George Melloan Editorial of The New York Sun | October 1, 2020
https://www.nysun.com/editorials/george-melloan/91283/ Just as we were sitting down to tap out an editorial on the homestretch of the presidential campaign, word reached us of the death of George Melloan. He had spent 54 years on the Wall Street Journal, including a long stretch as deputy editor of its editorial page. It included the climactic years of the Cold War, when we had the honor and joy of being edited by Melloan. He was one of the greatest newspapermen of his, or any, time. Continue Reading 
 An Incipient Mutiny By John Abbatiello, Strategy Bridge: “How should junior officers in the field deal with inept commanders and incompetent management from higher headquarters? How do military institutions organize, train, and equip forces employing new technologies? What is the role of the press in highlighting mismanagement of military organizations?" Can We Keep Our ‘Grey Zone’ Edge Over Our Enemies? By Seth Cropsey, The Hill: "Chinese fighter jets crossed the Taiwan Strait’s “mid-line,” the unofficial boundary between Taipei and Beijing, on Feb. 10. Since then, Chinese military exercises have become increasingly bellicose." Will the U.S. Really Go to Zero Troops in Afghanistan? By Jonathan Schroden, Lawfare: “. . . The agreement calls for the United States to withdraw all of its troops from Afghanistan within 14 months, but given Trump's sharp criticism of a similar, previous course of action in Iraq, it is unclear whether a full U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan will really happen." A Guide to North Korea’s Crisis Playbook By Khang Vu, The Diplomat: "The current “crisis” in inter-Korean relations follows a similar pattern from Pyongyang." What Should Come After Trump’s Failed China Policy? by Philip H. Gordon
Horns of a Dilemma Podcast: What’s the Role of America in American Foreign Policy? with Daniel Bessner, Fredrik Logevall, and  Sarah Stern on Reforming Title VI-Funded Middle East Studies Centers
by Gary C. Gambill June 1, 2020 https://www.meforum.org/60922/how-to-reform-middle-east-studies-at-american
Image: Transpolar Railway between Salekhard and Nadym, bult by gulag slave labor.
Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Long Overdue Curbs on U.S. Financial Investment in China Seem at Handby Alan Tonelson Democrats' Bid To Topple Trump Owes To Post-Reagan FailuresBy CONRAD BLACK, Special to the Sun | May 13, 2020 https://www.nysun.com/national/democrats-bid-to-topple-trump-owes-to-post-reagan/91130/ As the unprecedented effort of the elders of the Democratic Party to use the Justice Department and intelligence services to manipulate and then undo a presidential election collapses, their response is a study in the corruption of unchallenged incumbency. The reason the country is in its present impasse is inadequate post-Reagan presidential leadership. Continue Reading Paul Wolfowitz and Max Frost in an AEIdeas blog. China’s lack of transparency about even basic data, much less the source of this virus, is not just a question for the future. It may still affect present assessments about how best to fight this pandemic and whether China can be a trustworthy partner in doing so. Read more here. John Yoo and Ivana Stradner in a National Review op-ed. Seizing Chinese property would allow the US to use international law to make China pay for the COVID-19 pandemic. Continue here. FIXING THE IMPERIAL PRESIDENCY In a new Atlantic op-ed, Kori Schake argues that Trump’s hands-off approach to the coronavirus is in keeping with the founders’ original vision of a tightly constrained executive. But the imperial presidency should lose power over time--just not be abandoned abruptly when hundreds of thousands of lives are at risk. Finish here. 'Present at the Creation' -- the Sequel
Editorial of The New York Sun | April 12, 2020 https://www.nysun.com/editorials/present-at-the-creation-the-sequel/91089/ The best piece we've read during the current crisis is Henry Kissinger's warning that the corona pandemic "will forever alter the world order." Writing in the Wall Street Journal, the Nobel laureate acknowledges that America must protect its citizens from disease. Yet he reckons the time has already begun for "starting the urgent work of planning for a new epoch." Continue Reading   3,000-year-old talking mummy creates dispute in Egypt Egyptians are arguing among themselves on a new study that has recreated the voice of a 3,000-year-old mummified Egyptian priest. Egypt alarmed over Sudan's siding with Ethiopia in Nile water dispute
Sudan's rejection of an Arab League resolution supporting Cairo in negotiations with Addis Ababa over the filling of Ethiopia's Renaissance Dam has caused alarm in Egypt, already at odds with Ethiopia over construction of the multibillion dollar dam.
Ebola, SARS, AIDS, and something called Hendra killing horses and people in Australia - but those reports miss the big truth that such phenomena are part of a single pattern. The bugs that transmit these diseases share one thing: they originate in wild animals and pass to humans by a process called spillover.
 The Ghost of Dickens Past
By Cicero Bruce on Feb 06, 2020 09:00 pm Critics have well acquainted us with Charles Dickens the sentimentalist—lover of the oppressed, defender of childhood innocence, decrier of England’s industrial sweatshops. But seldom have they given readers a glimpse of the Dickens with whom Myron Magnet deals in “Dickens and the Social Order”: Dickens the philosophical traditionalist. Dickens and the Social Order, by ... Read in browser »  The Muslim World's Inferiority Complex by Raymond Ibrahim American Thinker February 1, 2020 https://www.meforum.org/60371/the-muslim-world-inferiority-complex Hassan Rahimpour Azghadi, a member of Iran’s Supreme Council for Cultural Revolution, said in a January 23, 2020 lecture aired on Ofogh TV (Iran) that Jihad and violence are a form of mercy to the world. Explaining that mercy for mankind had been the heart of Prophet Muhammad’s mission, Azghadi said that bloodshed through Jihad is merciful in the same way that surgery is merciful when compared to execution. – Middle East Media Research Institute Noah Rothman writes: America’s political class has never had enough faith in the voting public to level with them about what’s at stake. But Western interests in Syria did not cease to exist. Indeed, those interests seem increasingly imperiled by unabated violence and political chaos in the Levant. If Syria’s trajectory continues along its present course, Americans are going to be hearing a lot more about it. And soon. – Commentary Magazine
Dr. Aribert Heim worked at the Mauthausen concentration camp for only a few months in 1941 but left a devastating mark. According to the testimony of survivors, Heim euthanized patients with injections of gasoline into their hearts. He performed surgeries on otherwise healthy people. Some recalled prisoners' skulls set out on his desk to display perfect sets of teeth. Yet in the chaos of the postwar period, Heim was able to slip away from his dark past and establish himself as a reputable doctor and family man in the resort town of Baden-Baden. His story might have ended there, but for certain rare Germans who were unwilling to let Nazi war criminals go unpunished, among them a police investigator named Alfred Aedtner.
After Heim fled on a tip that he was about to be arrested, Aedtner turned finding him into an overriding obsession. His quest took him across Europe and across decades, and into a close alliance with legendary Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. The hunt for Heim became a powerful symbol of Germany's evolving attitude toward the sins of its past, which finally crested in a desire to see justice done at almost any cost. As late as 2009, the mystery of Heim's disappearance remained unsolved. Now, in The Eternal Nazi, Nicholas Kulish and Souad Mekhennet reveal for the first time how Aribert Heim evaded capture - living in a working-class neighborhood of Cairo, praying in Arabic, beloved by an adopted Muslim family - while inspiring a manhunt that outlived him by many years. It is a brilliant feat of historical detection that illuminates a nation's dramatic reckoning with the crimes of the Holocaust.
Just like us, medieval men and women worried about growing old, got blisters and indigestion, fell in love, and had children. And yet their lives were full of miraculous and richly metaphorical experiences radically different from our own, unfolding in a world where deadly wounds might be healed overnight by divine intervention, or where the heart of a king, plucked from his corpse, could be held aloft as a powerful symbol of political rule.
In this witty and unusual history, Jack Hartnell uncovers the fascinating ways in which people thought about, explored, and experienced their physical selves in the Middle Ages, from Constantinople to Cairo and Canterbury. Unfolding like a medieval pageant, and filled with saints, soldiers, caliphs, queens, monks and monstrous beasts, it throws light on the medieval body from head to toe - revealing the surprisingly sophisticated medical knowledge of the time. Bringing together medicine, art, music, politics, philosophy, religion, and social history, there is no better guide to what life was really like for the men and women who lived and died in the Middle Ages. Perfumed and decorated with gold, fetishized, or tortured, powerful even beyond death, these medieval bodies are not passive and buried away; they can still teach us what it means to be human.
In 1943, Winston Churchill and the British Empire needed millions of Indian troops, all of India's industrial output, and tons of Indian grain to support the Allied war effort. Such massive contributions were certain to trigger famine in India. Because Churchill believed that the fate of the British Empire hung in the balance, he proceeded, sacrificing millions of Indian lives in order to preserve what he held most dear. The result: the Bengal Famine of 1943-44, in which millions of villagers starved to death.
Relying on extensive archival research and first-hand interviews, Mukerjee weaves a rivetting narrative of Churchill's decisions to ratchet up the demands on India as the war unfolded, and to ignore the corpses piling up in the Bengali countryside. The hypocrisy, racism, and extreme economic conditions of two centuries of British colonial policy finally built to a head, leading Indians to fight for their independence in 1947. Few Americans know that World War II was won on the backs of these starving peasants; Mukerjee shows us a side of World War II to which we’ve been blind. We know what Hitler did to the Jews, what the Japanese did to the Chinese, what Stalin did to his own people. This tragedy has largely been neglected, until now. |
Introduction to Eric Hoffer's Classic "The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements".
FEMINISM: HOW WOMEN BETRAYED WOMEN
RESOLVING WORLD DISORDER
POLICY FRAMEWORK FOR MIDDLE EAST
HOW ISRAEL WINS
THE TREASON OF INTELLECTUALS: JULIEN BENDA
HAYEK & THE INTELLECTUALS
US STRATEGY FOR WINNING WORLD WAR IV
POLICY PAPERS FOR US GLOBAL ENGAGEMENT
COMPOSITION FOR THE LONG WAR
PROSPECT MAGAZINE
CategoriesArchives
October 2020
EXAMPLE OF SUCCESS IN U.S. FOREIGN POLICY ACE VENTURA
PAUL RAHE: REALISM IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS, SPARTA
CONSCIENCE & TEMPORAL AUTHORITY
SHAKESPEARE
POSITIVE LAW vs. CONSCIENCE
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