A Refiner’s Fire: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery (The Commissario Guido Brunetti Mysteries, 33) By Donna Leon (Atlantic Monthly Press, 288 pages, $22.00) Donna Leon’s 33rd installment of her immensely popular Commissario (detective inspector) Guido Brunetti series shows that at 82 she still has a literary fastball. And that she knows how to keep series characters fresh and alive. The plot in Refiner’s is complex, suspenseful, well-paced, and believable. Through her able and literate creation, Guido, Leon still beguiles, amuses, and sometimes gives us an insight into that vanity fair that is the human enterprise, like good literature always has. She’s one of the handful of writers in the crime/ mystery/detective section of the book store who are way more than mere genre writers offering up a few hours diversion from the day-to-day frustrations of real life. (READ MORE from Larry Thornberry: A Mystery Author’s Memoirs Are Appropriately Mysterious) Guido’s patch is Venice. This would be Italy, not Florida. Gondolas, not golf carts. A water-bound world that New Jersey native Leon loved so much on first visiting that she made it her home for 30 years. She knows from Venice. And she’s brought this unique city and those who sail in her to life for millions of readers, beginning with Guido’s first case, 1992’s Death in La Fenice. All of the Brunetti novels are still in print.    A few years back, mostly in search of anonymity and to escape Venice’s pollution and flood of tourists, Leon moved to a small village in Switzerland. This must have given her a severe case of cultural whiplash, leaving loosey-goosey Italy for uber-orderly Switzerland.            Most adults realize that all large organizations — including police and military ones — are self-protecting bureaucracies. Those in high positions in these are at least as concerned, too often much more concerned, with the organization’s public image and the effect this has on next year’s budget than they are in the stated mission. Leon explores this verity in A Refiner’s Fire. Guido’s Venice Police Department is no exception to this melancholy truth. Nor is the Carabinieri, a police/military mix that probably makes no sense outside of Italy. Squalid butt-covering by these two agencies enables a sordid and violent criminal enterprise that Guido, with his colleagues Commissario Claudia Griffoni, and the team’s researcher and computer whiz nonpareil, Signorino Elettra, have to sort, at considerable risk to their careers and persons. It all starts in the wee hours of a spring morning when two gangs of juveniles engage in a non-lethal but noisy dust-up in public. Pushing, shoving, name-calling, minor fisticuffs, and a lot of male strutting and posturing. Dreary stuff. Police break it up, arrest the mini-gladiators, who are promptly released to their parents. Save for a 16 year-old boy, one Orlando Monforte, who says he’s afraid to notify his father (with good reason as it turns out). So Griffoni volunteers to walk him home. This act of kindness does not go unpunished. Shortly after this unremarkable event, a cheesy lawyer with a history of even cheesier clients and tactics, presents himself in Guido’s office. He claims to represent a client making the preposterous claim that Griffoni, a lovely woman who could have her pick of adult men, had made sexual advances at young Orlando. This turns out to be a head-fake to divert police attention from a criminal enterprise headed up by Orlando’s father, Dario, and from a case of made-up valor. Dario Monforte had been known in Italy as a hero. For home consumption he had risked his own life to save comrades during a bombing of the Italian compound in Iraq. The truth of his actions that night, and of the weeks leading up to it, were far less noble than this official version, and the Carabinieri’s incompetence would have been embarrassing if revealed. Thus the faux hero, whose behavior does not improve when he returns to Italy. (READ MORE: The Road Well Traveled: Exploring the History of Literary Journeys) The plot in Refiner’s is complex, suspenseful, well-paced, and believable. Guido and his team solve the sorry business and bring it to a literally fiery ending. But while the plot is properly satisfying, and keeps readers guessing to the end, this story, like all of Leon’s work, is character-driven. The rich, always diverting, and finely-drawn characters being Guido, his wife Paola, and Griffoni, who we learn more about in this episode. If I have a tiny nit to pick with Leon, it’s that I’d hope she would either use fewer Italian words and phrases in her stories or provide a glossary. Some of these words and phrases are hard to determine, even from context, whether they are names of people, places, organizations, or food items. But this has not been too much of an obstacle to my reading pleasure. It probably hasn’t hobbled many others either. For those who share my addiction to detective fiction but have not sampled Donna Leon’s work, I recommend adding her to the list of writers to turn to when indulging your habit. Long-standing fans of Leon’s work, which includes me, look forward to Guido #34.   The post Venice Is Still in Good Hands — With Detective Guido Brunetti and His Team appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism By Sean McMeekin (Basic Books, 544 pages, $27) “Political power” — Communist political power — does, as Chairman Mao said, grow “out of the barrel of a gun.” Historian Sean McMeekin’s latest book, To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism, vividly recounts this violent history, as it played out on the world stage through propaganda, the exacerbation of crises, provocation of civil wars, and, finally, putsches. The publisher is to be commended for giving us this work of real scholarship about a subject that has become dominated by Communist sympathizers. As he writes in the early pages, “The real secret of Marxism-Leninism, as the reigning doctrine of Communism was called after 1917, was not that Marx and Lenin had discovered an immutable law of history driven by ever-intensifying ‘class struggle,’ but that Lenin had shown how Communist revolutionaries could exploit the devastation of war to seize power by force.” Communism Through the Years The 500-page volume expands on the material in Richard Pipes’ slim classic, Communism: A History, published nearly a quarter of a century ago. Unlike Pipes, McMeekin is not sanguine about Communism’s end after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Having witnessed Communism’s persistence over the past few decades, McMeekin tackles new sources to provide original insights and buttress existing knowledge. After briefly recounting the origins of communistic thought among the ancients and early Christians, McMeekin turns to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who are often lumped together in a simplistic mantra of “Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx.” Rousseau, however, “was not, quite, a Communist.” It was actually Étienne-Gabriel Morelly’s “critique of social inequality” in his Code of Nature that was “made into dogma by Soviet academics” and inspired the French socialist tradition, through François-Noël Babeuf, guillotined in 1797, after his failed putsch. Babeuf’s co-conspirator Philippe Buonarroti’s “memoir-history” memorializing Babeuf’s “Conspiracy for Equality,” sold over 50,000 copies. Hegel (1770-1831), the second member of the trio did, indeed, influence Marx. However, Hegel channeled Rousseau’s “’general will’ in a more conservative direction,” McMeekin explains. Marx latched onto Hegel’s idea of a dialectical process, but inverted Hegel’s view of Christian historical progression as the “consciousness of freedom” that ushered in “the modern concept of ‘equality before the law’ and the ‘rights of person and property.’” Marx denigrated religion as “opium of the people.” (READ MORE from Mary Grabar: Black Anti-Communists Have Been Memory–Holed) Although Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845) criticized “’the philosophers’” for having “’only interpreted the world,’” and not changed it, Marx himself “came to believe in Communism …  not out of real-world experience, but by applying the Hegelian dialectic to his historical studies (mostly of the French Revolution).” Nor was Marx concerned about the working class. In 1845, during his first trip to Manchester and London with his patron Friedrich Engels, he lobbed charges of “ignorance” at a tailor. His emphasis on the primacy of doctrine arose from the belief that workers lacked intellectual sophistication. Marx is the Marxist revolutionary prototype: a self-deluded, isolated “intellectual” with contempt for others. But Marx’s seeming ability to simplify Hegel and turn a pithy phrase, along with lucky timing — his Communist Manifesto was sent to the printers in February 1848, “just days before Paris erupted once again in revolution” — led to its success. The original German was translated into French that spring, and then into English in 1850, followed by translations in all the main European languages. It has remained in print ever since. Similarly, although the thesis in Capital (“about the ever-diminishing bargaining power of labor and the accumulation of capital in fewer and fewer hands”) was “demolished” over the next few decades, Marx’s vague moral critique — “’expropriators are expropriated’” — was “hypnotic,” and his prophecy of “’revolution in France’” seemed to be fulfilled in the 1871 Paris Commune. Communism, in spite of whiplash-inducing shifts by party leaders, could not tolerate criticism, such as that by Mikhail Bakunin, who questioned the “’dictatorial power of this learned minority, which supposedly expresses the will of the people,’” and Eduard Bernstein, who pointed out in Neue Zeit (1896-1898) that farmers did not want collectivization. But organizations, such as the International Working Men’s Association that Marx created and then killed off, were turned into legends to inspire future generations. Communists infiltrated and subverted reform parties and unions time and again. Deceit and old-fashioned violence were the keys to revolutionary success. In 1905, revolutionary instigators capitalized on the Japanese victory over Russia. “Vladimir Ulyanov Lenin of the ‘Bolshevik,’ or majority faction, and Julius Martov of the ‘Menshevik,’ or minority, faction — were in exile when Cossacks and Imperial Guard troops fired into a massive crowd in St. Petersburg on ‘Bloody Sunday,’ January 22, 1905, killing 200 people and wounding another 800.” Lenin and Martov returned in November 1905 — “after most of the revolutionary drama had played out.” Among the younger activists making “hay on the ground” were Joseph Stalin, “a rough-and-ready Georgian activist who organized a Bolshevik Battle Squad in Baku, and Leon Trotsky, a twenty-six-year-old Menshevik firebrand from Kherson, Ukraine.” Marxist revolutionaries claimed credit for a spontaneous labor walkout in September that shut down the country’s communications. But the resulting first-ever Russian parliament (Duma) and labor unions did not fit with the revolutionaries’ aims. The “outbreak of war in August 1914,” however, provided the opportunity for Lenin to transform “’the imperialist war into civil war’” and bring down the government, as Marx prophesied. (READ MORE: FDR and the Democrats’ Unmatched Undemocratic Ways) Tsar Nicholas’s error of abdicating to his brother Michael, instead of sticking to original orders with loyalist soldiers after violence broke out on International Women’s Day, 1917, aided the effort. Germany was also eager to help Lenin. Swiss socialist Fritz Platten coordinated Lenin’s trip home from Switzerland and with the Germans “released a cover story, parroted by credulous journalists (and repeated to this day by incurious historians), that Lenin’s train car was ‘sealed’ and would not open its doors while crossing Germany, satisfying ‘extraterritoriality’ requirements, enabling Lenin to deny that Germans had organized his trip.” German funds also allowed Lenin to buy a printing press to print notices encouraging soldiers and sailors to mutiny, and other propagandistic material. Another strategic error came from Russia’s provisional government leader, Alexander Kerensky: he falsely believed and accused his general Lavr Kornilov of treason, and lost the support of loyal troops. After winning victory over the Kerensky government and the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks created the “’the Soviet of People’s Commissars’” and abolished “’private ownership of land,’ granted amnesty to Bolshevik prisoners, and ended Russia’s war against the Central Powers.” Soon came censorship, collectivization, purges, starvation, arrest, imprisonment, forced labor, execution, and cruelties against all class enemies down to children. Such horrors are often glossed over in other histories, but McMeekin does not glance away. Covering the reign of terror from Russia, Eastern European satellites, Spain, China, Africa, Cuba, Central and South America, and Indonesia, he then draws attention to 1970s Cambodia, under China-educated Pol Pot. The objective of creating the “‘perfect communist country’” (Pol Pot’s “‘year zero’ ambition”) meant, as an escapee recounted, “no schools, no money, no communications, no books, no courts” and constant surveillance. McMeekin describes a veritable Land of the Living Dead: “free-willed humans” reduced “to animals, enslaved by robotic, heavily armed children who had themselves been deprived of any kind of genuine education, human warmth, or feeling.” Yet, many Westerners presented it as part of the “general tragedy of Indochina.” Reporter Sydney Schanberg, who first broke the story only in 1980, called Cambodia “’a surrogate Cold War battlefield.’” In 2018, Max Hastings, in Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975, claimed that “the U.S. and North Vietnam shared responsibility for the tragedy that engulfed Cambodia.” Communism Survives By the final decade of the Cold War, Western journalists were more interested in the “spheres of international competition such as the Olympics, the arms race, and the convening of [Soviet-sponsored] ‘peace congresses’ and ‘nuclear freeze’ demonstrations.” Communists continued to disregard the well-being of their people, as evidenced by the doping of Olympic athletes and the persecution of Jews, followed by their “selling” for a bounty to Western governments. The implosion of the Soviet Union resulted from its governmental and economic system, and Gorbachev’s Kerensky-like bad military decisions — but critically from President Reagan’s outmaneuvering the Soviets with military buildup, encouragement of oil production by Saudi Arabia, and support for the anti-Soviet Afghan forces. But in China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, and Laos, Communist parties continue to rule. China today illustrates the fact that business investments do not change the essential reality of state control of “the means of production.” Western trade has strengthened China’s military power — just as American business investments in 1930s Russia helped arm Stalin for his future conquests. Kirkus Review’s claim that McMeekin is retreading the ground covered by Pipes and Archie Brown’s The Rise and Fall of Communism (2009) is without merit. McMeekin’s reading of new German, Russian, and English-language sources — published and archival — uncovers much new information. For example, about the much-vaunted “Patriotic War,” Stalin was not “surprised” by Hitler’s “betrayal” in June 1941. Like Hitler, Stalin had stepped up war preparations to the point where he had a five-to-one advantage in tanks, seven-to-one in warplanes, and an even greater one in artillery. Yet, the German Luftwaffe nearly destroyed the Soviet air force on the ground. What was Stalin’s response (besides demanding help from Roosevelt)? To have Red Army soldiers shot for being captured (as about 300,000 Red Army soldiers were during the course of the war), and their wives and children sent to gulags. The great “Patriotic War” was won at the cost of 30 million dead, with half being civilians, and, crucially, with the limitless gifts of Lend-Lease, including enriched uranium and other materials used in Stalin’s atomic bomb program. McMeekin also provides little-known facts, such as the longtime persecution of Jews; ongoing collaboration with fascist leaders, such as the selling of arms to Franco (used against American volunteers of the “Abraham Lincoln Brigade,” some 500 of whom were executed by the Soviets); Yugoslav dictator Marshal Tito’s Stalin-like crimes. McMeekin also documents Winston Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s codification of slave labor at Yalta; Churchill’s abandonment of Draža Mihailović for Tito and his shameful invitation to Tito to visit London in 1953; Stalin’s machinations in China, which included helping the Japanese defeat Chiang’s Nationalists; Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956 for crimes against fellow Communists; and the promotion of “socialist feminism” for “soft-power appeal.” McMeekin rightly notes that the “heady moments” of 1989 and 1991 gave false promise “that the fall of Communism would usher in an era of greater civil liberties and freedoms worldwide.” Instead, as the Covid pandemic showed, most of the Western world is willing to follow “a hybrid Chinese Communist model of statist governance and social life,” with “Communist-Chinese-style surveillance.” I would add another aspect: the use of violence to provoke civil war and to silence opposition. Since establishing headquarters in New York City in 1919, Communists have been trying to stoke a war between white Americans and black Americans. They began in the 1920s by proposing a black nation in the American South, which they promoted during the 1930s Depression years and 1960s Black Power years. Black Lives Matter is openly Marxist. Antifa, a Marxist organization pretending to be “antifascist” (as did past Communists!) is often permitted by government forces to terrorize one party. China is funding violent protests and pro-China curricula. The vice presidential candidate on the Democratic ticket has disturbing ties to China. McMeekin warns about the continuing appeal of Communism, with promises of “social justice” for young idealists, and, for politicians, “an all-encompassing state granting them vast power over their subjects.” The publisher is to be commended for giving us this work of real scholarship about a subject that has become dominated by Communist sympathizers. To Overthrow the World is the kind of book that should be on everyone’s bookshelf. You will turn to it again and again.   The post The History of Communism Must Not Be Repeated appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Chester Finch (he/him) is a film critic and the Robert Mapplethorpe Professor of Pre-Colonial Criticism at Harvard University’s Department of Inclusionary Art. Right-wing provocateur and Daily Wire blogger Matt Walsh recently befouled American movie theaters with his immoral hate flick, Am I Racist? Walsh masquerades as a certiffied diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) instructor to lampoon an industry to which I have contributed thousands of dollars to exorcise the inherent racism that I didn’t realize I harbored until a DEI expert told me I did. Walsh describes DiAngelo and her like-minded DEI practitioners as grifters who prey upon naïve, guilt-ridden dupes. This cinematic abortion boasts a 98 percent positive audience score on Rotten Tomatoes based on more than 1,000 verified ratings. Mainstream media “Top Critic” reviews appear noticeably absent. Perfect. Media critics should never acknowledge art that challenges or mocks fundamental tenets of woke progressivism. Chiefly, whiteness equals racism you can never conquer but can mitigate if you have a large enough wallet. You redeem yourself by paying a DEI instructor to harangue you into thinking you’re an irredeemable bigot unless you “do the work” to decolonize yourself from your whiteness. How you do the work is a bit murky. It seems to involve me paying ever-increasing sums of money to DEI specialists like Saira Rao to say, “So, our pedagogy is white women. Stop caping for whiteness. Stop … propping up whiteness. Join gender intersectional solidarity, and we can overthrow all of it.” I’m all for overthrowing whiteness; however, other than genocide, I’m not sure how you do it. Regardless, Rao and her charming business partner Regina Jackson unwittingly appeared in Walsh’s film for $5,000 to eat dinner with and badger the racism out of a dozen educated white female Kamala Harris supporters. Walsh, pretending to be a waiter, interrupts the Race 2 Dinner meal to crow about his DEI credentials and coaxes the ladies to raise their glasses to toast their racism. Jackson, who spends the dinner denigrating whiteness, laughs and lowers her glass, stating, “Wait a minute, I’m not racist.” I attended an Am I Racist? showing and observed moviegoers the way Jane Goodall does chimps. These specimens uproariously laughed whenever a DEI instructor offered profundities like, “Decentering whiteness requires a strategic approach to split the subconsciously racist part of the holistic self from the consciously racist self to reflect how the racial hierarchy builds upon the white patriarchal hegemony that oppresses a Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) orthodoxy.” A DEI expert says something like that and asks Walsh, “Does that make sense?” And Walsh deadpans, “Yes, what do you mean?” People couldn’t contain their laughter! Ordinary, uneducated white men and women tell Walsh they are not racist and don’t notice skin color, which is the most racist thing you can say in 2024. Worse, a salt-of-the-earth African American man says he feels likewise. Anyone watching might conclude most Americans hold this misguided view and, therefore, will never uproot their inherent racism, thereby depriving well-meaning DEI experts of millions of dollars. Walsh acts as a pied piper to this illiterate horde. He possesses nothing more than a high school education. While anyone can opine, lacking a college degree disqualifies you from serious consideration and signifies someone prone to making poor personal and financial decisions. I might take Walsh seriously if he had gone $675,000 into debt to obtain a Ph.D. in Gender Fluid Marionette Puppetry the way I did. Sadly, some of the most educated (ergo, morally superior) people in the world fell for Walsh’s chicanery, except for Ibram X. Kendi, the high priest of antiracism, who wrote, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” If that doesn’t scream inclusion, nothing does. But Kendi escaped Walsh’s predations by either figuring out his identity or requesting $50,000 for a two-hour chat. The same cannot be said for antiracist high priestess Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility, who spoke to Walsh’s faux persona for $15,000, only to be tricked into paying $30 in slavery reparations to one of Walsh’s black producers. DiAngelo gave the producer whatever was in her purse. I would’ve cut a check for at least $1,000 at the risk of overdrawing my account. Walsh describes DiAngelo and her like-minded DEI practitioners as grifters who prey upon naïve, guilt-ridden dupes the way three-card monte dealers sucker marks into following the queen (Kendi offers an excellent hour-long course on this for $10,000). How else should DiAngelo, Kendi, Rao, and Jackson earn a living other than by stoking racial resentment? They have families to feed. Walsh has a speaking fee for whenever he pollutes minds with his “judging people by the content of their character” tripe. As one of the DEI instructors in the film dismissively says, “Martin Luther King said a lot of stuff.” Mocking antiracism serves to delegitimize it. Based on the theater laughter, the movement could be in trouble. We must fight back! Leave humor to comedians like Hannah Gadsby, and what is acceptable for review (e.g., “Porky’s,” “Dude, Where’s My Car?,” “Orgazmo”) to cultured, tolerant people like me. READ MORE from Matt Walsh: A Draft of the Democrat Party Platform The Secret Service Chief’s Rousing Testimony       The post Matt Walsh’s <i>Am I Racist?</i> Properly Reviewed appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Too many people pretend to have read The Wealth of Nations and I think it’s time to reclaim the importance of pretending to have read The Theory of Moral Sentiments. It is 301 years since Adam Smith was born and I love round anniversaries. I am amazed at the survival not only of his economic ideas but of his entire moral philosophy. This ability to understand the other, as well as the ability to negotiate, is typically human. Animals cannot do it. It is not that the 1,400 pages of the two great works are not objectionable today, but that reality has been determined to prove the Scottish thinker right, regardless of the evolution of theoretical battles. The best antidote to most of a nation’s ills remains the prosperity born of freedom not exempt from responsibility, of individualism not exempt from empathy. Freedom without responsibility, individualism without empathy, we already know it and it’s called Kamala Harris. You would not want to live in a society made up of millions like her. Conservatism is made up of several currents. Edmund Burke traveled a different theoretical route to end up in the same place as Adam Smith, perhaps that is why they agree even in the differences. Dynamiting mercantilism, improving the life of every man, building society from virtue and excellence, signing a pact with prosperity, trusting in the individual’s capacity to make better decisions than any institution, the language of exchange, understanding the ethics of sympathy, knowing how to listen to the inner voice of the “impartial spectator.” The author of The Wealth of Nations has so many accurate lessons and brilliant proposals that can be gleaned from his thinking that it is incredible that he has so few followers among Western politicians, who are more interested in learning economics by reading Marie Kondo, and ethics with Paulo Coelho, which is like learning the Ten Commandments while smoking marijuana. Between one democracy fest and the next, there is something Adam Smith wrote that should be engraved in our politicians’ hearts, including those on the right, who are always fearful when it comes to reducing the State: “Great nations are never impoverished by the prodigality or misconduct of some of their individuals, but they do fall into that situation due to the prodigality and dissipation of governments.” I try to put myself in the place of those political officials who indulge in inaction due to unfounded fears and I am unable to. Following the Scottish economist, I suppose I reject that sentiment or, to put it in plain English: my unbiased external spectator vomits upon imagining the situation. This is what Smith calls sympathy and we know today as empathy. Humans are empathetic, to the point that we can put ourselves in the shoes of others and feel what they are feeling, even if they are people we don’t love at all: think for example of the tax inspector who just caught a testicle in the elevator door of your block of flats. We don’t forget our hostility towards him, but neither do we wish him to lose a testicle either. This ability to understand the other, as well as the ability to negotiate, is typically human. Animals cannot do it, except in Disney movies, where everything is possible except the truth: even Tinkerbell is now black. The quotation from The Wealth of Nations is famous: “Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog. Nobody ever saw one animal by its gestures and natural cries signify to another, this is mine, that yours; I am willing to give this for that,” unless we’re counting Hunter Biden at the nightclub. Perhaps because we are created in the image and likeness of God, human nature is a constant discovery: everything about us has a reason. “The agreeable passions of love and joy can satisfy and support the heart without any auxiliary pleasure,” writes the Scottish author, “The bitter and painful emotions of grief and resentment more strongly require the healing consolation of sympathy.” And so it is: we need help when we are sick, when we have lost the ability to face life with hope, when our ill health — be it physical or mental — pushes us into dangerous zones. It is much more difficult to die of joy; instead, too many have passed away sad and lonely. The 301st anniversary of Adam Smith should be an invitation to reclaim more insistently our spaces of freedom, in a time in which it is in clear retreat. The old economist was clear about this in his Theory of Moral Sentiments: we need to be free to take care of ourselves as best we can, we need imagination to put ourselves in the shoes of others and take care of them, and — I would add — we need the Wealth of Nations to be able to afford a good seafood dinner washed down with expensive wine and to celebrate how much better off we all are when we are allowed to live in peace and freedom. READ MORE from Adam Smith: Terrorists Used to Lose Their Heads. Today, It’s Their Balls. My Teachers Knew I Was a Bad Student The post 301 Years Being Right on Sympathy and Nations appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

In the first volume of his history of World War II, The Gathering Storm, Winston Churchill laid bare the root causes of the war. The blame fell squarely on the Western powers’ failure to recognize the growing threat of war and to act to prevent it. Had the Allies’ prewar affairs “been conducted with the ordinary consistency and common sense usual in decent households,” war could have been averted. The painful, common sense solution to the debt problem is a systematic reduction in domestic spending. Instead, they allowed “conditions to be built up which led to the very climax they dreaded most.” Churchill concluded with this warning for us today, “They (the Western powers) have only to repeat the same well-meaning, short-sighted behavior towards the new problems which in singular resemblance confront us today to bring about a third convulsion from which none may live to tell the tale.” Defense Spending Two existential threats of staggering potential gravity face the U.S. today, one foreign and one domestic. The sadly shocking reality is the indifference with which these threats are sloughed off by not only the American public but by the leadership of both political parties.  Not since the end of the Cold War have the opponents of the Pax Americana gathered with such cohesion, determination, and aggression. The newly formalized alliance of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea threatens to drag the West into a global conflict for which it is ill prepared. This threat was recently laid out by the bipartisan Commission on the National Defense Strategy: “The U.S. faces the most serious and most challenging threats since 1945, including the real risk of major near-term war.”  The report concludes, “The nation was last prepared for such a fight during the Cold War, which ended 35 years ago. It is not prepared today.” At the end of the Cold War, the U.S. was spending over 5 percent of GNP on defense. In 2024, defense spending has fallen to approximately 3.5 percent. The cumulative result is a seriously depleted military capacity. The global nature of the opposing alliance has called into serious question whether the U.S. could respond to a multi-front world war. Historian and columnist Walter Russell Mead warned recently in the Wall Street Journal, “ World War III is becoming more likely in the near term, and the U.S. is too weak either to prevent it or, should war come, to be confidant of victory.”  National security is — or should be — a bipartisan issue. Neither party can escape blame for our current plight; but, sadly, neither party seems willing to call for the sacrifice and commitment needed to address the challenge. The Enormous National Debt Challenge The second existential threat is domestic, and it very much compounds the danger of the foreign threat. The 35-year decline in defense spending has been accompanied by an explosion in non-defense welfare and entitlement spending, with a commensurate explosion in the national debt. These numbers tell the story: From 1990 to 2024, the national debt has risen from under $5 trillion to over $35 trillion. The result of these compounding deficits has been that for the first time in our history, the annual cost of servicing the national debt in 2024 now surpasses the annual national defense budget. In 2024 gross interest payments on the national debt exceeded $1 trillion. Current projections estimate the national debt will exceed $54 trillion in 10 years. Congress and both political parties show no inclination to address this exploding problem. Implications of Debt The implications of the national debt threat are two-fold, and the consequences of both are dire. Deficit spending requires the ability annually to service (pay interest and rollover principal) national debt. No one knows the ultimate capacity of the financial markets to facilitate U.S. deficit spending; but at some point, if the deficits continue to accelerate, the markets will shut down and the U.S. will face the pain of bankruptcy. In the meantime, even as the financial markets accommodate our profligacy, the rising cost of debt service is slowly choking our military budget and limiting our ability to meet foreign challenges. The painful, common sense solution to the debt problem is a systematic reduction in domestic spending coupled with a re-setting of major entitlement programs (i.e., Social Security and Medicare) to insure their economic viability. Politicians find such belt tightening measures anathema. Neither party will campaign on the urgency of domestic spending cuts or the desperate need to restructure entitlement programs.  The confluence of these foreign and domestic threats demands a serious response. In the recent presidential debate, there was no serious discussion of either foreign threats or deficit spending.. The future of our country — and indeed the West — is at stake. Nothing less than Churchill’s “ordinary consistency and common sense usual in decent households” will enable the U.S. to avert the gathering storms of foreign adversaries and national bankruptcy. American voters intuitively know what common sense demands. But where is the clear-eyed, hardheaded, common sense leadership we need? READ MORE from Garland S. Tucker III: The Remarkable 1924 Coolidge vs. Davis Campaign A Prophet Without Honor: The Legacy of John W. Davis  Garland S. Tucker III, retired Chairman/CEO Triangle Capital Corporation, author of Conservative Heroes: Fourteen Leaders Who Shaped America- Jefferson to Reagan (ISI Books) and The High Tide of American Conservatism: Davis, Coolidge and the 1924 Election (Emerald Books). The post Staggering Debt and Foreign Threats appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Charlotte Wessels has released “The Obsession,” her third studio set. The lead single was “The Exorcism.” “This album is significant, for on the one hand, telling such a deeply personal journey — through its unintended theme of fear and obsessive thoughts — and at the same time, representing the joy of finding the song’s true forms with everyone involved in the making of this record,” Wessels explained. This will be Wessels’ third solo effort. “Tales From Six Feet Under” (’21) and “Tales From Six Feet Under Vol II“ (’22) were the first two.  In February ’21, Delain disbanded but reformed a short time later with a new line-up that made its official live debut in August ’22. The post Ex-Delain Singer’s Third Solo Effort Has Dropped appeared first on RockinTown.

from SD Bullion: TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

DIDDY TAPES will be used to control a lot of famous voices. You’ll be seeing a lot of celebrities ENDORSING KAMALA out of the blue. All the people in those tapes are now owned. They’ll be slaves to the government forever. — Patrick Bet-David – CEO of Valuetainment (Parody) (@notPBD) September 22, 2024

by Derrick Broze, The Conscious Resistance: Today we are thrilled to announce the creation of the Independent Media Alliance (IMA), a collaborative effort focused on promoting objective, fact-based media from a diverse team of journalists, podcasters, and writers. Our emphasis will be on countering narratives currently being seeded within the “alternative” media space, including, but […]