ANGLO-GERMANOSPHERE

Razib at Gene Expression points out that in the recently released Index of Freedom, all the top countries seem to have a connection to the Anglosphere or are Germanic. India, of course, would usually be seen as part of the Anglosphere. This does tie in rather well with my contention made in previous posts on this blog and also here to the effect that the love of individual freedom that characterizes the English and their descendants elsewhere in the world is ultimately due to the Germanic ancestry of most of the English.

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NAPOLEON AGAIN

I wrote recently that Napoleon was the first Fascist. Arthur Silber has put up some excerpts from the recent biography of Napoleon by Paul Johnson that show how very Fascist Napoleon indeed was.

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ASIAN NAZIS?

Twin Ruler has an interesting post about parallels between Asian Communists and Nazis.

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JAPANESE CONSERVATIVES

I have received the following interesting email from Derk Lupinek in Japan:

I have just read your piece on conservativism, and it seems to me that your disagreement with Philosoblog is more semantic than anything else. I live in Japan, and when I first moved here I found myself trying to decide whether the Japanese were deeply conservative, as I had been led to believe, or whether they were actually quite liberal, especially given their attitudes toward sex. They clearly do not value individual liberty, which would mean they are not conservative by your definition, but they seek to preserve their culture down to the most excruciating details, leaving me with the feeling that they are in fact deeply conservative, at least in the sense that Philosoblog intends. So, while I do agree with your definition as it relates to conservativism in the West, it certainly doesn't account for deeply conservative individuals in other cultures, and those individuals are indeed trying to "conserve" something. In other words, you seem to be using the term "conservative" to refer to a political movement that has occurred in the West, and Philosoblog is just using the term more generally to refer to a psychological mindset. Am I mistaken?

My reply: "Conservative" has come to have the lexical meaning of "opposed to change" but my point is that those individuals usually so labelled in the Anglosphere are motivated primarily by a love of liberty and that calling them �conservative� is a misnomer -- often a major misnomer given the changes that they favour. �Rightist� would be a less ambiguous and hence less misleading term for them.

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ARAB SLAVERS

Since my post on �reparations� for slavery, several people have written to me to ask� �What about the Arabs?�. Arabs were slave traders and slave users for many centuries -- and by some accounts still are. And one might ask when did any Arab country fight an immensely destructive civil war to end slavery? And what Arab state used its navy to stop slave-traders? Lots of Arab states today are oil-rich so if anybody should be putting up �reparations� money they should be. So if the USA were to say �after you� to the Arab world that would surely be fair. Yet for some reason, Leftists never seem to mention Arab �guilt�. I wonder why?

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DENG THE GREAT

China hand thinks that China�s Deng Xiaoping is one of the greatest men of the 20th Century. He rejects the notion that Deng had anything to do with the Tien An Men square massacre and posts that Deng was a pragmatist and realist throughout his career -- unlike Mao who was a crazy idealist. Jim Ryan of Philosoblog has argued that pragmatism and realism are the hallmarks of the conservative so perhaps Deng should be even more of a conservative hero than he now is. It is undoubted that it was Deng who took the lead in introducing capitalism back into China.

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MARXISM AS A RELIGION

Although Marxism is now dead, its great role in inspiring Leftists for around 100 years still in my view makes the effort to understand it worthwhile. This quote from Cinderella Bloggerfeller does help:

"Marxism scores over traditional religion for a certain kind of person because in Judaeo-Christian thinking you are supposed to examine your own conscience and feel bad about yourself; Marxism allows you to place all the blame onto other people and feel proudly self-righteous and anti-bourgeois when you do so. 'Mea culpa' becomes 'tua culpa'.

(For those who do not know their Latin, �mea culpa� means �I am guilty� and �tua culpa means �You are guilty�).

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SWEDEN VS. DENMARK

A fascinating article here showing that the compulsively Leftist Swedes are getting left way behind economically by the more conservative Danes. Link via Commonsense & Wonder.

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CIA CAUSES EARTHQUAKE!

I should ignore this stuff but the �Teutonic plates� gave me a laugh. And �manipulating� tectonic plates is nearly as funny. If it is not a spoof it ought to be.

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