This morning, I got the very sad news that my friend William F. Buckley Jr died earlier today. He was 82. I cannot say that the news was entirely unexpected–Bill had been seriously ill for months–but it was nevertheless shocking. I am one of a host of Bill’s friends who contributed a few words about him to NRO. I’d like also to share the some portions of the review I wrote of his “literary autobiography,” Miles Gone By, partly because it allows me to speak about him in the present tense:

“My God, he does everything,” my friend said. “Skis, plays the harpsichord, sails across the Pacific, writes novels . . .” I was chatting with one of the foremost jurists of our age, a man who is himself hardly innocent of superlative achievement. But when William F. Buckley, Jr.’s, new omnibus came up in conversation, my friend declared himself disgusted at the spectacle of so much energy and accomplishment.

By “disgusted” he of course meant “awed,” and I knew what he meant. The skiing, the harpsichord, the sailing, etc., are mere avocations. The main events are National Review, Firing Line, a syndicated column, and four-plus decades on the lecture circuit (seventy engagements a year: ponder that). How does he do it?

Miles Gone By is subtitled “A Literary Autobiography.” It isn’t really an autobiography, if for no other reason than that Mr. Buckley is much too interested in the world around him to dwell on himself. In an amusing piece about managing the tedium of social life (itself worth the price of the volume), he recalls the French political philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenal telling him that “every subject in the whole world is more interesting than oneself.” This was, Mr. Buckley winks, “some years before writing his autobiography.”

Miles Gone By is as near as Mr. Buckley will ever come writing an autobiography. He plays some part in all of the dozens of pieces he has collected here, but usually as a foil for the exhibition of another personality, event, or idea. In this sense, Miles Gone By is less autobiography than heterobiography: the gaze is cast firmly outwards, not inward. The model is not Augustine or even Montaigne; it certainly is not (thank God) Rousseau. What we have here is a chronicle of things done, not passions suffered, of people met, not feelings scrutinized, of issues debated, not emotions spent. That is doubtless one reason the book is such fun to read: it has the velocity and freshness of piqued curiosity–I almost said of a well-made martini.

Every life can be characterized by one or two governing attitudes. Perhaps the word that best characterizes Mr. Buckley is “relish.” The depth and variousness of this book reflect the depth and variousness of his pleasures. It is a cheerful book, a convivial book, somehow a youthful book, though Mr. Buckley himself is no youngster. Just about everything in it has appeared before, but by some synergistic literary alchemy, the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

Mr. Buckley opens the book with a few pieces about his family (he was in the middle of ten children), growing up in Sharon, Connecticut, going off to boarding school in England. He includes moving memorials to his mother and father. I wish I had known his father. Not only did he amass an impressive wine cellar–the list of clarets reproduced in the book is an invitation to envy–but he also had the right attitude about the Internal Revenue Service. Contemplating the irremediably acquisitive disposition of that organization–in particular, their proprietary interest in one’s estate–he cleverly managed to distribute to his children the vast majority of his goods and chattels before his death. So successful was he that when his will was probated, the children each got a check for $44. Not bad for a man who had made a respectable pile in the oil business. (Alas, no one can think of everything: a few month’s later an IRS agent appeared and exhibited an unhealthy interest in that wine cellar the deceased had spent many years populating.)

Miles Gone By collects pieces about Mr. Buckley’s passions (wine, music, sailing, skiing), the personalities he has encountered (he seems to know everyone who is anyone), and some of the positions he has defended. The longest piece in the book is his introduction to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of God and Man at Yale. Published in 1951, the book catapulted its twenty-four-year-old author to an atmosphere of hostile notoriety from which he never completely descended.

It is difficult at this distance to recreate the stir–no, the tornado–that book made. Remember the apoplexy that The Closing of the American Mind occasioned in the mid-1980s? My how the left-wing academic established loved (and continues to love) to hate that book! Double that enmity, treble it: that was the reception which greeted God and Man at Yale. Mr. Buckley’s opening credo that “the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world” was simply not to be borne. His codicil–”I further believe that the struggle between individualism [i.e., conservatism] and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level”–transformed disbelief into rage. The liberal establishment, Dwight Macdonald observed at the time, “reacted with all of the grace and agility of an elephant cornered by a mouse.” McGeorge Bundy pronounced anathema upon the book in The Atlantic Monthly. The well known Yale philosopher T. M. Greene deployed the word “fascist” three times in as many sentences. “What more,” Professor Greene asked, “could Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin ask for?” Well, as Mr. Buckley observes, “they asked for, and got, a great deal more.”

In retrospect, the reaction to Gamay (as the book was nicknamed by the publisher) is party amusing, partly frightening. The amusing part arises from the elephant-cornered-by-mouse aspect Dwight Macdonald mentioned. The frightening part comes when you realize how contemporary Mr. Buckley’s travails seem. Professor Greene went on to pontificate that

What is required is more not less tolerance–not the tolerance of indifference, but the tolerance of honest respect for divergent convictions and the determination of all that such divergent opinions be heard without administrative censorship. I try my best in the classroom to expound and defend my faith, when it is relevant, as honestly and persuasively as I can. But I can do so only because many of my colleagues are expounding and defending their contrasting faiths, or skepticism, as openly and honestly as I am mine.

Sound familiar? But this, Mr. Buckley rightly notes, is “ne plus ultra relativism, idiot nihilism.” No ethical code requires “honest respect” for any divergent opinion. “Complete moral tolerance,” James Fitzjames Stephen noted in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873), “is possible only when men have become completely indifferent to each other–that is to say, when society is at an end.” Besides, Professor Greene’s aria about tolerance would have been sweeter–or at least ostensibly more plausible–had he deigned to practice what he preached. “An honest respect by him for my divergent conviction,” Mr. Buckley writes, “would have been an arresting application at once of his theoretical and his charitable convictions.”

The nerve that Mr. Buckley struck with Gamay is still smarting; indeed, it is throbbing uncontrollably, as anyone who has contemplated the discrepancy between proclamations of “diversity” on campuses and the practice of enforcing a politically correct orthodoxy on any contentious subject. There is plenty of room for diversity, so long as you embrace the left-liberal dogma. Diverge from that dogma and you will find that the rhetoric of diversity has been replaced by talk of “prejudice,” “hate speech,” and the entire lexicon of liberal denunciation.

God and Man at Yale is full of observations that are at least as pertinent today as they were when penned fifty-odd years ago. Consider the issue of academic freedom. How much irresponsible politicking and smug posturing has been protected by the misuse of that privilege! As Mr. Buckley saw in the early 1950s, the phrase “academic freedom” is often little more than “a handy slogan that is constantly wielded to bludgeon into impotence numberless citizens who waste away with frustration as they view in their children and their children’s children the results of laissez-faire education.”

Mr. Buckley is especially good at exposing certain strategies of rhetorical (or perhaps I mean “moral”) evasion–for example, “the technique of associating oneself for institutional convenience with a general position but disparaging it wherever it is engaged in wars or skirmishes along its frontiers.” For example, Mr. Buckley was sharply upbraided for describing a certain economics professor as “collectivist” when the man himself had professed his belief in individual initiative, the free market, etc. Er, yes, but said professor also went on to advocate “diminishing the inequality of income and wealth,” to which end he proposed a tax of 75 to 99 percent on incomes over $100,000, confiscatory taxes on inheritance “aimed at the goal of ending transmissions of hereditary fortunes,” government-subsidized family allowances, a government-guarantee of full employment, and . . . Well, you get the picture. If you do not find those proposals breathtakingly collectivist, you need to see a doctor.

Mr. Buckley’s reflections on the reception of God and Man at Yale are probably the intellectual high point of Miles Gone By. The aesthetic peaks are distributed much more widely. Most of the book is given over to 1) the people Mr. Buckley has known socially or professionally and 2) scenes from his vocation and avocations.

One of the nice things about being conservative is that you run into many exotic human specimens. Unburdened by the ideology of “diversity,” conservatives tend to cultivate genuine diversity in their interests and acquaintances. I wish I had known many of the people Mr. Buckley recalls in this book–not just the celebrities: Clare Booth Luce, Roanld Reagan, David Niven, Alistair Cooke, Whittaker Chambers, Vladimir Horowtiz, et al. Sure, it would have been amusing to meet them, but how about characters like Wilmoore Kendall, a thorn in the side of the Yale administration for many years until he offered to let them by out his tenure contract for $40,000 (money ain’t what it used to be)? Kendall had been a teacher of Mr. Buckley’s at Yale and an important figure in the early years of National Review. At one editorial meeting of NR, Kendall announced that he had no objection to a proposed course of action, “provided that we would agree to change the denomination of National Review on the cover from “A Weekly Journal of Opinion” to “A Journal of Jacobinical Thought.”

Or how about Frank Meyer, another early NR stalwart? During his last illness, Meyer converted to Catholicism. But it was a struggle. Mr. Buckley reports that Meyer, from his bed of woe, complaining that “the only remaining intellectual obstacle to his conversion was the collectivist implication lurking in the formulation ‘the communion of saints’ in the Apostles’ Creed.” Then there is James Burnham, the political philosopher Mr. Buckley describes as “the dominant intellectual influence” on National Review. I have read a fair amount of Burnham’s work, and I believe he is one of the most under-rated political thinkers of the last century. It is a pity we have no one of his perspicacity with us today: a man of his insight would come in handy in our present muddles.

One piece that I missed in Miles Gone By was Mr. Buckley’s long evisceration of that malevolent fantasist, Gore Vidal, which appeared in the late 1960s in (I believe) Harper’s. It’s a perfect illustration of Hazlitt’s observation that “Those who lack delicacy hold us in their power.” Still, I understand why he decided against including it: it is about a supremely distasteful figure, and the caustic tone is at odds with this book’s dominant music which is by turns celebratory and elegiac. Sailers will be particularly moved by the several excerpts from Mr. Buckley’s adventures at sea. No one writes about sailing with his combination of brio and technical mastery. The most recent piece in Miles Gone By is “Aweigh,” which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly this summer. It recounts Mr. Buckley’s recent decision to sell his boat Patito. It is edged with quiet melancholy, that story, as farewells are wont to be. But I feel sure that in selling Patito Mr. Buckley, far from giving up the boat, was confirming his status as admiral emeritus in perpetuity.

At the end of his long and characteristically brilliant meditation on the importance of intellectual backbone in discussing the future of Islam in the West, Peter Collier has some wise words about the metabolism of appeasement:

Two decades ago, when a similar writ threatened Salman Rushdie, these same intellectuals instinctively and unambiguously rallied to his cause. What accounts for their failure of nerve? Two things, according to Berman: the rise of Islamism in the years since the Rushdie fatwa, and the spread of terrorism. But there is plainly a third reason: the neocons and their war.

Neither Buruma nor Garton Ash have programmatically replied to Berman’s New Republic piece [on Tariq Ramadan]. But Buruma did use the occasion of his review of Norman Podhoretz’s World War IV (which he ravages, needless to say) in the New York Review of Books to take a carom shot at Berman, describing him as “a tub thumper for Bush’s war.” Worse yet, he is one of those “neo leftists” who secretly share the judgments of people like Podhoretz and by so doing, promote neoconservatisim by other means, thereby “betraying the liberal principles they claim to be defending.”

For Buruma, the war in Iraq is the solvent that dissolves all fine distinctions. “I see no difference between the neo cons and the neo left,” he writes. And while he’s at it, he has one more go at [Ayaan] Hirsi Ali: “The problem with neo cons and neo leftists is that any disagreement with their idol is taken to be a hostile attack . . .” In other words, the problem with the Somali dissident all along was not so much what she had said or done, but rather the uses of what she had said or done—namely, granting aid and comfort to conservatives and to their malign project in Iraq and the Middle East generally.

While bashing Podhoretz and nicking Berman, Buruma says once again that we don’t face a juggernaut of “Islamo Fascism” but something like a loose conspiracy of jihadist affinity groups. Thus, “To assume that we are reliving 1938 and to put our trust in military invasion as the best way to defend ourselves is a dangerous form of hysteria.”

Buruma may be right, yet it is fitting that 1938 and Munich and appeasement should appear again at the end of this debate since they have been present, in the background, since the beginning. In Pascal Bruckner’s original criticism of Buruma and Garton Ash, the one thing he said that truly jangled a nerve was that in their willingness to placate Europe’s Muslim minority, as in their scourging of Hirsi Ali, the duo had failed to exhibit much in the way of courage. The word “courage,” like the term “Islamofascism,” set Buruma off. He shot back at Bruckner (and Berman, too, was struck by this), asking where have we heard such talk before: “The need to defend Europe against alien threats; the fatigued, self-doubting, weak-kneed intellectuals . . .”

The allusion, of course, was to the intellectuals who became excited by the rise of fascism in the 1930s and made themselves its fellow travelers and outriders. But it was possible to hear in Buruma’s words a parallel echo from that time—this one coming from a different part of the intellectual class that reacted to the threat of their lifetime by blinking: how, as part of their failure of nerve, they derided the indiscreet candor of those who raised warning flags; and how the peace they thought they had secured in their own time turned out to be anything but.

The “low dishonest decade” of the 1930s certainly provided an object lesson in the dangers of appeasement. It is worth noting, then, that appeasement can be a usefyl tool of diplomacy. As Donald Kagan noted in his book On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace, “Appeasement is a perfectly respectable and often useful instrument of policy. It can be effective when applied from a position of strength, when it is a freely taken action meant to allay a grievance and create good will. It is an unsatisfactory and dangerous device when it is resorted to out of fear and necessity, for then it does not reduce resentment but shows weakness and induces contempt.”

Unfortunately, as the 1930s wore on the policy of appeasement was applied from a position of cravenness, not strength. And here the British, epitomized in the person of the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, must bear the lion’s share of the blame. Not that Chamberlain was an evil man. There is good reason to think that he was motivated by the highest ideals. And it is worth remembering, too, that the hero of the moment, Winston Churchill, had once expressed admiration for Mussolini and even–albeit very briefly–Hitler. He had also presided over extensive military cuts in the 1920s. But Churchill had two things Chamberlain lacked: wit and gumption. He had the wit to understand the nature of the Nazi threat when it showed itself and the gumption to oppose it tooth and claw. It is said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Chamberlain was overflowing with good intentions. Perhaps his chief defect was the incapacity to recognize evil as such. He was a reasonable man, a humane man; he expected other men to be reasonable and humane as well. Chamberlain, Kagan writes, “regarded Hitler and Mussolini as rational men like himself with limited goals who could be dealt with by flexibility and reasoned discussion, and he was eager to get on with it. He did not permit himself to consider the possibility that their demands might be unacceptable or even unlimited.” But of course it was precisely Hitler’s strategy–not to say his character–to demand more and more and more. As he put it to one of his ministers in 1938, “we must always demand so much that we cannot be satisfied.”

The uncanny echo you hear is the reprise of the 1930s ricocheting off the smug columns of The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and other organs of establishment opinion. The question remains whether we have sufficient Churchillian foresight to supply this revival with a happier storyline.

When the Archbishop of Canterbury assured everyone a week or two ago that that the establishment of sharia law in Britian was “unavoidable,” there were howls of protest (there was also a standing ovation for the Primate of All England in the General Synod, but that, after all, was the Church of England bleating). But why the howls? After all, it was only a day or two later that it was announced that the British government planned to issue “sharia compliant” Islamic bonds “to pay for Gordon Brown’s public-spending programme by raising money from the Middle East.” “The scheme,” a story in the Mail on Sunday reported, would “mark one of the most significant economic advances of sharia law in the non-Muslim world. It will lead to the ownership of Government buildings and other assets currently belonging to British taxpayers being switched wholesale to wealthy Middle-Eastern businessmen and banks.” Well, nobody really liked those buildings anyway.

Over at NRO, Andrew McCarthy has some breaking news from the London Times on another front in the progress of soft jihad. “Knorbert the piglet,” The Times reports, “has been dropped as the mascot of Fortis Bank after it decided to stop giving piggy banks to children for fear of offending Muslims.”

That’s the new mantra, you know: “for fear of offending Muslims.” We don’t give away piggy banks (to say nothing of other “pig related items”) “for fear of offending Muslims.” We don’t draw cartoons of Mohammad “for fear of offending Muslims.” We mustn’t publish articles pointing out the demographic disparity between the Muslims of Canada and Europe and other parts of the population “for fear of offending Muslims.” We mustn’t even publish books saying critical things about “Saudis and terrorists” “for fear of offending Muslims.”

It’s all part of the campaign of soft jihad. Traditional jihad is waged with scimitars and their contemporary equivalents, e.g., stolen Boeing 767s, which make handy instruments of mass homicide. Soft jihad is a quieter affair: it uses and abuses the language and the principles of democratic liberalism not to secure the institutions and attitudes that make freedom possible but, on the contrary, to undermine that freedom and pave the way for self-righteous, theocratic intolerance. Soft jihad is patient. It can add and multiply as well as Mark Steyn can (and here). It, too, sees the demographic writing on the wall and is content to wait a few years to occupy the West’s real estate–it’s so much easier, when you come right down to it, than blowing the stuff up and then finding yourself with a massive clean-up and rebuilding bill. Just sit tight and watch the infidels tie themselves into knots making excuses for you while, elsewhere in their lives, they embrace barrenness as an “environmentally friendly” alternative to Genesis 1:28.

Speaking as a right-wing, knuckle-dragging Eurocentric infidel, however, I feel it incumbent on me to point out that where traditional jihad is probably best dealt with by talented chaps like General Petraeus, soft jihad might often be more effectively countered by quieter crusades. Clever readers will doubtless have many fertile ideas to contribute to the fulfillment of what I hope will become the West’s new Quiet Crusade to make the World Safe for Christendom (remember that?). Here’s a modest proposal to get the ball rolling. It was suggested to me by another story from the London Times today. Under a headline shouting “Muslims shocked to learn that crisps contain alcohol” is the illuminating news that that Walkers snacks “contain traces of alcohol” and that eating them is therefore prohibited by Islam.

Shuja Shafi, who chairs the food standards committee of the Muslim Council of Britain, said that he intended to investigate. “Certainly we would find it very offensive to have eaten food with alcohol.”

Is that so? Well, here’s my modest proposal, which I offer to British Food and Beverage industry free and for nothing: start putting a bit of alcohol in everything edible or potable. There are, of course, other reasons for wishing to increase one’s usual consumption of alcohol, but here is a patriotic imperative to guide you: what if you went into Harrod’s food hall or your local grocery shop and every item had at least some trace amount of alcohol (or, alternatively, pork residue)? I understand that there might be certain logistical difficulties, but if the EU can effectively police the system of mensuration used in its jurisdiction, if it can prohibit certain types of bananas because they deviate too markedly from the perpendicular, then surely they can employ the vast apparatus of their bureaucracy to assure that a drop of alcohol or a dollop of bacon fat is added to any food stuff sold in Britain.

It’s only a start, I realize, but from a tiny acorn the might oak does grow.

Update: A kind reader notes that Harrod’s is owned by “a Mohammedan.” Yes, yes, it is owned by Mohamed al-Fayed, father of Dodi, the (last) boyfriend of Diana, Princess of Wales, the royal adulteress, aficionado of high colonics, and friend of Sir Elton John. I singled out Harrod’s for that very reason! Even that august establishment, you see, would be subject to my tincture of alcohol, smidgeon of bacon fat rule, just as it is now subject (e.g.) to the no curved bananas rule and other laws of the land.

In “Portrait of an Age,” G. M. Young’s classic overview of early Victorian England, there are a few melancholy pages devoted to the devastating Irish potato famine of the mid 1840s. Young notes in an aside that Sir Robert Peel, the Prime Minister, followed polite opinion in referring to the disappointing tuber as “That Root” instead calling it by its common name. “[I]n all the prayers offered up for our Irish brethern,” Young observes, “potatoes were never mentioned.”

Young describes this policy of politesse as “characteristic of Early Victorian manners,” and perhaps it was. It is also characteristic of a certain perennial timidity that refuses to call untoward realities by their correct names. Consider the opening of this story from Reuters about the latest rash of rioting in Copenhagen:

Danish youths riot for sixth night [Update: make that the seventh straight night]

Gangs of rioters set fire to cars and garbage trucks in northern Copenhagen on Friday, the sixth night of rioting and vandalism that has spread from the capital to other Danish cities, police said on Saturday.

Five youths were arrested in the capital on Friday after 28 cars and 35 garbage trucks were burned, Copenhagen police duty officer Jakob Kristensen told Reuters.

Danish media said arrests in other towns brought to 29 the number of people police were holding.

Scores of cars and several schools have been vandalized or burned in the past week. Police could give no reason, but said that unusually mild weather and the closure of schools for a winter break might have contributed.

That odd odor you smell is the aroma of politically correct mendacity wafting through the hallway. Danish youths torching cars for six nights running because spring is coming? What’s wrong with this carcass? You can’t tell from the first four paragraphs, but the cat peeks out of the Burka in the paragraphs that follow.

Police arrested two Tunisians and a Dane of Moroccan descent on Tuesday . . .

“Ah Ha!,” you say, “that sort of ‘youth’ is out there with the gasoline and lighted matches.”

Exactly.

And why were the “two Tunisians and a Dane of Moroccan descent” arrested? Why, “for planning to kill a cartoonist who drew one of the cartoons printed in a Danish newspaper two years ago that roused a storm of protest in Muslim countries.”

You remember the Danish cartoon contretemps: that was when (it was one time when) some adherents of the Religion of Peace went postal and started baying for blood, organizing boycots, setting fire to various Danish embassies around the world.

The Reuters story goes on to note that 15 Danish papers reprinted the drawing by the poor bastard of a cartoonist who is now shuttling from safe house to safe house to escape the Wrath of Khan. “Several hundred Muslims gathered in central Copenhagen on Friday to protest against publication of the cartoon. Most Muslims consider depictions of the founder of Islam offensive.”

Two points: 1. Where is the connection between the “youths” of the opening paragraphs and the “several hundred Muslims” who gathered to protest that slip into the story at the end? Why does Reuters take advantage of the Peel option, referring to “youths” (”That Root”) instead of “Muslim youths” (the “plain potato”)? It’s not “manners,” as Young suggested was the motivation for Sir Robert, but a desire to avoid reality, aka cravenness. Reuters, remember, was the news service that, following the bombings of September 11, cashiered the word “terrorist” because, Steven Jukes, Reuter’s global head of news, wrote “We all know that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” Do we really?

2. One thing we all do know is that Muslims are “offended” by depictions of the Muhammad. In fact, the list of the things Muslims are offended by would take over a culture. They don’t like ice-cream that (used to be) distributed by Burger King because a decoration on the lid looked like (sort of) the Arabic script for “Allah.” They are offended by “pig-related items, including toys, porcelain figures, calendars and even a tissue box featuring Winnie the Pooh and Piglet” appearing in the workplace. They take umbrage at describing Islamic terrorism as, well, Islamic terrorism and have managed to persuade Gordon Brown to rename it “anti-Islamic activity.” But here’s the thing: one of the features of living in a modern, secular democracy is that there is always plenty of offense to go around. No Muslim is more offended by cartoons of their Prophet than I am by their barbaric reaction to the cartoons. But their reaction when offended is to torch an embassy, shoot a nun , or knife a filmmaker. I write a column deploring such behavior. You see the difference.

Final moronic comment from Reuters: “Social workers said the arrests, the reprinting of the cartoon and protests against its appearance might have fuelled the riots.” You don’t say? How many social workers did it take to figure that out?

Fortunately, organizations like Reuters do not–not yet, anyway–have a monopoly on the news. For them, “youths” are rampaging in Denmark because, after all, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. Thank God, then, for outlets like GatewayPundit, which has the wit to publish accurate headlines: RIOTS IN DENMARK! Muslim Youths Go On Torching Rampage. I think of intrepid Cecily Cardew, who in The Importance of Being Earnest has this illuminating exchange with her rival Gwendolen Fairfax:

Cecily. Do you suggest, Miss Fairfax, that I entrapped Ernest into an engagement? How dare you? This is no time for wearing the shallow mask of manners. When I see a spade I call it a spade.

Gwendolen. [Satirically.] I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different.

What would it take to convince the Steven Jukeses of the world that they had actually seen a spade?

In my post yesterday about the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s cringe-making “apology” to the Aborigines for the sins of his fathers, I mentioned Keith Windschuttle’s excellent book The Fabrication of Australian History. What I did not know was that volume two of Mr. Windschuttle’s work will be out shortly from Macleay Press. At the center of this volume of his ambitious panopticon of the history of Down Under is the “Stolen Generations” controversy that precipitated, or at least provided the pretext for, Prime Minister Rudd’s exercise in politically correct contrition: the idea that “tens of thousands” (as The New York Times moronically reported a few days ago ) of Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their families in an effort of social engineering that amounted to “genocide.”

Contrition is politically correct when 1) it is expressed about a matter that has been officially enrolled in the Index of Approved Grievances, so there is no chance of lamenting something not politically advantageous and when 2) it costs the person making the apology nothing. For example, apologizing for the white man’s nastiness to the American Indians is an OK subject for apology, but don’t bother looking for an American Indian apology for the way it treated other Indians, to say nothing of the Europeans, they captured in their endless wars. As for the matter of cost, or lack thereof: that is why legislators are so good at uttering such apologies. The only money they spend is your money: so as far as they are concerned the contrition is free.

The founding document of the myth of the Stolen Generations was a 1997 government report called “Bringing Them Home.” The logic of the report is impeccable: the story it tells is indeed the story of an attempted genocide, i.e., the effort to eradicate a distinctive race and culture. Fortunately, as Mr. Windschuttle shows, the story is not true. “The problem with the Bringing Them Home report,” he wrote a few days ago in The Australian, “is not its logic but its facts.

As regards NSW [New South Wales], the story of the Stolen Generations was largely formed in 1981 by the historian Peter Read, then of the Australian National University (now at the University of Sydney). Read’s work had an enormous influence on Aboriginal communities by saying institutionalised children had not been failed by alcoholic parents who neglected to provide them with food and shelter.

It was all the work of the white man, of faceless white bureaucrats who wanted to eliminate the Aborigines. Bringing Them Home did no original research of its own in NSW. Instead, it relied upon Read’s writings. It quoted verbatim his claim that the files on individual children removed by the Aborigines Protection Board confirmed his case: “Some managers cut a long story short when they came to that part of the committal notice ‘Reason for board taking control of the child’. They simply wrote ‘for being Aboriginal’.”

If it’s pretended this was commonplace, however, it is a serious misrepresentation. In a debate with Read last year at the History Teachers Association’s annual conference, I asked him how many files bore those words. He confessed to the audience there were only two. When I investigated the same batch of 800 files in the NSW archives, I found there was only one. Its words were “Being an Aboriginal”. There were two others with the single word “Aboriginal”.

I also found that, although popular songs and the Bringing Them Home report gave the distinct impression that most children were removed when they were babies or toddlers, there were hardly any in this category. The archive files on which Read relied show that between 1907 and 1932, the NSW authorities removed only seven babies aged less than 12 months, and another 18 aged less than two years. Fewer than one-third of the children removed in this period were aged less than 12 years. Almost all were welfare cases, orphans, neglected children (some severely malnourished), and children who were abandoned, deserted and homeless.

The other two-thirds were teenagers, 13 to 17 years old. The reason they were removed was to send them off to be employed as apprentices. In reality, the NSW Labor governments were not stealing children but offering youths the opportunity to get on-the-job training, just like their white peers in the same age groups.

Rather a different picture, eh?

In any event, Mr. Windschuttle makes an important moral point in his essay. Namely, that the enormity for which Prime Minister Rudd apologized is so serious that an apology that is unaccompanied by compensation is not only meaningless: it is also a further insult–could it possibly be a Hate Crime?–to the people it pretends to seek forgiveness from. There are, Mr. Windschuttle estimates, approximately 500,000 Aborigines in Australia today, living in about 100,000 families. Any meaningful apology, he suggests, should be accompanied by a lump sum payment of $500,000 per family. And where should that $50 million come from? Why, from those whose hearts are lacerated by the wrongs enumerated in the Bringing Them Home report, i.e., politicians like Kevin Rudd and politically correct historians like Peter Read and Robert Manne who specializing in purveying the satisfactions of guilt without the tithe of penance. If they really believe the fabricated “history” put forth by their revisionist narrative, they should be lining up to pay compensation to the people they have nominated for victimhood. The unsurprising fact, of course, is that in front of the sign reading “The queue forms here” you’ll find nary a soul waiting to make his contribution.

Australia’s recent decision to apologize to the Aborigines–it was, said The New York Times, “a comprehensive and moving apology for past wrongs”–was front-page news. But why? Kevin Rudd, Australia’s new Prime Minsiter, said his country would act “to remove a great stain from the nation’s soul.” But what, precisely, had Australia done to the Aborigines? Well, everything. Australia is run by white folks now, isn’t it? And then there is the issue of attempting to improve the lot of Aborigines by encouraging assimilation. This was the so-called “Stolen Generations” controversy. The Times says “tens of thousands” of children were removed, “sometimes forcibly,” from their families and resettled. I’d like to second the historian Andrew Bolt’s challenge to produce a list of even ten names of children who were resettled by Australian authorities. It’s not that I doubt some children were removed from their families–e.g., a 13-year-old called Dolly, who was taken into the care of the State after being “found seven months pregnant and penniless, working for nothing on a station.”

But the larger question is, why is Mr. Rudd or his countrymen to blame? And what sort of expiation does he expect from his “comprehensive and moving apology”? Benjamin Disraeli is one eminent statesman credited with the advice “Never apologize, never explain.” (Sometimes emended to “Never apologize, never explain, never repeat the mistake.”) Whatever the limitations of the policy, it at least avoids the cloying, hothouse atmosphere of unremitting pseudo-contrition that oozes like a fetid gas into the crowded chambers in which liberals rub up against one another in their little orgies of self-congratulation. (”We are guilty, guilty, guilty, and therefore virtuous.”) Somehow, I cannot quite picture the stalwart John Howard, Australia’s last Prime Minister, colluding in such festivals of purgation and limitless apology.

Not, of course, that apology is ever enough. It must be accompanied by penance, i.e., the taxpayer’s–that is your–money, and gobs of it. This is the kind of sentence that The New York Times specializes in: “But for some people, Mr. Rudd’s apology will not have gone far enough because he has ruled out setting up a government fund to compensate the victims of the policies that led to the Stolen Generations.”

A few years ago, the Australian historian Keith Windschuttle published a book called The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. The burden of this excellent work (reviewed here in The New Criterion by the eminent historian Geoffrey Blainey) is to show that the received wisdom about the founding of Australia–that it involved the European genocide of the native Aboriginal population–is a myth. Europeans did kill some Aborigines–some 120 Tasmanian Aborigines, for example. But then, the natives killed a like number of Europeans. So it goes.

Mr. Windschuttle’s book is a work of meticulous scholarship that patiently sifts through the historical record to show exactly how the myth got started, how it was perpetuated, and how an entire academic industry grew up to nurture and propagate a false view of the Australian founding. You might think that a man who had discharged this service to the truth and brought his fellow Australians the good news that their country was not, as they had always been told, founded on genocide would be greeted as a hero. Fat chance. Instead, Mr. Windschuttle was greeted by howls of rage and a cataract of calumny by academics who couldn’t bear the thought that their ancestors weren’t the guilty imperialists and racists they’d always assumed they were. The reaction to The Fabrication of Aboriginal History was as predicable as it was inadvertently amusing. (See John Dawson’s rave review in Washout: On the academic response to the fabrication of Aboriginal history.)

The interesting question is Why? Why were intellectuals so hostile to Mr. Windschuttle’s book? Why were they so wedded–irrationally wedded–to the idea that their country was founded on genocide? Why, in short, did they desperately crave that story to be true? More generally, why are intellectuals–not only Australian intellectuals–constitutionally drawn to such dismal fabrications? (Scratch an American intellectual and you’ll get a similar tale about European genocide of American Indians.)

Such questions formed the theme of Theodore Dalrymple excellent meditation on The Fabrication of Aboriginal History over at the web site New English Review. Mr. Dalrymple’s essay bears the provocative title “Why Intellectuals Like Genocide.” I won’t be giving too much away if I say that the answer–a large part of it, anyway–has to do with that unwieldy and insatiably voracious thing: intellectuals’ self-regard.

The dispute was not just a matter of the interpretation of the contents of old newspapers in Hobart libraries: it went to the very heart of the intelligentsia’s self-conception as society’s conscience and natural leaders.

A conflict over the veracity of footnotes was thus also a conflict also over the proper place of intellectuals in modern society. And Windschuttle was vastly more often right about the footnotes than he was wrong. This was quite unforgivable of him.

“Why Intellectuals Like Genocide” is a classic. Read the whole thing here.

I wonder how tickets to Al Gore’s mendacious Eco-Thriller “An Inconvenient Truth” (now available on DVD!) are selling in International Falls Minnesota? The temperature there fell to 40 below zero today, just a few days after it won a federal trademark making it officially the “Icebox of the Nation.”

Meanwhile, Northern Saudi Arabia has been “paralyzed” with snow and ice as it conjures with its coldest winter in 20 years. It will probably be difficult to get enough electricity in those snow-bound parts of Saudi Arabia to screen Mr. Gore’s movie as entertainment while the Kingdom imports some more snow plows, but over in China I’ll bet they could offer it as a distraction for the 200,000 people stranded at the Guangzhou railway station, a few of the “tens of millions” affected by the storms.

What is it about the Brits and free speech? Why do they hate it so? They didn’t used to. But nowadays their libel laws muzzle domestic criticism of radical Islam and have even sought to muzzle American authors making such criticisms. The Archbishop of Canterbury thinks that Britain needs new laws to prevent “thoughtless and cruel” speech. Really? What about people, like His Grace, who advocate (or at least acquiesce in) the institution of Sharia law in Britain? Who would like to take the measure of that species of thoughtlessness, not to mention the resulting cruelty should what the Archbishop described as “unavoidable” come to pass?

And then there is the story about prohibiting British Olympic athletes from criticizing China when they go to Beijing for the Games. “British Olympic chiefs are to force athletes to sign a contract promising not to speak out about China’s appalling human rights record – or face being banned from travelling to Beijing.” Yes, that’s right, if you are British and you want to swim or pole-vault or throw a discus in Beijing you have to leave your political conscience at the door. Belgium–that great moment to independence and freedom–has banned its athletes from expressing any political opinion about China while at the Olympic Games as has China’s future colony, New Zealand. As the Mail notes, other countries, including the United States, Canada, Finland, and Australia “have pledged that their athletes would be free to speak about any issue concerning China.”

The Chinese haven’t gone quite as far as Hitler, who inveigled the Brits into insisting that British athletes at the 1938 Olympic Games in Berlin line up and welcome their hosts with the Nazi salute.

The British team salutes, Berlin 1938

But they applauded Britain’s initial decision to muzzle its athletes. According to The Daily Mail, which reported the story, this latest effort to stifle free speech “immediately provoked a storm of protest.” Indeed, according to the London Telegraph “British Olympic officials were forced into a climbdown” on the issue:

Following protests, the association’s chief executive, Simon Clegg, claimed there had been no intention to “restrict athletes’ freedom of speech” and said the wording of the contracts would be changed.

Well, that’s nice. But the habit of pre-emptive capitulation is hard to break. Britain once was a cradle of liberty. In recent years, giving itself over increasingly to the dictates of political correctness, Britain has been more the grave than the cradle of liberty. It is a woeful spectacle, not least because freedom gained is relatively easy to maintain. Once lost, it requires the dedication of Hercules to regain.

OK, so 200 Marines stationed in Grand Rapids, Michigan, piled on to five buses and came to Toledo, Ohio, yesterday to practice some urban patrol exercises. The Toledo police knew about the request for the three-day exercise well in advance, but somehow Mayor Carty Finkbeiner didn’t see the memo requesting permission for the event. So when when the first bus arrives at 3:20 p.m. and Staff Sergeant Andre Davis steps off, he is greeted by a city employee and told that the mayor wanted him and his soldiers out of town by 6 p.m. “I wish,” Sgt Davis drily remarked, “they would have told us this four hours ago.” [Update: a reader points out that it is incorrect to refer to Marines as “soldiers”: soldiers serve in the army, not the Marines. I regret the mistake. I further regret referring to SSgt Davis incorrectly as “Sergeant”!]

Indeed.
I gather that Mayor Finkbeiner (a Democrat, readers will be surprised to learn), like the folks in Berkeley, California, can’t think of the United States Marines without having the first lines of “The Destruction of Sennacherib” float through his head (”The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold . . .”) “The mayor asked them to leave because they frighten people,” said Brian Schwartz, the mayor’s spokesman.

Gee, isn’t that a shame?

Lance Corporal Brandon Bukrey-McCarty recalled how useful such training was when he had been deployed in Fallujah in 2006-2007. The training, he said, “got me used to looking up on rooftops, looking around every alley, every open door.”

Too bad, Brandon! Carty Finkbeiner thinks having U.S. soldiers in town will frighten the voters, so your comrades will just have to do without that training.

The company’s commanding officer, Major Jeffrey O’Neill, was disappointed by Carty Finkbeiner’s cold shoulder–it would, he noted, be difficult to find a suitable alternative venue for the exercise–but “we’re Marines,” he said, “We’ll adapt and overcome.”

I have no doubt about that. I hope part of the adaptation will be to present the City of Toledo–or maybe Carty Finkbeiner himself–with the $10,000 tab that the aborted exercise cost the Marines.

Mayor Finkbeiner can boast on his official website that Tony Packos Restaurant in Toledo was “made famous on the television show M*A*S*H.” But when he has an opportunity to help the men and women who in real life protect this country, including the City of Toledo, he refuses to grant them the sort of permit he would routinely give to a bunch of anti-American activists who wanted to organize a protest march down Main Street. I think it’s disgusting. If I lived in Toledo, I’d be wondering when Carty Finkbeiner was up for re-election and would look forward to sending him out on a 6:00 p.m. bus at the earliest opportunity.

Hat tip for this item to Instapundit.

[Update: A resourceful reader suggests writing Mayor Finkbeiner to express your appreciation for his superb leadership. Good idea. Here’s the address: mayor.toledo@toledo.oh.gov]

A month or two ago I wrote piece in this space on the Archbishop of Canterbury called “Rowan Williams, public embarassment.” That reflection was occasioned by His Grace’s opinion, expressed in the course of an interview with Emel, “The Muslim Lifestyle Magazine,” that “the United States wields its power in a way that is worse than Britain during its imperial heyday.” Obviously, the Archbishop (who once described himself, correctly, as “a hairy leftie”)
meant it to sting (what could be worse for a leftie, hirsute or not, than being “imperial”?). As I pointed out, however, being compared to Imperial Britain would, by any ordinary standard of civilization and achievement, be high praise indeed. Everywhere Britain went, I noted, she “brought the rule of law, better education, better physical infrastructure, better health and hygiene, improved literacy, greater freedom, and greater civility.” Indeed, whenever anyone brings up Imperial Britain, I think of George Santayana’s observation about “The British Character” in his book Soliloquies in England, published in the early 1920s. “What governs the Englishman is his inner atmosphere,” Santayana wrote, “the weather in his soul.”

Instinctively the Englishman is no missionary, no conqueror. He prefers the country to the town, and home to foreign parts. He is rather glad and relieved if only natives will remain natives and strangers strangers, and at a comfortable distance from himself. Yet outwardly he is most hospitable and accepts almost anybody for the time being; he travels and conquers without a settled design, because he has the instinct of exploration. His adventures are all external; they change him so little that he is not afraid of them. He carries his English weather in his heart wherever he goes, and it becomes a cool spot in the desert, and a steady and sane oracle amongst all the deliriums of mankind. Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master. It will be a black day for the human race when scientific blackguards, conspirators, churls, and fanatics manage to supplant him.

Where is Santayana when you need him? What, I wonder, would he have had to say about Archbishop Williams’s declaration earlier today that the adoption of Islamic Sharia law in Britain is “unavoidable.” In a widely reported lecture on BBC radio 4 the Archbishop called for a “constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law” and said that Britons must “face up to the fact” that some of its citizens do not “relate” to the British legal system. “Constructive accommodation”: let’s see, I guess that is British English for “spineless capitulation”?

And what is all this about Muslim Brits not “relating” to the law? The rule of law is is not a lifestyle choice: it is not something you can opt out of if you happen to have alternative inclinations. “Gee, in my religion, we stone adulteresses to death, so would you mind stepping aside and handing me that pile of rocks?”

The proper answer to such gambits was formulated in the 19th century by General Charles Napier when dealing with sutte, the Indian custom of burning a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre: “You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”

Napier flourished in an age of cultural confidence. He was unassailed by the paralyzing multicultural thought that, after all, British civilization was just another civilization and that it only stood to reason that the Indians had their way of dealing with things. He knew that suttee was a disgusting, barbaric practice and he was in India to stamp out such barbarisms and bring the Indians into the modern world. Archbishop Williams seeks instead a “constructive accommodation” with practices that, if they proceed, would destroy everything he, as chief prelate of the Church of England, stands for. Public stupidity is always disagreeable to witness. Public stupidity fired by misplaced self-righteousness and underwritten by obvious cowardice is a positively emetic combination. Henry II may have erred when he raged against Thomas à Becket, Rowan Williams’s illustrious predecessor as Archbishop of Canterbury. I certainly would not wish to have the question “Who will rid us of this troublesome priest?” answered as Henry’s question was answered. But where Becket faithfully served his church and was savagely punished for it, Rowan Williams loses no opportunity to besmirch his Church and is lavishly praised for his perfidy. As I say, for the moment there is nothing at all “unavoidable” about the institution of Sharia law in Britain. All that is necessary to countermand it is a little self-assertion on the part of the British people. Surely the instinct for self-preservation has not been totally eradicated in Britain by the enervating imperatives of political correctness–do I end that sentence with a period or a question mark? It is a mark of how serious things have become that I am no longer certain. The triumph of Islam in Britain is eminently avoidable. But the triumph of civilizational Quislings like Rowan Williams might just change that.