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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; human nature</title>
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		<title>Why Should We Study War?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/why-should-we-study-war/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-should-we-study-war</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 02 Dec 2013 05:30:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[History]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Thermopylae]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[What military history tells us about human nature.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Jacques-Louis_David_004_Thermopylae.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-212081" alt="Jacques-Louis_David_004_Thermopylae" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Jacques-Louis_David_004_Thermopylae-450x330.jpg" width="270" height="198" /></a>Originally published by <a href="http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/162466">Defining Ideas</a>.</em></p>
<p>In the latter years of World War I, Winston Churchill met with the novelist and poet Siegfried Sassoon. Sassoon was a winner of the Military Cross––he single-handedly routed 60 Germans and captured a trench on the Hindenburg Line––and a fierce pacifist. Sassoon’s reminiscences of that meeting reveal how odd my title question would have struck most people before our time. He recalled that during their conversation, Churchill “gave me an emphatic vindication of militarism as an instrument of policy and stimulator of glorious individual achievements.”</p>
<p>After Sassoon left, he wondered, “Had he been entirely serious . . . when he said that ‘war is the normal occupation of man’? [I]t had been unmistakable that for him war was the finest activity on earth.” Churchill, remember, had served under fire in India, Sudan, Cuba, and South Africa even before his service in the trenches, so his comments were not the braggadocio of the armchair militarist unfamiliar with the horrors of war.</p>
<p>Many of us moderns, of course, find Sassoon’s beliefs, expressed in his poems and novels, about the futility and misery of war more attractive than Churchill’s idealization of it, and consider such enthusiasm untoward, if not sinister. Such attitudes have made war a disreputable topic of study. Once vigorous in the academy, military history programs are rarely found at universities and colleges today, even as  “peace studies” programs have proliferated. Reasons for this change are not hard to find. America’s historically unprecedented military power, its enormous wealth, and since 1865 its freedom from battle on its own soil and from foreign invasion have all insulated Americans from war, and enabled the perception that rather than a foundational and ennobling experience of humanity, war is an unnatural anomaly, a species of barbarism from our benighted past, and hence an unsavory topic of formal study, even as it remains a lucrative (and, to many people, low-brow) subject for books, movies, cable television channels, and video games.</p>
<p>In contrast to the modern disdain for studying war, most people before the twentieth century would have found Churchill’s comments unexceptional, indeed banal, and they would have considered self-evident the answer to the question raised in this essay’s title. The ancient Greeks were one of the most civilized, artistic, and cultured peoples in history. But they never questioned the eternal necessity of war. “War is the father of all,” Heraclitus said of the original “creative destruction.”  Plato in the <em>Laws</em> has Cleinias say, “Peace is only a name; in reality every city is in a natural state of war with every other.” The arch-realist Thucydides in his <em>History of the Peloponnesian War</em> has an Athenian ambassador tell the Spartans that states fight one another because of the constants of human nature such as fear, honor, and self-interest, and invoke higher ideals such as “justice” only when they cannot achieve their aims by force.</p>
<p>All these Greeks agree with Churchill that war is a non-negotiable necessity and a legitimate “instrument of policy,” given the realities of human nature and its perennial passions and interests. In a harsh world of limited resources and violent men, war is as critical for the survival of civilization as agriculture, and as such, it would be as great a folly not to study war, as it would be to ignore the craft and skills of farming.</p>
<p>So too with Churchill’s praise of war as the “stimulator of glorious individual achievements.” From the beginnings of Western literature in Homer’s <em>Iliad</em>, and of history in Herodotus’ <em>Histories</em>, the glorious deeds of warriors, their bravery and self-sacrifice for honor and community, have been celebrated and admired. Who can forget the doomed valor of Hector, when despite knowing he is fated to die at the hands of Achilles, says before his last charge, “But now my death is upon me. Let me at least not die without a struggle, inglorious, but do some big thing first, that men to come shall know of it”?</p>
<p>And even today, in an age of historical amnesia, the last stand of the vastly outnumbered Thespians and Spartans at Thermopylae is still remembered, when, as Herodotus writes, the Greeks, their spears and swords shattered, “defended themselves with knives, if they still had them, and otherwise with their hands and teeth, while the Persians buried them in a hail of missiles.”</p>
<p>Those before us knew that for all its horrors and misery––which our ancestors acknowledged as much as its glories––war is when the best that men are capable of is manifested, and great deeds worthy of memory are achieved. And they understood as well that the commemoration of these deeds by men “who knew their duty and had the courage to do it,” as Pericles said of his fellow Athenians, creates models of virtue and honor for subsequent generations to study and emulate. Only in that way can a civilization survive in a world of limited resources and ruthless aggressors.</p>
<p>Churchill’s comments, then, suggest two reasons for the study of war, one practical, and the other philosophical. If war is an unavoidable and necessary instrument of statecraft, then we should study the origins, conduct, successes, and failures of wars in order to find, as the Roman historian Livy describes the purpose of history, “what to imitate,” and to “mark for avoidance what is shameful in the conception and shameful in the result.” This need is particularly pressing in a democracy, where the military is subordinated to the civilian government, and the voters have the responsibility to debate and deliberate policies, and to choose leaders whose charge is to serve the security and interests of the citizens both in the short and in the long term.</p>
<p>Two historical examples, one ancient, one modern, illustrate the importance of military history for teaching the lessons of the past. In 415 B.C., over ten years into the war against Sparta, the democratic Assembly of Athens voted to send an expeditionary force 800 miles to attack the rich and powerful city of Syracuse. In Thucydides’ telling, this decision was based neither on short-term nor on long-term strategic national interests and security, but on the promise of an expanded empire and the greater revenues that would be available to the citizens through the tribute of subject states.</p>
<p>The charismatic and ambitious Alcibiades was a prime mover of the expedition. He dangled the lure of greater empire, telling the Assembly, “We shall either become masters, as we very easily may, of the whole of Hellas [Greece], or in any case ruin the Syracusans, to the no small advantage of ourselves and our allies.” As for the Assemblymen, Thucydides writes, “The idea of the common people and the soldiery was to earn wages at the moment [the treasury increased the pay for rowers, and the commanders of the ships promised bonuses as well], and make conquests that would supply a never-ending fund of pay for the future.” The expedition sailed, and became one of the most famous military disasters in history. The Athenians lost 6000 men and 200 ships, the whole expeditionary force and a relief fleet as well.</p>
<p>This disaster offers many lessons. First, dispassionate knowledge of the enemy and the logistics of war are critical for success. According to Thucydides, the Athenians were “ignorant of [Sicily’s] size and of the number of its inhabitants, Hellenic and barbarian, and of the fact that they were undertaking a war not much inferior to that against the Peloponnesians.” Thus the Athenians woefully underestimated the power and resources of the Syracusans and the dangers of resupply and relief when 800 miles from home, both factors in the ultimate debacle. Next, parochial self-interest, the selfish desire for personal wealth and glory rather than the safety and well being of the state as a whole, are dangerous motives for undertaking a war, as they obscure the limits and obstacles a more sober consideration might reveal.</p>
<p>Finally, politicians like an Alcibiades––who according to Thucydides was “exceedingly ambitious of a command by which he hoped to reduce Sicily and Carthage, and personally to gain in wealth and reputation by means of his success”­­––will end up sacrificing the state as a whole in order to further their own ambitions. These are all dangers that the citizens should beware when contemplating the use of force to pursue policy, and when deliberating and evaluating the aims which war will achieve.</p>
<p>The modern lesson comes from the origins of World War II. As Winston Churchill said in his famous “Sinews of Peace” speech in Fulton, Missouri in 1946, “There never was a war in all history easier to prevent by timely action than the one which has just desolated such great areas of the globe. It could have been prevented in my belief without the firing of a single shot.” Churchill was referring to the period before 1935, when Germany’s serial violations of the Versailles treaty, particularly its clandestine programs for rebuilding its army and armaments industry, were met with indifference or appeasement. But even later, timely military action could have stopped Nazi Germany at a fraction of the 50 million dead World War II cost.</p>
<p>In 1936, Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland, the territory between the French border and the Rhine River, in violation of the Versailles treaty. His 36,000 policemen and green army recruits faced nearly 100 French and Belgian divisions, who did not fire a shot. Later Hitler would admit that the Germans would have had to “withdraw with our tails between our legs” had the French resisted. Two years later, England and France abandoned their ally Czechoslovakia, and Germany absorbed this strategically critical country. Yet if England and France had fought back with force, an outnumbered Germany would have been defeated, as Poland and the Soviet Union would likely have followed their ally France’s lead. A French advance east from the Maginot Line would have opened a second front and overwhelmed Germany’s manpower and materiel. As historian Williamson Murray writes, “Germany would have faced overwhelming Allied superiority . . . The results would have been inevitable and would have led to the eventual collapse of the Nazi regime at considerably less cost” than the butcher’s bill of World War II.</p>
<p>Once Hitler’s ambitions became obvious even to the appeasers after the debacle of Munich, the French and British announced that they would protect Poland’s territorial integrity should Germany invade. But this was the wrong place and time to draw that particular red line. The occupation of Czechoslovakia had strengthened Germany and put the Wehrmacht on the southern border of Poland, beyond the state-of-the-art fortifications the Czechs had built in their mountainous western region. And Germany now possessed the military hardware of the Czechs and the Skoda works, one of the largest arms manufacturers in Europe. In fact, the Panzer 35(t) and 38(t) tanks used in the invasion of Poland were actually Czech tanks produced by Skoda. Given Germany’s advantages, there simply was not much England and France could do militarily to help the Poles, which explains the 8 months of “phony war” marked by the Allies’ inaction after Hitler invaded Poland.</p>
<p>The lesson we should learn from this sorry history is that preemptive war is a necessity when facing a determined aggressor, and that the time and place of a potential conflict, and the capacity to wage war until its successful conclusion, must be carefully considered and prepared for when making treaty commitments and pledging the nation’s blood and treasure. This means that often a nation cannot merely wait to react to aggression, but must anticipate where the blow will fall.</p>
<p>To use the simile of the great fourth-century Greek orator Demosthenes, when he chastised the Athenians for serially failing to react to Philip of Macedon’s aggression, a nation must not deal with an aggressor the way a barbarian boxes: “The barbarian,” Demosthenes said, “when struck, always clutches the place; hit him on the other side and there go his hands. He neither knows nor cares how to parry a blow or how to watch his adversary.” Given that Hitler had 13 years earlier laid out his plan of conquest in <em>Mein Kampf</em>, the Allies should have anticipated the sequence of aggression that would culminate in the attack on Poland, and resisted the Germans in 1936 in the Rhineland, or in 1938 in Austria or Czechoslovakia.</p>
<p>The larger lesson, however, of this “low dishonest decade,” as W.H. Auden called the thirties, is that success in war depends on morale, not material superiority. Long before 1938, England and France had lost their nerve, and simply did not have the will to fight. Instead they had bought into the illusions of internationalism and collective security, pacifism and disarmament, which had merely fed the alligator of Nazism, to paraphrase Churchill, in the vain hope that they would be eaten last. And this brings us to the philosophical lessons the study of war teaches. Contrary to our modern therapeutic utopianism, the history of war shows us the unchanging, tragic reality of human nature and its irrational passions and interests that will spark state aggression and violence.</p>
<p>The modern world, in contrast, rejects the notion that human nature comprises destructive passions and selfish interests that will start wars only force can stop. On the contrary, to the modern optimist, humans are universally rational and peace loving, if only the external, warping constraints on these qualities––ignorance, poverty, parochial ethnic and nationalist loyalties, the oppression of priestly and aristocratic elites––can be removed. Then people will progress to the realization that their true interests like peace, freedom, and prosperity will be achieved not by force but by international trade, economic development, democracy, and non-lethal transnational institutions that can adjudicate conflict and eliminate the scourge of war.</p>
<p>This influential belief was famously expressed by Immanuel Kant in his 1795 essay “Perpetual Peace.” In it Kant imagined a “federation of free states” that would create a “pacific alliance . . . different from a treaty of peace . . . inasmuch as it would forever terminate all wars, whereas the latter only finishes one.” In his conclusion, Kant expressed the optimism that would become an article of faith in subsequent centuries: “If it is a duty, if the hope can even be conceived, of realizing, though by an endless progress, the reign of public right––perpetual peace, which will succeed to the suspension of hostilities, hitherto named treaties of peace, is not then a chimera, but a problem, of which time, probably abridged by the uniformity of the progress of the human mind, promises us the solution.”</p>
<p>Throughout the nineteenth century international institutions were created to realize this dream and lessen, if not eliminate, the savagery and suffering of war. The First Geneva Convention in 1864 and the Second in 1906 sought to establish laws for the humane treatment of the sick and wounded in war. The first Hague Convention in 1899 established an international Court of Arbitration and codified restrictions on aerial bombardment, poison gas, and exploding bullets.  The preamble to the first Hague Convention explicitly acknowledged its Kantian aims: “the maintenance of the general peace” and the “friendly settlement of international disputes” that both reflected the “solidarity which unites the members of the society of civilized nations” and their shared desire for “extending the empire of law, and of strengthening the appreciation of international justice.” One wonders how such optimism made sense of the Franco-Prussian War three decades earlier, when two of the world’s most “civilized nations” suffered nearly a million casualties, including 170,000 dead.</p>
<p>Even after the industrialized carnage of World War I showed international solidarity and universal progress to be a fantasy, the Versailles treaty established the League of Nations, the transnational institution intended to realize Kant’s dream of a “federation of free states” that would keep the peace and promote global progress. But within a few years the League had been exposed as ineffective, since the same sovereign nations that had fought each other so brutally in the war continued to pursue their zero-sum interests, frequently with force. No more effective has been the United Nations, a “cockpit in the Tower of Babel,” as Churchill feared it might become, that also has failed at its foundational goal of maintaining peace, becoming instead an instrument of the member-states’ nationalist interests, one that frequently supplements and abets, rather than controls or limits state violence.</p>
<p>Familiarity with the history of war should disabuse people of these Kantian illusions. Studying the causes and nature of armed conflict reveals that technological progress, better education and nutrition, global trade, and increased prosperity has not eliminated or reduced wars, but often made them more brutal and destructive. Military history teaches us that war is not a distortion of a peace-loving human nature that not yet has sufficiently progressed beyond such savage barbarism, but rather is a reflection of a flawed human nature, and the necessary instrument for states to protect their security and pursue their interests, whether these are rational and good, or irrational and evil. The study of war, in short, can remind us of the tragic wisdom evident on every page of history: that humans are fallen creatures prone to destructive violence that only righteous violence can check.</p>
<p>The lessons we can learn from studying war, of course, are more numerous than the few discussed here. Our judgment of any war, whether of its origins or its conduct, must be based on the record of history rather than the utopian fantasies of a world that will never exist. From the standard of history, in any conflict we should always expect mistakes, unforeseen consequences, civilian casualties, deaths from friendly fire, barbarism, and cruelty. All of these contingencies can be found in every war, including the so-called “good war,” World War II, from the Market Garden disaster in September 1944 that cost the Allies 16,000 casualties, to the harvesting of gold teeth from the Japanese dead in the South Pacific. These evils are the costs of using violence to defend our security and interests, and should be expected, though never condoned, the moment the decision to go to war has been made.</p>
<p>We also should expect­­––particularly in constitutional states where citizens are responsible for the decision to go to war––impatience, second-guessing, and frustration with these unfortunately perennial evils of armed conflict. And we should not be surprised when the citizens want to punish the politicians and leaders who started and managed the war. After news of the disaster in Sicily reached Athens, Thucydides writes, the people “were angry with the orators who had joined in promoting the expedition, just as if they had not themselves voted it.” We recently experienced the same phenomenon during the Iraq war in 2004, when many of the same Senators who had voted to invade Iraq year earlier, a decision based on the same intelligence the Bush administration had studied, responded to growing criticism of the war by turning against it and attacking the president.</p>
<p>Leon Trotsky allegedly said, “You may not believe in war, but war believes in you.” Though likely a mistranslation, the sentiment is still valuable. War and its horrors will always be with us, along with its unavoidable suffering and cruelty, “such as have occurred and always will occur as long as the nature of mankind remains the same,” as Thucydides writes. And as long as we cherish our way of life, with its freedom and human rights, its prosperity and its opportunity, we will at times have to make the awful decision to send our citizens to fight, kill, and die to defend those goods from those who want to destroy them. The more we know about war, the better equipped we will be to make that choice and see our efforts succeed.</p>
<p><em>This essay is based on a speech delivered at Hillsdale College.</em></p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>David Horowitz</strong> on<strong> The Glazov Gang </strong>discussing his new collection of conservative writings, <strong><a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/productlist.html?key=SZLFMGIYTBFM">The Black Book of the American Left, Volume I: My Life and Times:</a></strong></em></p>
<p><strong>Part I:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/QL9WUvnJ_Cs" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Part II:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/eeN2K6romr8" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Rumsfeld’s Rules</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/mark-tapson/rumsfelds-rules/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=rumsfelds-rules</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 20 May 2013 04:55:20 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[human nature]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[leadership]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Rumsfeld’s Rules]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The former Secretary of Defense’s leadership lessons.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/donrum.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-190016" alt="donrum" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/donrum.jpg" width="300" height="400" /></a><strong>The Wednesday Morning Club Welcomes Donald Rumsfeld &#8212; In a Conversation With David Horowitz &#8212; on Tuesday, May 21, 2013 at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills. All welcome! For more info and to register, <a href="http://rumsfeld2013.eventbrite.com/#">click here</a>.</strong></p>
<p>When President Gerald Ford learned that his Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld had compiled a file of instructive observations and quotations about effective leadership and management, he asked to read them. An impressed Ford promptly designated them “Rumsfeld’s Rules” and distributed them to the senior members of the White House staff. Since then they have been read by presidents, government officials, business leaders, diplomats, members of Congress, and others. Rumsfeld was finally asked to collect them between covers and elaborate on them, and the result is the just-published <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Rumsfelds-Rules-Leadership-Business-Politics/dp/0062272853/"><i>Rumsfeld’s Rules: Leadership Lessons in Business, Politics, War, and Life</i></a>.</p>
<p>Donald Rumsfeld boasts a ridiculously distinguished résumé from the arenas of business, government, and the military: naval aviator, Congressman, top aide to four American presidents, ambassador, the CEO of both a worldwide pharmaceutical company and a leading company in broadcasting technologies, and of course, as he is most well-known, the 13<sup>th</sup> and 21<sup>st</sup> U.S. Secretary of Defense (the only man in American history to serve twice in that post). He is also the author of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Known-Memoir-Donald-Rumsfeld/dp/B0085RZOAQ/"><i>Known and Unknown: A Memoir</i></a>, a weighty tome but one of the most important political memoirs since the 9/11 attacks forever altered our geopolitical landscape. He now chairs the Rumsfeld Foundation, which supports leadership and public service at home, and funds global finance projects, fellowships, and charitable causes that benefit our armed forces and their families (all proceeds of <i>Known and Unknown</i>, for example, go to the Foundation’s military charities).</p>
<p>In the course of that multifaceted career, Rumsfeld collected his “Rules,” advice and maxims based on his own experiences and the wisdom of others. While he cautions that “rules cannot be a substitute for judgment,” he emphasizes in his new book that these</p>
<blockquote><p>are insights into human nature, timeless truths that have survived the changes in our culture… Most have broad applicability and can be useful whether you aspire to be a leader in government, church, business, sports, or the military. They convey distilled wisdom that can… serve as guideposts in decision-making.</p></blockquote>
<p>As Rumsfeld himself notes, the Rules are not all his, nor are they all rules. Some are life lessons or pearls of wisdom from others, who are quoted in the book – everyone from Thomas Jefferson, Confucius, Frederick the Great, Gen. Curtis LeMay (“I am unable to distinguish between the unfortunate and the incompetent, and I can’t afford either”), Margaret Thatcher, Von Clausewitz, Churchill, and the ubiquitous strategist of war, Sun Tzu (“He who defends everywhere, defends nowhere”), to Sammy Davis Jr. and Lewis Carroll (“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there”). “Truth be told,” Rumsfeld admits, “I don’t know if I’ve had a truly original thought in my life. I enjoy being around people smarter than I am, who know more than I do, and who have done things I haven’t done.”</p>
<p>Grouped thematically in chapters, the Rules address managerial basics – or what <i>should </i>be basics, but are too often in frustratingly short supply in the real world: “Starting at the Bottom,” “Running a Meeting,” “Thinking Strategically,” “Battling Bureaucracy,” “Planning for Uncertainty,” and so forth. “Be willing to learn from those at the top,” goes one rule. “If you’re working from your inbox, you’re working on other people’s priorities,” goes another. “Don’t overcontrol like a novice pilot. Stay loose enough from the flow that you can observe and calibrate.” “When negotiating, never feel that you are the one that must fill every silence.” “If you don’t know what your top three priorities are, you don’t have priorities.”</p>
<p>In a plainspoken style that suits his direct, no-nonsense character, Rumsfeld fleshes out the Rules with personal anecdotes and examples drawn from his vast personal experience. While his leadership advice is undeniably useful, and in many instances particularly so for someone just starting out in a management position or still striving for one, these illustrations are very often the most compelling parts of the book. He tells why, for example, Dick Cheney considers his first interview with Rumsfeld – back in 1968 when Cheney was seeking an internship on Capitol Hill – “the worst interview” of his life. He discusses the differences in personalities and leadership styles of the presidents for whom he worked. He even draws upon his sports experience as a young wrestler for leadership lessons.</p>
<p>Along the way, Rumsfeld sprinkles in a surprising amount of welcome dry humor. “In politics,” he writes, for example, “every day is filled with numerous opportunities for serious error. Enjoy it.” At another point he asserts that “the act of calling a meeting about a problem can in some cases be confused with actually doing something.”</p>
<p>The last handful of chapters are perhaps the most interesting, dealing as they do with the vastness and extraordinary integrity of military culture (“Lessons from the World’s Most Successful Leadership Organization”), the unique difficulties of managing the people within the White House (“Inside the Oval Office”), a passionate defense of capitalism and of America as a force for good in the world (“The Case for Capitalism”), and perseverance through mistakes and criticism, on both the personal and national levels (“The Optimism of Will”).</p>
<p>In closing, Rumsfeld again stresses that “leadership is not about following ironclad rules; it’s about one’s instincts. Leadership is not composed of a collection of maxims; it comes from one’s own independent judgment.” It requires “the courage to venture out into the world and make mistakes and, yes, even fail.” Nonetheless, <i>Rumsfeld’s</i> <i>Rules</i> is a very readable, insightful guide with practical advice to becoming a wiser and more effective leader. It is also an insightful window onto the leader behind the book.  <i> </i></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>The Virtue of Lucidity: Yuri Glazov and the Fate of Communism</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/vladimir-tismaneanu/the-virtue-of-lucidity-yuri-glazov-and-the-fate-of-communism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-virtue-of-lucidity-yuri-glazov-and-the-fate-of-communism</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 30 Apr 2013 04:23:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Vladimir Tismaneanu]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[A Soviet dissident's account of totalitarianism's haunting infiltration of the Russian psyche. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/russias1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-187405" alt="russia's" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/russias1.jpg" width="280" height="420" /></a><strong>To order <em>Yuri Glazov&#8217;s The Russian Mind Since Stalin&#8217;s Death</em>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Russian-Since-Stalins-Death-Sovietica/dp/9027719691">click here</a>.</strong></p>
<p>In 1985, the USSR seemed immortal. Most of the observers of Soviet affairs were aware of the insuperable systemic tensions (in Hegelian-Marxist parlance, &#8220;contradictions&#8221;), but very few anticipated the regime&#8217;s imminent end. In fact, such insights existed especially among the small and beleaguered dissident enclaves in the Soviet Union itself and in East-Central Europe. Most Western academics, however, were too busy to scrutinize the arcane workings of the Politburo and regarded the dissident activities as marred by romantic daydreaming. Dissidents could be admired, but not taken too seriously. There were exceptions, to be sure, among them Zbigniew Brzezinski, Robert Conquest, Leo Labedz, Martin Malia, Peter Reddaway, Richard Pipes, Robert C. Tucker and Adam Ulam.</p>
<p>A specialist in Oriental cultures and a professor at Moscow State University, Yuri Glazov (1929-1998) was a noble humanist and a committed democrat. He joined  this quasi-subterranean dissident counter-culture. Because of his heretical views, he was denied the right to teach. Eventually, he left the Soviet Union together with his family and settled in Canada where he taught Russian studies for many years at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. His main interests were linked to the role of the Russian intelligentsia in articulating oppositional discourses and strategies, the dynamics of Stalinism and post-Stalinism, and the soul-searching tribulations among those who refused to live within the Big Lie.</p>
<p>Yuri Glazov was among the first scholars to insist on the importance of scrutinizing the psychology of Soviet leaders as a way to fathom how the decision-making process in the Kremlin operates.  Many Western scholars, especially in the 1970s, during the detente era, treated Soviet institutions as similar to those in the West and tried to disregard the pre-eminence of ideology. Like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Yuri Glazov saw ideology as the main underpinning of the  communist dictatorship. Ideology sanctified the absolute falsification of reality, constructed a ritualized super-reality and a pseudo-scientific, in fact mystical vision of history.</p>
<p>He published a truly outstanding book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Russian-Since-Stalins-Death-Sovietica/dp/9027719691"><i>The Russian Mind since Stalin&#8217;s Death</i></a>,  in 1985, with D. Reidel Company, a respected academic press.  I read it recently and was struck by his extraordinary prescience and intellectual acumen. Before <em>Glasnost</em> became the ubiquitous buzzword, Glazov identified the search for truth as a subversive method to oppose the system and recover civic dignity. For him the most important psychological feature of Sovietism was the universal sentiment of fear:</p>
<blockquote><p>There is one feeling that people living in non-totalitarian countries are unable adequately to understand: a feeling of fear in a country without law and without justice. This feeling of fear could be read in the eyes and faces; it could be heard in voices and speeches. The feeling of fear destroys the process of communication between people. They say what they do not mean. They hear in other people&#8217;s words what is not meant. Who creates this atmosphere of fear? Who requires it? Can it be kept under control? To what extent does this feeling of fear alter the whole nature of a person?</p></blockquote>
<p>These are disturbingly vital (or, under Soviet conditions, mortal) questions to which Glazov offered remarkably persuasive answers. Fear and mendacity were intertwined in the genesis of what the system aimed at, the New Man, Homo Sovieticus. Communism was not only a political and social revolution, but even more important, it championed an anthropological mutation.</p>
<p>The passage quoted above is from the chapter dealing with the significance of Stalin&#8217;s death for the Soviet political culture. Sixty years have passed since that watershed moment and Stalin&#8217;s ghost continues to haunt the Russian mind. Yuri Glazov&#8217;s illuminating discussion should be read by all those who want to understand the relationship between Stalinism, post-Stalinism, post-Sovietism, and Putinism.  We should keep in mind that he wrote the studies included in that volume years before Mikhail Gorbachev&#8217;s coming to power, when the almost universal consensus was that the Soviet bureaucratic colossus could last for many more decades. Yuri Glazov realized that intellectuals were bound to play a crucial role in the forthcoming changes. In fact, Gorbachevism can be seen as the ideology and practice of the neo-Marxist party intelligentsia.</p>
<p>One of the most provocative chapters deals with Yuri Andropov, the former KGB boss who succeeded Leonid Brezhnev as general secretary in November 1982. Andropov was in fact Gorbachev&#8217;s mentor and it remains to a great extent a mystery how could he ignore the heretical potential in his protégé. For the KGB loyalists, Andropov was the genuine, even the optimal, Soviet leader. No surprise therefore that Vladimir Putin worships him and has encouraged the emergence in recent years of an Andropov mini-cult.</p>
<p>Yuri Glazov&#8217;s enduring analyses converged with those of a major Stalin scholar, Princeton professor Robert C. Tucker, the author of &#8220;The Soviet Political Mind,&#8221; a classic of Soviet studies. Both thinkers understood that, once the ideological zeal was extinct, the system was doomed. The degradation of faith was a decisive catalyst for the demise of the whole system. From the original Marxist-Leninist utopia nothing remained but cynicism, confusion, and disgust with broken promises. For Glazov, the indication of the revolutionary breakdown was the fact that even party bureaucrats were treating the official mythologies as empty, soporific phrases. Nothing captures better the nature of that system than a joke quoted by Yuri Glazov&#8211; Radio Yerevan asks : &#8220;What is Marxism-Leninism, a science or an art? The answer: &#8220;It is probably an art. If it were a science it would have been tried out first on animals.&#8221;</p>
<p><strong>Editor&#8217;s note: Don&#8217;t miss Vladimir Tismaneanu&#8217;s interview at Frontpage about his new book, <em>The Devil in History</em>, <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/jamie-glazov/the-devil-in-history/">here</a>.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Have We Stopped Trying to Make Good People? &#8211; by Dennis Prager</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/dennis-prager/have-we-stopped-trying-to-make-good-people-by-dennis-prager/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=have-we-stopped-trying-to-make-good-people-by-dennis-prager</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2009/dennis-prager/have-we-stopped-trying-to-make-good-people-by-dennis-prager/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 15 Dec 2009 05:02:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dennis Prager]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=41872</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The most important question a society can ask. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-41874" title="good" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/good.jpg" alt="good" width="450" height="416" /></p>
<p>The most important question any society must answer is: How will we make  good people?</p>
<p>That is the question Judeo-Christian values have grappled with. There are  many and profound theological and practical differences between Judaism and  Christianity. But in the American incarnation of Judeo-Christian values &#8212; and  America is really the one civilization that developed an amalgamation of Jewish  and Christian values &#8212; the emphasis has been on individual  character.</p>
<p>One cannot make a good society if one does not begin with the arduous  task of making good individuals. Both Judaism and Christianity begin with the  premise that man is not basically good and therefore regard man&#8217;s nature as the  root of cause of evil.</p>
<p>This may sound basic and even obvious, but it is not. In the Western  world since the Enlightenment, belief in the inherent goodness of human beings  has taken over. This has resulted in an increasing neglect of character  development because evil has come to be regarded not as emanating from human  nature (which is essentially good) or from morally flawed individuals but from  forces outside the individual &#8212; especially material ones. Thus, vast numbers of  the best educated in the West have come to believe that &#8220;poverty causes  crime.&#8221;</p>
<p>Now, while no one could possibly refute the argument that starving people  will steal bread for their families (an act that is morally defensible), the  argument that poverty causes crime posits that when poor people in America  commit murder and other violent crimes, it is because they are  poor.</p>
<p>This is irrational dogma, as much a matter of faith as any theological  doctrine. Two simple facts illustrate this: First, the vast majority of poor  people, in America and elsewhere, do not commit violent crimes. Second, a large  amount of crime is committed by the middle class and even by the wealthy.  Neither fact prompts the &#8220;poverty causes crime&#8221; believers to rethink their  position.</p>
<p>They need to, however, not only because the poverty-causes-crime thesis  is so demonstrably false, but because it prevents societies from making good  people. When society blames evil on forces outside the individual rather than on  the individuals who perpetrate evil, society will work to change those forces  rather than work to improve the character of individuals. That is a key to  understanding why the left constantly attempts to radically change society &#8212;  how else make a better world?</p>
<p>Conservatives, on the other hand, believe that the way to &#8220;repair the  world,&#8221; in the oft-used Hebrew phrase of those most concerned with &#8220;social  justice,&#8221; is far less dramatic, far less revolutionary and far less  macro-oriented. It is the laborious process of raising every generation from  scratch with good values and self-discipline. Without both of these, individual  goodness and therefore societal goodness is impossible.</p>
<p>That is why the most important question a society can ask is how to raise  young people to be good adults. American society, under the influence of the  left, asks other questions: How do we make young people environmentally aware?  How do we teach them to fight allegedly rampant racism, sexism, homophobia and  xenophobia in society? How do we fight AIDS and breast  cancer?</p>
<p>It is, of course, good to be environmentally aware, to fight AIDS and  breast cancer, and to oppose bigotry. But before training young people to be  social activists, they must first learn character traits &#8212; truth telling,  financial honesty, humility, honoring parents and, above all, self-control.  Before learning to fight society, people need to fight their own nature. The  world is filled with activists of all varieties who are loathsome  individuals.</p>
<p>In general, we would do well to be far more impressed with a young person  who sits next to the less popular fat kid who is eating alone at lunch, who  fights the class bully, who doesn&#8217;t cheat on tests and who refrains from drug  use.</p>
<p>There  is no federal budget, no Senate or House bill, no social policy, no health care  fix that can do as much good as a society that is filled with decent  people.</p>
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