THE SNOBBISHNESS OF THE LEARNED

by W. T. STACE (1936)

There is a story told of a very well known living writer who produced a popular book on a branch of modern science - one of the best books of its kind now in print. He is said to have submitted his manuscript for criticism to a fellow expert, who, having read it, tossed it back contemptuously, saying, " You understand thoroughly the subject on which you are writing, and I have no adverse criticisms to offer. But why do you waste your time writing stuff of this sort? "

The story is quite possibly apocryphal. But that such a story can be passed round, and gain credence, illustrates very forcibly the fact that there is among learned men a widespread tendency to look down upon popular writing as something not worthy of their serious consideration, as something to be despised and discouraged. On the face of it, this would seem to be an extraordinary attitude. That the discoveries made by men of science and the world conceptions of philosophers should be made as widely known as possible would be, one might expect, their especial desire. And how else can this be done, if not by translating their thought from the technical jargon in which it is apt to be expressed into plain English which the world can understand? How else can it be done, in fact, if not by the labors of the popular writer?

It would seem obvious that the widespread dissemination of knowledge already attained is of at least equal importance with the discovery of new knowledge. For what, in the end, is the value of knowledge? His acquisition of knowledge is, to the expert, often an end in itself. He may be uninterested in its subsequent influence on the world. And it is quite right, and even necessary, that there should be men who take this point of view. The advance of knowledge mostly depends upon such men.

But the matter, after all, cannot end there. To many others, discovery is of value because of the practical benefits which it confers upon mankind, as when pure science is applied to the extermination of disease or the invention of useful implements. But I would suggest that the supreme value of knowledge lies, not in the thrill which its discovery gives to the small band of experts, nor even in its practical usefulness, but in the enlargement and ennoblement of the human mind in general of which it is the cause. Of the human mind in general. That means the minds, not of a few experts, but of the multitudes of civilized humanity.

This has certainly been the case with the greatest discoveries of science. They have revolutionized human conceptions of the universe, given men at large a vaster sweep of mind; and it is this which has constituted their chief importance. The greatness of the Copernican hypothesis lay neither in its purely theoretical value for the scientist nor in the better application of astronomy to navigation or other practical affairs to which it may have contributed, but in the fact that it gave to mankind some conception of the immensity of the universe in which we live, and that it destroyed forever the petty views, the insolence, the self-conceit inevitably connected with the belief that the whole creation exists for, and revolves around, man. This is why the Copernican theory constituted a revolution in human thought. This is why it is so vastly more important than, shall we say, the discovery of a new variety of ant, or of a new theorem in mathematics.

Exactly similar remarks might be made about the theory of evolution. That too obtains its importance neither from its theoretical nor from its immediately practical bearings, but from its influence upon man's general conceptions of the world. Thus what makes the difference between an important and a trivial scientsc or philosophical discovery is precisely the influence which it exerts upon mankind in general, not upon the minds of a few learned men. And that is why, in philosophy, however interesting such a subject as symbolic logic may be to a few experts, it sinks into triviality beside the world conceptions of a Plato or a Kant. It is in itself a mere intellectual plaything, nothing of real importance, though it may become of importance if it can be applied to the solution of the great problems of philosophy. And it will be noted that it is precisely this trivial kind of subject which cannot be popularized.

In truth it matters little what the doctors of science or the doctors of philosophy think, believe, or say among themselves in their cloisters. What humanity thinks and believes -that is what matters. And the true function of the cloistered few is precisely to be the intellectual leaders of humanity and to guide the thought of mankind to higher levels. This function can only be carried out if someone, either they themselves or others, will translate their thought from technical language into the language of the market place. The best and the ablest discoverers and thinkers often possess both the ability and the desire to do this themselves. (It is worth noting that Einstein is the author of a popular book on relativity.) Or if their talents are not of the kind required for successful popular writing, it can be done by men who make a special business of spreading broadcast the best knowledge of their age. This type of popularizer is the liaison officer between the world's thinkers and mankind at large.

Thus it appears that the function of the popular writer is profoundly important and responsible. It is related that the soul of a dead man was conducted by Saint Peter on a tour of inspection of the Heavenly City. After seeing all the marvelous glories of the Lord, and the millions of white-clad worshiping souls, he was shown by his guide a little curtained-off enclosure in which half a dozen people were praying, cut off from all the rest of the multitude. These, he was told, were the Plymouth Brethren, who believed themselves to be the only people in Heaven. Those experts who look down upon the popularization, and who would, if they could, make all knowledge the exclusive property of a little coterie of intellectuals, show a spirit identical with that of the poor souls in the story.

But, it will be said, much, if not most, of what learned men think and discover cannot be made intelligible to the masses. This is, on the whole, untrue. The big conceptions, the important results of science and philosophy, can be communicated to the layman. What cannot be communicated is, as a rule, the detailed processes of discovery and argumentation which have led to those results. Every educated person now understands the main conceptions involved in the Copernican and Darwinian hypotheses, although the proofs and details may be a sealed book to the majority. In a tube of antityphoid serum there are so many millions of dead bacteria. The methods by which the number is counted or calculated may remain a mystery to the layman. But the fact that there are these many can be understood by a child.

The same principle holds true even in those sciences which seem to most of us too hopelessly mathematical. The results reached can usually be disentangled from their mathematical formulation and set forth by themselves. This is not true, of course, of pure mathematics itself, but only of those physical sciences which use mathematics as a mere instrument to reach their conclusions. And this is, after all, what one would expect. For mathematics is not itself knowledge at all. It is an instrument for obtaining knowledge. The actuary makes use of higher mathematics which no one except the expert can follow. But the resulting knowledge which he obtains is intelligible to everyone. The astronomer uses mathematics to calculate an eclipse, but none is required to understand his final prediction. And it is not fundamentally different with relativity. To think otherwise is like supposing that one cannot appreciate the scenery of Niagara Falls without understanding the mechanism of the railway locomotive which conveys one there.

Mathematics, said a famous writer, is a science of which the meanest intellect is capable. The statement by no means reflects, as one might be inclined to think, the mere partisan prejudice of a one-sided and narrow intelligence. There is a real truth in it. It is obviously false if it is understood to mean that a stupid man can be a good mathematician. For plainly it is only a very clever man indeed who can be first-class in this, as in any other, subject. But his intellect may nevertheless be, and indeed is, mean if he is incapable of doing anything with it except juggling with symbols - however cleverly he may do this. For mathematics, as I said before, is not knowledge, but only an instrument for obtaining knowledge. A Newton or an Einstein uses mathematics to help him to reach out to great and grand conceptions of the Universe.

This employment of mathematics as an instrument of general culture is the work of noble, and not of mean, intellects. But in so far as it cares for nothing save its own internal affairs, is without effect upon general culture, is a mere manipulation of symbols for their own sakes, it certainly can be cultivated, and successfully cultivated, by mean minds -that is, by minds which know nothing of, and care nothing for, what is really great in human culture. It is because mathematics is a means, and not an end, that a purely mathematical education is a bad education - or, rather, no education at all.

For the true purpose of education is to teach men what things in life are genuinely valuable. That is, it is concerned with ends. Therefore education ought not to concentrate upon means. They are a secondary matter. The true order is to learn first what to aim at, and then only what are the instrumentalities by which we may attain our ends. Mathematics, accordingly, should be part of a subsequent technical training. Thus the now old-fashioned preference for a classical - which really meant a humanistic - over a mathematical education, although it may have degenerated into a prejudice or even a pigheaded obscurantism, was originally rooted in a true insight.

The impression that philosophical and scientific ideas cannot be explained in plain language to plain people is also in large measure due to the fact that philosophers and men of science have not, as a rule, the wit to do it. It is due, in plain terms, to the stupidity of the learned men, not to the stupidity of humanity. They lack the mental flexibility and adroitness which are required if they are to come out of their hiding places in the laboratory and the library and make themselves intelligible in the big world of men. They can speak only one language, the language of cast-iron technical formulas. Change the language, take away from them their technical terms and symbols, and they no longer know where they are. They are like those inferior boxers who can only box according to the rules and are nonplused by anyone who disregards them and fights as the light of nature teaches him.

They lack too that human sympathy with simple people which is also essential if the teachings of science and philosophy are to be made available to the many. They cannot move with ease in the world of men. And these too are the reasons why erudite men, great figures in their own secluded world, are so often observed to behave like buffaloes in society. The contemptuous attitude toward popular writing so often affected by learned men is, then, nothing but an unwarranted prejudice. And it may not be uninteresting to inquire into its psychological motivation. May I be allowed to recommend to the reader that, whenever in this human world he finds a totally unreasonable opinion adopted by large bodies of people, he make a practice of looking, not for reasons, but for motives. He will thus save himself much time which might otherwise be wasted in searching for rationality where none exists.

Why, then, do so many workers in intellectual fields look askance at any attempt to make the results of their labors intelligible to the world at large? It is true that some apparently plausible reasons may be urged. Popular writers tend to develop certain characteristic faults. Cheap cleverness not infrequently mars their writings. And they are apt to slur over difficult and profound conceptions, and to substitute superficialities -because they have not the gift of being both simple and profound at the same time. Thus a writer on Aristotle, who wished to make easy for his readers that philosopher's teleological conception of the cause of motion, wrote that in Aristotle's view "'tis love, 'tis love that makes the world go round." *

But a moment's thought should be sufficient to convince one that these facts afford no basis whatever for a general contempt of popular writing. Popular writers may often be cheap and shallow. But to entertain a prejudice against popular writing because some popular writers are bad is like condemning all books because of the existence of certain inferior authors. The real ground for the disfavor in which popular writing is held among experts is to be found elsewhere. It is rooted in class prejudice. The learned think themselves superior to the common herd. They are a priestly caste imbued with the snobbishness that is characteristic of caste systems. Their learning is the mark of their superiority. It must be kept within the limits of their own class. And the means by which this is accomplished consists in a learned language of long words and technical terms. Anyone who translates knowledge from the technical into the popular language is disregarding the rules of caste, and is thus taboo.

Technical terms, long words, learned-sounding phrases, are the means by which second-rate intellectuals "inflate their egos" and feed their sense of superiority to the multitude. If an idea can be expressed in two ways, one of which involves a barbarous technical jargon, while the other needs nothing but a few simple words of one syllable which everyone can understand, this kind of person definitely prefers the barbarous technical jargon. He wishes to be thought, and above all to think himself, a person who understands profound and difficult things which common folk cannot comprehend. He wishes to feel himself cleverer than other people. The long words and clumsy phrases with which he encumbers the simplest thought are the badges of his class superiority. And as this kind of person is always in a majority in any large assembly of intellectuals, a definite prejudice against popular writing is engendered.

The poorer a man's intellectual equipment, the more does he revel in technicalities. A man with a wealth of valuable ideas is anxious to communicate those ideas, and will naturally tend to choose for that purpose the simplest language he can find. But a man whose intellectuality is a sham, and who has in truth nothing to communicate, endeavors to conceal his emptiness by an outward show of learning. The more unintelligible his language, the more profound will he appear to himself and (he hopes) to others. He fails to see that the love of long words and technical terms is in fact nothing but a symptom of his mental infirmity. It is a kind of intellectual disease. And perhaps those who suffer from this disease would like to have a technical term for their own malady. I will therefore make them a present of a new long word. I will christen their disease macronomatamania.

It is true that a few really great men, such as Immanuel Kant, have seemed to revel unnecessarily in technicalities. But let not all the macronomatamaniacs of the world attempt to shelter themselves under Kant's umbrella. Kant was great in spite of his obscure language, not because of it. And one does not become great by aping the weaknesses of a great man. It is true, too, that technical terms are a necessity. In many branches of knowledge one cannot do without them. This is especially true in science. And it is true (but in a much lesser degree) in philosophy.

About their use in science I will say nothing at all. Even regarding their use in philosophy I will not attempt in this place to say what their legitimate functions are, nor legislate as to where they should be used and where avoided. For that would be itself a technical inquiry, not suitable to this paper. I will, however, set down what I regard as an elementary first principle of a good style in philosophical writing. It is this: Never use a technical term when a simple nontechnical word or phrase will equally well express your meaning. And I would add as a gloss: Cultivate in yourself a dislike and suspicion of all learned-sounding words and technical terms, a habit of regarding them not as fine things, but at best as necessary evils.

This will come easily to anyone naturally endowed with a hatred of humbug, and also to anyone with an artistic sense of the beauty and value of words; and the result of it will be that, whenever a technical term springs to the writer's mind, he will instinctively cast about to see whether he cannot replace it by plain English. Sometimes it will happen that he cannot do so without prejudice to his meaning. But often it will happen that he can.

I think that these principles should be applied, not only to popular writing in the usual sense, but to all philosophical writing of whatever sort, even that which is written by experts for experts. For the use of a good style and of plain decent English will always facilitate the communication of meaning, to whomsoever it is addressed. And if anyone asks for an example of a good philosophical style, of the kind I have in mind, I would point to the writings of Mr. Bertrand Russell as showing the best philosophical style of the present day. Mr. Russell, of course, uses technical terms, plenty of them; but never, I think, where they could reasonably have been avoided.

A technical term as such is, anywhere and everywhere, a barbarism, an eyesore, an offense to the soul, a thing to be shuddered at and avoided. Macronomatamaniacs, therefore, are not only to be suspected of emptiness, but also to be accused of lack of taste. When a man uses a hideous jumble of technical terms where he could use plain English words, he writes himself down as a person without the sense of the beauty and dignity of language.

After all, the issue is a simple one. Do you wish to communicate thought? Or are you impelled by some other motive - to appear clever, to boost yourself up as a highbrow, to impress the simple-minded with your superiority, or what not? If you write an article or a book, your sole motive ought to be to communicate what you conceive to be truth to as many people as possible. If a writer is governed by this motive, it is inevitable that he will express himself in the simplest language which he can possibly find. And if, in addition to this sincerity, he has also some sense of the beauty of language, he will choose short, sharp, simple, expressive words in preference to long, uncouth, and clumsy ones. He will not, for example, write " ratiocination " when all he means is " reasoning," nor " dianoetic " when the word " intellectual" would do just as well.

Unfortunately, however, to communicate ideas is by no means the most usual motive for writing books. And if a man writes because he thinks himself a superior person, and wishes to impose this same delusion upon other people, he tends to make his style as obscure and difficult as possible. He hopes that his obscurity will be mistaken for profundity. He will write, if he can, in a learned language instead of a simple one. He will prefer big words to little ones, and a barbarous technical jargon to plain English.

And the American custom of forcing university professors to "produce" (that is, to write books), and of practically making their promotion in their profession depend upon their doing so, is responsible for no little evil in this matter. Not only does it result in the publication of floods of inferior books, which the world would be much better without; not only does it compel men who have no taste for writing, and no gift for it, to waste their time writing bad books when, if left alone, they might have made admirable and even great teachers; but it also demoralizes style, and develops macronomatamaniacs. For the man who has nothing to say worthy of publication is encouraged, almost compelled, to conceal his lack under a smoke screen of technicalities and obscure verbiage. He has to convince his university superiors of his intellectuality; and since he cannot do this by the inner worth of his thought, he must do it by putting out a spurious and pretentious conglomeration of learned-sounding words. How easily this succeeds, how easily the world (including the learned world) is gulled by long words, the following incident may serve to illustrate.

Years ago, in a certain university, there flourished a "Philosophical Society," in which the tendency to read papers couched in obscure and unintelligible language became rampant. A brilliant Irishman, wishing to prick the bubble, read before the society a paper called " The Spirit of the Age." In this paper there was not a single paragraph, not a single sentence even, which possessed, or was intended by the author to possess, the faintest glimmer of meaning. It was full of long words, of loud-mouthed phrases, of swelling periods. It sounded magnificent; it meant nothing. The society listened to it in rapt attention. Not one of the members perceived that the society was being fooled; and a long and learned discussion followed, in which not one of the members admitted that he had not understood the paper.

A man may write whole books of what is either totally meaningless or palpably false, and may secure by doing so a wide reputation, provided only that he uses long enough words. For example, the thought that there is no such thing as thought is self-contradictory nonsense. But if a man wraps up this same nonsense in a learned-sounding hocus-pocus about reflex arcs and conditioned reflexes, if he talks enough about neurons and the neural processes, and if he interlards his whole discourse with the technical terms of physiology, he may become the founder of a school of psychology, and stands a good chance of earning an enormous salary.

BUT to come back to popular writing and its place in the world of learning. I would contend for two positions. First, the works of the pure popularizer - the man who has nothing of his own to say, but who popularizes other people's thoughts -is of the utmost importance. So far from being despised, he ought to be regarded as performing an absolutely vital function in the intellectual progress of mankind. And it is perfectly possible for him to be popular without being either shallow or cheap.

Secondly, I would urge that, in a sense, all writing, even of the most original, learned, and abstruse kinds, should aim at being popular as far as possible. That such writing can always be made entirely suitable for the general reader is not for a moment contended. But the writer can at least aim at using technical terms as sparingly as possible, at avoiding unnecessary jargon, at expressing himself as simply and clearly as he can - even as beautifully as the nature of his subject permits. He can surely avoid giving the reader the feeling that he positively likes ugly words, that he revels in unintelligibilities, that he dotes on gibberish. Most readers will be grateful to him if they feel that he is at least trying to make some meaning clear to them, and not merely to stun, intimidate, and befuddle them with his cleverness. His writing will be popular in the only sense -and in the best sense -in which this can be demanded of him.

Nearly all the great philosophers of the English tradition have been in this sense popular writers, though I am afraid that the same cannot be said of the Germans. The style of Locke is lucid, if pedestrian; of both Berkeley and Hume beautiful in the extreme; of Mill clear and simple, though undistinguished and marred by some affectations; of Spencer perfectly lucid in spite of the "hurdy-gurdy monotony of him." William James, the greatest of American philosophers, had an absolute genius for graphic, telling, and brilliant English phrases. And of living writers, as I have already said, Mr. Russell's style is the best, and is a standing example of the fact that philosophy, and original philosophy too, can be written in plain English with an absolute minimum of technical terms.

* Obviously, it is not possible to explain Aristotle's teleological conception of the cause of motion in a short footnote. It may help, however, to know that Aristotle believed that since every motion presupposes a motive principle, one must assume the existence of a first motive force which is itself unmoved. This first motive force he calls The First Cause, or primum mobile, which he equates with absolute reality, or God. Since God is the ultimate source of all motion, and since God is also the object of desire, "'tis love that makes the world go round." The serious student will find a more satisfactory explanation in a good encyclopedia or in a history of philosophy.

Kevin Rudd and the philosophers' stones

David Burchell


IN the sodden northern winter of 1766 the Scottish essayist David Hume - surely one of the most sweet-tempered and agreeable of men - sallied across to Calais to transport the notorious Jean-Jacques Rousseau to the safety of the British Isles. Like many scholars since, Hume had a weakness for the glamorous authors of audacious theories. If shallow thinkers undershot the mark of truth, he reckoned, and abstruse theorists overshot it, the abstruse ones had at least the merit of "providing something that is new".

Poor Hume had occasion to repent his intellectual enthusiasm at his leisure. Pretty soon he discovered his guest to be the very archetype of that distinctive philosophical figure, the radical misanthrope. It was Rousseau, after all, who first combined that burning and sincere love of the people in general with a thoroughgoing detestation of all human beings in the particular; and whose vaulting hopes for some distant imagined future were matched only by his dissatisfaction with every single detail of the present. As Hume put it, Rousseau's extreme sensibility led him to experience pain far more keenly than pleasure: "He is like a man stripped not only of his clothes, but of his skin." And all this grand miserableness of temper transferred itself - as in philosophers it so often does - into a perfectly formulated world philosophy of grand miserableness.

Rousseau was happy only under persecution and he was endlessly ingenious in creating it. Hume's discreet attempts at financial generosity were read by Rousseau, inevitably, as humiliations; his efforts at securing Rousseau an income were read as treachery. When Hume rescued Rousseau's letters, Rousseau accused him of steaming them open.

Soon Rousseau's grand paranoia had woven together these imaginary petty betrayals into the cloth of his own grand theory of the world, in which the torrent of modern life rushes inexorably down the course of atomisation, fragmentation, selfishness and deceit.

If, as Hume suggested, a good deal of philosophy is merely the personality of the author laid over the landscape of the world, we have more than our share of miniature Rousseaus fluttering about us today.

It's to them that we owe the fashionable philosophy - recently given a kind of royal appointment by the Prime Minister - that the entire course of contemporary economic life runs, Rousseau-like, down the path of inexorable privatisation, marketisation, individualism and selfishness.

According to this view the only possible deliverer from this melancholy fate is that great contemporary equivalent of the 18th century's enlightened monarch, our very own Frederick the Great, the nation-building state.

Of course contemporary philosophers and political theorists are no less paradoxical than their 18th-century forebears. And in the otherwise polite and civilised corridors of academe you may sometimes discover - a real shock, this - that those who most zealously put their faith into the hands of grand impersonal entities, in their theories, may happen in life to be the most fissiparous, idiosyncratic and solitary of individuals. Indeed, in some cases it's hard to resist the intuition that the two impulses may be connected: sometimes we seek to cure the wounds in our own heart by diagnosing and resolving the ills of society.

This - or at least so I like to fantasise - is perhaps how Kevin Rudd came to play Hume to our gaggle of miniature Rousseaus. It's not that the Prime Minister really, seriously, views the past three decades of our public life as a moral desert, a wilderness from which the market's invisible hand has plucked all the fruit. Perhaps it's just that beneath that precise, calculating exterior there lurks a heart that hungers for abstruse philosophy and for the mind that overreaches. (In which case, what bitter irony that Rudd's article for the journal Foreign Affairs, which offers so much serious thought, should have been summarily rejected while his half-hearted wanderings through radical political philosophy were published with such fanfare.)

And yet almost immediately, Rudd has been confronted by the paradoxes that assail this position from every side. How can it be that the leitmotif of the past 30 years of public life is a soulless economic conservatism if the main progenitors of this state of affairs just happen to be the most respected Labor prime ministers of the past half-century? How can you treat economic policy as reform when it suits you, only to redescribe it as neo-liberalism when it doesn't? How can you be the apostle of a productivity revolution and at the same time a defender of the life-world against the deadening influence of economics? How can you present the nation-building state as the new social democratic tool when the future promises fiscal austerity?

Fortunately for Rudd, rescue is perhaps nearer to hand than it was for the unfortunate Hume. Julia Gillard nowadays presents herself as the Ms Fixit of public life, but in her political youth she was regarded by her mentors as an intellectual prodigy. In the legacy wars that have arisen over Paul Kelly's The March of Patriots, it may be that his loyal deputy has provided the Prime Minister with a ready-dug escape route from his Rousseauian paradoxes.

Gillard has brought the argument back down from philosophy's celestial spheres to the dust and dirt of political ethics. The central problem of the Howard years, in her view, wasn't a surfeit of ideology but rather a dearth of intellectual honesty. In a period of rapid and wearying economic change, "old certainties are swept away, old securities reduced". Frank acceptance of this by citizens required that government offer its citizens a social contract, lessening the birth pains of the new economy. Yet all the Howard government offered citizens "was an illusion that old certainties could be retained". Labor's role, on this logic, is not to battle against the global tide but rather to reshape state services in line with the greater risks and opportunities of the new world.

There is a straight line between 1983 and the future, in other words, and it passes through us. This is not exactly visionary, but it does make sense.

Hume wasn't a romantic acolyte of market economics. (But then which serious political thinker ever was?) He did, however, accurately anticipate the moral liberation that modern economic relations might bring.

He also understood how little these relations relied on the stock of innate human goodness, the same stock in which, paradoxically, the misanthrope Rousseau purported to place so much faith. Once his scarifying encounter with the great friend of mankind was over, Hume recovered his native equanimity and returned to worldlier speculations. Who knows, perhaps our would-be philosophers might now do the same.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,26067804-7583,00.html

Landmark ruling as internet race-hate fugitives locked up

TWO men have been jailed for publishing inflammatory race hate articles on the internet in a case that has been hailed as a landmark.
Simon Sheppard had argued that because his website used a server registered in the USA it was beyond the reach of English law but a judge disagreed and yesterday, after two trials, he finally sentenced Sheppard and Stephen Whittle, the author of five articles on the site.

Judge Rodney Grant told the pair at Leeds Crown Court their actions were unpleasant and very serious. He said: "I can say without any hesitation that I have rarely seen, or had to read or consider, material which was so abusive or insulting in its content towards racial groups within our own country and society."

The website featured extreme views and grotesque images of murdered Jews alongside cartoons and posters ridiculing ethnic groups, while Whittle's articles were "full of hatred".

The judge said Sheppard's counsel argued he had set up the website that way because he did not see himself as breaking British law. "I am satisfied having heard you give evidence and considered the submissions made you thought by using a server in the US you had found a way to circumvent English law."

Sheppard, 52, of Brook Street, Selby, was jailed for four years and six months on 16 charges relating to the possession, publication and distribution of material which could stir up racial hatred either on the internet or in hard copy.

He was previously convicted nine years ago at Hull Crown Court of publishing and distributing inflammatory material.

York University graduate Whittle, 42, of Avenham Lane, Preston, who was found guilty of five offences of publishing inflammatory material, was jailed for two years.

Both men were also sentenced to a further four months consecutive for breaching bail when they fled to the USA in July last year towards the close of the first trial. They spent 11 months in custody in California but failed to secure political asylum and were returned last month.

After the sentencing Adil Khan, head of diversity and community cohesion at Humberside Police, said: "This case is groundbreaking. The sentences reflect the gravity of the offences and send a very clear message there is nowhere to hide for people who do this."

Jonathan Sandiford, prosecuting, told the jury the men held extreme far right views "about people who were Jewish, black, Asian, Chinese, Indian and in reality anyone who wasn't white".

He said an investigation began in 2004 after a pamphlet Tales of the Holohoax, treating the subject as humorous, were pushed through the letterbox of a Blackpool synagogue and sent to a Jewish academic in London.

Copies of the leaflet were seized from Sheppard's then home in Market Weighton along with details of his website offering to supply it and other material through a post office box in Hull registered to him.

The website featured material including descriptions of Auschwitz as a holiday camp for Jews provided by the Nazis while articles written by Whittle described black people as "sex-crazed blood-thirsty savages".

Adrian Davies for Sheppard, who has a degree in mathematics, said he had a troubled childhood leading to a problem with authority, particularly the police. He considered his activities lawful with much of the information widely available.

Linda Turnbull for Whittle said he now appreciated his articles were "nasty and unacceptable".

http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/Landmark-ruling-as-internet-racehate.5449263.jp

FRAUD IN CLIMATE CHANGE RESEARCH

An email from James H. Rust [jrust@bellsouth.net] to Benny Peiser

As a retired professor I was alarmed by your CCNET email exposing fraud in climate change research by Prof. Wang at the University of Albany. Anyone's misconduct on a campus reflects on all who teach and do research. No matter what one has for beliefs, truth can not be compromised.

Your article did not contain sufficient detail to understand the nature of the suspected fraud. By doing a Goggle search, I think the nature of the fraud was understating the Urban Heat Island effect in China from 1953-1994. This may have been used to imply that carbon dioxide was the main culprit for global warming during that period.

Fraud, mistruths are common practice by those promoting AGW. Two notable examples are doctoring global temperature data to arrive at the "Hockey Stick" that was used to claim recent atmospheric carbon dioxide increases caused global temperatures to rise and the recent attempt by NASA to prove October's global temperature rose by using September data from Russia.

It may behoove those who are trying to educate the public about AGW to publicize errors by all who speak or write about climate change. This letter was sent to the MIT Technology Review to ask them to correct a recent error.

I may add that those of us who are trying to promote sanity to the AGW controversy must never lie or exaggerate facts because our credibility will always be under the most stringent scrutiny.

From: James H. Rust
To: letters@technologyreview.com
Sent: Tuesday, May 05, 2009 5:35 PM
Subject: Energy Research at MIT

Dear Editor:

As an advocate for a sound energy policy for the United States, I enjoy reading Technology Review because it contains so many great articles on promising energy research conducted at MIT. Many articles imply a need for this research is to develop energy resources that do not use fossil fuels that produce carbon dioxide that contributes to global warming(AGW). I realize a perceived threat from AGW has caused the annual release of billions of research dollars to find energy sources that do not produce carbon dioxide. Therefore, it is necessary to bow down to AGW in order to obtain research dollars.

However, I do take issue with telling untruths about global warming in order to get public support to reduce fossil fuel use. Examples of untruths are doctoring global temperature data in order to produce the "hockey stick" that suggested the past century rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide was responsible for a one degree Fahrenheit rise in global temperature and the October 2008 increase in global temperature by using September data from Russia. A more recent example of doctoring temperature data is underestimating the urban heat island effect in China from poor research at the University of Albany.

I am sure it was unintentional, but MIT is contributing to the untruths by a statement in its publicized "The MIT Energy Index". One of the statements is as follows: "Of the 12 years from 1995 to 2006, number that are among the warmest years on record: 11." This is clearly wrong. 1934 was probably the hottest year and the hottest 15 years since 1880 have been spaced over seven decades. So it would be prudent to simply drop this statement from The MIT Energy Index.

Regards,
James H. Rust, SM60
Professor of Nuclear Engineering(ret)

Second thoughts

Was World War II, and the unparalleled misery it caused, as inevitable as many historians claim?

ROY WILLIAMS reviews: "Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilisation" By Nicholson Baker Simon & Schuster, 566pp, $34.95

"Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost its Empire and the West Lost the World" By Patrick J. Buchanan Crown Publishers, 518pp, $53 (HB)

"Buchanan and Baker advance the same core thesis: World War II was avoidable, and should have been avoided"

WORLD War II had to be fought, according to conventional wisdom. Nazi Germany was bent on world domination and the extermination of the Jews; imperial Japan had designs on the Asia-Pacific. Western appeasement throughout the 1930s almost proved disastrous but, eventually, braver statesmen prevailed and the free world was preserved. Winston Churchill in particular has been idolised for his wartime leadership.

These notions remain deeply embedded in Western consciousness. Yet two generations of revisionist historians, from A. J. P. Taylor to Niall Ferguson, have shown the truth to be much murkier. Two recent books make the revisionist case with unusual passion, especially regarding Churchill's exalted status, and Graham Freudenberg's just-published Churchill and Australia has fuelled the fire.

These matters are not academic. The neoconservatives who hijacked George W. Bush's presidency belong to a modern Churchill cult. In the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and for years afterwards, they routinely smeared their critics as appeasers of Saddam Hussein in particular and of terrorists generally. This line was echoed by John Howard and Alexander Downer.

Human Smoke, Nicholson Baker's masterpiece, would be despised by the neocons. Indeed, the book has had a mixed reception. And no wonder: Baker dedicates it to "the memory of American and British pacifists [who] tried to stop the war from happening". He concentrates on the period from 1933, when the Nazis won power in Germany, to the end of 1941, when the US entered the conflict The book is a collection of vignettes, chronologically arranged Baker, better known as a distinguished novelist, explains in the afterword that he relied primarily on newspaper articles, diaries, memos, memoirs and public praclamations, "each tied as much as possible to a par ticular date".

Hovering throughout is the spectre of the Holocaust, to which the title alludes. Here are three examples of Baker's style:

George Bell, the bishop of Chichester, gave his first speech in the House of Lords. It wasJuly 27,1938. "I cannot understand how our kinsmen of the German race can lower themselves to such a level of dishonour and cowardice as to attack a defenceless people in the way that the National Socialists have attacked the non-Aryans."

Heinrich Himmler wrote a memo describing his plans for alien populations. The Jews would go to a colony in Africa or elsewhere, he wrote. "However cruel and tragic each individual case may be, this method is still the mildest and best, if one rejects the Bolshevik method of physical extermination of a people out of inner conviction as un-German and impossible." Hitler read Himmler's memo and, according to Himm]er, he found it "good and correct". It was May 28, 1940. "With respect to the Jewish question, the Fuhrer has decided to make a clean sweep," Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary. "The world war is here, and the annihilation of the Jews must be the necessary consequence." It was December 12, 1941.

The cumulative effect of hundreds of such snippets is extraordinarily powerful. Patrick Buchanan's The Unnecessary War is a more conventional work of history. Buchanan is no pacifist. Once a speechwriter for Richard Nixon, he was a competitive candidate in the Republican Party's presidential primaries in 1992 and 1996. As well as being a fine wordsmith, Buchanan is an old-fashioned American conservative: ornery, isolationist and proud of it.

Despite their radically different philosophies, Buchanan and Baker advance the same core thesis: World War II was avoidable, and should have been avoided The horrors tha war wrought are incontestable. More than 10 million Allied servicemen died and nearly six million from the Axis powers. Bombing of cities and towns became a routine strategy, devastating large tracts of Europe and coastal Japan. The Holocaust was perpetrated and nuclear weapons were invented and used. By 1945, total civilian deaths exceeded 40 million.

There were longer-term consequences as well: the final disintegration of the British Empire, the entrenchment of Joseph Stalin's tyranny in the Soviet Union, 40 years of brutal communist rule in eastern Europe and in China, the Cold War and the modern tragedy of Vietnam.

How and why did the world's 20th-century leaders allow all this to happen? Cold War statesman George F. Kennan once wrote: "All lines of inquiry lead back to World War I" Buchanan's early chapters are devoted to the origins of that war and its aftermath. Baker deals with those subjects only briefly, at least in any explicit way, but there is much in his book that casts a retrospective light.

It is notorious that the terms imposed by the Allies on Germany in June 1919 were fiercely punitive. Certainly, Germany was left ravaged and embittered. Yet its high command had surrendered in November 1918 on the basis that the peace would be governed by US president Woodrow Wilson's grand-sounding "Fourteen Points". The overriding principle was supposed to be this: "Unless justice be done to others, it will not be done to us."

Justice was denied. No German representatives were invited to the conference at Versailles and the "big three" Allied leaders -- Wilson, British Prime Minister David Lloyd-George and his French counterpart Georges Clemenceau -- lacked the character to resist populist howls for revenge. Lloyd-George had inflamed passions at the "khaki election" of December 1918 and he was bound to bring home, in Buchanan's words. "the peace of vengeance that British voters demanded".

Worst, for eight months after the armistice, Britain maintained a naval blockade of the Continent. This caused, and was intended to cause, widespread starvation in Germany. Hundreds of thousands died, mostly women and children. The terms to which Germany eventually acceded included a reparations bill of 32 billion gold marks, a debt so onerous that it crippled the economy in the '20s "To repair a broken window now costs more than the whole house would have cost before the inflation," lamented Stefan Zweig, a young Viennese writer who is quoted several times in Human Smoke.

The German people's confidence in moderate politicians steadily waned. Adolf Hitler's emergent National Socialist Party exploited that discontent and appealed to injured national pride. At Versailles the Allies had confiscated Germany's navy and merchant fleet. They had also revoked the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, agreed between Germany and Russia in March 1918. Germany had been victorious on the eastern front, but was stripped of its hard-won gains. In all, Buchanan estimates, it lost one-tenth of its peoples, one-eighth of its territory and all of its overseas colonies. Further, Germany was required to accept sole blame for causing the war. This, the now-infamous "war guilt clause", provoked a furious initial response from German foreign minister Ulrich Graf von Brockdorff-Rantzau: "Such a confession in my mouth would be a lie. We are far from declining any responsibility but we deny that Germany and its people were alone guilty."

There are historians, such as best-selling Briton Andrew Roberts, who still defend the Treaty of Versailles and-or World War I in general. They assert that Wilhelm II was an evil megalomaniac, that Germany, enslaved to a spirit of Prussian militariam, planned to conquer Europe, if not the world; and that liberal demovracy itself was at stake. Britain had no choice, they say, but to go to the rescue of Belgium when German troops entered its territory in late Julv 1914.

Yet as Buchanan and others have cogently demonstrated, the truth is more nuanced. Granted, the Kaiser was a vain and impulsive man, guilty during his reign of several gross diplomatic blunders. But in 1913 he acceded to Britain's demand that Germany limit the size of its navy to 60 per cent of the British fleet and, in the critical month of August 1914, he tried to avert a full-scale European war.

Germany, however, was facing two grave problems in 1914, one born of strength and the other of weakness. The German empire's industrial output had grown enormously, to the dismay of powerful vested interests in Britain. Meanwhile, Germany's geostrategic position in Europe had deteriorated. Britain, France and Russia, so frequently at loggerheads during the 19th century. were bound by various treaties and understandings to support each other militarily. Britain also had achieved rapprochement with Japan and the US.

Simon Schama has argued that there was another key factor at play: the turbulent political situation in Britain. Herbert Asquith's reformist Liberal government was barely re-elected in 1910 and by 1913 its position was even shakier The Liberals dreaded the thought of another Tory administration but were plagued by internal divisions. Lloyd-George - brilliant, charismatic and ambitious - was chancellor of the exchequer. Churchill - equally ambitious but bellicose, erratic and distrusted by his colleagues (he had defected from the Tories in 1904) - was first lord of the Admiralty.

By mid-1914, despite mobilisations of troops on the Continent, full-scale war was not inevitable. Buchanan shows that, until the fateful weekend of August 1-2, 1914, a clear majority of Asquith's cabinet (12 of 18) opposed any British involvement. A week earlier. Asquith had written: "There seems to be no reason why we should be anything more than spectators."

What changed? Buchanan contends that Churchill and Edward Grey, the foreign secretary, got to the waverers in cabinet. They saw a chance to crush Germany and seized on an obscure 1839 treaty under which Britain was entitled (but not compelled) to aid Belgium in the event of a violation of its neutrality. With support from Bonar Law's Tories and jingoists in the tabloid press, they invoked British honour. Crucially, they swayed Lloyd-George. His instincts were against aggression but he had opposed the Boer War and was scared of being tagged as weak. Asquith, too, caved.

It was a capitulation to what Zweig perceptively called "false heroism". In 1915, Zweig lamented the mindset "that prefers to send others to suffering and death, the cheap optimism of the conscienceless prophets, both political and military". Buchanan observes:

Churchill was exhilarated. Six months later, after the first Battle of Ypres, with tens of thousands of British soldiers in their graves, he would say "I am so happy I cannot help it --I enjoy every second "

In the event, Churchill had neither a successful nor an honourable war. His ill-considered plan to take the Dardanelles in 1915 was a disastrous failure, for which the Anzacs paid dearly at Gallipoli, and he played a central and shameful role in the naval blockade of 1918-19. The alienation of Germany was but one of several momentous consequences of World War I. Buchanan highlights the rise of the Bolsheviks in Russia and the emergence of the US as a fully-fledged world power.

But, above all else, according to historian N. K. Meaney: "The war had reinforced and extended the appeal and influence of nationalism. The right of the state in the name of the nation to demand absolute obedience and total sacrifice had been widely accepted." Hitler exploited these sentiments with singular cunning. But, as Buchanan argues persuasively, Hitler's ambitions for Germany were limited. He could have tolerated the retention of Alsace-Lorraine by France; until 1939 he confined his activities in western Europe to building defensive fortifications up and down the Rhineland. He had no desire to fight Britain, which he respected, let alone the US. His greatest fear was another war on two fronts.

Hitler dreamed of Lebensraum for Germany. Famously, he "turned his gaze to the east", to the lands and peoples of Austria. Czechoslovakia, the Baltic states and Poland and beyond to the Ukraine. Some of this territory was historically and culturally German; portions of it had been carved up by the Allies at Versailles. Hitler wanted a contiguous, self-sufficient empire that would be safe from blockade and starvation. The more thoughtful Western leaders, notably British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, understood that Germany harboured some well justified grievances; and, across Europe, nightmarish memories of 1914-18 still haunted millions.

How, then, did World War II come about? Buchanan and Baker agree on one thing: appeasement was not the main problem. Buchanan argues convincingly, on strictly pragmatic grounds, that Britain was right not to go to war in February 1938 in protest against the Anschluss. So, too, seven months later, at the Munich conference, when Chamberlain recognised Germany's retaking of the Sudetenland. Most of the population there was sympathetic to Germany, as was the vast majority in Austria; and, in any case, Britain was not militarily capable of defending their borders.

In my opinion, most of the blunders by the Allies in the '20s and '30s involved not craven timidity but hypocrisy or over-aggression, or plain ineptitude. It is not surprising that entreaties from the pacifist movement were ignored. (These were made eloquently and often by Mohandas Gandhi, Zweig and others, and are documented in Human Smoke.) It is harder to fathom the dismal failure of realpolitik.

Buchanan identifies many strategic missteps, not least Britain's dealings with Italy, which were clumsy and arrogant. Italy had fought with the Allies in World War I, losing 460,000 men; and, for all his odious faults, Benito Mussolini was quick to recognise the menace posed by Nazi methods and ideology. But by 1936 he felt compelled to "cast his lot with the Hitler he loathed".

Britain's two most calamitous errors stemmed from feckless bravado. The first was the war guarantee given to Poland on March 31, 1939, Chamberlain's panicky response to Hitler's occupation earlier that month of the rest of Czechoslovakia. (This was a breach by Hitler of the Munich agreement but, again, most of the local people empathised with Germany.) As for Poland, it was militarily indefensible, and Germany's claim on the port city of Danzig was especially strong. Chamberlain intended the Poland guarantee to deter Hitler, and to an extent it did, but it also emboldened the Polish government to reject German offers "widely recognised as mild".

In late August 1939 Hitler concluded an expedient non-aggression pact with Stalin, and German troops entered Poland on September 1. Britain still had a choice. It was powerless to help Poland by military means and Hitler had ordered his generals to make no aggressive moves in the west. War in the East between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia was now likely in the short to medium term, and if it had ensued must have weakened both regimes substantially. Buchanan argues that Britain would have been wiser to denounce Hitler outright and await events (and, with France, rearm in the meantime).

Who knows what would have happened? Could it have been worse than what did happen? On September 2, 1939 speaking in the House of Commons, Chamberlain rediscovered his pacifist convictions and proposed a peace conference. Predictably, this appalled Churchill and most of the Tory backbench, as well as many in the Labour Opposition. Later that night the cabinet voted for war and, the next day, Chamberlain dolefully declared it.

Yet again in a time of crisis, in the words of military historian Robert Cowley, "politicians seemed more afraid of what would happen to them if they didn't go to war than if they did". Baker quotes the French prime minister in 1940, the much-maligned Philippe Petain:

"It is easy, but also stupid, to talk of fighting to the last man, " Petain said, with tears in his eyes. It is also criminal in view of our losses in the last war."

But what of the elephant in the room? All other considerations aside, were the Allies honour-bound to fight the war to "save the Jews"? That is a widely held belief but it is mistaken. Hitler did not fight World War II to bring about the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a direct and foreseen consequence of Germany being simultaneously at war with Britain and the US, as well as Stalin's Russia. The Jewish population of Germany in the '30s was about 450,000. The Nazis wanted their mass deportation, either by resettlement (various destinations were proposed. including Palestine, Madagascar. even Alaska) or by immrgratiun to friendly countries. As the SS's atrocities worsened, more and more Jews in Germany wished desperately to escape. Kristallnacht (November 9-10 1938) was a watershed.

To the world's shame, no nations and few citizens responded. There were noble exceptions: Baker highlights the magnificent efforts of the Quakers, of former US president Herbert Hoover and of certain churchmen. But, in the main, indifference and bigotry prevailed. Baker shows how US president Franklin Roosevelt stymied all attempts to increase America's tiny quota of Jewish immigrants.

Once hostilities broke out, the Jews' position became yet more perilous, both in Germany and the occupied territories in the east, especially Poland. Emigration from Germany ceased altogether in October 1941 and two months later, following Pearl Harbor, the US entered the war. By early 1942 the Nazi high command realised that Germany was doomed. Then, and only then. was the final solution put into effect in all its systemic hideousness.

Where was Churchill in all this? He defected back to the Tories in 1921 and served a patchy stint as chancellor of the exchequer from 1924 to 1929. Then his career languished. It is a tenet of the Churchill cult that during the '30s he was one of the few voices of courage and good judgment. This is nonsense. Baker reminds us that Churchill's tactical acumen was poor and that, on several occasions, he expressed fulsome admiration for Mussolini and Hitler. Openly anti-Semitic Nazi sympathisers (such as American aviator Charles Lindbergh) at least urged peace.

By early 1938 Churchill was agitating for war, notwithstanding Britain's military unpreparedness, and he was elated when war came ("the glory of Old England thrilled my being"). After succeeding Chamberlain as prime minister in May 1940, he vetoed any idea of peace negotiations with Hitler, interned all "enemy aliens and suspect persons" in England (mostly Jewish refugees) and ordered another starvation blockade of the Continent (including occupied France).

For five years he directed Britain's war effort with determined savagery and child-like relish, as is well documented in Freudenberg's fine book. In July 1945, soon after the war ended in Europe, Britain held a general election. Churchill expected a grateful nation to return him and the Tories to power; instead, Clement Attlee's Labour Party won in a landslide. The beleaguered British people were fond of Churchill but at another level had seen through him. His career had borne out A. G Gardiner's prophetic warning in 1913: "Churchill will write his name in history; take care that he does not write it in blood."

Of course, for as long as World War II was raging, it was essential that the Allies prevailed. But should the war have been fought at all? Freudenberg emphatically says yes: Churchill was wrong about many things, but his decision in May 1940 to fight the Nazis "is his eternal greatness". Buchanan and Baker contend otherwise, and they persuade me. Buchanan endorses some wry advice of late 19th-century German chancellor Otto von Bismarck, a hard-headed conservative if ever there were one. He regarded preventative war as "like committing suicide from fear of death". Baker prefers the teaching of Gandhi, which echoes Christ's in the Sermon on the Mount: "We have found in non-violence a force which, if organised, can without doubt match itself against all the most violent forces in the world."

The above article appeared in "The Australian Literary Review" of 3 December, 2008

‘The World is My Constituency’

Are liberals rejecting the liberal-internationalist tradition?

JOHN FONTE

‘We are the party of Roosevelt. We are the party of Kennedy,” declared Barack Obama in accepting the Democratic nomination. Is that still true? Peter Beinart analyzed the liberal-internationalist tradition in the summer issue of World Affairs, arguing that Wilson and FDR’s optimistic vision of liberal internationalism, grounded in collective security and collective peace, confronts a rival Republican vision that he correctly describes as “conservative internationalism” rather than isolationism. The Republican internationalist tradition, from Henry Cabot Lodge to Reagan to McCain (as opposed to the more anti-interventionist Borah-Taft-Paul school), sees the world as a dangerous place. It is less optimistic about human nature and focused more on military alliances than on international institutions, Beinart tells us. Fair enough.

The problem with Obama’s oratory and Beinart’s thesis is that the traditional framework of liberal internationalism is dying. Liberal internationalism is first of all inter-national, concerned with relations between sovereign nation-states. As practiced by Wilson, FDR, and Truman, liberal internationalism meant American leadership while working with other nations in alliances and in creating new international organizations to promote peace and collective security, such as the United Nations. While they were unquestionably internationalists, those Democrats were also nationalists, pursuing American interests and willing to use force to secure them. While they were mostly Wilsonians, to borrow Walter Russell Mead’s formulation, they were also quite willing to employ Hamiltonian (which is to say, economic) and defense-oriented Jacksonian means. Mead specifically mentions the World War II bombing of Japanese and German cities as a Jacksonian turn. In sum, they were national progressives, not transnational progressives.

Today, in the major precincts of mainstream American liberalism, the merely international is passé; the transnational, or global, is ascendant. As John Ruggie of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government puts it, “Postwar institutions including the United Nations were built for an inter-national world, but we have entered a global world. International institutions were designed to reduce external friction, between states; our challenge today is to devise more inclusive forms of global governance.”

Typical of leading law-school opinion is a comment in May 2008 by the dean of Georgetown University Law School, Alexander Aleinikoff, who was general counsel of the immigration service under Clinton. Aleinikoff envisions new transnational political authorities above and beyond American constitutional democracy. He writes that we should expect the “development and strengthening of other political institutions — regional, transnational, some global . . . exercising what will be perceived as legitimate legal and coercive authority. . . . That is, a decline in citizenship in the nation-state is likely to be accompanied by new kinds of citizenships associated with ‘polities’ that tax and spend, organize armies and police, establish courts, and promulgate what are perceived to be binding norms. There is no reason that standard accounts of citizenship that link governance and a people cannot be stated at the appropriate level of abstraction to apply to new forms of political association.” Aleinikoff’s account may be read as both predictive and normative, an indication that American elites not only believe that our constitutional democracy will be subordinated to global authorities but also desire that this come to pass.

To what extent would an Obama victory mean the replacement of traditional liberal internationalism with transnational progressivism? To be sure, the liberal internationalists are still with us. They include writers such as Beinart, John Patrick Diggins, and Michael Lind, the venerable political scientist Robert Dahl, such foreign-policy practitioners as Richard Holbrooke and Michael O’Hanlon, and even some younger policy wonks at the Center for New American Security who describe themselves as “Truman Democrats.” But it is possible that Hillary Clinton’s campaign was the last hurrah of liberal internationalism. The Nation noted that Obama’s advisers “tend to be younger, more progressive . . . more likely to stress ‘soft power’ issues like human rights.” But it’s not the big names that we should watch; rather, we should keep in mind the observation of Gaetano Mosca, the political theorist who argued that an understanding of modern government does not begin with cabinet members (prediction: Lugar at State) but with the second stratum of appointees: the undersecretaries and the deputy assistant secretaries. It is very likely that this lower layer of Obama lieutenants would have internalized the transnational progressives’ positions on global governance, international law, shared sovereignty, international norms, and the like.

This would likely have two outcomes: first, a high-profile push to ratify a series of treaties that have been languishing for years; second, a less publicized but equally important initiative to transform (specifically to transnationalize and lawyerize) America’s security-defense establishment.

‘LEADERSHIP’ REDEFINED

In the name of “rejoining the international community” and exercising world leadership, an Obama administration would probably attempt to ratify some U.N. treaties that directly challenge American sovereignty, including the Law of the Sea Treaty, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, and the International Criminal Court. Tactically, Obama would probably start with the easier treaties, the Law of the Sea and the Rights of the Child. He could argue that both the current leadership of the U.S. Navy and the Bush administration have supported the Law of the Sea Treaty, and that only the U.S. and Somalia have declined to ratify the Rights of the Child. Joe Biden, with his experience as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, would be the perfect point man on U.N. treaty issues, demanding of opponents: “Don’t you trust the Navy? Do you want to stand alone with Somalia?”

The Law of the Sea Treaty raises serious national-security concerns. It could subject maritime disputes involving U.S. defense forces to mandatory arbitration by an international tribunal in Hamburg composed of 21 judges, some chosen by the likes of Burma, China, Cuba, and Russia. The former commander of the Pacific Fleet, retired admiral James “Ace” Lyons, said it would be “inconceivable” to “forfeit . . . America’s freedom of the seas” to an “unaccountable international agency.”

The Rights of the Child Treaty is at odds with the U.S. Constitution. If adopted, it would nullify federalism by requiring uniform penal codes for minors across all 50 states, meaning that Texas and Vermont would have to adopt identical laws governing juvenile offenders. It would abolish the death penalty and life imprisonment under all circumstances for those under 18 and severely curtail parental rights — for example, children would have a legal right to “correspondence” with anyone on the planet without “interference” from their parents. Whatever the particular merits of these issues, Americans should be able to decide for themselves how to raise their children or punish criminals.

CEDAW, the women’s-rights treaty, would almost certainly resurface under Obama. Joe Biden led the successful fight in 2002 to get CEDAW out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which he chairs, but it was not brought to the Senate floor because it lacked the necessary 67 votes to pass. Biden argued at the time that the U.S., in positioning itself as a champion of women’s rights in the Middle East and across the globe, was morally obliged to ratify the treaty. But in order for the U.S. to be in full compliance with CEDAW, Americans would have to alter our constitutional system, repudiate federalism, and allow U.N. treaty requirements to dictate domestic policies.

Testifying against CEDAW before the Senate, civil-rights lawyer Kathryn Balmforth stated that the U.N. committee monitoring compliance with the treaty “seems oblivious to political self-determination and freely chosen democratic leadership.” For example, she noted, the U.N. experts have called for sex-based preferences “in all spheres, public and private, and even for elective offices.” CEDAW monitors called on Georgia to return to its Communist-era gender quotas in political offices. Britain has been told to adopt the standard of equal pay for work of “comparable value,” as determined by bureaucrats. CEDAW monitors are also concerned that British men are not taking parental leave at the same rate as British women. This might be humorous if it were not for the fact that the American Bar Association and various human-rights lawyers already are planning to use CEDAW to overturn a vast array of federal and state laws that they do not have the votes to defeat through democratic means.

More than any other treaty organization, the International Criminal Court is central to the global-governance project. A key Obama foreign-policy adviser, Sarah Sewall of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, is an expert on the ICC. She has co-edited a book, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, recommending that the U.S. join the court. She writes: “The ICC represents an acid test of America’s commitment to international and universal concepts of justice and human rights — its willingness to be bound by the rules it establishes for others.” She and co-author Carl Kaysen argue that critics of this transnational court have an outdated conception of sovereignty and that “we have chosen to stand with rogue states in opposition to fundamental norms of international justice.”

The U.S. government opposes the ICC because American soldiers could be charged with war crimes and made subject to the court’s final jurisdiction by a decision of the ICC’s pre-trial chamber, which would supercede our Constitution. Moreover, even though the U.S. is not a party to the treaty, if an alleged “war crime” occurs within a state that has joined the treaty (e.g., Afghanistan), Americans could be prosecuted. To guard against this possibility, Congress passed the American Service Members Protection Act, authorizing military action in the event of such an occurrence. In sum, the ICC is a transnational authority that directly challenges American self-government under the Constitution.

McCain hasn’t been a pillar of reliability on this issue, either. In January 2008, the San Francisco Chronicle reported his comments on the ICC as follows: “I want us in the ICC, but I’m not satisfied that there are enough safeguards.” Writing in Foreign Affairs, McCain adviser Robert Kagan argues that America has “little to fear” from increased transnational authority and “should not oppose but welcome a world of pooled and diminished national sovereignty.” Kagan has it wrong here; diminishing our sovereignty is at odds with American constitutional democracy, and is, of course, a political loser for McCain.

McCain should forthrightly oppose the ICC and other transnational power grabs. He could say: “We support democratic self-government and oppose the ICC because it claims jurisdiction over the citizens of democratic, sovereign states without the consent of the citizens of those states. This means that, besides being concerned with its own interests and citizens, the United States will support the self-government and interests of other democratic states that have not ratified the ICC, including Israel, India, the Czech Republic, and Chile, on the universal grounds of democratic sovereignty.”

LAWYERIZING WAR

An Obama administration would seek to transform the culture and ethos of America’s soldiers. They would say, “We need to globalize thinking and develop new understandings of the role of international law,” which would appear reasonable enough. The subtext, however, would be a call to transnationalize and lawyerize America’s security in general and the American military in particular.

To see the future, one should examine the activities of Harvard’s Carr Center under the leadership of Sewall (and another prominent Obama supporter, Samantha Power). For years, it has conducted workshops on the crossroads of military doctrine, international law, and human rights. Participants have included former and current high-ranking military officers (Wesley Clark), NGO leaders from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (Kenneth Roth), international lawyers, academics, journalists, and activists.

In theory the workshops are for informational purposes. In practice they amount to a political campaign to soften opposition to the International Criminal Court (and transnational law generally) and to ensure that Amnesty International’s human-rights perspective becomes that of the American defense establishment. With Obama appointees at the top of the national-security agencies, we could expect an effort to transform what would be characterized as an outmoded, insular military culture.

Sewall gained foreign-policy credibility by participating in General Petraeus’s project to develop a new counterinsurgency doctrine. But she declared in a revealing Washington Post article that “Petraeus may provide the ultimate service to the troops and the nation — and seal his legacy — not by winning, but by speaking the truth about Iraq.” That truth, she said, was “the likelihood of failure.” She wrote a 2008 paper arguing that American national interests represent a “transitional phase” that will ultimately be subordinate to a transnational system.

AMERICAN IDENTITY

All indications are that an Obama administration will move beyond traditional liberal internationalism of the Wilson-FDR-JFK variety to transnationalism. Ultimately this means that the evolving norms of international law would trump the U.S. Constitution.

A Harris poll taken for the Bradley Project on America’s National Identity (I participated in the project) asked: “When there is a conflict between the U.S. Constitution and international law, which one should be the highest legal authority for Americans?” Sixty-six percent of registered voters preferred the Constitution, 16 percent put international law first, and 17 percent were undecided. The same Harris poll asked: “Do you think of yourself more as a citizen of the U.S. or a citizen of the world?” The result among registered voters: 83 percent American citizens, 12 percent global citizens, 4 percent not sure.

John McCain should clarify the differences between his views on America’s role in the world and his opponent’s ambiguity on global governance. Although the hour is late, he or a future Congress could stand with the overwhelming majority of the American people by articulating a strong case for constitutional democratic sovereignty. But whether debated in this election or not, the transnational challenge is not going away.

Mr. Fonte is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. His book Sovereignty or Submission: Will Americans Rule Themselves or be Ruled by Others? will be published by Encounter next year.

Source

DUMB GROWTH: TRADING SUSTAINABLE WATER FOR THE FOOLS GOLD OF GLOBAL WARMING

by Wayne Lusvardi

Economist Tom Sowell once aptly wrote that "there are no solutions; there are only tradeoffs." This can be no better seen than in the recent enactment of California Senate Bill 375 which will unknowingly trade precious groundwater resources for "Smart Growth" anti-urban sprawl policies. Under this legislation water will no longer be gold in California; ethereal concepts about reducing "global warming" and producing "green power" will be California's new fools gold. It is little wonder that California is experiencing a "perfect drought" with the adoption of such policies.

SB 375 is a piece of legislation which requires regional planning agencies to put into place "sustainable" growth plans. It will require the California Air Resources Board to double the targeted reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that local governments must meet in its land use plans. More specifically, it will require that new housing development be shifted from the urban fringe, where groundwater resources are more abundant (San Bernardino County, Morgan Hill), to highly dense urban areas near public transit and light rail lines (Pasadena, East Bay) where local water sources are patchy and often polluted. The environmental intent of SB 375 is to reduce auto commuter trips, air pollution, and gasoline consumption.

However, the legislation will unintentionally result in more reliance on imported water supplies from the Sacramento Delta, Mono Lake , and the Colorado River for thirsty cities along California's coastline instead of diverting development to inland areas which have more "sustainable" groundwater resources.

This can be clearly seen by viewing the California Department of Water Resources map of Groundwater Basins in California shown at this web link. As can easily be seen on the map, the populous coastal areas of the state have spotty groundwater resources while the inland areas have the most abundant water basins to sustain new development.

For example, the City of San Bernardino in the "Inland Empire" of Southern California has such abundant groundwater resources that it has long-range plans to draw down its high groundwater table to reduce the potential for liquefaction (ground failure) in the event of an earthquake, construct lakeside developments, and sell the surplus water.

Even if we ignore for the moment that diverting housing development to urban areas will increase reliance on imported water from the environmentally sensitive Sacramento Delta, the policy makes no sense from even a global warming perspective. Look at the drawing at the link provided below which depicts the geographic profile of the "Urban Heat Island Effect."

Urban Heat Island Profile Sketch

Concentrating housing development in already highly dense urban areas will only worsen the urban heat island effect and thus increase "global warming." The obvious solution from the greenhouse effect resulting from pollution is housing dispersion, not concentration.

Moreover, by virtue of shifting to reliance on imported water supplies California will need to generate more electricity to pump that water to urban centers located far from the sources of water. No doubt that electricity will also come from imported energy sources outside the state. Green power (solar, wind) cannot be used to pump water because it is too unreliable due to the unpredictability of the weather. Thus, SB 375 undercuts California 's Global Warming Solutions Act ("Green Power Law - Assembly Bill 32).

Fortunately, the new law doesn't yet mandate local governments to comply with the plans. No real changes are expected until regional planning agencies adopt the "sustainable communities" growth policies called for in the law three years from now. However, if cities choose not to comply, then state transportation tax funds can conceivably be diverted to compliant cities. That SB 375 is a license for greedy coastal cities in Democratic strongholds along the coast to capture the taxes of inland cities in Republican territory is never mentioned in the media. Environmentalism serves as a cover for politics by other means.

Laws like SB 375 continue dependence on costly imported wholesale water, say at $500 per acre foot (a football field of water one foot high which sustains two families per year) compared to cheap local groundwater at roughly $50 per acre foot.

That this piece of legislation was passed by "Green Governor" Arnold Schwarzenegger without dissent by local water agencies and even air quality resource boards, is indicative of how environmental policy often defies science and common sense and is based on powerful cultural images spawned by government and unquestioned by the media. Incredibly, the implementation of SB 375 will even be granted certain breaks for transit oriented development under the California Environmental Quality Act.

California is shifting from valuing water as gold to a Fool's Gold Rush to reduce global warming and generate green power. Unfortunately, the public has already bought the fake for the real gold thanks mostly to the media. Paraphrasing a Latin proverb, "(political) hay is more acceptable to a donkey than gold."

No Vote on California Proposition 8 is Anti-Feminist

by Wayne Lusvardi

As a former court protective services worker for abused and neglected children and a “community organizer,” I strongly oppose the superficial position of those against Proposition 8; and although I am in favor of the Prop 8 ban on same-sex marriage I am not persuaded by all the conservative and religious arguments for it.

The arguments in favor of the Prop 8 are overly defensive, conjectural, seemingly discriminatory and wrongly moralistic. The conservative Christian scriptural position of opposing same sex marriage for the harm that it will bring to children as the weakest members of society is important but does not answer whether “the state has the power to take away anyone’s right to marry the partner of his or her choice.” Concern over a speculative future harm to children will not likely overcome the perception of actual discrimination against gays today in the eyes of much of the modern public.

Conversely, the arguments against Prop 8 on the basis of injustice and unfairness and the unhappiness and social stigma inflicted on gays by denying them the sanction of marriage equally miss the mark. The social status of gay couples is no different than that of anyone else who lives in an unmarried status, including widows.

And the utopian notion that progressive “change” will overcome the “centuries long struggle for civil rights” for gays is historically myopic. The past Progressive reforms of busing in our public schools (“white flight”) and recent reform of affordable housing credit as a civil right (“sub-prime” loan foreclosures and investor wipe-outs) are tragic cases of the unintended consequences of the misguided quest for “civil rights.”

The word “marriage” comes from the Latin word “mater” for mother. And “mater” is what matters in marriage. Marriage is unavoidably built around female sexuality and procreation. Marriage can only concern a relationship to a woman for procreation. It is the opposite of concubinage, which is an involuntary relationship with a man of higher status in a traditional society.

A social order that doesn’t protect a woman from rape or incest or concubinage can’t give women freedom to control who the father(s) of their children are, or their own bodies, or even their own health. Marriage is the structure of this freedom of choice for women in a modern society. Women’s freedom to control access to their body is what marriage is all about. Without that there is no societal basis for laws to protect marriage, including gay marriage. Feminists are essentially right about marriage but not same-sex marriage.

Defining marriage down to a mere contract between companions or non-procreative sex partners will only end up harming all women, for if everyone can marry, no one needs to and it becomes meaningless. Women and children will ultimately suffer most. Gay marriage robs something that belongs exclusively to women. Man-woman marriage is not anti-gay, it is pro-feminine. Same sex marriage is anti-feminist

Recently, a friend told me the story of a male priest who had married a wealthy male divorcee parishioner who had previously had a heterosexual marriage including a male child. Ironically, his former wife attended the gay wedding ceremony reportedly out of “tolerance” and “love.” Without man-woman marriage it is women themselves who will be left out and eventually relegated to quasi-concubine status. The absurdity of the above story is perhaps why the poet Byron wrote "all comedies are ended by marriage."

Marriage isn’t a conspiracy of patriarchs or the respectable capitalistic bourgeoisie class. It is part of the divine order – only through marriage can the world persist. Procreative marriage is the transcendent link back to the Creator and our origins and to the future beyond our lifespan. It is as old as the story in the Hebrew Bible Book of Genesis about Sarah, who could not conceive, and thus offered her maidservant Hagar as a second married wife to her husband Abraham.

It is more important to preserve freedom for most women than to elevate the status of a few famous elite gays. This transcends the politics and religion of Left and Right. Even though I am disappointed with the arguments of the proponents for Prop 8, I nonetheless urge you to Vote Yes on Prop 8.

See: Sam Shulman, "Gay Marriage-And Marriage," Orthodoxy Today, Nov. 2003.

Wayne Lusvardi, MSW, is a Pasadena resident and blogs at PasadenaSubRosa.typepad.com/