For those who may have thought the Obama administration lacked real spine on responding to the 32-year old Iranian war against us, there is now a dramatic response (mild sarcasm alert).  The State Department has launched a “virtual Embassy” to Iran, a website with some useful material about the Iranian regime’s systematic distortion of America, and American policy towards Iran, a collection of old speeches and statements from Secretary of State Clinton and President Obama, links to Hillary herself doing TV interviews, and “news” from the Voice of America.

The best of it, aside from information about visas and student exchange programs (stuff that is easily available online in any event), comes in a section about “myths” about American policy, in which the “Embassy” takes pains to point out that the United States is aware of the repression of the Iranian people, and has sanctioned the officials guilty of it:

We have designated numerous Iranian officials and organizations for their responsibility in the serious human rights abuses carried out after the disputed 2009 elections.  The Iranian government is responsible for jailing, intimidating, and isolating Iran’s preeminent thinkers, filmmakers, lawyers, journalists and civil society activists, depriving the world of their contributions to the international community of ideas.

True enough, but there are two missing words in the list of regime abuses:  murdering and torturing.  And the “myths” carry on some of our unfortunate past errors, such as apologizing for our presumed sins in 1953, when we and the Brits supported millions of Iranians calling for the return of the shah and the removal of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeqh.  Indeed, both President Clinton and Secretary of State Albright both apologized for this.

And the number one myth the State Department is at such pains to knock down is the very idea that the United States wants to topple the regime in Tehran — which is what most Iranians want.  No way, they are told:  “Fact: U.S. policy is to support international norms, respecting both the rights and responsibilities of all nations.”

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Another week, another explosion at or near an Iranian military installation (or is it a nuclear research facility?).  As usual, the regime doesn’t know what to say.  The mullahcracy is so intensely divided that different “spokesmen” from different ministries/news outlets/cults/mafias put out different versions.  There was an explosion, or at least “the sound of an explosion.”  This goes out on the wires.  Then, no, there was no explosion, it was just the sound of our fierce military training.  Then again, yes, there was something, but not to worry, just go home and shut up.  And so it goes in the Islamic Republic of Iran, as our president so loves to call his intended international partners.

I’ve been reporting for many months about the ongoing sabotage of pipelines, refineries, military sites, Revolutionary Guards’ aircraft and trains, and groups of regime thugs. and have received the usual cold shoulder from publications “of record,” which is to say silent sneers.  But the tempo of attacks, most notably the monster blast a week ago that vaporized General Moghaddam and his foreign visitors (at least some of whom had taken the shuttle from Pyongyang to be with him on what they wrongly expected would be a happy day) led the Washington Post’s man in Tehran, Thomas Erdbrink, to note the phenomenon in a useful story entitled “Mysterious Explosions Pose Dilemma for Iranian leaders.”  He gives us a pretty good rundown of the explosions, and, living as he does in Tehran, gives ample space to regime “explanations” such as bad welding, western sanctions, and so forth.  Given the number of foreign journalists who have come to a bad end in Iran, you’d do the same.

Safe in London, on the other hand, Roger Cohen of the New York Times has no doubt about what’s happening:  his guy Obama is waging a secret war against the mullahs. “It would take tremendous naïveté,” he lectures the great unwashed,  “to believe these events are not the result of a covert American-Israeli drive to sabotage Iran’s efforts to develop a military nuclear capacity. An intense, well-funded cyberwar against Tehran is ongoing.”

So color me tremendously naive.  I would really love to believe Roger Cohen;  the very idea that Obama, at long last,  has ordered a response to the Iranian war against the west (totally unmentioned, needless to say), is delightful.  But I don’t believe it, and Cohen doesn’t give us any evidence for it, aside from intoning, as the mullahs themselves are so wont to do, that it’s the infidels and the Zionists.

Yes, there’s a cyberwar, but Revolutionary Guards generals don’t get vaporized by Stuxnet.  And Cohen’s judgment is so swayed by his fandom for Obama that it verges on the worst of the early Chris Matthews.  Try this, for example:

Foreign policy has been Obama’s strongest suit. He deserves great credit for killing Osama bin Laden, acting for the liberation of Libya, getting behind the Arab quest for freedom, winding down the war in Iraq, dealing repeated blows to Al Qaeda and restoring America’s battered image.

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Thanks to the ever-vigilant Italian press, in this case the Corriere della Sera,  we know exactly how the heirs of the Renaissance deal with dark days.  They treat it the way they cope with any other attack of ill fortune:  with magic gestures, objects, curses and careful attention to details that encourage bad luck.

The delightful (and sometimes not) details come from a new book on the superstitions of Italian VIPs, which contains warnings from the “Committee for the study of the Paranormal,” and a concluding note from Cardinal Ersilio Tonini.  They didn’t ask me for any input, even though my new book on Naples contains abundant material on magic, including the best methods for warding off attacks from enemies with evil eyes.

The Evil Eye features prominently in Italians’ methods to fend off misfortune, but there are other sources of bad luck, ranging from an assistant who wears green underpants, a member of the audience dressed in purple–an evident evil eyer–and a dinner party with exactly thirteen people at the table.

What to do?  One, a prominent astrophysicist, recites “Sh*t” three times.  Another, a Neapolitan politician, hides a golden braid under her own golden hair.  Another puts two big packages of kosher salt in her bath at least once a week, others make the symbol of what we would call “hook ‘em Horns” and cross their hands across their lower body.  Then there are those who always go on board an airplane with their left foot first, those who spit three times, and those who keep little statuettes of holy men and women (from Mother Teresa to Russian saints) and of course those who carry a cluster of cat hair…and finally an actress who touches her breast before going on the set.

I wonder what Mario Monti, the economist with the tremendous misfortune of becoming Prime Minister at a moment when Italy is teetering on the well-known abyss, has tucked away in his pockets to lure Dame Fortune to his side.

We’ll have to wait a bit for that book, but wouldn’t you love to read about the superstitions of world leaders?  Does Barack Obama have a little icon to rub at tough moments?  Does Nicolas Sarkozy curse three times?  Inquiring minds want to know, because such things are at least as important as leaders’ statements on the economy…

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This past weekend’s monster explosion at a Revolutionary Guards base outside Tehran has attracted the usual assortment of speculation and “informed information,” most of it sucked from the thumbs of pundits who feel they must write quickly.  There is still a scarcity of hard information, but I’m reasonably confident that:

–There were two explosions at the RG base at Bidganeh, one smaller, the other very large.

–At almost the same time, there was an explosion at another military base in the west, in Luristan.  The explosions seem to have been coordinated.

–The area around Bigdaneh is a military zone, with various facilities including two air fields, thus questions like “was it a munitions depot or a missile base?” are best answered “yes. Both.”

These attacks on the Guards — the symbol of the regime’s intensifying repression and slaughter of the Iranian people — are part of a pattern that includes explosions at refineries and pipelines. At the same time, strikes have been spreading (and no wonder;  up to 30,000 retired teachers have been waiting for their pensions for many months).  In short, people have lost patience, and the smaller of the two explosions at the RG base was aimed at Major General Hasan Tehrani Moghaddam, one of the most brutal of the country’s military leaders.

Contrary to the inevitable suspicions of the thumb-suckers (the Americans did it!  no, the Israelis did it!  no, it was an accident!), the operation was planned and carried out by Iranians from the opposition-that-does-not-exist.  They intended to demonstrate that no leader is safe from the people’s wrath (if that base can be penetrated, any place can, and if that man can be assassinated, anyone can), and that the opposition knows its gravediggers.

The second, larger, explosion was not planned, nor was the extremely high number of casualties (I am told that hundreds of people, including some “very important foreign dignitaries,” were blown up).  That second blast was apparently from a quantity of liquid fuel designed to extend the speed and accuracy of Iran’s Shahab-3 missile, the one the mullahs hope will some day carry a nuclear warhead.  My sources claim that the fuel caused the big white plume seen in the photographs.  The cloud may well have caused respiratory problems for the survivors.

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As usual, whenever the situation permits, the British press — led by the screaming meemies at the Financial Times — calls for the defenestration of Silvio Berlusconi.  “In the name of God and Italy, go!” the FT intones at the beleaguered PM.  A bit pretentious, yes, but then they’re the smartest newspaper in the world and so they consider themselves fully authorized to speak on behalf of the Almighty, and  of their favorite vacation spot.

You probably know that the Brits have long had a love/hate affair with Italy.  They love it because it’s so pretty, the weather is usually better than what they’ve got (although these days the weather in Italy is catastrophic, but never mind), and they hate it because it seems to them that the Italians have a lot more fun than they do.  As well they may, although Italy’s a lot tougher than the romantics suspect.  The campaign against Berlusconi has been raging for many years, and he’s been convicted of so many crimes in the British press (although, to the rage of his critics, not by Italian courts, whose judges are for the most part on a very different part of the political landscape from Berlusconi) that the very sight of him at international meetings provokes new outbursts.  The latest is of a piece with that tradition.

It has always seemed odd to me that so many self-proclaimed defenders of press freedom are so vitriolic about the man who may well have saved Italy’s media from total control by the country’s political parties.  It was Berlusconi who funded private tv way back in the seventies, at a time when every news broadcast on the official, state-owned networks was under party management, as they mostly remain today.  The liveliest and most independent newspaper in the country, il Foglio, is underwritten by the Berlusconi family.  Meanwhile, “his” TV broadcasts are chock full of anti-Berlusconi journalists.  So what, exactly, is their problem?

(Answer:  They don’t like competition).

And of course, going back to the Brits’ stereotype of the Italians, it’s obvious to a blind man that Berlusconi et. al. have a great deal more fun than the pols in London, although it’s certainly not for lack of trying, as we all know.  I will never forget a plaintive editorial in an Italian newspaper about the Profumo scandal in Great Britain, with its all-star cast of gorgeous spies and harlots, and the Italian editorialist moaned “the Brits and the Americans have endless sex scandals;  we’re supposed to be the Latin lovers and we haven’t had a decent sex scandal for years.”

Berlusconi solved that bit of national shame.

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“Do you believe it?”

I had just started talking to the spirit of James Jesus Angleton, the legendary chief of CIA’s counterintelligence, back when there were still a few folks who took such things seriously.  The Ouija board seemed to be in good shape, and his raspy, high-pitched voice, which more often than not sounded like a whisper, came through very clearly.

Obviously, I wanted to know what he thought about the alleged Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington.

JJA:  “I was going to ask you the same question.  After all, you’ve probably talked to somebody who actually knows something.  I’ve only got the news reports.”

ML:  “Yeah, but nobody’s saying a lot about the details of the case, since it’s going to trial and all…”

JJA:  “I get that.  But the Iranian guy apparently talked, didn’t he?”

ML:  “Yes, he did.  That’s pretty much standard for them, by the way.  I’m told it’s rare for Iranians to clam up.  However, now he’s pleaded ‘not guilty,’ so we’ll have to see how much of what he said will be admitted, and all that.”

JJA:  “Indeed.  But we’re not a jury, and it would seem on the face of it that if he confessed—as he seems to—then the government’s claim is certainly believable.”

ML:  “That was the opinion of a grand jury, anyway.”

JJA:  “Right-o.  But grand juries tend to believe prosecutors, as we know…”

ML:  “In fact, here in DC it is said that a good prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich.”

JJA:  “Chortle.”  And he started chortling, until that cough of his kicked in, and there was a pause.

ML:  “Got some water?”

JJA:  “I don’t think I’m supposed to talk about the liquid refreshment we get here, but it was delicious and effective.”

ML:  “I’m glad of that!  But getting back to the assassination plot, are you surprised at the number of experts who don’t believe it?”

JJA:  “Not only that;  I’m impressed at how much they think they know, even though none of them has seen anything approaching the full case.  There’s an undersecretary of the Treasury—David Cohen, I think his name is–running around describing the case to leaders of allied countries, and he seems to have made an impact with the Canadians and the French, both of whom have said that it justifies increased sanctions.”

ML:  “I agree.  And the Brits, as usual, were brought in early, trying to locate the Iranian co-conspirator, but without success. We’re in the usual funny situation concerning classified information, aren’t we?  Those who have seen it can’t talk about it, while those doing the talking haven’t seen it…”

JJA:  “That’s how it should be.”

ML:  “Somehow I knew you’d say exactly that.”

JJA:  “The other things that impress me are the claims that it couldn’t have been the Iranian Quds Force—that is, the foreign arm of the Revolutionary Guards—because they are so professional and smart, they couldn’t possibly have done this thing, which is unprofessional and stupid.”

ML:  “Yeah, very funny.  My friend and colleague Reuel Gerecht tried to disabuse some congressmen on this score.  Did you see it?  He said:

Well, let me tell you, the truth is Iranian operations are almost always sloppy. That’s the way they have been. Do not the mix up the notion that the operations are sloppy and therefore they cannot be lethal.

…I tracked Iranian operations all over the place in the 1980s and 1990s. Many of those operations succeeded – that is they killed individuals. Most of those operations, again, it didn’t take you very long to put all of the pieces together again. The Iranians really don’t hide all that much. That is the real truth.

JJA:  “Well said.  Furthermore, we know they have sent assassins to both North and South America.  Many Iranian leaders have been indicted for the bombings in Buenos Aires in ’93 and ’94—probably because the Argentines reneged on a promise of nuclear assistance to the mullahs—and then there’s the guy they sent to Canada, posing as a political and religious refugee, whom they enlisted to assassinate Salman Rushdie.”

ML:  “But an-ex CIA guy, Bruce Riedel, says that if they were working with someone in a drug cartel, that would be a major departure from their previous behavior.  He thinks it’s fishy, fishy, fishy.”

JJA:  “Really!  From what I hear, it’s well established that the Iranians are up to their necks in drug trafficking.  After all, they operate at the source, inside Afghanistan, and you’ve written many times that Supreme Leader Khamenei is a consumer of opium.  So they are in that network.  They couldn’t operate without joint ventures with mafias and drug cartels.  If there were better open reporting on Iran’s activities in Latin America, this would be common knowledge.”

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Take two headlines, one about Iraq, the other about Afghanistan.  The Iraqis told us to honor our signed agreement, and pull out all our troops by year’s end.  Over in Kabul, Karzai said he’d go to war against us if we attacked his neighbor, Pakistan.  It’s the same story in both places, but the real headline is the thirty-year-old one:  U.S. fails to come up with an Iran strategy.

It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?  You’re a Middle Eastern leader, and you’ve been working and fighting alongside the Americans.  The United States was magnificent on the battlefield, and you either won (as in Iraq) or were winning (Afghanistan) when the Americans announced they were leaving.  And they even set a date for their departure.  Where does that leave you?

It leaves you high and dry, at the mercy of the Iranians, who aren’t going away, and who, although defeated in one battle and bloodied in another, intend to keep on killing.  Maybe even you yourself.  Remember that Maliki in Baghdad used to be a member of an Iranian-sponsored terrorist organization called Dawa.  He knows all about the Iranians’ enthusiasm for slaughter, and he knows that if he’s uncooperative they won’t hesitate to blow him up.  And remember that Karzai in Kabul is being paid by the Iranians — he said so himself — and he, too, knows that there are lots of terrorists in his country who will kill him.  They already killed his brother, after all.

When the Americans are gone, who’s going to defend Maliki, Karzai, and the rest of them?  They are properly dubious about the capacity and loyalty of their own forces, and we’ve taught them they can’t rely on us.  Along come the mullahs with their protection racket:  “What a shame!  The Americans are leaving, as we told you all along.  But hey!  Everyone’s entitled to a mistake now and then.  And we’ll protect you much better than they did.  And it will only cost you…”

The reaction from the administration is predictably pathetic.  Having failed to convince the Iraqis to rewrite the Status of Forces Agreement they signed with Bush, Obama declared victory.  He proclaimed it a triumph of his diplomacy, and the fulfillment of a campaign promise.  As I remember it, he promised to run away right away, but no matter. At the same time, Defense Secretary Panetta acted as if it was just something we’d have to pretend to respect, while reopening talks that would lead to the return of American trainers.

And out there in diplofantasy land, our secretary of state, having overcome an attack of the giggles after being told of the butchering of Muammar Qaddafi, warned Iran that they’d better watch out, because our heroic diplomats weren’t about to leave.  Furthermore, we’ve got bases in the region. “Iran would be badly miscalculating if they did not look at the entire region and all of our presence in many countries in the region, both in bases, in training, with NATO allies, like Turkey…”

Nobody pointed out that one of our fiercest diplomats, Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford, had run back to Washington because of “threats to his safety.”  And Hillary’s reference to Turkey as a paradigm of tough American friends was particularly unfortunate, since the Turks neither talk nor act like allies.  They talk like anti-Americans.

Before I forget, let me remind you that anti-Americanism comes in two distinct versions.  The first is the one we’re most familiar with, the hatred of America because it is held to be arrogant, imperialistic, militaristic, and insensitive to the needs of the rest of the world.  The second, which is very much in play nowadays, is contempt for America because the Americans just aren’t up to the role history has assigned them:  global policeman.  There’s a lot of that out there, not without justification.

To be sure, as Obama’s fans will tell you, he approves the killing of lots of bad guys, of which Qaddafi is the latest case in point.  It’s an impressive list by now, and grows longer virtually every day.  And they insist that he’s brought down more tyrants than George W Bush and Dick Cheney ever dreamed of, and is calling for Assad to go.  Why is he not getting proper credit? they ask.  The answer’s pretty easy:  because in the three cases of regime change to date (Tunisia, Egypt and Libya), Obama arrived late to the fight, plainly dithered before making up his mind which side he was on, and never seemed to be “in charge,” without which he really isn’t entitled to ask for a medal.  And as for the assassination of terrorists, while it’s a better world without them, it’s not a fundamentally changed world, and Obama promised to change the world.  If you’re going to fight the terror network, you’re going to have to target headquarters, training camps, and home bases. He has yet to act effectively against the two surviving charter members of the Axis of Evil, Iran and Syria.  They have every reason to believe they can do most anything without fearing anything more than sanctions, headshakes, and tongue clucks.

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My new book, Virgil’s Golden Egg and Other Neapolitan Miracles, investigates why Neapolitans are so creative, and have been for centuries.  It’s a world’s record, I think.  The Florentine Renaissance was amazing, too, but it was largely over after two and a half centuries.  The Golden Age of Periclean Athens was less than one hundred years, as was the American “Truly Greatest Generation” of the War, the Constitution, and the consolidation of the state.  What accounts for explosions of creativity?  And what keeps it going?

I offer three suggestions for the Neapolitans’ extraordinary energy and creativity, and note that the personality type for which Naples is famous, is very much like ours.  We call them Triple-A types, and the psychologists have fancier names for them (hypomanics, for example), and we all know several.  You know, people just this side of manic-depression, people who aren’t likely to end up in a padded room, but you can’t tell for sure.  Think Steve Jobs, or Walt Disney or…well, put in your own favorites.  Naples is full of those people, and we can identify them scientifically;  they have a unique DNA.  It’s interesting that the countries with the greatest number of such people are all immigrant societies:  America, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Israel.

Naples has an added ingredient, as did New Orleans, as does Venice, as does Israel:  the people “know” that they are doomed, either because a terrible natural catastrophe is looming and can’t be avoided, or because there are so many murderous enemies that, sooner or later, death will be visited upon the place.  Doomed cities and doomed countries have a unique relationship with death, and (therefore, but you’ll have to read the book to get the particulars) are extraordinarily artistic, and imaginative.  There’s fabulous Neapolitan literature, art and music about Mount Vesuvius, the great volcano whose next explosion is, according to the vulcanologists, overdue.  When it comes, they say, it will totally destroy the city and a big area around it.

These remarks, which are considerably expanded in Virgil’s Golden Egg, came to mind today when a dear friend sent me this wonderful video from Tel Aviv, in which Italian opera is played and sung in a public market in Tel Aviv.  I cannot watch it without thinking of the enormous creative energy unleashed by the Israeli people, despite, or indeed because of, their surrounding doom.  No wonder they have such an amazing track record of scientific, literary, technological and scientific achievement.

History unfolds through paradox.  War is sure hell, but the looming presence of doom has creative consequences.

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I don’t think bloggers are supposed to confess bafflement, but I’m gonna do it:  I’m baffled.  I don’t get it.  Every time I think I’ve got a grip on this administration, they do something I just can’t deconstruct.  Sure, Obama is a lefty with the knowledge of a typical liberal arts undergrad (not so much). I get that.  And he’s now sealed into a very small compartment in which the handful of people he talks to tell him happy things like “all your decisions were the right ones.” No surprise there.  But look at the odd — maybe even weird — stories that have floated out of the White House of late.

The Uganda Adventure

He’s sending special operators to Uganda to fight against the Lord’s Resistance Army, which is itself a bizarre movement that combines shamanism, Christianity, animism and various other African cultish themes, and that slaughters people, most certainly including little children, in a war against the peoples of Uganda, Kenya, and the charmingly misnamed Democratic Republic of Congo.

Fine. I can understand that. But here’s the source of my bafflement: this operation was approved and even funded by Congress TWO YEARS AGO.  Yes, in 2009. Except that nothing happened. Until now.  I suppose there might be some “intelligence reporting” that suddenly got the attention of Petraeus, Panetta, Hillary, and Obama. East Africa is the wild east, with lots of Islamist terrorists running amok. Like in Somalia,  the Iranians are very busy in the wild east, as I’ve said before.  But nobody seemed to care. Until now. Why? Beats me.

Or maybe there’s some corrupt scheme involved. One of these days I’ll ask Angleton’s ghost if he has heard anything interesting. But since this little story trickled into the news feed late Friday, and since there hasn’t been much in the way of “investigative reporting,” I’m scratching around the margins of my baldness, wondering what is going on.  What took them two years to get to this?  And why don’t we hear much of anything about it?

The Assassination Plot

It’s not so much the plot itself that baffles me;  that’s just what Iran does, ask the Canadians, for example, who found that a poor immigrant was actually in cahoots with the regime back home, and was planning to carry out an assassination. I’m talking about the reaction. Just to keep things simple, have a look at two stories from al-Reuters. The first one  says that several government officials — that is, members of the Obama administration — have their doubts about the story. And the second one  says that leading members of Congress — including Republican critics — totally believe it and are worried that we’re going to war with Iran.

It looks a bit backwards, or upside-down to me.  Administration officials are supposed to back their leader, and the crowd on Capitol Hill is supposed to act “independently.”  Not here.  What’s going on?

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The “Occupiers” think they’re the new revolutionaries, but they’re not.  Indeed, they are farcical actors performing a failed drama on a stage resting on ignorance of history and a classic philosophical error best illuminated early in the last century by someone they’ve never heard of, Ludwig Wittgenstein.

The Occupiers, with their signs advocating “class war” and blaming the Jews for life’s intrinsic unfairness, bring to mind — at least to my aging mind — Karl Marx’s famous  line:  “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice…the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” The Occupiers are indeed farcical, and they go well beyond Hegel’s forecast.  They are not the second, but the umpteenth appearance of a bourgeois movement advocating the destruction of the bourgeoisie and the victory of the proletariat.

One of my wittiest friends was once the leader of the Youth Organization of the Italian Communist Party.  Like all good Communists, he fought zealously to bring the “working class” to power, until, one day, he had an epiphany.  Walking across an elegant piazza in Milano, he suddenly proclaimed “but there is no working class.”

As indeed there isn’t, not even in Europe, and less still in the United States. While it may once have existed in the sociological sense of the term (you could talk about people in certain kinds of work with certain levels of income and certain conditions of life), it never existed in the way Marx wanted:  the “workers” never thought of themselves that way. They never had “class consciousness” that would enable them to advance their “class interests.”

The myth of the working class existed in the minds of the intellectuals who conjured it up, and the revolutionaries who went to their doom trying to lead it.  Working-class revolution never succeeded anywhere. For a while, Marxist historians hailed the French Revolution — the early phases, anyway — as the model for such a thing, but in the past few decades even the greatest historian of the Revolution, Francois Furet, had the same sort of epiphany as my Italian Communist friend, and hardly any leading scholar believes in the myth any longer. Indeed, Furet came to see that the French Revolution was a very bad thing, all in all. Bad for the workers, bad for the bourgeoisie, bad for the French people.

Nonetheless, the myth lives on, with the farcical results we saw,  for example, in the streets of Paris in the summer of 1968. It damn near wrecked the city until de Gaulle’s troops rolled down the Champs Elysees and sent the advocates of “imagination in power” back to their classrooms and printing presses.

In America, the myth of socialist revolution has always been weak, and every serious student  of American history has pondered the question “why has there never been a serious socialist movement in the United States?” It’s an important question, because it highlights a fundamental difference between us and the Europeans.  The short consensus answer is:  “because Americanism embodies the ideals upon which the socialist movements are largely based,” in the sense of social justice and equality. Most Americans have never seen the need for social revolution because they believe they live in a revolutionary society that offers them a path to success and happiness.

The Occupiers are a spinoff of the European tradition, which is hardly surprising. Leftist American intellectuals — of the sort that gravitate to social activism or who enter government bureaucracy to impose on the people things that the people would reject if given a free choice — have always wanted the prestige that is enjoyed by their European counterparts, but which is generally denied American intellectuals. Marx would laugh at them.  Hegel wouldn’t pay them the slightest attention.

Finally, the Occupiers are caught in a linguistic trap best described by the early 20^th century British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. “What do all games have in common?” he asked in the Philosophical Investigations. And then he explored the various possible answers.  A winner and a loser?  No, because a boy throwing a ball against a wall and then catching it is playing a game.  Keeping score?  Not always.  And on and on.  Finally, he said, the question itself led us into a trap.  If we had instead asked the empirical question (“is there something that all games have in common?”),  we’d have stayed outside the trap and said something like “well yes, but it’s a sort of vague family resemblance.”

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