French and Germans Publish Yank-bashing History Text

For some time the French and the Germans have felt that they needed to get together to smooth over the differences they have had over the years. What better way than to write a high-school textbook together?

And what better way to cement Franco-German friendship than to fill the book with anti-American bile?

The textbook, published today, “was ordered in 2003 by President Chirac of France and Gerhard Schröder,” then Chancellor in Germany, according to Adam Sage in the London Times. Starting in 1945, the history soon gets to work on

the Cold War, where the US and the USSR are presented as broadly equivalent in moral terms.



Both were engaged in an arms race described as “the balance of terror” and both sought to “impose themselves by an omnipresent propaganda” that involved “gross exaggerations and simplifications”.

Actually the Germans, bless their hearts, didn’t really like all this Yank-bashing. They tried to tone things down a bit.

German historians had insisted upon softening the message with sentences such as: “Some people, notably in Germany, consider the US to be a power which defends democracy in a world where the UN is not always able or willing to do it.”

But not those those blood-curdling Gaulish warriors! They wouldn’t write a mamby-pamby sentence like that.

Still there’s a bright side to all the America-bashing. The next volume in the book deals with the 18th century up to 1945, during which the French spent a lot of time marching their armies through Germany—French-occupied Germany, as they call it in The Brothers Grimm. And they can end Volume II with the lovely spectacle of the French settling down contentedly to Nazi occupation after the shameful defeat of quarante.

Hey, it could have happened to anyone.

Let's Eliminate The "Dictator Dividend"

Washington State’s Senator Maria Cantwell has been in the forefront of demands to “make price gouging illegal.”

But private-sector oil companies, the evil spawn of John D. Rockefeller, own a mere 6 percent of crude oil production. The rest is owned by government-owned national oil companies. As Max Schulz in TCS Daily writes:

Red Caveney of the American Petroleum Institute noted, "Nearly 80 percent of the world's reserves are owned by these national oil companies and a mere 6 percent are controlled by investor-owned companies."

So how does Senator Cantwell propose to make the evil price gougers of OPEC illegal?

The problem goes beyond “price gouging” to what Max Boot calls a “dictator dividend.” Only one major oil-exporting country is a well-established democracy. The rest are mostly dictatorships. And the run-up in oil prices has delivered a $500 billion per year dividend to these fine global citizens.

This windfall helps to squelch liberal forces and entrench noxious dictators in such oil producers as Russia (which stands to make $115 billion more this year than in 2003) and Venezuela ($36 billion).

The problem with oil-exporting countries, as we have said here before, is that in resouce-rich nations the people are a cost. Only in advanced developed countries are the people a resource, where it pays the ruling elite to develop and enhance their skills and welfare so that they will generate more tax revenue for the elite to spend. In a country like Saudi Arabia, the people are just a cost. They reduce the amount of money available for the House of Saud to spend at the gaming tables of Europe and on prosletizing their Wahabism worldwide.

How can we reduce the dictator dividend? Everybody wants to raise taxes, but the better solution would be to drill, drill, and drill again. Let’s get all the oil out of the ground and then go onto the next energy resource. Could it be nuclear, or solar panels in space? Who cares? We are humans and we will figure it out.

But first of all, let’s scotch the dictator dividend.

National Charter Schools Week

Education of our children ought to be simple. It ought to be captured in the simple right of a parent to send their child to the school of their choice.

But Americans have been denied this simple human right. And it doesn’t seem as if they will get that right any time soon.

In the twilight of educational freedom good people struggle with the limited forms of educational freedom that are allowed in the unfree world of education. And this week is National Charter Schools Week.

In NRO Chester E. Finn takes a look at charter schools, the limited approach to education freedom that allows individual publicly-financed schools the license to escape some of the stultifying bureaucratic rules of the full metal jacket public school system.

Not surprisingly, Finn finds that the authorization and oversight of charter schools is the biggest problem area. (Why wouldn’t it be, considering the anomalous position of charter schools, half free and half slave?)

One good area is that authorizers are quick to close down a school that is failing. Usually, the failure is not academic, but organizational or financial.

But general oversight is not too good. Partly this arises from the fact that many authorizers of charter schools are public schools districts, and you can imagine that school districts are not the best when it comes to effective oversight and supervision.

[A]lmost half of all authorizers practice limited oversight of their schools, demonstrating scant concern either for school quality (e.g., not screening applicants rigorously and not holding schools accountable for student achievement, etc.) or for compliance (by ensuring fiduciary responsibility, enforcing federal laws, etc.).

Finn recommends expanding the use of independent charter school authorizing boards and taking the responsibility away from school districts.

They engage in chartering by choice, not coercion, have ample resources to draw from (financial and human), and can skillfully navigate the treacherous politics of charter authorizing.

But of course all this is mere bagatelle, moving the deck chairs on the you-know-what. The basic question remains.
Why are American parents denied the basic human right of sending their children to the school of their choice?

The evidence, from the distant past before the birth of the government public school, is that ordinary people can be trusted to supervise the education of their children. You can read all about it here.

How long, O Lord, how long?

US Special Forces are Out Kicking Butt in Iraq

Is Al Qaeda in trouble? Is it retreating from Iraq? That is what the StrategyPage guys are saying. Writes Harold C. Hutchison:

Despite the many brickbats of the media, al Qaeda has been defeated in Iraq, and is now retreating to lick its wounds where it can.

OK. That’s pretty direct. So how were they defeated?

In trying to defeat the United States, al Qaeda made three big mistakes: They fought the last information war, they underestimated the American leadership, and they also managed to anger the Iraqi people.

Another reason, according to this report on StrategyPage, is that the US special forces guys are kicking butt.

Under the Special Operations Command TF-145 is out every night following up on tips from informers.

The basic drill is for one of the four smaller Task Forces to grab a likely bit of info and quickly plan and execute a raid... The objective is to capture people alive, if possible, because interrogations and examination of documents starts immediately... Most of this takes place at night, and several raids may be carried out between dusk and dawn.

If old Osama bin Laden is still out there, I’d say this sort of thing doesn’t read too good. This isn’t a replay of Mogadishu. This is US soldiers out every night kicking butt.

There are still several well armed gangs and tribal militias in the "Sunni Triangle" of central Iraq, and some of these have been persuaded to make peace with the government in order to avoid a visit from TF 145. Iraqis are big fans of American action movies. And they note that a visit from TF 145 is just like the movies, except for the real bullets, blood and dead bodies.

We cannot know what the real situation is in Iraq. We must listen and learn and try to piece together what we read. At least we can be pretty sure about one thing. Our US Special Forces are out there making a difference. Thanks, fellas.

After 5/1, Let's Connect Some Dots

After 9/11 our Democratic friends were not too kind to the Bush administration. They said that Bush and his pals at Halliburton should have connected the dots and prevented the attack on the World Trade Center.

Never mind that Jamie Gorelick had forbidden the law enforcement and intelligence communities from talking to each other.

After 5/1 it is a matter of due diligence to try to connect some dots. If something nasty happens, we wouldn’t want the Democrats to blame conservative bloggers for betraying the nation by failing to connect the dots.

Is anyone connecting the dots between International A.N.S.W.E.R. organizing the demonstrations of the Day without Immigrants and International A.N.S.W.E.R. organizing the demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq, and reports of International A.N.S.W.E.R. officers taking trips to North Korea? Even the lefties at infoshop.org are concerned that their Peace efforts are being damaged by association with International A.N.S.W.E.R..

The Workers World Party [parent of International A.N.S.W.E.R.] is widely known to support regimes such as Kim Il Jong in North Korea. WWP leaders make yearly trips to North Korea.

International A.N.S.W.E.R. wouldn’t be trying to gin up street disturbances to prevent the US from dealing with the Iran Crisis would they?

Obviously, we average bears can’t really see all the dots, let alone connect them. But think about this. If you wanted to weaken the US military effort, what would be the best strategy? Foment unrest among the illegal aliens? Who knows?

White Guilt Goes Global

In his two thoughtful books, The Content of Our Character and A Dream Deferred, academic Shelby Steele has explained great disappointment of the post civil rights era. How was it possible that after the landmark Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s, the politics of race would turn sour? Steele explains that the politics of the United States must be understood in terms of white guilt.

It was not enough to just sign the Civil Rights Acts and go home. Left over from the euphoria was the shame of white oppression, the stain of centuries. That accumulation of white guilt had to be expiated.

And so we were led by guilty white liberals into the wilderness of racial preferences, affirmative action, and “diversity.”

As is so often the case, it turned out that the moral crusade of white expiation was not just good politics, but good business, and liberals found that they could build careers, not to mention power and the love of beautiful women, out of race politics. Indeed they have transformed the culture of the university completely in their great work of expiation.

Today in the United States the only thing that matters in an educational institution is race, class, gender, oppression, and victimization. In an era when barriers of race, class, and gender have been lowered to an extent never seen before in human history, the diversity activists declare that oppression and marginalization are the only reality.

In an article in OpinionJournal.com, Shelby Steele now takes his theory of white guilt global.

In the aftermath of global white colonialism and white imperialism, he explains, the powerful United States must expiate for the sins of the white race.

Today, the white West--like Germany after the Nazi defeat--lives in a kind of secular penitence.

...

So when America--the greatest embodiment of Western power--goes to war in Third World Iraq, it must also labor to dissociate that action from the great Western sin of imperialism.

That is why the weak and disorganized insurgency in Iraq can enjoy a certain success: the United States cannot bring the full force of its power to bear. It must fight two wars, one against the insurgency and one to prove itself free from the stain of white imperialism.

It is the same white guilt that makes the elite white Europeans flummoxed over the radicalized Moslems in their midst.

You can see where all this is going. It is going to get worse. It is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. It has to get worse before the white West finally flips and says: Enough already.

From a grand strategic point of view, it will probably help if India and China get singed by the Islamic conflagration so that when the tipping point comes they will tip onside.

Things will need to get worse before they get better because of the cultural power of the left in the West, the people who believe in white guilt instead of believing in God. It will not take argument and the give and take of debate to discredit the left and its discourse of power and oppression. It will take a disaster.

Although the West, the democratic capitalist West, is experienced world-wide as a white phenomenon, it is not. It is a middle-class phenomenon, the new world-historical culture that transcends race, tribe, religion, and political power. It champions the idea of free peoples serving each other in voluntary cooperation and trust under the rule of law. It champions the separation of powers in government, and the greater separation of powers in society between the political sector, the economic sector, and the moral/cultural sector.

It is still new, still confusing, still little understood. It is the first world culture that already in its structure and its ordering permits the flowering of a true cooperative world community.

And it will prevail.

Rush Pleads Not Guilty

On Friday Rush Limbaugh announced an agreement with the state attorney in Palm Beach County that ends the two-and-a-half year investigation into “doctor shopping.” Rush gets to plead not guilty to a single charge, and the state attorney, liberal Democrat Barry Kirschner, gets to pin a trophy up on the wall.

The lefty media seems to think that Rush has got special treatment. Here’s David Sweet in the Huffington Post.

All right, the world's most famous doctor shopper is free already on a $3K bond, having the good fortune to have ready access to the that kind of scratch... Lots of folks in that situation would have trouble meeting the bond... But not Rusty L., probably the wealthiest broadcaster in the hate-for-Jesus kingdom.

The good thing about lefties is that they haven’t a clue about Rush Limbaugh. Don’t know what he believes, and don’t know what he does for a living.

But in NRO they have a different take. Write Andrew C. McCarthy and Mark R. Levin:

A long, transparently politicized nightmare of an investigation is over for Rush Limbaugh today.

...

We are former federal government attorneys. We’ve collectively spent decades in law enforcement and believe passionately in its professional, non-political, non-partisan mission. Thus, it’s with outrage that we note that, rather than quietly dropping this embarrassment of an investigation, the state attorney, Barry Krischer — a politically active liberal Democrat — has insisted on filing a charge which he well knows will never be tried. Insisting, that is, on further media churning of an allegation of doctor-shopping that he’ll never prove.

As Dan Rather used to say in happier days: It goes with the territory. But as Hugh Hewitt writes:

Rush Limbaugh [is] the most innovative and successful radio talk show host in history, the most powerful brand on air from 1990 forward, and, as the story proves again, the new media voice most hated by the old media monopoly he -- almost single-handedly -- broke.

And that is why he is such an irresistible target for the left.