An interview, by Air & Space magazine.
[via Parabolic Arc]
Category Archives: History
Bill Safire, RIP
And remembering the great speech he wrote a little over forty years ago that fortunately never had to be given.
The End Of The Soviet Union
It should be apparent by now that Communism never died. The Soviet Union died. Being a Communist, or a neocommunist, is not an intellectual anachronism at all — it is quite the fashion in the academy and our other institutions. Does Charles not realize, for example, that Obama’s friend Bill Ayers — who proudly calls himself “a small ‘c’ communist” — was in 2008 elected vice president for curriculum of the American Education Research Association, the nation’s largest organization of education professors and researchers? (See Sol Stern’s profile of Ayers and education, here). I’m not sure “pathetic” is the right word, but what is a perilous intellectual anachronism is the belief that the communist threat ended 18 years ago.
The Jones incident, moreover, does not indicate that “we had a communist in the U.S. government.” To the contrary, as I argued last night, we have a U.S. government in which Van Jones was quite consciously selected because his views are representative of the president who made him the “green jobs czar.” Van Jones isn’t Alger Hiss. There’s nothing covert about him. He didn’t snooker Obama into bringing him aboard. He is who he is, and that’s why Obama wanted him. Having a Communist in that job was perfect since the “green jobs” initiative is an important part of the hard Left’s agenda to use environmentalism as an additional justification for usurping command of the economy.
In fact, the death of the Soviet Union has actually been a boon for neocommunists. Now, Obama and his fellow travelers like Jones, Ayers, Wright, Klonsky, and ACORN, can spout all the same totalitarian, anti-American, central-planning ideas the hard Left has always pushed, but in the abstract — under such mushy labels as “social justice” and “green jobs.” That is, they are liberated from having to defend the Soviet Empire, which, until 1991, was a living, breathing, concrete example of how horrific these ideas are when put in practice.
Yes, the superficially attractive (to those unfamiliar with human nature or economics) but ultimately disastrous idea lives on in the academy, and now in Washington. And our wonderful media, of course, thinks it’s no big deal, or are even attracted to it, not recognizing it for what it is.
Birds Of A Feather?
A picture has surfaced that may depict Hitler playing chess with Lenin. There is cause for skepticism, of course:
Historian Helen Rappaport, who has just written a book called “Conspirator: Lenin in Exile”, said the etching was probably a “glorious piece of fantasy”.
She said: “In 1909 Lenin was in France and there is no evidence that he was in Vienna.
“In October he went to Liege in Belgium and in November he went to Brussels. He would have visited Vienna before and after that year.
“He liked the place and went there because he travelled around Europe on trains, but he wouldn’t have been there long enough to meet a young Hitler.
“He was also as bald as a bat by 1894 with just hair on the sides of his head.
“And when in exile he was not known as Lenin and instead used a number of aliases.
“The person believed to be Lenin in the etching may well have been one of his revolutionary or Bolshevik associates who was misidentified.
“It may even have been an Austrian socialist with whom he associated in the Second International.
So, maybe it wasn’t Lenin. That right winger Adolf Hitler was hanging out and playing chess with some other socialist.
Seventy Years Ago
Germany invaded Poland, and started the latest, and hopefully last (if you don’t count the Yugoslavia breakup) European war. I don’t know if we’ve properly absorbed all the lessons from it. We seem to have already forgotten the lessons of the Cold War, which ended only two decades ago.
RIP, General Bond
I don’t know if he was the last Flying Tiger, but if he isn’t, there can’t be many left:
In September 1941, he left the Army Air Forces to volunteer for service in China as part of a secret program, the American Volunteer Group, nicknamed the Flying Tigers, under Gen. Claire Chenault. Made up of about 400 pilots and ground personnel and based in Burma, the Flying Tigers protected military supply routes between China and Burma and helped to get supplies to Chinese forces fighting the Japanese.
The group’s exploits became legend. Flying the P-40 aircraft, their fuselages painted with a toothsome tiger, the Flying Tigers were credited with shooting down 299 enemy planes and destroying 200 on the ground, even though the Japanese at times outnumbered Chenault’s group 15 to 1. On one day in late February 1942, the Flying Tigers downed 28 Japanese planes while losing none.
During one of the 1942 engagements, Gen. Bond destroyed three Japanese I-97 planes while piloting his P-40B. He was credited with nine kills in all.
Gen . Bond was shot down twice himself. On May 4, 1942, three Japanese fighters zeroed in on his plane over Pao-shan, China, and his plane and his clothing caught fire. Parachuting into a cemetery, he ran to a creek and was able to douse the flames. After spending a few weeks in a hospital, he returned to combat and was shot down again June 12, 1942. Despite head injuries — and shrapnel that he carried in his head the rest of his life — he was back in action a week later.
They probably still make them like that, but the opportunities to show it may be fewer. When I was a kid, I read Robert Scott’s God Is My Co-Pilot
Also, I’ve never been in a serious physical altercation in my life, and don’t know if I would have the physical courage to march into a battle. When I read accounts of warfare (particularly the Civil War or WW I) I recoil, and can’t imagine how they did it. I’m glad that we have people who do, though.
But I could always imagine strapping myself into an airplane and shooting down other airplanes. Getting shot down myself…not so much.
Auschwitz
A photoessay from Rachel Lucas:
You think of Auschwitz, or Poland in general after the Nazis invaded, and you think of bleakness and dreariness. Dark dank sickly winter and snow and death. I took that picture five minutes away from the camp, and there is little doubt in my mind that it looked generally the same way 65 or 70 years ago. The same green grass and the same bright sunshine. Those things didn’t disappear in 1939 and magically regenerate in 1945.
It cracks the heart open to fully comprehend that things like the large-scale industrial genocide that happened at Auschwitz-Birkenau took place in the middle of a perfectly normal world like we saw on that bus ride. It didn’t happen in hell, or in some bleak desert, or any permanently winter-bound nightmare landscape where you can explain away these things more easily. It was just in the middle of this gorgeous countryside.
It’s long, but well worth the read.
The President’s Reading List
I would have expected Das Kapital, myself, but I wish that he’d read Hayek, this time for comprehension. Actually, I think that he should have brought along a copy of HR3200, if he’s got that much free time for reading. But as commenters there note, this list is likely more for public consumption than what he’s actually going to be reading.
On a related note, Will Wilkinson asks an interesting question:
Here is a good debate proposition: It ought to be less embarrassing to have been influenced by Ayn Rand than by Karl Marx.
Yes, it ought to be. It’s really quite appalling that being a Marxist remains a sign of prestige in academia, instead of being met with opprobrium.
The Extinction Of A Generation
Harry Patch has joined his comrades in the poppy fields of Flanders.
Here’s a video from Iron Maiden that may or may not be appropriate to the occasion. Harry fought at Paschendale.
A Space Program For The Rest Of Us
I know, you’ve all given up, and just assumed that the piece in The New Atlantis was just another drug-addled Simberg fantasy of grandeur. That when I kept saying it would be Real Soon Now, that it was just vaporware. Well, Now has finally arrived.
As I wrote in an early draft, if extraterrestrial aliens had contacted the White House after the last lunar landing in 1972, and told the president that humans wouldn’t be allowed to move into space beyond earth orbit, and to pass the message on to his successors, but that the public was not to know this, it’s hard to imagine how policy actions would have been much different. Let’s Hope that this can finally Change with the new administration. That (unlike most of the rest of the agenda) would be Hope and Change that I could believe in.
[Late Friday update]
I want to thank everyone for the kudos, but I can’t accept it (did you know that kudos is not plural?) without acknowledging that this was a collaboration. Adam Keiper, the first and only (to date) editor of The New Atlantis, encouraged me to write this piece and, more importantly, played a key role in making it what it was. While we lost some things in editing (that I’ll rectify in a later Director’s Cut, and perhaps expand into a book), he focused it and almost certainly helped make it more influential in getting more to read it now, when we are at such a critical cusp of policy decisions.
But beyond that, he really helped write it. I was tired when I finished, and had a weak ending. The final paragraph, one of the best in it, if not the best (and it may be), is his.
And I’m grateful for the opportunity that he provided to get this message out, not just with The Path Not Taken five years ago (was it really that long?) but this and other pieces. The links in it are his, which indicates to me that he’s been following this topic closely. The most amazing thing is that this collaboration is a result of a snarky criticism by me of his own space-policy punditry, over half a decade ago. Rather than taking umbrage, he opened his mind to new possibilities, and the result is this (so far at least) collaborative magnum opus.
[Bumped]