The Three 9/11s

My Chilean-American friend, Bracey Fuenzalida, has posted this illuminating personal and historical reflection on the relevance of previous 9/11s to the 9/11 we remembered on Sunday.

Muslims have a long historical memory. Democratic people tend to live with a very short historical memory extending back one generation, or two at the most. (How much thought do you give to your great-grandparents?)

With his permission, I am re-posting it here from his Facebook page.

Reflections on three 9/11's
by Bracey Fuenzalida -- Saturday, September 10, 2011

Having worked on the 72nd floor of the north tower from March of 1999 up until the first week of August in 2001 I speak with a sense of thanks for having experienced God’s mercy for sparing my life. It was also at the top of World Trade Center 2 that I proposed to my wife some 16 years ago. The place had immense significance for us and it was one that I frequented a lot. So much so that there were times after work where I would go up to the observation deck to sit, stare and simply meditate. It was one of my favorite places to just be still and I will never forget the World Trade Center.

On the morning of September 11, 2001 I was sound asleep sitting on an express bus that had come in from Brooklyn. It was around 8:50 in the morning when I was rudely awoken to a woman who yelled with a loud scream, taking the Lord’s name in vain. As I awoke and gathered myself I immediately looked up and just like everyone else I could not believe the orange streak blazing across the entire upper part of the building. No one in the bus knew that a plane had crashed into the north tower. As soon as I looked up I thought, what happened? Did a server blow up?

I immediately called my brother who was home, and told him to turn on the television and watch the news. He did and we both watched the events live, he through the television screen and me with my own two eyes. We watched in utter shock and amazement. Within minutes, as I was gazing intently into the air, a large black dot appeared from the left corner of my eye and then a massive explosion. My brother and I were in shock! At first I yelled out; ‘what just happened?’ My brother yelled that another plane had just hit the tower. We had fears after the first plane had hit the towers that we were under a terrorist attack but after the 2nd plane struck the south tower our concerns were confirmed, foul play was at hand. Thus, we like everyone else, knew instantly that we were under a terrorist attack.

Needless to say, for the first time in my life I saw collective fear in the eyes of New Yorkers. I had never seen that before. Generally New Yorkers have an edge, a disposition, an attitude about them. But on that day, with panic in the eyes of everyone, people were all over the place in downtown NYC, some were even running and walking on the FDR heading toward the Brooklyn Bridge, many were on the streets, it was utter chaos. I remember a few days later, once people began returning to work there was a sense of loss, as if something had been stripped from every single person. But typical of most New Yorkers, everyone quickly gathered their confidence and inspired by the words of the president, ‘soon the whole world would hear from us,’ they went on about their business. Needless to say, the city would never be the same again.

September 11, 1973 for my family and I has special significance and that for historical reasons. You see, the mere mention of September 11 for Chileans evokes strong feelings, good and bad. You may remember that it was on September 11, 1973 that General Augusto Pinochet liberated Chile from the evil grip of Marxist president Salvador Allende. Chile had run into severe problems under the Allende regime because he wanted to convert a freedom loving, free market nation in a communist Marxist paradise. Believing that ‘a scientific Marxist’ revolution had to take place in order to advance Chile into communism, Allende’s reforms of nationalizing industry and property resulted in 600% inflation, food shortages, confiscation of private property and widespread societal chaos.

As my father and mother always remind me, had it not been for Pinochet private property would be no more and I would have been a communist living for the purposes of state. Given that my parents were resistant to the takeover they were marked for death by the MIR revolutionary thugs who were going around Chile intimidating Chileans who did not support Allende’s communism. You may also recall that Allende was the best of friends with Fidel Castro and with the leaders of the Soviet Union. Allende kept company with all the waste and trash that this world had to offer. Had the Chilean military not intervened to halt a totalitarian communist takeover and preserve the quickly fading liberty of the nation as was prescribed and protected by the constitution, Chile today would be singing a soviet type national anthem and perhaps, like the former Iron Curtain itself, attempt to further the cause of Marxism throughout the South American continent.

The dissemination of Marxism notwithstanding, news outlets like CNN and MSNBC have painted Pinochet as a tyrant and wicked dictator. But there is a true history out there that is accurately written which depicts the events as they happened. For Americans the Wall Street journalist James Whelan should come to mind. His work, Allende, the Death of a Marxist Dream, and Out of the Ashes are excellent. William Jasper has also written honestly on Pinochet. Thus, the memory of September 11 for Chileans brings back to life a whole range of thoughts and emotions. For me and my entire family September 11, 1973 meant that we escaped the clutches of death. Needless to say, after September 11, 1973 Chile would never be the same again.

September 11, 1683 also has special significance because of its historical connection with Sept 11, 2001. This is because it was on September 11, 1683 that the Islamic advance into Europe was halted at the battle in Vienna. You may recall that the Ottoman Empire had been expanding into Europe ever since Constantinople fell to the Turks, and even before that. Wherever the Muslim armies went, they plundered cities, took slaves, turned churches into mosques, and converted many tens of thousands of Christian captives to Islam at the point of a sword. The Sultan’s armies overran Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, and Serbia. They turned Protestant Hungary into a compliant vassal and made war repeatedly on Austria and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

The Ottomans had designs on Vienna, since the fall of the city would open the way into the heart of Austria and the rich principalities of southern Germany. Thankfully on a bright September morning in 1683 the tide of the second wave of the 'Great Islamic Jihad' turned and began to ebb. The Christians withstood the attacks and the Sultan's armies were rebuffed and the Islamic advance was halted and saw it go into retreat for 300+ years.

The historical connection between the three dates is undeniable, particularly 9/11/1683 and 9/11/2001. Europe has forgotten about both 9/11's and as such it will pay a heavy price, perhaps with their very life. If birthrates don’t improve soon they will have to kiss the old continent goodbye.

Needless to say, My parents and I will never forget September 11,1973. Muslims have never forgotten September 11, 1683 and Americans must never forget September 11, 2001.

The Progressive Project of Learned Feudalism

George Will gave this address to the Cato Institute on the occasion of receiving their Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty on May 13.

Fifty-one days ago the president signed into law health care reform, that great lunge to complete the New Deal project and the Great Society, that great lunge to make us more European. At exactly the moment that this is done the European Ponzi scheme of the social welfare state is being revealed for what it is.

There is a difference. We are not Europeans. We are not, in Orwell's phrase, a "state-broken people." We do not have a feudal background of subservience to the state. No, that is the project of the current administration - it can be boiled down to learned feudalism. It is a dependency agenda that I have been talking about ad nauseam.

Here is the podcast:




Read the print version of "Not a State-broken People."

Charles Murray spoke on this same subject to the American Enterprise Institute last year.

You might also read what David Brooks said at the same time.

The Tragedy of State Compassion

 The Spirit of Compassion Yet to Come

The Dutch are a fascinating people in so many ways. The Belgians must be ashamed by constant comparisons. My recent article with The Washington Times, "Netherlands' Tragedy of State Compassion: socialism undermines more than government solvency,"argues against he common identification of "compassionate society" with "socialist society" or even just "extensive social services."

This is a true account from a friend of mine on Long Island, but I have changed the names to preserve people's privacy.

Even young Mick Jagger, bless his heart, could see that it's hard getting old.

But Mrs. van Breda, at 90, is managing just fine. This is not because her two daughters and their husbands live just a five-minute walk from her apartment, which they do. Neither is it because her four grandchildren - three of them in their 20s - also live nearby. They offer little help because they don't have to: The van Bredas live in the Netherlands, a caring society. For this reason, Mrs. van Breda's course of life is smoothed by a welfare state that has institutionalized compassion. Quality of life is about more than just what you get, however. Much of it has to do with the relationships involved in the giving, relationships that even a caring government cannot deliver and even can destroy.

When her husband, Gert, died 13 years ago, Mrs. van Breda sold their house and moved into a government-subsidized apartment. The government sends a woman once a week to clean her apartment, but because she has the woman for up to four hours, Mrs. van Breda also has her do the grocery shopping. She pays something toward the cost of this help, but her contribution is based on her income - a government-funded pension - and so the service is highly subsidized.

Her daughter, Johanna, could easily help her with these tasks. In fact, Mrs. van Breda asked Johanna, who also cleans houses, if she would like to help in place of the state worker. It's better that the money benefit her family, after all. But Johanna said no: Why bother helping her mother when the government will do it?

When she developed arthritis, the state sent around someone to change the handles on all her doors and the taps on her faucets. In a less "compassionate" society, measured very narrowly by how much the government does, her sons-in-law or grandsons would swing by and take care of that sort of thing. But there is no need, and so they do not - and they would not.

Ironically, but perhaps not surprisingly, the Netherlands' "compassionate" social policy, with its preference for state provision, has made individual Dutch people less compassionate. A 2006 international study of charitable giving found that the supposedly less compassionate Americans individually gave 1.67 percent of the country's gross domestic product to charity. The Dutch gave just 0.45 percent, and the more moderate Canadians and British gave 0.72 percent and 0.73 percent respectively. Mrs. van Breda's expatriate son, Pieter, who lives in New York, notes that people have become personally unmindful of the needy as a result of these social-welfare policies. Personal relations are colder, he says, more businesslike, even within families.

The Dutch government serves Johanna's mother because it serves everyone, securing a minimal standard of living for all to enjoy. Through an array of birth-to-death social services that are either free of charge or subsidized according one's income, the state redistributes income widely. There is no reason for anyone in the Netherlands to be without a suitable home, to cut short his or her education anytime before senility or even to give any thought to feeding and clothing one's children. The Dutch have decided that a good society is a compassionate society, and so people should provide for one another's dignity and basic quality of life ... but only through the state. People needn't actually have anything to do with one another directly.

The Dutch state is said to be quite efficient in its delivery of services, and the Dutch people are happy with it. To be sure, neither Mrs. van Breda nor any of her children has any complaints. But this system comes at a human cost that its boosters must consider. My friend Pieter tells me that when it comes to serving the needy, regardless of the family relationship, the modern Dutch consider it enough that they pay taxes. In fact, they have come to bear a striking resemblance to none other than Ebenezer Scrooge in Dickens' "A Christmas Carol." Approached by two men who came collecting for the poor, he rebuffed them, asking, "Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?" Granted, Dutch provisions for those in need are on a level of humanity far higher than those Mr. Scrooge was satisfied with funding. But the spirit of personal indifference is the same. People simply don't want to be bothered, says Pieter - not even for their parents.

Daniel Henninger wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal, "One of the constant criticisms of Barack Obama's first year is that he's making us 'more like Europe.'" Those on the American political left are eagerly working to make us precisely that. They see our individualism as selfish and immoral, and they view our reliance on private charity as ineffective and degrading in comparison to government services and entitlements. The lesson of the Dutch experience, however, is not that the welfare state is the defining feature of a compassionate society, but that our choice in providing for those who are helpless and suffering is between the nanny state and a caring citizenry.

Henninger's article is "The We're-Not-Like-Europe Party," May 13, 2010.

A friend of recent Dutch descent shared this comment:

I am saddened by what has happened to the country of my father and grandfather.  We used to take pride in how industrious we were. The reason "Dutch cleanser" was called Dutch cleanser was that we Dutch people were ridiculously great housekeepers--they were clean freaks--scrubbing our stoops (yes, that is a Dutch name too) till they shined. I visited there a few years ago and hardly recognized it with all the filth. The government does not care about "clean"...and neither do the Dutch anymore.

I am sorry to hear about the filth. I have only heard about moral filth. I strongly suspect that it is closely related to the decline in personal responsibility. They have conquered the sea, but succumbed to the tide of nihilism. They are a tragedy, and in that is both a great compliment and an equally great lament. The North American Dutch have slouched in a different way toward their own Gomorrah. But there is still virtue in some of their communities here.

Park the Baby While You Shop

Annette Sorensen, a young actress, was visiting New York from Denmark with her 14-month old baby, Liv, and stopped to catch some lunch. She parked baby and stroller outside the restaurant’s plate-glass window amidst the café tables, and withdrew inside to dine. She managed to sit just three tables from the window, so was actually just six feet from the child. Not long afterwards, however, she was under arrest for child endangerment. The story was a nationwide scandal. Janie Bennett, 41, a teacher from Queens, told the press, "You can't leave your kids unattended in New York City. You aren't in Denmark…you're in New York." (for photo of Annette Sorensen with daughter, Liv, see BAX LINDHARDT, AP (May 22, 1997)

That was 1997, but it is still common throughout Scandinavia for a mother to leave her baby sleeping in a carriage outside a store while she does her shopping or drinks her coffee. You might see a line of babies parked on the sidewalk while mothers go about their business indoors without a care. And the babies are safe.

Here is a scene from outside a Copenhagen café. The woman who posted this picture explained the calm with which Danish mothers entrust their children to the community when they shop.

Nobody here would ever take a baby...oh, yes it actually happend in 1967- a women wanted a child so very much that she stole the small infant...and it was a story so unheard of that I know it, although it was many years ago! ((This winter a guy stole a cargo bike in front of a shop...and he didn't know that there were children sleeping in it...and as he found out he returned the children and the bike to the parents feeling very sorry....)).

Parents also go shopping with their children outside in the prams...and they can not always see the prams. That's okay...then they will go to the door from time to time to see if the baby still is sleeping . You don't have to watch your child ALL the time...nobody will hurt or take them...but you'll have to check if they wake up...several times I've seen people 'pop into a shop' saying: 'There's a baby crying out here...'...and a mother/father hurries outside. And people also place the prams with their children sleeping in them outside their houses etc.

So all in all Denmark is (still) a safe place in that respect. (A Polar Bears Tale)

It is quite common in Iceland, even at subzero temperatures. (See Reykjavik Daily Photo Blog.)

The practice is not limited to Scandanavia, but is also the way in France. Here the babies are unmistakably in the strollers. (Chez Thompson, someone's travel weblog)

I remember when a French woman got in trouble in Toronto for this same cultural faux pas, my mother told me that women used to it all the time in Scotland in the 1950s when she was young. Here is an old photo from England.

But lest you develop too much sympathy for the disoriented Danish mom, you should know that customers and waiters alike urged her to take her baby inside the restaurant, but she brushed them off. She had fair warning. Also, she was not on a five day sightseeing tour. She was in the city for a month, so she was more aclimated to New York ways that one would at first suspect. If that seems to be asking alot, it is not asking too much of her companion at the time to fill her in on what's done here and what's not. She was with her husband (actually, he was only "the baby's father"), Exavier Wardlaw, "a movie production assistant, who lives in New York," according to the news story. The fuller picture presents them as quite a pair. But that's their business.

Our business is to wonder how it is that these European societies have cultural norms that govern so widely and so effectively that mothers can leave their babies unattended in public in this way, whereas we cannot. My wife and I would not even put an "It's a girl" sign in front of our house when our eldest was born for fear that a local, childless, crazy woman might somehow sneak in and steal her. New parents. But we decided based on what we knew was happening. Is it the strength of their families that produces lawful people? What would account for that strength? Does their social democracy and pervasive statism account for people keeping their hands to themselves? Is there a low crime rate generally? Canada and Britain are more statist than America, but less so than Scandinavia. Does their social trust mirror that middling position?

Our society used to be a lot safer than it is now. In Georgetown, Ontario, I used to walk to school across town in the second grade with my fourth grade sister unattended. I won't let my kids, the eldest of whom is ten, walk two blocks on their own to a small park here in this nice Long Island neighborhood. Yes, it was Canada, but things have changed up there as well. What has changed? Can we restore what we have lost?

America Is Mutable and Mortal

Contrary to Harold Kildow's concerns in the previous post (citing Charles Murray), David Brooks argues that "the United States will never be Europe. It was born as a commercial republic. It’s addicted to the pace of commercial enterprise. After periodic pauses, the country inevitably returns to its elemental nature" ("The Commercial Republic," New York Times, March 16, 2009).

There is a sense in which this is true. But there is a more alarming sense in which that commercial spirit is being ever more heavily burdened by government hyperactivity and that the manly spirit of American self-reliance is being ever more seduced into infantile dependence on the state. We have never recovered from Roosevelt's power grab in response to the Great Depression of the 1930s. Brooks passes over this fact.

"We are now in an astonishingly noncommercial moment. Risk is out of favor. The financial world is abashed. Enterprise is suspended....Washington is temporarily at the center of the nation’s economic gravity and a noncommercial administration holds sway...But if there is one thing we can be sure of, this pause will not last. The cultural DNA of the past 400 years will not be erased. The pendulum will swing hard. The gospel of success will recapture the imagination."

But Brooks underestimates the profundity of this President's radical antipathy to the American political culture that sustains that commercial spirit. Furthermore, in referring to our "cultural DNA" and "elemental nature," he underestimates the conventionality and thus fragility of our commercial and entrepreneurial spirit. It's an expression of character, not nature. Whereas nature is immutable, character is corruptible. For that reason, civilizations are mortal, and every regime must give thoughtful attention to the principles of decay inherent in it, and thus what is necessary for its perpetuation. (On the rise and fall of different regimes, or forms of government and their political cultures, read Book VIII of Plato's Republic.) This is the problem to which Alexis de Tocqueville and Abraham Lincoln turned their profoundly insightful attention.

Quin Hillyer at The American Spectator is not as sanguine. Read "Destroying the Country To Save It" below.

In Harold's post, "We're All Europeans Now," he quotes Dick Morris as foreseeing Obama's New America being "a socialist democracy in which the government dominates the economy, determines private-sector priorities and offers a vastly expanded range of services to many more people at much higher taxes. Obama will accomplish his agenda of 'reform' under the rubric of 'recovery.'"

George Newman in the Wall Street Journal shows us where we are heading as Obama shifts the country's organizing principle more squarely on what he calls "fairness," "economic justice," "redistribution of wealth," and "empathy." I lay it out in "Obama's Coming Economic Justice." It is pillage as public policy, and it leads beyond Europe to the kleptocracy that is Africa, but democratized. Now there's a model!

Consider how entrenched all these changes will become once Obama shifts the entire tax burden to a minority of the voting population, brings millions of illegal immigrants onto the voter rolls, empowers ACORN to universalize voter fraud, and fiddles the census so that left wing majorities become mathematically inevitable for generations to come. Think of the Massachusetts Congressional delegation writ large. Under such circumstances (watch them unfold), removing these overlords from power would take a critical mass of economic, political, and social crises so severe that it is horrifying to contemplate it.

Let me echo Quin Hillyer: "Rhetorically, organizationally, financially, and politically, [Barack Obama] must be stopped. Must."

Why We Must Not Let America Become France

In a piece titled "The Europe Syndrome and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism" (The American, March 16, 2009), Charles Murray gives chapter and verse supporting the "socialism is a soul killing threat to humanity" meme that David and I have been promoting here every chance we get. (See below). Of course, being Charles Murray the eminent social scientist, he goes much further than that commonplace observation and extrapolates it into the call for a new Great Awakening; not a spiritual awakening (though he would not be against such a thing), so much as a cultural and political awakening. It is a call for Americans to realize what we have, and why we have it.

The advent of the Obama administration brings this question before the nation: Do we want the United States to be like Europe? President Obama and his leading intellectual heroes are the American equivalent of Europe’s social democrats. There’s nothing sinister about that. They share an intellectually respectable view that Europe’s regulatory and social welfare systems are more progressive than America’s and advocate reforms that would make the American system more like the European system.

Not only are social democrats intellectually respectable, the European model has worked in many ways. I am delighted when I get a chance to go to Stockholm or Amsterdam, not to mention Rome or Paris. When I get there, the people don’t seem to be groaning under the yoke of an evil system. Quite the contrary. There’s a lot to like—a lot to love—about day-to-day life in Europe.

But the European model can’t continue to work much longer. Europe’s catastrophically low birth rates and soaring immigration from cultures with alien values will see to that.

So let me rephrase the question. If we could avoid Europe’s demographic problems, do we want the United States to be like Europe?

I argue for the answer “no,” but not for economic reasons. The European model has indeed created sclerotic economies and it would be a bad idea to imitate them. But I want to focus on another problem.

My argument is drawn from Federalist Paper No. 62, probably written by James Madison: “A good government implies two things: first, fidelity to the object of government, which is the happiness of the people; secondly, a knowledge of the means by which that object can be best attained.” Note the word: happiness. Not prosperity. Not security. Not equality. Happiness, which the Founders used in its Aristotelian sense of lasting and justified satisfaction with life as a whole.

I have two points to make. First, I will argue that the European model is fundamentally flawed because, despite its material successes, it is not suited to the way that human beings flourish—it does not conduce to Aristotelian happiness. Second, I will argue that 21st-century science will prove me right.

The rest is must reading for all of you here at this blog. You can finish it here.

Charles Murray is the W. H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. This essay is adapted from The 2009 Irving Kristol Lecture delivered in Washington, D.C. on March 11, 2009. The American is a magazine of ideas published by the American Enterprise Institute.

Liberty Disappearing Under Mohammed's Turban

Photo: The Jawa Report

Recently, at the invitation of Dr Innes, I lectured at The King's College on John Locke's understanding of the individual human person as the central idea of modern, Western liberalism. The idea of designing government around the nature and rights of the individuals to be governed is one we in the West, particularly Americans, now take for granted, largely because of the brilliant institutional articulation of this idea put forward by our Founding Fathers. Focusing on individuals and their rights, while still inculcating the other bedrock liberal principle of tolerance among these rights-bearing individuals, is one of the amazing tight-rope walks between concepts in tension by which free government is characterized. Though the importance of the individual is not an idea original to modernity, the compromise that tolerance for religious beliefs in civil society represents made a way for true belief to coincide with broad political freedom.

Tony Blankley has a piece today, "Rising Euro-Muslim Tensions," pointing out the attack on both of these liberal principles by aggressive Islamism. All across Europe, craven and weak-willed leaders are bowing and scraping before non-Western immigrants who demand, in the very name of individual rights and tolerance, accession to their doctrines which deny those very principles.

He warns that while the official government response may be to give away the farm, large segments of Western populations will not stand idly by and watch as a thousand years of prescriptive rights and liberty are subsumed under Mohammed's turban. Governments across Europe will have only themselves to blame for the violence to come, if they continue to disregard their principle responsibility to protect individual rights.

As Locke taught, the state of nature lies just under the thin veneer of civil government. Stable, Western societies are about to be reminded, by those who would take it from them, of what a delicate balance and what a hard-won achievement, is their way of life.

Blankley's important column is here:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/04/rising_euromuslim_tensions.html