Category: What He Said

How NATO Lost Its Way

Peter Hitchens;

In the 1980s, I sometimes thought I was the only university-educated person I knew who thought deterrence was a good idea and NATO a good thing. Nowadays, it is all the other way round. I am one of the few educated people I know who thinks that the West bears some blame for the appalling conflict raging in Ukraine, though I can name a string of diplomats and academics, from George Kennan and Henry Kissinger to Yegor Gaidar and Noam Chomsky, who have long warned that NATO expansion was a terrible mistake, certain to strengthen the worst elements in Moscow. I have pursued a lone heresy of wondering why NATO even survived the end of its enemies, the USSR and the Warsaw Pact. Do we still maintain alliances against Austria-Hungary or the Ottomans? I can find no trace of them. Perhaps, overlooked in some elegant Paris street and living off ancient funds, elderly, learned men still occupy these joyous sinecures, hoping that they will not be found out.

But the political inheritors of the anti-cruise campaigners are today all hot for NATO, which I am sure they would have despised in the old days when it preserved the freedom of Western Europe through masterly inaction. These enthusiasts, for instance, desire to impose no-fly zones on Ukraine, a policy guaranteed to spread bloody war even further over the continent of Europe. The successors of the left-wing academics who once apologized for the USSR are now severe enemies of non-Communist Russia. The herbivores of 1982 are the warmongers of 2022.

How did this happen?

A Night With The Untouchables


I live in downtown Ottawa, right in the middle of the trucker convoy protest.

They are literally camped out below my bedroom window. My new neighbours moved in on Friday and they seem determined to stay. I have read a lot about what my new neighbours are supposedly like, mostly from reporters and columnists who write from distant vantage points somewhere in the media heartland of Canada. Apparently the people who inhabit the patch of asphalt next to my bedroom are white supremacists, racists, hatemongers, pseudo-Trumpian grifters, and even QAnon-style nutters. I have a perfect view down Kent Street – the absolute ground zero of the convoy. In the morning, I see some protesters emerge from their trucks to stretch their legs, but mostly throughout the day they remain in their cabs honking their horns. At night I see small groups huddled in quiet conversations in their new found companionship. There is no honking at night. What I haven’t noticed, not even once, are reporters from any of Canada’s news agencies walking among the trucks to find out who these people are. So last night, I decided to do just that – I introduced myself to my new neighbours.

Great piece. Share it far and wide.

It All Started In 1306

I’m not sure about my brothers, but I’ve been eager with anticipation for some public acknowledgment of our vast ancestral lands which are rightfully ours, but now lived on by others in Scotland.

Alas, so far there has been silence.

Even with world leaders and climate elites gathering in Glasgow for another climate summit. One would have at least expected Justin, whom has been making a speciality of land acknowledgments, to have given a grave voiced mere mention to the Cumming clan’s ancestral lands.

It might even prompt the Scots to get with the new morality of our time. It’s certainly long overdue.

Back here in enlightened Canada, institutions are following Justin’s examples these days of land acknowledgements. Every Canadian primary and high school, college and university and anyone else being important and polite on Canadian soil, whenever two or more are gathered in the government’s name.

It has replaced, “let’s bow our heads in prayer.”

Things started to fall apart for the Cumming’s – spelled Comyn in those days – on February 10, 1306. Sir John Comyn, at 32 years of age, was stabbed to death by Robert the Bruce at the altar in Greyfriars Chapel in Dumfries.

That’s a fact. My grandparents had mentioned it. Dad, in his callous disregard for the painful past when farming in the present could have cared less, but today it’s all there on the internet, complete with a portrait of Sir John.

At that point in the early 1300s the Comyn’s were the largest landowners in Scotland, having vast holdings throughout the country. Sir John had royalty on both sides of his pedigree.

Now the reason for the stabbing isn’t definitive. Batches of people do seem to get upset at the Cumming’s through the years. According to the internet, when Robert the Bruce ran from the church, Sir Robert Fleming went back in “to finish the job.”

Both Sir John and Robert the Bruce were ‘Joint Guardians’ of Scotland, after the recent demise of Sir William Wallace, of recent movie fame, who held that post for a wee while.

Wallace was a landless soul, but had an ability to motivate folks. He probably would be paid to give Ted Talks, or be an evangelist on TV, or another Randy Hillier, if he was circulating today.

But being Wallace had no land, he deserves no mention whatsoever at world events of importance, like this climate conference.

Several years before being stabbed to death in church Sir John had fought in the first war for Scottish Independence. Today they have referendums on the topic. He was sent as a prisoner to the Tower of London, but was released on the condition that he fight the French in Flanders on behalf of the English. Which was where he was when Wallace gathered an army and fought his Scotland battles, before being publicly executed in a horrible way.

At the time of the stabbing, Sir John’s son of the same name fled down to England. He returned as a young soldier in 1314 to fight for Scotland and was killed in the Battle of Bannockburn.

If you want to know how a clan can go from royalty, living on estates that would put Downton Abbey to shame, to living down a long lane in a farmhouse on the eighth concession in a cold land, with not a servant or footman in sight, there you have it.

It’s been a damn hard thing to live with, that shame and rage at the cruelty, over the past 800 years. People say you should get over it, but having property taken after your clan chief was murdered in cold blood, for no apparent reason other than being a Cumming, leaves permanent scars.

One is at a loss on how to get Justin to notice.

Perhaps my brothers and I could set up a sod hut on Parliament Hill, with a grazing Ayrshire cow tethered to a stake, a sucking calf at her side. At least I have a kilt, complete with that wee dagger that fits into the sock.

A piper could be summoned, to play every evening and morn.

The Buchans’ are part of our clan, but it’s best if they stayed away. They tend to be hot-tempered towards Justin, when we’re vying for his sympathy.

Ian Cumming, Reprinted with permission, originally published Nov 2 in Ontario Farmer.

The Decline And Fall Of The American Empire

Coffee time.

“THE MULTITUDES remained plunged in ignorance… and their leaders, seeking their votes, did not dare to undeceive them.” So wrote Winston Churchill of the victors of the first world war in “The Gathering Storm.” He bitterly recalled a “refusal to face unpleasant facts, desire for popularity and electoral success irrespective of the vital interests of the state.” American readers watching their government’s ignominious departure from Afghanistan, and listening to President Joe Biden’s strained effort to justify the unholy mess he has made, may find at least some of Churchill’s critique of interwar Britain uncomfortably familiar.

Britain’s state of mind was the product of a combination of national exhaustion and “imperial overstretch”, to borrow a phrase from Paul Kennedy, a historian at Yale. Since 1914, the nation had endured war, financial crisis and in 1918-19 a terrible pandemic, the Spanish influenza. The economic landscape was overshadowed by a mountain of debt. Though the country remained the issuer of the dominant global currency, it was no longer unrivalled in that role. A highly unequal society inspired politicians on the left to demand redistribution if not outright socialism. A significant proportion of the intelligentsia went further, embracing communism or fascism.

Meanwhile the established political class preferred to ignore a deteriorating international situation. Britain’s global dominance was menaced in Europe, in Asia and in the Middle East. The system of collective security—based on the League of Nations, which had been established in 1920 as part of the post-war peace settlement—was crumbling, leaving only the possibility of alliances to supplement thinly spread imperial resources. The result was a disastrous failure to acknowledge the scale of the totalitarian threat and to amass the means to deter the dictators.

Intimidation not Persuasion

It’s not so much that they’re brainwashing people as they’re bullying and scaring the shit out of them so they comply.

The common understanding of propaganda is that it is intended to brainwash the masses. Supposedly, people get exposed to the same message repeatedly and over time come to believe in whatever nonsense authoritarians want them to believe.

And yet authoritarians often broadcast silly, unpersuasive propaganda.

Political scientist Haifeng Huang writes that the purpose of propaganda is not to brainwash people, but to instill fear in them.

Beatings will continue until morale improves.

Our Increasingly Unrecognizable Civilization

Mark Steyn, for Hillsdale College;

It is not at all clear to me that many of America’s conservative politicians understand the seriousness of all this. You can see it in the fact that they go around trying to scare people with the specter of a “radical socialist agenda.” For well over a year now, we have been living in a world in which it’s accepted as normal that the state has essentially unlimited power—and in which our freedom to decide for ourselves has been diminished almost to invisibility. Why do these conservative politicians think the words “radical socialist agenda” still scare anyone in a time when the state can tell us whether we can have Aunt Mabel over for Christmas? They are completely out of touch.

Death Spiral Of American Academia

Patrick J Michaels, via Judith Curry,

In the academy the free interchange of competing ideas creates knowledge through cooperation, disagreement, debate, and dissent. Kaufmann’s landmark study proves that the last three in that list are severely suppressed and punished. The pervasiveness of such repression may be a death sentence for science, free inquiry, and the advancement of knowledge in our universities.

I am led to that dire conclusion because the universities appear to have no way to prevent this fate. No solution can arise from within the academy because it selects its own lifetime faculty, which is largely left wing—increasingly so—and makes the promotion of dissenters highly unlikely. Kaufmann demonstrates profoundly systemic discrimination by leftist faculty against colleagues they find disagreeable. […]

Kaufmann’s study is shocking in its depth, even to academics (like me) who experienced for decades what he describes. He documents all aspects of an academic career, from advanced graduate study to landing a faculty position, research funding, publication, and promotion. That normal career progression is all but derailed if a person expresses a scintilla of non-left views in casual conversations, faculty meetings, public discourse, teaching, grant applications, submitted publications, or the promotion process.

Academic Freedom in Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination, and Self-Censorship

What Would We Do Without Experts?

There’s a cure for this plague of experts, and it’s called “accountability.” Accountability is the bane of experts, so our ruling caste has dispensed with it. That’s why these people can be wrong time after time after time – on COVID, on Russia, on why crime happens and on how the economy works – and yet still maintain their public sinecures even though they are batting .001. The real reason the elite hated Donald Trump was not that he was an ideological conservative (he only sort of was) or that he tweeted mean things (they like mean tweets, just not ones directed at them). It was that Trump identified the failures of “the best and the brightest” and called them out. There is nothing these experts hate more than challenges to the authority they think they deserve.

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