WORLD WAR II ALSO A DISASTER?

Here's an interesting take on an old debate offered up by a Human Events reader from the Freat State of Ohio, backing up former Nixon speechwriter, former presidential candidate, and current MSNBC political pundit Patrick Buchanan once again on the "unnecessary war" the latter believes the Second (and First, for that matter) World War to have been.

AMERICA'S INVOLVEMENT in WWII was a total disaster.

The war started when Germany invaded Poland. After millions dead on both sides at the end of the war Poland was turned over to the Soviets. We never even accomplished the initial goal!

Adolph Hitler wanted to deport the Jews. Awful yes, but if we would have accepted them we would have gotten a million educated immigrants. Better than the millions of uneducated immigrants we get today. After Hitler's death the Germans would have gotten back to sanity. With the death of millions of Europeans, the Middle Eastern nations were able to rise to more power. This is also the reason millions of Muslims have been immigrating to Europe.

With the invasion of Muslims and the low birth rate of Europeans indigenous Europe will cease to exist in a generation. WWII may have very well be the seed that lead to the extinction of indigenous Europe. Remember the Holocaust didn't start until well after the war started and might never had happened if there had not been a war. So don't use the Holocaust as a reason for the war.

The Japanese front is even a more obvious failure. We never should have stuck our nose into the orient's business. We kicked the Japanese out of China, thus letting the Communist take over. This lead to Mao's murder of about 100 million Chinese. This is no improvement over the Japanese controlling China. The new Japanese Empire would have collapsed eventually, like all empires do. We didn't need to kill millions to speed it up.

Millions dead for no improvement at all and probably made things worse. This is nobody's definition of success.

ECONOMICAL SUPPLY CHAINS YANKED

No quick fix on the horizon. Note that even savings by those tight-fisted Asians are blamed for problems in their own region. Simply put, global merchants have overproduced in terms what the people can afford to buy, or desire to own; in other words, they have looked for love in all the wrong places.

But lest we forget, the Chinese and the Arabs still own America, unless we do something to break free (like produce our own energy and rebuild our own gutted industries, and insist on fair trade policies rather than this massive giveaway (trade deficit) that our leadership continues to pile up at national expense.

Washington Post reporter Steven Pearlstein:

FOR THE PAST TWO YEARS, Asians and Europeans have tended to view their own financial and economic problems as largely imported from the United States. The impacts on their own economies, they reasoned smugly, would be modest and short-lived.

Turns out they were wrong.

Over the past two weeks, the bottom has fallen out of Asia's export economy while Europe has come face to face with a financial crisis that is as bad as ours and will probably become even worse without the kind of unified response that individual countries have so far resisted.

And what does that mean for us? Nothing good. It means that our downturn will be longer and deeper than many had hoped and that we can't rely as much on export growth to pull us out of the ditch.

Basically, there are two stories to tell here about the sudden downturn in the global economy.

The easiest to understand is the collapse of industrial production in East Asia, where the supply chain starts in places like Taiwan and Vietnam and moves through places like China and Japan before cars, shoes, computers and flat-panel TVs arrive at stores in the United States, Western Europe and everywhere else.

According to Barry Eichengreen, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, the 40 percent decline in Taiwan's industrial production at the end of last year was the "canary in the coal mine" of Team Asia's formidable export machine. At about the same time, Japan's exports fell 35 percent, Korea's 17 percent, and China's fourth-quarter gross domestic product was essentially flat—no economic growth at all.

As did a number of other economists, Eichengreen told me he'd never seen declines this fast and this steep, even during the Asian economic crisis when he was working at the International Monetary Fund's war room here in Washington. It all reflects not only the sharp pullback in discretionary consumer spending around the world but also an equally sharp pullback in the flow of foreign investment that was used to build factories and shopping centers and has been an important driver of growth in the region.

Demand for Asian exports will pick up again before too long, but it will be a long time before they reach the levels attained at the height of the bubble economy. And it will be longer still before foreigners will be eager to invest in expanding capacity again.

Ideally, Asians would respond to this challenge by reducing their heavy reliance on exports and foreign investment and reorienting their economy more toward domestic consumption. But as Raghuram Rajan of the University of Chicago points out, that's not as simple as it sounds.

For starters, the things Asians might want to consume aren't necessarily the things they produce to export, so production would need to be reoriented and workers retrained and redeployed. And to replace the foreign investment, these economies would need to develop financial institutions that can raise and invest risk capital, which right now they don't really have. Most significantly, Asian governments would have to create safety-net programs like Social Security so people don't save so much and spend so little.

In short, the Asian downturn is probably manageable, particularly now that the Chinese government has responded with a massive stimulus package. But it will take time for the region to make the necessary adjustments to get the region humming again.

Read it all.

KICKING THE UNITED NATIONS OUT

We must quit the United nations. Then we must nationalize the UN properties, and send those carpetbagger delinquents, I mean delegations of Islamic appeasement, packing. Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post discusses the dire implications of the UN's willingness to throw freedom of speech overboard to placate the Islamic world.

The West stands by idly as its foundations are rent asunder. Last Friday the UN's Human Rights Council took a direct swipe at freedom of expression. In a 32-0 vote, the council instructed its "expert on freedom of expression" to report to the council on all instances in which individuals "abuse" their freedom of speech by giving expression to racial or religious bias.
The measure was proposed by paragons of freedom Egypt and Pakistan. It was supported by all Arab, Muslim and African countries—founts of liberty one and all. European states abstained.

The US, which is not a member of the Human Rights Council, tried to oppose the measure. In a speech before the council, US Ambassador to the UN in Geneva Warren Tichenor warned that the resolution's purpose is to undermine freedom of expression because it imposes "restrictions on individuals rather than emphasiz[ing] the duty and responsibility of governments to guarantee, uphold, promote and protect human rights."

By seeking to criminalize free speech, the resolution stands in breach of the UN's Declaration of Human Rights. Article 19 of that document states explicitly: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."

The Europeans' decision to abstain rather than oppose the measure seems, at first glance, rather surprising. Given that the EU member states are among the UN's most emphatic champions, it would have seemed normal for them to have opposed a resolution that undermines one of the UN's foundational documents, and indeed, one of the most basic tenets of Western civilization.

But then again, given the EU's stands in recent years against freedom of expression, there really is nothing to be surprised about. The EU's current bow to intellectual thuggery is of course found in its response to the Internet release of Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders' film Fitna.

The EU has gone out of its way to attack Wilders for daring to exercise his freedom of expression. The EU's presidency released a statement condemning the film for "inflaming hatred." Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende issued statements claiming that the film "serves no other purpose than to cause offense."

Then, too, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon blasted the film as "offensively anti-Islamic."

These statements follow the EU's quest to restrict freedom of speech following the 2005 publication of cartoons of Muhammed in Denmark's Jyllands Posten newspaper. They also come against the backdrop of the systematic silencing of anti-jihadist intellectuals throughout the continent. These intellectuals, such as Peter Redeker in France and Paul Cliteur in the Netherlands, are threatened into silence by European jihadists. And the governments of Europe either do nothing to defend the threatened thinkers or justify the intellectual blackmailers by sympathizing with their anger.

IT IS axiomatic that freedom of expression is the foundation of human freedom and progress. When people are not allowed to express themselves freely, there can be no debate or inquiry. It is only due to free debate and inquiry that humanity has progressed from the Dark Age to the Digital Age. This is why the first act of every would-be tyrant is to take control of the marketplace of ideas.

Yet today, the nations of Europe and indeed much of the Western world, either sit idly by and do nothing to defend that freedom or collaborate with unfree and often tyrannical Islamic states and terrorists in silencing debate and stifling dissent.

So why is the UN still in the US? The original headquarters is old. It was built when membership was half (at least) what it is now. The UN expects the US taxpayer to foot the bill for a new HQ in NYC. Why aren't the wealthier nations of the world paying up? It's not 1945. The US shouldn't need to pay 25% of the UN's operating costs. It shouldn't need to pay 15%. Even 10% is high, but it's acceptable. Journalist Fareed Zakaria describes this as a post-American world. Let's move the UN to a post-American locale. How about somewhere in Asia?

Read it all.

ISLAM: THE PILLAGING CIVILIZATION

On the question of the Golden Age of Islam, we have replied to this many times. You should read Fjordman's essay on that topic. Even in Europe's "Dark Ages" one is lead by rationality to believe the Europeans were evenly matched if not farther along than the Muslims.

To read postings by Muslims from the Middle East with all their spelling errors due to the lack of vowels in the Arabic language, one might question the whole "translation of texts" story that keeps getting repeated.

To suggest that once Rome was defeated, that the books of the collpased empire, which by then had circulated throughout Europe, were suddenly not available until an Islamic rescue is a rather quaint and fictitious notion. Did Greek and Roman 'thought' cease to exist simply because the empire had outlived its usefulness? Unlikely. Anything emanating from the Middle East after Islam was the result of them plundering it and bringing it home, and from the graces of their captives being able to preserve it.

Look to the Far East for the origin of the techniques of ceramics. Italy's own Marco Polo traveled through the Middle East on his way to China, and commented that there was nothing to be found but murderers, liars and thieves.

Even the new world was discovered because the merchants could not safely pass through the Middle East on their way to the Far East and they were looking for a safer route. Not necessarily a shorter route—a safer route. Remember the Cape Horn was also a very dangerous route.

Muslims take credit for far many things that, if one really investigates closely, just does't make sense.