Look who got buried

"We will bury you," Nikita Khrushchev famously threatened the United States in the late 1950s. His cockiness, and the concern of many liberals that he might be right, stemmed in part from the Soviet Union's supposed lead in science and technology as epitomized by their launch of Sputnik, 50 years ago last week. But news stories about the anniversary took insufficient note of who ended up getting buried -- first Khrushchev himself, then the Evil Empire, then its Marxist-Leninist totalitarian ideology. The cause of death for the latter two included not only democratic capitalism's inherent superiority in political governance, economic productivity, and moral vitality, but also the decisive advantage of a free society over a slave society in education, research, and innovation.

A Denver Post wire story on Oct. 5 reported: "Goose-stepping guards and medal-bedecked space veterans laid flowers at the tomb of the father of the Soviet space program, Sergei Korolyov, at the foot of the Kremlin wall." Wrong tomb; the wreath should have been laid on the grave of world communism and its vaunted historical inevitability -- except that the grave is unmarked and the death unmourned.

A local piece in the Rocky was headed, "Coloradans recount Sputnik's impact on science, classrooms." Quotes from three scientists and science educators who were in school back in 1957 made it sound as though gravity and the heliocentric theory had barely been discovered before the Russian launch embarrassed big government into turning things around, leading to the great things our schools and their graduates have begun accomplishing in latter years.

Nice try by the revisionists, but the sad fact is that the union-dominated, money-corrupted US education system at all levels today is turning out poorer-prepared young people -- in engineering, math, science, and technology particularly -- and far fewer entrants to such careers, than either the America of Ike's day or our leading competitor nations of today. It would appear that the US military and space innovation which loomed so large in Reagan's winning of the Cold War twenty years ago, and the info-tech revolution which has kept our economy booming ever since, occurred in spite of, not because of, all those ballyhooed science-education programs after Sputnik.

Meanwhile, as we also read in last week's papers, Democrats running the state legislature continue stiff-arming sensible proposals (inconveniently offered by Republicans) to toughen Colorado's math and science requirements for high-school graduation. And you gotta love their rationale for keeping ours among the five(!) states with few or no such requirements:

Committee chairman Rep. Michael Merrifield, D-Colorado Springs, said he is still opposed to "making students into widgets."

"Where is the opportunity for students to experiment and grow their multiple talents with a day that is going to be so regimented?" he asked.

Colorado should focus on making students well-rounded, creative and able to use the right sides of their brains to solve problems, said Merrifield, a former music teacher.

But don't worry, be happy -- with Maestro Mike leading the band, at least we can sing, dance, and fiddle our way down the slope of international mediocrity.

'New Deal' pitch at UN by Sarkozy

Friends of America and individual freedom in France can't be heartened by President Nicolas Sarkozy’s first-ever address to the UN General Assembly on Sept. 25. To this reader, his message was ambiguous if not downright devious. Ever since his election last May, Mr. Sarkozy has generally been described, particularly in the United States but also somewhat disparagingly in France, as a “conservative” and as “pro-American." Given the low ebb that relations between France and the United States reached in the wake of the U.S.-led military intervention in Iraq, Mr. Sarkozy’s personal admiration for America boded well not only for forthcoming efforts to reform French society and the French economy along necessarily free-market lines, but also for the future of the friendship between our two nations -- and by extension, for the security and stability of a world resolutely standing up to terrorist nihilism.

Alas! Heard or read through the typically French prism of aeons of Marxist brainwashing, decades of comprehensively anti-American indoctrination, and years of warnings against globalization (read: Anglo-Saxon capitalistic attempts to rule the world, ruthlessly crushing foreign cultures in the process), Mr. Sarkozy’s speech in New York clearly and objectively dashed many of the hopes his election had tantalizingly raised. Will France at long last go through some sort of redeeming cultural, political, economic, diplomatic, military and psychological revolution. It seems less likely now.

Take Marxism. It was Sarkozy at the UN, not Karl Marx in Das Kapital, who complained that “never before have there been so many instances of rents, channeling profits to big corporations”. He also focused attention on the plight of “the poor and those who are exploited who might one day rise up against the injustice they have been suffering.” When did you ever hear a true conservative use words like “rents”, “exploitation”, and “social justice” to promote and protect individual freedom?

Take globalization. Sarkozy insisted “in France’s behalf that there will be no peace in the world without respect for diversity, without respect for national identities, without respect – I dare use the word – for religions and religious beliefs, without respect for cultures.” Innocuous clichés? Not quite. Bear in mind that not so long ago France tried to ban English words from the French language and that legally-binding quotas still require French TV stations to show a set number of French-made programs per week.

Finally, take anti-Americanism. True, Sarkozy did not rant against American arrogance or imperialism. However he reaffirmed decades of French mistrust of American might when he invoked the seamless unity of the UN as a counterweight to “those who would project power and strength.” Wasn’t former Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin back in 2003 actually ominously invoking just such unity as a counterweight to “those trying to project power and strength” in defense of the 17 UN resolutions that had been defiantly flouted by Saddam Hussein?

It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Mr. Sarkozy should once again have added this caveat to French détente with the United States: “France is faithful to her friends and to the values she shares with them. But France also says that such faithfulness does not mean submission. France will not be cooped up in faithfulness of that sort.” And much more unnervingly he went on to warn that “if the clash of civilizations is to be avoided, then peoples throughout the world should not be made to think the same way.” What was the guy actually implying there? That America is to blame for terrorism as well?

The truly conservative mind finally boggles at Mr. Sarkozy’s crassly ignorant and downright dangerous “appeal to the UN to take charge of a fairer distribution of profits (…) and to see to the moralization of financial capitalism.” What was he advocating there? A return to Soviet-style central planning?

The conservative mind also reels at his deliberate use of the phrase New Deal in his calls for a new world order. He counterintuitively stated that “the world needs a new state of mind” and that “a New Deal, an environmental and economic New Deal, is necessary worldwide.”

That is the appalling message France sent to the world from the UN last month. On the basis of President Sarkozy’s speech there, I implore my American conservative friends to abstain from selectively focusing on parts of Mr. Sarkozy’s speeches that purportedly vindicate American foreign policy or the American way of life.

America is its own vindication. Mr. Sarkozy’s potentially totalitarian relativism is un-American.

Note: “Paoli” is the pen name, or should we say nom de plume, of our French correspondent, a close student of European politics and a well-wisher to us Americans. He informs us the original Pasquale Paoli, 1725-1807, was the George Washington of Corsica.

Radio links from 9/30 show

Click to RejectLost.org to help Frank Gaffney stop Senate ratification of the Law of the Sea Treaty. For a briefing by Amity Schlaes on "The Forgotten Man," her book about the Great Depression, see the latest Imprimis from Hillsdale College. While there, sign up to receive Imprimis in print, free each month. Click here for reservations at the Colorado Union of Taxpayers award event with Bob Schaffer on Oct. 6. Click here to learn about the Principles of Liberty course led by Penn Pfiffner of the Independence Institute.

US bears all blame, say French elites

"We are all Americans!" proclaimed the uncharacteristic but dramatic and poignant headline in Le Monde, France's left-wing newspaper, on Sept. 12, 2001, the day after the dastardly terrorist attacks on the United States of America. Six years later, the sympathy that rightfully characterized French reactions to infamy and abomination has regrettably vanished. Instead editorials, op-eds and commentaries in France last week almost unanimously blamed America for making the world a far more dangerous place to live, hypocritically rued what they described as America’s loss of prestige and “moral authority," and expectantly looked to French diplomats to broker some sort of international ceasefire and restore peace, love and understanding to a troubled world. They may as well look for them in Sesame Street.

Le Monde, the business daily Les Echos, the center-right Le Figaro, respected commentators on the radio, and prominent political scientists all deplored the fact that American foreign policy in general and the Iraq War in particular have -- as they see it -- directly contributed to today’s instability and insecurity.

If Bin Laden is still at large, defiantly cocking a blood-stained snoot at America through his well-publicized videos, if the Taliban fiend is once again rearing his ugly head in Afghanistan, if Iran is provocatively forging ahead with its nuclear weapons program, and if places like Pakistan, Indonesia, and Africa have become highly-inflammable tinderboxes, the blame (by this account) should unequivocally be laid at America’s door.

In Les Echos, on the 6th anniversary of the New York attacks, a regular columnist called Favilla went so far as to suggest that the American response to terrorism so far has generated so much hatred and sympathy for radical Islam among European-born young Muslims that many of them may well now be contemplating the destruction of the political and philosophical foundations of Europe.

The most striking thing about all these comments was their failure, deliberate or not, to even identify the threat coming from radical Islam. Instead, referring to Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib in particular, all of them insisted on America’s perceived inability to live up to its own democratic and humanitarian ideals and its supposedly ignorant and wrong-headed insistence on seeing the world in terms of good and evil.

Favilla explained that “the gap between [American] rhetoric on human rights and [American] acts at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib has completed the moral decay of the Western World”. The same day, in an editorial called “Of The Vanity of [American] Power”, the coat-turning Le Monde snidely drew attention to what it sees as America’s authoritarian and implicitly xenophobic, if not racist, restrictions on foreigners’ “individual freedoms."

Not coincidentally, the next day, a talk show host on Canal Plus, a popular pay-TV station, devoted a fifteen-minute segment of his prime-time show to a book called “In the Hell of Guantanamo”, written by Murat Kurmaz, a German national of Turkish descent, who was apparently wrongly accused of terrorist wrongdoing and spent four years in Guantanamo. Focusing more specifically on the psychological and physical torture allegedly carried out there, the segment was basically an excuse for indicting America, interdicting whatever sympathy viewers might have had for the country at a time of painful memories for its people.

Finally, in an op-ed published in Le Figaro on this Sept. 11, Nicole Bacharan, a prominent political scientist specializing in American politics, spoke of President Bush’s “obsession," expressed rigorously expert concern that the War in Iraq has been waged so ineptly by the Bush administration that the very foundations of American democracy are being shaken, and generously called for other nations, including France, to help “restore America’s political legitimacy and moral authority."

The most appalling but sadly predictable thing about such self-serving prattle is its lack of courage and logic. Indeed if its authors are so concerned about America’s moral standing, the safety of Europe, and the fate of the Iraqi people, why don’t they deafeningly call President Sarkozy’s bluff and urge him to send French troops to Iraq to help strike down the nihilist threat?

They never will. After all parroting such benighted platitudes as “negotiation” or “appeasement” that were murderously expressed in Munich in 1938 sounds so much more morally civilized, doesn’t it?

A 9/11 tribute from abroad

Upon waking this coming Tuesday, I will think aloud: "Today is 9/11. Today is a sad day. Today is the saddest day of the year." That fateful September 11th six years ago, at about four in the afternoon here in France, I remember getting into my car to go home after an uneventful day’s work. The radio was on and I was half-listening to a news program on the BBC World Service as I leisurely made my way home. I remember being suddenly yanked out of my comfortable daydreaming into a reality that my mind initially failed to grasp when the announcer reminded listeners that “at least 1,500 people were now feared dead in the New York attack”. I immediately reached for my cell phone to ask my wife to turn the TV on to find out what was going on. When she sketchily told me that a jumbo jet had ploughed into the World Trade Center, that the Pentagon had been hit and that a plane had crashed in Pennsylvania in mysterious circumstances I ended the conversation with words to the effect that this was nothing less than a declaration of war and rushed home to appalling pictures of a world in ruins.

Three years later, when the first opportunity came, my wife and I flew to the United States for a summer vacation on the East coast. I must admit that my very first encounter with an inhabitant of the New World turned out to be a little awkward. When I stepped up to the customs officer to show my passport, he asked me what the purpose of my visit to the U.S. was. I hate cheating so the answer I gave came from the heart: “Because I love America.”

The officer looked at me as if something was wrong with me, my sanity, or my mental age, and gave me a second chance when he repeated: “The purpose of your visit to the U.S. is because you love America??!!” I sheepishly said it again: “Yes, because I love America.” Still sizing me up incredulously, the officer eventually gave up and wished me a pleasant stay nonetheless, and I walked into a world that since then has never failed to amaze, fascinate, energize and inspire me.

What is so unique and awe-inspiring about America that still deserves praise and profound deference six years after that horrific attempt to throw us “into a thousand years of darkness”? Paradoxically “universality” encapsulates the essence of America’s uniqueness.

The genius of the Founding Fathers was to devise a system of government that not only worked well for thirteen colonies but also proved adequate and successful for thirty-seven more states. How could the rest of the world deny the potency of a simple formula based on individual freedom from government, constitutional checks and balances, and federalism?

The maverick vision, determination, and dauntlessness of men like Barry Goldwater and President Ronald Reagan to face down enemies morbidly bent on spreading collectivist Utopias, led to the triumph of the free enterprise system. How could the rest of the world deny the morality and efficiency of the most emancipatory economic system the world has ever produced?

None of this would have happened without America’s faith in the individual’s transcendent destiny and in the restraining mechanisms that Tradition has passed on from one generation to the next. How could the rest of the world deny that life is not an outlet for secular instincts? In all these areas and in others, the duty of America is to lead the world by example.

Although America’s image abroad has suffered even more since 2003, Americans should never be ashamed to be Americans. Americans should always be proud of their achievements as a nation since 1776. Americans should always be proud of their investment in freedom and democracy at home and around the world.

On this September 11, 2007 -- and eternally --the duty of America is to keep that French-given beacon in New York Harbor illuminatingly bright to give hope to the “huddled masses” who silently, awkwardly perhaps (as I did), but tenaciously always, proclaim “God bless America!”