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Andrew Roberts, author of The History of The English Speaking Peoples Since 1900 had an important op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor.
The English-speaking peoples of the world need to unite around their common heritage of values. And they need to sacrifice their naiveté about the true nature of war – and the losses that inevitably go with it. Otherwise, they will lose a titanic struggle with radical, totalitarian Islam.
The reason they are under such vicious attack – my home city of London came within minutes of losing up to 1,000 innocent people in an attempted nightclub bombing two weeks ago – is that they represent all that is most loathsome and terrifying for radical Islam.
Countries in which English is the primary language are culturally, politically, and militarily different from the rest of “the West.” They have never fallen prey to fascism or communism, nor were they (except for the Channel Islands) invaded.
They stand for modernity, religious and sexual toleration, capitalism, diversity, women’s rights, representative institutions – in a word, the future. This world cannot coexist with strict, public implementation of Islamic sharia law, let alone an all-powerful caliphate.
Those who still view this struggle as a mere police action against uncoordinated criminal elements, rather than as an existential war for the survival of their way of life, are blinding themselves to reality. …
William Kristol thinks W’s record is pretty good. Pickerhead agrees.
I suppose I’ll merely expose myself to harmless ridicule if I make the following assertion: George W. Bush‘s presidency will probably be a successful one.
Let’s step back from the unnecessary mistakes and the self-inflicted wounds that have characterized the Bush administration. Let’s look at the broad forest rather than the often unlovely trees. What do we see? First, no second terrorist attack on U.S. soil — not something we could have taken for granted. Second, a strong economy — also something that wasn’t inevitable.
And third, and most important, a war in Iraq that has been very difficult, but where — despite some confusion engendered by an almost meaningless “benchmark” report last week — we now seem to be on course to a successful outcome. …
Tech Central has an item on the recent BBC/Queen flap.
The clattering sound that was heard all round Britain at breakfast time last Wednesday was the sound of British jaws hitting breakfast tables, dressing tables and steering wheels as a commercial for a BBC program urged viewers to watch a program in which “the Queen storms out” of a photo session “in a huff.”
Given that, during the 60 years of her reign as head of state of Britain, Queen Elizabeth has never evinced the slightest sign of irritation – or indeed boredom which must, so many times, have been jaw-cracking as she listened to speeches at state banquets and official luncheons and endured thick-witted dining companions – never mind displeasure, the British simply didn’t believe it. A keen horsewoman and breeder of thoroughbreds, she never even allows herself to look vaguely disappointed in public when one of her horses loses.
Mouths also gaped round the British Commonwealth, for the Queen is also the Queen of Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand, Sri Lanka and around 50 other nations comprising around 2bn people in all. The workload, including traveling, endured by 81-year old Queen Elizabeth, whose devotion to her duty is legendary, would be daunting for someone 40 years younger. …
That will prepare the way for a long article (3,500 words) from the Daily Telegraph written by a former BBC producer. Samizdata tipped us to this.
… for nine years (1955-1964) I was part of this media liberal consensus. For six of those nine years I was working on Tonight, a nightly BBC current affairs television programme. My stint coincided almost exactly with Macmillan’s premiership, and I do not think my ex-colleagues would quibble if I said we were not exactly diehard supporters. But we were not just anti-Macmillan; we were anti-industry, anti-capitalism, anti-advertising, anti-selling, anti-profit, anti-patriotism, anti-monarchy, anti-Empire, anti-police, anti-armed forces, anti-bomb, anti-authority. Almost anything that made the world a freer, safer and more prosperous place, you name it, we were anti it.
It was (and is) essentially, though not exclusively, a graduate phenomenon. From time to time it finds an issue that strikes a chord with the broad mass of the nation, but in most respects it is wildly unrepresentative of national opinion. When the Queen Mother died the media liberal press dismissed it as an event of no particular importance, and were mortified to see the vast crowds lining the route for her funeral, and the great flood of national emotion that it released. …
… So how did it happen that this minority media liberal subculture managed to install itself as the principal interpreter of Britain’s institutions to the British public? And even more interestingly, where do its opinions and attitudes come from?
Some of the ingredients have a proud and ancient lineage: resistance to oppressive political and social authority, championship of the poor, the Factory Acts and the abolition of the slave trade, are golden threads that run though the fabric of British history. But there are four new factors which in my lifetime have brought about the changes which have shaped media liberalism, encouraged its spread, and significantly increased its influence and importance. …
… We saw ourselves as clever people in a stupid world, upright people in a corrupt world, compassionate people in a brutal world, libertarian people in an authoritarian world. We were not Marxists but accepted a lot of Marxist social analysis. Some people called us arrogant; looking back, I am afraid I cannot dispute the epithet.
We also had an almost complete ignorance of market economics. That ignorance is still there. Say ”Tesco” to a media liberal and the patellar reflex says, “Exploiting African farmers and driving out small shopkeepers”. The achievement of providing the range of goods, the competitive prices, the food quality, the speed of service and the ease of parking that attract millions of shoppers every day does not show up on the media liberal radar. …
… For a time it puzzled me that after 50 years of tumultuous change the media liberal attitudes could remain almost identical to those I shared in the 1950s. Then it gradually dawned on me: my BBC media liberalism was not a political philosophy, even less a political programme. It was an ideology based not on observation and deduction but on faith and doctrine. We were rather weak on facts and figures, on causes and consequences, and shied away from arguments about practicalities. If defeated on one point we just retreated to another; we did not change our beliefs. We were, of course, believers in democracy. The trouble was that our understanding of it was structurally simplistic and politically naïve. It did not go much further than one-adult-one-vote.
We ignored the whole truth, namely that modern Western civilisation stands on four pillars, and elected governments is only one of them. Equally important is the rule of law. The other two are economic: the right to own private property and the right to buy and sell your property, goods, services and labour. (Freedom of speech, worship, and association derive from them; with an elected government and the rule of law a nation can choose how much it wants of each). We never got this far with our analysis. The two economic freedoms led straight to the heresy of free enterprise capitalism – and yet without them any meaningful freedom is impossible. …
Corner post tells how the great left-wing conspiracy brought down Don Imus.
Remember the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, that loomed large in Hillary’s mind as a fabricator of obviously untrue rumors about her husband and an intern? As we have long known, Hillary’s most heartfelt complaints about the other side all arise about behavior of which she, personally, is guilty. The politics of destruction (who is more adept than the Clintons at that? Ask the Obama campaign for an update.) The Bush Administration’s ethical breaches? Any such pale in comparison to the Clintons’. The Scooter Libby commutation as a sign of lack of respect for the law? What about Bill’s 140 midnight pardons. And on…
This week, Front page magazine ran a fascinating expose of the connections between Hillary and the lead left wing media monitoring organization—Media Matters. It was Media Matters, you recall, that brought down Don Imus this past April, after a kid who was assigned to monitor his broadcasts heard the unfortunate “nappy headed ho’s” comment at dawn, and thought it might be useful. …
The Captain has some great posts. First on Lady Bird’s success in the broadcast business. Then on Rudy’s campaign. Finally on Thompson’s.