"The cause of Iran is the cause of humanity."

"Imagine watching women fling off their hijabs in glorious defiance of the cruel mullahs who rule over them and feeling nothing. Imagine seeing brave youths swarm the streets to confront the tyrants who oppress them and just looking the other way. ...

"The shameful, tight-lipped caginess of progressives in response to the glorious revolt in Iran is more than cowardice – it’s pathology. These people are so lost in the maze of moral relativism that they can’t bring themselves to criticise an Islamic regime. They’re so mind-screwed by intersectionality that the sight of young women throwing their hijabs on to open fires is more likely to baffle than excite them. ...

"The extraordinary valour of the young in Iran has exposed the moral bewilderment of the young in the West. Inculcated with that cruel, truthless idea that ‘All cultures are equally valid’, this new generation is struck dumb by a fiery foreign revolt against an Islamic government. ...

"Everything will change if the ayatollah classes fall. Hamas and Hezbollah, already battered by the Jewish nation’s resistance against their regime of terror, will be starved of resources. Israel will breathe easier. Russia’s wings will be clipped as its key, crucial ally in the Middle East is laid to rest by the very people it oppressed. A chastened Russia will be to the benefit of all Europeans, not least the long-suffering people of Ukraine.

"The West will be that bit freer, too. Free from the Iranian regime’s exporting of terror and its exploitation of mosques and charities to spread its misanthropic creed through our societies. ...

"The cause of Iran is the cause of humanity. Those brave souls are fighting first and foremost for themselves, as they should. After 47 years in the medieval gloom of Islamist rule, they deserve to see the light of liberty. But their revolt, their valour, their unshakeable yearning for freedom is a gift to the world, too. A stunning defeat for the forces of Islamism, delivered by women whose hair flows freely and men who want the right to think for themselves – it is exactly what humanity needs right now."

~ Brendan O'Neill from his column 'Iran's uprising and the moral bewilderment of Western youth'

"Pics like these almost make me want to start smoking in solidarity." ~ Amy Peikoff

Recognition => Consequences

"Keir Starmer has announced the UK’s recognition of a Palestinian state. Several other countries have done likewise.

"I think the consequences of this will be very bad.

"There will be even more Muslim terrorism worldwide. It evidently works.

"There will be more use of tactics like taking hostages and livestreaming murders and torture for political effect by non-Muslim groups and states, too. These tactics evidently work.

"Those people who think that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians still won’t get to see what actual genocide looks like, but Israel will be more willing than before to kill Palestinian civilians in order to destroy Hamas. Israel has lost a major motive for restraint. ...

"I do not wish for any of this. I just think it is what is likely to happen."

~ Natalie Solent from her post 'Consequences'

Kabul [UPDATED]

CIA officer helps evacuees up a ladder onto US helicopter in Saigon, 29 April 1975.

[Pic by Hubert Van Es, Wikipedia]

It's looking like Saigon in 1975 all over again, isn't it.

There was no good time to pull out of Afghanistan. We can probably all agree on that. But it is possible to question how the pull-out was done -- starting with the 'peace talks' with the Taliban (peace! with the Taliban!) that delivered to those butchers the US's timetable of withdrawal, and right up to the advice from the world's most expensive 'intelligence' agencies that the government, the army and the whole damn place would not collapse in a heap once that withdrawal happened.

Won't happen, they said back in July. Won't happen within 90 days, they said last Thursday. Turns out it took less than 90 hours -- "which is close enough for US intelligence work," as Mark Steyn quipped.

Make no mistake, for anyone concerned with peace -- or with the idea that a Pax Americana could be its source -- this is another dark day indeed in the continuing collapse of that myth. As the great Bernard Lewis warned nearly two decades ago, 

the danger here is that America risks being seen as harmless as an enemy, and treacherous as a friend... It's a very dangerous lesson to teach the planet.

That's no longer a risk. That's the lesson the whole world has just watched and learned. Again. To quote a line of Steyn's from about a decade ago, 

Afghanistan is about Afghanistan – if you're Afghan or Pakistani. But, if you're Russian or Chinese or Iranian or European, Afghanistan is about America.

So since we're posting old observations about America and Afghanistan, I thought I'd go back and briefly examine some of mine. Here's what I said on Afghanistan's day of liberation way back in 2001, when the coalition took Kabul:

The beards are coming off, and singing is heard again in Kabul. Although the war against terrorism is far from over, the Taliban retreat makes it possible to believe the war in Afghanistan just might be reaching a conclusion, and that civilisation and peace might come to Afghanistan some time soon. However, I have nagging doubts that will ever happen. First: while the occupying Northern Alliance is less single-mindedly oppressive than the Taleban, they are no less brutal. Second: the Taleban retreat to the hills puts them in their area of competitive advantage - these murderous witchdoctors don't know very much, but they do know all about killing and cave-dwelling.

Third, and most worryingly of all, the West has forgotten how to set up a successful civil government in an occupied area. In the long run this last concern is the most serious, and it might mean that the brutality becomes more visible, and Afghanistan more bloodstained....

If Bush can't set up successful civil government ... then he may have to call off the War Against Terrorism early, just as his father called off the Gulf War early for the self-same reason.

As you may recall, the Gulf War ended in 1991 with the US reluctant to finish the war as they should have - with the toppling of Saddam Hussein. When Bush senior stopped the turkey shoot on the road to Baghdad, it wasn't just a loss of courage - it was also the realisation that they had no end-game, that they wouldn't know what to do when they got there.

Our current statesmen may not know how to go about successfully rebuilding a conquered country, but we only need to travel back half a century to find some statesman who did know how.

Out of the rubble of Japan and Germany, Douglas McArthur, Ludwig Erhard, Wilhelm Röpke and Konrad Adenaur built new countries that abandoned their militaristic, totalitarian and feudal pasts and instead embraced peace, prosperity and freedom.

In the words of Röpke: "Men are gripped by a desire to be told what to do and to be ordered about, to the point almost of masochism. The state has become the subject of almost unparalleled idolatry." He and his colleagues recognised that attitude as the very source of war, and sought to banish it, new German Chancellor Adenaur declaring in March 1946: "The new state must no longer dominate the individual. Everyone must be allowed to take the initiative in every facet of existence." They set up governments large enough to maintain the rule of law and protect initiative, and small enough to get out of the way otherwise. And they worked like all hell!

Their minimal governments, constitutionally constrained to protect contracts and property rights, allowed free trade to flourish and prosperity to blossom. German and Japanese young men soon realised that there was more to life than butchery and invading their neighbours, and they set about getting rich instead.

They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Germany and Japan could hardly have started at a lower point. At the end of 1945, both countries were in ruins, yet only twenty years later they were flying. It was called a miracle, but it was in fact the work of some remarkable men.

We can only hope that the lessons from these remarkable men can be learned by the current crop of statesmen. It won't be easy, but if terrorism is to be eradicated and the gun-toting young men and the veiled women of Afghanistan offered any future at all - then the lessons must be learned, and they must be applied.

And if they are successful, then the world might have cause to give thanks once again to Douglas McArthur, Ludwig Erhard, Wilhelm Röpke and Konrad Adenaur.

In 1945, the knowledge existed to successfully rebuild countries after they'd been liberated from savagery. But by 1991's Gulf War, even the victors had realised that knowledge had gone. Disappeared. Gone with the wind. So they didn't drive to Baghdad, because they knew enough to know they wouldn't know what to do when they got there.

They still don't.

The result can be seen today in Kabul.

Taking questions from the press in July, Biden was asked if he saw “any parallels between this withdrawal and what happened in Vietnam.”

“None whatsoever. Zero,” he replied.

He was, in some way, right. The Afghan collapse was far more precipitous ...

UPDATE: "The Taliban have entered the Afghan capital, having rapidly swept to power throughout the country, while the U.S. is frantically airlifting its diplomats to safety. What explains the fall of Afghanistan? In 2001 U.S. forces targeted the Taliban’s Islamic totalitarian regime, which had harbored the 9/11 plotters. What went wrong? Join Onkar Ghate and Elan Journo for a special episode of the New Ideal podcast":

"It is no longer enough to say 'That’s awful' and then move on; we need a serious reckoning with this war, with the rise of seventh-century barbarism, and with the collapse of any semblance of moral restraint among the new terrorists." #QotD

"From the US to Europe, from the Middle East to the subcontinent, tens of thousands of people have been slaughtered by Islamist [terrorists].
    "This terrorism seems to have utterly dispensed with the old rules of engagement. Its battleground is as likely to be a church or a school or a hospital or a queue of children as it is a piece of land claimed by an opposing military outfit. It follows no moral code whatsoever. Its defining feature is a glaring and terrifying absence of moral restraint. Anything is acceptable. Anyone can be killed. There is no code or rule or even basic human impulse that says to these groups: 'Don’t do that. Not here. Not at a Sunday school.'
    "This means the new barbarism is very different to the violent groups that existed in the 1970s and 80s. These outfits, such as the Palestine Liberation Organisation or the Irish Republican Army, were usually, though not always, restrained by their political motives and ambitions, contained and controlled by their political beliefs.
    "Their claim to represent a political outlook and a political constituency meant they tended to behave within a basic moral framework. Their claim to be serious political actors meant they carefully tailored and targeted their militaristic acts. Their acts of violence were frequently bloody, of course, but they rarely did what Islamist terrorists do today: seek to kill as many people as possible, ideal­ly women and children, in a kind of perverse display of pornographic misanthropy, and with no higher aim than to devastate lives, communities and the human family more broadly.
    "For a few years now, some observers — not nearly enough — have tried to get to grips with the new barbarism, with this utterly unanchored, unrestrained, death-glorying violence. A 2005 New York Times piece titled 'The mystery of the insurgency' commented on Iraqi insurgents’ massacre of civilians and how historically unusual it was. This 'surge in the killing of civilians' reflects 'how mysterious the long-term strategy remains,' it said.
    "The writer arrived at a horrifying conclusion: that maybe there was no long-term strategy; that maybe killing civilians was the strategy, was the overriding aim. Death for death’s sake..."
    "The [vapid reactions] to the attacks in Sri Lanka [however] captures Western liberal elites’ caginess about morally and politically confronting [this] new barbarism...
    "A weak and morally disoriented West that will not strongly condemn the nihilistic ideology behind the slaughter of Christians in Sri Lanka, or the bombing of children in Manchester, or the gunning down of rock fans in Paris, is a West that cannot feign surprise when such violence continues. It is no longer enough to say 'That’s awful' and then move on; we need a serious reckoning with [this war], the rise of seventh-century barbarism, and the collapse of any semblance of moral restraint among the new terrorists."
       ~ Brendan O'Neill, from his post 'Islamist barbarism thrives on West’s weak response'
.

QotD: "They’ve always been here. But not everybody’s joining up."

"Terrorism has ... come of age with the millennial generation. The Islamic State ... is miles from the Al Qaeda it grew out of. Its supporters aren’t coming from Afghanistan, Iraq, or Pakistan anymore. They’re living in Belgium, France, Britain, and ... even the United States. They’re not refugees or illegal immigrants. They’re legal, passport-carrying, Western-born or naturalised citizens of our countries.... ISIS isn’t just a geographical entity. There are kids sitting across Western countries, right here in our cities and neighbourhoods, being inspired and groomed by the group’s wide-ranging social media expertise and slickly produced propaganda videos as we speak. These kids are not coming here from Syria. They’ve always been here. But not everybody’s joining up. The success of a campaign like #ExMuslimBecause; the burgeoning memberships of ex-Muslim groups like the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain (CEMB), Muslimish, and Ex-Muslims of North America (EXMNA); and the steadily growing audiences of pro-secular dissidents and reform activists from Muslim backgrounds show that there’s something else brewing too—something you don’t hear about as much because it has historically been suppressed by governments, moderates, and fundamentalists alike."
~ Ali A. Rivzi, from his book The Atheist Muslim: A Journey from Religion to Reason

.

Don't blame immigration for your home-grown terrorism

 

Fortunately for those of us down here at the bottom of the South Pacific, these discussions are always about other places. But since the facts about those other places are so easily and so widely misreported – or intentionally ignored – and then used to argue for policy here, it’s important to check out the real facts.
So in that vein, explains Alan Reynolds in this still topical guest post, don’t blame immigration for homegrown terrorism.

The Bastille Day slaughter of 84 people in Nice, following the 130 killed in Paris on May 13, 2015, left France the victim of two of the largest terrorist attacks outside the Middle East.

In France—as in the U.S., Turkey and Bangladesh—such attacks have nearly all been instigated not by recent immigrants, but by home-grown terrorists. All known Paris attackers were citizens of France or Belgium. The killer in Nice, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, was a resident of France since 2005.

The New America Foundation counts 94 Americans killed in seven Islamic terrorist incidents since 9/11. Terrorists in Orlando, San Bernardino, Fort Hood, Seattle and Little Rock were born in the USA; those in Boston and Chattanooga had been citizens for decades. 

The House Homeland Security Committee reported that, “Since September 11, 2001, there have been 124 U.S. terrorist cases involving home-grown violent Jihadists.”

Yet despite the home-grown origin of Jihadist terrorism, American politics has somehow spun toward the notion that controlling terrorism is primarily a matter of controlling immigration.

As the young folk might say, this is not even wrong.

Yet Donald Trump still claims, “We’re importing radical Islamic terrorism into the West through a failed immigration system.” He first proposed to bar immigrants who identify themselves as Muslims, then to “suspend immigration from areas of the world where there’s a proven history of terrorism against the United States, Europe or our allies” (a definition broad enough to include France). [And subsequently, as we now know, he selected 7 countries from whom to bar entry altogether, albeit “temporarily” – Ed.]

One problem with focusing on newly-arriving Muslims is that many U.S. terrorists and sympathisers converted to Islam, like Little Rock shooter Carlos Bledsoe in 2009. Out of 87 Americans charged with ISIS-related offenses in the past three years, a George Washington University study found 38 percent were converted to Islam.

More important, if fear of foreigners is supposed to be the big hot-button issue, then immigration is almost beside the point. Why? Because immigrants account for much less than 1 percent of the foreigners who arrive in the United States each year.

Without counting immigrants or refugees, 180.5 million foreigners came to the United States in 2014, according to the Department of Homeland Security. That is more than four times larger than all the immigrants now living in the United States (42.4 million).

Nobody could possibly imagine it feasible to carefully vet or otherwise limit the millions of tourists, business travellers and students who are constantly coming to the United States. So, what accounts for all the anxiety about infinitely smaller numbers who arrive as immigrants?

In contrast with 180.5 million non-immigrants arriving in 2014, only 69,975 arrived as refugees and only 481,392 new arrivals were granted green cards.

Any foreigner who wanted to come here on a suicidal terrorist mission needn’t wait two years to be vetted as a refugee, or try to get on a long waiting list for a green card. Tourists are allowed to stay in the U.S. for 90 days, business travellers 12 months, skilled workers six years, and students stay as long as they’re enrolled.  Citizens of 38 “visa waiver” countries (including France and Belgium) don’t even need a visa.

The chances of Homeland Security missing a handful of potential terrorists among 180.5 million temporary visitors are surely much greater than the odds of missing them among a few thousand well-vetted refugees.

What about illegal immigrants? In “Estimates of the Unauthorized Immigrant Population,” Homeland Security concluded, “It is unlikely that the unauthorised immigrant population has increased since 2007.”

Political obsession with the Mexican border is also misplaced because most foreigners arrive not on foot but on airplanes or ships.

Foreign nationals have to fill out an I-94 Arrival/Departure form only if travelling by land, so we know that 105.6 million (58.5 percent) of the 180.5 million foreign visitors in 2014 came by airplane or ship. Eighty percent of the 74.9 million who instead crossed the Canadian and Mexican borders were tourists; the rest were mostly business travellers and students.

In short, refugees and immigrants add up to only a tiny fraction of the 180.5 million foreigners who come to the United States, quite legally, in a typical year, and commonly remain for months or years. And nearly all Jihadist attacks in the West have been home-grown. But even if that were not the case, it is much faster and easier to come to the United States as a legal non-immigrant than to do so as refugee or permanent resident.

The U.S. visa program may well need tighter rules and enforcement, but that is an entirely different issue than making refugees and immigrants the primary scapegoats of anti-terrorist strategy. Because resources available for domestic security are limited, “keeping us safe” requires devoting the most resources to the most probable dangers rather than turning to hypothetical long shots.

Thwarting terrorism is primarily a task for intelligence agencies and police. Combating ISIS is primarily a military issue. Immigration policy or refugee quotas may indeed be important for other reasons [or not – Ed.], but the alleged link to Jihadist/Islamist terrorism is tenuous at best.

Attempting to enforce immigration restrictions based on a person’s self-described religious preference (or apparent national origin) would not be easy or cheap. Neither would tripling the size of the current 650-mile wall on the Mexican border. Such grandiose projects inevitably require diverting limited time and money away from more-promising options—such as hiring more FBI agents or private security firms for surveillance of suspicious activities and persons.

---

Alan Reynolds, author of the 2001 study Immigration Policy as Random Rationing, is a senior fellow with the Cato Institute.
A version of his article previously appeared at Newsweek and the Cato at Liberty blog.

RELATED POSTS:

• “Sadly, however, the report’s facts will not make a blind bit of difference, because the anti-immigration argument is not based on any facts. It is based on something else.
      You could see this here recently at NOT PC when I posted the crime stats on Sweden that help explode the alleged “facts on the ground” showing “rocketing Swedish crime” in the face of increased immigration.
      The problem might be most evident in the Fact-Free Zone that is modern America, where Trump's “America First” executive orders on immigration and deportation are political solutions in need of an actual problem.
  Facts are not what motivate the anti-immigrationists – NOT PC
• “We should be under no illusions about the evil of Islam, but neither should we grant it any more power than it has: as Ayn Rand used to say, evil on its own is impotent. Evil can only achieve its values through the actions of others—by that which we let evil-doers extort from us.
      “Never has this underlying impotence been more true of any ideology than Islam…”
  And, into that vacuum stepped Islam … – NOT PC, 2015
• “’The Duke of Wellington famously said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton: and if that is the case, then the advance of the Islamic State was begun in the nice, tolerant, liberal academies of Britain and other parts of western Europe.’”
  Home-grown horror – NOT PC, 2014

.

Immigration v multiculturalism & “identity politics”

 

A Twitter exchange recently threw out some good ideas and great reading recommendations. Here’s my quick summary.

Janet Wilberg suggested that “assimilation to Western civilisation's civic values is more complicated than just immigration itself…” Which is true. Very true. She argues that Multi-culturalism, i.e., the idea that all cultures however barbaric are equal, is “balkanising” America and causing serious assimilation problems simply because Multi-culturalism offers immigrants no reason at all to assimilate, and every reason not to.

Especially so when modern “identity politics” stresses so-called “group identity” over the individualism on which Western culture is actually based – the pressure-group warfare encouraged by the mixed economy being turbocharged into virtual tribal pressure-group warfare by the stale stew of collectivist “identity politics” – the biggest loser from this being the culture of individualism itself which so many immigrants have actively come to enjoy, and in which the had hoped to flourish!

Equally, it’s easy to see which cultures gain the most when all cultures are held to be equal to each other, no matter how barbaric they are or were  – “no coincidence then that multi-culti/PC universities put Islam on pedestal,” and Muslim clitorectomy clinicians and Maori baby batterers are given a virtual free pass.

It is in this sense then that she sees less of a threat, if any, from immigration, but a serious long-term threat from Multi-culturalism/Political Correctness & the political special interest groups it encourages.

She observes in this respect a difference between patriotism as seen in America (which at its best is subscribing to a set of values) with nationalism as experience in the likes of Europe. The latter is simpe tribalism,

As she says, “I'm not so concerned about Mexicans and a wall. We need to restore our ideological/civic ‘walls’.” In a similar sense and for similar reasons as it’s better to build a wall around welfare instead of around a country.

Where she caught my eye too was by her recommending the very best reading/listening on this topic, with which I strongly concur – both by Ayn Rand, both unique in their viewpoint, and both well ahead of their time. I suggest you take time out this weekend to settle back, and listen and digest (while savouring Rand’s rich Russian accent!):

• ‘Global Balkanisation’

The lecture lasts 54 minutes, followed by a 35-minute Q&A.
A version of the talk appears as an essay in the book The Voice of Reason.

• ‘A Nation’s Unity’

 

The lecture is 58 minutes long.
An edited version is available in The Ayn Rand Letter, a
biweekly newsletter published by Rand between 1971 and 1976.

.

Islam inhabits a vacuum; ignorant ISIS recruits again confirm it.

 

Recent evidence confirms that recruits to ISIS are almost wholly ignorant of the religion under whose banner they wish to fight – ordering up copies of The Koran for Dummies and Islam for Dummies to “prepare themselves for jihad.” Suggesting not just that those who devise book titles enjoy stating the obvious, but that ignorance of the religion itself is not a barrier to recruitment in its jihad, but a boon.

The jihadi employment form asked the recruits, on a scale of one to three, to rate their knowledge of Islam. And the Isis applicants, herded into a hangar somewhere at the Syria-Turkey border, turned out to be overwhelmingly ignorant.
    The extremist group could hardly have hoped for better. 

Turns out those very western recruits of whom everyone is so fearful are just idiots with empty lives seeking something seemingly meaningful to fill them. (Reflect, for example, on the comment on the would-be Garland terrorist: “He had been going down a bad path and then he found Islam.") These empty heads with empty lives are perfect fodder for an empty jihad for a religion that inhabits a vacuum – which perfectly describes their knowledge of it:

An Associated Press analysis of thousands of leaked Isis documents reveals most of its recruits from its earliest days came with only the most basic knowledge of Islam. A little more than 3,000 of these documents included the recruit's knowledge of Sharia, the system that interprets into law verses from the Quran and "hadith" — the sayings and actions of the Prophet Muhammad.
    According to the documents … 70 per cent of recruits were listed as having just "basic" knowledge of Sharia — the lowest possible choice. Around 24 per cent were categorized as having an "intermediate" knowledge, with just five per cent considered advanced students of Islam. Five recruits were listed as having memorized the Quran.
    The findings address one of the most troubling questions about Isis recruitment in the United States and Europe: Are disaffected people who understand Sharia more prone to radicalisation? Or are those with little knowledge of Islam more susceptible to the group's radical ideas that promote violence?
    The documents suggest the latter.

So these Jihadists know even less about the Quran than you and I do. Meaning that they are not being radicalised by the teachings of Islam, within which there is precious little to be inspired by anyway, but by the bullshit of their barbaric recruiters keen to harvest warm bodies willing to sacrifice for a cause. And for these empty heads who’ve heard from every corner that the willingness to sacrifice is the mark of a full life, these recruiters are there and willing and eager to pick up their remnants. And the emptier the head, the more useful the recruit,

because [it rurns out] those who claimed advanced knowledge in Shariah on the Isis entry documents were less likely to want to become suicide bombers, according to a study by the US military's Combating Terrorism Center, an academic institution at the United States Military Academy.
    "If martyrdom is seen as the highest religious calling, then a reasonable expectation would be that the people with the most knowledge about Islamic law (Sharia) would desire to carry out these operations with greater frequency," said the report.
    However, despite the religious justification that Isis uses for suicide missions, "those with the most religious knowledge within the organisation itself are the least likely to volunteer to be suicide bombers," the study found.

Empty heads filled up with a siren song of sacrifice.

These are empty heads not running to the recruiters for love of Islam; they’re invariably kids with empty lives running away from something else. Islam itself is simply the vacuum into which they’re sucked.

Islam still inhabits a vacuum; it always has. It’s an opportunistic ideology inhabiting, like a nest of cockroaches, all the dark forgotten corners of existence. Always has; still does.

Its empire was born only from the collapse of two others, born in the vacuum created by the collapse of the Roman and Persian powers and the demise of their religions) -- its military “strength” a reflection only of those two once-mighty empires’ fading power; its “scriptures” cobbled together from what they found in the Hebrew,Zoroastrian and heretical cultural remnants of the desert towns and waadis in the vacuum between crumbling empires that its marauding bands occupied. (Read Tom Holland’s ground-breaking history In the Shadow of the Sword.)

Its subsequent historic golden age was not wholly its own work, but the result of borrowing from much earlier Greek thinkers and with remarkably few original additions—and it was stopped overnight by the Arabic philosopher Al-Ghazali, more responsible than any other for turning Islam into the thing that now occupies its own Dark Age. (Read my own post ‘The Greatest Story (Hardly) Ever Told’ and Andy Clarkson’s ‘Yes, You Can Blame This Guy For Paris’)

Even its horrors enacted today are neither self-funded nor self-armed. The oil wealth without which neither Shia not Sunni violence could continue was created by and then stolen from western companies, income from which is now almost wholly provided by the oil purchases of the west. Its weaponry is aso from elsewhere, from the stockpiles of left-behind western military matériel, and from matériel donated directly to these butchers in pursuit of mistaken western strategic aims – and its belligerent limits are imposed only by the acquiescence and appeasement of of western political and intellectual leaders.  (Read the relevant chapters of Daniel Yergin’s classic The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power and Elan Journo’s Winning the Unwinnable War.)

And its very tactic of terrorism relies not on conquest–it is never going to establish a caliphate in Paris, in Nice or anywhere else—“but through scaring us into panicking, overreacting, and changing our behaviour.” (Read, for example, a former IS hostage’s article: ‘I know Islamic State. What they fear more than bombs is unity,’ and reflect on why western cartoonists and writers—Danish cartoonists, Salman Rushdie, Charlie Hebdo--ended up in the front lines of this battle)

Face it, the only reason we talk so frequently about this double-damned religion is because from a population of 1.5 billion Muslims worldwide a few dozen terrorists and just a few thousand ISIS fighters, financed by states long known to finance terrorism but for which the west has little appetite to say so, are allowed because of that appeasement to put whole continents on the alert. (Witness if nothing else the bowing and scraping of mute westerners at airports and sports events.)

Jihadists truly are the mouse that roars militarily.

Because these fuckers can’t even send their own fighters to do their job! Astonishingly, little has been written on this highly telling fact, but reflect on this: that with only trivial exceptions all those carrying out the horrors in Europe and the US, from London to Glasgow to Madrid to Paris to Boston to New Jersey, have not been poor fighters sent on a mission from far away through some secret refugee or immigrant network but have often been prosperous and almost always homegrown. Just think about the implications of that for a moment. (And read for instance my 2014 post ‘Home-grown horror’ and Adam Taylor’s recent piece ‘The Islamic State wants you to hate refugees: And the plan may be working’.)

So it is simply not true that this evil is strong; like all evil, in itself it is impotent. Like communism, which could only survive by looting capitalists, and like all anti-life evils, it is necessarily parasitic on the good.

But as with communism, of those most opposed to it few realise the vacuum at its unbeating heart. Too few seem to realise that. So while western hipsters download zombie films in their droves, portraying artistically the perfect replica of the ISIS drone, we have allowed ourselves to be attacked by literal self-made zombies—zombies that are self-admitted death worshippers.

So how can a place that fights back by stripping down at airplane gates ever get itself off its knees to fight back? How can a civilisation bewildered by burkinis and cowed by campus millennials ever summon the resolve to defeat Islamic terrorists? Oddly enough, in the culture and on the campus may be among the places to begin fighting back. Because that’s where the corruption starts. When these awkward kids see the west’s intellectual and political leaders so brazenly apologetic about the values of their own culture, especially at a time when the contrast between life and anti-life is so stark, then why in hell (those few who are seduced must wonder) should anyone at all take these western values at all seriously?

When they see a handwringing good appeasing a morally righteous evil, why wouldn’t they start to wonder if there isn’t something to be said for a fundamentalism from the stone age – even if they know neither jot nor tittle of what it stands for apart from the virtue of sacrifice they hear western leaders themselves embrace?

Why wouldn’t they embrace meaning then where they do find it—in revolt, in sacrifice, in barbarism … ?

But remember, evil itself is impotent:

“The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind; it is the appeaser’s intellectual abdication that invites them to take over. When a culture’s dominant trend is geared to irrationality, the thugs win over the appeasers. When intellectual leaders fail to foster the best in the mixed, unformed, vacillating character of people at large, the thugs are sure to bring out the worst. When the ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes.”
~ Ayn Rand (from ‘Altruism as Appeasement,’ The Objectivist, Jan. 1966)

By espousing the moral clarity eschewed by the appeasers in the west, even when they know nothing of the religion itself, young homegrown jihadis find something they hadn’t realised existed—and once again Islam steps into a vacuum of others’ creation.

The primary problem here of course is that westerners who are sure of their values are largely silent in defence of the values and virtues that made the west great, while pretending that a stone-age culture is in some way equal – leaving 0000the powerful moral certainty to come from the Dark Ages.  In this compromise between a handwringing good and a crusading evil, it’s astonishing only that evil has as few victories as it has. But as Daniel Pipes asks, how is that “a majority population accepts the customs and even the criminality of a poorer and weaker community? It is the result of a conquest ideology taking the measure of a civilisation that no longer values its heritage, no longer regards itself as worthy of defence.”

Sure,

some of these [homegrown killers] will simply be psychologically susceptible to the nastiness of a violent religion. But what else are they hearing? Where are the voices proclaiming the virtues of reason, individualism and liberty?  Where today will they hear these values proclaimed proudly and unashamedly? Where will they learn of the superiority of reason over religion, of freedom over tyranny?
    When Britain was exporting liberty to much of the known world, these values were unapologetically front and centre. These were the values that built western civilisation. These were values absorbed by immigrants and locally-born alike. People moved to Britain and the west because of these values [and still do!].
    What happened?
    In a word: multiculturalism.
    Multiculturalism teaching that the values of civilisation and those of barbarism are equal.
    Teaching that liberty and slavery are simply different choices.
    Teaching that if any culture should be shamed it should be western culture.
    That the west is responsible for all the world’s horrors, and the rest of the world simply a victim.
    This is the perversion now taught and promulgated in schools, in universities and in learned commentaries peddled by perfumed academics for the consumption of the self-anointed.
     So for all the decades that we’ve been told that Islamic terror is the result of ignorance and poverty, leading westerners have been silent about the superiority of  western health, wealth and freedom over a stone-age theocracy in which beheadings, clitorectomies, slavery and crucifixions still play a part.

What, then, can we do? asks Daniel Hannan.

Well, for a start, we can stop taking these losers at their own estimation. Let's treat them, not as soldiers, but as common criminals. Instead of making documentaries about powerful, shadowy terrorist networks, let's laugh at the pitiable numpties who end up in our courts. Let's mock their underpants bombs and their half Jafaican slang and their attempts to set fire to glass and steel airports by driving into them and their tendency to blow themselves up in error. Let's scour away any sense that they represent a threat to the state – the illicit thrill of which is what attracts alienated young men trawling the web from their bedrooms.
    At the same time, let's stop teaching the children of immigrants to despise the [west]. Let's stop deriding and traducing our values. Let's stop presenting our history as a hateful chronicle of racism and exploitation. Let's be proud of our achievements – not least the defence of liberty …
    The best way to defeat a bad idea is with a better one. Few ideas are as wretched as the theocracy favoured by IS; few as attractive as Anglosphere freedom.
    I'm not saying that patriotism alone will finish the jihadis. Like the urban guerrillas in the 1970s, they must be treated primarily as a security problem rather than a political one. But what ultimately did for the Red Army Faction and all the rest was the fall of the Berlin Wall and the almost universal realisation that revolutionary socialism was no alternative to Western democracy.
    It comes down, in the end, to self-belief. Not theirs; ours.

Do you have it?

Because a war of ideas is more preferable to the other kind. And even that other kind amounts in the end to ideas.

Wars are not won just by military hardware or political re-arrangements [points out Mary Kenny]. They are won by ideas. They are won by men and women who have convictions and values which give them the impetus to pursue victory…
    There's nothing wrong with tolerance and a universalist outlook: these are good things. But if a host society is craven and defeatist about its own history and traditions, then it is asking for trouble. Western societies must uphold the achievements based on our values, and do so with fortitude…
    Isis will not be defeated by drones, military action or even politics alone, but by ideas and leaders who really and truly believe in their own values and traditions. After James Foley was beheaded, it was triumphantly announced that: "The sword is mightier than the pen."
    But ideas, and the conviction to carry them, are still stronger than all else.

So let’s fight for the enlightenment—for Reason, Science, Liberty, Modernity, and Civilisation—and fill the vacuum the jihadis are so fitfully filling.

The Enlightenment is a long-term strategy.
    In fact, many westerners would have to discover the enlightenment. The Enlightenment encourages us to be reflective. But to reflect on whether we are doing the right thing, isn’t an invitation to stop doing the right thing. As a civilisation we have become paralysed by self-doubt when we should have become energised by self-reflection. As we have discovered (or as many knew all along) a moral and ideological vacuum will be filled by others – as it turns out, by savages and barbarians.

Only if we let them.

---

[Pic by Independent]

.

Johannes Gutenberg's information revolution holds many lessons for today

 

If history is a battle of ideas, then the man most responsible for allowing ideas to be widely spread must be among history’s greatest heroes.
Lawrence Ludlow examines that man in this guest post – and argues there are still important lessons to learn from his story about innovation, immigration and freedom of information.

In a previous post some years ago, ‘NASA, the Aerospace Welfare Queen,’ I explored what happens when technology is grafted on to big-government militarism and the bread-and-circuses mentality of the state. The result? The kind of scientific 'achievement' described by Ayn Rand as Project X in her novel Atlas Shrugged. Not very inspiring. But this post will be uplifting. It will focus on a true benefactor of mankind, Johann Gutenberg, the inventor of printing with moveable metal type. His innovative application of printing technologies was not only a showcase example of market entrepreneurialism, but a greater source of benefit to mankind than state-sponsored technologies can ever hope to be. His is a story not only of invention and innovation, but of immigration, opposition to politically connected interests, and freedom of information.

Remember the Millennium?

Nearly ten years ago – in time for the millennium celebrations – Johann Gutenberg (ca. 1400-1468) was singled out as the greatest inventor of the past 1,000 years by the British Broadcasting Company (BBC). Life rated his printing of the Bible as the top event of that time period. In addition, the Exlibris news and discussion group (University of California at Berkeley) dubbed him Man of the Millennium.

There were good reasons to celebrate Gutenberg's innovation – not to mention subsequent related breakthroughs such as (1) offset printing, which transferred images from page-size plates onto paper beginning in 1904, (2) digital printing, which developed in the 1980s, and (3) web-page publication, which developed in the 1990s and was the result of a decision (in 1988) to end the 30-year stranglehold of the U.S. government on Internet development.

And while some may argue that the origins of the Internet lie in the government-sponsored ARPANET, the ARPANET is yet another example of state-sponsored Frankenstein technology – a relative dead-end that did not yield significant benefits until it was released from its state-enforced dungeon to become transformed by the private sector into the World Wide Web.

In a sense, the Web has multiplied the potential of Gutenberg's original invention: first, Gutenberg made possible the publishing industry, in which scarce resources are concentrated to fund the dissemination of information from relatively few replication centers; the Web and the app economy take it further, making it possible for everyoneto become a publishing center.

Fact and Fiction: The Discovery of Printing

Let's look at what Gutenberg did and didn't do. He did not invent either book printing or moveable type. In The Gutenberg Bible, James Thorpe, former director of the Huntington Library, points out that the earliest known wood-block printing of a book took place in 9^th century China with the 16-foot-long roll of the Diamond Sutra. To produce it, entire pages were carved into flat wooden blocks that were inked and pressed onto paper rolls.

Furthermore, as early as the 11^th century, printers in China (and Korea) were experimenting with pieces of moveable type made of baked clay. That invention, however, did not endure in East Asia because too many distinctive pieces of 'type' (the baked-clay letters) had to be created to print a book. In contrast to the 26-letter English alphabet, for example, the Chinese language uses approximately 40,000 ideographs – far too many (at the time) to offer any labour-saving advantages through printing.

Copying Books by Hand

In Europe until the time of Gutenberg, books were copied by hand, usually on some type of parchment (the skin of an adult sheep, goat, or cow) or on vellum (skin from a newborn calf). During the early Middle Ages, most of this copying took place at monasteries in a scriptorium, but by the 13^th century, busy manuscript-copying establishments were located in major cities – usually near the early universities where books were in demand. Wherever manuscript copies were made, however, they contained errors.

The quill pens used by copyists – usually made of goose feathers – required frequent refills from ink pots, and the tedium of copying led to errors consisting of repeated or omitted portions of text. Even the introduction of wood-block printing in Europe during the late 14^th and early 15^th Centuries (usually for illustrations) offered few advantages. For example, wood-block carvings were laborious to create and could be ruined with a single false stroke of the carver's knife. They also wore out quickly and could not produce clear imprints for very long.

And while it is true that manuscript copyists used abbreviations to save time, new books still required about a year to produce. Not surprisingly, they were very expensive. As a result, the literacy rate was low – only 30% in some English towns during the 15^th century.

The Printing Press in Action

The idea of printing with reusable pieces of durable, moveable type held definite advantages for Europeans. Since the Latin alphabet had only 23 basic letters, only a limited range of metal pieces of type had to be cast and replicated. Once created, these pieces of type could be arranged into orderly rows and pages of text on a printing forme. The letters were inked up, and damp paper or parchment was lowered onto them to receive the ink impression.

The result was hundreds of nearly identical copies of books. Once a set of pages were printed, the pieces of type could be reassembled again and again to print other pages and books until they finally wore out after many uses. All things considered, printing with re-usable, metal type yielded savings in labor and cost, greater accuracy and consistency in the final product, and a remarkable increase in the volume of books available.

A Market-Driven Process

The invention of printing, however, did not occur in a vacuum. Like any other product, it was subject to market conditions to which Gutenberg responded in an entrepreneurial way. We already have seen how the Western alphabet – with its limited set of letters – played a supporting role in the success of European printing.

To this, we can add the availability of paper in 15^th century Europe – a cost-effective substitute for parchment and vellum. According to Warren Chappell and Robert Bringhurst (A Short History of the Printed Word), the process of making paper from plant fibers was discovered in China in the 2^nd century. It spread to the Middle East in the 8^th century (where it was improved), and the Moors brought it to Spain (11^thcentury). By the late 13^th century, a paper mill that used linen and rag fibers was operating in the Italian town of Fabriano . From there, it spread rapidly through Europe – just in time for Gutenberg's invention.

Gutenberg was responsible for the print process itself, and his story has been outlined by Christopher de Hamel in The Book: A History of the Bible. As a stepping stone to the invention of printing, however, Gutenberg may have developed a mechanical-stamping process in the late 1430s. Details of his metal-stamping process, however, are unclear, and what little we know is based on the much-debated record of a lawsuit that was filed after the death of one of his business partners.

Nonetheless, it appears that while living in Strassburg, Gutenberg and his partners intended to mass-produce small, inexpensive convex mirrors by using Gutenberg's metal-stamping process. They planned to sell the mirrors to pilgrims visiting the holy relics in the city of Aachen. The relics were displayed every seven years, and pilgrims would pin the expensive mirrors to their hats, or they would hold them up as they viewed the holy objects. The mirrors would reflect – and thus capture – some of the spiritual presence of the relics.

Unfortunately, Gutenberg and his partners miscalculated the date of the pilgrimage (or perhaps it was changed); the pilgrimage took place in 1440 instead of 1439. This delay and the partner's death led to the failure of the enterprise. Nonetheless, this business venture may have contributed to Gutenberg's later innovations when he moved to the city of Mainz in 1448. Note, however, that this was an entirely private endeavour. No risk was forced upon taxpayers.

Gutenberg's Test Projects

In Mainz, where Gutenberg eventually established his printing operation, a legal document once again provides the few reliable details that have been passed down to us. The document (called the 'Helmasperger Instrument' after the notary who signed it on November 6, 1455) describes the attempted recovery of two loans taken out by Gutenberg in 1450 and 1452. It also mentions Gutenberg's project as 'the work of the books,' and it is described in Johann Gutenberg and His Bible, by Janet Ing.

Despite a settlement that obligated Gutenberg to repay with interest any money not used on the project, the settlement may have favoured Gutenberg – despite a legend that he was bankrupted as a result. Furthermore, it is possible that Gutenberg continued to print books in Mainz during the 1450s even though his moneylender (Johann Fust) and his assistant (Peter Sch'ffer) became partners in their own printing business there.

In 1454, the year before he printed his Bible, Gutenberg completed a few smaller projects, and they testify to his entrepreneurial spirit. They included a pamphlet warning of the danger posed by the Turks, who had just captured the ancient capital of the Byzantine Empire in 1453. In addition, there were four printings of indulgences, which were sold to raise funds for a war against the Turks. He also printed a New Year's greeting in German and a small Latin grammar. These small projects indicate a businessman who was 'ramping up' his operation for a bigger undertaking, such as the printing of the Bible. Once again, Gutenberg's projects were entirely for profit.

Marketing the Bible

In the case of the Bible, Gutenberg was targeting a specific group of customers: religious institutions such as monasteries. They were his best potential customers because they needed large Bibles for public readings. Only a limited number of wealthy individuals could afford the other copies. Providing a glimpse into Gutenberg's sales effort, we have a letter written by Aeneas Silvius, who subsequently became Pope Pius II in 1458. He personally witnessed Gutenberg displaying several sections of his not-yet-completed Bible in October 1454 at a conference of nobles in Frankfurt. The purpose of the conference was to rally public support for war against the Turks.

Gutenberg clearly perceived the anti-Turk hysteria as a boon to his sales effort – a kind of rally-round-the-Bible marketing opportunity that exploited Christian fears of Turks and their faith – Islam. From the letter of Aeneas Silvius, we also learned that Gutenberg had pre-sold every copy of his Bible before its completion.

Furthermore, there is undisputed evidence that Gutenberg had to increase the size of his print-run by about 33% to meet the high demand. This required him to re-set (with type) and re-print additional pages of some early sections of his Bible and purchase additional paper and parchment. The re-printed sections of his Bible contain subtle differences that can be seen today in the surviving copies.

Short-Term Benefits of Printing

The scale of the Gutenberg Bible project was astonishing for its time. Each printed Bible consists of two volumes totaling 1,286 pages and measuring 11-' by 16 inches. They are set in two columns of large, Gothic, black-letter type with 40 to 42 lines per page, and they can be read at a distance of three feet. Approximately 160 to 180 copies were printed – 75% on paper and the rest on parchment. Paper copies weigh 30 pounds each, and parchment copies weigh 50 pounds – each requiring the skins of about 160 animals (over 6,000 skins for all of the copies).

Although the Latin alphabet has only 23 letters, a complete set of metal upper- and lowercase type used to create the Bible – including abbreviations, diphthongs, and punctuation marks – consisted of 290 characters. Four to six employees were busy setting type, and the print office held 200,000 printed pages stacked up for binding at the conclusion of the project.

Today, only 48 copies survive – 36 on paper, 12 on parchment. Only two parchment and four paper copies are in the U.S. , and prices have risen dramatically. A copy sold for $2,600 in 1847 and $50,000 in 1911. In 1978, the going price was $2.2 million, and in 1987, one volume (1/2 of a set) sold for $5.4 million at Christie's. Nobody knows what Bill Gates paid for the complete copy he purchased in 1994, but some say it was nearly $31 million. A single leaf can easily fetch more than $60,000. Contrast this with NASA. Who wouldn't happily pay to shut it down – along with its succession of orbiting money-pits that disintegrate and rain down debris from the sky?

The influence of Gutenberg's Latin Bible was tremendous, and by the end of the 15^thcentury, 80 more Bible editions were printed in Europe – all but two of them based directly on Gutenberg's text (which was itself based on a 13^th-century version of Jerome's late-4^th-century Vulgate translation).

Even more important were the spread of printing beyond its birthplace in the city of Mainz and the consequences of that proliferation. By 1470, there were printers in 14 European cities, and by 1480 they were located in more than 100. By the end of the year 1500, over 1,100 print shops were doing business in more than 200 European towns, and they had printed over 10 million books. We refer to these early printed books (through the year 1500) as incunabula, from the Latin word for swaddling clothes or cradle, because they represent the infancy of printing.

Long-Term Benefits of Printing

The creation of large numbers of books was not the only spin-off benefit of Gutenberg's invention. The abundance of books was reflected in the growing size and number of libraries as well. Before the advent of printing, libraries existed only in a few centres of learning and were very small. In England, for example, the largest libraries were located at Canterbury and Bury – each holding about 2,000 books.

Cambridge University Library held only 300 titles at the time, but today it holds over 5.5 million books and more than 1.2 million periodicals. With the widespread availability of books, the literacy rate increased. From a 15^th-century rate of 30% in some English locations, it rose to between 30 and 40% in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, 60% in the 18^th century, and 90% in the 20^th and 21^st centuries (although today's government schools are doing their best to curtail independent thought and churn out slogan-spouting automatons instead).

While the literacy rate rose, there also was a shift from oral learning to learning through reading – which made self-education even more widespread. There also was greater access to ideas and an increase in knowledge on the part of literate men and women. This helped to unleash an era of innovation and invention that continues today.

Some people even credit the success of the Protestant revolt to the printing press. If we consider the World Wide Web to be an outgrowth of the printing process, the number of 'publishing' centres continues to grow. For example, a Netcraft survey compiled in June 2006 identified 85,541,228 sites. There are now well over a billion, and growing.

Immigration: China to Islam to Westminster

We already have seen how the art of paper-making had its roots in East Asia and spread to the civilization of Islam before arriving in Europe. The free movement of people across borders – immigration – enabled the rapid spread of the new technology, and the story of William Caxton (ca. 1422-1492) illustrates perfectly the spread of printing and ideas from one country to another.

Caxton is famous because he printed the first book in the English language and introduced the printing press to England. Nonetheless, he spent much of his life abroad. By the year 1446, he was living in Bruges (Belgium). There he printed the first book in English in about 1473/1474 – the Recuyell(compilation) of the Historyes of Troye, which was his own translation of a French courtly romance. He completed this translation while living in Koln (Germany), and he probably learned the art of printing from Ulrich Zell, a priest from Mainz (Germany).

He moved back to England in 1475 or early 1476, and he set up a print shop near Westminster Abbey. There he published the first books printed on English soil. Among these were Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1476) and the Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers (1477). The latter was based on a work that originally was written in Egypt by Mubashshir ibn F'tik in the 11^thcentury. The original was translated from Arabic into Spanish, then Latin, and finally French before being translated into English. For those who suffer from the current xenophobic infatuation with impermeable borders and immigration restrictions, the story of printing offers a powerful and much-needed antidote.

Special Interests Oppose Innovation

With its many benefits, one would think that the invention of moveable-type printing was universally hailed, but vested interests can be counted on to oppose changes that threaten them. Just ask aerospace engineers how they would feel if competitors such as Burt Rutan and SpaceShipOne eliminated their NASA gravy train. In the case of 15^thcentury printing, calligraphers and illuminators levied political pressure to restrict its spread. Resistance was strongest in the city of Florence , where (according to Chappell and Bringhurst) calligraphers and their customers were 'contemptuous of what they considered the vulgar and mechanical imitations of good manuscripts.'

Oddly enough, the establishment of printing by the end of the 15^th century did not spell doom for calligraphers. As more people learned to read, more learned to write. Consequently, the art of calligraphy continued to thrive. The 16^th century was distinguished by many of the most beautiful manuscripts, and it also was the age of the great handwriting manuals.

Printing 'or Imitation Handwriting?

To understand the early opposition of calligraphers, we must remember that Gutenberg and other early printers did not conceive of printing as a way to produce a new kind of product. They viewed their technology as a way to produce handwriting. Consequently, calligraphers viewed printing as a direct competitor. Perhaps the greatest authority on early printing, Konrad Haebler (author of The Study of Incunabula as well as The German Incunabula and The Italian Incunabula), wrote extensively about the goals and practices of early printers. He explained that early printers – to comply with the aesthetic demands of their customers – were compelled to use confusing (to us) abbreviations in their printed products even though they were rendered entirely unnecessary by the new technology.

It is easy to understand why scribes made use of these labour-saving shortcuts: it reduced the amount of writing they had to do. But the printing press made it possible – and easy – to spell out every letter of every word without additional effort. In fact, the creation of unique pieces of type to imitate abbreviations (and diphthongs) was an additional burden and expense.

As Haebler explained, however, any attempt to break this rule resulted in products that could not be sold because they did not comply with the exacting standards of customers. Book buyers expected to see abbreviations, and printers gave them what they wanted. It was only in later years that they could depart from this imitation of manuscript models and take full advantage of the new technology. In a similar way, modern architects only gradually understood the new design possibilities made available by building materials such as steel and glass curtain-wall. The result is the sleek, geometric, glass-sheathed structures of today's skyline.

The Customer Is Always Right

Haebler described other characteristics of manuscripts that also were preserved by early printers. For example, the beginning of new chapters and other important sections of a book included oversized initial capital letters that were several lines high and projected into the body of the text and into the margins as well. Early printers – including Gutenberg – left large blank spaces in their columns of neat text so that calligraphers and illustrators could fill them in with large capital letters and decorations by hand. To this day, many incunabula contain all of their original blank spaces because rubricators were never hired to decorate them.

In a similar attempt to replicate the standards of hand-written text, books on medicine, law, and theology were printed using Gothic type almost exclusively. Otherwise, they could not be sold. Furthermore, when the art of printing spread from the German-speaking world to Italy in 1465 (with the arrival at Subiaco of German printers Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz), Roman letters – the ancestor of our Times Roman font – were used for the first time instead of Gothic letters.

Roman type became the necessary standard – in Italy – for all printed works of philosophy, literature, science, art, and authors from classical antiquity. It suited the aesthetic tastes of the learned men of Italy, who had imbibed a humanistic Renaissance education and had an appreciation for ancient Roman inscriptions. Again, the customer always came first.

Below is an example of what is now considered the perfected form of Roman type, printed in 1478 by Nicolaus Jenson in Venice (from Plutarch's Lives, or Vitae illustrium virorum).

Below is an example of Gothic type, printed in 1480 also by Nicolaus Jenson in Venice (from Antoninus Florentinus, Summa theologica, part IV).

In contrast to the sensitivity of these early printers to the preferences of their customers, the 'products' and 'services' of government agencies are usually provided in abysmal fashion or are forced upon the public under threat of a penalty. Next time you are compelled to 'contribute' to any state bureaucracy, remember the early printers and ruminate on what has been lost.

Epitaph for a Genuine Benefactor

It is not surprising that Gutenberg's name faded from memory shortly after his invention. His Bible is not dated, and it does not mention him by name. In fact, Gutenberg's connection with his Bible was only recovered many years later and after much research and controversy.

Nonetheless, a rector of the University of Paris, Professor Guillaume Fichet, wrote an early testimony to Gutenberg on December 31, 1470, just a few years after Gutenberg's death.

'Not far from the city of Mainz, there appeared a certain Johann whose surname was Gutenberg, who, first of all men, devised the art of printing, whereby books are made, not by a reed, as did the ancients, nor with a quill pen, as do we, but with metal letters, and that swiftly, neatly, beautifully. Surely this man is worthy to be loaded with divine honors by all the Muses, all the arts, all the tongues of those who delight in books, and is all the more to be preferred to gods and goddesses in that he has put the means of choice within reach'of mortals devoted to culture. That great Gutenberg has discovered things far more pleasing and more divine, in carving out letters in such a fashion that whatever can be said or thought can by them be written down at once and transcribed and committed to the memory of posterity.'

Gutenberg is a hero in the history of ideas. Everybody reading this is in his debt.

---

Lawrence Ludlow is a freelance writer living in San Diego.
This post previously appeared at FEE and Strike the Root.

.

No, don’t free Anjem Choudary

 

Free Anjem Choudary? No, let’s not.

 

Here’s how not to defend free speech: by defending the jailing of “Islamist hothead” Anjen Choudhary – that “Bin Laden without the balls.” Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill, now on a tour of Australia and often quoted here, argues that “he’s repulsive, but he shouldn’t be sent to prison.”

What Choudhary dreams of doing — smashing freedom of thought and demanding conformity to his ideology — is done by the British state to him. In seeking to solve the Choudary problem, we become like Choudary:.

This is errant nonsense.

Yes, O’Neill is right that we shouldn’t have people arrested simply because they’re odious. And he’s very right that Choudary’s arrest and conviction now is largely “a displacement activity, a legalistic performance of toughness against the problem of Islamist extremism in place of any serious ideas for how to confront the growing influence of such anti-Western, anti-liberal ideas among young Muslims, and others”:

How much easier it is to hold up the likes of Choudary as infectors of minds than it is to ask what it is about 21st-century Britain that means a significant number of our young people can be drawn to profoundly unenlightened thought. The showy conviction of Choudary, ridiculously branded ‘the most dangerous man in Britain’, is a sad stand-in for tackling the crisis of British values and liberal thought, which is so strong that we’re losing — rather than Choudary actually winning — young people to a depressing, death cult creed.

The death cult Choudary supports exists in a vacuum created by the west itself – Islam always has. Choudary’s gleeful sponging on British taxpayers is almost a metaphor for how Islam has always survived and flourished, right from when it first began. He’s a parasite, as his religion always has been. As O’Neill identifies so well, Choudary and his fellow creatures are not winning young peope to their nihilistic stone-age cause, the west is generally losing them by failing to fully uphold, defend and identify its own founding values.

We do love life as they love death, but you wouldn’t know it from all the cringing. Getting up of our own knees would be a good way to begin fighting back against the death cult.

But it’s not true anyway that Choudary was guilty only of loose lips.  Like other cowardly inciters of the suicide killings they might have done themselves but didn’t, Choudary was fully implicated in mass murder. Writes Maajid Nawaz, who has followed his career for years, this jihadi joke was in reality a terrorist mastermind:

Over the course of his 20-year jihadist freefall, Anjem’s group al-Muhajiroun and its “Sharia For…” offshoots have been deemed responsible for half of all U.K. terrorist attacks. Anjem himself has been directly linked to the RAF Lakenheath plot, to radicalising Jihadi John’s British successor Siddhartha Darr, the Anzac Day plot in Australia, the plot to behead a British soldier, the murder of drummer Lee Rigby at Woolwich in London, the Royal Wooten Basset plot, the London Stock Exchange Plot, and suicide bomber Omar Khan Sharif’s 2003 attack in Tel Aviv. Anjem has also been indirectly linked to London’s 7/7 bombings, the shoe bomber, the ricin plot, the fertilizer bomb plot, the dirty bomb plot, and the Transatlantic bomb plot.
   Around 6,000 European citizens don’t just get up out of a vacuum and leave to join the worst terrorist group of our lifetime. Anjem Choudary was a key voice responsible for cultivating what eventually became this ISIS support network in Europe. And he acted with impunity.
    No surprises, then, that police revealed his link to 500 British jihadists fighting with ISIS in Syria.

So, much more than just an evil clown then.

But evil itself is impotent – it “has no power but that which we let it extort from us.” So like the vermin he is, has survived midst the cracks and crevices of civilised life – surviving midst the self-imposed western disarmament of cultural relativism, of welfarism, and in the holes in people’s understanding of what free speech entails. The simple relevant fact about free speech here today is this: You are entitled to say anything you like. We all have that right. But you are not entitled, to borrow Raymond Chandler’s feliitous phrase, to become a killer by remote control. That right belongs to no-one.

There is one reason however not to lock him up, and one reason only. That reason, says Nawaz, is that prisons themselves have now become hotbeds of radical recruitment, so

now that Anjem is in prison, another challenge confronts us. He will be held for a while at HMP Belmarsh, previously described as a jihadist training camp. How will he be stopped from playing his wicked tune through his crooked flute in jail? This time his audience is made up of hardened criminals.

Nawaz maintains that “action to at least neutralise his recruitment efforts must certainly be considered. And any plan should form a blueprint for building such intervention to scale, globally.”

The way in which my path eventually forked from Anjem’s symbolizes the split at the heart of the civil war playing out within Muslim communities, and beyond: Islamists against secularists. Muslims with varying levels of devotion, and even non-Muslims, sit on both sides of this divide. They straddle a largely passive Muslim majority that values its religion and culture but just wants to get on in life.
    Islamist theocrats will not allow them to do so.
    A civil war has unfolded within Islam, and none of us can any longer afford to remain neutral. First and foremost, this is an ideological war. The state, private companies, and civil society must intervene on behalf of secularists.

Intervening on behalf of a terrorist mastermind to help free him would put you on the other side that civil war. Not to mention on the other side of the war against us all declared by Islamist theocrats themselves.

.