The Irish government is to take action over the soldiers who were punished for fighting with the British during World War II, the BBC understands.

Ireland was neutral during the conflict, but around 10% of its armed forces deserted to join the fight against fascism.

On their return many were placed on an official blacklist, banning them from getting jobs, benefits or pensions.

There has been growing pressure on Dublin to issue the men with a pardon…

Yours truly is unaware of any U.S. administration having ever requested so much as even a polite explanation from Dublin about its Soviet-style internal exile-like postwar mistreatment of those Irish soldiers. After all, they had not been fighting only “with the British”; they were, of course, ultimately also supporting the United States. How many American soldiers returned home alive because those Irish soldiers had bravely risked everything in defying their government’s absurd “neutrality”?

Ireland’s not declaring war on Nazi Germany ranks as its biggest blunder of the independence era. Participating would have led not only to a more mature country internationally after the war. Owing to it displaying a willingness to shoulder responsibility for the greater good and to move on from the divisive independence struggle, it could well have allayed fears among Ulster Protestants and helped lead eventually to a united 32 county Ireland.

Once the U.S. entered the war, joining the Allies, even if only diplomatically, would not have placed the country in greater peril. Unlike in 1940-41, by 1942 there was no longer any serious possibility of a Nazi invasion of Ireland. Moreover by 1942 even South American states were breaking diplomatic relations with Berlin.

A source of pride in Brazil today is the well-regarded expeditionary force sent to join in the battle against Nazi troops in Italy; but Ireland cannot — as a country — look back on any national effort like that. Indeed it has spent the years since 1945 supplying excuses for why its “neutrality” was proper. Yet what well could have been, had de Valera taken to the radio on New Year’s Day 1942?:

“Much has changed in the last three years. It is clear now this not a European conflict that Ireland can avoid. It has become a war for humanity.

“The President spoke of America’s gratitude. I reminded him Ireland is a land of heroes. It always stands without question for freedom…”

At a stroke, that would have united the Irish behind the Allies. However, as we know, that did not happen. And as we can see, Ireland continues to have to face the consequences.

…”religion-specific values” have driven the most consequential American political debates for over 200 years. Some make claims about objective moral truths: for example, in the Declaration of Independence (“all men are created equal,” “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”), abolitionism, women’s suffrage, civil rights laws and discussions of the nature and value of marriage. Others make more particular claims: for example, calling for temperance, withdrawal from Vietnam or a higher minimum wage. In the American system, all religious claims are free to contend. Without them, America would be a very different place…

There seems little argument with that summation factually. Yet it predictably also appears some commenters cannot be bothered to read. One example:

My wife and I are sick of religion being shoved down our children’s throats. the biggest threat to our country is from religious zealots taking over our Government.

If you want to believe in an invisible man in the sky go ahead but keep it to yourself.

We will never move forward until we stop believing in fairy tales. I think we’ve proved we’re too immature to possess the technologies we have. We could do so much but we make war instead.

Every time our Pastor in chief speaks about faith I feel excluded. Just another reason to be a card carrying member of Americans United. Thank Dog for them.

None of that actually addresses the issue; but such posturing reductionism is symptomatic. It is unsurprising in its sloppiness and conceit. Despite coming out swinging, he does not see fit even to let on as to from where he has derived the no doubt “non-fairy tales” he passes on to his own earthly offspring.

Similarly this from an Australian comic (and evidently little-known historian and theologian) named Tim Michin, quoted in the Telegraph:

“The appropriate reaction to people who think Jesus is a supernatural being is mild embarrassment, sighing tolerance and patient education.”

Presumably Mr Michin is happy to point out to aborginials that Uluru is also just a rock. And he, and that NYT commenter, may choose similarly also to dismiss the New Testament’s claims of Jesus’s divinity. However discovering they have their children devouring, say, Plato, Rousseau’s Confessions, or Quotations from Chairman Mao, might not exactly endear him to others “educationally” either.

There is the crux. It is always positioned as about the supernatural, when it is actually about ideas. Leaving aside the issue of how anyone knows for sure Jesus was not supernatural, supernaturality is actually not the point. More important is what Jesus had to say.

After all, he did live. The likes of Mr Minchin and that NYT commenter, no doubt accept the absolute historical existence of, and therefore reality, of, for instance, Pericles of Athens (c. 495 BC – 429 BC) and his Funeral Orations? There is essentially similar historical evidence of a Jesus of Nazareth (7–2 BC to AD 30–36), his “Sermon on the Mount” and other teachings.

Meaning one can read the Gospels as assuredly as Thucydides and Plutarch. Afterwards, one is then free to believe what one wants, or not. It is entirely your call.

Or one would think it should be anyway. Because one gleans moral groundings more from the Gospels, embelished perhaps by Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions, rather than from Rousseau’s, does not mean one forfeits the right to engage in public debate. Just as neither does an aboriginal Australian who resents tourists trampling on a site where he believes spirits dwell.

From where anyone derives his philosophical worldview is his own personal business, not any politician’s or any judge’s. Nor, for that matter, some NYT commenter’s. Nor those who consider themselves comedians.

The Lords is perhaps the most potent symbol of a closed society. The Lords as currently constituted is an affront to the principles of openness which underpin a modern democracy. So we will have a Lords Reform Bill in the second session of this parliament.

Mr Clegg would like to see a British “Senate“. However in that choice of name aimed at greater “democracy,” apparently he forgets “senate” comes down to us from one of the most elite-based and “closed” bodies of all time: the ancient Roman “senate”. That senate was, in fact, the Roman equivalent of the pre-1999 (and especially the pre-1832) UK House of Lords.

‘We The People’: NPR Readers Would Ratify Four New Amendments

Just what Americans need. Those “four new” amendments helpfully emanate from the keyboards of readers, some of whom, in all likelihood, cannot even name their state senator. They include one that abolishes the Electoral College that helped give us President Abraham Lincoln… and not a President Stephen Douglas or a President John C. Breckinridge.

Merry Christmas, everybody.

European leaders say 26 out of 27 EU member states have backed a tax and budget pact to tackle the eurozone debt crisis.

Only the UK has said it will not join. Prime Minister David Cameron said he had to protect key British interests, including its financial markets…

And unsurprisingly, there is anger among other EU states. In Germany in particular. As the BBC also points out:

…Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, head of the Germany’s FDP group, part of the European Liberals, goes as far as to say it was “a mistake to let the British into the EU”.

Britain must now renegotiate its relationship with the EU, he said. “Either they [the British] do it on their own initiative, or the EU refounds itself – without Great Britain. Switzerland is a model towards which Britain can turn itself.”

In fact, Switzerland does very well not being in the EU, not using the euro, and in being a member of the EFTA. None of the EU problems or intrusiveness, with most all of the benefits of EU membership. Such for themselves would likely not bother too many in Britain.

London has been central to world finance for as long as there has been something called “world finance.” It still is. Far more than Paris and Berlin.

English is also clearly the primary language of international business. Look around. New York City, Toronto, Sydney, Johannesburg, Singapore, Hong Kong, Mumbai…the list goes on. Even in the likes of Shanghai, Toyko and Rio, if a foreign language is spoken in boardrooms, it is most likely English, not French or German.

English may be widely heard and spoken in Brussels, but that is not because Brussels is a global commercial city. It is a consequence of it being an EU center — and English is also often the lingua franca among Europeans themselves. A Pole and an Italian are far more likely to converse in English, than either speak the other’s native tongue.

Yes, the eurozone’s Republic of Ireland speaks English. (And now the Irish face yet another EU referendum; any new treaty cannot be accepted by an Irish government without a national vote.) However London is no danger of being supplanted by a much smaller Dublin anytime soon. While continental Europeans — Germans and French especially — may not like to face the reality, the absence of a major English-speaking eurozone state, hurts.

So it is actually the eurozone that is on the wider global outs, not English-speaking Britain. Berlin, and Paris, appear to have believed that as part of a wider EU power grab that would well serve themselves, London could be milked to underwrite the eurozone’s debt crisis. It could also finally be forced under the eurozone regulatory thumb as well.

They overreached. Properly, David Cameron said, “No!” Or, as one English observer put it wryly:

I hope Cameron just said “non.”

The media discussion of Britain now being “isolated” is predictable and shortsighted. Yet it is the eurozone that needed Britain much more in this instance than Britain obviously needed the eurozone. Otherwise, Mr Cameron would have signed.

The Stupidity of “Buy American”

In what way are Americans “stupid”? Pardon the longish quote of his article, but it’s necessary. Mr Stossel explains:

One sign of economic ignorance is the faith that “Buy American” is the path to prosperity. My former employer, ABC News, did a week’s worth of stories claiming that “buying American” would put Americans back to work.

I’m glad I don’t work there anymore.

“Buy American” is a dumb idea. It would not only not create prosperity, it would cost jobs and make us all poorer. David R. Henderson, an economist at the Hoover Institution, explained why.

“Almost all economists say it’s nonsense,” he said. “And the reason is: We should buy things where they’re cheapest. That frees up more of our resources to buy other things, and other Americans get jobs producing those things.”

This is what people always forget. Anytime we can use fewer resources and less labor to produce one thing, that leaves more for other things we can’t afford. If we save money buying abroad, we can make and buy other products.

The nonsense of “Buy American” can be seen if you trace out the logic.

“If it’s good to Buy American,” Henderson said, “why isn’t it good to have Buy Alabaman? And if it’s good to have Buy Alabaman, why isn’t it good to have Buy Montgomery, Ala.? And if it’s good to have Buy Montgomery, Ala. …”

You get the idea. You wouldn’t get very good stuff if everything you bought came Montgomery, Ala.

“A huge part of the history of mankind is an increase in the division of labor. And that division of labor goes across national boundaries.“…

…The conglomerates that hire people in poor countries usually pay more than local employers do. In Honduras, many sweatshops pay $3.10 per hour. That’s low to us, but most Hondurans earn less than two dollars an hour.

Since Third World countries do not pursue free-market policies, worker opportunities are often foreclosed by self-serving politicians. So multinational sweatshops are usually people’s best alternative. Humanitarians should target the politicians, not the factories that provide some hope.

Interfering with peaceful exchange is never a good idea. The great 19th-century liberal Richard Cobden was right when he praised free trade for “drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonism of race, and creed, and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace.”

“Never”? Mr Stossel misses the point badly. It is not about attacking “the good” that foreign labor receives in getting $1 an hour higher pay from a U.S. corporation or subcontractor (which are doubtless so concerned about their personal well-beings). Nor is it about anyone pushing complete American autarky.

Rather, it is about Americans’ increasing realization they are being had, and irritation at our policymakers’ decided inability to strike some happy trade medium. There was a time US tariffs kept out lower priced and arguably more quality goods, with the end result that American consumers were ripped off. But now matters have been turned on their heads. Americans are being ripped off for much the opposite reason: hardly inexpensive (that description is important) and poorly made foreign goods, are flooding the country and slowly wiping out domestic manufacturing that might produce better products.

Certainly in the abstract — the world in which economists inhabit — buying at “the cheapest” makes sense. But anyone who shops regularly also knows Americans do not usually receive demonstrably lower prices to compensate for (much) lower wage foreign labor. Thus the American consumer does not keep vastly more in pocket enabling him to buy “other things”.

Lower labor costs are mostly pocketed by the company. Moreover quality shortcomings in too many foreign made items are becoming ever more noticable. Once more to no benefit to US consumers. But, again, they are still paying full hit for those short-lived, poorly-built items.

So where is the great “benefit” exactly? One example: yours truly had a less than 2 year old China-built drinks refrigerator simply give up. When the repairman saw “Made in China” on the rear plate, he groaned. In the end, it turned out to be unfixable. “Buy another one,” he shrugged.

The “throw-away” world strikes again — to someone else’s tidy profit. A piece of kitchen equipment in US households for close a century, one would think a fridge should be produced by now to run for years easily enough regardless where it’s made? But no. That fridge had cost about $300 when purchased originally, and all that can be done is buy another that might well also last for only 2 years; but again at a cost of at least $300. At that level of “quality,” yours truly could end up with 5 refrigerators over 10 years totalling over $1,500.

How exactly is that buying “cheaply” and so saving money to buy something else? That $300 yours truly might just as well have taken into the backyard and burned. Build this writer a refrigerator in the US for $600 that lasts (or is repairable at reasonable cost) for 10 years and yours truly will assuredly pass on getting the “economic benefit” of “lower cost” refrigerator-building foreign labor.

That said, quality can be produced in Chinese factories. Apple is proof enough of that. Poor quality is not often the laborers’ faults: workers produce based on work conditions and with the materials and the training they are given. It is the company that allows poor quality by cutting production corners, supplying poor materials, and not training workers satisfactorily. (When do iPhones become shoddy like China-built refrigerators? We wait.)

In case Mr Stossel has missed this also, Americans have long already had “Buy [fill in the state]” campaigns. Even “Buy [fill in the town]” ones too. They usually revolve around local products to keep local people employed in traditional businesses, especially agricultural.

George Washington was part of the 1769 Virginia boycott of British imports. Washington was also definitely not opposed to foreign trade in principle. (He famously enjoyed his Madeira.) But he came to see strong American domestic manufacturing as a key to American independence. Michael and Jana Novak:

…he did follow closely the ban on importing British goods (which he judged was good policy for the Americans and for the local economy)…

Today that same spirit exists symbolically at Mount Vernon. You cannot buy a “Made in China” George Washington mug: the gift shop sells only USA produced ones. However, presumably the fingerwagging Mr Stossel would also dismiss the Father of Our Country as “stupid” and “ignorant”.

True, nowadays America no longer deals with a monopolistic colonial power. Well, not yet anyway. But what Americans are finding, though, is that buying anything produced in the US is becoming ever more difficult, and often at great cost to Americans in quality and domestic jobs.

One cannot at times even pay “lots” for the privilege of “Made in the USA”. There is often simply no choice available to the point that off-shoring has become almost monopolistic in itself. High priced junk is shoved down our throats.

That is what is now termed “peaceful exchange”? And Mr Stossel thinks it is ALWAYS wonderful. Although he might have serious reservations about that had he bothered to consider how he himself benefits in his business: TV broadcasting.

As he reminds us in his opener, after a long career at ABC Mr Stossel now toils for Fox Business. Yet what if Americans are unimpressed with him? Do they have foreign choices? Meaning surely by now ALL TV channels broadcasting abroad are viewable in the US?

For instance maybe many Americans are keen instead to see Gráinne smiling in the mornings? But Britain’s ITV legally cannot — no foreign broadcaster can — currently broadcast inside the US; and if it were even to want to try to, it would have to jump numerous legal barriers first. So Mr Stossel’s US TV career benefits quite handsomely from US TV protectionism that keeps out foreign competition.

In contrast, US domestic “widget” manufacturers, Mr Stossel lectures, must never benefit from anything akin to what is granted his TV business. To encourage domestic manufacturing would be, we are informed, to deny us all the benefits of “the lowest prices” and the “uniting” us all more closely in a truly “global world”. However to deny American consumers the ability to watch every TV channel on the planet — and perhaps put Mr Stossel out of a job in the process of encouraging similar “free trade” in broadcasting — is, it appears, most definitely something else.

Years ago, yours truly recalls hearing a comment about lawyers and “free trade”. It seems apt here. It vaguely had to do with the price of legal services in the US vs those abroad.

If Americans conducted domestic legal services with the same “free trade” mentality as manufacturing, no doubt there would now also be call centers in India dispensing legal advice to Americans and presiding at US trials by video-links for $6 an hour. American consumers, though, curiously are not given that trading “choice”. Yet in keeping costs for US lawyering artificially high through reserving legal jobs for high-paid US resident lawyers only, are we not by Mr Stossel’s “free trade” lights forcing desperately poor and eager to work lawyers abroad — who could work for much less per hour than do American lawyers — into lives of despair and want?

Interesting for a moment also to ponder on how if US lawyers faced foreign competition in their field akin to that faced by domestic manufacturers, no doubt the “free trade” tune sung by most lawyers in Congress would change overnight. But lower-labor cost foreign competition to high-priced US domestic legal services will not happen ever. We know why: US lawyers drafts the laws, after all.

Much like it being hard to imagine anytime soon that Americans will be able at their whim to watch any TV channel and not merely those anointed by regulators to operate inside the US. Likely Mr Stossel, and his US domestically insulated from foreign TV competition Fox Business, are quite relieved about that fact too. Unlike millions of other Americans this Thanksgiving, smug Mr Stossel and his US employer have indeed much to be thankful for.

…The English translation of the Roman Missal will also include updated translations of existing prayers, including some of the well-known responses and acclamations of the people…

The rationale:

…The entire Church in the United States has been blessed with this opportunity to deepen its understanding of the Sacred Liturgy, and to appreciate its meaning and importance in our lives…

That change has already taken place in England. Having been through a Mass there in August which rolled out the new translation, the “updated translation’s” phraseology struck yours truly as very awkward to modern English language ears and tongues. One example of change, shared in a Q & A by the USCCB:

Q: In the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, why has “one in being with the Father” been changed to “consubstantial with the Father?”

A: The new translation is more in keeping with the ancient Latin text of the Creed and a more accurate translation.

“Accurate translation”? Who says “consubstantial” in 21st century native English-speaking conversation? Or even regularly writes that word? It is not even archaic: it has never been commonplace.

Any 1st year language student learns quickly “literal” translation is always dangerous. Often it is just wrong. “Je t’aime!” translated literally is “I you love!” in English. Those are English words yes, but that’s not a “translation” of the meaning, which is, of course “I love you”.

Chasing the too literal is a major pitfall for translators. They know that you cannot stray too far from an original; but you cannot also try so hard to stay too close to an original so as to make what is translated unreadable or unsayable in the tongue into which it is being translated. That is one of the very difficult things in translating poetry or musical lyrics, where cadence is vital. Some good balance must be struck.

If we truly crave “literal” in the English language Mass, that begs this question: historians tell us Jesus did not preach in Latin, or even in Greek. He spoke Aramaic. So one might as well also ask why is Latin the Mass basis anyway?

Because Latin was, in its era, 2,000 years ago, the venacular for the Mediterranean west of Greece and Egypt. However it would seem self-evident one cannot speak English today as one did Latin in AD 300. Just as you cannot speak French or Spanish as you do English.

With Latin becoming near extinct as a commonly spoken language, the Roman Catholic Church moved away from the Latin Mass with Vatican II. But suddenly, now, in trying to translate English too literally from the Latin, it is falling into pushing what borders on English gobbledygook. That is even worse.

A Latin Mass is wonderful. So is an English Mass. But the Vatican seems not to grasp there is no such language as Latinenglish.

We are also told there is a desire to get priests “to chant” more of the Mass. As if, with an aging priesthood, we were going to have elderly priests now try to chant when sometimes they have trouble even breathing? Whatever next? Having priests return to saying Mass with their backs to the congregations — as was also done for nearly 2,000 years?

Obviously trying to prepare celebrants for what is coming, a deacon in a local U.S. parish wrote this in a recent church newsletter:

The translation used in the new Roman Missal is more faithful to the old Latin translation. Rome’s concerns was that since third world counties (sic) don’t have the capability of translating from Latin, they use the English translation to develop the prayers of the Mass in their language. Therefore the English translation should be more word-for-word like the Latin…

Essentially, native English speakers will have to put up with a translation that could have been done by Google, in order to try to confuse the likes of non-native English-speaking African Christians even more.

For how does it actually help a Latin-less, native English speaker reflect on any deeper meaning, when he does not even understand what he is rote repeating? More important, how does it assist Latin-less, non-native English-speaking Africans translate the new English Mass into their tongues if the English Mass overnight becomes bizarre? In simple terms, they know how to translate “of one being” from English. Is there a “literal” word for, “consubstantial” in, say, Mashona?

English-speaking Catholics, of course, will memorize as instructed. Yet with all the other troubles the Church has in the English-speaking “First World” — unresolved alienation due to the sex abuse scandals, an increasing shortage of priests, an aging clergy, falling church attendances — it would seem the last thing the Church should be doing is trying to make the Mass itself less accessible to the modern ear. It will be especially odd to non-Catholics, who if they now venture into a Mass perhaps thinking Catholicism intriguing, may find what is being said so obscure, and even unintelligible (again), that they may well be put off.

Or maybe that is actually the goal? Perhaps the Church is trying to set itself apart even more so from Protestant demoninations — like Anglicans — which have become so “relaxed” as to give the impression they just make things up as they go along? If so, return to Latin entirely and just be done with it.

Greece, Ireland, Portugal – and now it’s Italy that will almost certainly need a bailout…

…Northern Italy is generally very rich and in temperament northern European, unlike the south, where poverty is widespread and corruption endemic…

…Europe is still divided between its Germanic north and Latin south, or alternatively between its Protestant and Catholic regions – it depends whether one views ethnicity or religion as more important, or if you view one as a reflection of the other.

Either way, not a single Protestant or Germanic EU country has so far needed a bailout…

…This is not to argue that northern Europe is better than southern, for in many, many ways Italian, Greek and Spanish societies are far more pleasant than ours: but it goes to illustrate how difficult it is to fix different national cultures into one political and economic structure…

Certainly pulling together diverse economies has always been very problematic. Still Ed’s religious boundaries didn’t seem quite to jibe with modern European social reality. So yours truly tweeted him:

Understand your general gist. But remember Germany’s about 1/3 Catholic. And Greece most definitely is NOT a Catholic land.

Ed is one of those journalists you feel you should actually be gracious to because he is gracious back. Meaning if you write calmly and sanely, he actually responds. Within minutes he had returned the tweet, clarifying that which yours truly had suspected was his underlying point anyway:

as i reply below its more a south/north divide than religion (headline notwithstanding). Catholic Bavaria is v. rich indeed

He added also amidst his post’s comments:

its not really Catholicism that im talking about – the headline is just to grab your attention, rather the divide between southern and northern Europe

That may be so. What is also the case is that any piece that has commenters holding forth on the likes of Weber and the Hapsburgs deserves to be read. We certainly have not so far been treated anything approaching such… in the Republican presidential debates.

__________

Even if inadvertently, the piece demonstrated that the long-held stereotype of the “corrupt” and “lazy” Catholic vs. the “dutiful” and “industrious” Protestant clearly remains. Proof enough of that is seen among the commenters arguing the issue. Which led yours truly to thinking more generally about that stereotype and tying it to the debt issue.

We should step back first and consider “the divide” between “northern and southern” Europe. True, no “northern” country has yet received a “bail out.” Yet is there still as much of a “divide” as we think there is?

Southern Europe west of Greece is predominantly Catholic. However Protestant Europe is actually a rather small place geographically. It is Great Britain (and a majority of Northern Ireland), northern and eastern Germany, most of Holland, parts of Belgium and Switzerland, and relatively thinly populated Scandinavia.

Importantly, the Catholic South is no longer nearly as Catholic-clerical dominated as it was before the introduction of socialism into governments in the 1930s. That is key: everywhere in Europe, state has essentially replaced church — whether Protestant or Catholic. France’s 1936 Popular Front was not “Catholic”: it was dominated by non-clerical leftists, headed by a socialist, and was supported even by the communists. Neither was Spain’s 1936-1939 similar “Popular Front” government, which was overthrown by Franco’s military revolt — a coup that was supported at the time by most of the country’s Roman Catholic clergy.

Prior to those 1930s, those in Catholic countries labored with few protections. There was no state unemployment support worth the name. If you couldn’t work, you simply didn’t eat.

Catholicism did not promise earthly riches, but socialism promised some earthly relief. In France that included unemployment coverage, a 40 hr week (and time and 1/4 for overtime); a weekend; 2 weeks’ paid vacation; collective bargaining; and a fight against deflation. Above all, the mass of the population got a government that professed not merely to worry about the budget, but was insistent on government’s role including overseeing the economic well-being of the country overall.

1930s European societies were much more stratified, and its industrial and governing elites much more deeply entrenched, than those in the U.S. That made socialism far more attractive to working class and lower middle class Europeans than it ever was in the U.S. A “moderate reformer” like an FDR and his “New Deal” would have made little headway in Europe. Indeed the “New Deal”, while denounced as “revolutionary” and “socialist” by most U.S. Republicans, was often mistrusted by American (actual) socialists and communists who felt it was not nearly radical enough.

Much the same inequality and want that was found in France and Spain also existed in Protestant Britain and mostly Protestant Germany. Protestant Scandinavia — Norway, Sweden and Denmark — was also for centuries one of the most impoverished parts of the continent. So, unsurprisingly, socialism in all also had begun to make inroads in governments in the 1930s.

In 2011 those same Protestant countries (if they can even be termed “religious” any longer) are not demonstrably more sound deficit-wise than predominantly Catholic states: it is merely a question of degree. Britain is mired in debt. Even Germany has its problems (with Germany’s being masked mostly by the size of its economy currently keeping the debt percentage smaller than elsewhere). In Business Week, the soon to be new Danish prime minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, had, just before her party triumphed in the 2011 elections, admitted:

“Of course we have to address the deficit if we win,” she said…

Catholic France has been a major part of current “bailing out” of other Catholic countries. “Northern” European Catholic Poland has not suffered nearly the economic distress as other parts of the continent — Protestant or Catholic. If northern Italy is “rich” while Sicily is poorer and far more state dependent, both areas are certainly “Catholic”. So is definitely unpoor Austria. And while Germany is now 2/3 Protestant, it was nearly 50% Catholic West Germany (1945-1990) that had during the Cold War become “rich”, while it was the mostly Protestant Soviet bloc East that had been the most state dependent (and kept so by the communists, of course). Regionally within the Protestant UK, increasingly devolved, mostly Protestant Scotland — home to some of the most stereotypically “frugal” of all: the Scots — remains, as it has long been, one of the most state-dependent and poorer local economies in northern Europe. Scotland is in many ways as “poor” compared to “rich” southern England, as Catholic Sicily is compared to the Catholic Italian north, or as eastern Protestant Germany is today to western Catholic Germany in the united Germany.

It is all enough to make one’s head spin. We feel there must be a “north-south” religious divide between “rich” and “poor” Europeans. If so, it is blurred to the point now that it is hard to know where it really is.

__________

Cutting state spending (or borrowing, depending naturally on one’s point of view) dramatically was a key plank of 1930s conservative governments — be they in Catholic or in Protestant lands. In the U.S., even FDR initially pledged “balanced budgets” as the means out of the Depression.

We seem somehow sure of that as a “magic bullet” again in 2011. On November 8, Sen Jim DeMint (R-SC), published a piece in the National Review Online. He tweeted it also, flat out stating:

We’re still not cutting spending http://t.co/JrY5qyus

Reading his piece, yours truly could only wonder if the Senator had ever read a history book? That led to a couple of gentle tweets back:

Ok, a majority’s dumb. Help them out. Name a country since 1865 that has deflated itself out of debt?: http://t.co/asPVaCBe

And next, immediately after:

We’re 2 years beyond grandstanding. Stop telling us about the end of our noses. Give us successful economic examples to emulate.

Meaning we are now well-past outlining “the problem”: it is time for solutions. To offer those, an example or two might certainly help convert the “dumb majority.” Assuming there are any examples out there, that is.

Yours truly did not expect a response. But some public one from someone of some prominence addressing the issue, seems called for by now. Reuters, November 15:

…a sharp rise in French borrowing costs raised fears that the two-year debt crisis may spread to the euro zone’s second biggest economy…

…Germany and France posted solid growth in the third quarter, statistics released on Tuesday showed, but euro zone nations on the front line of the debt crisis fared much worse and analysts expect bleaker times ahead in the core economies.

“The German economy has lost its immunity,” said Carsten Brzeski of ING, a Dutch bank. “With the latest stage of the sovereign debt crisis, today’s numbers are as good as it gets for the German economy.”

As the euro zone’s largest economy and growth engine for the past two years, any hiccups in the coming business quarters in Germany would have wider effects in the region…

We’ve seen this before. Borrowing invariably spikes as economies slow and unemployment upticks, because tax revenues fall off — thus combining to make state debt even bigger. As governments then try to cut outlays to tackle the growing debt, economies weaken further as unemployment then rises more, and tax revenues then fall off still more. With less money coming in yet again, government borrowing rises even more, so governments react by trying to cut still more spending. The vicious downward spiral embeds itself.

Breaking that cycle is vital. But how ultimately to get the economic trains back on the tracks appears beyond nearly all in governments everywhere. It is increasingly feeling so like the 1930s must have felt.

…My clients are the children; my clients are the next generation.  They do not know what promises and bonds I undertook when I ordered the armies of the United States to the soil of France, but I know, and I intend to redeem my pledges to the children; they shall not be sent upon a similar errand.

Again and again, my fellow citizens, mothers who lost their sons in France have come to me and, taking my hand, have shed tears upon it not only, but they have added, “God bless you, Mr. President!”  Why, my fellow citizens, should they pray God to bless me?

I advised the Congress of the United States to create the situation that led to the death of their sons.  I ordered their sons overseas.  I consented to their sons being put in the most difficult parts of the battle line, where death was certain, as in the impenetrable difficulties of the forest of Argonne.

Why should they weep upon my hand and call down the blessings of God upon me?  Because they believe that their boys died for something that vastly transcends any of the immediate and palpable objects of the war.  They believe and they rightly believe, that their sons saved the liberty of the world.

They believe that wrapped up with the liberty of the world is the continuous protection of that liberty by the concerted powers of all civilized people.  They believe that this sacrifice was made in order that other sons should not be called upon for a similar gift-the gift of life, the gift of all that died – and if we did not see this thing through if we fulfilled the dearest present wish of Germany and now dissociated ourselves from those alongside whom we fought in the world, would not something of the halo go away from the gun over the mantelpiece, or the sword?  Would not the old uniform lose something of its significance?

These men were crusaders.  They were not going forth to prove the might of the United States.  They were going forth to prove the might of justice and right, and all the world accepted them as crusaders, and their transcendent achievement has made all the world believe in America as it believes in no other nation organized in the modern world.

There seem to me to stand between us and the rejection or qualification of this treaty the serried ranks of those boys in khaki, not only these boys who came home, hut those dear ghosts that still deploy upon the fields of France.

My friends, on last Decoration day I went to a beautiful hillside near Paris, where was located the cemetery of Suresnes, a cemetery given over to the burial of the American dead.  Behind me all the slopes was rank upon rank of living American soldiers, and lying before me upon the levels of the plain was rank upon rank of departed American soldiers.

Right by the side of the stand where I spoke there was a little group of French women who had adopted those graves, had made themselves mothers of those dear ghosts by putting flowers every day upon those graves, taking them as their own sons, their own beloved, because they had died in the same cause-France was free and the world was free because America had come!…

It was his last major public speech. On October 2, exhausted, Wilson suffered a stroke.

Those American dead he had walked among, resting forever in that cemetery at Suresnes:

Casualties in Suresnes American Cemetery
2508 records found, AAS PETER A. to ZONA ORZAIO

Today is Veteran’s Day once more. Its observance stems from it being the date of the World War I armistice — which took place at 11 AM, on this the 11th day, of the 11th month (of 1918). So — while of course remembering all veterans — let’s also take a moment and specifically recall today also as the last day of the First World War.

America’s ‘Oh Sh*t!’ Moment

Or maybe it means to “talk down” to that audience? “Popular” does not have to be poor history; but as we move into his article we discover its basic premise is so sloppy as to be embarrassing. Surely some grad student must have been press-ganged to “ghost” write this in a hurry? Yours truly had to re-read it several times, in disbelief that anyone of his purported historical gravitas could have composed something so pedestrian, and even at times, just wrongheaded:

Don’t call me a “declinist.” I really don’t believe the United States—or Western civilization, more generally—is in some kind of gradual, inexorable decline.

But that’s not because I am one of those incorrigible optimists who agree with Winston Churchill that the United States will always do the right thing, albeit when all other possibilities have been exhausted.

In my view, civilizations don’t rise, fall, and then gently decline, as inevitably and predictably as the four seasons or the seven ages of man. History isn’t one smooth, parabolic curve after another. Its shape is more like an exponentially steepening slope that quite suddenly drops off like a cliff.

If you don’t know what I mean, pay a visit to Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Incas. In 1530 the Incas were the masters of all they surveyed from the heights of the Peruvian Andes. Within less than a decade, foreign invaders with horses, gunpowder, and lethal diseases had smashed their empire to smithereens. Today tourists gawp at the ruins that remain.

It is believed Machu Picchu was abandoned by the Incas around 1570 — some 40 years after Pizarro and the Spaniards invaded the region. So even a first-year, pre-Columbian history student knows full-well that paragraph is not immediate cause and effect. Pizarro did not capture it, destroy it, and then dance triumphantly among those ruins at which modern tourists now gawp.

It fell into ruins because it was abandoned and forgotten. The conquistador never knew the remote place even existed. No one outside of those very local did — including most of the Incas themselves — until a century ago, when those ruins were found by outsiders.

The Incas’ imperial government was overthrown and the population devastated by disease and enslavement. Yet today many Peruvians still don’t speak Spanish at all; and Inca ways are subtly woven throughout Peruvian society. The Incas were definitely conquered and changed in innumerable ways; and they have themselves also changed; but they have not vanished.

Still, that opening salvo from Ferguson might be deemed arguable and even plausible on its own. The piece’s real weakness is reinforced through Ferguson’s insistently piling on in that vein. Meaning it is when he ventures down paths much more familiar and tries to build the same case, that his argument most noticably comes apart:

The notion that civilizations don’t decline but collapse inspired the anthropologist Jared Diamond’s 2005 book, Collapse. But Diamond focused, fashionably, on man-made environmental disasters as the causes of collapse. As a historian, I take a broader view. My point is that when you look back on the history of past civilizations, a striking feature is the speed with which most of them collapsed, regardless of the cause.

The Roman Empire didn’t decline and fall sedately, as historians used to claim. It collapsed within a few decades in the early fifth century, tipped over the edge of chaos by barbarian invaders and internal divisions. In the space of a generation, the vast imperial metropolis of Rome fell into disrepair, the aqueducts broken, the splendid marketplaces deserted.

Historians did not “used to claim” Rome as a civilization declined and fell “sedately”. Rather they felt the evidence demonstrated, and does still, that its imperial government formally “fell” when the last nominal Western emperor (a child) was deposed in AD 476. The senate had by then also ceased to meet, and what had been the imperial center until Constantine had shifted it away to his “New Rome” in AD 330, finally became the preserve of the Church as centuries-old Roman state institutions faded out.

Edward Gibbon — whose “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” remains the gold standard against which Roman historians are still measured — generally pointed an accusing finger at “soft” Christianity (a largely internal ideology) first and foremost, for undermining the toughness of the Roman character and making it less capable of coping with barbarian invasions. Indeed Christianity had already changed Rome a century and a half before the Western half of the imperial government fell. And Rome already had changed barbarians who had invaded and settled before AD 476. In 378 an Eastern Roman emperor was killed and “40,000″ Roman, often by then Christian legionnaires, were slaughtered by the increasingly Christian Goths at Adrianople. Three generations later, in 451, a Western “Roman” Christian army Gaius Julius Caesar would barely have recognized tactically, religiously and ethnically — composed as it was mostly of Goths — in turn broke the invading Huns.

Moreover Ferguson overlooks that Gibbon viewed “Roman civilization” as ending not in AD 476, but in AD 1453. In the Eastern half of the empire, “imperial Rome” — Byzantium — existed until the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks. At that point, that “Roman government” also “collapsed”. Yet in the subsequent Ottoman Empire, its capital at Constantinople, much that had been Byzantium culturally survived; and it still does in modern Turkey. Byzantium may have changed the Turks as much as it was changed by the Turks.

Concurrently Western Rome persisted culturally through Charlemagne and later the “Holy Roman Empire”, and remains a major element of the West in the present. Today the Roman civilization we think of — togas, gladiators, Ben Hur and so forth — is with us still in the West within layers of our cultural essentials. It imbues our religions, languages, food, drink, and local cultures. It is also in our governments, amidst law codes, Latin, constitutions, and with its “capitols” and “senators” and so much more.

Quickly, Ferguson next takes us to China:

The Ming dynasty’s rule in China also fell apart with extraordinary speed in the mid–17th century, succumbing to internal strife and external invasion. Again, the transition from equipoise to anarchy took little more than a decade.

But once again, had Chinese civilization “fallen off a cliff”? Of course not. A dynasty — a government — is not a civilization.

A more recent and familiar example of precipitous decline is, of course, the collapse of the Soviet Union. And, if you still doubt that collapse comes suddenly, just think of how the postcolonial dictatorships of North Africa and the Middle East imploded this year. Twelve months ago, Messrs. Ben Ali, Mubarak, and Gaddafi seemed secure in their gaudy palaces. Here yesterday, gone today.

Likewise the more recent “fall” of the Soviet Union. To argue that the USSR as a political entity “collapsed” is absolutely true: that government was written out of existence in hours. Yet is “Russian civilization” gone? Is even the pervasive ongoing influence of Soviet institutions and outlook no more? Certainly not.

North Africa is among the oldest settled areas in the world. On it is grafted its “influencers”, including Islam, after it had already absorbed Christianity and a variety of invaders and cultures over the previous 3,000 years. They, in sum, help make up today’s Libyans, Tunisians and Egyptians. Citing a quickie list of its recent fallen state strongmen as evidence of civilizational “here yesterday, gone today” is so myopic from a serious historian, it is laughable.

What all these collapsed powers have in common is that the complex social systems that underpinned them suddenly ceased to function. One minute rulers had legitimacy in the eyes of their people; the next they didn’t…

If dynasties and governments falling are to be equated with civilizations collapsing, “Greek civilization” would have fallen many times over since 500 BC. Based on Ferguson’s Inca opener, “French civilization” must have also “collapsed” at least 3 times since 1814 — based on France’s conquests by invading foreigners in 1814, 1870 and 1940. And following the annihilation of millions of Germans through war and disease, and the destruction of its Third Reich “dynasty” in 1945, how is there still a “German civilization?”

Because civilizations’ boundaries are never as clearcut as narrative demands and invariably makes them out to be. The Vikings infamously wreaked havoc on western Europe in the Middle Ages. But, as they made their rampaging way along the coasts, many of the raiders found Frankish women marriageable. In becoming Christians, intermarrying and building permanent homes, those Scandinavian seafarers, who had been the scourge of the North Sea waters, changed. That slow evolution’s outcome is seen now in many of the surnames of today’s Norman French.

Civilizations never stand still: they are ever-changing, ever-blending, ever-evolving. The US is a vastly different society in 2011 than it was in 1789. Many of the Founding Fathers — John Jay pops immediately to mind — would likely be appalled at the demographic and religious evolution of the US, particularly at the huge increase in Roman Catholics (and Catholic Spanish-speakers), as well as in Jews, and the arrival of numbers of “Mohammedans”.

Yet in that “universalism” America is much like ancient Rome. By the 5th century, emperors who may never have set foot in Rome before assuming the purple, and followed the Gospel of one Jesus Christ, a Jew who had been born in Judea during Augustus’s reign, were sitting on the very throne (actually, by then, two of them) Augustus had created. If Augustus could have seen his Rome in AD 400, he would have been utterly astounded.

Much as today the US has Barack Obama as president. He is plainly in so many ways so unlike John Adams, yet now serving as US chief executive in the very same White House in which Adams sat. Adams would have found Obama — a man born in a Pacific island state called Hawaii, the son of a Muslim from British east Africa, married briefly to a white American woman from a state called Kansas (to say nothing of the electorate in 2008 being more than half female) — being in office incredible.

The rest of Ferguson’s article includes some interesting facts and statistics offered up in isolation, some of which may be telling, or maybe not. The bottom line is the piece never shakes off its initial structural mess. Ferguson opens by confusing governments “falling” with civilizations “falling”, and he then runs “off a cliff”.

One would think a highly esteemed historian would, in a popular article, at least try to enlighten readers instead of confusing them. Clarity is precisely something of which we are all in desperate need. We can do with much LESS of the potboiler stuff.

Poor economies may mean the collapse of governments. They might even lead to the violent overthrow of them. But civilizations tend to persist a lot longer than defeat in a war or two or three, to say nothing of merely a recession or a depression:

…the streets were filling with the unemployed and homeless; and, of course, the less they consumed, the weaker the demand and the more anemic the economy. Men of intelligence and goodwill were utterly puzzled: everything they tried turned out to be useless or, on occasion, actually harmful; and so the component parts of the nation shrank in upon themselves…

…Even the budget defied reason: successive finance ministers zealously cut expenditures, but the deficit kept ballooning… Statesmen whose best efforts were utter failures, theoreticians whose theories kept being dispproved, economists who saw with horror the economy behave in ways they had been taught were impossible, all looked about them in anguish, while the people, whom they were supposed to lead, blamed all impartially…

Does that, observed about the France of 1935 by historian Olivier Bernier in 1993, sound rather familiar to us now? It could also have been written in many respects of the US of that same era. Despite that economic downturn, and the “falling” of the presidency of Herbert Hoover in 1932, is American civilization still with us today? And if President Obama and the entire House of Representatives and 1/3rd of the Senate, are voted out of office in 2012, does that mark an American “collapse”?

In contrast, late 1920s prosperity was built on sand. Following WWI, the US underwrote the debts of others (Germany in particular). Eventually, that spur ran out, and we ended up in the Great Depression.

Post-WWII prosperity was fuelled similarly. True, it seemed to reach more Americans than that of the 1920s; but WWII had also been far more devastating to the economies of Europe and Asia than was WWI. The US was for a generation essentially the only economic game in town.

Wars to generate prosperity are not good ideas. But new immigrants bring jobs, buying power, and ideas in peacetime. The notion that mostly immigrants “suck” from the “native” populace is a fallacy; if allowed to, the better off in particular bring in money that was not there previously. The Albany Times-Union:

Sen. Chuck Schumer is proposing a bill that would grant three-year residential visas to foreign nationals who buy homes in the United States.

The Democratic New York senator describes his bill, which is co-sponsored by Sen. Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah, as a way to help the sluggish housing market by boosting demand. Foreign nationals would have to spend at least $500,000 on residential real estate, including at least $250,000 for a primary residence.

“Our housing market will never begin a true recovery as long as our housing stock so greatly exceeds demand,” Schumer said, adding that the effort “won’t cost the government a nickel.”…

His suggestion has been a target for much derision. One not unreasonable criticism has been that it will “re-inflate” house prices in desirable areas, such as Long Island. Another is:

“If the Schumer-Lee bill becomes law, the easiest way for a foreigner to live in America will be to plunk down $500,000 for a piece of property,” said former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich in an essay posted on his website.

Yet so what? Secretary Reich is apparently unaware that one already can “buy” a US residential visa (EB-5 visa) through investing in a new US company to the tune of at least $500,000. What is the difference between doing that and what we did — build a home and in doing so contribute to a local economy?

My English wife and I constructed a house in upstate NY between 2008-2010. In the process we bought the plot, did business with the home manufacturing company that milled the house, paid suppliers who provided all of the house internals — everything from garage doors to the dishwasher to (yes, really) solar panels — and employed the building company that constructed it. For that builder alone (a small business, too), we helped contribute to the livelihoods of probably at least some two dozen men and women for 2 years.

Separate from sales taxes, local government charged us for a building permit. And a fireplace permit. And there were various other permits than we now can barely recall.

We also saw some money vanish unexpectedly when one (fortunately smallish) sub-contractor filed for, and a federal judge granted him, bankruptcy. Why? We had had no clue when we had hired him. We were shocked to discover some 90% of his — and his wife’s — creditors were doctors, hospitals and otherwise medical related. (Some demand the US should NEVER have a healthcare “public option” because that is “socialism”? Well, we do already: it is called bankruptcy court. Which is one of the reasons I am a supporter of a true US public option. Unless you have been stung out of the blue like that by our dysfunctional healthcare “system”, you don’t know how it feels.)

The house is finished. We now pay $3,000 a year in school tax to a district that has about 500 students and roughly an 11-1 student-teacher ratio. We have no children.

We now pay also about $3,000 a year in property taxes. We are also told there is no way localities can possibly cope without 5, 6, 8, 15% increases annually. Hmm. We also have no obvious municipal services other than road maintenance. We have no town water (our own well), no town sewage (our own septic), no town garbage collection (a private company), volunteer firefighters, volunteer ambulances, and the hospital is some 40 miles away — for which, of course, unless you are very poor, or over age 65 (then you get a “public option”), you must cough up cash or produce private insurance … or you choose the “bankruptcy option” .

When you total up all the hands picking your pockets in return for little, you just have to laugh. In comparison, in the UK, taxes are not light either. But at least one feels one gets something — like a national health service — in return for them.

And we Americans tolerate this? In the US, one unreasonably can indeed be left wondering: what am I really getting in return for my taxes? It is often honestly very hard to say. To see to it there are enough highly-paid police so they have the time to concoct undercover stings on businesses which might sell beer to a 20 year old “child”? To enjoy the privilege of providing teachers, town and county employees with their health cover?

Capitalism indeed. Churches and civic groups pass the hat for cash to help Irene hurricane victims. They have to. The Federal government makes a big splash and flies in the great and the good in the hours after the destruction, but when the cameras have left reduces storm victims to jumping bureaucratic hurdles a mile high just to qualify for LOANS to try repair their lives.

The US is in its way actually worse than socialist: you pretty much work for a state which taxes rapaciously, but you don’t even get back in return some sense of personal security.

High taxes for few services are bad enough. Piling on is the attitude of the likes of huge private companies such as UnitedHealth Group. The largest private health insurer in New York broadcasts unabashedly in its job advertisements on its own web site (near the bottom of each, under “Additional Job Detail Information”) that it will NOT employ non-US citizens.

You mean my wife? She who has employed so many Americans? She who pays so much to endless layers of US officialdom for very little in return? UnitedHealth would, no doubt, be more than happy though to take our money if we were stupid enough ever to buy any of its products. It is also more than willing to take government contracts that are part-financed through taxes paid by people it would never employ.

The f-cking nerve. (Regular visitors know I never use such harsh language lightly.) There we were, for years lectured from both sides of the political aisle that the true problem is ILLEGAL immigration? Huh. Legal immigrants have the right to reside in the U.S. and must work to support themselves and their famillies. Yet it is perfectly legal now to put on the web a contemporary version of a “No Irish Need Apply” sign?

Disgraceful. Oh, we can raise some taxes on the rich, but the US desperately requires a huge injection of cash and entrepreneurs. Robert Reich may not realize it, but that can come now only from well-asseted non-citizens. We had better wake up to that fact.

Some insist if we build walls and other barriers and kept out foreigners, all will be well. We can try it. But if we do, one suspects the only alternative then open to us is somehow to contrive to get someone out there to start WWIII — which might enable a return to US prosperity akin to that of 1940-1970.

Meaning we can try to trick China into getting its aircraft carriers finished in a hurry and then attack Pearl Harbor. Or we must allow in more legal immigrants. If we cannot manage one or the other, the US seems unlikely to come out of this economic funk for decades — if it ever fully does.