Everyone has ganged up on the Germans for demanding austerity in the southern European economies that they are called upon to bail out, and President Obama enjoined the Group of Eight summit this weekend to focus on growth and jobs instead of austerity. Obama lined up with the new French Socialist President Francois Hollande to beat up Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Germans aren’t too popular in Greece at the moment. Two thugs beat up a Dutch tourist in Greece last week. He protested that he wasn’t German, but Dutch, and the thugs said, “Close enough.”  A joke has a German getting off the plane in Athens; when the immigration officer asks “Occupation?,” he answers, “Nein, vacation.” It’s quite unfair. I’m with Chancellor Merkel on this one.

The problem with Greece, Spain, Italy, and so forth is not that they lack fiscal stimulus (more government spending), but that stealing from the public till is their principal occupation. Germans are asking why they should reduce spending at home in order to spend more on their feckless southern neighbors. During decade 2000 to 2010, German unit labor costs  remained unchanged. But they rose  by 37% in Greece and by 30% in Italy and Spain. Southern Europe went into debt, in effect, to overpay workers. The Germans worked cheaper and harder (which is why Germany has nearly full employment). Spanish unemployment is at 25%.

What do you with a country where a third of economic activity is off the books? According to the World Bank, the proportion varies from 60% in Zimbabwe and Peru to 6%-8% in the USA and Canada. Italy and Greece are just below 30%.

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Why invent a new religion? Robert Spencer’s excellent new book Did Mohammed Exist? collates recent historical research questioning the existence of the historical Mohammed, much of it previously not accessible to a lay American audience. This is a dangerous thing to do, and a courageous one.

Some years ago I chided Spencer for giving the Koran too much credibility;  more important than the nasty things one finds in the Koran, I argued, are two questions: “1) Mohammed may never have existed, and 2) If he existed, he may have had nothing to do with the Koran, which well might be an 8th- or 9th-century compilation.” Spencer’s present book will be translated into major Muslim languages and published on the Internet, according to Daniel Pipes. That is an important and welcome development.

This point was made eloquently last year by the Georgetown University political philosopher Fr. James Schall, who argued, “The fragility of Islam, as I see it, lies in a sudden realization of the ambiguity of the text of the Koran. Is it what it claims to be? Islam is weak militarily. It is strong in social cohesion, often using severe moral and physical sanctions. But the grounding and unity of its basic document are highly suspect. Once this becomes clear, Islam may be as fragile as communism.” Koranic criticism, I have argued since 2003, is Islam’s Achilles’ Heel.

In his capacity as prosecuting attorney in the Mohammed hoax, Spencer has laid out means and opportunity. A bit more could be said about motive. Why invent a new religion? There have been efforts since the 18th century to recast Moses as a renegade Egyptian priest of a sun-worshiping sort of monotheism who became the leader of the backward Hebrews. We find this canard repeated from Schiller’s essay “Moses’ Mission” to Freud’s 1938 Moses and Monotheism. But Judaism is not monotheism as such, but a human relationship with an infinite God who loves and suffers with his people. Vast amounts of scholarship show similarities between the language of the covenant in the Bible and earlier legal documents in the region, or parallelisms between Ugaritic hymns and the Psalms. These are interesting but have no direct bearing on the astonishing innovation of Jewish revelation: nowhere in earlier history do we hear of an infinite and eternal God who also has a personality and engages human beings with love.

Serious scholars no longer argue that Judaism is somehow descended from an Egyptian sun cult. No-one has yet explained, moreover, why an ancient tribe would invent a history that portrayed its ancestors as slaves, or itself as conquerors of a land rather than as its autochthonous and legitimate inhabitants. In short, there is neither a literary, nor an historical, nor an anthropological, nor an archaeological argument against the Jewish claim that the written and oral laws were given to Moses at Mt. Sinai.

Christianity proposes to extend the Jewish covenant to all of humankind. After countless academic lives have burned out in the “search for the historical Jesus,” no reputable scholar claims to be able to demonstrate that Jesus of Nazareth was a fiction. One can argue about the reliability of different accounts of Jesus, but not the existence of Jesus himself. The Christian doctrine of Jesus’ resurrection cannot be refuted. One believes it, or not.

But Islam is an entirely different matter. We have extensive archaeological evidence in the form of coins and inscriptions from the 7th century, and there is no mention of a new religion in any of them until 70 years after Mohammed’s supposed death, as Nevo and Koren showed in their 2003 book Crossroads to Islam. Two centuries go by before an account of Mohammed’s life is circulated. The Koran itself is evidently a compilation that draws on contemporary Jewish and Christian sources, in a language that often does not resemble Arabic.

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The topic will be Greece and the prospective breakup of the Euro. Schedules change, but that’s the plan as of now.

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Arianna Huffington, a liberal media prima donna and Internet purveyor of celebrity gossip, offers the silliest advice we have heard so far to the beleaguered people of Greece in today’s New York Times. Her missive sets a new high water mark for liberal stupidity, both for the author, and for the newspaper that chose to print it.

Greece should default on its foreign debt, she avers, like Argentina:

Argentina, which defaulted and restructured beginning in 2001, offers a point of comparison. The austerity crowd warned that Argentina would collapse if it stopped pegging the peso to the dollar and defaulted on its debt. There are many differences between Argentina and Greece. But Argentina’s default was followed by a few short months of economic crisis and then many years of steady economic growth — a dramatically different direction than the one Greece is now taking toward a potentially endless path of contraction that is destroying millions of lives and crippling the indomitable Greek spirit.

The trouble is that Greece is another banana republic without bananas. Argentina is a commodity exporter that won the lottery when commodity prices soared. In 2010 the country exported $68 billion worth of goods, mainly food, oil and metals, and imported $56 billion, with a trade surplus at about 3% of GDP. If you have a trade surplus, you don’t need the international lending market. You can pay cash.

Greece, by contrast, had a trade deficit in 2010 of $22 billion, equal to 7% of GDP. In 2011, both the deficit and GDP shrank, and the deficit remained at 6% of GDP.  If Greece defaults, it will be unable to borrow the 6% of GDP it requires to finance this deficit, and it will be reduced to cash-and-carry trade–which means that it will cut imports by the equivalent of 6% of GDP. It appears that arithmetic wasn’t on the syllabus when Mrs. Huffington went up to Cambridge.

Her encomium begins with a sentimental portrait of her self-sacrificing mother, and concludes:

Greece, like my mother, has always been devoted above all else to its children. When the future of those children is diminished, the future — and life — of the country will be diminished, too.

If only the Greeks still troubled to have children, Mrs. Huffington’s sentiments would have more resonance. Greek fertility (number of children per female) fell to only 1.28 in 2005, the rock bottom of the European pile.

Source: United Nations

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Prof. Bernard Lewis has just published a memoir which is as much a valedictory statement of his views as a reminiscence about a remarkable life; I review it today at the Jewish webzine The Tablet. Lewis has of course been denounced from the left (by the sulfurous Edward Said) as an “orientalist,” which used to mean scholar of Semitic languages but now means “neo-colonialist.” That is an absurd charge by an incompetent and mendacious scholar, but it ruined Middle Eastern studies in the politically correct (and Arab-funded) world of academia. From the right, he has been denounced as an “Arab apologist” by Pamela Geller and as a “Pied Piper of Islamic Confusion” by Andrew Bostom.

One should be cautious about attacking Prof. Lewis, whose analysis of Muslim rage did more to galvanize Western support for the idea of a war on terror than any other single source, and who drew more opprobrium from the academic left than any other personality. His optimism about Islamic democracy ultimately was misplaced, in my view, but should be understood in context. As I wrote in Tablet:

Bernard Lewis’ era was a better one than ours, buoyed by a sense that the victorious West had the power to set a successful example for societies that had lingered in backwardness. His generation went young to World War II and saw the Cold War through at the cusp of middle age. Lewis himself is one of the very last of a race of giants. We have the sorry task of managing the chaotic decline of the Muslim world. If Bernard Lewis speaks to us from a better time, he reminds us all the more poignantly that we had better move on and address the unpleasantness of our own.

He is surely not an Arab apologist, but has been accused of being a Turkish apologist, with some justification: his intellectual love affair with modern Turkey is the source of his stubborn belief that the Muslim world eventually can achieve something like modern democracy. The most glaring omission in his new book is Turkey’s return to Islamism:

Lewis, incidentally, has nothing to say about Turkey’s shift to Islamism under Erdoğan. That is his least pardonable omission. His hopes for the Muslim future were founded on his perception of Turkey’s modernization, the subject of his most lauded academic work. Lewis’ affection for the Turks pervades his new book; he recalls nostalgically a decadelong liaison with “an aristocratic Turkish lady” who presided over his Princeton dinner parties. He took an unpopular Turkophile position in declining to characterize the mass murder of Armenians during World War I as a “genocide.” Now that Turkey appears to have returned to political Islam under a government that routinely jails its critics, Lewis’ silence is disturbing.

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Machiavelli says somewhere that if you injure an enemy, you not do so unless you plan to inflict a severe injury, because men will avenge themselves for small injuries, but cannot avenge themselves for severe injuries. That suggests a two-part question: Is China an enemy? And do we want to injure China? If the answer to both these question is “yes” (although that would not be my answer), why should we administer pinpricks to the Chinese, as in the case of Chen Guangcheng?

Leave aside for the moment whether China is an enemy today. Russia was an enemy during the Cold War. The debate in America during the Cold War was not over reform in Russia, but over whether to strike a long-term deal with Russia, or to try to ruin Russia. Under the Reagan administration we set out to ruin Russia. As my old boss Norman A. Bailey, then special assistant to President Reagan for national security, explained the plan to me in 1982, we would run Russia into the ground by launching a massive military buildup which its weak economy couldn’t match. That was the centerpiece of American strategy to which we added intermediate-range missiles in Europe, guerrilla war in Afghanistan, counter-guerrilla war in Nicaragua and Angola, and other things.

Russia was in fact ruined. We ruined the country and we did it with malice aforethought. Communism collapsed. Male life expectancy fell from 64 years in 1985 to just 58 years in 2000. Alcoholism became the leading cause of death of Russian men, responsible for half the premature deaths of working-age Russians. Victory is not a pretty sight. In 1992, thousands of people gathered in Moscow in impromptu markets within earshot of the Kremlin to sell used clothing and other household items, to buy food. Pensioners with military medals begged in the streets. You know when a country is defeated when it sells its women, and the women of the former Soviet Union still sell themselves in huge numbers. If you want to know why the Russians are peevish towards the United States, it is because we set out to ruin them and succeeded. That’s war, and war is hell. If you don’t believe the Russians, ask people from the state of Georgia about General Sherman.

All right, class: Who wants to ruin China? If so, how do you propose to do it?

The silence speaks for itself. If we are not going to ruin China, we had better decide how we propose to live with China.

Let’s set out a few premises here. Our purpose is not to arrange a happy outcome for every sympathetic dissident in the world, but to ensure that America remains the dominant power in the world with the strength to press for the outcomes we want.

First, the Chinese Communist party is one of the cruelest governments in history. The one-child policy broke the cycle of political upheaval that plagued China for thousands of years. China has little arable land, and has always had more people than land, and the surplus people have formed a reservoir of potential rebels. This time China preemptively eliminated this reservoir.

Second, China has accomplished something no other country ever has: it has moved the equivalent of the population of the United States from rural poverty to urban prosperity in the space of a single generation. It is the largest migration in world history, and the most successful.

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The big news in Friday’s employment report was not the miserable 115,000 jobs the economy added in April, but the disappearance of 340,000 workers from the labor force. We haven’t seen unemployment on this scale since the Great Depression. Indeed, since Obama took office, the labor force participation rate has fallen from 66% to 63% as almost 5 million American adults stopped looking for work. About a fifth of working-age Americans aren’t working — and a fifth of all personal income is transfer payments. These numbers are astonishing and without precedent. If they continue, America will go bankrupt. Obama’s hope for re-election lies in dependency. No one could run for re-election as dogcatcher with this record — except for the cynical presumption that Americans have become so dependent on the state that they have lost hope of working again, and will vote for more state dependency.

If you’re not scared, you haven’t read the numbers. Here they are, courtesy of the St. Louis Fed’s excellent free data base.

Not since the 1970s has the overall labor force participation rate been this low. As women began entering the labor force in large numbers, the overall participation rose. Truly alarming, though, is the labor force participation rate for men:

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Tens of millions of young Chinese now study classical music, including an estimated 36 million pianists. Nothing builds attention span and analytic fortitude like classical music, and a nation that combines a vast amateur music culture with academic ambition will overwhelm the world with qualified and ambitious young minds.

China may fail; it might even descend into political chaos, to be sure — but then again, it might not. China’s massive and enthusiastic adoption of Western classical culture just might give it a world-dominating edge. There’s a difference between an engineer and an engineer who plays Bach. Higher mathematics as we know was incubated in music theory to begin with, as I explain in an essay in the April issue of First Things, “The Divine Music of Mathematics” (subscription required).

Asian dominance of classical music is nearly matched by the Asian presence in America’s top art schools. India does not give us classical musicians, but seems to aspire to dominate English fiction. What Americans deprecate as “highbrow culture” has become a mass presence in the lives of aspiring Asians on a scale that would have baffled the European elites who had an audience of thousands rather than millions. Our Philistinism could turn out to be our demise. America thrived in part because other countries failed and sent us their best minds along with their tired and poor. That’s not the sort of thing we should count on happening in the future.

That is why Fred Siegel’s diatribe in the April issue of Commentary, “How Highbrows Killed Culture,” makes such depressing reading.  He begins:

It is one of the foundational myths of contemporary liberalism: the idea that American culture in the 1950s was not only stifling in its banality but a subtle form of fascism that constituted a danger to the Republic. Whatever the excesses of the 1960s might have been, so the argument goes, that decade represented the necessary struggle to free America’s mind-damaged automatons from their captivity at the hands of the Lords of Conformity and Kitsch. And yet, from a remove of more than a half century, we can see that the 1950s were in fact a high point for American culture — a period when many in the vast middle class aspired to elevate their tastes and were given the means and opportunity to do so.

“Given the means and opportunity to do so,” indeed. The notion that evil highbrows undermined an inherently robust American culture is, well, spieβbürlicher Scheiβdreck. It’s true that NBC maintained its own symphony orchestra and paid Arturo Toscanini a superstar salary to conduct it for radio broadcasts, while today’s American orchestras can barely give their broadcasts away. But immigrants and their children dominated the classical music audience, including Jews and Italians on the coasts and Germans in the Midwest. The war produced a flowering of American culture in fields from art to rocketry because so many of Europe’s best thinkers sought refuge in the United States.

America has produced genius that tower above all other countries in only one field, namely politics: one can argue that the Federalist Papers are the greatest work of political theory ever penned, or that Abraham Lincoln is the supreme visionary among Western political leaders. But that is where it ends. Allan Bloom observed in The Closing of the American Mind (1988) that American intellectuals were singing from a cheat sheet, with bad English translations of German originals. Keynes said that the practical man of business is usually the mental slave of some defunct economist, and our practical politicians today are the mental slaves of defunct theorists.

It’s true, as Siegel complains, that leftists of all varieties derided American democracy and egalitarianism:

The Frankfurt School, led by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, theorized that the rough beast of popular fascism would come round at last in bourgeois America. Relying on an unholy blend of Freud and early Marx, the Frankfurt School writers averred that private life had ceased to be private since it had been colonized by the forces of industrialized leisure — movies, radio, TV, and comic books. These amusements were, they argued, the modern equivalent of the “bread and circuses” used to contain Rome’s plebeians as the empire descended into decadence. With their formidable dialectical skills, they had the intellectual dexterity to argue past the lack of evidence and insist that the jackboots were coming. Because the underlying reality of American life, dominated by hectoring fathers à la Freud, was intrinsically fascist, they argued, there was no need for an overt movement of the sort represented by the Nazis. Nazism was inevitable in America.

The whole vocabulary of the counterculture, as Allan Bloom explained two decades ago, is watered-down Nietzsche. Siegel is quite right to excoriate the Frankfurt School and other left-wing “highbrows.” The trouble is that conservative culture is dominated by European highbrows. What one might call the conservative mainstream consensus rests on two pillars: Natural Law theory as revived by Catholic neo-Thomism, and self-styled classical political rationalism as espoused by Leo Strauss, among others. What great homegrown Catholic philosopher stands beside de Lubac, Urs von Balthasar, not to mention Ratzinger? What American Straussian can claim the mantle of the elusive sage whose dissertation was supervised by Ernst Cassirer? What American Protestant can be compared to Karl Barth? Most of the main currents of American Judaism derive from individuals who studied at the University of Berlin in the 1920s or early 1930s: Joseph Soloveitchik, A.J. Heschel, Leo Baeck, not to mention Menachem Schneerson. To make sense of Strauss, moreover, one has to understand why he considered Heidegger the decisive mind of the 20th century (how may programs in “political philosophy” include instruction in Heidegger, which in turn requires study of Aristotle, Kant, Kierkegaard, and the Phenomenologists?). I don’t like Strauss at all, and rely instead on another German Jew, the theologian Franz Rosenzweig.

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UPDATE: See “The Horror and the Pita,” today’s “Spengler” essay in Asia Times Online, for updates and additional color on Egypt’s descent into chaos.

On April 28, Saudi Arabia closed its embassy and most consulates in Egypt following demonstrations and “attempts to storm and threaten the security and safety of Saudi and Egyptian employees, raising hostile slogans and violating the inviolability and sovereignty,” as the Saudis explained in recalling their ambassador from Cairo. This turn of events should come as no surprise. The Muslim Brotherhood hopes to use Egypt as a power base to replace the corrupt monarchies of the Persian Gulf with a modernized, quasi-Leninist breed of Islamic radicalism, and the Saudis have made public their alarm about the Muslim Brotherhood for months. As I wrote April 10 in this space, the Egyptian Islamists want economic chaos in order to consolidate their power at the street level and replace the doddering and feckless military government.

The proximate cause of the anti-Saudi demonstrations is the case of Ahmed el-Gezawi, an Egyptian lawyer, whom Saudi judges last week sentenced to a year in prison and 20 lashes for “insulting” Saudi King Abdullah. The Saudis claim that he was smuggling Xanax into the kingdom. Just who started the demonstrations against Saudi embassies and consulates is unclear, but the Muslim Brotherhood is holding a net to catch the fallout. As Reuters reported today,

In a statement, the Muslim Brotherhood’s political party said the protests at the Saudi embassy showed “the desire of Egyptians to preserve the dignity of their citizens in Arab states”.

Analysts point to the rise of the Brotherhood as a cause of Saudi concern about the direction of the post-Mubarak Egypt.

“It’s no secret that Saudi Arabia is very concerned about losing one of its closest Arab allies and the rise of the Brotherhood,” said Shadi Hamid, a political analyst at the Doha Brookings Center.

Attacking the Saudis drastically reduces Egypt’s chances of avoiding economic catastrophe, as we’ll explore after the page break.

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