"Challenges"

 Yesterday was the 50^th anniversary of Earth Day, originally established to celebrate awareness of, and to help protect, our environment – still a message that resonates. Sadly, it has been usurped by politicians and other cranks who claim that climate change is caused solely by humans, like Al Gore, who used the issue to gain wealth and John Kerry, who uses it to maintain relevance.

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Challenges”

April 23, 2022

 

“If we want a society where truth can be pursued,

we need a system in which ideas can be expressed.”

                                                                                             Steven Pinker, Cognitive Psychologist, Harvard College

                                                                                             Phone interview with A.R. Hoffman, New York Sun

                                                                                              April 2022

 

In a letter to a friend in late 1777, after General Burgoyne’s loss at Saratoga, Adam Smith wrote: “There’s a great deal of ruin in a nation.” His point was that great nations can withstand defeats – that it takes a great deal of bungling to bring down a powerful and prosperous state. But he did not deny that nations, like empires, can and do collapse.

 

We face challenges, but is the United States confronting ruin that could imperil our way of life? In the April 11, 2022 issue of The Atlantic, Jonathon Haidt wrote an article titled “After Babel: How Social Media Dissolved the Mortar of Society and Made America Stupid.” “Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We were disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.” Mr. Haidt warned of abuses from social media, which he blamed for the lack of cohesiveness, civility and trust in society and in government, as well as being a risk to democracy. The answer, he believes, lies in three parts: “hardening” democratic institutions against extremist elements; providing more intense regulation of social media, and helping the next generation by letting children be children, encouraging more time for fun and less time on smart phones. While I agree with his suggestions about children, I have doubts as to the wisdom of “hardening” democratic institutions, and I am not a fan of more regulation. In addition, I was disappointed he did not spend more time on how social media impedes free speech, in legacy media, schools, universities and in board rooms

 

A world in a whirlwind needs an anchor to windward. For most of man’s history that was religion. Today, in the United States, just over 40% of Americans say religion plays an important role in their lives. In the past two hundred years, since the onset of Industrial Revolution, there have been unprecedented changes in the lives of our species. Life expectancy in 1800 was 43, about the same as it had been at the time of Christ. In the past two centuries, it has increased almost 100 percent, and the quality of our lives have improved in hundreds of ways: transportation, communication, agriculture, the environment, sanitation, education and healthcare. Consider improvements we take for granted – central heating, air conditioning, public transportation, on-line shopping and options in entertainment. Think of the knowledge we have access to today through the internet. For better and for worse, social media has been one of those changes. We must ask ourselves: Has innovation outstripped our species’ innate ability to adapt?

 

For thousands of years man could travel (on land) only on foot or by horse. Now there are an estimated one billion passenger cars serving a world-wide population of eight billion, and rockets take us into outer space. The world’s population has grown by a factor of eight since 1798 when Thomas Malthus published his theory that a geometric increase in population could not be sustained with an arithmetic increase in food supply. He was wrong on both counts. Birthrates declined and food production per acre increased. The average American lives longer, eats better and lives more comfortably than yesterday’s kings. Consider the changes in communication in just the past twenty years. Technological advancements have outpaced the ability of humans to evolve naturally, and religion, as a moral anchor, no longer plays the role it once did.

 

Social media challenges customs and traditions. But we also face other threats: The United States is a multiracial nation, yet we are condemned as being systemically racist by today’s progressives. In an April 18^thopinion for americagreatness.com, Victor Davis Hanson asked of America: “Can its various tribes and races unite around the Constitution?” My answers: If left alone from interfering progressives they would, but not when a cult of “social justice” drives decisions at schools, colleges and businesses. And not when we are seen as a nation of victims and victimizers. Woke progressives divide us based on race, ethnicity and gender, but not on class. Individualism has been sacrificed on an altar of collectivism. A black NBA millionaire is oppressed, while a white auto mechanic is an oppressor. A transgender cable TV anchor is a victim, while a white, cisgender nursing home aide is a victimizer. Globally, a peace-loving Israeli farmer is an aggressor, while a teenage Palestinian terrorist is a victim. Woke political correctness, with its mandate for diversity, equality and inclusion, threatens democracies.

 

In my opinion, the biggest challenge we face are threats to speech. Free speech encourages debate, thus slows decisions, an irritant for an impatient world. Social media, like Twitter, acts as a conduit, rather than an open forum. Today’s technocrats resemble H.G. Wells’ Morlocks, in their desire for control and in limiting open discussion. Opposition to free speech originated on college campuses, where professors fear offending sensitive students and where administrators see their mission as the indoctrination of students into a woke ideology, rather than providing an open-minded, liberal education. In this milieu, conservatives have been censured or cancelled. Intolerant woke ideologies have advanced in mainstream media where reporters act as editorialists, and they have infiltrated corporations where fear for one’s job prevents questioning doctrines of social justice. In Washington, what is information to one politician is labeled misinformation by another. People are not stupid. Let them hear both sides and decide for themselves.

 

There is validity to the concerns expressed by Mr. Haidt in The Atlantic, as social media attracts extremists and dregs of society; it is addictive and harmful to the vulnerable young, and much of the information that flows through its portals is garbage. But the way to handle the problem is to help users differentiate between good information and bad, to help them understand both the positive and negative aspects of what they are reading and viewing. The best way to do that is to ensure a classical, liberal education, where youth are exposed to different ideas and opinions, where they learn through debate and discussion, and where they are taught rules of moral behavior that have withstood the test of time. Religion, meditation and tradition provide moorings in an ever-changing, restless world. They restrain behavior and act as a governor on technological changes that infuse our lives. The great value of free speech is that deliberation slows the process of change by making all participants consider the consequences of their decisions.

 

Is the challenge we face enough to bring ruin to our nation? I don’t pretend to know. I hope not, but I worry.

"Madame Fourcade's Secret War," Lynne Olson

 

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

Madame Fourcade’s Secret War, Lynne Olson

April 17, 2022

 

“Although they were from varied walks of life and political backgrounds, a moral common denominator overrode 

all their differences: a refusal to be silenced and an iron determination to fight against the destruction of freedom and human dignity. In doing so, they, along with other members of the resistance, saved the soul and honor of France.”

                                                                                                                     Lynne Olson (1949-)

                                                                                                                     Madame Fourcade’s Secret War, 2019

 

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel The Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo speaks to the wizard Gandalf: “’I wish it had not happened in my time,’ said Frodo. ‘So do I’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do we all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.’” Lynne Olson’s story is of a young woman who lived in such times and the decisions she made. 

 

Using her second husband’s surname, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was born into wealth and privilege to an expatriate French family in Shanghai in 1910. Seven years later, upon the death of her father, her mother moved the family back to Paris. She grew into a beautiful young woman: “Cool and elegant, with porcelain skin…” At seventeen, she married and bore two children but soon separated, as she wanted more than to be a wife and mother. Her first husband was an army captain and through him she met many young men who would serve in the war to come, including Charles de Gaulle. When France capitulated in June 1940, she fled Paris with her children to the resort town of Vichy where she became involved in espionage.

 

French resistance was divided into three groups – saboteurs who blew things up, like communication and rail lines; those who manned escape lines, helping shot-down British pilots and others escape back to Britain, and espionage – spies, messengers and radio operators who gathered intelligence on German-commandeered factories, naval bases and gun emplacements, etc. and sent it on to the Allies in London. Madame Fourcade was involved with the latter. The group she joined, and of which she became its leader, was known as Alliance and became the Allies largest and most important espionage network in occupied France. They provided schedules for departing German U-Boats from Bordeaux and La Rochelle, and they supplied a fifty-foot-long map of the beaches at Normandy prior to D-Day; they radioed to London information on Germany’s V1 and V2 rockets, which allowed the Allies to bomb launch bunkers in northern France. Three thousand individuals served Alliance, of whom 438 were captured and executed by the Nazis. (Another 150 survived captivity.) Because the code names assigned each agent was an animal or bird, the organization was known to the Germans as Noah’s Ark, the title Fourcade took for her post-War memoir. Fourcade chose the name Hedgehog for herself, a small mammal, beloved by writers from Louis Carroll to Beatrix Potter, that protects itself from the fiercest predators by rolling into a ball with its spines extruding.

 

Madame Fourcade had to overcome the chauvinism of most male members of her organization, as well as those in England who Alliance served; she had to constantly move, changing her name and her appearance; she was once smuggled over the Pyrenees in a trunk to meet her British counterpart in Madrid; she was captured and escaped from a Nazi prison; she rarely saw her two children. After the war, her exploits were initially ignored: a spy was less visible than a resistance fighter blowing up rail tracks, and in the early years of the war she had coordinated with the Vichy government, which was a no-no with Gaullists. But most important, remembrances of her war-time leadership were initially shunned because she was a woman. However, as the years went on, that changed. When she died at age 79 in 1989, she became the first woman to be given a funeral at Les Invalides where Napoleon is buried.

 

She was proud of the role Alliance played in helping save France during the almost five years of German occupation. She led the effort to return to France the remains of those members of Alliance who had died in German prisons. In her memoir, Fourcade wrote: “The connection formed by a threat to one’s country is the strongest connection of all. People adopt one another, march together. Only capture or death can tear them apart.” It is a spirit alive today in Ukraine.

 

As Tolkien wrote, none of us chooses the time and place to be born. Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was born at an inauspicious time, yet she accepted the fate that was hers. Lynne Olson’s Madame Fourcade’s Secret War is the tale of a brave young woman who used intelligence, guile and persistence to help free her beloved France. It tells of how ordinary people can and will do extraordinary things.

"Corruption in a Woke World"

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Corruption in a Woke World”

April 14, 2022

 

“Politics. n: The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.”

                                                                                                                                          The Devil’s Dictionary, 1906

                                                                                                                                          Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)

 

Power and money are at the heart of politics, so it is unsurprising that politics is rife with corruption. Corrupt politicians rank among the world’s oldest professions. In his 1894 novel Pudd’nhead Wilson, Mark Twain wrote: “There is no distinctly American criminal class, except Congress.” Theodore Roosevelt is alleged to have once said, “When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer ‘present’ or ‘not guilty.’ Humor aside, has corruption become more common? Certainly, we have moved beyond the late 19^th and early 20^th Centuries’ big city political machines like Tammany Hall in New York and the Pendergast organization in Kansas City. But we live in a time and a place that venerates wealth and power.

 

President Truman famously refused a corporate board seat in 1953 – “You don’t want me. You want the office of the president, and that does not belong to me. It belongs to the American people and its not for sale.” His decision can be contrasted to the wealth accumulated by ex-presidents Bill Clinton ($80 million) and Barack Obama ($70 million). George W. Bush has an estimated net worth of $40 million. Unlike Messrs. Clinton and Obama, Mr. Bush entered the Presidency with an estimated $20 million. And then we have the greatly resisted Donald Trump who became the first individual to lose a billion dollars while President. Yet he is the one cited by an honor-challenged media as being the most corrupt.

 

Since Clinton’s and Obama’s wealth was made after they left the White House, they may not meet a common definition of corrupt: “to act dishonestly in return for money or personal gain.” However, both diverged from the moral standards enunciated by Mr. Truman when he left the Presidency. Clinton and Obama had no qualms in leveraging their fame (or infamy) into book contracts and speaking engagements. Mainstream media’s lack of interest in their extraordinary (and quick) wealth accumulation may be explained by the fact we live in a material age, as Madonna sang almost forty years ago: “You know we are living in a material world/And I am a material girl.” The hypocritical woke elite publicly lament income and wealth inequality, while privately celebrating their own riches behind gated compounds.

 

The word “corrupt” derives from the Latin cor (altogether) and rumpere (break). Its meaning is broader than simply selling access for dollars, which President Biden’s son Hunter has done in China, Russia and Ukraine, activities “which,” wrote Kimberly Strassel in the April 8, 2022 edition of the Wall Street Journal, “raises questions about counterintelligence and extortion, even as it puts a spotlight on how honest President Biden has been in claiming no knowledge of his son’s doings.”

 

Corruption can refer to any action that results in dishonest and immoral behavior. It can refer to an organization that has debased its raison d’être – the United Nation’s Human Rights Council comes to mind. Corruption escalates in our woke world. In his recent memoir One Damn Thing After Another, William Barr wrote about the blitzkrieg of progressive ideological thinking: “The essential factor, in my view, was the corruption of the mainstream news media beginning around the turn of the century.” False stories of Russia-collusion during the 2016 Presidential election was manifest of media corruption, and it was corruption within Congress and intelligence agencies that led to Robert Mueller’s $40 million fruitless search for corroborating evidence of Russian interference. It was the corruption of ethics that allowed the New York Times and the Washington Post to sit on a story of Hunter Biden’s laptop computer for over a year, a story written up by the New York Post on October 19, 2020 and then banned on social media. It was fifteen months before mainstream news outlets acknowledged the laptop and its contents. The intelligence services have yet to admit their role in withholding information. Woke corruption is pervasive. It raises fear in corporate boardrooms; it dominates Hollywood; it proliferates in colleges and universities, which shut down debate and cancel harmful (read conservative) speech, while claiming their mission is to seek truth. 

 

This is not a blanket condemnation of all politicians, government bureaucrats and members of the woke community. Not all are corrupt and not all news sources are propagandists. But many are. Not all universities are hotbeds of progressive nihilists and not all boardrooms bow to woke ideologies. Serving the public as an elected representative is an honorable task and most who go to Washington do so to improve the lives of their constituents, but there are those who fit Ambrose Bierce’s description and who will, with the help of a compliant press, use all means to personally benefit. The decision by the jury in Grand Rapids last week to acquit Daniel Harris and Brandon Caserta of conspiring to kidnap Michigan’s Governor Gretchen Whitmer was an example of corruption embedded in the FBI’s “Praetorian Guard” mentality of entrapping opponents of favored politicians. 

 

The world will never be rid of corrupt politicians, moralizing news reporters, social media suppressors, sanctimonious bureaucrats, obsequious business leaders and progressive professors. While cynicism may be unhealthy, skepticism about what we read, hear and watch is not. We should read extensively, retain our moral standards and form our own conclusions, while remembering we are part of a larger community. We should be wary of politicians bearing false promises. We should remember President Reagan’s warning of the nine most terrifying words in the English language: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

"The Last King of America," Andrew Roberts

 

Sydney M. Williams

30 Bokum Road – Apartment 314

Essex, CT 06426

 

Burrowing into Books

The Last King of America, Andrew Roberts

April 9, 2022

 

“Because he was in fact a civilized, good-natured, Christian and enlightened monarch…

subject to moral and ethical restraints…he did not fight the kind of scorched-earth

campaign that every other contemporary despotic power would have fought.”

                                                                                                                                Andrew Roberts (1963-)

                                                                                                                                The Last King of America, 2021

 

As a British historian, Andrew Roberts is indefatigable. He has written extensively on the Second World War. His biographies of Napoleon (2015) and Churchill (2018) are among the most definitive. He was the right person to continue Churchill’s 1958 opus, A History of the English-Speaking People, with his 2007 A History of the English-Speaking People Since 1900. In The Last King of America, preparatory to the semiquincentennial celebration of the Declaration of Independence in 2026, he addresses the common perception of a tyrannical and “mad” King George III, an image derived from Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and from a series of accusations in the Declaration of Independence, an image ingrained in the minds of American school children and popularized in the Broadway show, Hamilton.

 

The title suggests this biography is aimed at an American audience, with a third of the book devoted to the eight years between the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775 and ratification of the Treaty of Paris in 1783. His point is not that the colonists were wrong in pursuing independence; in fact, he embraces self-government and admires the colonists for pursuing freedom, and he refers to the United States’ Constitution as the “jewel of the Enlightenment.” His objection is for the portrayal of George III as a crazed and tyrannical ruler. The use of hyperbole by colonists who sought independence, Mr. Roberts writes, was to garner support from those who preferred to remain an English colony.

 

Like a lawyer pleading his case before a jury, Mr. Roberts takes us through his extensive research, which includes access to 200,000 pages of previously unavailable documents and letters, which helped define the man. Unlike most lawyers, however, Roberts has a sense of humor. When he writes of George III urging his eldest son, George Frederick (later George IV), to read more history, the historian Andrew Roberts adds, parenthetically, that the study of history is “always fine advice for everybody at all times.” 

 

In this long but readable biography, the cartoonish figure of George III, who has inhabited our imagination for generations, becomes a real person, whose devotion is to his family, his people and his country. We learn of his myriad interests, from gardening and farming to science, art and music. He was an enlightened traditionalist. In May 1798 (in a letter anticipating President Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural), George wrote to his Prime Minister William Pitt who had just fought a duel: “I trust what has happened will never be repeated…Public characters have no right to weigh alone what they owe to themselves; they must consider also what is due to their country.”  Those are not the words of a tyrannical king. They evoke empathy. Unlike some of his contemporaries, George III did not believe in the divine rights of kings. “But he did,” Roberts writes, “believe in the near-divinity of the British constitution.” Mr. Roberts does not shy from the King’s mental relapses – likely, he tells us, some form of manic depression – but those bouts, with the exception of a few weeks in 1765, occurred after the American Revolution. However, it is true that in the last ten years of his 60-year reign, a regency was created, as he could no longer function.

 

 

George III was Great Britain’s third longest reigning monarch (1760-1820), after Victoria and the current Elizabeth II. During his reign, Britain overcame the loss of the American colonies, survived the revolutionary fervor unleashed on Europe by the French Revolution, defeated the combined French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar, was victorious over Napoleon at Waterloo and saw Great Britain emerge as the world’s largest empire. His final years witnessed the end of continental wars that had enshrouded Europe for centuries. His reign began in the Age of Enlightenment and saw the birth of the Industrial Revolution, which removed millions from rural poverty and lifted life expectancy in England by 40 percent.

 

At 676 pages, with another 80 pages of notes, bibliography and index, this biography may appear anachronistic in our digitalized 21^st Century lifestyles when, according to a 2015 Microsoft study, the average human attention span is eight seconds, shorter than that of a goldfish. Nevertheless, for those willing to put in the time, this book – a pleasure to read – will add to your knowledge…and may, as it did mine, change your opinion of George III. 

"Conformity - Death Knell for Freedom"

                                                                   Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Conformity – Death Knell for Freedom”

April 4, 2022

 

“…for conformity is the jailer of freedom, and the enemy of growth.”

                                                                                                                              President John F. Kennedy

                                                                                                                              Speech to the UN General Assembly

                                                                                                                              September 25, 1961

 

News sources seem unable to deal with more than one crisis at a time. Three months ago, and for the previous twenty-one months, airwaves were dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Now it is Ukraine. What has been happening in Ukraine is awful, but is it, as commentators on both Fox News and MSNBC have reported, the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II? Is it worse than China’s Cultural Revolution, which caused an estimated 20 million deaths? Is it worse than the Cambodian killing fields when the Communist-led Khmer Rouge slew as many as 3.0 million people? Does it compare to Islamic terrorism in sub-Saharan Africa where 3 million Christians have been displaced and 43,000 killed in Nigeria alone? Where is perspective? Evil is part of human nature. It was because of the existence of evil that the Founders put constraints on governmental power. Evil leaders – from Hitler, Hirohito and Stalin to Mao Zedong, from Kim Jong-un to Ali Khamenei, from Xi Jinping to Vladimir Putin – rule by forced conformity, with none of the restraints on their leadership necessary for people to live freely and securely. Dissent is not allowed. Opposition to prescribed doctrines threatens totalitarian leaders.

 

Lest one tags me as an anarchist, let me add that I do believe in conformity when it comes to adherence to civility – tolerance, decency and respect for others, regardless of opinions, gender or race. And I believe in the universal values, embedded in traditional concepts of virtue. It is not the superficial differences reflected in gender and race, but differences in the opinions we carry, that threaten progressives’ desire for conformity. The freedom to express those opinions in a civil manner is critical to a democracy. In his 2007 book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, Stanford Professor Philip Zimbardo wrote, “Research shows that the decisions of a group as a whole are more thoughtful; and creative when there is a minority dissent than when it is absent.” It is the premise behind the success of democracies versus the failure of authoritarian rule.

 

Politically, my preference is for Lockean free markets and individual liberty, but I realize our country and politics have grown more complicated, with government assuming responsibilities it did not once have – in voting rights, education, commerce, transportation, retirement, health, protections against fraud, etc. Nevertheless, and while I am in accord with many of government’s responsibilities, they have come with a cost. While the population of the U.S. has increased by a factor of 63 times, from 5.3 million in 1800 to 335 million, the budget of the federal government has grown at a far faster rate – from $11 million in 1800 to a proposed $5.8 trillion in fiscal 2023, or by a factor of over 500,000 times. As government has become more deeply rooted in our lives, elected officials have become less representative – from 106 House members in 1800 to 435 today. Yet there are 1000 times more unelected federal employees today than in 1800 –11,000 to over 11 million. One might argue that today’s social and international complexities warrant a relatively larger government, but this much bigger? And is it surprising that federal bureaucrats whose careers are dependent on ever-growing government, support politicians who favor government expansion?

 

The Left claims the threat to democracy comes from an autocratic Donald Trump and his far-right followers, but that is a red herring to detract from the greater risk that stems from conformity to a progressive manifesto, with tenets that preach gospels which must be obeyed – on climate change, critical race theory, ESG ratings, DEI adherence, mask mandates and digital IDs. Failure to comply with woke policies at universities, and in law firms and corporations, and on Wall Street result in an Orwellian world of cancellation and loss of employment. While Mr. Trump never attained my standards for civility, and his undisciplined use of words risked damage at home and abroad, he was never the threat to democracy that comes from the insidious reach for power that is the progressive state. In a recent op-ed regarding Anthony Fauci and COVID-19 but which is pertinent to today’s woke progressives, Roger Kimball wrote of frogs and boiling water. If you toss a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will immediately jump out. On the other hand, if you place the frog into a pot and gradually heat it, the “frog will linger languidly…as it is slowly cooked alive.”

 

Reversing the trend in federal expansion may be impossible but slowing its rate is doable, which should be the goal, as every service assumed by government reduces individual choice. At a time when the Left warns of threats to democracy, we should remember that democracy is not designed to be efficient or to have equal outcomes. It was designed with checks and balances. It abhors an invasive administrative state that demands conformity. It thrives on limited and unintrusive government, while it empowers the individual and encourages values found in families and personal faith.

 

The social, psychological and economic effects of the government’s mandates regarding COVID-19, the subsequent rise in inflation and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have had (and will have) real-world consequences for the well-being of the American people. “When the rock of green and woke ideology hits the hard place of reality, sheer madness always results,” wrote Victor Davis Hanson in an op-ed last month. Phrases like social justice, words like inclusivity, diversity and equity and acronyms like ESG and CRT lose their meanings when definitions conform to what the state deems acceptable. Is it right for transgender women to be allowed to compete against biological women in sports, or is it okay when parents are discouraged from instructing their children in traditional Christian values?

 

The French expression vive la difference is generally linked to distinctions between the sexes, but it could as well refer to the myriad opinions we all carry, views that reflect our individual upbringings, experiences, studies, readings and associations. It is the uninhibited flow of ideas that is the backbone of democracy. Conformity, in contrast, demands we relegate our minds to the imprisonment of those who would guide us.