Reactions to my Weekly Standard, Mormons, Muslims, and Multiculturalism article

I've received a fair amount of email traffic reacting to my Weekly Standard piece (open link at the WS, a blog summary here, and a letter back to Michael Novak re his (mis)summary, here).  The emails have been very mixed, very divided - not a big surprise. 

Among the various blog reactions, I wanted to flag to readers' attention the blog Levantine Dreamhouse - Abu Kareem, in New York, writes a very interesting blog that I recommend quite apart from the discussion of the Mormons, Muslims, Multiculturalism piece.  It's both reasoned and witty.

***

What has surprised me among the reactions, however, is how many evangelicals were most offended not by things I said about Huckabee or even about evangelicals (I think some of them decided not to take public offense, but instead to wallow in silent martyrdom=quiet resentment), but instead by my having the chutzpah to cite not just to Isaiah 3, but to the corresponding verses in the Book of Mormon. 

My goodness.  The horror, the horror. 

Very, very telling.   

Did Michael Novak actually read my Weekly Standard article?

19 November 2007

To the editor, National Review Online:

I ran across the following article by Michael Novak in the National Review, "Salt Lake Debate," December 17, 2007, taking a quick shot at the end at my Weekly Standard article this week, "Mormons, Muslims, and Multiculturalism," available online here (and some additional discussion at my blog post, here).

Look, I grant that the article was very long and had a long list of targets.  I acknowledge that numbers of people - including intellectuals, professors, theologians, etc., had some trouble following the argument.  Inelegant?  Possibly. My fault for bad writing?  Maybe.   Emotional?  No doubt, for reasons I explain at length in the essay. 

Still, it is hard to believe that Mr. Novak actually read the article before penning the following paragraph about it:

In another vein, a writer in The Weekly Standard, a former Mormon, urged publicly testing candidates even about purely theological matters — transubstantiation, baptism by immersion, circumcision, and other particular practices or beliefs of various faiths — just to see how, by the criteria of Enlightenment and liberal correct reasoning, the candidate “reasoned” about such matters. This, I think, makes Enlightenment and liberal political philosophy a new orthodoxy. And that test would provide a very narrow gate into republican self-government. By that test, only a small part of the population of the United States might pass. Most Americans have a much larger definition of “reason” and the “reasonable” than that.

Does my article urge publicly testing candidates about purely theological matters as transubstantiation, baptism by immersion, circumcision, etc., just to see how by the criteria of the Enlightenment and liberal correct reasoning, the candidate "reasoned about such matters?  

I offer three basic rules of thumb for what it is okay to ask of a candidate for public office about his or her religious doctrines.  The first is that any question of religious doctrine must have something to do with public policy or governance.  Specifically, I say:

[A]re there principles that can help define what religious questions should be in-bounds and what should be out of bounds in a tolerant, liberal polity?

First, for something to be "in," [bounds for questions] there does have to be a connection to governance, politics, and the public sphere. This is the most traditional form of American religious toleration in politics. A Buddhist's belief in reincarnation ought to be neither here nor there; a Mormon's conception of the Savior likewise; and a Jew's refusal to regard Jesus as Lord likewise.

Well, I don't know, that sounds to me like it rules out questions of transubstantiation, baptism by immersion, etc.  How else would Mr. Novak take it?  Indeed, the article does specifically raise transubstantiation and the Virgin Birth.  What does the article say?

Just as it is not considered irrelevant to know if one believes that space aliens came to Roswell, New Mexico, or has views on Area 51--shades of Dennis Kucinich?--a candidate's views on the Virgin Birth or transubstantiation or creationism are likewise relevant to making an informed electoral choice as to a candidate's fundamental rationality.

True, that does sound like it subjects the Virgin Birth and transubstantiation to politically correct tests of reason.  It sounds indeed as though this would create a new orthodoxy of reason, as Mr. Novak suggests.  But suppose we actually look at the article and see to whom this view is attributed:

And note that on this matter, atheistic rationalists and religious overbelievers join hands to say, all-in. A Hitchens, after all, would say that the electorate deserves to know the full irrationality of a candidate, and that is best expressed in his or her religious beliefs, even apparently private ones. (He would say this, and has said it: "Phooey," writes Hitchens, "to the false reticence of the press and to the bogus sensitivities that underlie it.")

So, this new orthodoxy of reason is attributed to ... the atheist rationalist Christopher Hitchens but also religious zealots like Huckabee who would insist that all religious practice, including weird aspects of Mormon belief and ritual that have no connection to governance, should be considered in deciding for whom to vote.  Mr. Novak's plainly rejects that and, I would have thought pretty obviously, so do I.  I'm arguing against it.  It is stated pretty clearly in this paragraph.  I don't believe that Mr. Novak read it, or at least not closely enough to follow it.

Past this first principle - that the religious belief in question has to have some relevance to public governance in order to be up for question at all - I further add a second, still more limiting principle on questions about religious doctrines.  It is that even where a religious belief does conceivably have a connection to governance - such as abortion or opposition to the death penalty - questions put to a candidate should be framed in a way that focus on the issue of the candidate's private conscience and belief about such matters, and not on the religion as such, in order to avoid, as Romney correctly said, making the candidate a spokesperson for the corporate religion as such.  I praised Romney on that very point, and took it even further in defense of liberal toleration:

To be sure, there was something good and liberal in part of his answer, and we should start with that. Romney said--correctly as a matter of deep liberalism--that for him to give representations as to the content of his faith would make him a representative of that faith, rather than of the people, who are of many faiths. To do so would be to head down the path of communalism, a political space defined not by a religiously neutral public sphere but by a division accepted as reasonably legitimate consisting of groups--religious, ethnic, whatever--that have claims on behalf of their immutably identified members.

How Mr. Novak could get from that to an assertion of a new liberal orthodoxy is quite beyond me.  I simply doubt he read the article.  What is so hard about this?

Finally, I offer a third principle, for when it is appropriate to take account of religious doctrine of a candidate.  It is in a limited circumstance - important, but limited by the previous two principles.  If a candidate asserts, or gives sufficiently good reason by his or her actions to show, that a position is rooted not in religious belief as such, but in the authority of the church, and thus puts an officeholder squarely between two authorities and obligations - church and the polity - then it is legitimate to inquire into the content of doctrine. 

I offer an example that I say flatly is hypothetical and indeed "fantastical" - the Catholic bishops announcing that any Catholic politician voting for abortion funding will be excommunicated and is therefore in peril of his or her salvation.  In that case, a genuinely devout candidate is genuinely caught between two competing authorities, the obligation to God and the obligation to the commonwealth, if, for purposes of the hypothetical, that is the will of the populace and, for example, prior to the announcement of this new doctrine, the candidate had promised to support abortion funding (saying, eg, that this was not his or her private religious view, but following the clear will of the majority).  In that case, it seems to me perfectly liberal and consistent with toleration for citizens to inquire into the content of doctrine that might lead a candidate, or even an officeholder, to vote in a way that is loyal to one's soul and God, but not loyal necessarily to one's citizens who are not necessarily of the faith. 

Any reasonable reader - no, any reader - of my article would recognize that the intent of this essay is to offer straightforward principles of liberal toleration that Mr. Novak himself would broadly endorse.  It seems pretty obvious to me that he started reading, perhaps got annoyed at the length (but surely Mr. Novak is used to reading things longer than 1500 words?) or at the tone of the essay, landed on a particular paragraph without bothering to read to whom its view was attributed, decided that it was my view, and engaged in a little drive-by libel. 

I understand that some readers found this essay hard to follow.  I don't defend its elegance; I was quite annoyed when I wrote it, and decided to take on all targets.  If it was too scattershot or emotional for Mr. Novak's sensibilities, my regrets.  But I can hardly think that the views he attributed to the me or the article by Mr. Novak are correct on any reading.  They are exactly what they are - views attributed to my foils, in this case Hitchens in particular.  Thirty seconds more of reading would have shown Mr. Novak this. 

I don't defend the readability of the article.  If it confused Mr. Novak then I will grant it had its problems of readability.  I do think Mr. Novak, whether my fault or his, has quite misread it.  He is, with good reason, a widely respected commentator, and his views on what the article said will and, all things being equal, should carry weight with those who might read the article Would Mr. Novak care to withdraw or amend his reading of it?

My Weekly Standard article, Mormons, Muslims, Multiculturalism

(I am indeed taking a break from blogging, but I do plan to use this blog as a way of making available things I am writing and publishing, as well as the occasional announcement of other things.)

I have a new piece in the Weekly Standard, December 24, 2007 issue, titled Mormons, Muslims, and Multiculturalism: The Deeply Dispiriting Romney-Huckabee Religion Showdown.  You can find it at the Weekly Standard, open link, here.

(PS.  I respond to Michael Novak's blatant misreading of my article (it appears in a quick drive-by attack in a National Review article) in a letter to the editor posted to the blog here, including links to Novak's article.)

(PPS.  Looking at some comments and links people have put to Amazon and elsewhere - Kenneth Anderson is a pretty common name, so be aware that I am not the author of any books on Mormonism or religion or anything like that.  Also not the Kenneth Anderson who blogs at the Brad Blog or Bonehead Compendium.  I'm also not, alas, the wonderful author of the books on India, a descendent of that British general in WWII, the great African-American singer, the Harvard medical school professor, etc., etc.  (I'm also not the Kenneth Anderson convicted recently of child molestation in some public school in the midwest.  Amazing what you find when you google a common name like mine.)  Also, if I might make a suggestion - actually reading my article, although it is long, is a pretty good idea before thinking to comment.  You can get to it through the link to the Weekly Standard.)

The essay is very long - some 5-6,000 words, in fact - and I am very grateful to the Weekly Standard, and my editor Richard Starr in particular, for giving me such a sizable amount of space for this essay.  As will be evident, oh, two sentences into the piece, I was quite angry when I wrote it - angry that there really does appear to be 30% or so of this country that is prepared to vote against someone - not my candidate - solely on account of their religion.  Not aspects of that person's religion that have to do with public policy, but simply the religion itself and its most un-public policy, un-governance related aspects of it.  So I did not hesitate to lampoon the evangelicals who are displaying this season such remarkable religious bigotry.

That said, the fact that I can lampoon them, fairly nastily, and know that at most they will leave rude blog comments - rather than firebombing my house - is a credit to them.  It should not really be such a great credit to anyone, of course, that on account of angry or offensive speech, you forbear from killing them (wow! such restraint!), but these days I suppose you take what you can get.

The essay also sharply attacks Mitt Romney's Mormon speech - not on the usual liberal grounds that he left out the unbelievers, which I think it is true and wrong but not actually the greatest wrong of that speech - but instead on the grounds that he offers the country a sort of conservative multiculturalism, a conservative moral relativism, that puts his and everyone else's religion entirely beyond discussion.

That multiculturalism, while leaving Romney maximum ability to deflect questions of religion, is wrong because there are in fact important questions of religion that do need to be asked of candidates.  And many of them need to be asked if, and at some point in time - as I deeply hope, will in fact be one of these days - that there are Muslims in America who, again as I deeply hope, will think that they have as much reason to be president as any other person does.  Multiculturalism says that any questions about any of this are illegitimate, and that is both wrong and a practical disaster because it precludes the possibility of true integration and assimilation into the political culture.

Well, you can judge for yourself.  It does manage to attack evangelicals, Mormons, Muslims, and Christopher Hitchens, which is why it is so long.  I apologize to all those I left out as targets; perhaps next time.  It is available at the Weekly Standard, and I look forward to the debate that I hope will follow.

I don't actually write very much about Mormons and Mormonism.  However, I have written two review essays, both back in the 1990s, one for the Times Literary Supplement, here, and the other for the Los Angeles Times Book Review, here.  The links are to SSRN, and you can download the pdfs free from that site if you like.

Here is a bit of the Weekly Standard essay:

***

Now consider Mitt Romney’s speech and the answer he
gave to the matter of religious tests. Leave aside the whining
secularists who complain that Romney left no place
for unbelievers in the Republic. Correct and not of unconcern
by any means, but frankly far less important than the
question of multiculturalism; and anyway, one may trust
left secularists to look after their interests in such matters.
No, the much more important matter was that Romney
announced what might be called, appallingly, “conservative
multiculturalism”—indeed, a form of conservative
moral relativism. If the demand of the evangelicals was
all‑in, then his answer was all-out.

To be sure, there was something good and liberal in
part of his answer, and we should start with that. Romney
said—correctly as a matter of deep liberalism—that for
him to give representations as to the content of his faith
would make him a representative of that faith, rather than
of the people, who are of many faiths. To do so would be
to head down the path of communalism, a political space
defined not by a religiously neutral public sphere but by
a division accepted as reasonably legitimate consisting of
groups—religious, ethnic, whatever—that have claims on
behalf of their immutably identified members. This is, by
the way, the relatively humane (in historical perspective),
but altogether illiberal political order of the Ottoman
Empire. It is what many Muslims from those historical
lands appear to think would be the best and natural political
order in the lands to which they have emigrated—Canada,
for example (which anyway has its own powerfully
illiberal forces driving toward group-identity communalism),
and, increasingly, Britain. It is not—at least not so
far—the American way, and Romney was right firmly to
reject it.

But he did so, unfortunately, in a typically Romneylike
way, with a corrupt little wink-and-nod to his evangelical
inquisitors—oh, but don’t worry, “I believe that Jesus
Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind,” etc.;
just don’t ask me about Mormon underwear. It is corrupt
not because it is untrue, but because it aims to let him eat
his cake and have it, too. He rejected demands to explain
his faith, but did so while letting his interlocutors know
that he was really one of them. Too clever by half, in the
end, because they will not actually believe him, but this
is what comes of positions of moral conviction devised by
management consultants.

The “all-out” answer that Romney gave was the denial
that citizens might ever legitimately and ethically demand
to know the content of religious doctrines professed by a
candidate for public office. (“Each religion has its own
unique doctrines and history. These are not bases for criticism
but rather a test of our tolerance.”) It is multiculturalist
because it essentially treats all private beliefs as immutable
and beyond reason, and because it says that to propose
to subject any of them to public scrutiny of reason is an act
of intolerance akin to racism. It is a position traditionally
asserted by the left on behalf of its identity-politics constituencies.
It is dismaying, to say the least, that Romney would
claim it for his own to deny the legitimacy of all questions.

It is, moreover, relativist in implication. Toleration is
not an assertion of relativism. It is, rather, the forbearance
from judging and acting on judgments in the public sphere
that one might well believe oneself entitled to make in private.
Toleration entails the suspension of public disbelief,
or at least political action thereupon, about matters that
one might nonetheless consider well within the realm of
private moral judgment. Relativism, by contrast, is denial
of grounds for judging at all. They could not be more different—
and, crucially, relativism removes the possibility
of toleration because it removes the possibility of reasoned
judgment.

Romney’s “all-out” stance goes well beyond a plea for
liberal toleration to an assertion of genuine relativism and
the denial of the very possibility of moral judgment. And
all of this in the midst of a lecture on the decline of religion
in Europe. But of course it is not declining, it is rising
in the form of an Islam whose liberal commitments are in
doubt at best. Romney answered as a Mormon looking for
maximum room to maneuver, but seemingly without any
thought whatsoever to the institutional settlement implicitly
proposed, affecting not just Mormons and evangelicals,
but Catholics and Buddhists and Muslims and Hindus,
as well as the unbelievers and atheists he could not bring
himself to mention.

And then toward the end:

The firm demand of the state for conformity to neutral
standards is what—contrary to the claims of the multiculturalists—
provides the grounds of liberal toleration. There are many reasons, but the simplest is this: Taken together, the demands of religious groups for ever stronger and expansive special accommodations must eventually result in profound and antagonistic standoffs and conflicts.
Indeed, we have gone too far with special accommodations for religions that depart from neutral governance.

 

(Thanks to Ms. Althouse for the link, here.  And welcome Instapunditeers, and thanks Glenn!  Thanks also to Sandy Levinson for the link from Balkinization.  And to Andrew Sullivan for calling this essay, um, "ornerily brilliant."  Thanks also to Powerline, who correctly describe me as a Powerline reader, here.  Also Peter Leithart.  And Andrea Urseem at ReligionWriter.) 

Recommended - Malise Ruthven's NYRB review essay on books on Islam

I finished reading today Malise Ruthven's excellent review essay in the New York Review of Books on books on Islam, particularly Islam and war and just war. Very fine essay. I have read one of the books in his review, Olivier Roy's new book, Secularism Confronts Islam, and thought it also well worth reading, although I think Roy uses "multiculturalism" in a way that is not exactly what it means in American or UK ideology (more on that later). I look forward especially to reading the books on Islam and war. The review essay itself is elegant as Ruthven's essays always are. Highly recommended. Here at the NYRB.

(Update. How to embarrass yourself! I've been reading Ruthven's essays in the TLS for years and never realized Malise is a man's name. Thank you Scott in the comments, and I've corrected it above.)

Mark Steyn on Ahmadinejad at Columbia University

Mark Steyn on Ahmadinejad at Columbia, here. (For a blog comment, my forwarding of it to Steyn, and Steyn's reply, see the very end of this post.) Excerpts:

***
Saturday, September 29, 2007
OC Register

Democracies talk, tyrannies act

By MARK STEYN

"I'm proud of my university today," Stina Reksten, a 28-year-old Columbia graduate student from Norway, told the New York Times. "I don't want to confuse the very dire human rights situation in Iran with the issue here, which is freedom of speech. This is about academic freedom."

Isn't it always? But enough about Iran, let's talk about me! The same university that shouted down an American anti-illegal-immigration activist and the same university culture that just deemed former Harvard honcho Larry Summers too misogynist to be permitted on campus is now congratulating itself over its commitment to "academic freedom." True, renowned Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo is not happy. "They can have any fascist they want there," said professor Zimbardo, "but this seems egregious." But, hey, don't worry: He was protesting not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's presence at Columbia but Donald Rumsfeld's presence at the Hoover Institution.

At some point during this past week, it was decided that the relevant Ahmadinejad comparison was to Nikita Krushchev. The Soviet leader toured America in 1960, was taken to a turkey farm, paid a visit to Frank Sinatra and Co. on the set of "Can-Can" and pronounced the movie "decadent." And yet the republic survived. As one of my most distinguished fellow columnists, Peggy Noonan, put it in the Wall Street Journal, Krushchev's visit reminded the world that "we are the confident nation." And, as several e-mailers observed, warming to Noonan's theme, back then hysterical right-wing ninnies didn't get their panties in a twist just because a man dedicated to the destruction of our way of life was in town for a couple of days.

Whether or not this was a more "confident" nation in 1960, it's certainly a more post-modern nation now. I don't know whether Stina Reksten, as a 28-year old Norwegian, can be held up as an exemplar of American youth, but she certainly seems to have mastered the lingo: We've invited the president of Iran to speak but let's not confuse "the very dire human-rights situation" – or his nuclear program, or his Holocaust denial, or his role in the seizing of the U.S. Embassy hostages, or his government's role in the deaths of American troops and Iraqi civilians – with the more important business of applauding ourselves for our celebration of "academic freedom."

So much of contemporary life is about opportunities for self-congratulation. Risk-free dissent is the default mode of our culture, and extremely seductive. If dissent means refusing to let the Bush administration bully you into wearing a flag lapel pin, why, then Katie Couric (bravely speaking out on this issue just last week) is the new Mandela! If Rumsfeld is a "fascist." then anyone can fight fascism. It's no longer about the secret police kicking your door down and clubbing you to a pulp. Well, OK, it is if you're a Buddhist monk in Burma. But they're a long way away, and it's all a bit complicated and foreign, and let's not "confuse the very dire human rights situation" in Hoogivsastan with an opportunity to celebrate our courage in defending "academic freedom" in America. Ahmadinejad must occasionally have felt he was appearing in a matinee of "A Chance To Hear [Insert Name Of Enemy Head Of State Here]." Could have been Chavez, could have been Mullah Omar, could have been Herr ReichsfuhrerHitler himself, as Columbia's Dean John Coatsworth proudly boasted on television.

Lots of prime ministers and diplomats accepted invitations to meet with Hitler, and generally the meetings went very well – except for one occasion when Lord Halifax, the British foreign secretary, was greeted by the little chap with the mustache, mistook him for the butler, and handed him his coat. But even that faux pas is a testament to how normal thugs can appear in social situations. Civilized nations like chit-chatting, having tea, holding debates, talking talking talking. Tyrannies like terrorizing people, torturing people, murdering people, doing doing doing. It's easier for the doers to pass themselves off as talkers then for the talkers to rouse themselves to do anything.

As witness this last week. Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia University, was evidently taken aback by the criticism he got for inviting Ahmadinejad and so found himself backed into what, for a conventional soft-leftie of academe, was a ferocious denunciation of his star guest, dwelling at length on Iran's persecution of minorities, murder of dissidents, sponsorship of terrorism, nuclear ambitions, genocidal threats toward Israel, etc. For a warmup act, Bollinger pretty much frosted up the joint. The Iranian leader sat through the intro with a plastic smile, and then said: "I shall not begin by being affected by this unfriendly treatment." He offered many illuminating insights: There are, he declared, no homosexuals in Iran. Not one. Where are they? On a weekend visit to Kandahar to see the new production of "Mame"? Alas, there was no time for follow-up questions.

And afterwards Bollinger got raves even from the right for "speaking truth to power." But so what? It's like Noel Coward delivering a series of devastating put-downs to Hitler. The Fuhrer's mad as hell but at the end of the afternoon he goes back to killing, and dear Noel goes back to singing "The Stately Homes Of England." Ahmadinejad goes back to doing – to persecuting, to murdering, to terrorizing, to nuclearizing – and Bollinger cuts out his press clippings and puts them on the fridge.

The other day, National Review's Jay Nordlinger was musing about our habit of referring to some benighted part of the world's "humanitarian needs" and wondered when we'd stopped using the term "human needs," which is, after all, what food, water and shelter are. And his readers wrote in to state the obvious: That "humanitarian" label gives top billing not to the distant, Third World victim but the generous Western donor – the "humanitarian" relief effort, the "humanitarian" organizations, the NGOs, the Western charities: It's about us, not them. Bill Clinton's new bestseller on charity is called "Giving" – because it's better to give than to receive, and that's certainly true if the giver is busying himself with some ineffectual feel-good "Save Darfur" fundraiser while the recipient is on the receiving end of the Janjaweed's machetes. The Sudanese government appreciates that, as long as we're allowed to feel good about ourselves and to participate in "humanitarian relief," the killing can go on until there's no one left to kill. Likewise, Ahmadinejad knows that, as along as we're allowed to do what we do best – talk and talk and talk, whether at Columbia or in EU negotiations – his regime can quietly get on with its nuclear program.

These men understand the self-absorption of advanced democracies. The difference between Winston Churchill and Ward Churchill, another famous beneficiary of "academic freedom" who called the 9/11 dead "little Eichmanns," is that for Sir Winston talking was a call to action while for poseurs like professor Churchill it's a substitute for it.

The pen is not mightier than the sword if your enemy is confident you will never use anything other than your pen. Sometimes it's not about "freedom of speech," but about freedom. Ask an Iranian homosexual. If you can find one.

***
THE PERSECUTION OF HOMOSEXUALS

Dear Mark,

I posted a bit of your Columbia U Iran column up on my international law blog - well, quite a lot, actually - well, probably violated copyright law, to be honest - and received the following quite serious response back in the blog comments. (See below the asterisks.)

I am big fan of yours - something which caused a senior editor of ... well let's just say a very important book review to shake his head and say, "Ken, you have almost such exquisite taste, but you have this weakness for Mark Steyn" and, he added, "and AA Gill." Quite. All best. KA.

Anonymous [in the comments] said...

"Mark, I must be a little older than you. First of all, I remember the persecution of homosexuals in the US right into the 1970's. And, being a San Franciscan, I remember the national outrage at my city's adoption of gay culture in the 1980's. That wasn't so long ago, Mark. And now an Iranian leader from a different culture is mocked for not recognizing homosexuality in Iran. You know, it's quite possible he just doesn't know any.

"I can tell you this, Mark. I lived in Iran in 1975. Its people are in many ways the same as the rest of the world. Its culture is different, but there are a good many people there. The nation has suffered the trauma of a revolution and then had a terrible war inflicted upon it for eight long, bloody years. Iran is easily criticized from afar, from a Western perspective. But Mark, until you've visited a land and its people, preferably living there for a spell, your criticism is merely the passing off of opinions generated by the words and writings of others, many times told from the vantage point of bias and special interest.

"By the way, Mark, have you ever heard Ward Churchill speak in public? I've heard him speak at City Lights bookstore in San Francisco's North Beach. Again, all you've done here is recycle a quote you've read from sources other than your own. When you sit and listen to Mr. Churchill, you gain an understanding of his personal perspective. You may not agree with him, but that's an insight you would make first hand.

"My advice is to gain some firsthand knowledge before simply regurgitating opinions on subjects that interest to you."

MARK REPLIES:

Your commenter's a twit. He "remembers the persecution of homosexuals in the US right into the 1970s"? Okay, how many homosexuals were executed in New York or San Francisco or even Salt Lake City in the 1970s? That's what happens to homosexuals in Iran: they get sentenced to death. The inability to distinguish between "persecution" US-style and Iranian-style is a sign of a moral frivolity that would shame anyone who gave it a moment's thought. Oh, and by the way, Iran-wise, I have plenty of hands-on experience.

Ilya Somin on potential breakup in Belgium

The redoubtable Ilya Somin, over at Volokh Conspiracy, has a post here on articles speculating on the possibility of a breakup of Belgium into its two major ethnic and linguistic parts. The post goes on to discuss the virtues, and limits, of federalism. A couple of quick thoughts in no particular order.

1. Federalism tends to work best where there are more than two ethnic/linguistic groups in play. Binary federalism tends to feed into a zero sum game. I have sometimes thought (on no actual evidence whatsoever) that the prominence given to native peoples in Canada represented, apart from Canadian guilt spasms over past behavior, a rather clever ideological move to broaden the federalism discussion from two to three, and with the addition of Canadian style multiculturalism, a melange of everyone - every one his own minority - so to water down the nature of conflict by introducing so many of them. Canada has gone rather whole hog for the idea that to be Canadian is to be a minority, thus watering down the very idea of being a minority, at least a French-speaking Quebecker. The confusion introduced has the very great virtue - from the standpoint of Candada's governing elites in Ontario at least - of committing the management of all those many mini-conflicts into the hands of federal authorities.

2. It has been widely remarked, of course, that supra-federal structures such as the EU facilitate breakup along ethnic and linguistic lines because people inside the dissolving nation state feel less risk of civil war. This is particularly true of minorities left within the now dissolved nation state - the supra-federal structure will protect them from ethnic cleansing. The potential costs of dissolving are reduced, and from the standpoint of the supra-federal structure, it has the virtue of creating entities smaller than nation-states that are quite dependent upon it politically. This conception of the Roman empire reduplicated within the EU, with relatively homogenous ethnic and linguistic units inside it, has deep roots in Carl Schmitt - and I don't mean this here in order to tar this idea with the brush of Schmitt's reactionary collaboration with the Nazis, but it is historically true of this strand of intellectual thought within Europe. It is also not very compatible with genuine labor mobility within the empire - Poles moving to France, etc.

3. A test of federalism is not merely its ability to hold together a country, but its ability peaceably to oversee its breakup. The great example is the breakup of Czechoslovakia; if there is any example that is relevant to Belgium, that is it.

4. My own first practical encounter with pressures to breakup was in Yugoslavia in the middle 1980s, under Tito still, and long before it had fallen into civil war. I was monitoring the place for Human Rights Watch, and in Slovenia began to perceive that "progressive" opinion in each of those places had reached the conclusion that Slovenia was forced to pay for the impending disaster in Serbia and Kosovo, both in money and in conscript troops. They didn't want to get involved in the dispute between the Serbs and Albanians - and they understood very early on that ultimately, that was the fight, not with the Croats. They also didn't want to keep paying the costs of the Yugoslav wealth-transfer welfare state, believing correctly that it imposed serious costs on the standard of living in Slovenia. The Slovenes opted out of Yugoslavia on a combination of (a) washing their hands of the rest of the Yugoslav conflicts, (b) having maintained, very, very fortunately from their view, a homogenous population that had not accepted into Slovenian territory large numbers of Albanians or Serbs, (c) a completely hard headed economic calculation that the rest of Yugoslavia was an economic albatross around Slovenia's neck.

5. My other early encounter with Yugoslav separatism was at the very beginning of the Serbia-Croatia phase of the war. Indeed, in retrospect it must have been one of the very first armed encounters, if not the first. Human Rights Watch's experienced and wise Helsinki Watch director, Jeri Laber, and I, along with a Croatian intellectual who was unusual for being simultaneously a liberal humanist human-rights universalist but also a Croatian nationalist who favored separation, were out visiting places outside of the main cities that were going through waves of panic. We had been at a couple of Serb nationalist speeches in various rural places in Serbia, and we were now going through Croat villages. The big issue at the moment was the status of arms deposited at the local police stations as part of plans against an invasion either by the Warsaw Pact or NATO - now those arms would wind up fuelling the ethnic breakup, if the particular governments of Croatia, etc., could lay hands on them before the Yugoslav Army could seize them. Anyway, we wound up in one village where no one seemed to be about at all. Our Croatian companion suggested we simply wait - so we did. The villagers came back in small groups several hours later - they had gone to hide in the forest because, they explained, they remembered the ethnic slaughters and burnings of villages in the Second World War. I naively thought at the time that they were a bunch of peasants repeating their grandfathers' actions - the Yugoslavia I knew was an urbane, highly modern, politically relaxed place - whatever had happened in the past, it was way too civilized ever to behave like that again. It was as inconceivable to me as France and Germany going to war again. And boy was I wrong, of course.

But while we waited, I had a long conversation with my Croatian friend. His commitment to the universalism of human rights was real, and so was his belief that it was completely compatible with an independent Croatia. Which is true; the baseline human rights he supported wholeheartedly applied whether to Yugoslavia or to Croatia. But I asked him what was so important about an independent Croatia. Indeed, I quizzed him closely about what exactly he believed that a Croatia could do independently that he thought it was important to do now. I asked if he thought it was crucial that Croatia have an independent army - only, he said, to protect against the Serbs, but for that he preferred the UN or the then-EC because they would be neutral as against both Serbs and Croats. I asked if it was in order to control the economy - so that, as Slovenia had concluded, it would have control over its own economic destiny and not be forever subsidizing basket cases further south; he told me that Croatia was too small to be economically successful except as part of a larger economic unit, preferably the EC, and anyway he understood perfectly that Croatia needed to be economically integrated with Serbia. I asked whether it was that most traditional of sovereign state functions, the emittance and control of a currency - at which he looked genuinely shocked and said, you must be joking - turn control of a currency over to the rapacity of the government, no, no, no, the currency must be controlled by the EC, otherwise there would be hyperinflation within three years. Surprised by this point, I ran down the list of pretty much everything that a sovereign state would consider to be the crucial matters of sovereign control - defense, monetary policy, the economy, etc., etc. only to find that everything that I associated with sovereignty was to be controlled by an outside body, the EC, because he didn't trust his compatriots with anything internal, and he feared war with Serbia if there wasn't an outside body in charge of everything external.

A little exasperated, I asked him if there was anything that he thought Croatia should actually control on its own in the name of sovereignty. He said, yes, of course - language, language education in the schools, sponsorship of culture, and television. It all came down to culture - precisely those attributes of culture than a large and genuinely sovereign state more or less takes for granted. It was all about the promotion of Croatian language and culture, and the EC could, and should, control the rest. Echoes of Schmitt were in my head. As for the sizable Serb minority, they would be protected by universal human rights along with a protective regime of minority rights enforced by the EC. It was a very humanistic dream of how to have a relatively homogenous, culture protecting national enclave within a larger empire - and the whole dream fell apart, before the EC could take it all in, in war that broke out in earnest a few weeks later. It was also a peculiar conversation to be having in an empty Croat village where the inhabitants were hiding from the spectres of WWII ghosts that turned out to be not ghosts of atrocities past but ghosts of atrocities to come.

6. The model which many ordinary Muslim immigrants aspire in Europe and, over time perhaps, in the United States is not that of liberal integration, but instead communalism. It nicely fits with the multiculturalism of today's post-liberal West, whether the Netherlands or the United States, that isn't interested in integration, either. The model for many Muslim immigrants of how different groups should fit together is Ottoman. It makes good sense - it is what they came from, in a larger historical sense and, to give it its due, it was a pretty good model over a pretty long time of how to manage an empire with many different peoples and a dominant, but not exclusive, religion. It has the virtue, from the standpoint of immigrants, of putting core parts of one's identity, religion and ethnicity, or more precisely in the West's multiculturalist reinterpretation, religion as ethnicity, at the center of everything. It reinforces identity in a strange land, and it does so in a way that seemed to work back in the semi-golden past of the homelands.

It is also profoundly illiberal, however - a point that seems to bother not at all either large swaths of immigrants or the multiculturalists, including, amazingly enough, the human rights organizations, organizations that would be better described in their ideology as multiculturalists using the language of rights rhetorically (and in the law) to bludgeon opposition to what is really a post-liberal programme. Multiculturalism used to be, in the West, a language of patronization, as well as a conveniently if only superficially a liberal language for those not interested in undertaking the much harder work - because it requires a certain unapologetic cultural coercion - of liberal integration. Multiculturalism is today the language of fear, how elite managers seek cover for policies based, no longer on its patronization of, but on its fear of a population who, if told 'no' about anything that might be construed as religious, doesn't merely shout what it has been taught is the sum total of democratic liberal citizenship - "discrimination!" - but is distressingly prone to add, implicitly or explicitly, "And behead the enemies of Islam."

The fact of multiculturalism will have an effect on federalism in other places, such as Belgium or, for that matter, Canada. What those effects might be is quite uncertain, however. But multiculturalism and its chief client at this moment, various Muslim populations in the West, will necessarily effect calculations of what breakup might mean in places like Belgium.

6. Breakup is favored by many Western intellectuals, or a federalism so loose as to be a "soft" breakup. Iraq, of course, is the chief example. But the most learned and smartest scholar I know on questions of ethnic groups in conflict, Duke's Donald Horowitz, has written repeatedly of how it is that breakup of nation states on ethnic grounds quickly becomes a source of war. Horowitz's classic Ethnic Groups in Conflict is still required reading on this subject, and I strongly recomment his recent Wall Street Journal essays warning of what breakup might well lead to in Iraq, which are excerpted on this blog if you search.

7. The sovereign nation state still seems to me to be the best level - as between the homogenous mini-state or the empire - in which the conditions of liberalism can obtain - the levevl of interaction in which interests and universal values can best be mediated to include both. It avoids the false universality that so many imagine they find in pure cosmopolitanism - the 'citizen of the planet' stuff that so many of my law students, for example, entirely and unselfconsciously cocooned in the security and economic benefits of large nation states, imagine for themselves - while avoiding the chauvinism of unmediated and unchallenged particularity, either ethnic or religious, of the mini-state. Elite hostility to the large democratic nation-state - the only working model of liberalism and, quite possibly, the only political model in which liberalism can, however imperfectly, be realized - has always been mysterious to me and only explained, finally, on grounds of elite interests.

Saudi money

A small proposal. Why would it be a bad idea to enact a legislative ban on money from abroad to charitable institutions, including universities, think tanks, or on money to engage in lobbying by for profit institutions on K Street, that comes from countries, or from persons or entities in such countries, that engage in systematic religious discrimination as determined in State Department reports? What exactly is the interest in allowing a fantastically wealthy country like Saudi Arabia to buy itself a whole religious following, measured in everything from mosques to endowed university chairs, for the most viciously anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Western form of Islam in the world, while, among other things, criminalizing Christianity within Saudi Arabia? The marketplace of ideas is not what this is about, as demonstrated by its utter lack of reciprocity. It seems to me a perfectly neutral principle on which to exclude foreign money which is creating vast damage in the United States.

Intersection of counterterrorism legal regimes and the psychology of Islamist radicalization

Brief note to myself. I am thinking about an article next year - ideally in conjunction with a sociologist or political scientist - on the intersection of two areas, legal regimes of counterterrorism and the psychology of Islamist radicalization. I have in mind, first, the literature on the psychology of radicalization - eg, the stages offered in the recent NYPD report - and a survey of the literature on how radicalization takes place. I draw, in my own background, on a (relatively obscure) journal with which I've had a long if loose affiliation, The Journal of Terrorism and Political Violence. That literature of (iterated) individual psychologies links up to a second body of literature on the spread of Islamist and jihadist ideology via social networks. But I would propose to carry that one step further, into the overlap these two have with a third body of literature on legal institutions and regimes of counterterrorism. The idea would be to assess the ways in which different legal regimes of counterterrorism create incentives or disincentives toward radicalization, reinforce or "deinforce" tendencies toward radicalization and jihadism.

One aspect of this is the effects of detention on tendencies toward radicalization - at Guantanamo or in Iraq. Many observers have noted that at least in some cases, the fact of imprisonment might well have contributed toward a greater radicalization while in detention. It is a well known phenomenon, after all, and it would be surprising if it did not take place under these circumstances. Human rights monitors and other observers hostile to the idea of preventive detention as such might have an incentive to exaggerate these effects, but it seems highly likely that it is a fact among some number of detainees in Guantanamo or Iraq. One question is whether, if one regards it as a sufficiently large issue - or, for that matter, if there is an intention at some point to release detainees - certain aspects of detention, apart from the very fact of detention, exacerbate or, alternatively, ameliorate the tendency to radicalization. Humiliation and other sources of long term resentment perhaps play a role here, and the fact that humiliation, for example, might well be an important part of some parts of interrogation, does not mean that its amelioration in later phases of detention, where the purpose is to seek to prepare for eventual release, might be also very important.

Or consider the issue of monetary compensation. I have suggested in various articles, but never really evaluated, that a regime of monetary compensation for detainees could have an important justice effect. In the case of someone who was unjustly detained for a substantial time - whatever those terms mean - where the government did not follow its own procedures in good faith, that's pretty obvious. But I have in mind instead compensation in cases in which the government did follow procedures, did act in good faith, but in retrospect turned out to have acted incorrectly. On the one hand, the government does not want to apologize for the program as such, because of its national security importance. On the other hand, an innocent person has been unjustly detained. In those circumstances, the best one can do is not apologize for the existence of the program, nor even necessarily for the detention as such. At the same time, it seems to me the government has an obligation to compensate the person very well. It seems to me critical, in that case, for reasons of both psychology and justice, that the government not be cheap. The person has been wronged and yet the government did not act wrongly. The government ought to make that person rich. Peculiarly, if the government had indeed acted wrongly, there is less need to make the person rich as opposed to well compensated, precisely because the payment is in part apology for wrong-doing. The government should pay more - this, I suggest has a certain intuitive sense both morally and psychologically - precisely because it is not apologizing. It is saying, instead, that its actions have unfortunately collateral effects, and the best it can do given two opposing mandates, is to pay very well.

It is a very delicate pas de deux, to convey precisely the correct sense of compensation without abasement, to make amends
that do not apologize for having acted as such. And I would also suggest that a portion of the money be paid out as an annuity, so that there is an unstated complicity between not undertaking jihad and continuing to get paid.

It is this kind of legal regime and the intersection with the psychology and sociology of radicalization that I partly have in mind. I also mean the examination of legal rules to see what incentives are created. Here, I am thinking of multiculturalism and what, in my view, are the very bad incentives created by its endless attention to sensitivity. The result is a constant raising of the bar of what has to be done to satisfy it - a demand regime that raises the bar of what sensitivity means higher and higher. Consider, for example, the extraordinary way in which the US government, or at least US neoconservatives, defined victory in Iraq - how many people danced in the street or threw flowers. It is an incentive merely to raise the bar higher and higher. Or the way in which the US military, in a quite misguided effort to be religiously sensitive, deprived detainees of Guantanamo of all identities - indeed, stimuli - other than a Koranic one. No television, no secular reading, nothing but ... the Koran, and an empty cell. It was simultaneously hypersensitive, but also, crucially, imperialist - for who was the US army to presume that its detainees were nothing more than vessels of jihadism?

The article I have in mind does not aim to be normative, not the first one at any rate. The more provocative possibilities I suggest above are not really what I have in mind for an initial paper. I am interested in the first cut at this not in normative formulations but instead at putting the three literatures on the table and seeing their intersections. This descriptive task, combined with a sort of incentives-disincentives type analysis, obviously familiar in the legal and social science literatures, is enough to get things started, I think. It is also something that a team effort could undertake without having to commit itself on normative issues in advance of getting a developed interdisciplinary account on the table.

(Ryan Goodman, Ryan Goodman, calling Ryan Goodman ... does this interest you?!)

Steyn on the disappearance of 'Alms for Jihad'

Creeping one way multiculturalism is so normal today that one hardly notices. But Cambridge University Press's ignoble decision to pulp Alms for Jihad and take the extraordinary step of asking libraries around the world to remove it from their shelves, without so much as an effort to defend against libel charges threatened by someone who, on pretty good evidence, is a solid part of the wealthy Saudi funders of jihad and virulent Islamism around the world - well, that is important.

One thing CUP's unseemly-eager surrender especially signals is the direction that this kind of one way multiculturalism takes Britain. An ever more illiberal Britain, gradually shutting down its own liberal institutions through the manipulation by illiberals of the very mechanisms of its liberalism - yet loudly announcing how liberal it is and, as supposed evidence of that liberalism, pointing to the use of its liberal institutions to stifle dissent from its multiculturalism. Remarkable. It really is one's social and cultural constitution-as-suicide pact.

Yet, to be fair to Cambridge University Press, English libel law makes it nearly impossible to fight off a determined billionaire. Each defendent can be picked off separately. On the other hand, there is no evidence that Cambridge UP would have fought back in any case.

Mark Steyn (the full article is worth reading because it gives essential background to the story of jihadist funding.) Here.

***
from:

Mark Steyn
Orange County Register
August 5, 2007

The Vanishing Jihad Exposes

... So why would the Cambridge University Press, one of the most respected publishers on the planet, absolve Khalid bin Mahfouz, his family, his businesses and his charities to a degree that neither (to pluck at random) the U.S., French, Albanian, Swiss and Pakistani governments would be prepared to do?

Because English libel law overwhelmingly favors the plaintiff. And like many other big-shot Saudis, Sheikh Mahfouz has become very adept at using foreign courts to silence American authors – in effect, using distant jurisdictions to nullify the First Amendment. He may be a wronged man, but his use of what the British call "libel chill" is designed not to vindicate his good name but to shut down the discussion, which is why Cambridge University Press made no serious attempt to mount a defense. He's one of the richest men on the planet, and they're an academic publisher with very small profit margins. But, even if you've got a bestseller, your pockets are unlikely to be deep enough: "House Of Saud, House Of Bush" did boffo biz with the anti-Bush crowd in America, but there's no British edition – because Sheikh Mahfouz had indicated he was prepared to spend what it takes to challenge it in court, and Random House decided it wasn't worth it.

We've gotten used to one-way multiculturalism: The world accepts that you can't open an Episcopal or Congregational church in Jeddah or Riyadh, but every week the Saudis can open radical mosques and madrassahs and pro-Saudi think-tanks in London and Toronto and Dearborn, Mich., and Falls Church, Va. And their global reach extends a little further day by day, inch by inch, in the lengthening shadows, as the lights go out one by one around the world.
Suppose you've got a manuscript about the Saudis. Where are you going to shop it? Think Cambridge University Press will be publishing anything anytime soon?

Multiculturalism is ...

... the elite management of group social conflict (and the solicitation of such conflict to be managed by such elites) through the conversion of sensibility, chiefly resentment, founded upon group identities of ethnicity, race, gender, and religion into universal and legally and bureaucratically enforceable claims of human rights; with the consequence of displacing the hithertofor liberal content of those rights while yet still proclaiming a universal liberal basis for these new multiculturalist, sensibility-resentment-based claims of rights.

(Multiculturalism is not really capturable in a one sentence definition, of course, but I thought I'd give it a try. No doubt I will amend it down the road.)

Mark Steyn on multiculturalism in Britain and the July 7 bombings

From the several columns Mark Steyn wrote two years ago in London's Daily Telegraph following the July 7 London bombings, or, against multiculturalism:

It has been sobering this past week watching some of my "woollier" colleagues (in Vicki Woods's self-designation) gradually awake to the realisation that the real suicide bomb is "multiculturalism". Its remorseless tick-tock, suddenly louder than the ethnic drumming at an anti-globalisation demo, drove poor old Boris Johnson into rampaging around this page last Thursday like some demented late-night karaoke one-man Fiddler on the Roof, stamping his feet and bellowing, "Tradition! Tradition!" Boris's plea for more Britishness was heartfelt and valiant, but I'm not sure I'd bet on it. The London bombers were, to the naked eye, assimilated - they ate fish 'n' chips, played cricket, sported appalling leisurewear. They'd adopted so many trees we couldn't see they lacked the big overarching forest - the essence of identity, of allegiance. As I've said before, you can't assimilate with a nullity - which is what multiculturalism is.

So, if Islamist extremism is the genie you're trying to put back in the bottle, it doesn't help to have smashed the bottle. As the death of the Eurofanatic Ted Heath reminds us, in modern Britain even a "conservative" prime minister thinks nothing of obliterating ancient counties and imposing on the populace fantasy jurisdictions - "Avon", "Clwyd" and (my personal favourite in its evocative neo-Stalinism) "Central Region" - and an alien regulatory regime imported from the failed polities of Europe. The 7/7 murderers are described as "Yorkshiremen", but, of course, there is no Yorkshire: Ted abolished that, too.

Sir Edward's successor, Mr Blair, said on the day of the bombing that terrorists would not be allowed to "change our country or our way of life". Of course not. That's his job - from hunting to Europeanisation. Could you reliably say what aspects of "our way of life" Britain's ruling class, whether pseudo-Labour like Mr Blair or pseudo-Conservative like Sir Ted, wish to preserve? The Notting Hill Carnival? Not enough, alas.

Consider the Bishop of Lichfield, who at Evensong, on the night of the bombings, was at pains to assure his congregants: "Just as the IRA has nothing to do with Christianity, so this kind of terror has nothing to do with any of the world faiths." It's not so much the explicit fatuousness of the assertion so much as the broader message it conveys: we're the defeatist wimps; bomb us and we'll apologise to you. That's why in Britain the Anglican Church is in a death-spiral and Islam is the fastest-growing religion. There's no market for a faith that has no faith in itself. And as the Church goes so goes the state: why introduce identity cards for a nation with no identity?

It was the Prime Minister's wife, you'll recall, who last year won a famous court victory for Shabina Begum, as a result of which schools across the land must now permit students to wear the full "jilbab" - ie, Muslim garb that covers the entire body except the eyes and hands. Ms Booth hailed this as "a victory for all Muslims who wish to preserve their identity and values despite prejudice and bigotry". It seems almost too banal to observe that such an extreme preservation of Miss Begum's Muslim identity must perforce be at the expense of any British identity. Nor, incidentally, is Miss Begum "preserving" any identity: she's of Bangladeshi origin, and her adolescent adoption of the jilbab is a symbol of the Arabisation of South Asian (and African and European) Islam that's at the root of so many problems. It's no more part of her inherited identity than my five-year- old dressing up in his head-to-toe Darth Vader costume, to which at a casual glance it's not dissimilar.

Is it "bigoted" to argue that the jilbab is a barrier to acquiring the common culture necessary to any functioning society? Is it "prejudiced" to suggest that in Britain a Muslim woman ought to reach the same sartorial compromise as, say, a female doctor in Bahrain? Apparently so, according to Cherie Booth.

One of the striking features of the post-9/11 world is the minimal degree of separation between the so-called "extremists" and the establishment: Princess Haifa, wife of the Saudi ambassador to Washington, gives $130,000 to accomplices of the 9/11 terrorists; the head of the group that certifies Muslim chaplains for the US military turns out to be a bagman for terrorists; one of the London bombers gets given a tour of the House of Commons by a Labour MP. The Guardian hires as a "trainee journalist" a member of Hizb ut Tahir, "Britain's most radical Islamic group" (as his own newspaper described them) and in his first column post-7/7 he mocks the idea that anyone could be "shocked" at a group of Yorkshiremen blowing up London: "Second- and third-generation Muslims are without the don't-rock-the-boat attitude that restricted our forefathers. We're much sassier with our opinions, not caring if the boat rocks" - or the bus blows, or the Tube vaporises. Fellow Guardian employee David Foulkes, who was killed in the Edgware Road blast, would no doubt be heartened to know he'd died for the cause of Muslim "sassiness".

But among all these many examples of the multiculti mainstream ushering the extremists from the dark fringe to the centre of western life, there is surely no more emblematic example than that of Shabina Begum, whose victory over the school dress code was achieved with the professional support of both the wife of the Prime Minister who pledges to defend "our way of life" and of Hizb ut Tahir, a group which (according to the German Interior Minister) "supports violence as a means to realise political goals" such as a worldwide caliphate and (according to the BBC) "urges Muslims to kill Jewish people". What does an "extremist" have to do to be too extreme for Cherie Booth or the Guardian?

Oh, well. Back to business as usual. In yesterday's Independent, Dave Brown had a cartoon showing Bush and Blair as terrorists boarding the Tube to Baghdad. Ha-ha. The other day in Thailand, where 800 folks have been killed by Islamists since the start of the year, two Laotian farm workers were beheaded. I suppose that's Bush and Blair's fault, too.

I'd like to think my "woolly liberal" colleague Vicki Woods and the woolly sorta-conservative Boris Johnson represent the majority. If they do, you've got a sporting chance. But in the end Cherie Booth and Dave Brown and the Bishop of Lichfield will get you killed. Best of British, old thing.

Two years later, some observers are hoping that things have shifted in Britain. Senior political figures in Britain have spoken out against full female Muslim coverage garb of precisely the kind in which feminist human rights lawyer Cherie Blair discovered such a smashing victory. Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis - two liberals whose antipathy towards the political orthodoxy of multiculturalism is not in question - have written columns expressing the hope that Jack Straw's position, despite it being widely reviled in Britain itself, represents the hope of a new policy in Britain.

Well, I should like to believe that as much as Hitchens and Amis, but I think it is hoping against hope. I had a conversation with a friend in London a couple of weeks ago, and I remarked to him that knowledgeable friends in Paris view London as the capital of Islamist terrorism, the feeder from Pakistan, and the incubator of terrorism in its deadly combination of liberal protections for terrorism's ideological support groups and multicultural refusal to address an ideology that proposes to use liberalism to dispose of itself. My London friend assured me that the July 7 bombings had been a wakeup call, no more business as usual. Two weeks after my family and I have left London, the attempted car bombings a few blocks from our hotel in Piccadilly. The New York Times, on little evidence except its own wishful narrative, assures us that the doctors involved had been radicalized by the Iraq war: blame it on Bush and Blair.

Steyn remarked in a column back at the time of the New Jersey terror plot that every terrorist plot looks ridiculous if caught in the planning stages. The terrorists look like idiots for thinking they could succeed. Alas, it all looks very different if they do succeed. Had the 9-11 plotters been caught midway through the planning, what would our collective public response have been? God, what morons for thinking they could hijack not just one but four planes and use them as human-filled missiles against the largest buildings in New York. In the event, who were the morons? The most frightening thing about the most recent UK events is how extraordinarily close even some fairly amateur terrorists got to succeeding - concrete barriers at the airport, and someone thankfully observant in Piccadilly. But they got nearly all the way to home plate and were stopped by the frailest of last-stage tactical defenses, not by any kind of coherent counterterrorism strategy. Where were the vaunted domestic intelligence services? Might the mighty strictures of multiculturalism made surveillance rather more difficult than it should have been?

Meanwhile, the strictures of multiculturalism in the United States - the insistence that despite the obvious facts of where Islamist violence incubates, counterterrorism measures can take no account of that fact - lead to a copying of the dumbest of UK measures, the penchant for putting surveillance cameras everywhere. To record the carnage. To indulge the foolish idea that counterterrorism can and should consist of after-the-fact criminal justice, which is all that a video camera recording the action can hope to do, when posted on every possible location in a large city. It can't help you prevent terrorism - it merely announces that you don't intend to try to stop it in advance, but to go after people by sifting through the rubble and body parts afterwards.

Welcome to the world of on-defense, not offense, counterterrorism. If your counterterrorism policy is defensive, domestic, and essentially at-home, then be prepared either for a massive, general invasion of privacy in order to try and catch terrorists after the fact. And it still won't be effective, because the assumption of criminal law is deterrence through after the fact punishment. What does it mean if your terrorists are not deterrable?

Despue de los neocons - my Fukuyama TLS essay in the June 2007 Madrid Revista de Libros

(Por si acaso alguien se interese en una traduccion de mi ensayo sobre el libro Despues de los neocons por Francis Fukuyama. El ensayo aparecio originalmente en el TLS, y esta traduccion en la Revista de Libros de Madrid, No 126, Junio 2007. Es una traduccion magnifica por Luis Gago de la Revista de Libros.)

(At SSRN, here.)

Michael Gerson in WP on African Episcopal missionary outreach to the US

Michael Gerson, a new columnist for the Washington Post, has an important and insightful column, Wednesday, May 16, 2007, Washington Post, on the installation of the missionary bishop of the Nigerian Anglicans to northern Virginia, and the movement of the global south to re-Christianize the global north. This article is about the United States; my sense, however, is that a historically much more important re-evangelization will eventually take place in Western Europe, led by Africans and African immigrants.

On of these days, when I get a moment, I will write something about religion here. I suppose I might respond to part of Chris Hitchens' new book, but I'm more interested in the sensibility about religion at this moment.

I was once a Mormon missionary, many years ago, in Peru. I am a long lapsed Mormon, but unlike a lot of lapsed Mormons, I hold no ill-feelings for the Mormon church. Most of my family is still devoutly Mormon, and I have enormous respect for how they live they lives, and well as a great fondness for Mormon culture, even if I don't count myself as a Mormon believer. I don't write about the Mormon church very much, although I wrote two long review essays about the Mormons some years ago - one in the Times Literary Supplement, on the intellectual and spiritual roots of Mormonism in gnosticism and the radical religious reformation, here, and a second in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, when under the editorship of the great Steve Wasserman, here, on a new journalistic account of the Mormon church.

Excerpted from Gerson's column, midway:

***
In 1900, about 80 percent of Christians lived in North America and Europe; now, more than 60 percent live on other continents. There are more Presbyterians in Ghana than in Scotland. The largest district of the United Methodist Church is found in Ivory Coast. And many of the enthusiastic converts of Western missions have begun asking why portions of the Western church have abandoned the traditional faith they once shared. Liberal Protestant church officials, headed toward international assemblies, are anxiously counting African votes, because these new voters tend to take their Bible both literally and seriously.

This emerging Christianity can be troubling. Church leaders sometimes emphasize communal values more than individual human rights, and they need to understand that strongly held moral beliefs are compatible with a commitment to civil liberties for all. Large Pentecostal churches are often built by domineering personalities promising health and wealth.

But the religion of the global south has a great virtue: It is undeniably alive. And it needs to be. A mother holding a child weak with AIDS or hot with malaria, or a family struggling to survive in an endless urban slum, does not need religious platitudes. Both need God's ever-present help in time of trouble -- which is exactly what biblical Christianity claims to offer.

Some American religious conservatives have embraced ties with this emerging Christianity, including the church I attend. But there are adjustments in becoming a junior partner. The ideological package of the global south includes not only moral conservatism but also an emphasis on social justice, an openness to state intervention in markets, and a suspicion of American economic and military power. The emerging Christian majority is not the Moral Majority.

But the largest adjustments are coming on the religious left. For decades it has preached multiculturalism, but now, on further acquaintance, it doesn't seem to like other cultures very much. Episcopal leaders complain of the threat of "foreign prelates," echoing anti-Catholic rhetoric of the 19th century. An activist at one Episcopal meeting urged the African bishops to "go back to the jungle where you came from." Not since Victorians hunted tigers on elephants has the condescension been this raw.

History is filled with uncomfortable turnabouts, and we are witnessing one of them. Serious missionary work began in Nigeria in 1842, conducted by a Church Mission Society dedicated to promoting "the knowledge of the Gospel among the heathen." In 2007, the Nigerian outreach to America officially began, on the fertile mission fields of Northern Virginia. And the natives here are restless.

The Examiner (DC) on one-way multiculturalist ratchet and Muslim special demands

The Examiner (DC) editorializes against the increasingly common trend - already de rigeur in Europe - on American college campuses to grant special rights to Muslim student demands that they would plainly not grant, and often would not be allowed by courts to grant, to other faiths. Here. Thanks Instapundit.

C'est l'identite de la France, c'est l'histoire de la France

La déclaration de Nicolas Sarkozy

lefigaro.fr
Dimanche 6 mai, 20h30, salle Gaveau (Paris).

Nicolas Sarkozy s'adresse à ses partisans pour la première fois depuis son élection. Il confesse son "immense émotion".

"Mes chers compatriotes. En m'adressant à vous ce soir et en ce moment qui est, chacun le comprend, exceptionnel dans la vie d'un homme, je ressens une immense, une sincère et profonde émotion. J'éprouve depuis mon plus jeune âge la fierté indicible d'appartenir à une grande, à une vieille, à une belle nation, la France. J'aime la France comme on aime un être cher qui m'a tout donné, maintenant c'est à mon tour de rendre à la France ce que la France m'a donné.

Ce soir, ma pensée va aux millions de Français qui aujourd'hui m'ont témoigné leur confiance. Je veux leur dire qu'ils m'ont fait le plus grand honneur qui soit, à mes yeux, en me jugeant digne de présider aux destinées de la France. Ma pensée va à tout ceux qui m'ont accompagné dans cette campagne. Je veux leur dire ma gratitude, je veux leur dire mon affection. Je veux le dire d'abord à ma famille, je veux le dire à mes amis, je veux le dire mes partisans, je veux le dire à tout ceux qui m'ont soutenu.

Et ma pensée va à Mme Royal. Je veux lui dire que j'ai du respect pour elle et pour ses idées dans lesquelles tant de Français se sont reconnus. Respecter Mme Royal, c'est respecter les millions de Français qui ont voté pour elle.

Le président de la République doit aimer tous les Français. Ma pensée va donc à tous les Français qui n'ont pas voté pour moi. Je veux leur dire que par delà le combat politique, par delà les divergences d'opinion, il n'y a pour moi qu'une seule France. Je veux leur dire que je serai le président de tous les Français, que je parlerai pour chacun d'entre eux. Je veux leur dire que ce soir, ce n'est pas la victoire d'une France contre une autre. Il n'y a pour moi ce soir qu'une seule victoire: celle de la démocratie, celle des valeurs qui nous unissent, celle de l'idéal qui nous rassemble.

Ma priorité sera de tout mettre en oeuvre pour que les Français aient toujours envie de se parler, de se comprendre, de travailler ensemble. Le peuple français s'est exprimé. Il a choisi de rompre. De rompre avec les idées les habitudes et les comportements du passé. Je vais donc réhabiliter le travail, l'autorité, la morale, le respect. Je vais remettre à l'honneur la nation et l'identité nationale, je vais rendre aux Français la fierté de la France, je vais en finir avec la repentance qui est une forme de haine de soi et la concurrence des mémoires qui nourrit la haine des autres.

Le peuple français a choisi le changement. Ce changement je le mettrai en oeuvre parce que c'est le mandat que j'ai reçu du peuple et parce que la France en a besoin. Mais je le ferai avec tous les Français. Je le ferai dans un esprit d'union et dans un esprit de fraternité, je le ferai sans que personne n'ait le sentiment d'être exclu, d'être laissé pour compte. Je le ferai avec la volonté que chacun puisse trouver sa place dans notre République, que chacun s'y sente reconnu, s'y sente respecté dans sa dignité de citoyen et dans sa dignité d'homme. Tous ceux que la vie a blessés, ceux que la vie a usés doivent savoir qu'ils ne seront pas abandonnés qu'ils seront aidés, qu'ils seront secourus. Ceux qui ont le sentiment que quoi qu'ils fassent, ils ne pourront pas s'en sortir, doivent être sûrs qu'ils ne seront pas laissés de côté et qu'ils auront les mêmes chances que les autres.

J'appelle tous les Français par delà leur parti, leurs croyances, leurs origines à s'unir à moi pour que la France se remettre en mouvement. J'appelle chacun à ne pas se laisser enfermer dans l'intolérance et dans le sectarisme, mais à s'ouvrir aux autres, à ceux qui ont des idées différentes, à ceux qui ont d'autres convictions.

Je veux lancer un appel à nos partenaires européens auxquels notre destin est profondément lié pour leur dire que toute ma vie j'ai été européen, que je crois profondément, que je crois sincèrement en la construction européenne et que ce soir, la France est de retour en Europe. Je conjure nos partenaires européens d'entendre la voix des peuples qui veulent être protégés. Je conjure nos partenaires européens de ne pas restés sourds à la colère des peuples qui perçoivent l'Union européenne, non comme une protection, mais comme le cheval de Troie de toutes les menaces que portent en elles les transformations du monde.

Je veux lancer un appel à nos amis américains pour leur dire qu'ils peuvent compter sur notre amitié renforcée dans les tragédies de l'histoire que nous avons affrontées ensemble. Je veux leur dire que la France sera toujours à leurs côtés quand ils auront besoin d'elle mais je veux leur dire aussi que l'amitié, c'est accepter que ses amis puissent penser différemment. Et qu'une grande nation, comme les Etats Unis a le devoir de ne pas faire obstacle à la lutte contre le réchauffement climatique, mais au contraire de prendre la tête de ce combat, parce que ce qui est en jeu, c'est le sort de l'humanité toute entière. La France fera de ce combat son premier combat.

Je veux lancer un appel à tous les peuples de la Méditerranée pour leur dire que c'est en Méditerranée que tout va se jouer, qu'il nous faut surmonter toutes les haines pour laisser la place à un grand rêve de paix et à un grand rêve de civilisation. Je veux leur dire que le temps est venu de bâtir ensemble une Union méditerranéenne qui sera un trait d'union entre l'Europe et l'Afrique. Ce qui a été fait pour l'union de l'Europe, il y a 60 ans, nous allons le faire aujourd'hui pour l'union de la Méditerranée.

Je veux lancer un appel à tous les Africains, un appel fraternel pour dire à l'Afrique que nous voulons l'aider à vaincre la maladie, à vaincre la famine, à vaincre la pauvreté, à vivre en paix. Je veux leur dire que nous allons décider ensemble d'une politique d'immigration maîtrisée et d'une politique de développement ambitieuse.

Je veux lancer un appel à tous ceux qui dans le monde croient aux valeurs de la tolérance, de la liberté, de la démocratie, de l'humanisme, à tous ceux qui sont persécutés par les tyrannies et les dictatures. Je veux dire à tous les enfants à travers le monde, à toutes les femmes martyrisées dans le monde, je veux leur dire que la fierté, le devoir de la France sera d'être à leurs côtés.

La France sera aux côtés des infirmières libyennes (bulgares, ndlr) enfermées depuis huit ans, la France n'abandonnera pas Ingrid Betancourt, la France n'abandonnera pas les femmes qu'on condamne à la burqa, la France n'abandonnera pas les femmes qui n'ont pas la liberté. La France sera du côté des opprimés du monde. C'est le message de la France, c'est l'identité de la France, c'est l'histoire de la France.

Mes chers compatriotes, nous allons écrire ensemble une nouvelle page de notre histoire. Cette page de notre histoire, mes chers compatriotes, je suis sûr qu'elle sera grande, qu'elle sera belle. Et du fond du coeur, je veux vous le dire, avec la sincérité la plus totale qui est la mienne au moment où je vous parle: Vive la République et vive la France".

(Update, Volokh Conspiracy has some translation, plus a YouTube link to the crowd singing La Marsellaise. VC notes that the second to last paragraph, in italics, was added in the delivered version. Actually, I like this YouTube version better.)

(I also just want to note for the record that I was honored a few weeks ago to be contacted by a researcher in France looking for a rare English translation of the wartime poetry of the great French poet, Rene Char. The English translation, Leaves of Hypnos, translated by the poet Cid Corman, appeared in 1973, but has long been out of print. I was pleased to be able to supply the translations from my copy of the book for an English language version of a DVD from the ministry of culture on Char's poetry. And to think she contacted me because she had noticed a post about Rene Char on this blog!)

(While I am at it, I recommend this article in Commentary by Michael Gurfinkiel, "Can France Be Saved?", here. And I recommend anything written by that fine, extraordinarily smart French political commentator, Dominique Moisi, even when - or better said, especially when - I disagree with him. Writing in the Guardian, here, on the Sarkozy election.)

When you write about things like Wolfowitz and the Bank ...

The comments people have put up on my blog re Wolfowitz and the Bank have generally been reasoned and civil, even when they disagreed with me. Knowing the nature of much of blogosphere, I appreciate that very greatly. That is unfortunately not true of a number of the comments posted to some of the World Bank staffer blogs - David Ignatius described them as "shrill"; I would describe a goodly percentage of them as considerably more vicious than that. However, this email arrived at my office a few minutes ago, from one Mohamed Cassam, cassamm@aol.com, and while it is probably not very unusual a communication for people who write on these topics, for someone like me who teaches pretty prosaic areas of corporate finance, governance, nonprofits, business transactions, etc., it is a bit startling.
***

Why such animus against Wolfie? Hostility to his "reforms"? So you ask.

What world do you live in?

Wolfie, Feith, Kristol and all the other Likudist gangsters who cooked up the Protocols of the Elders of....................................................................Neo Connery

are responsible, to date, for the murder of 1 million Irakis and smashing the lives of 22 million others by invading their country on false pretences for Israel's benefit.

You being a Hoover Institute hack couldn't give a damn how many Ai-Rabs the DoD kills, being the NAZI you are (North American Zionist+Israeli) Any way, congratulations on getting equal time with that Nobelisto JS on the FT..not bad for 3rd rate academic at a soso degree factory.


However you are on the right track regarding the spousal benefits that the senior Bank management cook up and enjoy. Go after them!

Mohamed Cassam

Simon Winder's The Man Who Saved Britain - my late night reading

For the past week, my late night reading has been Simon Winder, The Man Who Saved Britain: A Personal Journey into the Disturbing World of James Bond (FSG 2006). It is wonderfully entertaining - thesis is that Ian Fleming's novels provided an essential palliative to 50s and early 60s Britain as it faced one humiliation after another following its heroic victory in the Second World War. It is more a cultural history of Britain through a certain period - the period, from my own standpoint, of most of my British friends, who are old enough to have been growing up as children in exactly this period - than a book about Bond, the Bond movies, or even Bond as cultural icon. It is using Bond as a lens on the period rather than Bond as Bond or even Bond as cultural artifact. Winder says a lot about Bond and the Bond books and early movies, and his readings are wonderfully quirky. But it is his take on Britain itself during this period that actually engages me. I understand my British friends who were children during that period a little better for it - I think, anway.

For one thing, I guess I knew - reading, for example, Tony Judt's wonderful Postwar - that postwar 50s Britain was really, really poor. Poor, and not rebuilt with the vigor and speed of Germany. The contrast Winder makes with the United States is striking. Say what one does about the 50s in America - I was born in 1956 and wasn't conscious of any of this - it was a time of tremendous optimism and growth, people having babies everywhere because they had a confidence about the future, the growth of the suburbs, all that. That was apparently not the state of Britain at all - grimy, decayed, destroyed, poor, straitened, Winder has a nearly limitless set of adjectives to describe this world of hopelessness and the irony of victory.

The curious part is that Winder does not have an original political thought in his head - the main point is that Britain was both doomed to this unhappiness and deserved it as the price for its wicked centuries of empire. The vultures come home to roost. Britain's pain is the price - far too cheap, according to Winder - of having been the self-confident Victorian imperialist. His thesis is entirely a conventional whine - or whinge? - about the wickedness of British imperialism and how Bond is supposed to make the British feel better about being on the receiving end of humiliation as things fall apart after the War. I'm not British, I am not especially anglophile, but there is something entirely goofy, if politically correct, about Winder's sense of historic and cosmic justice. The world which got the East India Company going is not the world of Indian independence, and it doesn't help in the present very much at all - not from the standpoint of social justice today or thinking through present problems - to adopt a sort of transhistorical sense of judgment about how things came to be from centuries ago. It just multiplies the problems of historical injustice to the point of complete paralysis, because everyone got fucked by someone in the past, and trying to fix it all guarantees either permanent war or permanent paralysis. This is not to say one doesn't try to address injustice in the present - along with economic growth for the living, political stability, and a lot of other things - but Winder is smitten in the most conventional PC way with ancient wrongs and rights.

Still, it must be said that for an utterly conventional political thinker of the whining, guilty, self-abasing, apologizing variety, put in the service of everyone else's resentments which are finally Winder's own - well, he manages to put this in prose and expression at a level so far above the common academic herd that it is, for all the vacuity of the political ideas, genuinely a pleasure to read. He manages to make one laugh aloud with pointless political correctness, anti-imperialism, anti-god-knows-what - rather than at it, which is much the normal formulation. He's a terrific writer even devoid of political ideas; he is rescued by the acuity of his cultural observations and his highly original readings of Bond. I never thought I would find myself laughing aloud in a book of this sort, which, in academic hands, ordinarily runs to ressentiment.

Or to put all this another way. I'm not sure I've ever read a book that is quite so cheerily and wittily self-loathing. Self-loathing about oneself, one's country, one's political culture, one's fellow citizens. There is a lot of self-loathing about, of course, but almost never does it come so cheerfully dressed. So much so that it almost - almost, but finally not quite - makes me wonder if Winder actually believes it.

(ps., May 10, 2007. Winder's book has inspired me to pick up an ancient - dating back the 1960s - paperback copy of On Her Majesty's Secret Service. I have no idea where it came from - I hope we didn't pay to have it moved from NY to DC ten years ago. I don't recall if Winder mentions it - I'm sure he does - but I can't remember the last time, outside of old-fashioned children's books, where I saw quite so many exclamation points! Every other sentence on some pages seems to have an exclamation point! It seems peculiar because the suave, competent, quiet Bond does not seem like the kind of person to think in sentences ending in exclamation points! But he does!)

(pps, May 10. Once, a couple of years ago, I took my daughter with me on a speaking trip to the LSE - we did tea at the Ritz, the Tower, all the good stuff. At the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, the band struck up the themes to James Bond. I think of this today because Gerard Baker, writing about the Queen's visit to the US this week, noted that along with Rule Brittania, the band at the embassy party struck up the Bond theme as well. The man who saved Britain, indeed?)

***
Update, August 9, 2007. Here, by the way, is what Mark Steyn had to say about this book in the WSJ:

Contemplating the cover of The Man Who Saved Britain – Sean Connery, wearing a tuxedo and a sadistic smile, caressing his cheek with his Walther PPK, as a nubile underclad Sixties dolly bird somewhere down at crotch height nuzzles against his upper thigh…

Where was I? Oh, yes. Bond, James Bond. Contemplating the cover of The Man Who Saved Britain, you’re struck by the apparent ingenuity of Simon Winder’s concept: it is weird, when you think about it, that the great enduring iconic figure of the Cold War, the very embodiment of the espionage profession, should be a Brit. The country was, after all, pretty peripheral in the vanquishing of Communism, and indeed at the height of the Soviet threat was lapsing into a grim Brezhnevite decay of its own. And even the dolly birds were more honored in the breach: if Kim Philby and co are anything to go by, Her Majesty’s Secret Service inclined more toward Plenty O’Toole than Pussy Galore.

And yet, if one were to say the words “secret agent” to almost anyone within range of western popular culture this last half-century, he or she would conjure a suave Englishman (mostly played by Scotsmen, Welshmen, Irishmen and Australians) ordering martinis and shagging his way around the world on behalf of a nation all but shagged out. President Bush implicitly endorsed this curious pre-eminence in his notorious 16 words from the 2003 State of the Union:
The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

Well, of course. And how would they learn that? The CIA, with the unlimited resources of the hyperpower, sent in Joseph C Wilson IV to sip mint tea in Niger with retired bureaucrats for a few days: Double-oh-IV, licensed to kill time. London no doubt dispatched Bond to break into the presidential palace and run around the basement laboratory shooting huge numbers of extras in aluminum-foil catsuits, while still finding ten minutes for a vigorous encounter with some appealingly dusky West African totty (007 was always an equal-opportunity sex fiend; long before it was fashionable, he was usually game for a little affirmative action…

Where was I? Oh, yes. Bond, James Bond. Simon Winder’s thesis is that 007 is both a reflection of and an escape from imperial decline: “I want to convey, perhaps in an overdrawn form, some of the ways in which Britain has changed – and by following James Bond show some of a vanished world which he in various ways pulled together.”

Sounds fun, and Winder would seem the ideal chap to do it. A few years back, he compiled a lovely anthology called My Name’s Bond… rounding up Ian Fleming’s best soundbites from the 007 novels. There are an awful lot of them, not least from Casino Royale:

‘A dry Martini,’ he said. ‘One. In a deep champagne goblet.’
'Oui, monsieur.’
‘Just a moment. Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon-peel. Got it?’
‘Certainly, monsieur.’ The barman seemed pleased with the idea.

Unlike Bond's critics, who get ever more irked with his rituals. My Name’s Bond… is one of those small perfect books I love to take on long flights. Winder is a Fleming fan and he has an eye for those moments of pure stylistic pleasure the novels offer. It’s in attempting to advance from annotated arcana to an argument that Winder’s new book comes a cropper. He begins in the dark at the dawn of the Roger Moore imperium: “I am ten years old, sitting in a suburban English cinema. On the screen a man with a large chin and black roll-neck sweater pushes through jungle foliage… A white woman has been tied to a post and a black man dressed in animal skins is laughing crazily and wielding a massive poisonous snake… The man with the large chin starts shooting the black people…”

The fan of My Name’s Bond… suddenly seems a lot more sheepish about the whole business. He can’t even get through a list of the movies without collapsing in embarrassment: “The Man With The Golden Gun (1974), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), Moonraker (1979)… I’m sorry. I just can’t go on it’s all so terrible. They’re roughly the same, come out at irregular intervals and tend to have the word Die in the title.”

Oh, dear. And this is before Mr Winder has even got stuck into his big picture: the violence and racism and ugliness of the British Empire. Though he refers to “a sort of paroxysm of national self-loathing”, he would appear to be the principal evidence of it. And even then you vaguely suspect that he’s faking it. There are, broadly speaking, three reactions to Bond: those who dislike him; those who love him; and those who love him but feel obliged to deplore all the frightful imperialism, racism, alcoholism, chain smoking, snobbery, profoundly unsafe sex, etc.

Winder elects to join this last category, which makes the book a glummer read than it ought to be, a kind of Doctor No But... British audiences have never had any difficulty reconciling 007’s luster with their more general eclipse: The opening of The Spy Who Loved Me, when Bond skis off a cliff and opens his Union Jack parachute, is offered and understood as a kind of semi-parodic flag-waving. In the Roger Moore era, the film-makers took to ending the movie with a scene in which the Queen or Mrs Thatcher or some such would be waiting to congratulate Bond via satellite link only to be confronted by the old legover maestro doing the horizontal mambo with Holly Goodhead as an excuse for a final double-entendre. “What’s Bond doing?” “I think,” explains Q, looking at the radar rather than at Roger, “he’s attempting re-entry, sir.” Or: “Just keeping the British end up, sir.” Or a dozen others, as Roger Moore rogered more.

With the best will in the world, one can’t divine a lot of imperial self-doubt in this oeuvre. And Winder, demonstrating the peculiar snobberies of the minor public schoolboy (if you’ll forgive a touch more snobbery), allows his obsessions to lead him astray – as in his assertion that these tales of Brit derring-do were viewed in America as “comedies of self-delusion”. Oh, really? So it’s not the babes and the gadgets and the car chases? Just the huge market for post-imperial “comedies of self-delusion”. Who knew?

Poor old Winder. A genial gentleman publisher of the patrician left, he seems to have missed the central feature of Bond’s character: his cool. Winder is not cool; he is over-heated to the point of rhetorical meltdown: his nation’s history is “despicable”, “repulsive”, “revolting and mad”, “sickening”, “nauseating”, “nauseating and absurd”… One feels that, instead of this shrill overkill, he might have taken a lesson from Blofeld et al and expressed his loathing with an amused contempt – “I’m afraid you’re beginning to bore me, Mr Bond” – before lowering him into the piranha tank. There are some useful insights here – the observation that Ken Adam’s Bond sets are so good that real location scenes such as the Vegas hotels of Diamonds Are Forever look wan by comparison. But otherwise, generalizing ever more wildly and hysterically, Winder manages to miss all his targets – Fleming, Bond and the British Empire. He seems an amiable self-deprecating cove, but so’s Hugh Grant, and I wouldn’t fancy his chances trying to beat up Daniel Craig.

The Wall Street Journal, November 24th 2006