law, however, does not mandate anything on states. Arkansas, if it wants, can give every illegal alien in America the exact same driver’s license it gives legal Arkansas residents. But if it does, when the driver’s license provision of REAL ID takes effect in three years, the federal government will no longer accept Arkansas driver’s licenses for federal purposes, such as boarding a plane or visiting a nuclear power plant.
This law should have been enacted in December, when senators stripped it from the 9/11 Commission bill. It passed this week as part of the supplemental spending bill for Iraq and Afghanistan thanks to the persistence of House Judiciary Chairman Jim Sensenbrenner (R.-Wis.). He deserves three cheers from Americans who want our borders secured.
Saturday, May 14, 2005
Tuesday, May 10, 2005
From The Boston Globe:
How good was the Good War?
On May 8, 1945, the war against Hitler’s Third Reich was won — and some of the victors’ most cherished myths were born
By Geoffrey Wheatcroft
May 8, 2005
‘‘NO ENGLISH SOLDIER who rode with the tanks into liberated Belgium or saw the German murder camps at Dachau or Buchenwald could doubt that the war had been a noble crusade.’’ Forty years ago the historian A.J.P. Taylor eloquently expressed what has become a universal belief. Other wars are looked back on with horror for their futile slaughter, but the conflict that ended in Europe in May 1945 is today seen as what Studs Terkel called his famous oral history of it: ‘‘The Good War.’’
In one way it will always remain so. A revisionist case, that defeating Hitler was a mistake, would be not only perverse and offensive, but simply absurd. And yet we have all been sustained since V-E Day, 60 years ago today, by what Giovanni Giolitti, the Italian prime minister of a century ago, once called ‘‘beautiful national legends.’’ By ‘‘we’’ I mean the countries that ended the war on the winning side (the Germans and Japanese have some national legends of their own).
Some of these legends are more obvious than others. The French suffered a catastrophic defeat in 1940, and the compromises many Frenchmen made with their conquerors thereafter ranged from the pitiful to the wicked. More Frenchmen collaborated than resisted, and during the course of the war more Frenchmen bore arms on the Axis than on the Allied side. Against those grim truths, Charles de Gaulle consciously and brilliantly constructed a nourishing myth of Free France and Resistance that helped heal wounds and rebuild the country.
Other myths about the war have grown up less deliberately. For Americans, the first national legend concerns the very definition of World War II. In recent decades it has come more and more to mean the war against Hitler’s Germany. But for the American people at the time, ‘‘the war’’ meant the Pacific war. That was where the first and last American blood was spilled, where America was engaged in combat the longest, and where Americans for most of the time watched the war unfold.
Funnily enough, when President Bush says that the war on terror, like World War II, began with a surprise attack on America, he is echoing that original perception. To say that the war started with the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941 (which is what he means) will come as a surprise to Europeans and especially the Poles, who have an idea it began on Sept. 1, 1939, when the Wehrmacht invaded their country. And yet Bush is harking back unconsciously to the days when the war for America meant ‘‘The Sands of Iwo Jima,’’ rather than ‘‘Saving Private Ryan’’ and ‘‘Band of Brothers.’’
The reason for the subtle shift in American perception is easy to see. If a purely evil regime ever existed, it was the Third Reich, and if any war ever had a moral purpose it must have been the war fought to end its mad persecution. By contrast the morality of the Pacific war was much less clear-cut. To be sure, Japan launched that surprise attack, and Japanese troops behaved horribly to American, British, and Australian POWs and much worse to the Asian peoples they conquered. Still, the Marines scarcely pretended to take prisoners (even when the Japanese wanted to surrender), while the score for Pearl Harbor was more than settled at Hiroshima.
Apart from the way it was fought, that war was pretty much a traditional contest for imperial hegemony. The Philippines did not belong to Japan by right, nor to America. And while the Third Reich practiced a kind of evil different in kind even from Japanese atrocities, the Germans were never demonized and dehumanized in American propaganda and popular culture as the Japanese were a difference grimly reflected in the way Japanese-Americans were interned but German-Americans were not.
. . .
For my own country the first nourishing myth is that ‘‘we won the war.’’ It’s true that only the British, along with their Commonwealth and Empire, took part in the war from its start in September 1939 to its end in August 1945; true too that British defiance of Hitler in the year from June 1940 to June 1941 was absolutely crucial. But the British, as they knew even at the time, could only play a negative partby not surrendering. They could not defeat Hitler on their own, but had to wait for him to bring about his own doom, by invading Russia in June 1941 and declaring war on the United States (rather than the other way round, be it remembered) in December.
Even then, others did the fighting. The best description of how Hitler was defeated was Stalin’s. The old monster said that England provided the time, America provided the money, and Russia provided the blood.
Not only did it take the Western Allies nearly three years after the German attack on Russia seriously to engage the German army in Normandy, but even then most of the fighting was still on the other side of Europe. In the campaign from D-Day to V-E Day, something like 110,000 American soldiers were killed, as well as about half as many from the combined British-Canadian armies. That sounds formidable, and indeed is by today’s standards, until you remember that in the same 11-month period more than half a million Russians were killed on the Eastern Front. Leaving aside the respective Allied casualties, to see how the war was won you need only compare two figures. In all the western campaigns of the war against French, British, Americans, and troops of many other lands, some 200,000 German soldiers died. Four million Germans died on the Eastern Front.
Behind this lies an awkward truth, one we didn’t learn in the cheerful war comics and books of my boyhood in the 1950s, but on which all serious military historians are now agreed. From the beginning to the end of that war, whenever the British Army met the Wehrmacht on anything like equal terms, the Germans always prevailed. And that pretty much goes for the US Army too, from their first disastrous encounter with the Germans, at Kasserine Pass in North Africa, in early 1943. American and British commanders always took good care thereafter that they had an overwhelming superiority in men and especially in weaponry before engaging the enemy.
That is not a cause for shame. The British were haunted by memories of the Great War and its vast carnage. As much to the point, Great Britain and the United States were democracies. Their soldiers were not brutalized peasants, or even an ‘‘army of mercenaries,’’ as A.E. Housman called the 1914 British regular army. As the British military historian Max Hastings puts it in his excellent recent book ‘‘Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-45’’ (Pan), they were citizens in uniform, and they could not be treated as German or Russian soldiers were.
For that fighting spirit of the Germans had another side to it. Hitler ruled by glamour and terror; his soldiers were driven by fear as well as zeal. In a war during which no British soldier, and only one GI, was shot for cowardice, at least 15,000 German servicemen were executed for dereliction of duty.
And that went for the Russians even more so. A heroic Russian narrative of the war, and the memory of the tens of millions of Russian dead, is still potent and plays a part in the sinister nostalgia for Stalin resurfacing in Russia but Russian heroism also has to be qualified.
We now know that in the first winter of the war on the Eastern Front in 1941-42, more than 8,000 Russian soldiers died not in action but shot by their own army for cowardice or desertion. During the battle of Stalingrad alone, another 12,000 men of the Red Army were put to death pour encourager les autres. This was a regime fighting a desperate war that could nevertheless put to death well over a full infantry division of its own men. On the other hand, the Russians relaxed at the end of the war, with Stalin’s encouragement, by indulging in the greatest act of gang rape in history against millions of women in Hungary, Austria, and eastern Germany.
. . .
For the Western Allies, the ‘‘good war’’ was compromised in other ways, particularly by the bombing campaign that reduced the cities of Germany to rubble. Here is another somber comparison, between the 300,000 British servicemen killed in the war and the 600,000 German civilians killed by Allied mainly British bombing. At the time consciences were numbed the war had to be won, and ‘‘they had it coming’’ but it is not now easy to look back with pride on the scores of thousands of women and children incinerated in Hamburg in July 1943 or Dresden in February 1945.
Nor on the other moral compromises at the war’s end. Great Britain did not go to war to save the Jews from Hitler’s torment (and did not succeed) but to protect the freedom and integrity of Poland, an aim that Churchill, with Roosevelt’s encouragement, abandoned at Yalta. Worse still was the forcible repatriation of prisoners to torture and death in Russia and Yugoslavia. And yet all this was not simply conspiracy or betrayal: The Iron Curtain, with half of Europe under Soviet rule, was a painful but logical consequence of the way the West had let Russia do most of the fighting.
Was it ‘‘a noble crusade’’? For the liberation of western Europe, maybe so. Was it a just war? That tricky theological concept has to be weighed against very many injustices. Was it a good war? The phrase itself is dubious. No, there are no good wars, but there are necessary wars, and this was surely one.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft is an English journalist and author. His most recent book is ‘‘The Strange Death of Tory England.’’
How good was the Good War?
On May 8, 1945, the war against Hitler’s Third Reich was won — and some of the victors’ most cherished myths were born
By Geoffrey Wheatcroft
May 8, 2005
‘‘NO ENGLISH SOLDIER who rode with the tanks into liberated Belgium or saw the German murder camps at Dachau or Buchenwald could doubt that the war had been a noble crusade.’’ Forty years ago the historian A.J.P. Taylor eloquently expressed what has become a universal belief. Other wars are looked back on with horror for their futile slaughter, but the conflict that ended in Europe in May 1945 is today seen as what Studs Terkel called his famous oral history of it: ‘‘The Good War.’’
In one way it will always remain so. A revisionist case, that defeating Hitler was a mistake, would be not only perverse and offensive, but simply absurd. And yet we have all been sustained since V-E Day, 60 years ago today, by what Giovanni Giolitti, the Italian prime minister of a century ago, once called ‘‘beautiful national legends.’’ By ‘‘we’’ I mean the countries that ended the war on the winning side (the Germans and Japanese have some national legends of their own).
Some of these legends are more obvious than others. The French suffered a catastrophic defeat in 1940, and the compromises many Frenchmen made with their conquerors thereafter ranged from the pitiful to the wicked. More Frenchmen collaborated than resisted, and during the course of the war more Frenchmen bore arms on the Axis than on the Allied side. Against those grim truths, Charles de Gaulle consciously and brilliantly constructed a nourishing myth of Free France and Resistance that helped heal wounds and rebuild the country.
Other myths about the war have grown up less deliberately. For Americans, the first national legend concerns the very definition of World War II. In recent decades it has come more and more to mean the war against Hitler’s Germany. But for the American people at the time, ‘‘the war’’ meant the Pacific war. That was where the first and last American blood was spilled, where America was engaged in combat the longest, and where Americans for most of the time watched the war unfold.
Funnily enough, when President Bush says that the war on terror, like World War II, began with a surprise attack on America, he is echoing that original perception. To say that the war started with the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941 (which is what he means) will come as a surprise to Europeans and especially the Poles, who have an idea it began on Sept. 1, 1939, when the Wehrmacht invaded their country. And yet Bush is harking back unconsciously to the days when the war for America meant ‘‘The Sands of Iwo Jima,’’ rather than ‘‘Saving Private Ryan’’ and ‘‘Band of Brothers.’’
The reason for the subtle shift in American perception is easy to see. If a purely evil regime ever existed, it was the Third Reich, and if any war ever had a moral purpose it must have been the war fought to end its mad persecution. By contrast the morality of the Pacific war was much less clear-cut. To be sure, Japan launched that surprise attack, and Japanese troops behaved horribly to American, British, and Australian POWs and much worse to the Asian peoples they conquered. Still, the Marines scarcely pretended to take prisoners (even when the Japanese wanted to surrender), while the score for Pearl Harbor was more than settled at Hiroshima.
Apart from the way it was fought, that war was pretty much a traditional contest for imperial hegemony. The Philippines did not belong to Japan by right, nor to America. And while the Third Reich practiced a kind of evil different in kind even from Japanese atrocities, the Germans were never demonized and dehumanized in American propaganda and popular culture as the Japanese were a difference grimly reflected in the way Japanese-Americans were interned but German-Americans were not.
. . .
For my own country the first nourishing myth is that ‘‘we won the war.’’ It’s true that only the British, along with their Commonwealth and Empire, took part in the war from its start in September 1939 to its end in August 1945; true too that British defiance of Hitler in the year from June 1940 to June 1941 was absolutely crucial. But the British, as they knew even at the time, could only play a negative partby not surrendering. They could not defeat Hitler on their own, but had to wait for him to bring about his own doom, by invading Russia in June 1941 and declaring war on the United States (rather than the other way round, be it remembered) in December.
Even then, others did the fighting. The best description of how Hitler was defeated was Stalin’s. The old monster said that England provided the time, America provided the money, and Russia provided the blood.
Not only did it take the Western Allies nearly three years after the German attack on Russia seriously to engage the German army in Normandy, but even then most of the fighting was still on the other side of Europe. In the campaign from D-Day to V-E Day, something like 110,000 American soldiers were killed, as well as about half as many from the combined British-Canadian armies. That sounds formidable, and indeed is by today’s standards, until you remember that in the same 11-month period more than half a million Russians were killed on the Eastern Front. Leaving aside the respective Allied casualties, to see how the war was won you need only compare two figures. In all the western campaigns of the war against French, British, Americans, and troops of many other lands, some 200,000 German soldiers died. Four million Germans died on the Eastern Front.
Behind this lies an awkward truth, one we didn’t learn in the cheerful war comics and books of my boyhood in the 1950s, but on which all serious military historians are now agreed. From the beginning to the end of that war, whenever the British Army met the Wehrmacht on anything like equal terms, the Germans always prevailed. And that pretty much goes for the US Army too, from their first disastrous encounter with the Germans, at Kasserine Pass in North Africa, in early 1943. American and British commanders always took good care thereafter that they had an overwhelming superiority in men and especially in weaponry before engaging the enemy.
That is not a cause for shame. The British were haunted by memories of the Great War and its vast carnage. As much to the point, Great Britain and the United States were democracies. Their soldiers were not brutalized peasants, or even an ‘‘army of mercenaries,’’ as A.E. Housman called the 1914 British regular army. As the British military historian Max Hastings puts it in his excellent recent book ‘‘Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-45’’ (Pan), they were citizens in uniform, and they could not be treated as German or Russian soldiers were.
For that fighting spirit of the Germans had another side to it. Hitler ruled by glamour and terror; his soldiers were driven by fear as well as zeal. In a war during which no British soldier, and only one GI, was shot for cowardice, at least 15,000 German servicemen were executed for dereliction of duty.
And that went for the Russians even more so. A heroic Russian narrative of the war, and the memory of the tens of millions of Russian dead, is still potent and plays a part in the sinister nostalgia for Stalin resurfacing in Russia but Russian heroism also has to be qualified.
We now know that in the first winter of the war on the Eastern Front in 1941-42, more than 8,000 Russian soldiers died not in action but shot by their own army for cowardice or desertion. During the battle of Stalingrad alone, another 12,000 men of the Red Army were put to death pour encourager les autres. This was a regime fighting a desperate war that could nevertheless put to death well over a full infantry division of its own men. On the other hand, the Russians relaxed at the end of the war, with Stalin’s encouragement, by indulging in the greatest act of gang rape in history against millions of women in Hungary, Austria, and eastern Germany.
. . .
For the Western Allies, the ‘‘good war’’ was compromised in other ways, particularly by the bombing campaign that reduced the cities of Germany to rubble. Here is another somber comparison, between the 300,000 British servicemen killed in the war and the 600,000 German civilians killed by Allied mainly British bombing. At the time consciences were numbed the war had to be won, and ‘‘they had it coming’’ but it is not now easy to look back with pride on the scores of thousands of women and children incinerated in Hamburg in July 1943 or Dresden in February 1945.
Nor on the other moral compromises at the war’s end. Great Britain did not go to war to save the Jews from Hitler’s torment (and did not succeed) but to protect the freedom and integrity of Poland, an aim that Churchill, with Roosevelt’s encouragement, abandoned at Yalta. Worse still was the forcible repatriation of prisoners to torture and death in Russia and Yugoslavia. And yet all this was not simply conspiracy or betrayal: The Iron Curtain, with half of Europe under Soviet rule, was a painful but logical consequence of the way the West had let Russia do most of the fighting.
Was it ‘‘a noble crusade’’? For the liberation of western Europe, maybe so. Was it a just war? That tricky theological concept has to be weighed against very many injustices. Was it a good war? The phrase itself is dubious. No, there are no good wars, but there are necessary wars, and this was surely one.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft is an English journalist and author. His most recent book is ‘‘The Strange Death of Tory England.’’
Monday, May 09, 2005
From The Louisville Courier-Journal. One of the few relatively accurate reviews I've read in the midst of the overpraising of what is essentially a mediocre album, and Springsteen's worst.
Springsteen's 'Devil' is all words, little music
By Jeffrey Lee Puckett
Bruce Springsteen has always told a good story, dating back to his first album with its Hazy Davys, motorcycle angels and teenage diplomats. Whether singing about beach bums, street kids looking for salvation in rock 'n' roll or working-class people looking for salvation of any kind, there was always the ring of truth in his yarns.
On "Devils & Dust," Springsteen is in heavy storyteller mode. The songs are literate, thoughtful, thick with ideas — and largely unmemorable. The album isn't bad by any measure, but is so self-conscious and serious that it ultimately falls flat.
The problem is twofold.
One of the first rules of fiction is to write about what you know. Springsteen does stick to familiar themes on the majority of songs, but his fascination with the Southwest doesn't yield any better results than it did on "The Ghost of Tom Joad." He sounds forced. Two songs even provide footnotes that translate Spanish lyrics and Western references, as if we were reading a term paper.
The second problem is the music. Springsteen's famously tall tales have always been mated with equally dramatic music; he probably didn't really know a guy named Magic Rat, but the symphonic grandeur of "Jungleland" made it a moot point. The same is true for his more grounded stories on "The River" or "Darkness on the Edge of Town." The scope of "Racing in the Streets" is fairly simple, but the music draws you in deeply. Most of the music on "Devils & Dust" exists simply as a framework for the words. Melodies are at a premium, popping up only on a handful of songs — "Long Time Comin'," "Leah," "Maria's Bed," "All I'm Thinking About" and "Matamoros Banks."
After the emotional purity and drive of "The Rising," one of Springsteen's finest albums, "Devils & Dust" feels closed up, more like a writing exercise than a fully realized record. Again, it isn't a bad record, just average when held against Springsteen's own standards.
Springsteen's 'Devil' is all words, little music
By Jeffrey Lee Puckett
Bruce Springsteen has always told a good story, dating back to his first album with its Hazy Davys, motorcycle angels and teenage diplomats. Whether singing about beach bums, street kids looking for salvation in rock 'n' roll or working-class people looking for salvation of any kind, there was always the ring of truth in his yarns.
On "Devils & Dust," Springsteen is in heavy storyteller mode. The songs are literate, thoughtful, thick with ideas — and largely unmemorable. The album isn't bad by any measure, but is so self-conscious and serious that it ultimately falls flat.
The problem is twofold.
One of the first rules of fiction is to write about what you know. Springsteen does stick to familiar themes on the majority of songs, but his fascination with the Southwest doesn't yield any better results than it did on "The Ghost of Tom Joad." He sounds forced. Two songs even provide footnotes that translate Spanish lyrics and Western references, as if we were reading a term paper.
The second problem is the music. Springsteen's famously tall tales have always been mated with equally dramatic music; he probably didn't really know a guy named Magic Rat, but the symphonic grandeur of "Jungleland" made it a moot point. The same is true for his more grounded stories on "The River" or "Darkness on the Edge of Town." The scope of "Racing in the Streets" is fairly simple, but the music draws you in deeply. Most of the music on "Devils & Dust" exists simply as a framework for the words. Melodies are at a premium, popping up only on a handful of songs — "Long Time Comin'," "Leah," "Maria's Bed," "All I'm Thinking About" and "Matamoros Banks."
After the emotional purity and drive of "The Rising," one of Springsteen's finest albums, "Devils & Dust" feels closed up, more like a writing exercise than a fully realized record. Again, it isn't a bad record, just average when held against Springsteen's own standards.
From Christianity Today. Good review of a fine, nuanced film.
Kingdom of Heaven
Review by Peter T. Chattaway
posted 05/06/05
There have been surprisingly few films about the Crusades, and the handful that do exist have been ambivalent at best about the legacy of those wars.
Prior to Ridley Scott's action epic Kingdom of Heaven, perhaps the biggest Hollywood production to date was Cecil B. DeMille's The Crusades, a 1935 romance that condensed a century or two of history into a melodramatic but ultimately pious love triangle. The film opens on a sensationalistic note, as Muslims tear down crosses and sell Christian women into slavery, but concludes with a message of religious tolerance, as the arrogant King Richard sets aside his faith in the power of his sword in order to find peace and harmony with the Saracens. Gamal Abdel Nasser, the future president of Egypt, was so impressed with the film's dignified portrayal of Saladin (or, in Arabic, Salah-ad-Din) that he let DeMille use the Egyptian army as extras in his 1956 remake of The Ten Commandments.
Beyond that, there have been one or two smaller films, as well as scattered references to the Crusades in films about Robin Hood and Ivanhoe, though the wars themselves are almost always kept well off-screen. One significant exception is the 1991 Kevin Costner vehicle Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, a rather noisy and politically correct action flick that begins in a Jerusalem prison mainly so its title character can add a Muslim sidekick to his Merry Men, preaching the virtues of religious diversity.
So when Scott set out to make his own movie about this era (technically, it does not take place during the Crusades but, rather, between them) he was venturing into largely unexplored territory. And it is to his credit that the film is as nuanced and complex as it is.
Scott and his screenwriter, William Monahan, had been discussing this project before the "war on terror" began, and they are quite alert to the fact that their film comes out at a time of intense religious and political fervor. Thus, instead of settling for the pat messages of earlier films, they aim for a more complicated understanding of both the Christian and Muslim sides. Kingdom of Heaven focuses not only on the conflict between the opposing armies, but on the debates within both camps over what God's will might be.
The film stakes out its own kind of neutrality by viewing these events through the eyes of Balian of Ibelin (Orlando Bloom), a French blacksmith who has been doubting his faith ever since his wife committed suicide, thus damning herself in the church's eyes. As his wife's corpse is laid to rest, a knight named Godfrey (Liam Neeson) visits Balian's smithy, reveals that he is Balian's father, and offers to take him to the Holy Land. Balian is reluctant at first, but when he sees that the local priest has not only beheaded his wife's body but stolen her crucifix, he kills the man in a crime of passion. To atone for both his sin and his wife's, Balian then catches up with Godfrey to go with him to Jerusalem.
Once there, though, Balian does not sense the divine forgiveness he had hoped for. Soon he finds himself embroiled in local politics. An uneasy truce exists between the Kurdish warrior Saladin (Ghassan Massoud) and Jerusalem's King Baldwin IV (Edward Norton), a leper whose body and face are kept hidden behind robes, gloves, and masks. Muslims and Christians may practice their faiths openly for now, but Baldwin must contend with the fanatical, warmongering Knights Templar, and Saladin knows he can exploit this internal division. Eventually these tensions escalate into a full-fledged war, with Saladin laying siege to the Holy City, and Balian, as senior military officer, leading its defense.
On one level, Kingdom of Heaven does for history what Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films did for Tolkien's novels—it turns its source material into an exciting, action-oriented spectacle, yet manages to capture something of the spirit of the original events. An early fight scene between Godfrey's men and some officers who have come to arrest Balian would be right at home in the macho B-movies of the 1980s; one musclebound warrior keeps right on fighting long after an arrow has pierced his throat and neck. In addition, the armies and trebuchets that surround Jerusalem during the final battle cannot help but bring to mind the assault on Minas Tirith in Return of the King, the finale in Jackson's trilogy. Even so, Scott finds singular moments of breathtaking, menacing beauty; late at night, a string of fires comes to light on the dark, distant horizon, and it takes a moment to register that these are firebombs heading straight for the camera.
More importantly, the film raises provocative questions that, given their setting and theme, are reminiscent of more thoughtful epics like Lawrence of Arabia. Key among them is the relationship between God's will and human agency—and whether the former can ever be discerned in the latter. Baldwin's sister Sybilla (Eva Green) suggests the two faiths have fundamentally different sensibilities on this point when she remarks, "Their prophet says 'submit.' Jesus says 'decide.'" But the question is debated within each faith, too.
Guy de Lusignan (Marton Csokas), a Templar who is married to Sybilla and is thus poised to sit on the throne himself, insists that God wants the Christians to slaughter the Muslim hordes. But Baldwin refuses to comply, even going so far as to hang knights who would pick fights with their putative enemies. Witnessing one of these executions, Balian remarks to a Hospitaller (David Thewlis), a member of the military-religious order entrusted with the care of unwell pilgrims, that this seems odd: "They are dying for doing what the pope would tell them to do." The Hospitaller replies, "Yes, but not Christ, I think."
Similarly, one of Saladin's underlings chastises him for not pressing forward more boldly against the Christian armies; he insists that Saladin, by pursuing his more cunning strategy of waiting for Baldwin's ranks to collapse from within, is failing to follow God's will. To this, the Kurdish warrior replies by asking how many battles God had won for the Muslims before he (Saladin) came along—that is, before God determined that he should come along.
The film also emphasizes the need to take responsibility for one's own actions in the midst of competing and conflicting forces. Baldwin proposes killing Guy and marrying Sybilla off to Balian, thus ensuring the city will remain in moderate hands. But Balian, despite his adulterous affair with Sybilla, refuses to be involved in a premeditated murder, even if it might preserve the peace. "It is a kingdom of conscience or nothing," he says.
Ultimately, Balian must defend Jerusalem itself. And it is fascinating to see Bloom, who began his career as an elfin auxiliary in the Lord of the Rings films, grow into the sort of semi-kingly leading man who can rally the troops to the highest ideals of chivalry.
Kingdom of Heaven inevitably invites comparisons to Gladiator, Scott's last major epic. But it is a better film, partly because it does less violence to the history, and partly because it rises above the simple-minded revenge-movie dynamics that grounded that earlier film. It also does a much better job of fitting its personal stories within their political context. Balian might never find the answers he is looking for; the film is decidedly doubtful about knowing God's will. Still, stunning visuals and all, it does raise some questions that might prove useful in these interesting times.
Kingdom of Heaven
Review by Peter T. Chattaway
posted 05/06/05
There have been surprisingly few films about the Crusades, and the handful that do exist have been ambivalent at best about the legacy of those wars.
Prior to Ridley Scott's action epic Kingdom of Heaven, perhaps the biggest Hollywood production to date was Cecil B. DeMille's The Crusades, a 1935 romance that condensed a century or two of history into a melodramatic but ultimately pious love triangle. The film opens on a sensationalistic note, as Muslims tear down crosses and sell Christian women into slavery, but concludes with a message of religious tolerance, as the arrogant King Richard sets aside his faith in the power of his sword in order to find peace and harmony with the Saracens. Gamal Abdel Nasser, the future president of Egypt, was so impressed with the film's dignified portrayal of Saladin (or, in Arabic, Salah-ad-Din) that he let DeMille use the Egyptian army as extras in his 1956 remake of The Ten Commandments.
Beyond that, there have been one or two smaller films, as well as scattered references to the Crusades in films about Robin Hood and Ivanhoe, though the wars themselves are almost always kept well off-screen. One significant exception is the 1991 Kevin Costner vehicle Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, a rather noisy and politically correct action flick that begins in a Jerusalem prison mainly so its title character can add a Muslim sidekick to his Merry Men, preaching the virtues of religious diversity.
So when Scott set out to make his own movie about this era (technically, it does not take place during the Crusades but, rather, between them) he was venturing into largely unexplored territory. And it is to his credit that the film is as nuanced and complex as it is.
Scott and his screenwriter, William Monahan, had been discussing this project before the "war on terror" began, and they are quite alert to the fact that their film comes out at a time of intense religious and political fervor. Thus, instead of settling for the pat messages of earlier films, they aim for a more complicated understanding of both the Christian and Muslim sides. Kingdom of Heaven focuses not only on the conflict between the opposing armies, but on the debates within both camps over what God's will might be.
The film stakes out its own kind of neutrality by viewing these events through the eyes of Balian of Ibelin (Orlando Bloom), a French blacksmith who has been doubting his faith ever since his wife committed suicide, thus damning herself in the church's eyes. As his wife's corpse is laid to rest, a knight named Godfrey (Liam Neeson) visits Balian's smithy, reveals that he is Balian's father, and offers to take him to the Holy Land. Balian is reluctant at first, but when he sees that the local priest has not only beheaded his wife's body but stolen her crucifix, he kills the man in a crime of passion. To atone for both his sin and his wife's, Balian then catches up with Godfrey to go with him to Jerusalem.
Once there, though, Balian does not sense the divine forgiveness he had hoped for. Soon he finds himself embroiled in local politics. An uneasy truce exists between the Kurdish warrior Saladin (Ghassan Massoud) and Jerusalem's King Baldwin IV (Edward Norton), a leper whose body and face are kept hidden behind robes, gloves, and masks. Muslims and Christians may practice their faiths openly for now, but Baldwin must contend with the fanatical, warmongering Knights Templar, and Saladin knows he can exploit this internal division. Eventually these tensions escalate into a full-fledged war, with Saladin laying siege to the Holy City, and Balian, as senior military officer, leading its defense.
On one level, Kingdom of Heaven does for history what Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films did for Tolkien's novels—it turns its source material into an exciting, action-oriented spectacle, yet manages to capture something of the spirit of the original events. An early fight scene between Godfrey's men and some officers who have come to arrest Balian would be right at home in the macho B-movies of the 1980s; one musclebound warrior keeps right on fighting long after an arrow has pierced his throat and neck. In addition, the armies and trebuchets that surround Jerusalem during the final battle cannot help but bring to mind the assault on Minas Tirith in Return of the King, the finale in Jackson's trilogy. Even so, Scott finds singular moments of breathtaking, menacing beauty; late at night, a string of fires comes to light on the dark, distant horizon, and it takes a moment to register that these are firebombs heading straight for the camera.
More importantly, the film raises provocative questions that, given their setting and theme, are reminiscent of more thoughtful epics like Lawrence of Arabia. Key among them is the relationship between God's will and human agency—and whether the former can ever be discerned in the latter. Baldwin's sister Sybilla (Eva Green) suggests the two faiths have fundamentally different sensibilities on this point when she remarks, "Their prophet says 'submit.' Jesus says 'decide.'" But the question is debated within each faith, too.
Guy de Lusignan (Marton Csokas), a Templar who is married to Sybilla and is thus poised to sit on the throne himself, insists that God wants the Christians to slaughter the Muslim hordes. But Baldwin refuses to comply, even going so far as to hang knights who would pick fights with their putative enemies. Witnessing one of these executions, Balian remarks to a Hospitaller (David Thewlis), a member of the military-religious order entrusted with the care of unwell pilgrims, that this seems odd: "They are dying for doing what the pope would tell them to do." The Hospitaller replies, "Yes, but not Christ, I think."
Similarly, one of Saladin's underlings chastises him for not pressing forward more boldly against the Christian armies; he insists that Saladin, by pursuing his more cunning strategy of waiting for Baldwin's ranks to collapse from within, is failing to follow God's will. To this, the Kurdish warrior replies by asking how many battles God had won for the Muslims before he (Saladin) came along—that is, before God determined that he should come along.
The film also emphasizes the need to take responsibility for one's own actions in the midst of competing and conflicting forces. Baldwin proposes killing Guy and marrying Sybilla off to Balian, thus ensuring the city will remain in moderate hands. But Balian, despite his adulterous affair with Sybilla, refuses to be involved in a premeditated murder, even if it might preserve the peace. "It is a kingdom of conscience or nothing," he says.
Ultimately, Balian must defend Jerusalem itself. And it is fascinating to see Bloom, who began his career as an elfin auxiliary in the Lord of the Rings films, grow into the sort of semi-kingly leading man who can rally the troops to the highest ideals of chivalry.
Kingdom of Heaven inevitably invites comparisons to Gladiator, Scott's last major epic. But it is a better film, partly because it does less violence to the history, and partly because it rises above the simple-minded revenge-movie dynamics that grounded that earlier film. It also does a much better job of fitting its personal stories within their political context. Balian might never find the answers he is looking for; the film is decidedly doubtful about knowing God's will. Still, stunning visuals and all, it does raise some questions that might prove useful in these interesting times.
Sunday, May 08, 2005
Reluctant Crusader
Chivalry where you’d least expect it.
By Steve Beard
Deceit vs. valor, murder vs. mercy, courage vs. cowardice, faith vs. uncertainty. Throw in a horrendous case of leprosy, brutal sword fights, the cross of Christianity, and the crescent moon of Islam, and you have a glimpse into Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven — a 130-million-dollar epic about the Crusades.
Set in 1184, between the second and third of eight crusades, the film focuses on a time of uneasy truce in Jerusalem when Christians, Muslims, and Jews were able to worship and pray at their holy sites. Not intending to be a documentary, Kingdom of Heaven is an elegant drama drawn from real-life characters and historical events.
The story follows the remarkable ascent of Balian (Orlando Bloom), a blacksmith who becomes a reluctant Crusader and valiant defender of Jerusalem. Through the gut-wrenching loss of his family, Balian set off to the Holy Land in search of forgiveness and redemption "to erase my sins and those of my wife," he says.
According to historians, there were many reasons that men and women went on the Crusades. There were those who went for deeply devout reasons — forgiveness of sin, defending their brothers and sisters in the faith, and protecting the Church of the Holy Sepulcher that was built where Christ is said to have been buried and then resurrected. "Remission of sins will be granted to those going," Crusaders heard from their priests.
Famous Christian leaders of the time such as Bernard of Clairvaux, Catherine of Siena, and Thomas Aquinas were very supportive of the Crusades. Although he is most well known for writing On Loving God, Bernard was passionate about defending Jerusalem: "Evil men have begun to occupy this land of the new promise, and unless someone resists them, they will be feasting their eyes upon the sanctuary of our religion and will try to stain that very bed, on which for our sake slept our life in death; they will profane the Holy Places — the places, I say, purpled with the blood of the immaculate Lamb."
There were other reasons that people traveled thousands of miles to face uncertainty and possible death in the Holy Land. Sometimes, the idle rich had nothing else to do. They went on a crusade like wealthy New Yorkers head to the Hamptons. The number-two son of a castle may go in order to prove his manhood. Others simply went in search of land, riches, and adventure.
But for our story, "Balian is on a spiritual journey to actually reinforce — or not — his doubts about the existence of God," observes Ridley Scott. It does not appear that Balian is as uncertain of the existence of God as much as he is worried about his status with Him. "God, what is it that you want of me?" he asks. "I am outside God's grace," he says in a fit of desperation. "God does not know me," he later confesses.
Balian discovers that it is nearly impossible to find a relationship with God on such a bloody sectarian battlefield. Instead, he finds a vast supply of pompous and bloodthirsty warriors ("I am what I am. Someone has to be," says one), religious zealots ("To kill an infidel is not murder, it is the path to heaven," says another), and underhanded political wrangling ("There will be a day when you will wish you had done a little evil to gain a greater good," says yet another).
As if that were not enough, he is enticed by the charms and beauty of Princess Sibylla (Eva Green), King Baldwin's sister. Of course, things become more complicated when he discovers that she was given away in marriage at a tender age to Baron Guy do Lusignan, an all-around despicable ignoramus.
Some may attempt to fault Ridley Scott and screenwriter William Monahan for portraying Muslim characters with distinct chivalry and humanity while portraying some of the more zealous Christian Crusaders (such as the Knights Templar) in a less favorable light. However, the balance of the story portrays power-grubbing imperialists and religious nutcases on both sides of the battlefield, as well as honorable and virtuous Muslims and Christians.
Viewers will be justifiably intrigued by Saladin, a Saracen (Crusader word for Muslim) general of considerable military ingenuity and uncommon civility — sometimes brutal, other times merciful. This role is masterfully portrayed by the Syrian actor and director Ghassan Massoud.
Whether you believe the Crusades were justified or not, the movie seems to promote the need for interfaith tolerance and respect, especially in a place like Jerusalem — namely that we should be able to agree that it is not God's will for us to kill one another over "God's will."
"It celebrates goodness, the chivalry of human beings," said French actress Eva Green about the film. "It's about people finding love and understanding for one another, no matter what the race or the religion is. It is more about being tolerant and listening to each other....People use religion as an excuse for bad behavior."
Regrettably, too often that is true. The film actually goes to great lengths to make a distinction between heart-felt faith and institutional religion. There are those who use Balian's leadership skills to press forward with a political agenda and there are others who genuinely care for the welfare of his soul.
He has lost his wife and unborn son — a true dark night of the soul. "I know that anyone in that situation would ask, 'Who is this God?'" observed Orlando Bloom. Balian actually climbs the hill of Golgotha in order to find peace. "God does not speak to me on the hill where Christ died," he tells the Hospitaler (David Thewlis), a monastic military priest who cared for religious pilgrims, the sick, and needy.
"I haven't heard that," the Hospitaler replies. "I have seen rage and madness in the eyes of many men who are religious. Godliness is what is here [pointing to the head] and here [pointing to the heart]. It is about what you do each day to your fellow man."
So much has changed and so much has stayed the same since that era. Nations still go to war over the region and tensions never seem to relax in the Holy Land. On another level, however, I was reminded how different things have become. The screening I attended of Kingdom of Heaven was shown on the night before the funeral for Pope John Paul II.
In May of 2001, he became the first leader of the Catholic Church to set foot inside a mosque. Although no one doubted his profound theological differences with Islam, the pope visited the Ummayad Mosque — one of the oldest mosques in the world — in Damascus, Syria. The site holds special significance to both Muslims and Christians because it is believed to contain the tomb of John the Baptist (Prophet Yahya to Muslims).
While in Damascus, Pope John Paul II said, "It is my ardent hope that Muslim and Christian religious leaders will present our two great religious communities in respectful dialogue, never more as communities in conflict." In some ways, that is the message of this movie.
With the current political-socio-religious tensions between the West and the Islamic world, making a film about killing one's enemies in the name of God can be carelessly incendiary or politically correct mush. This movie fell into neither trap. Instead, Kingdom of Heaven is a majestic triumph in portraying the passionate fanaticism, religious zealotry, and uncommon chivalry that marked the dark and fascinating era of the Crusades.
— Steve Beard is the creator of www.Thunderstruck.org — a website devoted to faith and pop culture.
Chivalry where you’d least expect it.
By Steve Beard
Deceit vs. valor, murder vs. mercy, courage vs. cowardice, faith vs. uncertainty. Throw in a horrendous case of leprosy, brutal sword fights, the cross of Christianity, and the crescent moon of Islam, and you have a glimpse into Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven — a 130-million-dollar epic about the Crusades.
Set in 1184, between the second and third of eight crusades, the film focuses on a time of uneasy truce in Jerusalem when Christians, Muslims, and Jews were able to worship and pray at their holy sites. Not intending to be a documentary, Kingdom of Heaven is an elegant drama drawn from real-life characters and historical events.
The story follows the remarkable ascent of Balian (Orlando Bloom), a blacksmith who becomes a reluctant Crusader and valiant defender of Jerusalem. Through the gut-wrenching loss of his family, Balian set off to the Holy Land in search of forgiveness and redemption "to erase my sins and those of my wife," he says.
According to historians, there were many reasons that men and women went on the Crusades. There were those who went for deeply devout reasons — forgiveness of sin, defending their brothers and sisters in the faith, and protecting the Church of the Holy Sepulcher that was built where Christ is said to have been buried and then resurrected. "Remission of sins will be granted to those going," Crusaders heard from their priests.
Famous Christian leaders of the time such as Bernard of Clairvaux, Catherine of Siena, and Thomas Aquinas were very supportive of the Crusades. Although he is most well known for writing On Loving God, Bernard was passionate about defending Jerusalem: "Evil men have begun to occupy this land of the new promise, and unless someone resists them, they will be feasting their eyes upon the sanctuary of our religion and will try to stain that very bed, on which for our sake slept our life in death; they will profane the Holy Places — the places, I say, purpled with the blood of the immaculate Lamb."
There were other reasons that people traveled thousands of miles to face uncertainty and possible death in the Holy Land. Sometimes, the idle rich had nothing else to do. They went on a crusade like wealthy New Yorkers head to the Hamptons. The number-two son of a castle may go in order to prove his manhood. Others simply went in search of land, riches, and adventure.
But for our story, "Balian is on a spiritual journey to actually reinforce — or not — his doubts about the existence of God," observes Ridley Scott. It does not appear that Balian is as uncertain of the existence of God as much as he is worried about his status with Him. "God, what is it that you want of me?" he asks. "I am outside God's grace," he says in a fit of desperation. "God does not know me," he later confesses.
Balian discovers that it is nearly impossible to find a relationship with God on such a bloody sectarian battlefield. Instead, he finds a vast supply of pompous and bloodthirsty warriors ("I am what I am. Someone has to be," says one), religious zealots ("To kill an infidel is not murder, it is the path to heaven," says another), and underhanded political wrangling ("There will be a day when you will wish you had done a little evil to gain a greater good," says yet another).
As if that were not enough, he is enticed by the charms and beauty of Princess Sibylla (Eva Green), King Baldwin's sister. Of course, things become more complicated when he discovers that she was given away in marriage at a tender age to Baron Guy do Lusignan, an all-around despicable ignoramus.
Some may attempt to fault Ridley Scott and screenwriter William Monahan for portraying Muslim characters with distinct chivalry and humanity while portraying some of the more zealous Christian Crusaders (such as the Knights Templar) in a less favorable light. However, the balance of the story portrays power-grubbing imperialists and religious nutcases on both sides of the battlefield, as well as honorable and virtuous Muslims and Christians.
Viewers will be justifiably intrigued by Saladin, a Saracen (Crusader word for Muslim) general of considerable military ingenuity and uncommon civility — sometimes brutal, other times merciful. This role is masterfully portrayed by the Syrian actor and director Ghassan Massoud.
Whether you believe the Crusades were justified or not, the movie seems to promote the need for interfaith tolerance and respect, especially in a place like Jerusalem — namely that we should be able to agree that it is not God's will for us to kill one another over "God's will."
"It celebrates goodness, the chivalry of human beings," said French actress Eva Green about the film. "It's about people finding love and understanding for one another, no matter what the race or the religion is. It is more about being tolerant and listening to each other....People use religion as an excuse for bad behavior."
Regrettably, too often that is true. The film actually goes to great lengths to make a distinction between heart-felt faith and institutional religion. There are those who use Balian's leadership skills to press forward with a political agenda and there are others who genuinely care for the welfare of his soul.
He has lost his wife and unborn son — a true dark night of the soul. "I know that anyone in that situation would ask, 'Who is this God?'" observed Orlando Bloom. Balian actually climbs the hill of Golgotha in order to find peace. "God does not speak to me on the hill where Christ died," he tells the Hospitaler (David Thewlis), a monastic military priest who cared for religious pilgrims, the sick, and needy.
"I haven't heard that," the Hospitaler replies. "I have seen rage and madness in the eyes of many men who are religious. Godliness is what is here [pointing to the head] and here [pointing to the heart]. It is about what you do each day to your fellow man."
So much has changed and so much has stayed the same since that era. Nations still go to war over the region and tensions never seem to relax in the Holy Land. On another level, however, I was reminded how different things have become. The screening I attended of Kingdom of Heaven was shown on the night before the funeral for Pope John Paul II.
In May of 2001, he became the first leader of the Catholic Church to set foot inside a mosque. Although no one doubted his profound theological differences with Islam, the pope visited the Ummayad Mosque — one of the oldest mosques in the world — in Damascus, Syria. The site holds special significance to both Muslims and Christians because it is believed to contain the tomb of John the Baptist (Prophet Yahya to Muslims).
While in Damascus, Pope John Paul II said, "It is my ardent hope that Muslim and Christian religious leaders will present our two great religious communities in respectful dialogue, never more as communities in conflict." In some ways, that is the message of this movie.
With the current political-socio-religious tensions between the West and the Islamic world, making a film about killing one's enemies in the name of God can be carelessly incendiary or politically correct mush. This movie fell into neither trap. Instead, Kingdom of Heaven is a majestic triumph in portraying the passionate fanaticism, religious zealotry, and uncommon chivalry that marked the dark and fascinating era of the Crusades.
— Steve Beard is the creator of www.Thunderstruck.org — a website devoted to faith and pop culture.
What happened to history?
By Victor Davis Hanson
Our society suffers from the tyranny of the present. Presentism is the strange affliction of assuming we ourselves created all our good things -- as if those without our technology who came before us lacked our superior knowledge and morality.
We naturally speak of our own offspring in reverential tones. Do this or that "for the children" -- youth who are the most affluent and leisured in the history of civilization. A new Medicare prescription drug benefit will add a mountain of national debt. Yet contemporary "seniors" as a group, even apart from the largess of Social Security and Medicare, are already the most insured cohort in our society.
We rarely mention our forebears. These were the millions of less fortunate Americans who built the country, handed down to us our institutions, and died keeping them safe.
Such amnesia about them was not always so. Public acknowledgment of prior generations characterized the best orations of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, who looked for guidance from, and gave thanks to, their ancestors.
We rarely do. We argue endlessly over the academic freedom of a Ward Churchill -- plagiarist and faker -- as he becomes famous for calling the 3,000 murdered on September 11, 2001, "little Eichmanns." Few in the debate pause, if just for a moment, to think of the thousands of now anonymous Americans blown apart over Berlin or on Okinawa to ensure we can freely embarrass ourselves over this charlatan.
Why do we not carry with us at the least the whispers of those who gave us what we have, from the Hoover Dam and Golden Gate Bridge to penicillin and relief from polio? In part, it is a simple ignorance of real history. The schools and university curricula today are stuffed with therapy -- drug counseling, AIDS warnings, self-improvement advice, sex education, women's/gay/Chicano/African-American/Asian/peace/urban/environmental/leisure studies. These are all well-meaning and nice -isms and -ologies that once would have been seen as nonacademic or left to the individual, family or community. But in the zero-sum game of daily instruction, something else was given up -- too often it was knowledge of the past.
What history we know we often judge as illiberal, forgetting we are the beneficiaries of past sacrifices and wealthy largely because of the toil of others who were far less secure. History is also not easy melodrama, but rather tragedy.
It was hard for women to be fully equal in the pre-industrial world of rampant disease and famine, when they had 15 pregnancies or so to ensure three to four children survived to keep the family alive. In the so-called intolerant past, 9 in 10 Americans worked on the farm until dark just to feed the populace; less than 1 in 100 do so now.
Before dismissing them as hopelessly biased, sexist, superstitious or prejudiced, at least concede that most of us sensitive suburbanites would collapse after a few minutes of scything, threshing, milling and baking to get our daily loaf.
To appreciate the value of history, we must also accept that human nature is constant and fixed across time and space. Our kindred forefathers in very dissimilar landscapes were nevertheless subject to the same emotions of fear, envy, honor and shame as our own.
In contrast, if one believes human nature is malleable -- or with requisite money and counseling can be "improved" -- history becomes just an obsolete science. It would be no different from 18th-century biology before the microscope or early genetics without knowledge of DNA. Once man before our time appears alien, the story of his past has very little prognostic value.
Finally, there is a radically new idea that most past occurrences are of equal interest -- far different from the Greeks' notion that history meant inquiry about "important" events that cost or saved thousands of lives, or provided ideas and lessons that transcended space and time.
The history of the pencil, girdle or cartoon offers us less wisdom about events, past and present, than does knowledge of U.S. Grant, the causes of the Great Depression or the miracle of Normandy Beach. A society that cannot distinguish between the critical and the trivial of history predictably will also believe a Scott Peterson merits as much attention as the simultaneous siege of Fallujah, or that a presidential press conference should be pre-empted for Paris Hilton or Donald Trump.
Reverence for those who came before us ensures humility about our own limitations. It restores confidence that far worse crises than our own -- slavery, the great flu epidemic, or World War II -- were endured with far less resources.
By pondering those now dead, we create a certain pact: We, too, will do our part for another generation not yet born to enjoy the same privilege of America, which at such great cost was given to us by others whom we have now all but forgotten.
By Victor Davis Hanson
Our society suffers from the tyranny of the present. Presentism is the strange affliction of assuming we ourselves created all our good things -- as if those without our technology who came before us lacked our superior knowledge and morality.
We naturally speak of our own offspring in reverential tones. Do this or that "for the children" -- youth who are the most affluent and leisured in the history of civilization. A new Medicare prescription drug benefit will add a mountain of national debt. Yet contemporary "seniors" as a group, even apart from the largess of Social Security and Medicare, are already the most insured cohort in our society.
We rarely mention our forebears. These were the millions of less fortunate Americans who built the country, handed down to us our institutions, and died keeping them safe.
Such amnesia about them was not always so. Public acknowledgment of prior generations characterized the best orations of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, who looked for guidance from, and gave thanks to, their ancestors.
We rarely do. We argue endlessly over the academic freedom of a Ward Churchill -- plagiarist and faker -- as he becomes famous for calling the 3,000 murdered on September 11, 2001, "little Eichmanns." Few in the debate pause, if just for a moment, to think of the thousands of now anonymous Americans blown apart over Berlin or on Okinawa to ensure we can freely embarrass ourselves over this charlatan.
Why do we not carry with us at the least the whispers of those who gave us what we have, from the Hoover Dam and Golden Gate Bridge to penicillin and relief from polio? In part, it is a simple ignorance of real history. The schools and university curricula today are stuffed with therapy -- drug counseling, AIDS warnings, self-improvement advice, sex education, women's/gay/Chicano/African-American/Asian/peace/urban/environmental/leisure studies. These are all well-meaning and nice -isms and -ologies that once would have been seen as nonacademic or left to the individual, family or community. But in the zero-sum game of daily instruction, something else was given up -- too often it was knowledge of the past.
What history we know we often judge as illiberal, forgetting we are the beneficiaries of past sacrifices and wealthy largely because of the toil of others who were far less secure. History is also not easy melodrama, but rather tragedy.
It was hard for women to be fully equal in the pre-industrial world of rampant disease and famine, when they had 15 pregnancies or so to ensure three to four children survived to keep the family alive. In the so-called intolerant past, 9 in 10 Americans worked on the farm until dark just to feed the populace; less than 1 in 100 do so now.
Before dismissing them as hopelessly biased, sexist, superstitious or prejudiced, at least concede that most of us sensitive suburbanites would collapse after a few minutes of scything, threshing, milling and baking to get our daily loaf.
To appreciate the value of history, we must also accept that human nature is constant and fixed across time and space. Our kindred forefathers in very dissimilar landscapes were nevertheless subject to the same emotions of fear, envy, honor and shame as our own.
In contrast, if one believes human nature is malleable -- or with requisite money and counseling can be "improved" -- history becomes just an obsolete science. It would be no different from 18th-century biology before the microscope or early genetics without knowledge of DNA. Once man before our time appears alien, the story of his past has very little prognostic value.
Finally, there is a radically new idea that most past occurrences are of equal interest -- far different from the Greeks' notion that history meant inquiry about "important" events that cost or saved thousands of lives, or provided ideas and lessons that transcended space and time.
The history of the pencil, girdle or cartoon offers us less wisdom about events, past and present, than does knowledge of U.S. Grant, the causes of the Great Depression or the miracle of Normandy Beach. A society that cannot distinguish between the critical and the trivial of history predictably will also believe a Scott Peterson merits as much attention as the simultaneous siege of Fallujah, or that a presidential press conference should be pre-empted for Paris Hilton or Donald Trump.
Reverence for those who came before us ensures humility about our own limitations. It restores confidence that far worse crises than our own -- slavery, the great flu epidemic, or World War II -- were endured with far less resources.
By pondering those now dead, we create a certain pact: We, too, will do our part for another generation not yet born to enjoy the same privilege of America, which at such great cost was given to us by others whom we have now all but forgotten.
From the blog PeakTalk:
REMEMBERING FORTUYN
by Pieter Dorsman
Friday, May 6, 2005
Today it is three years ago that Pim Fortuyn was shot by an animal rights activist, ending the life of a great political mind and someone who was very close to becoming prime-minister of the troubled Dutch nation. Pim’s impact today can probably best be summed up by the words that he must have spoken when his old friend Theo van Gogh showed up in the afterlife last year: “see Theo, I told you so”.
Rather than rehashing what happened or his legacy in Dutch politics I think it’s far more important to once more reflect on who Pim was and why he came to the positions and ideas that formed the basis of his short political career. Both Dutch and foreign media, and the blogosphere too, have not always done a great job here. One of the best pieces was written by Bruce Bawer who as an American in Europe probably had a far better perspective than Dutch commentators who were too close to the situation or poorly informed foreigners writing from a distance.
Fortuyn was above a child of the 1960s, politically on the left, openly and proudly gay and an academic with a PhD in sociology. Hardly the material that makes a conservative but it was the collectivist and politically correct environment at Groningen University, in particular the Marxist leanings of his faculty, that contributed to Pim’s steady rightward journey. One of the most notable incidents that influenced his political thinking was a situation where Pim as member of the university board had worked both hard and creatively to achieve some cost-savings measures where all parties had been allowed input – it dealt with the catering services - but where at the very last moment the employees union nixed the plan as it meant they would lose their treasured status as government employees. Fortuyn was furious and it encouraged him to abandon the publicly funded academic world, literally by striking out as a self employed consultant in Rotterdam, the nation’s most culturally diverse city. His consulting work rapidly transformed itself into writing books and speaking engagements and he became a celebrity, especially among entrepreneurs and business owners with his eloquent speeches about the stifling impact of the omni-present welfare state. Pro-business talk show hosts gave him room on TV and a media star was born. His message wasn't limited to economics though. At the same time he started to take on the negative impact of a rapidly growing Muslim population in The Netherlands with well reasoned books and articles, pointing out that the greatest difficulty people often face is social change.
His critical notes on immigrants and his economic conservatism may have contributed to the label ‘right’ or for his many friends in the traditional media, ‘fascist’, but Pim was at heart a true liberal in the original meaning of the word. For a self-employed gay man who had lived through the tumultuous 1960s and had witnessed at first-hand the value of the achievements of these years, he was the first one to point out that maybe it was time to start defending them rather than continue the journey into the abyss of cultural and moral relativism. For the media and the political establishment to brand him as a dangerous and extreme-right zealot hurt deeply, although he never showed it. Instead he smiled, his message gained momentum after 9/11 and despite the ongoing vile attacks of the Dutch media and the political establishment he gained an incredible amount of popularity.
While his critics tried to demonize him they at the same time pointed to his likely inability to manage the nation as a cabinet leader. Pim always replied that he would manage the nation by speech and if you think about that it is hard not to compare him to Ronald Reagan. Both men had traveled from the left to the right over a long period of time and were able to use their unique gift to connect with the public and translate their political journeys into compelling messages that struck a chord left and right, leaving their opponents dumbfounded. Fortuyn was intellectually more gifted than Reagan and would probably have become quite pro-active in running the nation on a day-to-day basis as opposed to the hands-off management style of the American president. But both men however recognized that changing political attitudes can only be effected by actively guiding citizens through times of social and economic upheaval through an endless repetition of ideas and a vision for the future. That implied that at one point the highest office in the land needed to be captured so that it could be used as the pulpit for incessant message delivery. Fortuyn never got there, but Reagan did and it seems that Americans have indeed had some more exposure to the low-tax, peace through strength message than their Dutch friends.
That brings me to one last striking similarity. Both men took bullets, although Pim didn’t survive. That’s what we’re remembering today.
REMEMBERING FORTUYN
by Pieter Dorsman
Friday, May 6, 2005
Today it is three years ago that Pim Fortuyn was shot by an animal rights activist, ending the life of a great political mind and someone who was very close to becoming prime-minister of the troubled Dutch nation. Pim’s impact today can probably best be summed up by the words that he must have spoken when his old friend Theo van Gogh showed up in the afterlife last year: “see Theo, I told you so”.
Rather than rehashing what happened or his legacy in Dutch politics I think it’s far more important to once more reflect on who Pim was and why he came to the positions and ideas that formed the basis of his short political career. Both Dutch and foreign media, and the blogosphere too, have not always done a great job here. One of the best pieces was written by Bruce Bawer who as an American in Europe probably had a far better perspective than Dutch commentators who were too close to the situation or poorly informed foreigners writing from a distance.
Fortuyn was above a child of the 1960s, politically on the left, openly and proudly gay and an academic with a PhD in sociology. Hardly the material that makes a conservative but it was the collectivist and politically correct environment at Groningen University, in particular the Marxist leanings of his faculty, that contributed to Pim’s steady rightward journey. One of the most notable incidents that influenced his political thinking was a situation where Pim as member of the university board had worked both hard and creatively to achieve some cost-savings measures where all parties had been allowed input – it dealt with the catering services - but where at the very last moment the employees union nixed the plan as it meant they would lose their treasured status as government employees. Fortuyn was furious and it encouraged him to abandon the publicly funded academic world, literally by striking out as a self employed consultant in Rotterdam, the nation’s most culturally diverse city. His consulting work rapidly transformed itself into writing books and speaking engagements and he became a celebrity, especially among entrepreneurs and business owners with his eloquent speeches about the stifling impact of the omni-present welfare state. Pro-business talk show hosts gave him room on TV and a media star was born. His message wasn't limited to economics though. At the same time he started to take on the negative impact of a rapidly growing Muslim population in The Netherlands with well reasoned books and articles, pointing out that the greatest difficulty people often face is social change.
His critical notes on immigrants and his economic conservatism may have contributed to the label ‘right’ or for his many friends in the traditional media, ‘fascist’, but Pim was at heart a true liberal in the original meaning of the word. For a self-employed gay man who had lived through the tumultuous 1960s and had witnessed at first-hand the value of the achievements of these years, he was the first one to point out that maybe it was time to start defending them rather than continue the journey into the abyss of cultural and moral relativism. For the media and the political establishment to brand him as a dangerous and extreme-right zealot hurt deeply, although he never showed it. Instead he smiled, his message gained momentum after 9/11 and despite the ongoing vile attacks of the Dutch media and the political establishment he gained an incredible amount of popularity.
While his critics tried to demonize him they at the same time pointed to his likely inability to manage the nation as a cabinet leader. Pim always replied that he would manage the nation by speech and if you think about that it is hard not to compare him to Ronald Reagan. Both men had traveled from the left to the right over a long period of time and were able to use their unique gift to connect with the public and translate their political journeys into compelling messages that struck a chord left and right, leaving their opponents dumbfounded. Fortuyn was intellectually more gifted than Reagan and would probably have become quite pro-active in running the nation on a day-to-day basis as opposed to the hands-off management style of the American president. But both men however recognized that changing political attitudes can only be effected by actively guiding citizens through times of social and economic upheaval through an endless repetition of ideas and a vision for the future. That implied that at one point the highest office in the land needed to be captured so that it could be used as the pulpit for incessant message delivery. Fortuyn never got there, but Reagan did and it seems that Americans have indeed had some more exposure to the low-tax, peace through strength message than their Dutch friends.
That brings me to one last striking similarity. Both men took bullets, although Pim didn’t survive. That’s what we’re remembering today.
What Exactly Is Bush Celebrating in Moscow?
By Pat Buchanan
To Americans, World War II ended with the Japanese surrender on Aug. 15, 1945, following detonation of atom bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and Aug. 9.
But for Russians, who did not enter the war on Japan until Aug. 8, 1945, "The Great Patriotic War" ended on May 9, with the surrender of Nazi Germany. Which raises a question:
What exactly is President Bush celebrating in Moscow?
The destruction of Bolshevism was always the great goal of Hitler. And the Red Army eventually bore the brunt of battle, losing 10 times as many soldiers as America and Britain together.
But were we and the Soviets ever fighting for the same things, as FDR believed? Or was Stalin's war against Hitler but another phase of Bolshevism's war to eradicate Christianity and the West?
Vladimir Putin, a patriot and nationalist who retains a nostalgia for the empire he served as a KGB agent, refuses to renounce the Hitler-Stalin Pact of Aug. 23, 1939. Under the secret protocols of that pact, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and the Romanian provinces of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina were ceded to Stalin, as was eastern Poland.
Hitler's attack on Poland, the success of which was guaranteed by that pact, came on Sept. 1, 1939. On Sept. 17, Stalin, who had hidden in the weeds to see how Britain and France would react to Hitler's invasion, stormed into Poland from the east and claimed his share of the martyred nation. Six years of terror for Poles began, ending in 44 years of captivity in the bowels of what Ronald Reagan bravely called an "evil empire."
As a result of this war, Hitler's 1,000-Year Reich lasted 12 years and Germany was destroyed as no other nation save Japan. Hamburg, Cologne, Dresden and Berlin were reduced to rubble.
Between 13 million and 15 million Germans were ethnically cleansed from the Baltic region, Poland and Czechoslovakia. Two million, mostly women and children, perished in an orgy of murder, rape and massacre that attended that greatest forced exodus in European history.
As a result of the Great Patriotic War, Finland had its Karelian Peninsula torn away by Stalin and 10 Christian countries -- Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Yugoslavia -- endured Stalinist persecution and tyranny for half a century.
Again, what, exactly, is Bush celebrating in Moscow?
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a soldier of the Red Army in the Great Patriotic War. Let us hear from him about what a wonderful cause it was. As for Putin, into whose soul Bush has looked, his position is understandable. From the vantage point of Russian vital interests, the Hitler-Stalin pact was a brilliant coup.
Hitler was on the path to war. The war he wanted was one with the Soviet Union: to kill it, carve it up and put every Bolshevik to the sword. His war was also to be a racist war. Hitler wanted to impose Germanic rule over Slavic peoples.
Stalin, with his pact, redirected Hitler's Panzers to the west and bought the Red Army two more precious years to prepare for Hitler's onslaught -- years Stalin used well.
How did Stalin succeed?
On March 31, 1939, the British and French -- in panic after Hitler drove into Prague without resistance -- handed Poland an unsolicited war guarantee they could not honor and did not intend to honor. It was a bluff. But believing in that guarantee, the brave Poles defied Hitler over Danzig, stood and fought, and were crushed, as the British and French hid inside the Maginot Line.
But because they had declared war on him, though they had no plan to attack him, Hitler, in April 1940, invaded Denmark and Norway, and in May, the Low Countries and France. In three weeks, he threw the British army off the continent at Dunkirk, and, in six weeks, crushed France.
Meanwhile, Stalin provided Hitler all the food and fuel he had requested and declared Britain and France to be the aggressors against his Nazi partner.
When Stalin's turn came and Hitler invaded on June 22, 1941, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov, who had negotiated the Hitler-Stalin -- or Molotov-Ribbentrop -- pact, said plaintively to the German ambassador, "What have we done to deserve this?"
Churchill and FDR rushed to embrace Stalin, gave him everything he demanded and more, and at Tehran and Yalta, ceded to him custody of all the peoples of Eastern Europe and of Poland, for which Britain had gone to war.
What Putin is celebrating is easy to see. But, tell me again: What exactly is our president celebrating in Moscow?
By Pat Buchanan
To Americans, World War II ended with the Japanese surrender on Aug. 15, 1945, following detonation of atom bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and Aug. 9.
But for Russians, who did not enter the war on Japan until Aug. 8, 1945, "The Great Patriotic War" ended on May 9, with the surrender of Nazi Germany. Which raises a question:
What exactly is President Bush celebrating in Moscow?
The destruction of Bolshevism was always the great goal of Hitler. And the Red Army eventually bore the brunt of battle, losing 10 times as many soldiers as America and Britain together.
But were we and the Soviets ever fighting for the same things, as FDR believed? Or was Stalin's war against Hitler but another phase of Bolshevism's war to eradicate Christianity and the West?
Vladimir Putin, a patriot and nationalist who retains a nostalgia for the empire he served as a KGB agent, refuses to renounce the Hitler-Stalin Pact of Aug. 23, 1939. Under the secret protocols of that pact, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and the Romanian provinces of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina were ceded to Stalin, as was eastern Poland.
Hitler's attack on Poland, the success of which was guaranteed by that pact, came on Sept. 1, 1939. On Sept. 17, Stalin, who had hidden in the weeds to see how Britain and France would react to Hitler's invasion, stormed into Poland from the east and claimed his share of the martyred nation. Six years of terror for Poles began, ending in 44 years of captivity in the bowels of what Ronald Reagan bravely called an "evil empire."
As a result of this war, Hitler's 1,000-Year Reich lasted 12 years and Germany was destroyed as no other nation save Japan. Hamburg, Cologne, Dresden and Berlin were reduced to rubble.
Between 13 million and 15 million Germans were ethnically cleansed from the Baltic region, Poland and Czechoslovakia. Two million, mostly women and children, perished in an orgy of murder, rape and massacre that attended that greatest forced exodus in European history.
As a result of the Great Patriotic War, Finland had its Karelian Peninsula torn away by Stalin and 10 Christian countries -- Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Yugoslavia -- endured Stalinist persecution and tyranny for half a century.
Again, what, exactly, is Bush celebrating in Moscow?
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a soldier of the Red Army in the Great Patriotic War. Let us hear from him about what a wonderful cause it was. As for Putin, into whose soul Bush has looked, his position is understandable. From the vantage point of Russian vital interests, the Hitler-Stalin pact was a brilliant coup.
Hitler was on the path to war. The war he wanted was one with the Soviet Union: to kill it, carve it up and put every Bolshevik to the sword. His war was also to be a racist war. Hitler wanted to impose Germanic rule over Slavic peoples.
Stalin, with his pact, redirected Hitler's Panzers to the west and bought the Red Army two more precious years to prepare for Hitler's onslaught -- years Stalin used well.
How did Stalin succeed?
On March 31, 1939, the British and French -- in panic after Hitler drove into Prague without resistance -- handed Poland an unsolicited war guarantee they could not honor and did not intend to honor. It was a bluff. But believing in that guarantee, the brave Poles defied Hitler over Danzig, stood and fought, and were crushed, as the British and French hid inside the Maginot Line.
But because they had declared war on him, though they had no plan to attack him, Hitler, in April 1940, invaded Denmark and Norway, and in May, the Low Countries and France. In three weeks, he threw the British army off the continent at Dunkirk, and, in six weeks, crushed France.
Meanwhile, Stalin provided Hitler all the food and fuel he had requested and declared Britain and France to be the aggressors against his Nazi partner.
When Stalin's turn came and Hitler invaded on June 22, 1941, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov, who had negotiated the Hitler-Stalin -- or Molotov-Ribbentrop -- pact, said plaintively to the German ambassador, "What have we done to deserve this?"
Churchill and FDR rushed to embrace Stalin, gave him everything he demanded and more, and at Tehran and Yalta, ceded to him custody of all the peoples of Eastern Europe and of Poland, for which Britain had gone to war.
What Putin is celebrating is easy to see. But, tell me again: What exactly is our president celebrating in Moscow?
From Human Events:
Conservative Booknotes Interviews Thomas Woods
Posted Thursday, May 05, 2005
This afternoon Thomas Woods sat down with one of our editors to answer our questions about The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History and his new book, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization. Here's what he had to say.
Professor Woods, your Politically Incorrect Guide to American History has been a huge hit with our members. Like a lot of our selections, it came in for some flak from the mainstream media. Is there any particularly frustrating criticism that you'd like to answer?
I'm happy to say that I've answered most of the significant critics. For example, David Greenberg on Slate wrote a nasty review; yet he shows almost no knowledge of anything I'm covering. He claims the book is too short, doesn't have enough victimology, etc. I'm writing an 80,000-word book; I want to talk about the things that interest me. I don't talk enough about slavery, he says. There are 16,000 books on Lincoln; there must be 20,000 books on slavery. But the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions, the basis for a state's right to nullify unconstitutional Federal laws, have had one book written on them in the last 100 years. If David Greenberg wants to write on slavery, I encourage him. I'd like to write on topics that have been completely ignored.
What will fans of the Guide find to interest them in How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization?
People who like the Guide love America; if you love America, you love Western Civilization. My book is implicitly about the uniqueness of Western Civilization -- science, the university, international law. It's the same kind of celebration of Western Civilization that the Guide is of the real America.
In past surveys most of our members have identified themselves as Protestants. What in your new book is going to interest non-Catholics?
It highlights some of the unique aspects of Western Civilization that we should all be proud of. Some of the chapter on charity, for example, points out that the Christian idea of charity is different from the Roman idea. The Roman idea of liberality looks to fame for the giver and putting the recipients in your debt in some way. The Christian idea is different; the giver does it with a cheerful heart for people who are his equals; that's something that's unique to Christianity.
We know you're a fan of the free market. Isn't Adam Smith the father of laissez-faire economics? What role did the Catholic Church play there?
Modern historians of economic thought are increasingly concluding that 18th-century economists were indebted to 16th-century Catholic priests -- on inflation, on prices, ideas of this nature, that were analyzed in a very sophisticated way in Spanish universities.
People tend to think of religion and science as antithetical, but you claim that Western science is a gift of the Church. How can that be?
I cite the work of Stanley Jaki, who has argued throughout his career that the development of science in the Christian milieu of the Western world wasn't a coincidence. Certain Christian ideas lent themselves to the scientific enterprise -- God is rational; God's order is an expression of His goodness. It becomes possible to think of the natural world as being autonomous, regulated by natural laws -- you'd expect that from an orderly God. In Islam, on the other hand, it's much more difficult to make this claim. Whenever you point to natural laws, Muslims think of them as infringements on the absolute sovereignty of Allah, who is free to act as arbitrarily as he wishes.
What's the real story behind the Galileo controversy?
This is one where you're really going to have to read the book! Cardinal Newman, even in the 19th century, used to say that Galileo seems to be the only example of the Church's open hostility to science that people can think of. Here's a little taste of what's in the book. It's not very well known that cathedrals in Rome, Florence, Bologna, and Paris were constructed as solar observatories. They were the most precise instruments in the world for observing the sun's apparent motion. When Kepler suggested that planetary orbits were elliptical rather than circular, it was in the basilica of San Petronio that the Catholic astronomer Giovanni Cassini proved him right using the instruments of solar observation there. There's a lost incident in the history of science.
You teach at the college level. What do your students know about the history of Western Civilization -- and the Catholic Church?
Basically nothing. I say that not tongue in cheek, or jokingly -- really nothing, even the ones who have gone to Catholic school. I get people saying that they've learned more in one semester in my class than in 12 years of Catholic school.
You point out that the Catholic Church preserved the literature of Greece and Rome -- and invented the university. How did the Church get the reputation of being opposed to intellectual freedom?
This is a hard one to answer because I quote in my book major historians of science who suggest that the broad intellectual freedom that the universities afforded created the intellectual terrain that made the scientific revolution possible. It's true that some opinions (primarily theological ones) were considered out of bounds in the medieval universities. But before we congratulate ourselves on how much freer we are today, take a look at your typical university and observe the level of intellectual discourse. Do we really have a free exchange of ideas there?
Some people are saying that the new pope decided on the name Benedict after St. Benedict (the father of Western monasticism, whose Benedictine monks saved European culture after the collapse of the Roman Empire) because the pope thinks Europe -- and maybe all of Western civilization -- is in danger of collapsing into a new Dark Ages. What do you think? If it is, can the Catholic Church do anything to stop it?
I do think that this danger exists, and it's interesting that in the early centuries of Christianity, the Church upheld the value of human life against certain pagan practices. Now she finds herself having to do the same thing all over again. And if the Church is going to stop it, she will do so not by mimicking the secular world, but by having the courage to stand up against it. And one hopes that men of good will, when they see the contrast between the Church and the modern Western world -- its aesthetic impoverishment, its cavalier treatment of human life, its failure even to reproduce itself -- will join her in working toward the restoration.
Conservative Booknotes Interviews Thomas Woods
Posted Thursday, May 05, 2005
This afternoon Thomas Woods sat down with one of our editors to answer our questions about The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History and his new book, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization. Here's what he had to say.
Professor Woods, your Politically Incorrect Guide to American History has been a huge hit with our members. Like a lot of our selections, it came in for some flak from the mainstream media. Is there any particularly frustrating criticism that you'd like to answer?
I'm happy to say that I've answered most of the significant critics. For example, David Greenberg on Slate wrote a nasty review; yet he shows almost no knowledge of anything I'm covering. He claims the book is too short, doesn't have enough victimology, etc. I'm writing an 80,000-word book; I want to talk about the things that interest me. I don't talk enough about slavery, he says. There are 16,000 books on Lincoln; there must be 20,000 books on slavery. But the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions, the basis for a state's right to nullify unconstitutional Federal laws, have had one book written on them in the last 100 years. If David Greenberg wants to write on slavery, I encourage him. I'd like to write on topics that have been completely ignored.
What will fans of the Guide find to interest them in How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization?
People who like the Guide love America; if you love America, you love Western Civilization. My book is implicitly about the uniqueness of Western Civilization -- science, the university, international law. It's the same kind of celebration of Western Civilization that the Guide is of the real America.
In past surveys most of our members have identified themselves as Protestants. What in your new book is going to interest non-Catholics?
It highlights some of the unique aspects of Western Civilization that we should all be proud of. Some of the chapter on charity, for example, points out that the Christian idea of charity is different from the Roman idea. The Roman idea of liberality looks to fame for the giver and putting the recipients in your debt in some way. The Christian idea is different; the giver does it with a cheerful heart for people who are his equals; that's something that's unique to Christianity.
We know you're a fan of the free market. Isn't Adam Smith the father of laissez-faire economics? What role did the Catholic Church play there?
Modern historians of economic thought are increasingly concluding that 18th-century economists were indebted to 16th-century Catholic priests -- on inflation, on prices, ideas of this nature, that were analyzed in a very sophisticated way in Spanish universities.
People tend to think of religion and science as antithetical, but you claim that Western science is a gift of the Church. How can that be?
I cite the work of Stanley Jaki, who has argued throughout his career that the development of science in the Christian milieu of the Western world wasn't a coincidence. Certain Christian ideas lent themselves to the scientific enterprise -- God is rational; God's order is an expression of His goodness. It becomes possible to think of the natural world as being autonomous, regulated by natural laws -- you'd expect that from an orderly God. In Islam, on the other hand, it's much more difficult to make this claim. Whenever you point to natural laws, Muslims think of them as infringements on the absolute sovereignty of Allah, who is free to act as arbitrarily as he wishes.
What's the real story behind the Galileo controversy?
This is one where you're really going to have to read the book! Cardinal Newman, even in the 19th century, used to say that Galileo seems to be the only example of the Church's open hostility to science that people can think of. Here's a little taste of what's in the book. It's not very well known that cathedrals in Rome, Florence, Bologna, and Paris were constructed as solar observatories. They were the most precise instruments in the world for observing the sun's apparent motion. When Kepler suggested that planetary orbits were elliptical rather than circular, it was in the basilica of San Petronio that the Catholic astronomer Giovanni Cassini proved him right using the instruments of solar observation there. There's a lost incident in the history of science.
You teach at the college level. What do your students know about the history of Western Civilization -- and the Catholic Church?
Basically nothing. I say that not tongue in cheek, or jokingly -- really nothing, even the ones who have gone to Catholic school. I get people saying that they've learned more in one semester in my class than in 12 years of Catholic school.
You point out that the Catholic Church preserved the literature of Greece and Rome -- and invented the university. How did the Church get the reputation of being opposed to intellectual freedom?
This is a hard one to answer because I quote in my book major historians of science who suggest that the broad intellectual freedom that the universities afforded created the intellectual terrain that made the scientific revolution possible. It's true that some opinions (primarily theological ones) were considered out of bounds in the medieval universities. But before we congratulate ourselves on how much freer we are today, take a look at your typical university and observe the level of intellectual discourse. Do we really have a free exchange of ideas there?
Some people are saying that the new pope decided on the name Benedict after St. Benedict (the father of Western monasticism, whose Benedictine monks saved European culture after the collapse of the Roman Empire) because the pope thinks Europe -- and maybe all of Western civilization -- is in danger of collapsing into a new Dark Ages. What do you think? If it is, can the Catholic Church do anything to stop it?
I do think that this danger exists, and it's interesting that in the early centuries of Christianity, the Church upheld the value of human life against certain pagan practices. Now she finds herself having to do the same thing all over again. And if the Church is going to stop it, she will do so not by mimicking the secular world, but by having the courage to stand up against it. And one hopes that men of good will, when they see the contrast between the Church and the modern Western world -- its aesthetic impoverishment, its cavalier treatment of human life, its failure even to reproduce itself -- will join her in working toward the restoration.
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