You had me with “I want McCarthyism now.” The greatest triumph of the left in the 20th century was in tarring McCarthy so successfully in our media and in our universities.
Absolutely. In the US McCarthy represents the moment where the official Right capitulated-it was his own party that destroyed him, mocked him, accepted the leftist definition of what he had been doing. His last years his own party refused to speak to him or sit beside him or offer him any respect. Exactly the same as happened with Enoch Powell in the UK. In both cases these men were morally right and the official Right sided with the Left against them.
I read your articles because they are excellent, but on some of this one, I must respectfully disagree with you. You were right at the end of this article when you advocated for moral clarity and commitment to the service of the general public. However, at the start of this article you were advocating for McCarthyism and for doing-unto-them-as-they-do-unto-us,-but-worse. This does not seem to me to be congruent with the moral clarity and integrity you were rightly praising in your final paragraphs.
If we destroy our enemies using the same cruel and immoral tactics they use against us, then we corrupt ourselves and become like them. In the long run, we would only succeed in replacing one tyranny with another.
You correctly point out that they are successful because they do not limit themselves with scruples: we must find another way to be successful, because we must keep what sets us apart from them, our scruples, our honour, our integrity and commitment to justice and fairness.
Thank you for all your articles, which are always worth reading and debating over.
The apparent contradiction is easily resolved. I advocate for utter ruthlessness towards those who actually do threaten western civilisation and its peoples. They advocate for utter ruthlessness towards western civilisation and its peoples. I do not want the innocent targeted, but I do want the guilty targeted vigorously.
A comparison that springs to mind is this. At the height of the British Empire, we produced men and women who could endure and inflict more than we would endure or inflict, but who did so according to a genuine and deep rooted code of honour. We wiped out the practice of suttee because we were firm enough to consider it barbaric, we wiped out the thugee cult because we were firm enough to consider it barbaric. Both of those were good things. The same, actually, with slavery. We had no problem in recognising that our culture was more advanced than barbaric cultures doing barbaric things.
The same must apply politically, within our culture. We must have that firmness again, and we must use it.
You miss the point of my article. I want us to be worse than them to them. But that is not being the same as them and it’s not abandoning our morality. Why? Because the evil they do is aimed at the innocent, at those who actually did them no harm. We are the innocent, and they have committed terrible crimes against us. So retribution is fully moral, based on their own actions and natural justice.
In WWII the US dropped atom bombs on Japan. Compare Pearl Harbor with Nagasaki or Hiroshima. The response was a lot more deadly than the initial crime, but it was still justified for various reasons, the first being that it was retribution and the Japanese had initiated the conflict.
Well you have stirred up an interesting debate here! I have only been reading your Substack for a few weeks after I enjoyed your one on the Norman Fenton post about the ONS. They are always worth reading and getting debate is a good thing. However, I think the exisiting processes of justice need to be used if at all possible, though of course, they are under attack and corrupted. I want to see justice done, not retribution, and most of all I want to make sure the attacks on individual liberty and the medical harms inflicted during covid never happen again. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not retribution for Pearl Harbour, as far as I understand it. I believe they were an effort to stop WW2, which was very difficult given the Japanese kamakaze mentality and belief in a divine emperor. But I may be wrong about that. I am sure the people in the French Revolution thought they were handing out justice when they guillotined so many people. That went badly wrong. Retribution is the job of God, not man, I think. Who are we to judge?
Thanks Clare, interesting reply. Yes, one of the other things making Nagasaki and Hiroshima justifiable is the belief that they would end the war and save hundreds of thousands of lives that would be lost by an island by island, city by city, street by street conventional invasion of Japan. That’s true.
Re the French Revolution, or any barbaric revolution, those people could indeed consider themselves to be enacting retribution. But many, many innocents were directly targeted by these revolutions.
My point though is that we would not be attacking the innocent. We wouldn’t even be attacking those whose guilt is debatable. We would be attacking people who have already tried to destroy everything we cherish, reduce our rights to zero, and directly harm us.
An existential threat that has already attacked you morally warrants a ruthless response.
But what stops you becoming a monster is not what you are limited in doing by others, it is always what you know is right or wrong. For example, you could be firm enough to confront and kill your enemies, but morally object to torture. The point of difference between the war I am advocating and the war waged against us in terms of who is targeted. I want harms targeted at the genuinely guilty, whereas the systems I oppose aim harms at the innocent.
I must agree with Clare - you have indeed started an interesting debate! I also agree with her main point, that we must seek justice, not retribution.
However, I also see that we do face an existential threat, and we have a duty to ensure that we pass on to our descendants the freedom and tolerance that defines us as a people. Sadly, we can now see that our tolerance must have limits, we cannot continue to tolerate the intolerance that now undermines our way of life. We cannot, through weakness, allow our children and grandchildren to grow up in an authoritarian society where they are denied freedom of speech and conscience.
Our government is currently an illustration of the old saying 'all that is necessary for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing'. We cannot do nothing.
The hard task, as you point out, is to be sure that we choose our targets correctly. Behind the corruption and institutional inhumanity we face, there are many people who oppress others because they work in a coercive situation where they fear to lose their jobs, homes, careers, if they do not toe the line. Or they work or study in a 'bubble' of limited social contacts and social media feedback loops, which slowly draws them into ever more extremist views. Modern businesses receive financial incentives to impose ideologies on their staff and customers. We should liberate the coerced, reach out to the misinformed, free businesses from perverse incentives, and help those who need to get a life outside their radical bubble. (Some of the latter are MPs, making them quite a challenge.)
If we succeed in all that, we will still confront a hard core of people who simply despise our laws and democracy. That is where we face the real difficulty of meting out effective justice without becoming the monster.
I suggest the answer starts with protecting the innocent.
Sorry this reply seems to have turned into a rambling essay. Please accept it as a compliment to the interest and importance of the debate you have raised.
I do Catherine, and it’s also a very well written, well thought out reply that I enjoyed reading and largely agree with. Especially the sentence beginning ‘we should liberate the coerced…’, which is excellent both as a thought and as a piece of writing.
No. Not in the least. Every target was a legitimate military target. That’s why people like Vonnegut are wrong on Dresden for instance. Dresden was a key logistic and transport hub, which made it a legitimate target even without the fact that the Nazis started the war and had already bombed British cities.
If we had created gas chambers to gas German civilians, or performed horrific medical experiments on German children, then people could talk about a moral equivalence.
One point though. You say, "For our freedom to exist, we must ignore the rights and freedoms of the people who seek to enslave us."
However, I'm not sure this is necessary. In the philosophy of liberal democracy we all have the right not to be interfered with, and the duty not to harm others. i.e. negative rights and duties. (rooted in the Charter of Liberties in the year 1100, then Magna Carta, revived in 17th century England, and then crystallised by John Locke)
So those tyrants don't have rights and freedoms to either interfere with us or to harm us, and therefore we don't have to ignore such rights and freedoms. They don't exist anyway.
But the question is, if people transgress, who has the moral authority to punish them? Fellow Christians say God alone, or may pray as in Psalm 7:15 that a transgressor falls into its own pit: "He made a pit, and digged it, and is fallen into the ditch which he made."
We can aim to keep ourselves safe and free by resisting centralisation of power, and also by erecting governance frameworks to keep powers separate. Often we think of separating powers of state, religion, police, judiciary, the press, etc, but critically, we must also keep the power of corporations separate from the power of governments.
In the end, the mass of weak and empathetic people (that's most of us) must somehow maintain power over both the psychopath and the well-meaning fool. (Psychopaths must be combatted or drained of their power, but the fools can be reformed, hopefully.)
Fortunately, we are the vast majority, and the few psychopaths actually need our help to control us!
It may be as simple as keeping ourselves educated so we can think for ourselves, and continuing to expose ourselves to small attacks from the psychopath pathogen so that we keep our immune systems against them up to date. Then perhaps our police force will not defend the state against us, nor our army come on to the streets against its own people during an election (in November?) or a next declared pandemic of disease X, nor psychopathic corporations embrace state power as a marketing tool to force their products upon us.
I'm not sure whether it's this simple, to just not help them to control us? Even if it is, we need some good psychological tools. David Charalambous is a good start.
By the way, I've heard that psychopaths fear humiliation, and hate being ridiculed ... that's an Achilles Heel we can aim at. Bring on the cartoons!
But let's hope we can avoid the spectacle of another Mussolini hanging by his ankles.
The truth Solzhenitsyn continually returned to was that "the people had forgotten God". A sound religion is of absolute necessity to a free state. Thomas Sowell began his intellectual odyssey as a Marxist, and then has gone on to become one of the clearest enunciators of the Conservative argument ever. Without sin you can not create mature Christians, and perhaps without Marxism you cannot see the beauty of the free market. The solutions seem simple to me: Hold people responsible for their crimes. Make sure the incentives ensure that people will reap what they sow.
The West don't want to learn from the history, and don't want to learn from what people like me tell them about tyranny... In the entire Eastern Europe, when communism felt on the heads of those nations, the biggest mistake done by kings and politicians was to play by the democracy rules, to keep their moral high ground - most of them kept it until they went six feet under via communist political jails. Fast forward several decades, and we see the commies making a mockery of the anti-communist revolts. Why? Again, the new non-communist political class wanted to play by the book, whereas the former commies, now self-labeled social-democrats, socialist-democrats, etc, had no such problems, using the violence on large scale to win elections and terrorise anyone who was not them.
For our freedom to exist, we must ignore the rights and freedoms of the people who seek to enslave us. We must be worse than them, to defeat them...
It has long been understood, in military circles anyway, that the only way to beat a hooligan ... is to be a bigger and better hooligan. There is no appeal to hooligans for fairness or entreaties to their better nature ... because they don't have one. Hooligans, such as Hamas must be ruthlessly put down and put down so hard that they can never get up off the floor ever gain.
Very well thought out and expressed, sir. Plan to share excerpts. Yup. A thorny challenge, for sure: how to pitilessly and effectively defend Liberty without yourself morphing into the tyrant you loathe. Currently, some very savvy folks out there have voiced their objections to republicanism, relying on current events in the USA alone to justify a new form of government which is more directly responsive to the people. While the constitutional republican model has failed us--or we it--am not so sure of that solution at all. Democracy was, for good reason, shunned by our Founders. And in what has become an expansive "empire"with a terrible voter to representative ratio, this model has effectively failed. And then there's Athens, much smaller in scale, where democracy worked for awhile but ultimately failed as well. How the West deals with its impending collapse and what form of governments replace this mess is a huge unknown. Perhaps the best we can hope for is periodic benevolent dictatorship. I hope that's no the case. It may be that Democracy and Republicanism are simply too ideal-- probably unachievable--for us, the awfullly flawed and corrupted lot which we are. Frankly, I've run out of possible remedies. But one thing's for certain, at least in my humble mind: the US's union of currently vassalized States, which would be anathema to our Foudners, will soon be no more. And I don;t honestly bleieve that is something to be lamented. I view it as an opportunity, an escape from the neo-Marxist madness. War and more election interference, but especially the assassination of a presidential candidate (Trump?), will expedite what I believe to be this inevitable re-ordering. Let this alliance of independent States experiment with a workable, more responsive Liberty-minded system of government. One of these independent States will, hopefully, figure it out to the benefit of all otehr seceded States. Way above my pay grade to figure all that out. In any event, I am an avid secessionist now. I see no other viable remedy, short of suicidal revolution or civil war which would be in no one's interest. And, again, we cannot, in desperation, ape the behavior of tyrants with the hope of eliminating tyranny. But I do think free people and their representatives must be much more assertive, organized, fearless, determined when dealing with that tyranny. I think that's just a given. Too much pussy-footing and spinelessness on the Right these days. Makes us easy pickings for the more ruthless authoritarians among us. That's blatantly obvious now. That's gotta' change NOW. The question is when and how. Keep up the great writing, thinking. Refreshing.
You had me with “I want McCarthyism now.” The greatest triumph of the left in the 20th century was in tarring McCarthy so successfully in our media and in our universities.
Absolutely. In the US McCarthy represents the moment where the official Right capitulated-it was his own party that destroyed him, mocked him, accepted the leftist definition of what he had been doing. His last years his own party refused to speak to him or sit beside him or offer him any respect. Exactly the same as happened with Enoch Powell in the UK. In both cases these men were morally right and the official Right sided with the Left against them.
I read your articles because they are excellent, but on some of this one, I must respectfully disagree with you. You were right at the end of this article when you advocated for moral clarity and commitment to the service of the general public. However, at the start of this article you were advocating for McCarthyism and for doing-unto-them-as-they-do-unto-us,-but-worse. This does not seem to me to be congruent with the moral clarity and integrity you were rightly praising in your final paragraphs.
If we destroy our enemies using the same cruel and immoral tactics they use against us, then we corrupt ourselves and become like them. In the long run, we would only succeed in replacing one tyranny with another.
You correctly point out that they are successful because they do not limit themselves with scruples: we must find another way to be successful, because we must keep what sets us apart from them, our scruples, our honour, our integrity and commitment to justice and fairness.
Thank you for all your articles, which are always worth reading and debating over.
The apparent contradiction is easily resolved. I advocate for utter ruthlessness towards those who actually do threaten western civilisation and its peoples. They advocate for utter ruthlessness towards western civilisation and its peoples. I do not want the innocent targeted, but I do want the guilty targeted vigorously.
A comparison that springs to mind is this. At the height of the British Empire, we produced men and women who could endure and inflict more than we would endure or inflict, but who did so according to a genuine and deep rooted code of honour. We wiped out the practice of suttee because we were firm enough to consider it barbaric, we wiped out the thugee cult because we were firm enough to consider it barbaric. Both of those were good things. The same, actually, with slavery. We had no problem in recognising that our culture was more advanced than barbaric cultures doing barbaric things.
The same must apply politically, within our culture. We must have that firmness again, and we must use it.
I completely agree with you Catherine. We will get absolutely nowhere by being 'worse than them'. You can't switch moral behaviour on and off!
You miss the point of my article. I want us to be worse than them to them. But that is not being the same as them and it’s not abandoning our morality. Why? Because the evil they do is aimed at the innocent, at those who actually did them no harm. We are the innocent, and they have committed terrible crimes against us. So retribution is fully moral, based on their own actions and natural justice.
In WWII the US dropped atom bombs on Japan. Compare Pearl Harbor with Nagasaki or Hiroshima. The response was a lot more deadly than the initial crime, but it was still justified for various reasons, the first being that it was retribution and the Japanese had initiated the conflict.
Well you have stirred up an interesting debate here! I have only been reading your Substack for a few weeks after I enjoyed your one on the Norman Fenton post about the ONS. They are always worth reading and getting debate is a good thing. However, I think the exisiting processes of justice need to be used if at all possible, though of course, they are under attack and corrupted. I want to see justice done, not retribution, and most of all I want to make sure the attacks on individual liberty and the medical harms inflicted during covid never happen again. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not retribution for Pearl Harbour, as far as I understand it. I believe they were an effort to stop WW2, which was very difficult given the Japanese kamakaze mentality and belief in a divine emperor. But I may be wrong about that. I am sure the people in the French Revolution thought they were handing out justice when they guillotined so many people. That went badly wrong. Retribution is the job of God, not man, I think. Who are we to judge?
Thanks Clare, interesting reply. Yes, one of the other things making Nagasaki and Hiroshima justifiable is the belief that they would end the war and save hundreds of thousands of lives that would be lost by an island by island, city by city, street by street conventional invasion of Japan. That’s true.
Re the French Revolution, or any barbaric revolution, those people could indeed consider themselves to be enacting retribution. But many, many innocents were directly targeted by these revolutions.
My point though is that we would not be attacking the innocent. We wouldn’t even be attacking those whose guilt is debatable. We would be attacking people who have already tried to destroy everything we cherish, reduce our rights to zero, and directly harm us.
An existential threat that has already attacked you morally warrants a ruthless response.
Thanks for replying!
No one ever regarded Nemesis, the goddess of retribution, who came with whips and a sword, as being “immoral.”
Yes. While I'm no particular admirer of Nietzsche in general, he was surely right when he warned, when fighting monsters, not to become one.
But what stops you becoming a monster is not what you are limited in doing by others, it is always what you know is right or wrong. For example, you could be firm enough to confront and kill your enemies, but morally object to torture. The point of difference between the war I am advocating and the war waged against us in terms of who is targeted. I want harms targeted at the genuinely guilty, whereas the systems I oppose aim harms at the innocent.
I must agree with Clare - you have indeed started an interesting debate! I also agree with her main point, that we must seek justice, not retribution.
However, I also see that we do face an existential threat, and we have a duty to ensure that we pass on to our descendants the freedom and tolerance that defines us as a people. Sadly, we can now see that our tolerance must have limits, we cannot continue to tolerate the intolerance that now undermines our way of life. We cannot, through weakness, allow our children and grandchildren to grow up in an authoritarian society where they are denied freedom of speech and conscience.
Our government is currently an illustration of the old saying 'all that is necessary for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing'. We cannot do nothing.
The hard task, as you point out, is to be sure that we choose our targets correctly. Behind the corruption and institutional inhumanity we face, there are many people who oppress others because they work in a coercive situation where they fear to lose their jobs, homes, careers, if they do not toe the line. Or they work or study in a 'bubble' of limited social contacts and social media feedback loops, which slowly draws them into ever more extremist views. Modern businesses receive financial incentives to impose ideologies on their staff and customers. We should liberate the coerced, reach out to the misinformed, free businesses from perverse incentives, and help those who need to get a life outside their radical bubble. (Some of the latter are MPs, making them quite a challenge.)
If we succeed in all that, we will still confront a hard core of people who simply despise our laws and democracy. That is where we face the real difficulty of meting out effective justice without becoming the monster.
I suggest the answer starts with protecting the innocent.
Sorry this reply seems to have turned into a rambling essay. Please accept it as a compliment to the interest and importance of the debate you have raised.
I do Catherine, and it’s also a very well written, well thought out reply that I enjoyed reading and largely agree with. Especially the sentence beginning ‘we should liberate the coerced…’, which is excellent both as a thought and as a piece of writing.
Just one question: did the Allies become like Nazis when they transformed in rubble the German cities?
No. Not in the least. Every target was a legitimate military target. That’s why people like Vonnegut are wrong on Dresden for instance. Dresden was a key logistic and transport hub, which made it a legitimate target even without the fact that the Nazis started the war and had already bombed British cities.
If we had created gas chambers to gas German civilians, or performed horrific medical experiments on German children, then people could talk about a moral equivalence.
This kind of populism is now very necessary throughout the Western world. Our societies must be cleansed
Yes, that’s entirely my view as well.
Knotty problem, well addressed.
One point though. You say, "For our freedom to exist, we must ignore the rights and freedoms of the people who seek to enslave us."
However, I'm not sure this is necessary. In the philosophy of liberal democracy we all have the right not to be interfered with, and the duty not to harm others. i.e. negative rights and duties. (rooted in the Charter of Liberties in the year 1100, then Magna Carta, revived in 17th century England, and then crystallised by John Locke)
So those tyrants don't have rights and freedoms to either interfere with us or to harm us, and therefore we don't have to ignore such rights and freedoms. They don't exist anyway.
But the question is, if people transgress, who has the moral authority to punish them? Fellow Christians say God alone, or may pray as in Psalm 7:15 that a transgressor falls into its own pit: "He made a pit, and digged it, and is fallen into the ditch which he made."
We can aim to keep ourselves safe and free by resisting centralisation of power, and also by erecting governance frameworks to keep powers separate. Often we think of separating powers of state, religion, police, judiciary, the press, etc, but critically, we must also keep the power of corporations separate from the power of governments.
In the end, the mass of weak and empathetic people (that's most of us) must somehow maintain power over both the psychopath and the well-meaning fool. (Psychopaths must be combatted or drained of their power, but the fools can be reformed, hopefully.)
Fortunately, we are the vast majority, and the few psychopaths actually need our help to control us!
It may be as simple as keeping ourselves educated so we can think for ourselves, and continuing to expose ourselves to small attacks from the psychopath pathogen so that we keep our immune systems against them up to date. Then perhaps our police force will not defend the state against us, nor our army come on to the streets against its own people during an election (in November?) or a next declared pandemic of disease X, nor psychopathic corporations embrace state power as a marketing tool to force their products upon us.
I'm not sure whether it's this simple, to just not help them to control us? Even if it is, we need some good psychological tools. David Charalambous is a good start.
By the way, I've heard that psychopaths fear humiliation, and hate being ridiculed ... that's an Achilles Heel we can aim at. Bring on the cartoons!
But let's hope we can avoid the spectacle of another Mussolini hanging by his ankles.
The truth Solzhenitsyn continually returned to was that "the people had forgotten God". A sound religion is of absolute necessity to a free state. Thomas Sowell began his intellectual odyssey as a Marxist, and then has gone on to become one of the clearest enunciators of the Conservative argument ever. Without sin you can not create mature Christians, and perhaps without Marxism you cannot see the beauty of the free market. The solutions seem simple to me: Hold people responsible for their crimes. Make sure the incentives ensure that people will reap what they sow.
The West don't want to learn from the history, and don't want to learn from what people like me tell them about tyranny... In the entire Eastern Europe, when communism felt on the heads of those nations, the biggest mistake done by kings and politicians was to play by the democracy rules, to keep their moral high ground - most of them kept it until they went six feet under via communist political jails. Fast forward several decades, and we see the commies making a mockery of the anti-communist revolts. Why? Again, the new non-communist political class wanted to play by the book, whereas the former commies, now self-labeled social-democrats, socialist-democrats, etc, had no such problems, using the violence on large scale to win elections and terrorise anyone who was not them.
They've created people incapable of loving or being loved, just visit any Walmart for a plethora of examples.
For our freedom to exist, we must ignore the rights and freedoms of the people who seek to enslave us. We must be worse than them, to defeat them...
It has long been understood, in military circles anyway, that the only way to beat a hooligan ... is to be a bigger and better hooligan. There is no appeal to hooligans for fairness or entreaties to their better nature ... because they don't have one. Hooligans, such as Hamas must be ruthlessly put down and put down so hard that they can never get up off the floor ever gain.
Very well thought out and expressed, sir. Plan to share excerpts. Yup. A thorny challenge, for sure: how to pitilessly and effectively defend Liberty without yourself morphing into the tyrant you loathe. Currently, some very savvy folks out there have voiced their objections to republicanism, relying on current events in the USA alone to justify a new form of government which is more directly responsive to the people. While the constitutional republican model has failed us--or we it--am not so sure of that solution at all. Democracy was, for good reason, shunned by our Founders. And in what has become an expansive "empire"with a terrible voter to representative ratio, this model has effectively failed. And then there's Athens, much smaller in scale, where democracy worked for awhile but ultimately failed as well. How the West deals with its impending collapse and what form of governments replace this mess is a huge unknown. Perhaps the best we can hope for is periodic benevolent dictatorship. I hope that's no the case. It may be that Democracy and Republicanism are simply too ideal-- probably unachievable--for us, the awfullly flawed and corrupted lot which we are. Frankly, I've run out of possible remedies. But one thing's for certain, at least in my humble mind: the US's union of currently vassalized States, which would be anathema to our Foudners, will soon be no more. And I don;t honestly bleieve that is something to be lamented. I view it as an opportunity, an escape from the neo-Marxist madness. War and more election interference, but especially the assassination of a presidential candidate (Trump?), will expedite what I believe to be this inevitable re-ordering. Let this alliance of independent States experiment with a workable, more responsive Liberty-minded system of government. One of these independent States will, hopefully, figure it out to the benefit of all otehr seceded States. Way above my pay grade to figure all that out. In any event, I am an avid secessionist now. I see no other viable remedy, short of suicidal revolution or civil war which would be in no one's interest. And, again, we cannot, in desperation, ape the behavior of tyrants with the hope of eliminating tyranny. But I do think free people and their representatives must be much more assertive, organized, fearless, determined when dealing with that tyranny. I think that's just a given. Too much pussy-footing and spinelessness on the Right these days. Makes us easy pickings for the more ruthless authoritarians among us. That's blatantly obvious now. That's gotta' change NOW. The question is when and how. Keep up the great writing, thinking. Refreshing.
You sound just like my husband