Thursday, February 06, 2003

PITY OUR CONSERVATIVE COLLEGE STUDENTS

David Horowitz has for some time been running a campaign to get some political balance onto US college and university campuses. But he has a long way to go. I have just received an email from a US college student that details the tripe he has to endure as part of his studies. The bias and inconsistency is so bad that it is actually painful for him. Students should not have to endure propaganda in lieu of scholarship. Read his email here. It has its funny side.

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VIN FERRARI

Vin Ferrari also has a good summary up about the oppression of a conservative student by a “liberal” academe. He has lots of pithy summaries up in fact. Like this one:

2 great liberal contradictions

Saddam Hussein doesn't have any weapons of mass destruction. We definitely shouldn't go in there because if we do he might use them.

Saddam Hussein has no connection to Al Qaeda, etc., because Saddam Hussein is hated by Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, etc. If we attack him, they will retaliate against us around the world.


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GERMANIC LIBERTIES AND PRUSSIA

Razib has posted an excellent but necessarily long post on whether our Anglospheric respect for individual liberties is of Christian or Germanic origin. He and I agree that Germanic origin maps respect for the individual a lot better than the prevalence of Christianity does.

Razib gives a rather more wide-ranging history lesson in support of his views than I have done (see the second half of my article here) so far but he seems to have more difficulty with the Prussian phenomenon than I do. Roughly, Prussia is the Northeastern part of Germany which, over the course of the 19th century, gradually came to dominate the whole of Germany. And the Prussian army had a famous tradition of requiring that its troops be Kadaver gehorsam (corpselike obedient) so how that squares with a Germanic respect for individual liberty does at first seem very difficult to explain indeed.

The point is, however, that, like many other groups, Germans encompass a wide variety of people within their ranks and Prussia is only one part of Germany (and in fact for most of its history it was only partly German -- including large numbers of Poles, Silesians and other non-Germans). Furthermore, the Prussian ascendancy was both very recent and very short-lived. It dates essentially from the French surrender at Sedan in 1870 and ended with the flight of the Kaiser to Holland in 1918 -- to be succeeeded by the very un-Prussian Weimar Republic. Those 48 years are undoubtedly of enormous significance to the world but all that they show essentially is that Prussian militarism had some initial success but ended up destroying itself.

Prior to Sedan, Germany was a disunited and decentralized agglomeration that generations of Prussians, French and others tried unsuccessfully to subdue. And after Sedan, unity of a sort was achieved and maintained only by the diplomatic genius of Bismarck. And after the remarkable restraint provided by Bismarck was dispensed with by the new Kaiser, the German Empire very quickly self-destructed -- in World War I. And Hitler’s attempt to revive it went the same way. So now Germany is back to something much more like what it always was -- a nation with a strongly decentralized power structure in the form of the various Land (State) governments. And that is of course exactly the same structure that certain other countries of mainly Germanic origin (the USA, Canada and Australia) have adopted too. And “devolution” is rapidly leading to a similar state of affairs in Britain as well.

In short, from a historical perspective, the Prussian ascendancy was no more than a short and atypical blip in the more than 2000 years of decentralized power in Germany so cannot possibly be the major source of any generalizations about Germany that we might wish to make.

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY

Today is Ronald Reagan’s birthday. I wish him as happy a birthday as is possible in his present reduced state. After what he did for his country and the world, no-one is more entitled to have his birthday honoured. There is a great photo of him here. One of his typical sayings:

"One legislator accused me of having a 19th century attitude on law and order. That is a totally false charge. I have an 18th century attitude. That is when the Founding Fathers made it clear that the safety of law abiding citizens should be one of government's primary concerns."


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MAJOR CENSORSHIP IN THE LEFTIST MEDIA

“Media bias” is not the right word for it. Jim Miller shows that what people get from the major U.S. newspapers is straight-out, old-fashioned censorship that would do a wartime censor proud. As Jim shows at length, if you had relied totally on such newspapers for your information about the world, you WOULD NEVER KNOW that the leaders of major European nations such as Britain, Poland, Spain and Italy had all signed a letter supporting the U.S. policy on Iraq. Infinitely less important and less newsworthy stories were run instead.

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ELSEWHERE

Michael Darby is keeping up his campaign of awareness about Zimbabwe with another firsthand report.

Chris Brand stresses the extent to which Hitler was a deceiver

Under the heading: Are Catholics ethically primitive?, the Wicked one has put up a major rant that seeks to explain the spinelessness of the French over Iraq as an outcome of their Catholicism. His concluding sentence: Chirac is an amoral, corrupt sleazeball.

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