Author: J. Arthur Bloom

J. Arthur Bloom is the blog's editor, opinion editor of the Daily Caller, and an occasional contributor to the Umlaut. He was formerly associate editor of the American Conservative and a music reviewer at Tiny Mix Tapes, and graduated from William and Mary in 2011. He lives in Washington, DC, and can be found, far too often, on Twitter.

Did Jeff Flake think Robert Mugabe was a T.S. Eliot fan too?

Charles Johnson uncovers the masters thesis of Sen. Jeff Flake, the main GOP supporter of rapprochement with Cuba. It, uh, doesn’t speak well of his judgment:

The entire premise of Flake’s thesis, “Zimbabwe: Rhetoric vs. Reality,” (below) is that Mugabe really isn’t a Socialist and is “on the side of the West.”

“After a visit to the country with exposure to the amount of private enterprise and limited government interference in the economy, as well as recognizing the viable existence of a second party, one would clearly see that Zimbabwe is more on the side of the West,” Flake wrote.

Flake doubted that Mugabe really was a socialist. “What is the reason for Mugabe’s continuing lip service to socialism? Perhaps Mugabe never believed in following the socialist path at all,” he wrote. “Mugabe may have come to the conclusion that the socialist model of development is bankrupt in the African context.”
Flake continued arguing that “despite the Marxist-Leninist rhetoric, Zimbabwe has not moved towards a high degree of socialism under Mugabe.”

Now, let’s give Sen. Flake the benefit of the doubt; his thesis was exceptionally ill-timed. It was turned in in 1987, the year Zimbabwe’s decline began to accelerate as Mugabe assumed new powers, and major collectivization schemes had yet to take place. But still, we would rightly take a dim view of a masters thesis from 1935 just before the Nuremberg Laws saying Hitler displayed a “gulf between rhetoric and reality” (Flake’s words).

Really wanting socialist revolutionaries to be on your side is different from really wanting national socialists to be on your side. Wyndham Lewis is pretty much forgotten, but in 2008, we see columns in the New York Times about how, despite the lack of evidence, Mugabe was a secret T.S. Eliot fan (h/t Moldbug).

Those parts of the West that didn’t quite support left-wing anti-colonial movements were deeply invested in the notion that the transition to majority rule in Africa would be painless and orderly. The United Church of Christ was firmly in the former camp, however, and had a long history with Mugabe’s regime. That was fine when he was a revolutionary socialist, but less fine when he started oppressing gays. One of the presidents of ZANU, Ndabaningi Sithole, was a UCC minister. He gave an interview in 1995 saying the revolution was kindled by, of all people, Swedes:

Tor Sellström: There was an early involvement by the Nordic countries in the liberation struggle in Zimbabwe. How can you explain that? Did it start with the missions?

Ndabaningi Sithole: Well, to begin with it was an involvement by the missions. Sweden had a very big mission in this country at Mnene. Incidentally, my first child was born at that mission. When the struggle started, somehow the good-hearted people at Mnene sympathized with the African nationalist cause and we were able to send some of our fellows to Sweden. My own son, for instance, got into a family there. They looked after him. My daughter also got there through a Swedish family. But it is not only my family that benefited from being kept by Swedish families during the struggle, but other families as well. They benefited a great deal.

Flake is a Mormon, though, and we usually expect more sober assessments from them.

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Sacred Harp 178: ‘Africa’

Now shall my inward joys arise,
And burst into a song;
Almighty love inspires my heart,
And pleasure tunes my tongue.

God, on His thirsty Zion’s hill,
Some mercy drops has thrown;
And solemn oaths have bound His love
To show’r salvation down.

Why do we then indulge our fears,
Suspicions and complaints?
Is He a God, and shall His grace
Grow weary of His saints?

Introducing The Sensorium of B.H. Obama

I suppose it’s a rarity for someone to get two posts in a row on here, but this is a fine reason to break rules. Cross-posted from FPR:

Pete Davis made his debut on this blog [ed — that blog] this week, with an essay on the poisonous politics of The West Wing. But he’s not just a writer or community reformer. Today he has released The Sensorium of B.H. Obama, written by Davis and Paul VanKoughnett. I had the pleasure of seeing it at a private screening last weekend, and even my right-wing companions enjoyed the heck out of it. For a short description, we’ll let the creators speak for themselves:

In the early months of 2015, a young United States President named Barack Obama made a fateful decision. Frustrated by the endless pressures of his thankless, dead-end, white-collar job, Obama delivered his State of the Union speech and disappeared– to America’s heartland – Lawrence, Kansas – where he began the great work of which he’d always dreamed. But with the lamestream media and the forces of Washington politics-as-usual hot on his tail, could this plucky POTUS deliver the change he believed in?

It’s a wonderfully original, creative movie with a heart of gold and a Joe Biden impersonator. Without further ado:

(Check out their production company here and here)

Pete Davis on the West Wing mentality and how it’s ruined Washington’s Millennial politicos

Over on the porch:

The act of “engaging” with national politics has come to resemble more and more the act of watching The West Wing, as political media – from MSNBC to POLITICO – focuses in on the internal dramas of the Beltway kings’ courts. After you have watched all the episodes where Josh Lyman wheels and deals his way to another win, you can turn on the real news and watch talking heads discuss how Mitch McConnell’s or Valerie Jarrett’s next move might give their team a win, too. It’s no surprise that political statistician Nate Silver joined ESPN last year: his meteoric rise over the past elections was the final keystone in the complete ESPNification – with its wins and losses, points and scorecards – of American political journalism.

Viewing hundreds of millions of Americans who are not Washington insiders as useful only for votes and campaign donations is not an idiosyncrasy of Jim Messina and his fictional counterparts on The West Wing— it’s endemic to Beltway politicos. As Theda Skocpol pointed out in her wonderful book Democracy Diminished, we have moved from a “membership democracy” to a “management democracy” in the past century. A once-thriving national network of participatory federated societies – which involved routine local activities in small town chapters which cascaded bottom-up into member-driven state conventions and influential national offices – gave way to a politics where we send our checks in to D.C. managers, who engage in democracy for us. The West Wing will be a perfect historical artifact of this age of political management.

Go read the piece, it’s great.

Conservatives for secular morality and cultural relativism

Not cool, Austin Petersen:

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This is from his public page. What’s a little Catholic bashing to establish your Cool Atheist bona-fides? It’s apparently news to Judge Napolitano’s former producer that the Holy Father isn’t quite on board with the liberal paradigm. I wonder if he’s told his former boss he’s a member of the “cult of Christ.”

Let’s reassure him by noting that there are some liberal Catholics trying to sanctify Charlie Hebdo, and claim that Western Civilization depends on the protection and dissemination of publications like it:

The attack on Charlie Hebdo was an assault on Christendom. Magazines that publish sophomoric cartoons mocking religion are, paradoxically, part of the Body of Christ – if perhaps its lower intestine.

We also have conservatives like the neocon Herodotus Victor Davis Hanson engaging in a little moral relativism, which should cheer an atheist like Petersen:

Unfortunately, when we look to prominent defenders of the Western faith in free speech, we find too often offenders.

Start with Bill Donohue, the president of the Catholic League. He recently made a series of silly statements about the terrorist attack in Paris. The gist was that the slain Charlie Hebdo staffers were nearly as much to blame for their deaths as were their killers, given their gratuitous blasphemy against the Islamic religion.

Does Donohue believe that satirists who poke fun at Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism and Judaism — and there are many, including the editors of Charlie Hebdo — are in similar mortal danger worldwide? Would Donohue wish such crass artists and writers to be?

These are both examples of the disturbing tendency after the Paris attacks of shutting down anyone who’s observed a cause and effect relationship between the cartoons and the murders. Indeed, against anyone who has dared to point out that words and pictures have consequences. Should the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists have been murdered in the name of Islam for drawing stuff? No, of course not. But they were. Can we handle that?

What people like Pope Francis, Pat Buchanan, and Bill Donohue, in descending order of erudition and kindness, have pointed out is that disrespect for religion has bloody consequences. A defining feature of the revolution in France, which established the secular order under which Charlie Hebdo has been allowed to flourish, was the massacre of priests, for example.

Now, not even Donohue wants to go back to those bad old days of “theocracy.” He’s quite clear that he doesn’t support blasphemy laws; apparently he’ll make a big stink if you even ask him to. But if he did, who cares? Are we going to pretend Bill Donohue really has the ability to tip elections, enact massive speech-curtailing laws, call pogroms, or whatever it is that makes him haunt these people’s nightmares?

On the other hand, multiculturalism, cultural relativism, European self-abasement, whatever you want to call it, is not irrelevant. It’s directly related to France’s problems. Which is why it strikes me as cowardly and unreflective that conservatives and libertarians are jumping to the defense of a naked, value-free public square that has been useful for nothing so much as prioritizing Islam at the expense of Christianity. (more…)

The Benedict Option for the underground

The last bit from David Keenan’s piece, “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” in the January issue of The Wire:

“We need a new art that is almost sociopathic in its evasion, in its willingness not to be liked; a non-consensual art that refuses to market itself, that negates that old art world and free music chestnut about creating a space where dialogue can take place. At this point we need to shut down dialogue, halt conversation, put down the iPhone. We need a ruthlessly stratified, exclusionary, hermetic, refusenik art, one that takes its form and its content from the precise, awkward, barely translatable contours of the persons making it as opposed to a happy-clappy magpie approach to SoundCloud mixes, YouTube clips and rips of obscure vinyl. These days we are all fans … and music made by fans ends up uninteresting. Or at least unchallenging, and somehow subservient to our fandom. We need critics, too, who aren’t afraid to be unpopular, to be actually critical, and to write for the good of the culture rather than for the validation of their would-be friendship circle.

The future of underground music exists in the margins, in the one-offs. It’s time for lone voices, barely decipherable ones, in fact. The underground has disappeared but somewhere out there solitary cells are forming. Next time around, the revolution will not be liked, retweeted, favourited or followed back. In 2014 the underground is dead. Long live the underground.”

They aren’t underground by any stretch, but I feel like it would be somehow negligent of me not to note that The Band Perry played in the new Congress this afternoon.