A Word from London

  Herbert London

      Herbert London is John M. Olin Professor of Humanities at N.Y.U., President of the Hudson Institute, author of Decade of Denial, published by Lexington Books, and publisher of American Outlook. He can be reached at: www.herblondon.org.

Facing the Enemy Within

Forged into the very fabric of this nation is the Emma Lazarus belief that Americans will throw out the welcome mat for the tired, hungry and those huddled masses yearning to be free. It is also the case that in our desire to aid the poor and oppressed we have also welcomed the angry, fanatical and those yearning to destroy freedom.

After 9/11 and now 7/7 the time has come for those who have turned a blind eye to notice that the enemies of our way of life are here exploiting the freedom we have provided in order to undermine the foundation of this nation and strangle any possibility that freedom might emerge in Arab and Muslim countries.

For a considerable period the West averted its gaze to the threat it imported. Our evolving values militate against any form of discrimination. Even when the unassimilable say they are intent on destruction, we either deny the reality, responding struthious-like, or we assume the melting pot will ultimately mold these people into solid citizens. It should be clear at this point how naïve these positions are. Of course there are those who will never learn.

Were it not for the legacy of Joseph McCarthy, or should I say the way in which McCarthyism has been converted into an adjectival phrase as fear-rending as Stalinism, some form of a subversives act would be seriously entertained. After all, there are some people in our midst who are intent on murder and mayhem. Must we wait for another several thousand people to die before action is taken?

It seems to me if people preach sedition they have forfeited the right to live in this nation. My detractors will undoubtedly say, isn’t American uniqueness related to its tolerance of opposing viewpoints. Indeed, this is correct and a position I embrace, but there is a distinction to be made between opposition and conspiracy. There isn’t a right to conspire against the American government, there is only a right to express dissatisfaction with that government.

Wooly-headed spokesmen on both sides of the Atlantic have apparently lost their way. For them the threat is exaggerated and the civil liberties issues paramount. It is instructive that many commentators ignore the cold-blooded horror inflicted on Iraqis by insurgents and concentrate instead on Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.

Those congressmen who do recognize the problem will be engaged with their colleagues in a bare-knuckled struggle over immigration policy. As I see it, this is the moment to argue that some people are unassimilable. They wish to use liberalism to destroy an open society and, curiously, many liberals are dupes complicit, willy-nilly, in this destructive quest.

While there is still time--before the next attack results in a political tsunami--serious consideration should be given to policies that thwart radical Islam here and in Europe. This is an ideological contagion that has found refuge in our neighborhoods. It must be extirpated before it destroys whole nations.

To argue complacently that this problem will ultimately run its course is to underestimate the fanaticism and sanguinic rage that coruscates through this subculture.

This is a war for survival. Either we take preventive steps now or we take curative steps later. I prefer the former before blood is shed again.

Those Who Deny the Terrorist Threat

In the 1930s Adolph Hitler made no attempt to conceal his ambitions. Mein Kampf spelled out a dark strategic vision. Yet the West chose to either avert its gaze or deny reality. The prospect of fighting a major war so soon after the horror of World War I catalyzed the rationalizers. Some said Hitler was engaged in mere bravado; others said, he was a reflection of German national sentiment, not imperial ambition.

Whatever the rationalizers said, they stood tremulous in the face of Hitler’s goals. Now the West is engaged in its latest act of denial vis-à-vis radical Islam.

The civil libertarians contend any modification of our laws in order to hunt down and destroy these shadowy killers in our midst represents a threat to the nature of our government and the Constitution. Therefore fighting an all-out war only damages our side.

The second group of deniers might be called “the rationalists” who assume there is a justifiable hatred directed at the West because we invaded Iraq, support Israel, have a degraded popular culture or some other reason which, if only corrected, would lead to peace and harmony.

The third is composed of those who actually hate the West even as they derive the blessings of an open society. Michael Moore serves as an exemplar of this position. In the view of self-haters any position which undermines the status of the U.S. and the West is desirable. This is “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” syndrome.

Each stance, in my judgment, is deeply flawed. The civil libertarians ignore American history that suggests that even though President Lincoln abrogated habeas corpus during the Civil War, it was restored immediately thereafter. And while the U.S. took steps to intern Japanese citizens during World War II in order to prevent espionage activity, restitution occurred once the war was over.

If the Patriot Act helps ferret out those who want to kill Americans, it may be a desirable short-term measure even as the civil libertarians speak glibly about the threat to our Constitutional liberties. So far more than 165 violent acts against the U.S. have been thwarted by the Patriot Act according to the Justice Department.

The “rationalists” suffer from post hoc analysis. We invaded Iraq; hence radical Islamic violence has increased. Overlooked in this exegesis are the many violent acts which occurred before the invasion in Iraq, e.g., the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, Khobar Towers, U.S.S. Cole, the embassies in East Africa, etc.

It is as if the rationalists suffer from historical amnesia. After all, they note, “there must be a valid reason for this hatred directed at the West.”

The idea that people hate us for who we are rather than what we do is a condition the rationalists cannot accept. Theirs is what I call the Enlightenment flaw: There must be a rational answer for all events.

Rationalists also contend that only a tiny fraction of the Moslem world shares extremist sentiments. That is true, of course, but it glosses over a key fact: radical Islamists may represent an insignificant percentage of Moslems, but every terrorist is a Moslem. Even if one percent of that population which numbers 1.3 billion is extremist, more than a million Moslems can cause a lot of death and destruction.

Last, are the subversives from within who detest America so much they would prefer to see Osama bin Laden as president rather than George Bush. One might assume these people aren’t taken seriously; alas they shouldn’t be taken seriously, but in some circles they have influence.

So filled with hate is this group that they do not even respect the laws that offer their freedom to resist. Herbert Marcuse offered an explanation for the haters when he described America as the land of “repressive tolerance.” I wonder how this group would react to Sharia law. Can you imagine Jeanine Garofolo in a burkha?

These three groups may always be present in nations that promote self-examination and allow protest. But when one considers the nature of the present threat, these groups can jeopardize national security or undermine our defense. The West should value its freedom, but first it should fight for survival, notwithstanding all the doubting in our midst.

The Reemergence of Bloodlines in America

The Union Army not only liberated the South from the ravages of slavery, it reasserted the basic principle that race would not be a legitimate standard for government decisions. From the Civil War to the civil rights struggles of the 1960s this point of view was asserted and reinforced.

Now, however, a new era is being ushered in with Senator Daniel Akaka’s bill which calls for the self-governance and self-determination of native Hawaiians. This bill, cosponsored by Senator Inouye, will create a race based and racially separate government for native Hawaiians.

Should this bill become a law, it would be the first time in our nation’s history that U.S. authorities will have created an extra-constitutional race-based government out of a subset of American citizens.

In defense of this ostensibly anti-American proposition is the argument that indigenous Hawaiians are akin to Indians and require similar rights. But even a cursory review of the issue would demonstrate the false nature of this premise. For one thing, Indian tribe certification is not based on race, albeit that is merely the tip of this proverbial analytic iceberg.

Perhaps most significantly, the federal government would be creating a government beyond the scope of the Constitution, which, if my reading of the Constitution is correct, is unconstitutional.

The proposed legislation also provides for a commission to screen people by race. Any drop of Hawaiian blood counts. Even Jim Crow would smile at this provision.

To make matters worse, this bill has support from both sides of the aisle with several notable Republicans contending it is “benign,” “merely window dressing.”

That a Republican administration would remain silent on this issue, as it has thus far, is an outrage. It would be a strange legacy for this Bush administration to be remembered as the one that did not oppose a race-based government within the United States.

So far down the slippery slope of affirmative action have we gone that race is a criterion for special citizens’ rights. My suspicion is that if the public had any awareness of the issue, it would immediately apply pressure on the Congress. But so far this has been a stealth bill with virtually no debate.

In what surely would be offensive to any fair-minded person hostile to racism is the following legislative language which constitutes eligibility for special status in Hawaii:

An individual who is one of the indigenous, of the aboriginal, native people who reside in the islands that now comprise the State of Hawaii on or before January 1, 1893; and occupied and exercised sovereignty in the Hawaiian archipelago, including the area that now constitutes the State of Hawaii.

It is ironic that after the Civil Rights Acts finally eliminated race as a handicap or privilege, the dawn of a new era has arrived in which bloodlines are critical in making decisions. By any measure this bill represents a betrayal of the nation’s Founders, an about-face from Appomattox and a shocking disregard for Constitutional principles.

In an effort to at least mitigate the likely damage from this legislation Senator John Kyl will introduce amendments to the bill that forestall a race-based government and prohibit race-based legal immunities. Presumably the Bill of Rights and the Constitution would apply to this artificially created government in Hawaii. Whether these amendments would be accepted remains to be seen. However, the amendments might be a way to trigger a debate on the matter that has been blatantly overlooked by most Congressmen.

Defining Americans by race is and should remain anathema. Defining citizenship by race was an issue settled in the blood soaked soil of Gettysburg. Defining a state government by a racial criterion was interred in South Africa more than a decade ago.

This bill entitled the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act of 2005 violates every decent instinct in our body politic. It is late in the day, but my hope is the public might be aroused and maybe, just maybe, it will force Congress to reconsider this shamefully misguided legislation.

Darwinism Revisited

Christoph Cardinal Schonborn, the Catholic archbishop of Vienna, caused a firestorm in intellectual circles when he argued recently that Darwinism has many unexplained characteristics. The New York Times responded reflexively by suggesting the Church was turning away from “modern science.”

But this is a discussion surrounded by a conundrum. Much of the science of Darwinism is surmise. Even the word evolution is filled with obscurantism.

Cardinal Schonborn didn’t help his case when he wrote:

Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinism sense--an unguided unplanned process of random variation and natural selection--is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.

Needless to say, words such as “evolution,” “random” and “design” are fraught with contested meaning. What, I believe, the cardinal was trying to say is that various forms of natural phenomena suggest, even if they do not offer proof in themselves, that intelligent design or providential will cannot be dismissed out of hand on an a priori basis.

The Cardinal’s view is compatible with the possibility that God set a process of natural selection in motion or introduced the condition of human design without the benefit of a random evolutionary process. One may, of course, reject this position as hoary religionist theory, but one cannot reject it out-of-hand on the basis of sheer scientific analysis, albeit Daniel Dennett, professor of philosophy at Tufts University, attempts to do so in his 8/28/05 New York Times article entitled “Show Me the Science.” From the point of view of the Catholic Church, there isn’t a repudiation of modern science. Rather an effort is being waged to consider intelligent design as one way to explain or hypothesize evolution.

That the Times contends the Church opposes modern science is to attribute a truth to a theory and then criticize those who do not embrace all aspects of the theory. That a Catholic Cardinal will not exile God to the fringe of this debate should hardly be surprising, unless, of course, you’re a correspondent for the New York Times.

There are questions raised by natural phenomena that do not fit comfortably in the Darwinian model.

For example, a male praying mantis dies after mating with a female. If natural selection is dependent on survival of the fittest, why does a pattern exist where males are killed as a natural condition?

For as long as birds have been on the planet, they build nests to hatch their eggs and tend to the very young. In order to build those nests a series of complicated maneuvers are necessary including the selection of the “right” twig size, avoidance of predators, twisting the nest into the appropriate shape and depth. Is this knowledge or instinct imbibed from environmental experience or has it been built into the genetic code of birds? The answer is not apparent, nor is it subject to facile testing.

As the March of the Penguins film shows, penguins march 70 miles into the thick ice of Antarctica to mate. Afterward the females march back to the sea in order to provide food while the males use a flap of skin to protect the fertilized egg from the freezing cold conditions. Is this a survival mechanism that evolved from conditions at the bottom of the globe or are these responses to cues in the DNA embedded from the on-set of the animal kingdom?

Clearly these conditions might be explained as part of an evolutionary pattern. Cardinal Schonborn, despite his ambiguous language, sees it differently. His position is not a rejection of Darwinism; it is, however, a questioning of assumptions that have a critical place in scientific analysis. Darwinism has not proved all that occurs in nature, perhaps it can’t. But it does leave huge epistemological gaps that require continued questioning.

For those who contend this questioning is a repudiation of modern science, I would say their criticism is neither modern nor scientific.

Is Cheerleading Raunchy or Innocent: A National Debate

If you’ve seen half time at a pro-basketball or pro-football game half-clad cheerleaders have become a source of audience delectation. The girls are sexy and the movements often suggestive. This is the new America that shuns modesty.

Recently, a Democratic Texas legislator, Al Edwards, sponsored a bill dealing with cheerleaders at high school football games. Needless to say, these cheerleaders tend to emulate their grown-up counterparts.

Mr. Edwards said, “Girls can get out and do all of these sexual performances and we applaud them and that’s not right.” He goes on to argue that lascivious performances distract high school students and can result in “pregnancies, school drop-outs, the contraction of HIV, and herpes . . . cutting off their youthful life at an early age.” He adds: “Any adult that’s been involved with sex in their lives; they know it when they see it.”

Exposed midriffs and ever shorter skirts are de rigueur for cheerleaders, but, for many, this exposure is offensive. Of course not every Texas legislator shares Mr. Edwards’ views. In fact, some call his proposed legislation “stupid” or “ridiculous.”

It is interesting to examine the evolution of cheerleading. Originally cheerleading was a male dominated activity, a way for men to assist their comrades in athletic competition and a method for displaying leadership potential. During the Second World War, with so many men at war, women replaced males in what became a source of inspiration. For the first time cheerleading became a beauty-obsessed pastime.

By the 1970s, led in large part by the success of the Dallas Cowboys, cheerleading became highly sexualized. What worked for the Cowboys became the standard for other professional teams. In less than a decade the fully clothed high school and college cheerleader looked and moved very much like her professional counterpart.

Is this a problem?

For these who remember a more innocent time when cheerleaders were covered down to their shins, contemporary standards are vulgar. That said, the vulgar has colonized every aspect of popular culture. Even cheerleading has gone from, “Go back, go back, go back into the woods, cause you haven’t got, you haven’t got, you haven’t got the goods” to “You’re dead, you’re dead, we’ll bop you on the head.”

Yes, this is all said in good humor, but the humor has an edge to it that has changed the nature of sportsmanship. Fans routinely shout obscenities at the opposition.

On the other side of the social ledger, it could be argued that the problem is in the eye of the beholder. Cheerleaders may emulate their elders, but that doesn’t necessarily suggest they are sexually charged.

The real issue is the spread of pornography into every cultural crevice from ads on buses, to television programming and popular music. It has become inescapable. What effect it is having may be difficult to determine, but I would submit, based on empirical evidence, it is having some effect.

Cheerleading may, in fact, be one manifestation of this trend and, in its way, among the more innocent manifestations. But the trend line is a matter of concern for any American who believes the levers of popular culture affect and enhance or undermine the nation’s character.     *

“The shortest and surest way to live with honor in the world is to be in reality what we would appear to be.” –Socrates

We would like to thank the following people for their generous support of this publication (from 7/12/2005 to 9/14/2005): John E. Alderson, Hale E. Andrews, Bud & Carol Belz, Robert P. Bringer, Priscilla L. Buckley, Alva D. Butler, D. J. Cahill, Cliff Chambers, Irma I. Clark, John Alden Clark, William D. Collingwood, Gary W. Croudis, Gary E. Culver, Robert Day, Jeanne L. Dipaola, Eugene H. Donovan, Edward J. Drury, Robert M. Ducey, Reuben M. Freitas, Gary D. Gillespie, Thad A. Goodwyn, Joseph H. Grant, Hollis J. Griffin, Joyce Griffin, Alene D. Haines, Daniel J. Haley, Norman G. P. Helgeson, Ray Hodges, John A. Howard, Thomas E. Humphreys, Don Johnson, Martin Kellogg, Ronald B. Maddox, Paul Maxwell, Robert A. Moss, King Odell, Larry A. Olsen, Leo E. Parra, Richard F. Radke, Michel J. Ryan, Mr. & Mrs. Richard P. Schonland, Fred W. Schultz, Irene Schultz, Richard R. Shank, L. Sideris, Richard G. Slade, David L. Smith, John D. Sours, Richard J. Stasiak, Carl G. Stevenson, Michael S. Swisher, John West Thatcher, Jack E. Turner, M. O. Turner, Miller Upton, Eugene & Diane Watson, Charles L. Wilson, Lowell M. Winthrop, Piers Woodriff.