About the dropping of the atomic bomb, and whether Japan had been about to surrender

The New Neo Posted on by

The issue was raised in a comment by “Phil D,” here.

The answer is contained in this 2005 article from the Weekly Standard. Pay particular attention to page three.

It is very detailed and cannot really be summarized here. However, the conclusion was as follows:

Finally, thanks to radio intelligence, American leaders, far from knowing that peace was at hand, understood–as one analytical piece in the “Magic” Far East Summary stated in July 1945, after a review of both the military and diplomatic intercepts–that “until the Japanese leaders realize that an invasion can not be repelled, there is little likelihood that they will accept any peace terms satisfactory to the Allies.” This cannot be improved upon as a succinct and accurate summary of the military and diplomatic realities of the summer of 1945.

Lee Harris, prognosticator

The New Neo Posted on by

In 2004, Lee Harris wrote a book called Civilization and Its Enemies.

It’s a relatively short volume; only 220 pages in hardcover, and the print’s not small. But it’s dense with thought-provoking ideas. I don’t agree with everything Harris says, but I agree with a great deal of it, and everything he says is worth pondering.

Including this (and again, understand that this was written over ten years ago):

When we think of Hitler or Mussolini or Lenin, we think of them strutting grandiloquently across the stage of history, magnified many times their original size in order to fit the huge dimensions suggested by their gigantic effect on the history of the human race. From such great effects one is tempted to deduce a great cause. But such is not the case.

They all started the same way—as small clubs attended by insignificant men, an uninspiring nucleus of fanatics devoted to the same cause. What gave them their power—aside from sheer dumb luck—was their deliberate deployment of ruthlessness. They stopped at nothing, and nothing held them back. Both agents and victims of a fantasy ideology, they transformed themselves through the power of group hypnosis into men who were able to overcome all the inhibitions of their own middle-class and often prosperous and cultured backgrounds.

To permit any group of this nature to decide the next stage of history is insane, and yet this is precisely what would happen if the United States were to disengage from the world.

I might disagree with “nothing held them back” (some things did, at least for a while). I might also disagree with whether they overcame those “inhibitions of their own backgrounds,” because in sociopaths those inhibitions don’t have to be overcome, they don’t operate in the first place. But it’s that last sentence that caught my eye: “if the United States were to disengage from the world.”

Lee goes on:

Ruthlessness has no root causes. It is not engendered by poverty or illiteracy or a lack of education or the Muslim religion or the concept of jihad. It is a technique for gaining power. That is what it started as and what it will always be.

That is why we must beware of giving ruthlessness a reason to be ruthless. For the moment you have done this, for however noble a purpose, you have fallen into its own fantasy world, and you are seeing an act of catastrophic senseless killing as a legitimate expression of a political grievance. To mistake ruthlessness for desperation is the fundamental error of those whose sympathies are unclouded by judgment.

You see it all around you. It is read as a fatal weakness by the enemy (any enemy, be it Communism or jihadis). And it probably is.

[NOTE: Harris has also written a book entitled The Next American Civil War: The Populist Revolt Against the Liberal Elite. It was written in 2010, partly as a reaction to the Tea Party. I haven’t read it, but it seems prescient, too, since the title describes the 2016 campaign, at least on the Republican side.]

The evolution of the term “RINO”

The New Neo Posted on by

Have you noticed it?

Used to be that the term “RINO” was reserved for Republicans who really were very close to being Democrats—that is, Republicans who crossed the line to vote with the Democrats very often, argued Democratic causes, and were usually although not always ensconced in blue states such Maine (Olympia Snowe comes to mind). Every now and then they went all the way and became actual Democrats (see this; Jim Jeffords and Arlen Spector were prominent recent examples, and Charlie Crist another).

The argument for keeping them in elective office, especially in Congress, rested on the idea that (a) they sometimes did vote with Republicans, which was more often than a Democrat would have (b) if they weren’t in office, a real Democrat would be elected in their place, which would be worse, and (c) they caucused with the Republicans and therefore helped to keep Republicans a majority, which meant control of committees and that sort of thing, and control of what was brought up for a vote and what wasn’t.

So they had at least some value, no matter how they voted. But they made conservatives angry, and understandably so—particularly when it seemed as though Democrats were never plagued with such flagrant turncoats.

Over, the years, more and more ire was directed against these RINOs. Some of it was stirred up by popular talk show hosts on the right; Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin come to mind, although there are others. RINOs were increasingly seen as lying betrayers, taking the place of someone else who could be elected and would be more conservative. Never mind that a state such as Maine (just to use an example) was unlikely to elect any Republican member of Congress who was conservative rather than Republican-lite. It was worth a try, worth giving up a possible seat, because (the argument went) the Republican Party as is was no different from the Democratic Party, just a bit slower at driving us over a cliff.

But I’ve noticed that in just the last few years the term “RINO” has morphed. It no longer means what I wrote above. Now for many people on the right it means “any Republican who has ever, on any issue whatsoever, taken a less-than-strictly-conservative stand (with the exception of Donald Trump, who is given a pass).”

The new terrorism in Israel: stabbings

The New Neo Posted on by

Call it the Knife Intifada.

From Bret Stephens:

…[T]wo weeks of Palestinian assaults…began when Hamas killed a Jewish couple as they were driving with their four children in the northern West Bank. Two days later, a Palestinian teenager stabbed two Israelis to death in Jerusalem’s Old City, and also slashed a woman and a 2-year-old boy. Hours later, another knife-wielding Palestinian was shot and killed by Israeli police after he slashed a 15-year-old Israeli boy in the chest and back.

Other Palestinian attacks include the stabbing of two elderly Israeli men and an assault with a vegetable peeler on a 14-year-old. On Sunday, an Arab-Israeli man ran over a 19-year-old female soldier at a bus stop, then got out of his car, stabbed her, and attacked two men and a 14-year-old girl. Several attacks have been carried out by women, including a failed suicide bombing.

Regarding the causes of this Palestinian blood fetish, Western news organizations have resorted to familiar tropes…

Left out of most of these stories is some sense of what Palestinian leaders have to say. As in these nuggets from a speech Mr. Abbas gave last month: “Al Aqsa Mosque is ours. They [Jews] have no right to defile it with their filthy feet.” And: “We bless every drop of blood spilled for Jerusalem, which is clean and pure blood, blood spilled for Allah.”

Then there is the goading of the Muslim clergy. “Brothers, this is why we recall today what Allah did to the Jews,” one Gaza imam said Friday in a recorded address, translated by the invaluable Middle East Media Research Institute, or Memri. “Today, we realize why the Jews build walls. They do not do this to stop missiles but to prevent the slitting of their throats.”

Then, brandishing a six-inch knife, he added: “My brother in the West Bank: Stab!”…

…Above all, it’s time to give hatred its due [as an explanation]. We understand its explanatory power when it comes to American slavery, or the Holocaust…Yet we fail to see it when the hatred disturbs comforting fictions about all people being basically good, or wanting the same things for their children, or being capable of empathy.

Today in Israel, Palestinians are in the midst of a campaign to knife Jews to death, one at a time. This is psychotic. It is evil. To call it anything less is to serve as an apologist, and an accomplice.

And yet our press is deeply engaged in just that sort of apologia.

More on “Truth,” the movie

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a review of the movie “Truth,” which is about to officially open in a few days. The film, which stars Robert Redford, is an attempt to whitewash the Rathergate fiasco and is based on the memoir of one of the perpetrators, Mary Mapes (played by Cate Blanchett).

I’ve already written about the movie (which I haven’t yet seen) here. Right now I’d like to add that the title “Truth” is especially apt, since that is the translation of the name of the Soviet newspaper that served as the mouthpiece of the Communist Party during the Soviet era.

I remember hearing this grim joke when I was a youngster:

As the names of the main Communist newspaper and the main Soviet newspaper, Pravda and Izvestia, meant “the truth” and “the news” respectively, a popular Russian saying was “v Pravde net izvestiy, v Izvestiyakh net pravdy” (In the Truth there is no news, and in the News there is no truth).

Well, in “Truth” there is no truth.

After apple picking

The New Neo Posted on by

I went apple-picking this weekend. It’s easy to do—just drive about 15 minutes, go to the pick-your-own orchard, buy one of their little bags, walk out on a lovely fall day to where the trees are, and begin.

The trees are dwarves. They’re all labeled as to type. I didn’t even have to get on my tippy toes, and I’m only 5’4″. They were laden with fruit, all ripe. Just reach out and grab it, fill up your bag, and walk back to the barn and the cash register. Buy some cider, too, while you’re at it.

The place was loaded with families with young children, who’d even brought the dogs—mostly tiny little dogs like Yorkies. A lot of photo-taking, although not by me.

And, as always happens to me with apple-picking, there’s the poetry that pops into my brain. Frost, naturally:

AFTER APPLE-PICKING

My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

If you think that’s merely a poem about apple-picking, Frost is eluding you. As usual with Frost, the familiar country scene and familiar country activities are merely the jumping off points for much deeper ruminations about life itself: youth versus age, goals and dreams versus accomplishments, energy versus ennui, and of course life and death. In other words, the biggees.

The modern world being what it is, I was able to stand in the orchard, dial the poem up on my cell phone, and read it right then and there. Concentrating on the images in the poem, it struck me for the first time that apple-picking itself has changed mightily, at least in this orchard and at most of the pick-your-own orchards I’ve visited. Ladder? No ladders needed; the fruit is right there at knee level, waist level, eye level. Tired? We pick only what we want, and pay for the privilege.

It’s a Disneyland of apple-picking, a serious activity recast as entertainment for us modern folk. Frost’s daylong, repetitive, wearying task is now a brief, light excursion into a storybook past. As Frost wrote in another poem, “Two Tramps in Mud-Time,” about a different chore (wood-splitting):

…I had no right to play
With what was another man’s work for gain.
My right might be love but theirs was need.
And where the two exist in twain
Theirs was the better right–agreed.

Well, the orchards have figured out how to make their work our play, and have us pay them for the privilege. And we enjoy it, especially on a beautiful day.

The first debate: all hail Queen Hillary

The New Neo Posted on by

I watched about 20 minutes of it, which was 20 minutes more than I wanted to watch.

As regular readers know, I don’t like debates in general, not just Democratic debates. But this debate was unusually strange—or rather, the crop of un-Hillary candidates was unusually strange. Bernie Sanders is your average New York (yes, I know he’s been in Vermont for a long time, but so has much of the population of New York) socialist crazy uncle. Jim Webb is a Republican who’d wandered onto the stage by accident (ought we to call him a DINO, which is an endangered species?). O’Malley? Pretty much a nonentity there, but the consensus among Democratic women is that at least he’s hot. Chafee was weak.

And all except Webb were in a race to out-leftist each other.

The fact that Clinton was able to string together some forceful sentences in English is considered a major achievement at this point, and enough for the usual suspects in the MSM to sigh in relief and be reassured that she’d make a fine, fine candidate and president. And why not? The bar is rather low for a Democrat right now, and it rests on rhetoric. That Hillary Clinton could best this particular field, and would, was a foregone conclusion.

Another brilliant person who doesn’t understand Obama

The New Neo Posted on by

The other day we had Victor Davis Hanson. Now we have Niall Ferguson as another brilliant and often insightful man who doesn’t seem to have a clue about Obama despite seven years of close observation.

It’s a failure of imagination, a line many otherwise smart people refuse to cross. But why? I don’t think it’s just fear of being called “racist,” either, because they’re certainly criticizing Obama and have been for a long time, and such criticism is often enough to trigger the “racist” charge. But apparently both Hanson and Ferguson would rather twist themselves into pretzels to say “fool, Obama’s nothing but a fool” rather than “knave.” Perhaps “knave” seems to them to be tinfoil hat territory, and that’s why they just won’t go there?

This really says it all in terms of what Ferguson is missing:

Those who know the Obama White House’s inner workings wonder why this president, who came into office with next to no experience of foreign policy, has made so little effort to hire strategic expertise.

I don’t know the “White House’s inner workings,” but I haven’t wondered. I noticed the phenomenon at the outset of Obama’s presidency, and Obama gave us the answer right off the bat, too. This was my first piece on the subject (September of 2009), featuring a quote from none other than commenter Artfldgr:

Why might Obama have a tendency to ignore experts, even those he has appointed? Arrogance and hubris on his part would certainly be one explanation, and not a bad one at that. But another phenomenon may be in play, best summed up by this comment made by “Artfldgr”…:

“Expertise has no place in power. It is irrelevant and an opposing force. so no one under the despot can have expertise except for the lowest proles who have no other options and no way to leverage their expertise except in the service of the power above.

…Power loves a servant, and an independent capable person is a power of opposition, not servant. So they move incompetents into place. The incompetents owe all they have, since they can’t do that well on their own. So their morals are easy to corrupt and they know whom they serve.”

Couple that with Obama’s arrogance/hubris, already in clear evidence in April of 2008, when I wrote this post quoting an ominous interview with Obama, and how could Ferguson have failed to notice these signals from Obama, clearly explaining why he didn’t think he needed experts (or, rather, that he was always the most expert expert in the crowd)?:

Ironically, this is an area””foreign policy is the area where I am probably most confident that I know more and understand the world better than Senator Clinton or Senator McCain.

It’s ironic because this is supposedly the place where experience is most needed to be Commander-in-Chief. Experience in Washington is not knowledge of the world…

“I traveled to Pakistan when I was in college”“I knew what Sunni and Shia was [sic] before I joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee…

And then there was this famous Obama quote:

I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.

Instead of the experts Obama doesn’t think he needs, he surrounds himself with leftists, political operatives, and/or worshipers who agree with him, such as Jarrett:

He knows exactly how smart he is. .”‰.”‰. I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually. .”‰.”‰. He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do. He would never be satisfied with what ordinary people do.

Tell me, what need would such a person, with such an opinion of himself, have for conventional “experts,” other than as window-dressing?

In February of 2010, I was still wondering why people don’t get it (in a post about how Obama’s closest advisors are almost all political advisors rather than experts on anything else).
More here (from before his first inauguration) and here, as well as here.

There’s more, but you get the picture. It wasn’t hard to see; it was easy.

In the Ferguson article, he explains that his initial assumption about Obama was that his strategy was to be unlike his predecessor Bush. Ferguson later jettisoned that idea and figured Obama was flailing because he lacked expert advisors. But Ferguson seems determined to ignore the fact that these people have been chosen by Obama over and over again; what’s operating is neither chance nor bad luck. And he ignores Obama’s repeated statements of hubris and arrogance. Ferguson—and so many others—don’t put this all together, nor do they see the overarching goals and patterns of the actual decisions that Obama (or Jarrett and Obama; take your pick) have made—that neither the decisions nor the policies are incoherent, and this is because the Obama administration’s goals are different than they seem, and different from the goals of Obama’s predecessors.

Now, here’s a hypothetical

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Ackler” poses the following hypothetical:

…[S]uppose that tomorrow Obama announced he was canceling the 2016 Election by executive order. Either he would stay in power indefinitely or he would voluntarily cede the Presidency to the anointed Hillary (or Biden, etc) on 1/20/2017. Furthermore, he suspends the 114th Congress immediately. For the remainder of his term, laws will come about through executive order.

To be clear: Obama has not declared martial law, utilized the military or threatened anyone who dissents. Nope. He just announced the above is happening and that’s that.

Yes, there would be an uproar. Immediate calls for impeachment throughout the right of the spectrum. My question is: what of liberals? I’m not thinking of the fire breathing Alinskyite academics/journalists/activist ”“ organizer types (who would cheer him on gleefully). I’m thinking of our ordinary “good German” liberal (“moderate”, ever so moderate!) neighbors and colleagues. How many would raise a fuss, would be shocked, scared and outraged? How many would simply shrug secure in the knowledge that the ends justify the means?

Whether you think Obama capable of such a thing and/or planning such a thing, or whatever you think he would do if it didn’t work out as planned for him, is irrelevant for the purposes of this post. The question is how people would react initially.

Ordinary people, that is, of the liberal and/or LIV persuasion. My guess is that there would be enough of them who would shrug or reluctantly approve, enough that the only real outcry would be among conservatives. Many liberals would justify or excuse Obama’s move by arguments that, after all, something had to be be done, because Congress has accomplished so little and Republicans are so negative and just plain mean.

As I’ve gotten older and older, I’ve come to observe that most people don’t understand the importance of process versus content. That is, the way something is done doesn’t bother them as long as it gets done (that is, if it’s something they want done). Ruthlessness is applauded as strength, tyranny as decisiveness and accomplishment. “After all, he made the trains run on time.”

Report: Iran convicts WaPo journalist Jason Rezaian

The New Neo Posted on by

Meet the new Iran, same as the old Iran:

Washington Post correspondent Jason Rezaian, imprisoned in Tehran for more than 14 months, has been convicted in an espionage trial that ended in August, Iranian state television reported.

News of a verdict in Tehran’s Revolutionary Court initially came early Sunday, but court spokesman Gholam Hossein Mohseni-Ejei did not specify the judgment. In a state TV report late Sunday, Mohseni-Ejei said definitively that Rezaian, The Post’s correspondent in Tehran since 2012, was found guilty.

But many details remained unknown. Rezaian faced four charges ”” the most serious of which was espionage ”” and it was not immediately clear whether he was convicted of all charges. Rezaian and The Post have strongly denied the accusations, and his case has drawn wide-ranging denunciations including statements from the White House and media freedom groups.

Statements from the White House. That’ll do the trick.

Rezaian is a dual Iranian/American citizen born in this country to an Iranian father and an American mother, but he was tried in Iran as an Iranian. For a while, reports have been “floated” that the Iranians would be willing to exchange him for a couple of Iranian prisoners held in American jails for violating sanctions, but that hasn’t gone anywhere so far. Previous Americans held by Iran have been released after the payment of hundreds of thousands of dollars in “bail.”

The WaPo article, and the statement by the paper’s executive editor, manage to report on—and condemn—this latest development re Rezaian without once mentioning the missed opportunity of the Iran deal negotiations, where the Obama administration refused to even discuss matters such as Rezaian’s release. But this paragraph, which comes at the very end of the long WaPo article, hints at what is quite obvious:

With hard-liners under Khamenei, the country’s ultimate religious and political authority, firmly in control of key levers of power, the case served to underscore the relative impotence of the Rouhani government in judicial and national security matters.

That’s the end of the article. The paper decides not to draw the obvious conclusion, which is that Obama’s deal supposedly rests on the idea that the Rouhani government and other so-called “moderates” have some power to change things in Iran, which seems to be either a lie or a delusion.

Some advice for Marco Rubio

The New Neo Posted on by

I think some of it is good advice.

Kurt Schlichter wrote it, and it goes this:

I would be supporting you today except for the amnesty thing. There are a lot of Republicans like me. Here’s how you win us back.

First, quit the denial. You supported amnesty ”¦ stop what you are about to say. You are about to say, “But it wasn’t amnesty,” and saying that is going to set me off…

Say this: “I wanted to try and find a compromise to solve the illegal immigration problem. I was too trusting of Chuck Schumer and the Democrats – a mistake I won’t make again – and I let myself become a salesman for what was essentially amnesty. I was wrong.”

Would that do it for you?

Or would he have to add (as the author of the piece insists) that all illegal immigrants must go home (although how that it to be accomplished is never quite specified, either by Trump or anyone else)? And—as Schlicter also suggests—would Rubio also have to pledge to build an actual physical wall rather than any sort of virtual one, or partly virtual one?

Would that do it for you?

Or will you never trust him, never ever ever, despite his obvious electoral pluses?