Memorial Day weekend

For five years we have been lectured that George Bush ruined the trans-
Atlantic relationship. But now we see pro-American governments in both
France and Germany, and a radical change in attitudes from Denmark to
Holland to Italy. The truth is that the Europeans neither hated nor
loved Bill Clinton, whom they on occasion privately seethed at for not
exercising leadership, or George Bush who swaggered and talked tough
to them during the lead-up to Iraq and seemed to them to be rudely
unilateral. Instead, after getting their teen-age anger out, they are
starting to see that the United States did not fabricate Islamic
radicalism nor order them to let in and then not assimilate millions
of now angry Muslims.
For all the cheap shots, the European public is worried about
importing half their natural gas from Vladimir Putin, who now bullies
Eastern Europeans, former Soviet republics, and dissidents well beyond
his borders on the premise that his oil wealth and nukes ensure Europe
can't and won't do anything.
Europeans know they won't or can't stop the Iranians from getting a
nuke, but hope someone-that is, the United States-will. And from the
Spanish flight from Iraq after the Madrid bombing, the spectacle of
the British naval personnel in Iranian hands, and the continental
paralysis after the Danish cartoons and other serial Islamic affronts
to free expression, Europe knows that radical Islam is both dangerous
and has little respect for either European moral authority or force of
arms.

European Sobriety?

So it is they, not us, that are returning to sobriety in matters of
the trans-Atlantic relationship, and they are doing this not because
of affection for George Bush, but despite their anxiety about him. And
that is good news, since it suggests the warming exists apart from
personalities, and reminds us that if the so-called and much
deprecated "West" were ever to act in unison (the former British
commonwealth, Japan, the US, and continental Europe), then radical
Islam would simply have no chance against 8-900 million of the
planet's most productive, ingenious and democratic peoples.
At some point, European statesmen are going to bump into a great
truth: that they spend almost nothing on defense, but intrinsically
have access to the United States military, both by shared values, or
at least the memory of shared values, and the allegiance of the
American people to this now ridiculed, now archaic notion known as the
"West." All they have do is to occasionally show some warmth to the
United States, and we crazy American people whether in World War I,
II, the Cold War, or the war on terror, give our all to them-at no
cost. We sense that Merkle and Sarkozy and the majorities that elected
them, finally fear that they were reaching the point of American
exasperation at which the old ties were broken for good, adn Europe
was truly to be on its own, and thus pulled back-in time?

The Danger is Isolationism, not Preemption

If I were a European, Taiwanese, Saudi, or almost anyone else who
habitually complains about American presumptuousness, I would worry
that the American public is reverting to its (natural?) 1930s sort of
isolationism. Tired of cheap anti-Americanism, the burden of global
defense obligations, and the continual erosion of the dollar, they
wish to pull in their horns and let others in multilateral fashion
pick up the slack.
Perhaps the European rapid reaction force could respond to Estonia's
plight should Putin send in a punititive brigade. Maybe the UN could
provide the necessary deterrence to protect Taiwanese autonomy should
the island provoke mainland China to the point of invading.
No doubt the EU3-Britain, France, Germany-could warn Iran not to nuke
Israel-or else. These are not longer just parlor-game musings, but the
look of the world if the exhaustion of the American people is
reflected in retrenchment, best summed up by "These people are not
really worth it, so let them handle their own affairs." It would be a
very dangerous attitude to adopt, but one psychologically
understandable.

Revolutionary America

Globalization is mostly driven by the United States, whether defined
by the spread of the English language, crass advertising, the
Internet, American pop culture of rap, jeans and I-pods or worldwide
businesses like Starbucks and MacDonald's. A global sameness seems to
trample traditional cultures and appeal to the masses worldwide
despite lectures from their elites about the dangers of such American-
induced contamination.
This influence of the United States is not attributable to strategic
location like that enjoyed by a Germany or Iran. We don't have vast
oil reserves like a Saudi Arabia, or an enormous population such as
India or China.
Instead, it's what we do rather than what we have that attracts
others. Our radical Democratic culture of informality and
inclusiveness results in an unusually tolerant and secure society, in
which participation is open to all. Being an American can be like
playing at a cut-throat, madcap poker table, but it invites any to
play who are willing to ante up and risk their all.
We can see this dynamism not just by the flood of immigrants-America
takes more of them than all industrialized countries combined-but by
the nature of some of them. Those who are sometimes most publicly
critical of the United States, privately seem to like us a great deal.
Why else would the dictator of Pakistan, an Amal militia leader in
Lebanon, or a Turkish Islamist Prime Minister entrust their families
either to live in the United States or to go to school here? Only in
America can a Palestinian criticize the Hamas leadership, a Turkish
woman wear a scarf, or a female Saudi student date.
In terms of foreign policy, many of our troubles result not, as
charged, from imperialism, but from this very democratic fervor. Of
all the critiques of our experience in Iraq, few have pinpointed our
chief challenge: we extended one-man, one-vote and thereby empowered
the traditionally downtrodden, and denigrated Shiite population, to
the chagrin of Sunni elites in and outside of Iraq. It mattered little
that few of the Shiia were educated, or had any experience in
governance: in the naïve American sense, as free people born into the
world as equal as any others, they had a right to run or ruin their
own country.
By the same token, radical American egalitarianism is what terrifies
our Islamist enemies. Bin Laden-many of the terrorist's family were
living in the United States on September 11-knows the insidious
dangers of Americanization, both from his own wealthy youth spent
enjoying the high life, and the failure of his Sharia law to compete
with Spiderman for the attention of most of his flock.

China, Wave of the Future?

Other superpowers like India and China pose as third-world
revolutionary powers. But both are plagued by caste and rigid
political or class obstacles to full participation in their societies.
A Chinese can become a fully-accepted American citizen. A non-Chinese
American black, white, or Hispanic would never fully be accepted as
Chinese-even with mastery of the language and the formal acquisition
of Chinese citizenship.
Abroad China does not care from whom it buys or to whom it sells, and
hardly cares about promoting democracy abroad. In short, it is still
America that is the most radical, revolutionary, and destabilizing
nation of all-and thereby disliked for precisely the opposite reasons
that the Left proclaims.

What's Being Left Have to Do With It?

What, then, is the radical Left good for? Mostly psychological cover.
It is our version of the Athenian elite demagogue's dung on his boots
or Medieval indulgences or the Bible in the hand of the philandering
fundamentalist. Its rhetoric alone allows Edwards to enjoy his
mansion, Gore his jet, the Kennedys' their drink and drugs, Bill
Clinton his sex, and Soros his billions-and China its cutthroat
acquisitions abroad and its suppression at home. Proclaiming to be a
man of the people these days can cover almost anything from living
like 18th-century royalty to making the foreign policy of the United
States look downright saintly.

Postscript on last posting:

I am afraid that I got a lot of email about my rants about the brave
new world of multicultural, yuppie international business people, and
the pretensions that this new class of financial enterprenuer embraces
to hide his zest for profit. And I am afraid that I feel my thoughts
were too kind, rather than cruel. I don't mind graduate schools of
business. They do a lot of good in ensuring American competiveness.
But like John's Edward's haircuts and paid $50,000 dollar sermons on
poverty to gullible middle-class university students, we should not
take their claims seriously-of promoting either liberal education
(which I heard) or international brotherhood. And when they
pontificate, as I was lectured, that the "nation state is through",
one wonders which nation state protects their entire system of global
security, freedom of trade, and the rights of ships and planes to
navigate without fear of piracy or attack. Or is it the UN? World
Court? EU?

www.victorhanson.com

....and how is this related to soaring??? Ugh! I read the whole
frickin thing thinking there would be some tie to the global soaring
community.

The only thing I could come up with is a metaphor for a lot of "hot
air".


On May 27, 12:02 am, Slingsby wrote:
For five years we have been lectured that George Bush ruined the trans-
Atlantic relationship. But now we see pro-American governments in both
France and Germany, and a radical change in attitudes from Denmark to
Holland to Italy. The truth is that the Europeans neither hated nor
loved Bill Clinton, whom they on occasion privately seethed at for not
exercising leadership, or George Bush who swaggered and talked tough
to them during the lead-up to Iraq and seemed to them to be rudely
unilateral. Instead, after getting their teen-age anger out, they are
starting to see that the United States did not fabricate Islamic
radicalism nor order them to let in and then not assimilate millions
of now angry Muslims.
For all the cheap shots, the European public is worried about
importing half their natural gas from Vladimir Putin, who now bullies
Eastern Europeans, former Soviet republics, and dissidents well beyond
his borders on the premise that his oil wealth and nukes ensure Europe
can't and won't do anything.
Europeans know they won't or can't stop the Iranians from getting a
nuke, but hope someone-that is, the United States-will. And from the
Spanish flight from Iraq after the Madrid bombing, the spectacle of
the British naval personnel in Iranian hands, and the continental
paralysis after the Danish cartoons and other serial Islamic affronts
to free expression, Europe knows that radical Islam is both dangerous
and has little respect for either European moral authority or force of
arms.

European Sobriety?

So it is they, not us, that are returning to sobriety in matters of
the trans-Atlantic relationship, and they are doing this not because
of affection for George Bush, but despite their anxiety about him. And
that is good news, since it suggests the warming exists apart from
personalities, and reminds us that if the so-called and much
deprecated "West" were ever to act in unison (the former British
commonwealth, Japan, the US, and continental Europe), then radical
Islam would simply have no chance against 8-900 million of the
planet's most productive, ingenious and democratic peoples.
At some point, European statesmen are going to bump into a great
truth: that they spend almost nothing on defense, but intrinsically
have access to the United States military, both by shared values, or
at least the memory of shared values, and the allegiance of the
American people to this now ridiculed, now archaic notion known as the
"West." All they have do is to occasionally show some warmth to the
United States, and we crazy American people whether in World War I,
II, the Cold War, or the war on terror, give our all to them-at no
cost. We sense that Merkle and Sarkozy and the majorities that elected
them, finally fear that they were reaching the point of American
exasperation at which the old ties were broken for good, adn Europe
was truly to be on its own, and thus pulled back-in time?

The Danger is Isolationism, not Preemption

If I were a European, Taiwanese, Saudi, or almost anyone else who
habitually complains about American presumptuousness, I would worry
that the American public is reverting to its (natural?) 1930s sort of
isolationism. Tired of cheap anti-Americanism, the burden of global
defense obligations, and the continual erosion of the dollar, they
wish to pull in their horns and let others in multilateral fashion
pick up the slack.
Perhaps the European rapid reaction force could respond to Estonia's
plight should Putin send in a punititive brigade. Maybe the UN could
provide the necessary deterrence to protect Taiwanese autonomy should
the island provoke mainland China to the point of invading.
No doubt the EU3-Britain, France, Germany-could warn Iran not to nuke
Israel-or else. These are not longer just parlor-game musings, but the
look of the world if the exhaustion of the American people is
reflected in retrenchment, best summed up by "These people are not
really worth it, so let them handle their own affairs." It would be a
very dangerous attitude to adopt, but one psychologically
understandable.

Revolutionary America

Globalization is mostly driven by the United States, whether defined
by the spread of the English language, crass advertising, the
Internet, American pop culture of rap, jeans and I-pods or worldwide
businesses like Starbucks and MacDonald's. A global sameness seems to
trample traditional cultures and appeal to the masses worldwide
despite lectures from their elites about the dangers of such American-
induced contamination.
This influence of the United States is not attributable to strategic
location like that enjoyed by a Germany or Iran. We don't have vast
oil reserves like a Saudi Arabia, or an enormous population such as
India or China.
Instead, it's what we do rather than what we have that attracts
others. Our radical Democratic culture of informality and
inclusiveness results in an unusually tolerant and secure society, in
which participation is open to all. Being an American can be like
playing at a cut-throat, madcap poker table, but it invites any to
play who are willing to ante up and risk their all.
We can see this dynamism not just by the flood of immigrants-America
takes more of them than all industrialized countries combined-but by
the nature of some of them. Those who are sometimes most publicly
critical of the United States, privately seem to like us a great deal.
Why else would the dictator of Pakistan, an Amal militia leader in
Lebanon, or a Turkish Islamist Prime Minister entrust their families
either to live in the United States or to go to school here? Only in
America can a Palestinian criticize the Hamas leadership, a Turkish
woman wear a scarf, or a female Saudi student date.
In terms of foreign policy, many of our troubles result not, as
charged, from imperialism, but from this very democratic fervor. Of
all the critiques of our experience in Iraq, few have pinpointed our
chief challenge: we extended one-man, one-vote and thereby empowered
the traditionally downtrodden, and denigrated Shiite population, to
the chagrin of Sunni elites in and outside of Iraq. It mattered little
that few of the Shiia were educated, or had any experience in
governance: in the naïve American sense, as free people born into the
world as equal as any others, they had a right to run or ruin their
own country.
By the same token, radical American egalitarianism is what terrifies
our Islamist enemies. Bin Laden-many of the terrorist's family were
living in the United States on September 11-knows the insidious
dangers of Americanization, both from his own wealthy youth spent
enjoying the high life, and the failure of his Sharia law to compete
with Spiderman for the attention of most of his flock.

China, Wave of the Future?

Other superpowers like India and China pose as third-world
revolutionary powers. But both are plagued by caste and rigid
political or class obstacles to full participation in their societies.
A Chinese can become a fully-accepted American citizen. A non-Chinese
American black, white, or Hispanic would never fully be accepted as
Chinese-even with mastery of the language and the formal acquisition
of Chinese citizenship.
Abroad China does not care from whom it buys or to whom it sells, and
hardly cares about promoting democracy abroad. In short, it is still
America that is the most radical, revolutionary, and destabilizing
nation of all-and thereby disliked for precisely the opposite reasons
that the Left proclaims.

What's Being Left Have to Do With It?

What, then, is the radical Left good for? Mostly psychological cover.
It is our version of the Athenian elite demagogue's dung on his boots
or Medieval indulgences or the Bible in the hand of the philandering
fundamentalist. Its rhetoric alone allows Edwards to enjoy his
mansion, Gore his jet, the Kennedys' their drink and drugs, Bill
Clinton his sex, and Soros his billions-and China its cutthroat
acquisitions abroad and its suppression at home. Proclaiming to be a
man of the people these days can cover almost anything from living
like 18th-century royalty to making the foreign policy of the United
States look downright saintly.

Postscript on last posting:

I am afraid that I got a lot of email about my rants about the brave
new world of multicultural, yuppie international business people, and
the pretensions that this new class of financial enterprenuer embraces
to hide his zest for profit. And I am afraid that I feel my thoughts
were too kind, rather than cruel. I don't mind graduate schools of
business. They do a lot of good in ensuring American competiveness.
But like John's Edward's haircuts and paid $50,000 dollar sermons on
poverty to gullible middle-class university students, we should not
take their claims seriously-of promoting either liberal education
(which I heard) or international brotherhood. And when they
pontificate, as I was lectured, that the "nation state is through",
one wonders which nation state protects their entire system of global
security, freedom of trade, and the rights of ships and planes to
navigate without fear of piracy or attack. Or is it the UN? World
Court? EU?

www.victorhanson.com

wrote:

...and how is this related to soaring??? Ugh! I read the whole
frickin thing thinking there would be some tie to the global soaring
community.

[....]


So, why aren't you out soaring instead of reading USENET?



On May 27, 12:02 am, Slingsby wrote:

[....]

...as I was lectured, that the "nation state is through",
one wonders which nation state protects their entire system of global
security, freedom of trade, and the rights of ships and planes to
navigate without fear of piracy or attack. Or is it the UN? World
Court? EU?

www.victorhanson.com



Jack

Slingsby wrote:
For five years we have been lectured that George Bush ruined the trans-
Atlantic relationship.

The (bad) magician waves wand in his left hand to distract us from what
his right (very right) hand is doing. It's all about the oil dumbass.

Nothing a solar charged Antares can't solve. Now, where'd I put that
Lotto ticket....
;-)


Shawn

Slingsby wrote:
For five years we have been lectured that George Bush ruined the trans-
Atlantic relationship.

The (bad) magician waves a wand in his left hand to distract us from
what his right (very right) hand is doing.
It's all about the oil dumbass.

Nothing a solar charged Antares can't solve. Now, where'd I put that
Lotto ticket....
;-)


Shawn

On May 27, 10:26 am, Jack wrote:
wrote:
...and how is this related to soaring??? Ugh! I read the whole
frickin thing thinking there would be some tie to the global soaring
community.

[....]

So, why aren't you out soaring instead of reading USENET?

On May 27, 12:02 am, Slingsby wrote:

[....]

...as I was lectured, that the "nation state is through",
one wonders which nation state protects their entire system of global
security, freedom of trade, and the rights of ships and planes to
navigate without fear of piracy or attack. Or is it the UN? World
Court? EU?

www.victorhanson.com

Jack

Love of country is fine, but this is not the place, but since it's
been started...
George Bush reminds me of the movie 'Dave' - the president is in a
coma and a clueless look-alike has been substituted for public
appearances. When he appears in public he embarasses himself. Could
someone elected to the presidency be such a terrible public speaker?
The funniest public appearance was the one where he started dancing.
His advisors probably told him to appear more human, but instead, he
looked like an android with bad wiring. Is HE actually leading the
free world?
H. G. Welles's '1984' is becoming more of a reality every day. In the
U.S, and even more so in England, cameras will monitor all citizens'
movements, electronic id chips (implanted under the skin) will become
mandatory. All phone calls are already monitored. They can monitor
the location and movements of any one who owns a cell phone . 'Big
Brother' is watching and listening.
Let's not forget the imprisonment without charge or legal consul.
All this in the name of fighting terrorism. The danger is that we
loose our cival liberties permanantly. If the government can
'temporarily' ignore our cival liberties for any reason, we've already
lost some of that freedom that so many servicemen gave their lives
for, that we remember this memorial day.

wrote:

H. G. Welles's '1984' is becoming more of a reality every day. In the
U.S, and even more so in England, cameras will monitor all citizens'
movements, electronic id chips (implanted under the skin) will become
mandatory.

Whoa! My cat has one of those. Do you think they're listening? 8-O