The History of History: Remembering the Dam Buster Raid, 1943

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British history, Dam Busters, Operation Chastise, Stephen Fry

During the Second World War, Britain’s Operation Chastise bombed major German dams using a custom “bouncing bomb” that skipped along the water to reach the dam walls.  The associated movie, The Dam Busters, paid tribute to the heroism of the flight crews, many of whom did not return, as well as the technical ingenuity of the engineers.

A series of documentaries filmed in recent decades gives insight into how the British documentary maker’s view of this raid has changed over time.

The 1981 documentary Night Bombers relies heavily on rare color footage of the operations on the airbase, not for the actual raid, but for a similar mission.  The tone is reverential, and the stiff upper lip is prominent throughout.  The modern production is so in synch with the vintage footage, it feels as though home movies are being shown by their makers’ descendants.

The title of the 1992 documentary on the subject suggests that much had changed: Dambusters: The True Story.  Despite the title, this documentary is faithful to the traditional telling of the story, and it is difficult to see it as revisionist in any way.  The documentary does depend heavily on The Dambusters movie for footage, and there is a distance between the narrator and the material that didn’t exist in the first documentary.  There is enormous emphasis on the technical problems encountered, delivered in a matter-of-fact manner by all concerned.  The surviving members of the operation are interviewed at length.  We learn that the main boffin, Barnes Wallis, was so affected by the British casualties that he made pilot safety a much bigger priority in his subsequent work.  At the end, the narrator carefully weighs the pros and cons of the operation, and judges it a significant success.

Made in 2008, Last of the Dambusters presents the operation as a personal, highly emotional journey for the last surviving airman of the raid.  Whereas the previous documentaries’ narrators stayed off-screen and maintained a level, objective tone, Stephen Fry narrates in front of the camera.  Fry is a comic actor who has played military characters as buffoons; here he reins in the comedy, but not his sentimentality. The veteran in question flew in a plane attacking the one dam that was not breached.  Thanks to Fry’s guidance, which includes visits to the dam, the crash sites of some of the veteran’s comrades, and local historians with details about German civilian deaths caused by those dams that were destroyed, the veteran ends up grateful that his part of the mission failed.

The trajectory of the documentaries starts with a proud remembrance of a patriotic achievement, and ends with the sense that the whole affair was just a regrettable squabble between European cousins.

The Ambidextrous View of the Mass Importation of Labor: Karl Marx and Adam Smith Unite

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Adam Smith, economics, immigration, Marx

Wages are not exempt from the laws of supply and demand.  When you import a lot of workers into a country, whether as migrant workers or immigrants, you increase the supply of workers and thereby place downward pressure on wages.

Proponents of mass immigration have been denying this basic precept in recent years.  However, the traditional economist of the left, Karl Marx, agreed with Adam Smith, the traditional economist of the right, on this point, as we can see from this excerpt from Marx’s essay “Moralizing Criticism and Critical Morality: A Polemic Against Karl Heinzen” (available in Kindle’s “Selected Essays” of Karl Marx):

If wages are higher in North America than in Europe, this is by no means due to its lighter taxation.  It is the consequence of its territorial, commercial, and industrial situation.  The demand for workers in relation to the supply of workers is considerably greater than in Europe.  And this truth is known already to every pupil of Adam Smith.

Neither Up Nor Down: Why Multiculturalism Will Ultimately Fail The Progressives

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multiculturalism

What is the opposite of “up?”  “Down,” of course.    Naively, we might explain that “up” is as far apart from “down” as one can get, but what about the word “car?”  “Car” is even further removed from “up” than “down” is, because at least “down” is a direction, whereas “car” is addressing a completely different conceptual space.

In the same way, the average Westerner with little exposure to other cultures can get caught up in defining all politics as either “right” or “left.”  However, even in Western politics, if you go back too far in history, you run into problems.  Was Julius Caesar a man of the left or the right?  The terms would have been meaningless to him.  There are political ideas further from “left” than “left” is from “right.”  When you opt for multiculturalism, you open yourself up to new political landscapes.

If you are progressive, imagine living in a progressive environment with a growing minority of conservatives.  At first, the conservatives will have to make accommodations to fit in, so you will still be able to promote environmentally friendly policies.  At some point, if the minority moves towards becoming a majority, there will be a tipping point,  in the Malcolm Gladwell sense, and you will suddenly find yourself in a conservative environment.  After that point, the environmentally friendly policies will abruptly disappear, and you will be laughed at for believing in global warming.  The conservative world view is distinct from the progressive world view in myriad ways.  In welcoming a local conservative majority, the progressive’s whole world will change.

Of course, progressives aren’t welcoming a conservative majority, but they are anticipating a new majority of people who didn’t come from a culture that created the progressive movement.  The new majority will follow political correctness at first, but once the majority is established, they will do things their way.

I’ll give a concrete example.  I knew a Pakistani immigrant to the United States who was about as well assimilated as you could hope.  He spoke almost flawless English, was a family man, held down a job, and was well respected.  He mentioned to me that his relatives in another Western country had told him that a Pakistani group had infiltrated that country’s police force and corrupted it, recreating the base of an influence-peddling ring that existed in Pakistan.

Corruption in Western police forces is nothing new, but here is the critical point that shows how much further away from “left” than “right” other conceptions of political culture can be: my friendly acquaintance was proud of the corruption of the Western police force.

If the progressives keep inviting immigrants from non-Western cultures and promoting multiculturalism, they can expect the progressive movement to be ultimately swept aside.

If Feminists Really Cared About Equality, They Would Agitate to Lower the Life Expectancy Gap

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feminism, life expectancy, political rhetoric

The feminist lobby is very quick to raise the alarm if men are paid more than women for the same job, and sometimes even for jobs that are “comparable.”  They will hop up and down in horror if “sexist” language is used, and happily “correct” you that an actress must be called an actor.

Are men’s sports celebrated more than women’s sports?  If so, legislation is required, they say.

In the medical arena, they find all sorts of major concerns.  Is more money being spent on men in some area of health care?  If so, it’s time for a protest.

One major gap between the sexes is life expectancy.  According to the CIA factbook entry for the United States, life expectancy for men (at birth) is 76.19 years, and for women it is 81.17 years.  There is no question that if these figures were reversed, it would be the feminists’ number one issue.

The next time a feminist wants to complain about inequality between the sexes, ask her what she is doing to close the life expectancy gap.

There Is No Such Thing As a Nation of Immigrants

“Nation of Immigrants” was a book written by John F. Kennedy, and since then the phrase has emigrated to other English-speaking countries.  However, as you might expect from a politician, the phrase is slanted, self-serving, and misleading.

Kennedy became president in a time when America’s founding fathers were revered, but his family could make no claim to this heritage.  Kennedy’s ancestors, on his father’s side, didn’t arrive in America until several generations after the American revolution.  As a young president with limited prestige, reinventing America as a “nation of immigrants” put his family on par with Benjamin Franklin’s.

A nation is created either by pioneers or conquerors; it depends on whether the land is already inhabited.  In no case is a country ever created by immigrants; an immigrant is somebody who is born in one country and moves to join an existing order in another country.

Whenever somebody tells you that America is a “nation of immigrants,” you should chide him for not being “inclusive” and rephrase it as a “nation of the native born and immigrants.”

The progressive’s rejoinder is typically that “you may not be an immigrant, but some of your ancestors were.”  However, such legal status is not inherited, so it is not relevant.   If your father wins a Nobel Prize, that doesn’t make you a Nobel Prize winner.  In the same way that today’s Kennedy family is American, not Irish, its members are now native born in America, not immigrants.

Promoting America as a “nation of immigrants” is a sly way of pushing aside the existing order.  The phrase suggests that the newcomers are more important to the nation’s character.

Hold the Mustard: Gas Attacks Today and One Hundred Years Ago

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Chemical warfare, Syria, United States, World War I

Barbara Tuchman discussed America’s late entry into World War One in The Zimmerman Telegram.  She laid a lot of emphasis on two telegrams sent by Germany’s foreign secretary, Arthur Zimmerman, to Mexico plotting an alliance between the two countries against the United States.  The second of the two telegrams went so far as to to list the American states Mexico could hope to annex in the case of a conflict with its northern neighbor.

This came on top of the sinking of the Lusitania, an American passenger ship, by German submarines.

Relatively unnoticed in all of this was Germany’s introduction of poison gas to the Western front.  The Allies also experimented with gas weapons, but Germany was first to use it on a serious scale.

In the early twentieth century, use of deadly weapons like poison gas in a war between two distant belligerents was not a credible reason for America to go to war.  As America threatens Syria today, it isn’t really a credible reason in this century, but it sounds better than the cold reality of geopolitical chess.  It’s not so much that the rebels in Syria are “our” guys as they are not Putin and al-Assad’s guys.

Sinister Development: Left-Handers Join the Leftist Collective

For generations, children left-handed from birth were coerced into making their right hands dominant.  From the Latin words for right (dexter) and left (sinister) we get the words English dextrous and sinister.  Plainly, there has been massive societal discrimination against the left-handed.  And isn’t “lefty,” a diminutive after all, some sort of slur?

Are there occupations in which left-handers are “underrepresented?”  Very probably, and others in which they are “overrepresented,” but let’s not focus on that.

Fortunately, the progressive collective is racing to the rescue.  They are carefully examining whether left-handed tools are being made in sufficient proportion to right-handed tools.

None of this is really happening, of course, but claiming the left-handed are being discriminated against is probably just as accurate as claims that, say, Malaysians are.  The arguments for adding left-handed people to the protected groups of political correctness are as convincing as those for any of its other members.

Imagine being an employer if the anti-discrimination laws were changed to accommodate the left-handed.  Until this point, you probably didn’t keep track of the handedness of your employees, but now you must become extremely conscious of handedness.  Why?  Because of the threat of disparate impact lawsuits; if it turns out that your hiring process tends to end up with fewer left-handed employees than chance would anticipate, then you are at fault, even if you never intended that effect.

Affirmative action programs force employers to be extremely conscious of the race, sex, and ethnic group of their employees, even if they otherwise wouldn’t care.  It is no recipe for an easy-going workplace.

White Not Like Me: Cognitive Dissonance of the Progressive White Anti-White

A number of commentators are trying to make a parallel between the George Zimmerman case and the shooting death of Australian baseball player Christopher Lane.  One commonality is that they were both attacked by black teenagers with a history of hurling racial slurs; George Zimmerman was able to protect himself with his gun, and lived, whereas Christopher Lane was apparently unarmed.  To be fair, in such a surprise attack, there isn’t any weapon Christopher Lane could have carried that would have saved him.

In an article at Gawker.com, Tom Scocca argues that public outrage was justified in the Zimmerman case and not in the Lane case because no charges were initially laid against Zimmerman.   In light of the not guilty verdict in the Zimmerman trial, and especially given the weakness of the prosecution’s case, the initial progressive outrage against the lack of charges was clearly unwarranted.

Scocca starts his invective by telling off “race-hustlers,” but he subverts the usual meaning of the term to indict those who saw Zimmerman’s acquittal as a victory.  Because the verdict simply reflected the evidence presented to the court,  the outcome was a victory for the justice system, not for any particular race.  Indeed, Zimmerman’s ancestry is so complex that the media struggled to classify him according to race, so it’s not clear which ethnic group would be cheering him on.

The Lane shooting is not the first murder case to involve youngsters who kill for chillingly mindless reasons, but such an inhuman motive always captures the attention, like a horror movie.  To the extent that there is outrage about this case, that is its natural starting point.  If a young bank robber in a panic had shot a bank teller, it would not have received the same response, whatever the races of the people involved.

For Scocca, the idea that there should be an outrage attached to the Lane case is only suitable for “white dummies.”  Strangely, Scocca insists on painting his opposition in racial terms, despite him singling out John McWhorter, a man at least as black as Barack Obama, for criticism.  However, Scocca quickly attempts to undermine McWhorter’s credibility by claiming that McWhorter “has made a nice career as a writer noticing the things about race that white people want noticed.”  This is no more than the usual frivolous attack by progressives whenever a member of a designated victim group ignores the party line.

By the end of the piece, Scocca identifies his opposition simply as white people: “But what are white people trying to accomplish, by calling our attention to race here? What does a discussion of supposed black criminality, in general, have to do with the specifics of this case? The individuals who allegedly killed Lane have all been arrested. Should the police in Oklahoma have arrested additional black people (or, you know, black and white people in a 2-to-1 ratio), on principle? It’s almost as if the people who want to talk about black criminality don’t care about facts.”

I have quoted Scocca’s last paragraph at length to make it clear that he doesn’t identify with “white people,” whom he has apparently identified as the “other,” to use progressive parlance.  How could he, when he is essentially admitting that he doesn’t understand the opposing viewpoint?

The most fascinating point of all of this is that Tom Scocca, based on his appearance, would be classified as white anywhere in the world.  Assuming that Scocca considers himself white, he is in the strange position of castigating a multi-racial group for a viewpoint he abhors, and in so doing labels them in terms of his own racial group.  As far as I can understand his mindset, Scocca seems to have positioned himself in the argument so that he can’t help but lose.

Blackface as Heartfelt Tribute: Fred Astaire in “Swing Time”

One of the most pernicious aspects of progressive discourse is its willful disregard of historical weltanschauung.  The technique takes an innocent aspect of past behavior and then attempts to tar the entire endeavor with any negative connotation available.

As an example, the theatrical convention of blackface is now seen as prime facie evidence of racial animus.  When we examine Fred Astaire’s blackface number in Swing Time, we can get to grips with reality.  In that movie, Astaire introduces a blackface number in order to pay tribute to William “Bojangles” Robinson, a black dancer.  The number exists outside the plot of the movie, and its only purpose is homage.

Note to posterity:  the title “Swing Time” refers to music, not lynching.

 

 

 

And Hillary Ensued: Why A Second Clinton Preseidency Won’t Be As Good As the First

If Hillary Clinton had never married Bill Clinton, she would never have become first lady, a senator, favorite for the Democratic nomination for 2008, secretary of state, or favorite for the Democratic nomination for 2016.  The basic reason is that she has never shown the capacity to handle such important jobs, so she never would have been handed them if her husband hadn’t been able to call in favors from his time as president.  As first lady, her inept leadership scuttled serious healthcare reform in the 1990s; as senator, she was prominent in approving the Iraq war; as front runner for 2008, she managed to squander a sizable initial advantage over Obama; and as secretary of state, her department ignored clear warning signs that led to the death of America’s Libyan ambassador,

One of the reasons that the British monarchy transformed into a constitutional monarchy is that managing a state became more and more challenging.   The son of an able ruler was not necessarily one himself.  In time, it became clear that you needed an executive that met a certain standard of competence.

Replacing a ruler with his wife is one of the oldest forms of political organization, so a President Hillary Clinton would be a throwback, not an earth-shattering novelty.  The only unusual aspect of it is that Hillary’s husband is still alive, although because of the two term limit, his candidacy would be unconstitutional.

Some observers may imagine that a Hillary presidency would be a back-door third term for Bill Clinton.  However, Bill Clinton hasn’t been able to improve his wife’s performances in her other jobs since he left office, so I don’t see that changing if she becomes president.