Last month we explored the closed loops of the left via quotes from two very different authors, Arthur Koestler and Ann Coulter. To recap, we’ll start with the former:

A closed system has three peculiarities. Firstly, it claims to represent a truth of universal validity, capable of explaining all phenomena, and to have a cure for all that ails man. In the second place, it is a system which cannot be refuted by evidence, because all potentially damaging data are automatically processed and reinterpreted to make them fit the expected pattern. The processing is done by sophisticated methods of causistry, centered on axioms of great emotive power, and indifferent to the rules of common logic; it is a kind of Wonderland croquet, played with mobile hoops. In the third place, it is a system which invalidates criticism by shifting the argument to the subjective motivation of the critic, and deducing his motivation from the axioms of the system itself. The orthodox Freudian school in its early stages approximated a closed system; if you argued that for such and such reasons you doubted the existence of the so-called castration complex, the Freudian’s prompt answer was that your argument betrayed an unconscious resistance indicating that you yourself have a castration complex; you were caught in a vicious circle. Similarly, if you argued with a Stalinist that to make a pact with Hitler was not a nice thing to do he would explain that your bourgeois class-consciousness made you unable to understand the dialectics of history…In short, the closed system excludes the possibility of objective argument by two related proceedings: (a) facts are deprived of their value as evidence by scholastic processing; (b) objections are invalidated by shifting the argument to the personal motive behind the objection. This procedure is legitimate according to the closed system’s rules of the game which, however absurd they seem to the outsider, have a great coherence and inner consistency.

The atmosphere inside the closed system is highly charged; it is an emotional hothouse…The trained, “closed-minded” theologian, psychoanalyst, or Marxist can at any time make mincemeat of his “open-minded” adversary and thus prove the superiority of his system to the world and to himself.

– Arthur Koestler, via David Foster of the Chicago Boyz blog.

Much more recently, Ann Coulter wrote:

“If you can somehow force a liberal into a point- counterpoint argument, his retorts will bear no relation to what you’ve said — unless you were in fact talking about your looks, your age, your weight, your personal obsessions, or whether you are a fascist. In the famous liberal two-step, they leap from one idiotic point to the next, so you can never nail them. It’s like arguing with someone with Attention Deficit Disorder.”

– Coulter, as quoted in John Hawkins’ article at Townhall, “The 25 Best Quotes About Liberals.”

But how to break that cycle? At PJM today,  ex-Soviet immigrant Oleg Atbashian of the Peoples’ Cube blog employs the Socratic method to cut through the fog via a lengthy and fun series of  interrogatories. Don’t miss “Question Insanity: What to Ask Progressives.”

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“Christmas is now celebrated, however imperfectly, in most lands where the worst tyrants tried to eradicate it and its celebrants,” Mark Tooley writes at the American Spectator. But for much of the 20th century, that wasn’t the case:

Today, unsurprisingly, North Korea and Saudi Arabia actively suppress Christmas. But much of the rest of the world seems to have at least secular versions of the holiday. Although still officially communist, Chinese cities are more and more decorated with holiday trees and lights, partly reflecting the country’s growing economic integration with the West, partly reflecting the growing Christian population. Much of the world’s Christmas ornaments are now manufactured in China.The old Soviet Union tried to displace Christmas by highlighting New Year’s Day as the alternative Winter holiday. (In the Eastern Orthodox calendar, Christmas follows New Year’s.) Of course, Christmas outlasted Soviet communism. East European communism collapsed in 1989 in time for Christmas. Romania’s brutal tyrant Nicolae Ceauşescu and his equally brutish wife were tried and executed by the “people” on Christmas Day. Two years later, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned on Christmas Day, providentially ending the Soviet Union.

Less than two decades later, how easy to forget that the last century was dominated by totalitarian monster regimes like the Soviet Union. Soviet communism, Chinese communism, and German National Socialism together murdered more millions than all that century’s wars combined. The Nazis usurped Christmas by emphasizing its supposed pre-Christian pagan origins. This Christmas, we can celebrate, among so much else, despite the world’s current travails, that the great totalitarian murder machines are, for the most part, gone.

To get a sense of the Nazis warped Christmas to fit their ideology, check out this heavily-illustrated 2009 article at the London Daily Mail: “How Hitler’s Nazi propaganda machine tried to take Christ out of Christmas.”

Related: At Roger Kimball’s blog, it’s Christmas, Antonio Gramsci style:  “’Tis the Season to be Politically Correct.”

But then, isn’t that the case 24/7, 364 days a year?

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Kathy Shaidle writes:

Archaeologists 10,000 years from now will assume this guy started a new religion

Which would only be sort of true.

In more ways than one.

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“The 60′s were a leap in human consciousness. Mahatma Gandhi, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Che Guevara, Mother Teresa, they led a revolution of conscience. The Beatles, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix created revolution and evolution themes. The music was like Dali, with many colors and revolutionary ways. The youth of today must go there to find themselves.”

– Which just might be the first time in recent history that the names of Che Guevara and Mother Teresa were ever spoken back to back, and both positively.

Che would find the juxtaposition rather astonishing himself, since he’s been quoted as saying, “In fact, if Christ himself stood in my way, I, like Nietzsche, would not hesitate to squish him like a worm.

And Che would be immensely proud of the rock and roll-admiring “youth of today:”

Not that ignorance, willful or otherwise, is exactly rare on the topic of Cuba or Che Guevara. When Carlos Santana and Eric Burdon, (among many other rockers) smugly sport their elegant Che t-shirts they plug a regime that in the mid to late 60′s rounded up “roqueros” (Cuban rock & roll fans) and long hairs en masse, and herded them into prison camps for forced labor under a scorching sun. These young prisoners’ “counter-revolutionary crimes” often involved nothing more than listening to music by The Animals and Santana.

When Madonna camped it up in her Che outfit for the cover of her American Life CD, she plugged a regime that criminalized homosexuals and anything smacking of gay mannerisms. In the mid 60′s the crime of effeminate behavior got thousands of youths yanked off Cuba’s streets and parks by secret police and dumped in prison camps with “Work Will Make Men Out of You” in bold letters above the gate (the one at Auschwitz’ gate read: “Work Will Set You Free) and with machine gunners posted on the watchtowers. The initials for these camps were UMAP, not GULAG, but the conditions were identical.

No doubt though, the sanitary conditions at these “camps of concentration,” as these particular youth gatherings might be called, were (and are) rather reminiscent of Woodstock, so they’ve got that going for them.

(H/T: Big Hollywood)

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“The world’s newest Nobel Peace Prize winner remained unreachable in a Chinese prison Saturday, while his wife’s mobile phone was cut off and the authoritarian government continued to censor reports about democracy campaigner Liu Xiaobo’s honor.”

Thomas Friedman could not be reached for comment.

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Now’s the time at Ed Driscoll.com when we juxtapose!

Reuters, today:

BEIJING — The 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner’s wife Liu Xia was being forced to leave her home in Beijing by plainclothes police officers Friday, she told Reuters during a phone interview shortly after the prize was awarded.

The officers said they wanted to take Liu to the prison in Jinzhou in the northeastern province of Liaoning, where her husband Liu Xiaobo is being held in an apparent effort to prevent foreign reporters from speaking to her, she said.

“They are forcing me to leave Beijing,” said Liu as her brothers packed her bags with plainclothes police waiting for her outside.

“They want me to go to Liaoning to see Xiaobo. They want to distance me from the media,” she added.

Barack Obama on the campaign trail, August 2008:

Everybody’s watching what’s going on in Beijing right now with the Olympics. Think about the amount of money that China has spent on infrastructure. Their ports, their train systems, their airports are vastly the superior to us now, which means if you are a corporation deciding where to do business you’re starting to think, “Beijing looks like a pretty good option.”

Or, maybe it isn’t, unless you’re Obama or Thomas Friedman.

Update: On the other hand to give credit where it’s due, “Maybe the best moment of his presidency?”

(Concept H/T: SDA.)

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That’s Jimmie Bise’s great headline to his post on yesterday’s “One Nation” rally in DC. Perhaps John Edwards was right — on the left, there really are two nations: the USSR, which much of the signage yesterday referenced, and Woodstock Nation, as evidenced by the amount of trash left behind.

Power Line’s John Hinderaker adds two brief comments on yesterday’s yesterday’s event:

1) Four hundred organizations, including all the major labor unions, the NAACP, the Sierra Club, Code Pink, the Green Party, the Communist Party, Planned Parenthood and hundreds more were not able to turn out as many people as Glenn Beck.

Michael Barone has definitive visual proof of that, adding that “Suffice it to say that the crowd at Beck’s event was much, much larger. Plus he didn’t have to pay people to attend.”

2) One of the stated purposes of the gathering was to protest against lack of civility in public discourse. The program was opened by Ed Schultz.

The Left may be in even more disarray than we thought.

Not to mention that Schultz isn’t exactly the second coming of Broadway Joe when it comes to following through on blockbuster predictions.

Related: “Human Events Reporter Assaulted at Leftist Rally,” Jason Mattera writes:

A liberal protester at the “One Nation Working Together” march physically assaulted a HUMAN EVENTS reporter who was videotaping Rep. Charlie Rangel (D.-N.Y) at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., where the liberal rally took place.

The reporter, Emily Miller, was first hit from behind while she was taping Rangel as the Harlem congressman glad-handed supporters in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Miss Miller is heard on the video saying, “Please don’t hit me.” The protester proceeds to yell at the reporter, “Well get out of the way! What do you think this is? A–hole.” The activist was attempting to meet Rangel herself. Miss Miller continued videotaping the event, when suddenly the same unhinged protester lunged at her, hit her on the arm, and yelled, “Don’t take my picture.”

Video at link; more video at Gateway Pundit: “Stunner. High School Students Admit They’re Getting Class Credit to Attend Leftist One Nation Rally.”

HUMAN EVENTS Reporter Assaulted at Leftist Rally

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Recently, a group of indeterminate size assembled in Washington DC to demand a return to the past. Back to a government they could trust. They were true religious believers, uncomfortable with the challenges of the high-tech modern world they were trapped in:

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And as with many of these nostalgia-based gatherings, judging by the images in the above video, this was one “predominantly white crowd” — to coin a phrase.

(More photos from this gathering that you won’t see in their lapdog noise machine media online here.)

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“The Khmer Rouge did not slaughter one and a half million of their countrymen because the United States provoked them to do it. They did not do it because of their distinct Khmer history. They did it because they were communists, and that’s what communists do.”

– Claire Berlinski.

(H/T: The Anchoress.)

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It only took 92 years, but the Telegraph declares World War I is at an end:

The final payment of £59.5 million, writes off the crippling debt that was the price for one world war and laid the foundations for another.

Germany was forced to pay the reparations at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 as compensation to the war-ravaged nations of Belgium and France and to pay the Allies some of the costs of waging what was then the bloodiest conflict in history, leaving nearly ten million soldiers dead.

The initial sum agreed upon for war damages in 1919 was 226 billion Reichsmarks, a sum later reduced to 132 billion, £22 billion at the time.

The bill would have been settled much earlier had Adolf Hitler not reneged on reparations during his reign.

Hatred of the settlement agreed at Versailles, which crippled Germany as it tried to shape itself into a democracy following armistice, was of significant importance in propelling the Nazis to power.

But then, from the first communist nation to the rise of fascism to the map of the Middle East, to the Wilson retreads drafting the New Deal (“We planned in war!”) what part of the 20th century didn’t World War I shape? And from that perspective, the after effects of the Great War continue to ripple, even if the last reparation check has been written.

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A uniter, not a divider! Steve Green presents a modest proposal “to Annoy Christians and Witches Alike:”

I’ll say this right up front: Your friendly neighborhood VodkaPundit has lots of secondhand — and even a little firsthand — experience with modern witchcraft. That’s right: I’ve broken bread with witches, suffered them to live, and lived to tell the tale.

But first you need to know that “witchcraft” is a loaded word, and an inaccurate one, too. Ask your modern witch what she (or he) calls herself, and most likely she’ll tell you: Wicca.

During my northern California days, and even here in conservative southern Colorado, I’ve known quite a few Wiccans. And way back in the day, I even participated in a Samhain ritual — mostly out of curiosity, not conviction. I’ve also been to Catholic mass, Jewish passover seders, and more.  So, from the front lines of religious exploration, I can report to you that Samhain was quite lovely, and that Satan was never once observed, not even in the breach.

But I know what some folks reading this must be thinking: Satanism! Devil-worshippers! Witches!

Well, no — and I say that gently.

Modern Wicca has nothing to do with Satan. To look at a Wiccan ritual and see any kind of Satanism is to go to Wimbledon for a pro-wrestling fight. Sure, tennis and wrestling are both sports — but neither takes any heed of the other. It’s the same with Wicca and Satanism. Or to be more accurate: it’s the same with Wicca and Christianity. Wiccans neither worship nor recognize the Christian pantheon. So you can call Wicca “pro wrestling,” if you like. But it’s still tennis, and usually just as genteel.

For the uninformed, Wicca is a modern medley of ecology, herbalism, and somewhat squishy spiritualism, all wrapped up in the divine feminine mystique. (Yes, I’m cutting corners here, and my old Wicca friends and acquaintances would shudder at my description — and to them I apologize.) Inwardly, Wicca is ancient folk wisdom combined with modern touchy-feelyness. And outwardly, in my experience, Wicca is entirely harmless — except maybe to those looking for witches to burn.

So when I saw that old Bill Maher video of Christine O’Donnell talking about her dabbling days with “witchcraft” and blood and Satanism, well… I knew that in that video she was one of two things: Either she was full of it, or that she hadn’t been dealing with actual Wiccans. But whatever — no harm, no foul. If I were being held to account for all the claims I made when I was twenty, well, I’d blush bright red and leave the public scene forever.*

As an agnostic, I’m not taking any sides — or choosing any gods — in this debate. To each their own, “and harm ye none,” as any good Wiccan would tell you.

All of which is just a long way of saying: Relax.

If what O’Donnell said 11 years ago is true, then she wasn’t dealing with Wiccans, but with actual Satanists. And she has — inadvertently and through the “good” graces of Bill Maher — given Wiccans a platform to explain what they’re really all about. I would encourage them to do so.

And if O’Donnell is being disingenuous, then Wiccans have an even bigger case to make, and one heck of a juicy target to take down in the process.

Or as Kathy Shaidle wrote over the weekend, O’Donnell was going through a typical teenage phase. And O’Donnell has a few things going for her these days:

1. She was perceptive enough to joke this weekend:

Delaware Republican Senate nominee Christine O’Donnell responded to old clips that surfaced over the weekend where she said she had once “dabbled in witchcraft,” clarifying at a GOP picnic in Delaware Sunday, “I was in high school, how many of you didn’t hang out with questionable folks in high school? But no, There’s been no witchcraft since, if there was, Karl Rove would be a supporter.”

Which is much wittier line than anything Al Franken ever wrote. Which brings us to…

2. O’Donnell is not Al Franken, and if his local constituents think he’s qualified to be a senator, then well, pretty much everybody is. And they are. See also, P.J. O’Rourke’s famous motto:

The founding fathers, in their wisdom, devised a method by which our republic can take 100 of its most prominent numskulls and keep them out of the private sector where they might do actual harm.

3. She’s not a bearded Marxist, so she also has that going for her.

4. She’s not Joe Biden, whom Delaware voters also thought was somehow qualified to be a senator.

Update: Still though, if O’Donnell has lost Wiccan-America….

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To paraphrase Groucho, quote one of the last of the Marxist brothers as saying he was misquoted:

Fidel Castro said Friday his recent comment that communist-led Cuba’s economic model does not work as badly understood and that what he really meant was that capitalism does not work.

Castro, speaking at the University of Havana, said his words had been misinterpreted by his interviewer, U.S. journalist Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic Monthly magazine, who quoted a U.S. analyst saying they indicated Castro now supports a smaller state role in the island’s Soviet-style economy.

Goldberg wrote in a blog on Wednesday that he asked Castro, 84, if Cuba’s model was still worth exporting to other countries.

“The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore,” Castro told him.

Castro confirmed that he said those words “without bitterness or concern.” But, he said, “the reality is that my response means exactly the opposite.”

“My idea, as the whole world knows, is that the capitalist system now doesn’t work either for the United States or the world, driving it from crisis to crisis, which are each time more serious.”

At age 84, it’s only a matter of time before Castro borrows another riff from Groucho, and sings the chorus from “Hello, I Must Be Going.” As with all of the obits the New York Times writes when ancient communists shuffle off this mortal coil, the Gray Lady’s obituary for Castro is guaranteed to be a masterpiece of performance art worthy of Groucho himself — and likely almost as funny, albeit unintentionally so.

Update: To borrow another classic Groucho riff, “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them…well, I have others.”

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That’s Iowahawk’s response to Fidel Castro only just now, figuring out, at an age slightly older than Yoda, that Castronomics is a bust:

HAVANA – Fidel Castro told a visiting American journalist that Cuba’s communist economic model doesn’t work, a rare comment on domestic affairs from a man who has conspicuously steered clear of local issues since stepping down four years ago.

The fact that things are not working efficiently on this cash-strapped Caribbean island is hardly news. Fidel’s brother Raul, the country’s president, has said the same thing repeatedly. But the blunt assessment by the father of Cuba’s 1959 revolution is sure to raise eyebrows.

Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent for The Atlantic magazine, asked if Cuba’s economic system was still worth exporting to other countries, and Castro replied: “The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore” Goldberg wrote Wednesday in a post on his Atlantic blog.

On the other hand, Castro’s epiphany might just be proof that his universal education initiatives can actually produce results.

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“This inscription, said to be on the wall of a public restroom somewhere in China, gives us a reason to be thankful for one of the few freedoms we have left.”

On the other hand, Sheryl Crow’s use of toilet paper as propaganda continues to roll on, moving progress backwards, one sheet at a time.

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There’s a tremendous essay in the new issue of City Journal by Pascal Bruckner titled “Europe’s Guilty Conscience –Self-hatred is paralyzing the Continent” It’s brilliant writing, but also tremendously depressing, if not at all surprising, watching from afar Europe’s response to 9/11 and beyond:

Brooding over its past crimes (slavery, imperialism, fascism, communism), Europe sees its history as a series of murders and depredations that culminated in two global conflicts. The average European, male or female, is an extremely sensitive being, always ready to feel pity for the world’s sorrows and to take responsibility for them, always asking what the North can do for the South rather than asking what the South can do for itself. Those born after World War II are endowed with the certainty of belonging to the dregs of humanity, an execrable civilization that has dominated and pillaged most of the world for centuries in the name of the superiority of the white man. Since 9/11, for example, a majority of Europeans have felt, despite our sympathy for the victims, that the Americans got what they deserved. The same reasoning prevailed with respect to the terrorist attacks on Madrid in 2004 and on London in 2005, when many good souls, on both the right and the left, portrayed the attackers as unfortunate people protesting Europe’s insolent wealth, its aggression in Iraq or Afghanistan, or its way of life.

Europe has surely engendered monsters. But it has, at the same time, engendered the ideas that made it possible to slay monsters. European history is a succession of paradoxes: arbitrary feudal power gave rise to democracy; ecclesiastical oppression, to freedom of conscience; national rivalries, to the dream of a supranational community; overseas conquests, to anticolonialism; and revolutionary ideologies, to the antitotalitarian movement. Europe sent armies, missionaries, and merchants to distant lands, but also invented anthropology, which is a way of seeing through others’ eyes, of standing at some distance from oneself in order to approach the stranger. The colonial adventure died of this fundamental contradiction: the subjection of continents to the laws of a mother country that at the same time taught its subjects the idea of a nation’s right to govern itself. In demanding independence, the colonies were applying to their masters the very rules that they had learned from them.

Since the time of the conquistadors, Europe has perfected the art of joining progress and cruelty. But a civilization responsible for the worst atrocities as well as the most sublime accomplishments cannot understand itself solely in terms of guilt. The suspicion that colors our most brilliant successes always risks degenerating into self-hatred and facile defeatism. We now live on self-denunciation, as if permanently indebted to the poor, the destitute, to immigrants—as if our only duty were expiation, endless expiation, restoring without limit what we had taken from humanity from the beginning. This wave of repentance spreads through our latitudes and our governments like an epidemic. An active conscience is a fine and healthy thing, of course. But contrition must not be limited to certain parties while innocence is accorded to anyone who claims to be persecuted.

The United States, despite its own faults, retains the capacity to combine self-criticism with self-affirmation, demonstrating a pride that we lack. But Europe’s worst enemy is Europe itself, with its penitential view of its past, its corrosive guilt, and a scrupulousness taken to the point of paralysis. How can we expect to be respected if we do not respect ourselves, if our media and our literature always depict us by our blackest traits? The truth is that Europeans do not like themselves, or at least do not like themselves enough to overcome their distaste and to show the kind of quasi-religious fervor for their culture that is so striking in Americans.

That’s just a sample; definitely read the whole thing. Though heed Andrew Stuttaford’s cautionary warning at the Corner:

It’s well worth reading, but do so with care. The topic is the sense of guilt that Europeans are meant to feel about their past, but, as I read on, it was impossible to avoid the conclusion that Professor Bruckner has succumbed to the temptation of assuming that the supposed values of Europe’s elites are those of the European in the street. In the age of the post-democratic EU, that’s an understandable mistake to make, but I still read lines like this with amazement:

. . . since the end of World War II, Europe has been tormented by a need to repent. Brooding over its past crimes (slavery, imperialism, fascism, communism), Europe sees its history as a series of murders and depredations that culminated in two global conflicts. The average European, male or female, is an extremely sensitive being, always ready to feel pity for the world’s sorrows and to take responsibility for them, always asking what the North can do for the South rather than asking what the South can do for itself. Those born after World War II are endowed with the certainty of belonging to the dregs of humanity, an execrable civilization that has dominated and pillaged most of the world for centuries in the name of the superiority of the white man.

As a description of what “average Europeans” think, this is close to nonsense. Of course, there are quite a few Europeans who feel or claim to feel the way that Professor Bruckner describes, but most of them belong to the continent’s governing class, a class that now spends a great deal of its time trying to convince its distinctly skeptical fellow citizens that they share the proudly proclaimed morality of their bien-pensant betters.

To be fair, Bruckner goes on to make a fine case showing how this sense of guilt (which he describes in more detail in the rest of the piece) is overdone, and how disastrous its consequences are becoming. Nevertheless, by missing the key distinction between the views of Europe’s elite and those of its people, he misses the way in which “guilt” is being used by the elite as a device to drain power (and justify draining power) from uncouth electorates and, of course, the nation-states that are, unforgivably, the reasonably authentic expressions of the populations that live within them.

Still, it sounds like the 1970s-vintage “punitive liberalism” that James Pierson once described in the Weekly Standard is very much alive and well and working overtime in the minds of European elites, as it is amongst of the many of those who make up America’s entrenched Ruling Class (to reference another recent magnum opus essay.)

In 2005, Jonah Goldberg wrote:

The ideas, assumptions and prejudices held by the statistically typical Democratic voter, according to the Pew study, are quite simply, European. Europeans believe in a strong social welfare state, for rich and poor alike. Europeans are cynical. They look askance—these days—on patriotic sentiment (hence the rush to form a new European nation). The church pews of Europe would make a great hideout for bank robbers since they’re always empty. The United Nations is, in the typical European’s worldview, the last best hope for mankind. From the death penalty to gay marriage, the more similar you are to a typical European in your political and social outlook, the more likely you are to be a Democrat.

How much of America’s punitive liberalism was an offshoot of this sort of Euro-nihilism? And for elites, academics, and those who presumably are making a more than reasonable wages, how can one live day to day in a country — or a continent — one loathes so painfully?

(Cross posted at Ricochet, where I’m guest-blogging this week.)

Related: Steve Green on “Old Europe’s Old Recipe for a Very Modern Failure.”

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“We didn’t fully understand the true horror of nuclear weapons until Richard Nixon annihilated North Vietnam.”

Wow, I had no idea the Linebacker II missions of 1972 were so devastating! But actually, this post asking “What if … Atom Bombs Weren’t Used” against Japan at the conclusion (funny how that worked out, huh?) of World War II is a nice piece of “What-if” writing from the Iconic Photos blog — complete with some pretty good what-if Photoshops to illustrate it:

In 1950, Japan was divided into North and South Japans with Tokyo itself jointly administered between the Soviet Union, China and the United States. In 1955, the Chiyoda Wall dissecting the Imperial Palace went up; in the years that followed, its importance was underlined in two famous presidential speeches made in front of it: Adlai Stevenson’s “Today we are all Japanese,” and Ronald Reagen’s “Mr. Gorbachev, Tear Down This Wall”, but back in 1955, so palpable were the fears that the Soviet Union would drive 20 miles down the 36th parallel delimitation line to invade Tokyo that the wall came as a relief.

The idea of using the atomic weapons seems ridiculous now, knowing as we do the atom’s perverse effects. But back in the 1950s, everyone entertained those ideas; Generals MacArthur and Le May nearly prevailed upon President Dewey to use them when the Soviets invaded Korea and Hungary and squashed revolts there. There were proposals to use nuclear weapons to shot down Russian satellites, to quell insurgants against American-supported dictators in South America, and to control weather. Senator Joseph MacCarthy of Wisconsin denounced Dewey as a red agent for his refusal to use them against the Russian fleet. Only with President Steveson’s gentle explanation after the Cuban Missile Crisis, did we finally come to terms with the dangers of what Oppenheimer called, “Destoryer of Worlds”. Even then, we didn’t fully understand the true horror of nuclear weapons until Richard Nixon annihilated North Vietnam.

To yearn nostalgically for the destruction of multiple Japanese cities is definitely a taboo, but it is always tempting to indulge in some alternative history. Atom bombs would undoubtably have ended the war before the Soviets joined it, and would have led to the American occupation of entire Japan, not just its southern parts. And without the constant anxieties about the Soviet presence in the Far East, America would not have gone into Vietnam. Without the costly war for Japan, American would have prevented the communist encroachments in China and East Europe. On the other hand, a Japan devastated by nuclear bombs and its population alienated by such inhumanity would not have warmed up to Americans occupiers who dropped the bombs. It is equally hard to imagine a modern futuristic Japan without the industrial centers in the south. But all these counterfactuals aside, this much is certain: despite its high human costs and less-than-satisfactory outcome, Operation Olympic was America’s finest hour.

As for the other half of great World War II what-ifs, Robert Harris has you more than covered.

(H/T: 5′F)

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Taken from this week’s edition of PJM Political, I interview Gary Bruce, the author of the new book from Oxford University Press, The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi. In this 19-minute long interview, Bruce, an associate professor of history at University of Waterloo in Ontario explains the inner workings of the secret police of the former East Germany in the 60th anniversary year of their founding. He’ll discuss researching in their labyrinthian Kafka-esque archives,  their complex web of informants, and the uneasy coexistence their surviving former members have with the now unified Germany.

Click here to listen.

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If you missed it on Sirius-XM today, click here to join host Steve Green of VodkaPundit.com for a look at Washington and beyond:

• Steve has Five Questions for James Lileks, the Bard of Jasperwood to get his take on the JournoList scandal, Sarah Palin’s “Refudiate” malapropism, and the shocking surprise to be revealed on Mad Men tomorrow!
• Glenn Reynolds interviews former Senator Dan Coats (R-IN), who’s running again this November.
• Allen Barton of PJTV, Don Watkins of the Ayn Rand Institute, and Terry Jones of Investor’s Business Daily on the recent Aspen Ideas Festival.
• Bill Whittle of PJTV on the future of commercial space flight.
• Ed Driscoll interviews Gary Bruce, author of the new Oxford University Press book, The Firm: the Inside Story of the Stasi. (This interview was heavily edited for time; the complete version can be heard here.)
• Produced by your humble narrator.

Click here to listen!

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Breaking “news” from the Onion:

LONDON—Officials announced this week that the country’s ongoing financial crisis would necessitate the closure of a mysterious seaside village operated by the British government since 1967. “In light of the current economic downturn, it is unwise to maintain this secret locale any longer,” said a man identified only as Number Two, referring to the bucolic village whose sole aim appeared to be the recovery of desirable information from former intelligence agents. “Plus, the cost of maintaining human chessboards, outdated penny- farthings, and our state-of-the-art escapee- retrieval sphere just proved too much. We would have closed this whole place down years ago had it not been for one particularly uncooperative resident.” The man refused to directly answer any questions about the village, instead using surreal imagery and oblique references before ending the press conference with a quiet and ominous “Be seeing you.”

In retrospect, I’m not sure how well it actually fit the show, but did The Prisoner have the coolest theme song, or what?

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Last fall, Theodore Dalrymple wrote a damning piece on Le Corbusier titled “The Architect as Totalitarian.” The fun started right at the opening sentence:

Le Corbusier was to architecture what Pol Pot was to social reform. In one sense, he had less excuse for his activities than Pol Pot: for unlike the Cambodian, he possessed great talent, even genius. Unfortunately, he turned his gifts to destructive ends, and it is no coincidence that he willingly served both Stalin and Vichy. Like Pol Pot, he wanted to start from Year Zero: before me, nothing; after me, everything. By their very presence, the raw-concrete-clad rectangular towers that obsessed him canceled out centuries of architecture. Hardly any town or city in Britain (to take just one nation) has not had its composition wrecked by architects and planners inspired by his ideas.

Writings about Le Corbusier often begin with an encomium to his importance, something like: “He was the most important architect of the twentieth century.” Friend and foe would agree with this judgment, but importance is, of course, morally and aesthetically ambiguous. After all, Lenin was one of the most important politicians of the twentieth century, but it was his influence on history, not his merits, that made him so: likewise Le Corbusier.

And then there’s Corbu’s own writing. He was extremely prolific self-promoter; or as Tom Wolfe quoted Frank Lloyd Wright in From Bauhaus to Our House, “We’ll, now that [Corbu's] finished one building, he’ll go write four books about it.”

(And boy, did he ever.)

But the problem is that “the Machine for Living In” was built by a man who was meshugeneh. Or as Eric E. Johnson, assistant professor of law at the University of North Dakota writes at the PrawfsBlog:

Recently, I’ve been taking a peek at the writings of Le Corbusier. He’s one of history’s most celebrated architects, and he has had a profound influence on the modern cityscape. He has designed buildings such as the Saddam Hussein Gymnasium in Iraq. These are buildings that don’t exactly exude warmth. Basically, Le Corbusier is the creative genius behind the concrete box.

What’s that? You’re not a fan? Well, you should know that Le Corbusier provided lengthy philosophical justification for his concrete-box style of building. Here is how he begins his argument in the book Toward a New Architecture:

The Engineer’s Aesthetic, and Architecture, are two things that march together and follow one from the other: the one being now at its full height, the other in an unhappy state of retrogression. The Engineer, inspired by the law of Economy and governed by mathematical calculation, puts us in accord with universal law. He achieves harmony. The Architect, by his arrangement of forms, realizes an order which is a pure creation of his spirit … he determines the various movements of our heart and our understanding; it is then that we experience the sense of beauty.

Here’s another passage:

Eradicate from your mind any hard and fast conceptions in regard to the dwelling-house and look at the question from an objective and critical angle, and you will inevitably arrive at the “House-Tool” the mass-production house, available for everyone, incomparably healthier than the old kind (and morally so too) and beautiful in the same sense that the working tools, familiar to us in our present existence, are beautiful. It will be beautiful, too, with the vitality that the artist’s sensibility can give to its strict and pure organism.

I’d quote more, but you’ve got a flavor for it: It sounds like a brief from one of those pro se litigants who is suing the president. If you’ve clerked, you definitely know what I’m talking about. In a word: CRAZY.

Sometimes you get the feeling that behind every lawsuit-against-the-president-pro-se brief, there’s an unsuccessful cult leader. That’s where Le Corbusier was different. He was not unsuccessful at all.

From the quoted material, you can see a central claim Le Corbusier is advancing here: My architecture is beautiful because I proved it is beautiful in writing. (A ranting, disconnected, pro-se-litigant-who-is-suing-the-president kind of writing, but that’s beside the point.)

An argument such as this one, if it thrives in the fine arts fields of literature or painting, can only do so much damage. But because we are literally overshadowed by the creations of architects through out our day, architecture has the potential to injure. And Le Corbusier’s style of architecture has damaged cityscapes the world over.

Governments, universities (law school’s included), and public housing authorities in the United States got hit especially hard by the brutalist architecture hysteria in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. People think lawyers are clever persuaders. But what about architects? How did they persuade people to actually erect such monstrosities? Gerry Spence, eat your heart out.

Philip Johnson was an American architect with a similar totalitarian bent, who admired Corbu sufficiently that he eventually “borrowed” his trademark thick owl-like black eyeglasses. Corbu wanted to build for the Soviets, and got to build (after his death) for Saddam Hussein. In the 1930s, Johnson had an even more murderous tyrant than Saddam he worshiped — and not from afar. A few years before Johnson’s death, Hilton Kramer quoted Marga Barr, the wife of Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art, where Johnson, as its first architectural director, would help to put Corbu and similar modernist European architects on the map in the 1930s:

In responding to difficult questions, Marga had a way of turning away for a few moments while she composed her thoughts and then facing her interlocutor with a very determined look. This is what she did that morning as she said to me: “I feel about Philip today the way I would feel about a beloved son who had gone into a life of crime.”

Perhaps Corbu was his own jailhouse attorney.

(H/T: Walter Olson)

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