Commentary Magazine

Posts For: September 5, 2007

On Bayard Rustin

| @jkirchick 09.05.2007 - 6:06 PM

Last Friday, I had a short essay at The New Republic Online discussing the legacy of Bayard Rustin, the 20th anniversary of whose death was August 24th. Rustin was a towering figure among American liberals, even though some could no longer recognize him as one of their own at the time of his death in 1987. Rustin, who got his start in politics as a Quaker pacifist, ended up as a frequent contributor to COMMENTARY, a founding board member of the pro-Scoop Jackson/anti-McGovernite Coalition for a Democratic Majority and the Committee on the Present Danger, and as Chairman of the Executive Committee of Freedom House. All of these organization had incurred the disfavor and wrath of large segments of the American Left, because of their unabashedly anti-Communist, pro-democratization policies and aims.

Rustin was also the most prominent African-American defender of the state of Israel (another casus belli for much of the American Left), having founded the Black American Israel Support Committee (BASIC) in 1975, as a response to the United Nations’ resolution equating Zionism to racism and to the then-rising tide of black anti-Semitism. In honor of Rustin, COMMENTARY has made available some of his most trenchant essays written in its pages.

From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement—February, 1965.

Written after the congressional passage of major civil rights legislation, this article was a call to African-Americans to involve themselves in political organizing. Rustin would soon become a target of the Black Panthers and other radicals for arguing against black nationalism.

The “Watts Manifesto” & The McCone Report—March, 1966.

In this essay, Rustin analyzes the roots of black anger that led to the Watts riots of 1965.

The War Against Zimbabwe—July, 1979.

In April of 1979, Rustin was part of a Freedom House delegation to monitor elections in Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. This is the most thorough and convincing attack on the Carter administration’s policies towards this southern African state and its feckless dealings with communist-sponsored movements more generally, and delivers a prescient warning against the horrors of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. Rustin was one of the very few black American leaders to speak out against a transition to power that put Mugabe in control.

Topics: , , , , , , ,

Preventative Care . . . or Else

09.05.2007 - 4:54 PM

One of the most illuminating moments of the 2008 presidential race came this past Sunday. Speaking to an audience in Iowa, John Edwards said that under his proposed universal health care plan, Americans would be required to go to the doctor regularly for preventative exams:

It requires that everybody get preventive care. If you are going to be in the system, you can’t choose not to go to the doctor for twenty years. You have to go in and be checked and make sure that you are OK.

This raises some obvious practical questions: What’s the penalty for choosing not to go to the doctor? Will the government keep records of people’s doctor visits? Are you also required to comply with doctor’s advice about diet and exercise? But it also offers some political and philosophical insight into the long, bitter argument over health care.

Politically, it highlights the extent to which the Democrats have begun to make themselves vulnerable on health care by overreaching. In part because Republicans have been absent from the debate, Democrats have convinced themselves in recent years that the public wants a universal, single-payer system. Their internal debate has been about whether the government should merely fund or actually own and run that system.

This is basically nuts. Examined carefully, public concerns about health care do not amount to a rejection of America’s private health insurance system. Rather, these concerns express anxiety about access to that system, and about portability and stability of coverage. Republicans slowly are coming to champion modest reforms that address these anxieties. In time, Democrats will find that they have vastly overshot the mark with their arguments for replacing the current system with a massive bureaucracy. Calls for mandatory doctor visits won’t help them refute criticisms on that score.

Read More

Topics: , , ,

No Good Options

| @NoahPollak 09.05.2007 - 2:34 PM

How should Israel respond to the relentless missile fire emanating from Gaza? At first glance, there appears to be an array of good options, from targeted killings to air strikes to a cutoff in fuel, water, and electricity to a ground incursion. (And certainly there is no question that Hamas and Islamic Jihad deserve any and all of these punishments, and then some.)

But a problem arises when one considers the current political and diplomatic environment, specifically, the American and Israeli project to prevent the West Bank, a more populous and less containable territory than Gaza, from being turned into Hamas’s next battleground. Setting aside the question of whether this project is a good idea, the pursuit of it remains a powerful delimiting force for Israeli action, and it is thus that the array of options for Gaza suddenly shrinks.

Read More

Topics: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Rafsanjani, “Moderate”

| @eottolenghi 09.05.2007 - 12:43 PM

Today’s print edition of the International Herald Tribune—the New York Times-owned international paper—has an article by Michael Slackman on Hashemi Rafsanjani’s election as the new leader of Iran’s Assembly of Experts. Its title, in the print edition, runs “Moderate wins Iran election.” (In the online edition, the article has a different title, strangely.) It’s often a mistake to look for convoluted explanations where none may be found. Still, we’d like to know who decided that Rafsanjani is a “moderate,” and how they arrived at that decision. After all, it was Rafsanjani who said that

If a day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with the arms Israel has in possession, the strategy of colonialism would face a stalemate because application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel, but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world.

Is it this (rather peculiar) interpretation of nuclear deterrence that makes him a moderate?

Topics: , , , ,

Learning to Love Anthrax

09.05.2007 - 11:17 AM

Who was behind the anthrax attacks of 2001? The FBI has still not solved the case and, at this rate, it probably never will. But even if we never solve the mystery, we still were taught a terrifying lesson in the perils of biological terrorism. We really do need to worry about biowarfare (BW) agents like anthrax and botulinum falling into the hands of groups like al Qaeda.

Or do we? Perhaps not as much as we think. Last year, Christian Enemark, a national-security expert at the Australian National University in Sydney, prepared a comprehensive evaluation, “Biological Attacks and the Non-State actor: A Threat Assessment.” Focusing on the use of salmonella bacteria by the Rajneesh cult in Washington State in 1984, the Aum Shinrikyo attacks in Japan in the early 1990’s, and the U.S. anthrax attacks, it offers a complete balance sheet of the pros and cons of using BW agents for terrorist purposes.

On the pro side from the terrorist’s point of view, one of the attractive features of using biological weapons is the effect on the “worried well.” Even small attacks, like the 2001 anthrax episode, which sickened seventeen people and killed five, play upon “the visceral human fear of infection” so that even a modest attack generates a huge impact:

Read More

Topics: , , , , , , , , , ,

Bookshelf

09.05.2007 - 10:56 AM

• Is the Holocaust a fit subject for novelists? It’s tempting to reply with the oft-quoted words of Terence, the Roman playwright who declared that “nothing human is alien to me.” As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich made surpassingly clear, it is possible to make humane art out of the most monstrous of historical events. But if there is any act of human monstrosity that resists fictional treatment—especially by those who did not witness it at first hand—it is the Holocaust. The very phrase “Holocaust fiction” makes me squirm, and to look at a list of novels in which that dread occurrence figures is to be struck by how few have succeeded as art, whatever their value as testaments of man’s inhumanity to man. The more I reflect on the problem of Holocaust fiction, the more I find myself inclined to echo Wittgenstein: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

Be that as it may, novelists continue to grapple with the Holocaust, and on occasion something readable emerges from the struggle. Eugene Drucker’s The Savior is by no means a great novel, but it is exceedingly thought-provoking, and it also has something interesting to say about one of the deepest mysteries of the Third Reich, which is the corrupting effect it had on German art. Drucker comes by his interest in this subject honestly, for he is not a novelist de métier but a member of the world-renowned Emerson Quartet, and his father, a violinist who played in the Busch Quartet, got out of Germany in 1938, just in time. Small wonder, then, that his violin-playig son should feel moved to reflect on the nature of Hitler’s appeal to the artists of the Third Reich.

Read More

Topics: , , , , , , , , ,

Clarity on Taiwan

09.05.2007 - 9:28 AM

Chinese President Hu Jintao reportedly will ask that President Bush personally express his opposition to the upcoming referendum in Taiwan over U.N. membership. Evidently, statements of opposition from Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte (on Phoenix TV in Hong Kong) and former CIA analyst (and now National Security Council member) Dennis Wilder have not satisfied the Chinese authorities. According to the World Journal of September 3, Hu will make the request when he meets President Bush at the upcoming APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) meeting in Australia. A tempest is now brewing over a matter that Washington should have dismissed with a simple “no comment.”

Beijing is clearly worried that democracy in Taiwan will get out of hand. It has evidently been warning and threatening us—perhaps, and this is my own speculation, suggesting the Chinese government might undertake some symbolic or real military action if a “red line” is crossed. This would be most unwelcome given the current state of Iraq and Afghanistan. So Washington has made a huge effort to make absolutely certain that no trouble develops in Asia—leading to an overreaction that is proving seriously counterproductive.

Read More

Topics: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Phone Cards
International Phone Cards
DIY Awards - Personalized Crystal Awards & Plaques