- Worth Reading 9-28-2021 September 27, 2021 by The Editors - Local historian Barton Cockey wrote a strong essay on the preservation of monuments that brings a new perspective to the Talbot Boys debate. Those who want to tear down statues try to claim the moral high ground, and this thoughtful essay reveals the emptiness of that claim. In an article that reminds JDQB and WDM of where we were 50+ years ago, Harvard professor emerita Ruth Wisse points out how distant the rising members of the political class are from the experience of national service. She writes that ROTC was driven off campus during the Vietnam War by the combined opposition to the war and the draft. After that era was long past, “rather than encourage outstanding students to undertake military training as part of their civic responsibility, faculty at Harvard and elsewhere took the lead in banishing ROTC from campus.” Thus the understanding grew among those elite students that the nation was not worth their privileged lives to defend. As a result, she writes “the war in Afghanistan was lost in the halls of Harvard.” While on the topic of elites, Matt Taibbi reviews a new book that examines the rise of “credentialism” – the “last acceptable prejudice” of the highly educated that makes them despise the less-educated, particularly…
- Never Forget… September 11, 2021 by The Editors - Sgt. Nicole Gee KIA Kabul, 8/27/2021 World Trade Center, New York 9/11/2001
- Thinking About Things: Afghanistan, Mr. Biden, and Coming Full Circle September 11, 2021 by John DeQ. Briggs - John DeQ Briggs Homage to A Government, Philip Larkin, 1964 Next year we are to bring all the soldiers homeFor lack of money, and it is all right.Places they guarded, or kept orderly,Must guard themselves, and keep themselves orderlyWe want the money for ourselves at homeInstead of working. And this is all right.It's hard to say who wanted it to happen,But now it's been decided nobody minds.The places are a long way off, not here,Which is all right, and from what we hearThe soldiers there only made trouble happen.Next year we shall be easier in our minds.Next year we shall be living in a countryThat brought its soldiers home for lack of money.The statues will be standing in the sameTree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same.Our children will not know it's a different country.All we can hope to leave them now is money. My wife and I flew over Afghanistan in 2019 on the way back to London from a three week stay in Vietnam as a sort of pilgrimage to celebrate the 50th anniversary of my own departure from Vietnam after my second tour of duty with the Navy. We seemed to be flying over Afghanistan for hours, but it…
- Worth Reading 9-11-2021 September 11, 2021 by The Editors - JDQB notes these as materials worth reading Harking back to George Bush’s embarrassingly premature Mission Accomplished ceremony aboard an aircraft carrier after the initial few weeks of the invasion of Iraq, Noah Rothman writes about Joe Biden’s Mission Accomplished moments. Peggy Noonan has an excellent article from September 2 in the Wall Street Journal (apologies for paywall). The Afghan Fiasco Will Stick to Biden. The Economist magazine has put together an issue with a number of articles of real depth. Two of these are Henry Kissinger on Why America Failed in Afghanistan and Francis Fukuyama on the end of American hegemony. The Washington Post published an especially good article by Robert Kagan in late August busting various myths about Afghanistan. John Podhoretz hosts a podcast on Biden’s claim of victory for partially solving the very hostage crisis he started. God knows what the Taliban are being paid for allowing the occasional plane to take off. https://www.commentary.org/john-podhoretz/solving-the-hostage-crisis-you-started/ Interesting article by Jonathan Turley on the legal question whether the vaccine mandates should apply to those who already have natural immunity and antibodies by virtue of having recovered from the Covid-19 virus. https://jonathanturley.org/2021/09/10/california-medical-ethics-expert-sues-university-over-vaccine-mandate/ Finally, and as something of a precursor to my next article, the hysterical reaction by the media to the Texas abortion…
- America’s Obligation to Those Left Behind August 31, 2021 by Matthew Daley - By Matt Daley Today’s edition of the Chesapeake Observer coincides with the official end to America’s war in Afghanistan. The wisdom – or lack thereof – of the decision to end the U.S. military presence, first taken by President Trump and embraced wholeheartedly by President Biden, will be debated for years. What will not be debated is that the Biden Administration’s implementation of that decision was deeply flawed, in particular by its civilian policy team. Our NATO allies were not consulted and as a result the alliance has suffered its worse setback and consequent internal discord in its history. In Afghanistan, America had long promised that it would not abandon either its citizens in Afghanistan or those Afghans who were closely associated with the US and who would face severe retaliation by Taliban. This is a sacred obligation – and a strategic one as well should at a future date we ask others to put themselves at risk in a common undertaking. The planning on the civilian side of the Biden Administration to fulfill this obligation was dreadful. I say this not in hindsight, but as one who together with others attempted to move the Administration in a positive direction when there was still time. Thanks…
- Worth Reading 8-31-2021 August 31, 2021 by The Editors - WDM recommends an essay titled “A Christian Response to a Defeat”. It is a forceful reminder of how civilians have been able to ignore the sacrifices made by service members and their families. The author is a former Army officer and mother of 2 sons who serve, and the essay is notable because it does not go on to condemn our involvement in Afghanistan. Instead, it gives a personal view of the sacrifices made by those who serve and their families, and how they continue to give to their Afghan allies. She writes “The simple act of a military family member [at Ramstein AFB] buying a diaper for an Afghan baby whose father may have contributed to the violence targeted against their own loved one is a defining moment for our nation.... Service and giving to others are a simple reflex for those who have chosen to serve. Americans really need to reflect deeply upon this humble example.” From MPD: The Washington Post describes without apology the errors of judgment and character in Presidential leadership that led to the debacle in Afghanistan. “Both the Biden and Trump administrations justified their actions by presenting a binary choice: endless combat or immediate retreat. The U.S. military, in contrast, was seeking…
- Thinking About Things: While You Were Out August 16, 2021 by John DeQ. Briggs - Like many, I have been away for a few weeks, away on summer holiday just when society began to appear to be opening up. It was a glorious few weeks, unplugged as I chose to be from television, newspapers, and most of social media. Well, children and grandchildren have departed, and I have been scrolling around the internet to take a peek at the recent past to find out what has been going on and what sort of interesting things may have happened while I was happily unaware of them. It turns out, things have gotten much worse while I was out.
- Should Scientists Dictate Policy? August 2, 2021 by W. David Montgomery - By W. David Montgomery The recent tergiversations of the CDC on masks, vaccine effectiveness and potential lockdowns bring the belief that policy should be dictated by “scientists” into question once again. And the answer is so clearly “No” that a review of where that belief originated and how it has taken over may be worthwhile. In any event, that is what I am attempting. The origins, as many philosophers have pointed out, are in the Enlightenment, and its belief that through rational, empirical inquiry humankind could learn everything there is to know and use that knowledge to achieve human and social perfection. The empirical evidence against that belief has been overwhelming, from the immediate turn of the rational French Revolution to murderous Terror to horrors of the First World War, scientific endorsement of genocide in the name of eugenics and the deaths of hundreds of millions under the “scientific socialism” of Stalin and Mao. Nonetheless, the Progressive movement in the late XIXth century – perhaps lacking the XXth century’s additional proofs of Original Sin -- retained the belief that all social and economic ills could be cured if only experts were put in control of the levers of policy and economy. This was the origin of…
- Reflections on the Fourth July 7, 2021 by W. David Montgomery - By W. David Montgomery On this day in 1776, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence. That statement explained the reasons why the 13 colonies at war with Great Britain considered themselves to be independent, sovereign states. For most of us for most of our lives, the second sentence “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” has been a clear statement of what makes America exceptional. The men who wrote the Declaration and led the war against the King of England were all white and generally prosperous. Now, they, and the Declaration itself, are vilified by some, including a member of the U.S. House of Representatives who tweeted “When they say that the 4th of July is about American freedom, remember this: the freedom they’re referring to is for white people. This land is stolen land and Black people still aren’t free.” Now some crazies want to remove murals depicting their momentous actions from the Capitol rotunda. Apparently the National Archives created a “Racism Task Force.” It was headed, typically, by the Director of Office of Equal Employment Opportunity…
- Thinking About Things: The Present Ambiguity of July 4th, the Rise of China as the CCP Hits 100, the Decline of the United States as a Serious Power, and the Politics of Everything. July 7, 2021 by John DeQ. Briggs - By John DeQ Briggs At the confluence of the 245th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the Chinese Communist Party we seem to be living under the ancient Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times. Who would have thought that half of the population of the United States would now be viewing the July 4 holiday as a holiday not to celebrate, but to be embarrassed about. The Founding Fathers and everybody associated with them have been condemned by much of the country, not just in academia but in the halls of government too, as white racists or worse. Government buildings, especially the US capital’s Rotunda, are candidates for being emptied of their portraits, their statues, and their busts. The Founding Fathers are increasingly persona non grata in public spaces, to be replaced by new aacceptable symbols of current progressive ideology that would turn all public spaces into “safe spaces” monitored by a supposedly benign government much in the way that preschool classes are monitored by supposedly benign teachers. Our students are increasingly taught to be ashamed of their country and its founders and, similarly, ashamed of their own whiteness. Like homosexuality decades ago, whiteness is now like a disease…
