Free Republic

Remember when “anti-Communist” was a preferred leftist term of abuse? “Oh, you’re an anti-Communist” — translation: you’re not one of the trendy people and, moreover, you probably harbor “McCarthyite” tendencies and think Ronald Reagan (the American cowboy) is more of a hero than Mikhail Gorbachev, the glamorous prophet of perestroika. Think back to the 1980s. Was there any cool person you knew who didn’t glamorize Gorbachev? Every academic (near enough) did, and of course the media slobbered all over the guy. Was he a Communist to the very end? Yes, but for Dan-Diane Sawyer-Rather, for the battalions of scribes who...

Recently, I read the 2010 paperback edition of Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom (with a new afterward). Inside author Bruce Bawer slams the forces of political correctness, and with good reason. Yes. We live in a world where puppy posters offend hypersensitive anti-dog Muslims, where beer is associated with evil according to Islam, and where the murder of Koran-unfriendly artists is seen as complex, or at worst, legitimate. But should we submit? Appease? Sacrifice our freedoms? Here are my 10 it-made-me-think quotes from Surrender. 1. On America’s long battle against Islamofascism (p. 3): America’s very first foreign conflict after the...

There is no more important issue facing the West than Islamism, Islamofascism or — to use yet another label — radical Islam. And there is no more necessary precondition to countering that threat than understanding it: where it springs from, how it is expressed and the ways in which it is spreading. But before we do any of that, we have to agree that the threat exists. For the United States, the danger so far has taken the form of terror, as 9/11 so clearly demonstrated. In Europe, terror is real too, but a more insidious problem has now taken...

Sunday, April 8, 2007 "Peace in our time." Neville Chamberlain's umbrella. The British prime minister's appeasement of evil at Munich in 1938. It all came rushing back this past week, but before Iran and Great Britain worked up the return British sailors and marines taken hostage and humiliated by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government. No, the appeasement in the service of peaceful relations is happening on the home front in Great Britain. Last Monday brought word that a new government-backed study found British schools are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons for fear of riling up Muslim students. That's right, teachers...

The approach of the New Year and departure of the old inevitably brings a flurry of "year's best" lists. This even applies to nations, which some organizations make it their business annually to rank in order of wealth, quality of life, and what-have-you. Surprisingly often, the Nordic countries come out on top. This placement is usually a reflection less of objective reality, however, than of the list-makers' enthusiasm for the Nordic welfare-state model. The criteria, in other words, are formulated in such a way that the Nordic countries will inevitably end up on top. Hence Norway, for example, is repeatedly...