Retro Culture & Next Conservatism

You know the times are a changing when two old line conservatives publish what amounts to an outline for a radical transformation of American Culture and politics.
In their “Next Conservatism” series of essays, Paul Weyrich and Bill Lind are demanding that the conservative movement take some radical actions. They demand what amounts to a rejection of ideology and politics, and something called Retro Culture, a return to what they see as traditional American culture. These conservatives are demanding a rejection of modern American culture, a radical break with the direction that American society has been taking for the past seventy years or so.
Weyrich and Lind are also asking that conservatives turn their backs on politics and wage a grassroots war for control of culture and communities. They want conservatives to adopt the tactics of the Left, the left lost the political war but won the cultural battle. The counterculture transformed American culture and society but at a high cost.
I have a feeling the “Next Conservatism” and Retro Culture are going to be very popular in the years ahead. Already we have seen the popularity of home schooling which is a rejection of public education, New Urbanism the rejection of urban planning and suburbia and the organic and slow food movements which reject industrialized agriculture and processed food.
On a more basic level millions of Americans have voted with their feet moving from glitzy suburbs to traditional communities like small towns and inner city neighborhoods. Many of these communities feature things like community gardens, bicycle paths and streetcars all conscious attempts to create a slower life style.
The grass roots sentiment against immigration, genetic engineering, big box stores and free trade which is manifesting itself in the form of organized movements is an example of the Next Conservatism’s appeal. As is the opposition to the Iraq War and the Neoconservatives American Empire project.
Even Hollywood has noticed the urge to retroculture, popular superhero flicks such as Disney’s animated film “The Incredibles” and the “Spiderman” movies can be seen as attempts to revive traditional American entertainment. On television “Battlestar Galactica,” “Star Trek: Enterprise,” “Everybody Loves Raymond” and the BBC’s revival of “Doctor Who” were all attempts at retro entertainment. Even “American Idol” can be seen as nothing but an attempt to revive the old-fashioned talent show.
Interestingly enough Weyrich and Lind may find more support and sympathy on the Left than the right. Much of the Left’s renewed popularity in recent years comes from its opposition to recent changes in American society that Mainstream Conservatives hail as progress. The Democrats’ reactionary tendencies are about the only thing getting them elected these days.
The communities and regions of the country (such as Oregon, New York City and Vermont) that most fit Weyrich and Lind’s criteria for traditional American living are usually hotbeds of liberal activism such as environmentalism and the peace movement. The modern conservative base is in Red states like Nevada and Texas which are the most suburban.
Will Retroculture work and the Next Conservatism succeed? My guess is yes but only on a grass roots level and only if there is no real opposition.
Fortunately for our society the dominant ideology of Cultural Marxism like Political and Economic Marxism before it has been completely discredited by the march of history. It sticks around only because nothing has arisen to replace it. Perhaps the Next Conservatism and Retro Culture will succeed because of the growing impotence of Cultural Marxism and its ugly step child the counterculture. Then we have to ask ourselves if New Conservatism and Retro Culture will become as corrupt and destructive as Cultural Marxism and the Counter Culture have.

How to Deal With Iran & North Korea

The way to prevent countries such as Iran & North Korea from developing nuclear weapons is to utilize covert operations instead military action or international sanctions.
Covert operations means just that: take secret action to sabotage the North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs. This way we can prevent those nations from developing nukes without resorting to war which could lead to another quagmire like the one in Iraq or sanctions which don’t work. If we can secretly sabotage those nuclear weapons programs without starting a war or an international incident we can make the world safer.
Now it should be a simple matter for our Central Intelligence Agency and its allies abroad to sabotage the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs. Both Iran and North Korea are poor countries, I imagine that there are lots of Iranian and North Korean officials including some very high ranking generals who would gladly go along with our sabotage program for a large deposit into their Swiss bank accounts. I also imagine that it wouldn’t cost very much to bribe security guards, technicians, scientists and laborers working on the Iranian or North Korean bomb program to perform some act of sabotage.
Making a nuclear bomb is a complex process and I imagine it wouldn’t be too hard to gum up the works. Say a little computer hacking, a bomb in the right place or just the wrong materials.
There is historical precedent for this in the early 1980s the Soviets were building a massive pipeline to ship natural gas to Western Europe. The CIA messed up this project by hacking into the Russian computer and causing it to malfunction if the CIA can do this to the Soviets, I imagine sabotaging the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs should be a piece of cake.
Such sabotage would benefit us immensely the USA would take little political risk for it and the bad guys would waste their money and resources on bombs they’d never complete. There’d be no three ring circus of idiotic diplomatic squabbling at the UN and no destructive wars like the one in Iraq. Since neither Iran or North Korea has real military power they wouldn’t be able to retaliate against us even if they caught our agents sabotaging their plans. Their leaders would end up looking like fools who wasted their national resources on weapons that never got built and eventually be driven from power just like the Soviet Communists were
Neither the North Korean Communist Party or the Iranian Revolutionary could admit that we had sabotaged their nuclear weapons programs even if they had evidence. This would show their peoples how impotent they really were and hasten their demise.
If our sabotage program was detected we could use that to our advantage. If our agents are captured just give them orders to tell the Iranian or North Korean secret police that loyal and effective scientists, technicians and administrators in their nuclear programs are traitors on the American payroll. We can add credence to these claims by planting evidence proving these claims such as overseas bank accounts in their names filled with US dollars. Or plant false biographies proving that prominent figures in their nuclear weapons programs are Jews on the Internet.
Instead of developing nuclear bombs, the effective nuclear weapons makers would be locked up in the secret police dungeon getting tortured rather than building nuclear weapons. If we can get the Iranian and North Korean leaders believing all their scientists are agents of the American Jewish conspiracy we can effectively shut down their entire program. More importantly this will drive many of their scientists to defect to our side.
With a little imagination our spies could effectively and quietly end the threat posed by North Korean and Iranian nuclear weapons without creating an international crisis. Unfortunately our leaders don’t want to take such action because it wouldn’t benefit them.
If there is no international crisis there is no media spotlight to focus on our leaders and give them free publicity. There is no international crisis to make the UN seem important and nothing for its diplomats and inspectors to do.
Nor is there any threat for the Pentagon to use to justify massive military spending. No need for additional troops or new weapons systems. Nor is there any chance for defense contractors make money that they can share with politicians or military officers.
Politics instead of common sense is driving our National Security policy and ensuring that North Korea and Iran develop nuclear weapons in the process. We can only hope that the covert operators at the CIA, and their counterparts in foreign countries do their job in spite of our short sighted leaders.

Some LIbertarian Views

Conservatives and liberals alike suffer because of both groups’ failure to embrace libertarianism.
Many on the right are bellyaching because the Democratic Congress is talking about bringing back the “Fairness Doctrine.” “The Fairness Doctrine” is a form of censorship which mandates that if political commentary is presented in the media both sides of the issue must be presented. Historically the Fairness Doctrine was used by the liberal media to keep conservative political views off the airwaves.
If conservatives don’t like the Fairness Doctrine they have only themselves to blame for it. The Republicans controlled Congress for twelve years, in that time they could have passed a law abolishing the Federal Communications Commission which enforces the Fairness Doctrine. Social conservatives didn’t want to get rid of the FCC because it enforces regulations against offensive content on television and radio. Conservatives want the FCC because it can censor Howard Stern, what they don’t want to admit is that the same entity that can censor Stern can ban Rush Limbaugh.
The saddest part of the FCC debate is the fact that the FCC can’t censor anybody anymore. When the bureaucrats started turning the screws on Howard Stern, Stern simply left broadcast radio for Satellite TV, and increased his listening audience in the bargain. If the FCC tries to bring back the Fairness Doctrine, Rush and other conservative talkers will take their shows to satellite or the Internet and leave radio. The result will be the death of what little is left of Broadcast radio. Just as cable, satellite and DVD are killing off what is left of broadcast TV. Despite the FCC’s regulation, R-rated TV content now reaches virtually every American home.
Libertarians could have predicted this, when government regulation becomes too oppressive in a particular industry or a corner of an industry the creative people simply move to where the regulators aren’t. Technological progress as usual outstrips government regulation, the bureaucracy designed to regulate a few broadcast networks can’t cope with our multi-channel world. The logical course of action would be to see the FCC as the dinosaur it is, shut it down and spend our tax money on something constructive.
Liberals face a similar bizarre crisis, they demanded that marriage rights be extended to gays. The idea was to increase individual freedom by increasing individual rights, the result was that conservatives are able to get laws restricting marriage to a man and a woman passed. Some social conservatives even want a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage passed. In Washington State some gay activists have taken this stupidity to its logical conclusion by trying to get a law requiring all heterosexual couples to have children passed.
A Libertarian would have told the liberals that increasing the scope and power of government and its regulations which was what the extension of marriage rights to gays is would increase freedom. The result of course is the opposite when government’s scope and power increases, freedom decreases. Extending marriage to gays will not increase the rights of gays, only increase government’s ability to interfere in everybody’s private lives.
Perhaps a better alternative would be to do away with marriage licensing and government sanctioned marriage. That would make gays and straights practically equal and lessen the power and scope of government. The regulation of marriage and sex lives would be left to the churches, and religious freedom increased. We can remind the Faithful that Christ himself said “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s,” and I don’t think the Savior meant sex and marriage when he said those wise words so long ago.
Note no conservative or liberal proposes this simple and intelligent solution because it would decrease government’s power and influence. They would rather trample our rights rather than give up their petty power. The Democrats will sacrifice our right to privacy for the chance to give gays social respectability just as the Republicans will sacrifice free speech in order to keep dirty words out of prudes’ living rooms.
Perhaps it is time for those of us who love Freedom to take a long hard look at the possibility of a third party again. Or to at least take a second look at the Libertarian Party.

Barack Obama

Barack Obama is not a serious presidential candidate or even a force in American politics he is a political lightweight who got very lucky.
Obama’s luck is almost astronomical, he was the only African American elected to the Senate in recent years. Obama only won that election because the Republican candidate Mr. Ryan was destroyed by a sex scandal. Obama immediately caught the eye of the media and won their hearts not because he has any serious credentials or experience but because they like him.
Obama came along at the right time the liberal elite was looking for a political savior and a black leader they could like. Obama fit the bill perfectly, he’s the kind of politician, the leftist elite loves: Ivy League educated, liberal, wishy washy, antiwar, intellectual and whiny. Yet he has very dark skin and his father was from Africa so he can call himself an African American.
Obama is the liberal elite’s dream politician an African American politician who isn’t the least bit black. He doesn’t talk in a thick Southern accent, he isn’t a preacher he doesn’t go to church or read the Bible. He never played football or served in the military and he doesn’t harp on the injustices real and imagined meted out against Blacks. He’s the African American political leader the liberal elite has been looking for since the Civil Rights movement.
Democrats look to Obama because they’re short on leadership and political heroes. Let’s face it there hasn’t been a truly popular Democratic President since FDR and he died in 1945. Truman was a strong president and a great leader but he wasn’t a popular figure, John F. Kennedy, (well his cult of popularity didn’t appear until after his death), LBJ he was a miserable failure, Jimmy Carter a disaster and Bill Clinton well he was liked. No strong leader has emerged to take Clinton’s place and Hillary well she really isn’t an inspiring leader.
The media seeing a rather dismal presidential field, latches onto Obama. One big reason is that he’s in Washington, no need to fly to Iowa or New Mexico or Arkansas to interview some governor nobody in the Beltway has ever heard of. Obama is in the Senate, a subway ticket downtown is a lot easier to justify in your expense report than a trip to Little Rock to interview some guy name Huckabee. Of course no liberal reporter wants to visit Little Rock, it’s full of ignorant Bible thumpers, a president couldn’t from that place.
Another reason the media latches onto Obama is that in modern American politics no publicity is good publicity. Potential presidential candidates remember Gary Hart who dared the reporters to get him, they got him he now practices law in Denver and occasionally walks the streets and nobody notices him (I’ve seen it). The same candidates remember Bill Clinton and George W. Bush who quietly hid below the radar until the start of the campaign, they both captured the White House.
No potential presidential candidate is going to go anywhere near the national press until the big race starts. Even then they’ll keep reporters at arms length because they want to survive.
Obama by being the media favorite runs interference for the real candidates and that’s about all. We’ve seen this kind of media celebrity candidate before, remember Bill Bradley and John McCain in 2000 neither of them stood a serious chance but the media pushed them because they sold newspapers and drove ratings. The media needs drama, a bunch of career politicians sticking their heads in the sand to keep safe from the reporters isn’t but the plucky African American crusader from Chicago is.
My prediction Barack Obama’s presidential bid will go nowhere and he’ll be lucky to be appointed Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Bill Richardson cabinet. Of course, Obama does have one potential thing going for him, Oprah Winfrey likes him….

How To Catch Bin Laden

The way to catch Bin Laden is to completely change how we wage war and how we think about it.
The War on Terror is a Fourth Generational War, that is a war waged by entities other than the state such as terrorist groups like Al Qaeda. Recent history - such as our failure to catch Bin Laden - proves that the non-state entities have all the advantages in a Fourth Generational War.
In the past three years we have seen four major attempts by traditional national military forces to crush Islamic terrorist groups. Three of these efforts the US occupation of Iraq, the Pakistani attempt to push Al Qaeda and the Taliban out of the tribal areas near the Afghan border and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon to crush Al Qaeda were miserable failures. Despite massive deployments of men and weaponry and the extensive use of firepower the terrorist groups were still fighting and inflicting damage after the operations ended.
The only major success in the War on Terrorism has been Afghanistan where the Taliban was driven out and Al Qaeda’s base areas broken up. Even that battle has been only a partial success because Al Qaeda and its allies have been able to regroup and launch new attacks.
The US was successful in Afghanistan because it utilized very different tactics from those employed in the other conflicts. When it invaded Afghanistan in 2001, the United States used a combination of airpower, small special forces units and local fighters. This unorthodox mix succeeded and pointed to a new kind of war but the lesson wasn’t learned. The next time America went to war in Iraq, the war was fought by a traditional large scale army and the results have been disastrous.
To catch Bin Laden and break up the sorry remains of Al Qaeda once and for all we will have to wage a Fourth Generational War, a covert war. Instead of bombing the Tribal Areas of Pakistan where Bin Laden is believed to be or sending in large numbers of troops we’ll have to move quietly and secretly.
Send in small teams of covert operators who can easily blend into the local population. These would be men who can pass as Muslims and earn the respect of the local leaders. These Operators would have lots of cash and dispense it liberally, they would win over the tribal leaders by earning their respect and bribing them. Such tactics probably wouldn’t work on hardcore Taliban and Al Qaeda members but they would work on poor tribesmen trying to scratch out a living. It might take years to win over the tribal people of Pakistan but I imagine it can be done and we can get Bin Laden in the end.
The US has a long history of such covert warfare, especially in the Cold War where our covert operators outwitted and defeated Communism in places as diverse as Greece and El Salvador. Yet we have been reluctant to resort to such covert methods in the present conflict even though they are the perfect strategy for victory.
There are two reasons for this, first the massive military establishment has to justify its existence and the massive amounts of tax money it costs us. The cheap simple war in Afghanistan scared the generals and admirals in the Pentagon to death for it proved that much if not most of their war machine was obsolete. To this equation we can add all the people who profit from military spending such as defense contractors, politicians and lobbyists they want the gravy train to keep rolling. Similar concerns are at play in other countries such as Israel and Pakistan, Israeli and Pakistani generals also have to justify their defense spending.
Then there are the politicians who dislike covert warfare because there is no publicity and glory in them. There is no possibility of a photo opportunity on an aircraft carrier or a ceremony handing out medals to strapping young soldiers at the White House.
When covert operations succeed the public doesn’t hear about them and there is no opportunity for publicity. When covert operations go wrong political leaders take the heat especially from self righteous moralists. Every president wants to be FDR leading the troops to victory in World War II, no President wants to be Richard Nixon taking the fall.
With our leaders refusal to wage the kind of sensible covert war the present situation calls for, it is no wonder we haven’t caught Bin Laden.

Media & War by Proxy

The best way for America to wage war on terror in our media saturated modern age is by proxy - to get somebody else to do our fighting for us.
Whenever regular American forces go into battle they are subject to constant media coverage which limits their effectiveness. A prime example of this was the first battle of Falujah a couple of years back. Falujah is a small town in Iraq in 2003 a convey of American military contractors was ambushed there and four Americans were dragged from their vehicles, hanged and tortured to death by a lynch mob.
US Forces attacked the town in retaliation and were winning the battle. They were forced to withdraw because of media coverage mainly by Al Jarzeerah. American politicians back home feared the political repercussions that news footage of Americans destroying an Arab town would bring. A bunch of thugs were able to get away with the brutal murder of Americans because of the media spotlight.
We’ve seen this pattern before first in Vietnam where media coverage convinced the world that the US was waging war against a defenseless people and in Somalia where TV footage of American bodies being dragged through the streets convinced Bill Clinton to end an American military adventure.
Recent history proves that it is impossible for a democracy like the United States to wage war in the traditional way with large military forces because of media coverage. Everything the US military in the war zone does is put on camera which means soldiers are unable to get on with the dirty business of war. Anything that is the least bit offensive and most battlefield activities horrify a sane person, must not be allowed because it will have political repercussions.
The media’s coverage of the military is two faced, on hand it portrays the military as victims, Christ like heroes martyred on the cross of American foreign policy. On the other it shows them as bad guys, mindlessly focusing on every crime and misdeed they perpetuate often blowing them all out of proportion. Politicians back home live in fear of what will appear on the nation’s TV screens either American boys and girls dying horribly or American boys and girls doing something terrible to foreigners.
The only way the US can wage war under such circumstances is to find somebody other than the US military to fight its battles. The same media that mindlessly focuses on the activities of American forces completely ignores the behavior of foreign forces.
One problem is that the US military’s operations are played out before the TV cameras while the bad guys operate in the shadows. During the Vietnam War news about the Mai Lai Massacre was flashed around the world while the far more numerous atrocities of the Communists occurred out in the jungle far from the TV camera. In the present conflict in Iraq there are no embedded reporters with the insurgents but plenty of embedded journalists with the US military.
A prime example of this is the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, at Abu Ghraib American military personnel abused and humiliated Iraqi prisoners but didn’t actually hurt or killed them. Offensive pictures of this abuse led to a media frenzy, courts martials and the closing of Abu Ghraib.
So what happens to Iraqi prisoners taken by US forces since Abu Ghraib? Simple they are now turned over to the Iraqi government and placed in prisons operated by men who learned their trade under Saddam Hussein. Instead of being merely humiliated these prisoners are now regularly tortured, abused and probably murdered by the Iraqi government. We see no coverage of this in the international media because reporters don’t care what Iraqis do to each other.
A similar dynamic is at play at Guantanmo Bay the humans rights lobby and its cheerleaders in the media demand that the Git-Mo facility be shut down and the prisoners released. This would mean the prisoners would be returned to their own countries where they would doubtless be tortured and killed by their governments.
Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prove that the media doesn’t care what happens to America’s enemies as long as the people doing it to them aren’t Americans or at least the US military. This means that the best way for America to wage war on terror is to use forces other than the US military because the media ignores their activities.
A similar dynamic was at play in the Cold War, in Vietnam US forces were unable to stop the advance of Communism largely because of excessive media coverage. In several other places including El Salvador, America was able to crush Communism by relying on local forces. These allies did the fighting and the dirty work and took the heat off the US military.
The usual collection of self proclaimed “peace” and “human rights” activists raised a few concerns about human rights abuses but their rantings and ravings made page three of the newspapers. Congress couldn’t be bothered to hold hearings or investigations, after all no voters kids were dying over there.
There are alternatives to the military including special operations forces, the CIA, local military and paramilitary forces, the forces of allied countries. and military contractors (mercenaries organized along corporate lines. This unfortunately involves creativity and out of the box thinking, things that our political leaders seem to be incapable of.
The US has to learn to fight wars using forces other than our military in the age of the media spotlight. Unfortunately the officers at the Pentagon and their allies in Congress need to justify huge military expenditures. To do this they have to send huge numbers of troops overseas and engage in massive military operations that make no sense. Massive military operations that attract huge amounts of media attention that makes it impossible for us to fight or win the war.