The barbarous Continent
The notion of Continental Europe as the home and heart of "enlightenment" is a conceit of the Left and a fantasy; it's in the English-speaking world where is found stability and decency and rule of law and inalienable rights, to a fault. In Continental Europe as I write this there is a good old-fashioned shooting war over borders, there was genocide as recently as the 1990s, and societies as far westward as Germany and as recently as the '80s were totalitarian, not to mention that Iberian fascism survived into the '70s, and to say nothing of the culling and extinguishing of European Jewry within the lifetimes of my parents, with the cooperation and collaboration of civilians in Germany and across occupied Europe, and with pan-European auxiliaries filling out the Nazi armies, and with three-fifths of France capitulating to Hitler voluntarily. Europe is not one generation removed from genocide, and is even now yawning at the dawn of a new age of violent territorial struggle, so if for instance the Muslims of France and Europe imagine themselves to be secure or their supply of supplemental Muslim immigrants to be assured, they have no grounds for it in the histories of their hosts.
The notion of Continental Europe as the home and heart of "enlightenment" is a conceit of the Left and a fantasy; it's in the English-speaking world where is found stability and decency and rule of law and inalienable rights, to a fault. In Continental Europe as I write this there is a good old-fashioned shooting war over borders, there was genocide as recently as the 1990s, and societies as far westward as Germany and as recently as the '80s were totalitarian, not to mention that Iberian fascism survived into the '70s, and to say nothing of the culling and extinguishing of European Jewry within the lifetimes of my parents, with the cooperation and collaboration of civilians in Germany and across occupied Europe, and with pan-European auxiliaries filling out the Nazi armies, and with three-fifths of France capitulating to Hitler voluntarily. Europe is not one generation removed from genocide, and is even now yawning at the dawn of a new age of violent territorial struggle, so if for instance the Muslims of France and Europe imagine themselves to be secure or their supply of supplemental Muslim immigrants to be assured, they have no grounds for it in the histories of their hosts.
The suicide-pact Left
Leftism in this 21st Century amounts to a sort-of civilizational suicide pact, to wit: the impulse to kill the goose that laid the golden egg, to starve and beat and damn the producers; the demands for wave on swamping wave of immigration, of only those most alien outsiders, or better yet the most hostile; the incapacity for taking our side in a war, damning as wickedness any measure for the national defense much less the national interest, with the attendant apologizing for the enemy; the apologizing also for convicts, casting as victims the victimizers and demanding their turning out of the prisons and onto the streets; the affirmative celebration of abortion and euthanasia and homosexuality; the denial not of religion so much as of Christianity, and persecution of its true believers; and the damning of any impulse to nationalism or patriotism, and equally an unthinking glorying in all things exotic, for the reason of their exoticism. One could go on, but QED. The Left anymore are Frankfurt Schoolers to a man, wittingly and otherwise, their cause is contempt and disdain, and their purpose to tear it down, blow it up, and watch it burn.
Mission accomplished and the tide of war
There was a time when it was great sport for the Left and the Democrat Party to observe that President Bush had stood before a banner reading "Mission Accomplished", that banner having to do with the Iraq War and the occasion being the toppling by American and allied forces of the Saddam Hussein regime in spring '03. Those Democrats and leftists were of course making hay, but they were unjust inasmuch as the "mission" in question had well and truly been "accomplished": Bush had ordered the deposition of the Hussein regime, and a matter of weeks thereafter that order had been executed to completion.
Obviously the reconstruction and democratization turned out to be long and costly and bloody, but the rest of that story is that after the "light footprint" policy was demonstrated in '06 finally to have failed, Bush remade it utterly, ordering the surge policy in January '07, that policy going into effect fully in middle June of that year and turning the war decisively as of early August. I.e., the failed Bush policy was recognized as a failure by Bush himself, whereupon he set to putting it right, and half a year after his order and a month and a half after its execution, he had effectively won the war. Or rather, Bush had won the war for some years before Obama junked the victory, cavalierly and indulgently, nullifying the sacrifice, forfeiting to ISIS and Iran what that sacrifice had won, and condemning the Iraqi people again to war and brutality and tyranny, all for nothing greater than the ideology and partisanship and vanity of Barack Obama.
The "Mission Accomplished" banner on that aircraft carrier in spring '03 was conceived by the Left and the Democrat Party as some world-historic folly on Bush's part, never mind that the "mission" in question was about as "accomplished" as any ever is, or that the unaccomplished, secondary mission also was effectively accomplished in summer '07. But for presidential pronouncements on war, there can be no folly to excel Obama's "The tide of war is receding".
Obama was precisely and catastrophically wrong in the assessment and in the thinking behind it, which guided his foreign and defense policies and determined that his "tide of war" would crash over the greater Middle East, harder and farther than we warmongering types dreamt possible. To take for a case-study just one of those enemies who want us all dead and burning in hell, ISIS presently occupies a great swath of Iraq and Syria, and operates in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Jordan, and Lebanon. And ISIS was undreamt of until this Age of Obama. The monumental irony is that the "tide of war" had turned, before Obama and despite him, and it was Obama who brought it crashing back.
Aryanism for Chinamen
The 2012 Chinese film with the nondescript and cliched title of The Assassins purports to tell some history circa 200 BC, and looks to be official, not to say any major motion picture could be released in China if it ran afoul of the Politburo in Beijing. It's a cliche of the Asian history picture, with the mass choreography and the comicbook combat and the fantastical "Forbidden City" sets and costumery. But then, the Chinese never were accused of restlessly reinventing and reimagining, and they're nothing if not slaves to uniformity and conformity. What rates notice is that the movie makes out from the outset that China was the summit of the world even as of 200 BC, and sacrifices historical authenticity for grandeur, so that anyone might be forgiven for concluding its purpose is not to tell history as it was, so much as to promulgate a mythology of Chinese greatness and superiority.
The Assassins mostly duplicates that fantastical-martial-arts-and-fantastical-Forbidden-City formula that no-one outside the hermetic seal of Chinese Communism could mistake for a representation of reality, not even those Westerners in thrall to Orientalism or the ones of our number who appreciate the genre for the preposterous fantasy that it is. It's the domestic audience that's cause for fretting: this is Aryanism for Chinamen, the sort of national mythology invoked to enact the wickedest atrocities in the world. Only a truly and deeply Christian nation can bear mythology like that, direct it to noble ends, and China like Germany is elementally pagan.
And while I'm at it, my summary review of the 2012 Anglo-Canadian-German miniseries World Without End, derived from the novel by Ken Follett: Crap dialogue, politics and preoccupations of a 21st C elite presented as 14th C history, contemporary conventions and cliches only incidentally set in the Middle Ages, unworthy and unwatchable. Magnificent title, though.
