Free Republic

I was rewriting history, while walking along some cold lakeshore the other day. My thought was: if Churchill had only come to power in 1937, Chamberlain would have been installed to replace him in 1940. Had Churchill been in power, and refused to sign Munich, he would have been blamed for the outbreak of war. I can just hear the prattle in an English pub, circa 1950. "He pushed Hitler to it! Had it not been for Churchill, Hitler would have been satisfied with the Sudetenland, and England would never have had to surrender. Everything was Churchill's fault!" Today, everything...

Decades ago when Osama bin Laden was a gawky teenager considering a career in civil engineering, Ishmael Reed attacked what he called "gliberalism." Gliberalism is the curdling of the most vital political tradition in American life into a crude, apologetic vanity, one that contends, Reed wrote, that "violence is healthy for the 'oppressed' even if it kills them." Gliberalism captivated upper-class liberals paralyzed by their material and social privilege on the one hand and their sympathies for the dispossessed on the other. It proved a dangerous overreaction to the uncomfortable premodern concept of noblesse oblige, the idea that, adapted for...