John C. Wright's Journal

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An unpublished paper presented at the American Political Science Association by AM Lopez has this succinct judgment.

This paper is a preliminary look at the similarities and differences of the insurgencies in Iraq and Chechnay and at the similarities and differences of American and Russian counterinsurgency efforts respectively. It argues that the Russians have some inherent advantages in Chechnya–smaller country in terms of both terrain and population, greater will to fight the war–than the Americans in Iraq. However, Russian counterinsurgency policy, and in particular the over-reliance on force and failure to include Chechens in the local politics, has increased the likelihood of long-term failure. In Iraq, while the Americans have not conducted themselves flawlessly, their more measured use of force and incorporation of a wider swath of Iraqi society into the political scene increases the likelihood of long-term success. The danger for the Americans, however, is in the short-term.

In plain language, the US appears to be doing better than the Russians, despite the ability of the Russians to be significantly more violent and brutal. The Jamestown Foundation has a detailed evaluation of the Russian position in Chechnya prepared on Oct 18, 2007. It basically concludes that the Russians have not succeeded at any of the goals they have set for themselves.

Yakov Nedobitko’s [ the commander of the Russian Joint Military Group in Chechnya] comments imply that the Russian authorities have not yet achieved any of their key goals, which include:

1) Shifting the responsibility for maintaining the stability in the republic from federal bodies to local authorities;

2) Withdrawing most of the troops from the republic, leaving in Chechnya only one division and one brigade that will be stationed there permanently in large garrison camps;

3) Destroying the centralized command structure of the Chechen and Caucasian rebels;

4) Disbanding or at least reducing commandant offices of the Russian armed forces in the republic.

Of particular interest are the factors that did not help the Russians in their campaign. “Neither knowledge of the local language, nor the knowledge of the terrain and the other advantages cited by Nedobitko, helped the units to defeat the guerillas who are hiding in the mountains.”

Although it is fashionable in certain “sophisticated” circles to deride it, one of the key American success factors in Iraq may be the policy to “bring freedom” — political empowerment — to the Middle East. Rather than being a naive emotion at odds with “adult” foreign policy, the idea of politically empowering a population may actually have great practical value. This is not to say that the Russian campaign in Chechnya has been without result, but a straighforward comparison between the two campaigns against a Jihadi foe shows that the American campaign has been surprisingly effective.

It’s interesting to note that at the very moment that al-Qaeda seems have been defeated in Iraq it appears to be augmenting its presence in Chechnya. Bill Roggio reports today that “Doku Umarov, one of the last remaining original leaders of the Chechen rebellion and a close associate of al Qaeda, has declared an Islamic emirate in the greater Caucasus region.”

The setbacks of the Russian campaign stand in some irony to the persistent left-wing criticism of the American strategy in Iraq. If the former Soviet Union and its successor state in Russia are at all representative of how the left wing would fight a counterinsurency it suggests that not only would they be more brutal but they would also be far less successful.

 

Instead, I am disappointed and saddened. I rather liked the first book in this series, and thought maybe Hollywood could revise and rewrite the second the third to give it some much needed plot-logic. Maybe they could come up with a CGI beastie that would depict the utterly disgusting four-wheeled elephant-things from the third book: I know most people must not have the mental image I took away, which was revolting. So, no glee in the misfortune for me: The ads for this movie looked swell, and I was probably going to go see it on the big screen. I thought it would not be that bad.

But no. When the New York Post (not exactly a bastion of conservative thought) is criticizing a film for its heavy-handed anti-clericalism, I no doubt would be better entertained by watching the second MATRIX movie again.

Love the armored bears fighting scene in the book. Loved it. Loved the icy witches of lapland flying through the air on rafters. Loved the evil scientist named Asrael. How could they get this wrong? They have an evil gorgeous mad scientist woman who experiments on children and robs them of their souls! This is seriously Princess Aura level pulp! How could they make a movie and screw this up?

Well, let us not be hasty. This is only one reviewer. Who trust reviews anyway?

I called him a coward and left him a challenge to debate the fine points of theism and atheism both at the original post, and on his otherwise empty live journal. Perhaps this is not very Christian of me, perhaps I should turn the other cheek, but the atheist conceit that they are smarter than the rest of us needs to be deflated.

I have met reasonable atheists, that is, men who for sincere reasons, with no loss of intellectual honesty, do not believe in God, or in the supernatural. It is to their shame that highly-emotional and arrogant fools, men of inferior intellect who boast of their superior intellect, also march under the same banners. Anyone who can tell the difference between Carl Sagan and Christopher Hitchens knows what I am talking about.

We Christians have an unfair advantage. We are supposed to be fools in the eyes of the world. It pleases our God to reveal to the simple people the mysteries of the universe that intellectuals like me stumble and fumble at. He makes the wise foolish and the foolish wise. Should all my intellectual powers and all my reasoning turn out to be vain, what does that matter to my Christian life? Saint Peter is not going to administer an IQ test at the Pearly Gates. If I meet an atheist smarter than I, the humility will be good for me.

But look on the other hand. The irrational atheist’s self-esteem, he of the Proud and Loud wing of the atheist party, is tied entirely into their self-image as our lofty intellectual superiors.  What does an honest atheist do if he is ever trounced in debate, or if he realizes Aquinas, or Augustine, or Kant, or Newton, or some other person who believed in God was actually smarter than him? If he refuses to admit that there are smart theists, he is no longer honest. If he admits it, his self-esteem has no grounds. The peevish and shallow arrogance of Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins is the result.

A rational atheist, of course, simply follows where the evidence leads, seeks truth for the sake of truth, and leaves his emotional baggage at the door. No one can predict the results of such a case: look at what happened to famous atheist writer Anthony Flew.

What is interesting is that a small part of this diagrams seemed to describe or map onto certain parts of the subatomic particle bestiary investigated by modern physics. Particles were correctly predicted to exist merely because of gaps in the diagram that appeared when the number values for certain particles were mapped onto a small part of this E8 diagram.

Well, now that the whole of the E8 diagram has been defined by this team of mathematicians and their flotilla of computers, a Spark named Garrett Lisi has pointed out more symmetries and relationships that exist between other fundamental particles and forces and other parts of this 248-dimensional object.

Ladies and Gents, this is the stuff science fiction is made of. What if Lisi is correct? What if the reconciliation of quantum mechanics and special relativity just took place? What if this diagram actually holds the key to the fundamental way the physical constants of the universe are put together?

Frankly, I looked this movie up because it was lauded among Christian Conservatives as something to show the crucial role Christianity played in abolishing the slave trade. But, with no offense to my Christian friends, the move does nothing of the kind. Clearly religion is a central part of the life of the main character, Wilberforce, but the real movie centers around three plot points: (1) the romance between Wilberforce and Barbara Spooner, who is a strong-willed women attempting to put the heart back into a sick and sickened Wilberforce after years of unsuccessful crusading; (2) the friendship and conflict between Wilberforce and William Pitt, whose more pragmatic approach to politics clashes with Wilberforce’s zeal; (3) the conflict between Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, who is a revolutionary dreaming of a Jacobin overthrow of all institutions, whereas Wilberforce remains loyal to the social order he wants to improve.

Being something of a romantic myself, I was most interested in the romance. I thought the young actress selected for the role particularly fetching, especially in her Big Historical Hat:

Reviews had led me to expect a movie with a strong pro-Christian theme. That is not what I saw: to me, the Christianity was the background issue, no more intrusive than mentions of Jupiter would be in a movie set in Ancient Rome, or mentions of the Great God Tao in a movie set on planet Mongo.

On thing that surprises me about the movie is that I do not recall a great fanfare and applause among the political Left when it came out. This man, Wilberforce, should by rights be one of their foremost heroes, a secular saint. He is an activist of the purest quill, a model for every crusading world-changer and world-improver to come after him. Unlike a majority of modern crusaders, his crusade was a success: the Holy Land, so to speak, was taken. I don’t think a serious argument can be made against the idea that William Wilberforce did much more to improve the condition of blacks in the world than did Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, or the interracial space-kiss between Kirk and Uhura. Maybe there was a huge hurrah on the Left when this film came out, and a shower of rewards, but, if so, I did not hear a peep of it. Aren’t they in favor of Abolition?

I found the movie by turns charming, moving, romantic, witty, and poignant. The gentle humor of the old married couple trying to play match-maker with bachelor Wilberforce delighted me. The grim scenes with the old slaver ship captain, John Newton (who wrote the hymn whose name graces the film), a man haunted by the thousands of ghosts of the slaved killed aboard his ships were both effective and affecting. When it is revealed that Barbara Spooner admired and hero-worshipped Wilberforce since age fourteen, when she gave up sugar, or when the pair are trying to discover what they do not have in common, was romantic without being forced or erotic. The banter with William Pitt, and the speeches in Parliament, showed the wit and force of their characters. The depiction of conditions aboard slave ships, even today, has the power to shock the conscience.

The abolition of slavery is without parallel. It is the single shining moral achievement in the long, sad history of mankind. The institution existed since time immemorial, and no ancient philosopher, sage or holy man condemned it.

This abolition was done against all custom and against the economic self-interest of the British Empire. It was done for reasons of pure conscience, and not for any earthly reward.

First the slave-trade, and then all slavery, was eliminated in France, in other European Countries, and in the Americas not long after. British warships blockaded Turkey to put an end to the Muslim traffic in human slaves, which was larger than Christian traffic had been. China and Japan followed suit, and abolished slavery in their attempts to Westernize. Only in recent years have we seen the slave trade making a come-back, now that Western power is in decline, and now that Westerners have convinced the world that ours ways are not the way to progress and happiness.

Even Christianity, the only religion ever to take a stand against slavery, did not begin to abolish it in Europe until after the fall of the Empire. (The African slave-trade, ironically enough, was a Sixteenth Century phenomena, the time of the Enlightenment. The Dark Ages was the true anti-slavery age, with the practice being outlawed and abolished and anathematized bit by bit, across Christendom.)

When I was young, I read Heinlein’s HAVE SPACE SUIT, WILL TRAVEL. There is a climactic scene where the human race is put on trial, and the alien super-beings meditate on human history to determine if our species holds more promise or more potential threat. In one of the author’s few missteps in this otherwise engaging book, he has his main character defy and threaten the aliens; in effect, he was confessing that mankind was indeed too dangerous to the civilized galaxy to be allowed to spread. Rereading it with adult eyes, I find the scene to be absurd and incongruous. When an alien superbeing asks you if your race is civilized enough to justify not destroying your whole planet immediately, you say “Yes.”

Had it been me on trial for humanity, I would have called William Wilberforce as my star witness. Even a harsh judge of our world might spare us merely because of this one monumental moral accomplishment.

The movie to praise the memory of the author of this titanic achievement in human felicity is long overdue.   

I will let C.S. Lewis voice my antipathy for this particular bit of T.S. Eliot’s studied ungainliness:

I am so coarse, the things the poets see
Are obstinately invisible to me.
For twenty years I’ve stared my level best
To see if evening—any evening—would suggest
A patient etherized upon a table;
In vain. I simply wasn’t able.

To me each evening looked far more
Like the departure from a silent, yet crowded, shore
Of a ship whose freight was everything, leaving behind
Gracefully, finally, without farewells, marooned mankind.

Now, as I age, I suspect my youthful conclusion, like many conclusions of youth, too harsh: and generously I am willing to admit that there may be some merit in these modern books invisible to me— I am sure persons with severe sexual neuroses, or a dyslexia of the cognitive faculty, for example, might feel a sense of relief reading this bit of pagan glossolalia:

The visible signs of antesatisfaction? An approximate erection: a solicitous adversion: a gradual elevation: a tentative revelation: a silent contemplation. Then? He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation. The visible signs of postsatisfaction? A silent contemplation: a tentative velation: a gradual abasement: a solicitous aversion: a proximate erection.

I see no merit in this passage. It is pure artsy-fartsy phoniness: word-clever, inauthentic, heartless, gross. The same words could be rearranged at random with no loss and no addition of meaning. Ah! But perhaps the Emperor’s clothes are woven of such a fine silk that only those whose artistic sensitivities are exquisitely elevated can perceive them! If so, allow me to wallow in the coarse and common taste— I would rather read about Peter Parker’s awkward teen romance with Kitty Pryde in ULTIMATE SPIDERMAN Annual #1.

On the other hand, certain modern novels, such as Conrad’s HEART OF DARKNESS or Melville’s MOBY DICK strike me as perfectly well-written, about something real, and if a little grim, understandably so. The modern age is a grim age. Indeed, the delight in escapist fantasy is precisely because of the grimness of modernity. The clanking wheels of the factory becomes the din of Mordor, and the pollution becomes the soot of Mount Doom.

So, if Norman Mailer had been widely lauded among the mainstream intelligentsia, I would never have heard of him, and rightly so. I have no interest in books of that kind.

But I had heard of Jack Abbott: because he is an example used in more than one article I have read of the irresponsible and corrupt nature of the intelligentsia, of their pure inhumanity.

I case you have not heard the story, Jack Abbott is a killer who wrote a book in prison describing his life as a murderer: IN THE BELLY OF THE BEAST. The book won the praise of a highly-placed and influential novelist, who arranged his parole. Abbott was feted and celebrated at New York parties by the novelist’s friends. Abbott was in a restaurant, but, upon being told by a waiter the restroom was for staff only, knifed him to death. The waiter, the son in law of the restaurant’s owner, was a Cuban emigrant named Richard Adan.

That is all I knew of the story. I did not know who the novelist was.

Now, a room will look brighter or darker to you if you step into it from out of a dark cellar, or indoors from a bright noon. In this particular case, Mr. Mailer’s record looks dark to me indeed, since it turns out that he was the novelist whose influence sprung Jack Abbott. I suppose if I had been introduced to him from some other angle of his career, my opinion would be different.