End of a Century

National Review Online, august 6th, 2001 

A few days ago, in a quiet English country town, the long, long life of Bertie Felstead finally came to an end. And when the old man died, a small, surviving fragment of the 19th century died with him. He had been a local celebrity, an approachable Methuselah, a dapper figure in blazer, regimental tie, and, sometimes, on very special occasions, a row of medals. He had bright eyes, a cheery, amazed-to-be-here smile, and a lifespan that stretched across civilizations. Born on October 28th, 1894, Mr. Felstead was ancient enough to have seen the imperial spectacle of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, sufficiently young to have outlived the Clinton presidency. It was an astonishing achievement, made all the more remarkable by the fact that, in his youth, Mr. Felstead was to participate in an event that characterized, more than most, the last moments of the world into which he was born. Historians like to tell us that the European 19th century did not end at the moment dictated by the calendar. Its optimistic bourgeois spirit, its almost naïve belief in progress, continued to flourish for more than another decade. It took the First World War to bring that "long 19th century," and so much else, to a close. Spiritually and physically, the Europe that emerged from that conflict bore very little resemblance to the seemingly stable culture that had existed only four years before. In August 1914, totalitarian hecatombs were the stuff of nightmare, believable, perhaps, by madmen or in the dark of night, unimaginable in the reassuring light of an Edwardian morning. Forty months later Lenin was already ordering his first mass executions.

The men that went off to fight that summer were still the soldiers of the older era, still the sort of men who believed that war could be a bit of a lark. With luck, they thought, it would be over by Christmas. In Britain, poignantly, the troops were all volunteers, professional soldiers, "Territorials" (National Guardsmen) perhaps, or the first wave of that trustingly patriotic civilian army that was doomed to die in the killing fields of Flanders and of France.

Christmas 1914, of course, eventually arrived, but peace did not. Despite this, up and down the line the holiday was marked by informal cease-fires, the sound of carols, and, surprisingly often, even more. The opposing armies shared meals, drinks, and cigarettes. There were contests, peaceful for once, a shooting match, card games, some soccer. The generals did not approve, but to see these encounters as an early pacifist spasm is to believe hindsight's myth. Those sentiments would come, but only later, after the disillusion brought by countless battles over scraps of Belgian mud. In that first, almost innocent Christmas of the war the troops were celebrating a truce, not a mutiny, a day off, not a desertion, and, yes, they were pleased to do so with their counterparts in the opposite trench. The enemy was still the enemy, certainly, but that word had not yet come to bear its full, modern significance. There could be room for a break in a war that was still, just, being fought according to the rules of a dissolving, shared civility.

A year later, the orders went out. There was to be no repetition of such disgraceful scenes. Christmas fraternization was a crime, a desertion, a betrayal of the glorious dead. In the event, these instructions were largely superfluous. The sporting contest of 1914 was no more. The war had become an abattoir struggle that stretched the length of a continent. There had been too many casualties, too many tens of thousands of corpses, too many bitter memories. The hundred-yard gulf between the two trenches was no longer so easily crossed by mistletoe, schnapps, and a burst of song. In a couple of magical spots along the Front, however, wonderfully, hauntingly, the older decencies still managed to linger on. One of those places was Laventie, in France. Bertie Felstead, in those days a private in the 15th Welch Fusiliers, was there. The man who was to survive into the 21st century participated in one of the final grace notes of the long 19th.

It was a story that this last witness would often tell. "We were only one hundred yards or so apart when Christmas morning came. A German began singing All Through The Night, then more voices joined in and the British troops responded with Good KingWenceslas…you couldn't hear each other sing like that without it affecting your feelings for the other side."

"The next morning all the soldiers were shouting to another, "Hello Tommy, Hello Fritz." The Germans started it, coming out of their trenches and walking over to us. Nobody decided for us, we just climbed over our parapet and went over to them. We thought nobody would shoot at us if we all mingled together." And nor they did. No shots were exchanged, only cigars and cigarettes. "We met, we swapped cigarettes and had a good smoke…Of course, we realized we were in the most extraordinary position, wishing each other Happy Christmas one day and shooting each other the next, but we were so pleased to be able to forget the war and shake hands."

Someone started kicking around a soccer ball. "It wasn't a game as such, more of a kick-around and a free-for-all. I remember scrambling around in the snow. There could have been 50 on each side. No-one was keeping score." No one was keeping score. Ah, the relief of it. Just for a moment, just for a snatched miraculous instant, there was a pause in that daily murderous struggle, a pause in that struggle where the savage accounting never seemed to stop, a pause in that struggle where high commands always knew the score.

Just for a few minutes, it was all so different. In the age before the mass ideologies and the slaughters that they made so easy, it was still possible for these opponents to remember what they had in common. "The Germans were men of their Fatherland, and we [were men] of our Motherland, and human nature being what it is, the feelings built up overnight and so both sides [had] got up…to meet halfway in No Man's Land." To Bertie Felstead, a civilized, understated man, a man of an older era, it was the natural thing to do and, as for those Germans that day, well, they were, he said, quite simply, "all right".

It couldn't last. The 20th century was not to be kept waiting. After about half an hour an officer appeared to warn his troops that they were in France to fight "the Huns, not to make friends with them." It was not long before artillery had replaced the carols.

In 1916, there were no Christmas Truces.

Spirits in the Sky

National Review Online, July 24, 2001

Is it possible, do you think, that Democratic senators are, in reality, demons sent by the Devil to pester, humiliate, and torment the rest of us? It may be a somewhat far-fetched theory, but take a look at the latest proposed policy initiative from Dianne Feinstein and see if you can come up with any other explanation.

 Ms. Feinstein, the senior senator from California, has decided that the experience of air travel in this country needs to be made worse. The senator, a lawmaker with, clearly, too little to occupy her time, has recently written to the CEOs of seven major air carriers suggesting that they should not serve any passenger more than two alcoholic drinks in the course of a domestic flight.

 Now, a "suggestion" from Dianne Feinstein is, like a "request" from Don Corleone, something to take seriously. Just in case any of the CEOs did not understand this, the sober-sided senator spelled out the threat implicit in her proposal. If the airlines would not comply "voluntarily" they would be required to do so by law. "I am," she warned sternly, "in the process of writing legislation." And that legislation would be tough. The ban, she explained, would apply "regardless of the type of alcoholic beverage served."

 Let us imagine what that could mean. You are in Coach, in a middle seat narrower than George W. Bush's Florida majority. One neighbor, grotesquely obese, is spreading out from the confines of his chair into your own space. The other, who does not appear to have washed for some days, is sobbing quietly after a nasty spot of turbulence over Des Moines. Two rows behind, a baby screams, but undeterred his mother carries on with the grim task of changing a diaper then and there (she has little choice — the line for the restroom stretches halfway down the plane). The flight itself, theoretically a six-hour hike from New York to Seattle, took off very late owing to unspecified "trouble" at O'Hare. You will, you already know, miss the meeting that was the purpose of your journey in the first place. The flight attendant has just informed you that the last chicken entrée has already been taken, leaving a choice of a bean-based mush or a packet of honey-coated pretzels. It has been two or three hours since your last drink. To numb the pain, you ask for a third Bud Light. Under the terms of the Feinstein fatwa your request will be denied.

 If there is anything guaranteed to spark an outburst of anger, this is it, which is ironic really, as the alleged purpose of the two drinks limit is to reduce "air rage." Of course, why Sen. Feinstein should be so worried by this subject is not clear. The senator was, after all, famously relaxed ("we've got to step back…let cooler minds prevail") when, in this year's most spectacular instance of aerial misbehavior, a hot-dogging Chinese jet collided into an American surveillance plane. We can only speculate as to what it is that has now led Ms. Feinstein to take a new harder line against trouble in the sky. It would, of course, be absolutely inappropriate to suggest that a double standard is at work and quite, quite wrong to hint that the senior senator from California is a self-important busybody, who finds it easier to boss around American citizens than stand up to Communist China.

 No, the answer must lie elsewhere. Was there, perhaps, an incident, senator, a squabble, maybe, on one fraught flight over just whose suitcase was going to have priority in a jam-packed overhead locker? We can only speculate. There is no evidence of such a drama, but then, why worry too much about that? There is no evidence of any epidemic of air rage either, but that does not seem to have stopped Ms. Feinstein.

 The real data are, in fact, rather reassuring. In response to the senator's proposal, a spokesman for an airline industry group, the Air Transport Association, has claimed that most of the four thousand or so (usually fairly minor) incidents of "air rage" that take place each year do so on the ground. Minor or not, that is four thousand too many, but it is worth remembering that U.S. airports catered for over six hundred million passengers last year. Based on those statistics, therefore, unruly travelers account for .0007 percent of the total, and most of those are enraged not by drink, but by delays. One of the principal causes of those delays, Sen. Feinstein, has been Washington's failure to bring the private sector into the management of the air-traffic-control system.

 What is more, when a drunken passenger is, or may become, a problem, the airlines already have all the powers they need. As Ms. Feinstein's own press release admits, under FAA regulations airlines are prohibited from serving alcoholic beverages to any person aboard who appears to be intoxicated. Disorderly passengers can be handcuffed or otherwise restrained. Quite rightly, as a number of loutish holidaymakers have recently discovered, they can also be prosecuted.

 As for those who argue that two drinks should be enough for anyone, well, that may be true for them (and for me. I'm a very frequent flier, but, in the air at least, a very infrequent drinker) but it is not for others, and those folks should be left to make their own choices. A drink or three can help wile away the time, or soothe, perhaps, the truculent traveler who might otherwise cause just the sort of problems which, supposedly, so alarm the senator. In addition, most of us know those terrified fliers (hi, Mom!) who need more than a little something to help them through their ordeal. Why should they suffer?

 In the end though, the utilitarian case misses the point. This particular example, the right to that third beer, may be not be the most important cause, but what matters here is the underlying principle, the principle that government should not take away any of our freedoms without a good reason. In this instance, Sen. Feinstein has not shown us that reason. The facts do not support her argument, and if we reject Satan as an explanation for Dianne's draft diktat (and, probably we must, although the Devil does, notoriously, find work for idle hands), then the only motive that can be found is in her own mindset, one all too typical of her party's leadership: priggish, arrogant, condescending, and unbelievably interfering.

 And you don't need to get in an airplane to be angry over that.

Another Fine Mess

National Review Online, July 18, 2001

When the British Conservative Party decides to make a mess of things, it does so in style. Last night, Mrs. Thatcher's tatty successors did it again. Battered, humiliated, and crushed in two successive general elections, the Tories are now identified with precisely one popular policy, their opposition to any attempt to abandon the Pound in favor of the European Union's laughable single currency, the Euro. So last night, when Conservative MPs had the task of narrowing the shortlist of candidates for the party's leadership down to two contenders, what did they do? Why, naturally they gave the most votes to former finance minister Ken Clarke, who politically, at least, is best known for one thing. He wants Britain to adopt the Euro. Now, that is a perfectly respectable, if misguided, opinion, but it is a remarkable viewpoint to be held by the challenger for the leadership of a profoundly euroskeptical party, although that, in turn, is less strange than the fact that, when the final vote is held this September, Mr. Clarke is very likely to end up the winner.

In part, of course, Ken Clarke's success is the product of desperation. The Tories are patient folk, but, after two of the biggest defeats in British electoral history, they would quite like to start winning again. Opinion polls repeatedly show that Mr. Clarke is easily the most popular Conservative in the country, despite the fact that he rejects the Conservatives' most popular policy. He combines political heft (Clarke is widely perceived as having enjoyed a successful ministerial career, although no one can quite say why) with a likeable public image. Untidy (the suits!), non-workaholic (the naps!) and rather portly (the waistline!), Mr. Clarke has perfected the English art of concealing a sharp intelligence, and no small amount of arrogance, behind a façade of shabby bonhomie. He is known to enjoy a few drinks and it is a fair guess that lean cuisine remains a mystery to him. Spectacularly (he is also a former Health Minister) Mr. Clarke also smokes, and, as Deputy Chairman of British American Tobacco, he would probably like you to take up the habit as well.

Being a merchant of death, however, is not enough, by itself, to make Ken Clarke the best choice for the Tory party. When it comes to more conventionally political matters, he has shown himself to be a very conventional politician, with ideas that are very unlikely to prove much of a challenge to the Labour Party's existing dominance. Mr. Clarke came into politics in the 1960s and his attitudes stem from the orthodoxies of the compromising and vaguely defeatist Conservative Party of that era. This too is probably the source of his fixation with the EU. Back then, "Europe" was seen as a relatively prosperous, sunlit alternative to the gloom of Britain's decaying welfare state. Indeed, in those days, that is just what it was, but times have changed. Thinking in the EU has not, however, and its dirigiste economic model has now clearly run out of steam. Post-Thatcher it is the Continent that should look at the UK for economic inspiration, not the other way round.

This is a change that seems to have eluded Ken Clarke. He fails to grasp the fact that, for Britain, deeper integration within the federal European project can only mean one thing, an irrevocable return to the high-taxing, bureaucratized ways of 30 or 40 years ago. Mr. Clarke may be the most attractive of the candidates for the Tories' top job, but his failure of imagination over Europe means that he is also the most dangerous.

The GOP was faced with a similar temptation last year. John McCain offered the prospect of a landslide, but the price he asked, campaign "reform," was too much for a party that still had some principles. It was a decision made easier, of course, by the fact that, in George W. Bush, the Republicans had an alternative candidate with a reasonable chance of victory. Looking at the potential opposition to Mr. Clarke, in a party where the ranks of aspiring leaders had been thinned by electoral carnage, it is by no means sure that Britain's Conservatives have had the luxury of such a choice.

To prove this, just look at the relative success of one of Mr. Clarke's supposed rivals, the mysterious Michael Ancram, a man who had risen to obscurity as Chairman of the Tory Party. Unelectable (as a member of the hereditary aristocracy he is considered beyond the pale in Tony Blair's supposedly classless new Britain), his campaign platform consisted of two pretty daughters and one vague principle (something to do with "unity"). Nevertheless, in a sparse field it was enough. The great man got some votes, and by the end of his campaign the London Times could even talk about yet another Tory sect, the "Ancramites."

It was not to last. Ancram and the Ancramites were defeated in an earlier round of voting. Another challenger dropped out shortly thereafter, leaving two other candidates. One, Michael Portillo, a former defense minister, had been the early front-runner. Once viewed as Mrs. Thatcher's heir, Portillo, an occasionally charismatic politician, who was seen by some as a potentially exciting choice to take on Tony Blair, has, over the past few years, compounded bad luck (he was out of parliament at a crucial time) with worse tactics. A self-indulgent and very public "journey" of self-discovery designed to help him connect to a wider audience played poorly with a party that, even these days, still prefers some degree of emotional reticence. The wider audience was pretty startled too. Doubts as to what the former Thatcherite stood for were intensified by the speed of his departure from the Iron Lady's old certainties. British Conservatives are a pragmatic bunch. They understand the reason for a strategic retreat, but would, perhaps, have preferred that this one had been carried out somewhat less enthusiastically.

Unfairly, Mr. Portillo's admission a few years ago of some early homosexual relationships may also have inflicted some lasting damage, but in the end it was questions over his judgment and what he stood for that were to prove fatal. Despite a strong start, his campaign was clumsy, and, in the absence of any real evidence of his electoral pull, the old doubts returned and he was done for. He was eliminated in last night's ballot, passed on the one side by the popular appeal of Ken Clarke and, on the other, by the ideological attraction of the other remaining challenger, Iain Duncan-Smith, the most recent keeper of the Thatcherite flame.

Iain Duncan-Smith, or "IDS" as he has been dubbed by the egos of the Parliamentary Conservative Party, is an amiable former army officer and the son of a Battle of Britain hero. He is bright, well informed, and a confirmed Euroskeptic. In fact, unlike Mr. Clarke, there is no doubt that he actually supports Conservative policies. By rights, all this should make IDS the favorite for the final ballot in September (all Party members get to vote), except for one teeny-weeny problem. Many Tories worry that the undeniably retro Mr. Duncan-Smith may be completely unelectable. He is, they worry, too unknown, too old-fashioned, too uptight, and perhaps the worst offense, too bald (a no-no, allegedly, in politically sophisticated Britain). Over the next couple of months IDS will have to show that these concerns have been overdone. If he can do that, he will see off Mr. Clarke. If he cannot, Conservative Party members will face a difficult dilemma. Do they vote for Mr. Clarke, a proven vote-getter, who might win an election, but whose policy preferences run the risk of splitting the party, and enmeshing Britain in a federal Europe, or do they vote for IDS and run a high risk of a third electoral disaster, a disaster that might give Mr. Blair the mandate he needs to adopt the Euro?

IDS, I think, needs to get a move on.

Baltic Reflections

National Review Online, July 14, 2001

© Andrew Stuttaford

It is playtime now in Tallinn. The brief, bright northern summer has transformed the Estonian capital into a city of outdoor cafes, tourist buses, and long, lazy strolls. At night, if you can call it that, music bursts out of the bars and clubs, bouncing off old town walls, and echoing down winding streets still lit by a sun that seems never quite ready to set. Add to the picture some of Europe's most attractive architecture, a vista of church spires, merchant houses, and impressive medieval fortifications and you have, for once, a city that really does deserve the label "fairytale." But, as with all the best such tales, reality is not quite what it seems. A good portion of the old town is, in fact, a reconstruction, the product of years of careful rebuilding, a restoration made necessary by Russian bombardment towards the end of the Second World War. The country's prosperity is also less than Tallinn's glow may initially suggest. Estonia's current economic recovery, the most impressive of any former Soviet Republic, is the product of hard work and free-market economics, but it remains, inevitably, uneven. Outside Tallinn, much of the country remains trapped in post-Leninist torpor, while even in the capital itself existence is tough for many, particularly if they are old, dependent on a hopelessly inadequate pension, and wondering where it was that their lives had gone.

A new exhibition located, with characteristically blunt Estonian reproach, a hundred yards or so from the Russian embassy, gives part of the answer. It commemorates the 60th anniversary of the mass arrests and deportations of June 1941, an episode of totalitarian savagery that still haunts this small Baltic nation. The black mourning banners announcing the exhibit flutter in the breeze. They are dark reminders of a cruel past, a haunting contrast to the bright skies, pale stucco and cheery advertising of contemporary Tallinn, basking in the summer sun.

To enter the exhibit hall is to return to that past. Walk into the lobby and find yourself in a gray dawn, feet crunching on a gravel path. It was the last sound that many deportees were to hear in what they mistakenly thought was still their familiar, normal existence. It was the sound of visitors, but who was it, they must have wondered, so early in the morning? Secret policemen, their victims were soon to discover, prefer not to do their work in the full light of day.

The exhibit's second room, an old dining hall by the look of it, gives the background to the tragedy. On its stone floor, strangely, there are patches of illustration, faded signs of the zodiac, a relic, perhaps, of some earlier avant-garde daubing. They must have proved impossible to erase. In a way, that is appropriate. All around the room are relics of another modernist experiment, Soviet Communism, the future, the world was once told, that "worked," the future that, in June 1940, rolled into Tallinn on the back of Red Army tanks, and left an indelible stain on the history of Estonia.

It was to be the end of the country's pre-war independence, a brutal return to the foreign rule that had characterized this land for over seven hundred years, a return made worse by the fact that of all Estonia's alien rulers, the Soviets were the worst, barbarians with a Plan that had no room for small, inconvenient nationalities. Estonia's First Republic passed into memory and into myth; it was, as older people sometimes still refer to it, "the Estonian time," a lost Eden, a moment in the light no more durable, in the context of centuries of oppression, than the short Baltic summer. And yet its memory endured, preserved by the Estonians as a reminder to themselves, if not to an indifferent world, that they were still a nation. In Tallinn's museums you can still find lovingly preserved consumer products from the 1920s, chocolate bars and tins of coffee, resplendent under glass, poignant souvenirs of an outraged sovereignty.

You can see that same clutching for the past at the deportation exhibit. There is evidence, that all-important proof, of Estonia's inter-war existence prominently on display. Drawn from home movies and news reels,  jerking images of farmers, factories, picnics, politicians, parades with too many flags and all the other clumsy baby steps of a new nation flicker and shine as they are projected against the walls of the old banqueting hall.

Across the room, there are reproductions of the doomed republic's newspapers from 1940-41. They reflect the end of independence. In June and July, 1940 the front pages could still boast a few advertisements, for Alex Rahn's radio store, for example, or "Isis Kreem" ointment, but these suggestions of capitalist prosperity already have to coexist with pictures of arriving Soviet satraps, 'elections' where the communists win over 90 percent of the vote, and the first calls for Estonia to join the USSR. By August the same year, the advertising has gone, and so has the republic's independence. Free Estonia is mutated into the 'Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic', the latest recruit into Stalin's gargoyle Union. The headlines now jabber of progress, proletarians and production. The only significant information is what they leave out.

On June 14, 1941, the front page of the principal Estonian newspaper featured a photograph of rowers on a canal in Moscow. There was no mention, of course, of the real news that day, the simultaneous arrest and deportation of people across all three Baltic countries. Ten thousand were deported from tiny Estonia alone, of whom one third (counter-revolutionaries, I'm sure) were under the age of seventeen.

The Tallinn exhibit tells some of their stories. There was Niina (guilty!), arrested at 14, and Juula (guilty! Her brother was a philatelist, and thus, it was explained, a British spy). As for Ebba Saral, well, she was a criminal too dangerous to be confined to a mere cattle truck with the others. They put her on a sofa on a flatcar and, surrounded by guards, she rode into hell "like a queen." She and her husband (a professor — guilty!) both perished. There is a photograph of his grave, and copy of her death certificate, grudgingly issued nearly half a century after her execution. Fittingly, it is in Russian. This is, sadly, not a rare story. In the first year of the Soviet occupation a total of sixty thousand Estonians (four percent of the population, the equivalent of around eleven million Americans today) were deported, conscripted or murdered.

Two doors then lead from the exhibit's main hall. It is not much of a choice. One door leads to "prison," the other to "Siberia." "Prison" is an assembly of iron doors and a nightmare reconstruction of a squalid Soviet jail cell. "Siberia" displays homemade tools and rough-hewn luxuries, the former essential for existence, the latter for sanity. There are group photographs of the deportees, stoic in the tundra, dumped into a wilderness and left to adapt or to die. Some of them even managed to survive and so, miraculously, did the dream of freedom. An independent democratic Estonia finally reemerged from the wreckage of the Soviet Union in August 1991.

Understandably, this new Estonia has applied to join NATO. Russia's arrogant, disturbing opposition remains one of the best reasons to agree to the request. George W. Bush appears to sympathize. Speaking recently in Warsaw, he said that, "All of Europe's new democracies, from the Baltic to the Black Sea" should have the chance of NATO membership. It was, for the peoples of the former Soviet bloc, a marvelous moment. In Western Europe, needless to say, the political classes were not quite so sure. To many of those folks, the real threat lies elsewhere. Sweden's prime minister, a Social Democrat by the name of Goran Persson, marked Mr. Bush's arrival in Europe by calling on the European Union to build itself up as an alternative to American "domination."

Of course, Swedish Social Democrats know a thing or two about "domination." Not long after those Red Army tanks rolled into Tallinn, a few weeks, perhaps, after the day that Ebba Saral was taken to her death in the East, the Swedes (the government was led by a Social Democrat then, as now) decided to do something about Moscow's Baltic land grab. And what they did was give it diplomatic recognition, one of the first two countries in the world to do so.

The other was Nazi Germany.

Rough Justice

National Review Online, July 5 2001

The Serbs made a furtive sale and a dirty trade. It was a handover made in exchange for a dollop of aid and a whitewashed reputation. You do not have to be either an admirer of Milosevic or a worrier about black helicopters to find it more than a little distasteful. Last weekend's events in Belgrade and The Hague may have been a short-term victory for Uncle Sam, but, in the longer term, they may come to be seen as a disaster. What they really represented was a triumph for a form of intrusive international jurisprudence that already represents a menace to effective diplomacy and will, in the end, be a threat to the interests of this country. It is worth remembering, after all, that if there is any legitimacy to prosecutor Del Ponte's crusade, it is based on the authority of the United Nations, an organization that has never been notably friendly to the U.S.

Yes, that's right, the U.N., that same collection of moral colossi whose most recent notable achievement in the area of human rights has been the decision that the slave state Sudan represents a better guarantor of basic decency than does the United States. The sad thing about last weekend's drama was that it was all so unnecessary. Milosevic was, mercifully, already a beaten man, a thug at the end of his tether, who seemed destined finally to face the judgment of his own nation, a people that he had led to disaster and humiliation. The trial would have lasted longer than that of Romania's unlamented Ceausescu, and the punishment might have been less, shall we say, immediate, but the consequences would, for practical purposes, have been much the same. Yugoslavia's failed savior would have been finished. Almost as importantly, such a trial would have provided an occasion for his countrymen to confront their own past. With, doubtless, the help of some prompting from outside, the proceedings would have been a valuable chance for the Serbs to contemplate not only the crimes committed by their former leader, but also the horrors in which far too many of them had themselves participated. Milosevic, too, had many willing executioners.

There is a clear danger that removing the trial to The Hague will dilute that message. Handled with anything other than the most exquisite sense of fairness, it may well play into the hands of those who want to portray Milosevic as a martyr, a victim of victors' justice, a hapless scapegoat found guilty only by a kangaroo court. In such a scenario, the real evidence of terrible atrocity would almost inevitably be dragged into controversy and disrepute. The slaughtered tens of thousands would suffer further, grotesque insult. Their corpses would be mocked as tragic accidents and their mass graves as exaggerations. The dead would be left slandered and their memory reduced to nothing more than the bogus prop of a fraudulent show trial, the basis of a poisonous myth that could prove compelling in a Serbia where history too was a casualty of Milosevic's war. The very real chance of such a development cannot be ignored. The rump of the old Yugoslavia is an embattled and broken nation, surrounded by hostile states and, understandably, skeptical about the evenhandedness of NATO's new justice. It is a fertile ground, as we already know, for paranoia and crazed theories of betrayal.

Distance too, will pave the way for another, gentler form of denial, the seductive fantasy in which nobody, neither the Serbs, nor NATO, is guilty. Only the bogeyman Slobodan will be to blame. Safely tucked away in Holland, Milosevic will become the repository for a people's guilt, out of sight, out of mind and off their conscience. In Germany's immediate post-war years the conveniently deceased, and thus equally absent, Hitler fulfilled a similar function for surprisingly large numbers of his former supporters. It is not difficult to imagine the same occurring in Serbia, but more nastily. After all, in the Balkans national myths have a way of turning rapidly rancid, and, unlike in the territory of the fallen Reich, there is hardly anyone on the ground to keep the peace should the desire for revenge become too great to contain.

So if the decision to try Milosevic abroad is an opportunity missed, and a risk taken, what exactly was its point? It cannot have been deterrence. The prospect of a Dutch jail is unlikely to put off any more than the feeblest of dictators-in-waiting. What Milosevic's fate may do, however, is operate as a disincentive to some future despot contemplating a voluntary abdication. In the end, the Yugoslav leader had, of course, to be shoved out of office, but at least even he had the sense to go (reasonably) quietly when the game was up. The Hague has been his reward. Future dictators will draw the necessary conclusions.

In all probability, the real purpose of making such an effort to get hold of Milosevic was something else: It was to make clear that this latest application of international law was for real. To be fair, there was some practical justification for this. If, like the NATO allies, you intervene in the affairs of a foreign country, it is always handy to get a little legal backing, even if you have to make it up. The problem is that, in going along with this, the United States has given further momentum to the efforts of an increasingly assertive international bureaucratic class, prominent in the U.N. and elsewhere, to grab ever more power for itself. Kyoto was one notorious instance, but this is a continuous, relentless process. There will soon, for example, almost certainly be a permanent international criminal court (Iranian judges, anyone?), which will, you can be sure, have a permanent anti-American agenda.

Meanwhile, activist European magistrates have used this era's more expansive notions of international law to start taking it upon themselves to 'investigate' a perceived retired oppressor or two, none of whom, strangely, ever appear to be on the Left. Augusto Pinochet was harassed for years, and there's even excited talk about prosecuting Henry Kissinger, but when it comes to Mikhail Gorbachev, the hero of Afghanistan, Vilnius, and Tbilisi there is only silence. No French magistrate, I suspect, will be bothering Gorby.

President Bush appears to understand the implications of this. Quite rightly, he has made clear that the US will not subject itself to the proposed International Court, but international law has, of late, shown a tendency to turn up in the most unexpected places. The Bush administration will have to make sure, in its understandable enthusiasm to punish the butchers of the former Yugoslavia, that it is not inadvertently setting a precedent for future less savory 'international' prosecutions of, say, US troops on a peacekeeping mission.

Such an outcome really would give Milosevic the last laugh.

De-Demonizing Rum: What's wrong with 'underage' drinking?

National Review, June 25 2001

IT was a day of shame for the Bushes, an incident made all the more embarrassing by the family's previous well-publicized difficulties with alcohol. I refer, of course, to the regrettable 1997 decision by then-governor George W Bush to approve legislation further toughening the penalties for underage drinking. In Texas, the legal drinking age is 21. A typical Texan of 19—let's call her "Jenna"— is judged to be responsible enough to vote, drive, marry, serve in the military, and (this is Texas) be executed, but she is not, apparently, sufficiently mature to decide for herself whether to buy a margarita. The 1997 legislation made things worse: Miller Time could now mean hard time, a possible six months in jail for a third offense. It is a ludicrous and demeaning law, but it has been policed with all the gung-ho enthusiasm that we have come to expect in a land where the prohibitionist impulse has never quite died. In Austin, there is now a special squad of undercover cops dedicated to fighting the scourge of teenage tippling. In other words, they hang around in bars.

The crusade does not stop there. The Texas Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse boasts a campaign called "2young2drink," which features billboards, a hot line (Denounce your friends!), and a program enticingly known as "Shattered Dreams." Other efforts include the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission's sting operations (Make your kid a snoop!) and, for those parents 2stupid2think, a helpful series of danger signs compiled by the Texas Safety Network. One early indicator that your child is drinking may be the "smell of alcohol on [his] breath." Who knew?

But it's unfair to single out Texas. The legal drinking age has been raised to 21 in every state, a dreary legacy of Elizabeth Dole's otherwise unremarkable tenure as President Reagan's transportation secretary. She is not apologizing; her only regret is that the age of barroom consent was not increased to 24. In her jihad against gin, Mrs. Dole forgot that the guiding principle of the Reagan administration was supposed to be a reduction in the role of the state.

And, as usual, government is not going to do any good. The only circumstances in which the approach taken by the zero-tolerance zealots could have the faintest chance of success would be in a society where alcohol was a rarity. Zero tolerance has been a disastrous failure in the case of young people and illegal drugs; how can it be expected to work with a product that is available in every mall or corner store? Sooner or later, your child will be confronted with that seductive bottle. The only question is how he is going to deal with it.

Not well, if the Dole approach continues to hold sway. Demonizing alcohol—and thus elevating it to the status of forbidden fruit—is counterproductive. Adult disapproval magically transforms that margarita from a simple pleasure into an especially thrilling act of rebellion.

My parents avoided this error. Growing up in more tolerant England, I could always ask them for a drink, and, fairly frequently, I would even be given one. At least partly as a result, I went through adolescence without feeling any need to drink a pint to make a point. My drinks were for the right reasons. The only recollection I have of any real parental anxiety in this area was when, at the age of about 13, I accepted a brandy from a friend of the family (an alleged murderer, as it happens, but that's another story). The worry was not the drink, but the uninsured glass containing it: antique, priceless, and, as our host explained to my trembling mother, quite irreplaceable. In the event, the glass survived me, and I survived the drink.

Parents, not bureaucrats, are the best judges of how and when their offspring should be permitted to drink. Intelligent parents don't let alcohol become a big deal, a mystery or a battleground. They teach its perils, but its pleasures, too. Have a bottle of wine on the table, and let the kids take a gulp; it will not, I promise, turn them into Frenchmen. Treat a drink as a part of growing up, as something to be savored within a family, rather than guzzled down in some rite to mark passage from that family.

Furthermore, too much of the discussion about alcohol in this country reflects prohibitionist fervor rather than scientific fact. We act as if alcohol were a vice, a degenerate habit that can—at best—be tolerated. In reality, it does not need to be apologized for. Alcohol has been a valuable part of Western culture for thousands of years. It can be abused, sure, but it can inspire as well as intoxicate, illuminate as well as irritate. In excess, the demon drink merits its nickname; in moderation, it can be good for you.

Ah yes, some will say, but what about drunk driving? They have a point. While it is possible to debate the numbers, there can be little doubt that the higher drinking age has coincided with a reduction in the number of highway deaths. But has the price been worth paying? The question sounds callous, particularly given the horrors of the individual tragedies that make up the statistics, but all legislation is, in the end, a matter of finding a balance between competing rights, interests, and responsibilities. We could, for example, save lives by denying drivers' licenses to those over 65, but we do not. We understand the trade-off: There is an interest in safer roads, but there is also an interest in allowing older people to retain their independence.

In the case of the drinking age, the balance has shifted too far in one direction, away from individual responsibility and towards government control. Raising the limit may have reduced drunken driving, but the cost in lost freedom has been too high, and, quite possibly, unnecessary: Alcohol-related auto accidents seem to be falling in most age categories. The problem of teen DWI is best dealt with directly, by strengthening the deterrents, rather than obliquely, in the context of a wider attack on "underage" drinking—an attack that might, in fact, ultimately backfire on those whose interest lies in combating the drunk at the wheel.

For the most striking thing of all about the minimum drinking age of 21 is how unsuccessful it has been. A 19-year-old in search of a drink will not have to hunt for long; just ask "Jenna." Almost impossible to police effectively, our current policy sends a signal to the young that our legal system is capricious, weak, occasionally vindictive, and not to be respected. In the interest of enforcing important laws—such as those against drunk driving—we should do what we can to make sure our young people see the police not as interfering busybodies, but as representatives of a mature, broadly respected moral order, who are prepared to treat them as adults. Those who believe government should be in the message-sending business should pay a little more attention to the message they are really sending, when they ask the police to enforce unenforceable—and frankly indefensible—taboos.

Springtime for Castro

National Review Online, May 30 2001

It was amiable chitchat, a piece of fluff for last Sunday's New York Times. Just how do you get hold of tickets for The Producers, Broadway's hottest show, a musical about a musical devoted to Hitler? The newspaper ran through the alternatives: sleazy scalpers, cunning concierges, even a crafty charitable contribution or two, and then fell back on that most effective of Manhattan ruses, "It's whom you get to know." For, as the Times explained, every night the "house" hangs on to tickets for distribution to a favored few. Readers were told that Rocco Landesman, the show's lead producer, has 18 to hand out. "If you're Bill Clinton, we've got tickets," he told the Times. Such generosity is not extended to everyone. There will, Mr. Landesman warned, be no such tickets for George W. Bush. Well, of course not, Mr. Landesman, we understand. The man is a monster, a fanatic in cowboy boots. Who would give tickets to Arsenic Boy? Not Rocco Landesman, that is to be sure. He would rather extend his invitation to someone else, someone, presumably, far more deserving. He would give, he said, tickets to Fidel Castro.

Yes, that's right, Fidel Castro. Rocco Landesman would be glad to play host to a tyrant.

It was a revealing moment, a joke, maybe (memo to Rocco: Jokes about living dictators are a lot trickier than those about their dead counterparts), but more likely a glimpse into the contemporary liberal psyche. Characteristically, the New York Times chose not to examine it. Maybe the paper's writers were embarrassed for their interviewee. There is, after all, something more than a little nauseating about the spectacle of some self-important showbiz hustler, a hawker of grease paint and someone else's tunes, taking it upon himself to "snub" the president of the United States by withholding tickets for a night at the theater.

Perhaps, though, the awkwardness lay elsewhere. What do you say, after all, to a man who, in the course of a light-hearted interview, has, in effect, just blurted out his admiration for one of the nastier rulers of the last century, and, by implication, compared him favorably with the current incumbent of the White House? Well, what the Times should have done is called him on it. If "the paper of record" was doing its job, its journalist should have taken Mr. Landesman at his word and asked him just what it was he admired so much about Fidel.

One can only speculate. Was it, perhaps, the crushing of the Cuban trade unions, and the arrest of leaders such as David Salvador of the sugar workers? After long years of having to deal with the irritating folks at Actors' Equity, was it the thought of trade unionist Mr. Salvador spending twelve years in jail that Mr. Landesman found so inspiring, so worthy of those tickets?

It could just be a matter of culture. The Broadway promoter doubtless sees himself as an artistic individual, so maybe he was impressed by the twenty-year imprisonment of the poet Jorge Valls? Clearly Castro is a man who takes culture very seriously, so unlike that barbarian Dubya. Armando Valladares, another poet, also survived for more than two decades behind bars. Reduced to a wheelchair by years of mistreatment, he was not spared the attention of his jailers. The beatings continued with steel cable and rifle butt, while, for variety, buckets of urine and excrement were thrown in his face. Well, said the literary Mr. Castro, Valladares "was no poet." Now that, as Rocco will appreciate, is criticism, far more rigorous than anything that can be found in the pages of Playbill. We should not be surprised. Under Castro, as we are always told, literacy rates have increased exponentially: Cuba is an island of learning.

Maybe it was the Cuban justice system that Rocco wanted to honor, so much more effective than anything to be found in George W's Texas, the torture in the Villa Marista, perhaps, or the interrogation rooms in Pinar Del Rio. But why single out these centers for special praise? Over the years, Castro has run so many prisons, each of them distinguished in their own particular way, and not just because of the quality of their inmates, those impudent critics (yes, Rocco, don't you hate that word) of the Caribbean gulag. There is La Cabana of the "rat holes," for example, or Boniato with its typhus and rapes, and let us not pass over those little cages at Tres Macios del Oriente, always so handy for keeping order.

Some people (there's always somebody) did not appreciate everything that was being done for them. After enjoying ten years of Castro's compulsory hospitality and the benefits of that famed Cuban healthcare (both his legs had had to be amputated as a result of the beatings he had endured), an ungrateful former student leader by the name of Pedro Luis Boitel went on hunger strike. He died, which was just as well. Castro had already said that Boitel had to be "liquidated" so that he would not "f*** up any more." Unfortunately, Rocco Landesman has not yet given us his views on whether such a fate was deserved. We can only guess.

Maybe there was something else. Mr. Landesman is, we need to remember, a man currently making money, albeit indirectly, out of the Third Reich. Did Castro's camps strike a chord, El Manbu, perhaps, or was it the forced labor on the Isle of Pines that caught his attention? In that context, how interesting to note that, just like the Fuhrer, Castro has had no time for those awkward gays, the people he once so charmingly described as "limp-wristed, shameless creatures." Surely Mr. Landesman would not have spoken out on Castro without taking the trouble to do some research beforehand, so we can only assume that he knows that the Cuban caudillo put a good number of such "social deviants" behind barbed wire, something that Rocco may wish to reflect upon before he invites Castro to the next Landesman production of Angels in America.

Responsible government must also focus on the vulnerable. In particular, Mr. Landesman, a good liberal, is bound to be worried about "The Children." When it comes to Cuba, he can, again, find satisfaction. Castro cares too. Indeed, Il Lider Maximo was, in the past, reportedly kind enough to organize an internment camp especially for tots under ten. Unlike that hypocrite Bush, Fidel is a man who really will leave no child behind. Just ask Elian.

Finally, and maybe this is the key, as a Broadway professional, Mr. Landesman must always be interested in the grosses, and if there's one thing that is big about Castro, it is the numbers. Over the years, they have, it is estimated, been spectacular, particularly given the size of his small home market. Two million exiles! One hundred thousand jailed! Fifteen thousand executions! And what a run it has been. With no pesky free elections to spoil the show, Castro's performance has been playing for more than forty years. That's longer than Cats.

Ah yes, that must be it. No wonder Rocco is so impressed.

The Paper of Record

National Review Online, May 14 2001 

Imagine, if you can, Berlin in November 1938, the grim capital of a savage ideology heading deeper into horror and cruelty. The New York Times correspondent has just emerged from an interview with the Fuhrer. It is an exclusive. His editor will be pleased. On the way home the Times man passes a looted synagogue, and the broken bodies of those who were worshiping there. Elsewhere, homes and businesses are being ransacked, and their occupants are under attack. Other victims are rounded up and dragged to the concentration camps from which far too few will ever emerge. Filing a report that night, the journalist prefers not to dwell on such distasteful events. Instead he contents himself with a comment that stories of a Kristallnacht pogrom had been exaggerated. Yes, there had been some scattered excesses, but they had been the work of a few hotheads, nothing more. Delighted by the coverage, the Nazi hierarchy gives the correspondent privileged access. He becomes the doyen of the Third Reich's foreign press corps, the essential contact for every new visitor to Berlin. In the ultimate accolade the journalist wins a Pulitzer Prize for the "scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment and exceptional clarity" of his reporting from Germany.

In the years that follow, of course, it becomes impossible to deny the reality of Hitler's charnel-house state. The reporter is revealed for what he really was, evil's enabler, a greedy, venal man, whose soothing words had done much to calm the fears of an outside world that might otherwise have tried to step in to stop the slaughter. Amazingly, however, more than 60 years later his Pulitzer still stands, and with it, his distinguished place in the history of the New York Times. Last month, the newspaper, as it does once every year, proudly published the honor roll of its Pulitzer-winning writers. It is not difficult to find the name of the dictator's apologist. It is right up there near the top, fitting company, in the view of the New York Times for the other journalists on the list: Walter Duranty is still, it is clear, a man with whom the Grey Lady is in love.

It is a remarkable, and disgusting, story. Sadly, it is also true, with only one qualification. The journalist, Walter Duranty, was a propagandist for Stalin not Hitler, the evil that he was to witness took place in the Soviet Union, not Nazi Germany.

For well over a decade, Duranty's influential reports from Moscow described a Soviet Union run by a tough, but dedicated, elite, who could, he conceded, be cruel, but only in the cause of improving the lives of the people. As the Times man liked to say, "you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."

To Duranty, Stalin ("the greatest living statesman") represented progress and the chance of a better future for the once benighted masses. In one typical passage he gushed that, "Stalin and his associates have carried with them the strongest and most intelligent elements of the Russian people, and have created a national unity and enthusiasm which the Tsarist Empire never knew. They have learnt by their own errors and pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps, and the nation has followed them." It was, he wrote, "a heroic chapter in the life of humanity."

That this "heroic chapter" was to prove fatal for large numbers of that same humanity did not seem to trouble Duranty too much. "I'm a reporter," he explained, "not a humanitarian." In fact, he was neither, something that can be seen most clearly from his treatment of the Ukrainian famine of 1932-3. This man-made famine, a deliberate attempt to break the Ukrainian peasantry, is one of history's most terrible episodes (In his Harvest of Sorrow Robert Conquest estimates the death toll in the Ukraine and neighboring regions at seven million). Walter Duranty of the New York Times, however, did what he could to cover it up.

It was behavior that puts the Pulitzer winner in the same moral category as the present day's Holocaust deniers, if not somewhere worse. Today's revisionists, I suppose, can at least claim the excuse that they were not there. By contrast, Duranty was right on the spot, in Moscow and briefly, even, in the killing fields of the Ukraine itself. He knew. Privately, he told British diplomats that as many as ten million people might have died, "The Ukraine," he admitted, "had been bled white."

Publicly, however, his story was very different. He claimed that tales of a famine were "bunk," "exaggeration," or "malignant propaganda." There was "no actual starvation." As other accounts of the tragedy filtered out, Duranty was forced to backpedal a little: his reports still avoided references to famine, but he conceded that the annual death rate in the affected areas might have trebled from its normal level of around one million to a total of three million. These unfortunates had perished not so much from "actual starvation as from manifold disease." It is an absurd distinction, as grotesque as any made by those revisionists who argue that many of the deaths in the Nazi camps were the product of typhus. Typically, such people will then sidestep the issue as to why it was that those victims were in the camps in the first place. Duranty took a similar approach. The increase in the death rate by two million was presented to his readers as an almost passive tense disaster: it just happened, nobody was really responsible.

In reality, of course, the famine was, as Duranty well understood, the organized product of a murderous regime. Had he told the truth, he could have saved lives. When today's revisionists deny the Shoah, their lies, thankfully, have little or no impact. They are simply irrelevant. Duranty's distortions, by contrast, helped mute international criticism of Stalin's lethal project at a crucial time, criticism that might, perhaps, have made the killing machine at least pause. Instead, the "Great Duranty" kept quiet, pocketed his Pulitzer, and crossed the Atlantic the following year in the company of the Soviet foreign minister, who was on his way to Washington to sign off on U.S. diplomatic recognition of the Stalinist state. Within four years an emboldened Stalin had launched the Great Terror.

As I said, it is a disgusting story, but not a new one. Back in 1974, Joe Alsop used his final syndicated column to attack Duranty's pro-Soviet stance, and Robert Conquest covered the same ground in rather more detail a few years later. 1990 saw renewed focus on this subject with the publication of Stalin's Apologist, S. J. Taylor's invaluable biography of Duranty. The New York Times responded with a favorable review of Ms. Taylor's book and an editorial comment that Walter Duranty had produced "some of the worst reporting to appear in [the] newspaper," citing, in particular his "lapse" in covering the Ukrainian famine.

That, at least, was a start, but eleven years later Duranty's name still features in the paper's annual honor roll of Pulitzer winners (the only change has been that he is now described as having won the award for his "coverage of the news from Russia," previously he was lauded for his "dispassionate interpretive reporting" of the news from Russia). For a journal that prides itself on its sensitivity this is another remarkable "lapse," one made stranger still by the Times's understanding in other contexts that the symbols of the past can still hurt. Its attacks on, say, the continued display of the Confederate flag might have more moral force if the paper could bring itself to stop its own annual celebration of an employee who was, in effect, a propagandist for genocide.

Nobody should ask the Times to rewrite history (that's something best left to Stalinists), but a Pulitzer Prize has, in the past, been withdrawn. It is a precedent that the paper should urge be followed in the case of Duranty, not for his opinions (loathsome though they may have been) but for the lies, evasions, and fabrications that characterized the reporting that won him his award. Beyond that, the paper should ask itself just what else it is going to do to make some amends to the memory of the millions of dead, victims whose murder was made just that little bit easier by the work of the man from the New York Times.

An apology might be a start.

(War) Toy Story: Where have you gone, G.I.Joe?

National Review, May 14 2001

TO Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan, it is the moment of crisis, the turning point when it all starts to go wrong; "You see this picture of a little boy with a stuffed bunny in one hand and a Lego gun in the other." Society, she argues, will push the tot to drop the rabbit, and this, she believes, is a tragedy, a brutal suppression of the sensitive man-child within. It is for insights such as these that Jane Fonda has just awarded Harvard $12.5 million, endowing a chair in Gilligan's name. That's very fortunate for Gilligan, because my nephew, Oliver, would be unlikely to give her the time of day. Sitting amid the debris of last Christmas’s festivities, the 6-year-old had a Seventh Cavalry revolver in his hand, a newly unwrapped Sherman tank at his feet, and, doubtless, dreams of battle on his mind. "This," he said, "is heaven." He was celebrating the season of peace and goodwill in an appropriately martial style, something difficult in his native England—a country where toy armies are in retreat and cowboys have to be armed with sticks.

Fortunately for Oliver, his uncle could help. In the finest tradition of the Atlantic convoys, I was able to come to the rescue with weaponry from across the ocean. The revolver came from the shop attached to the NRA's National Firearms Museum in Virginia (take your children!), and the tank from Toys "R" Us, a store that can usually boast at least one aisle where it is always 1944. It's all there; the armor, the artillery, and the dedicated, handpicked troops, including, of course, G.I. Joe, back now in uniform, after a post-Vietnam hiatus in which the poor fellow was shamefully repackaged as an "adventurer."

All, however, is not yet well in Toyland. In the more upscale FAO Schwarz, for example, it is still 1968. To be fair, if you look hard enough you can still find G.I. Joe and his friends, but they make up a small, desperate platoon, holed up in a last redoubt, lacking air cover and surrounded by Teletubbies, victims of our elite's continuing anxiety over the allegedly pernicious impact of plastic garrisons and battery-powered combat. (Even Toys "R" Us is not entirely safe: Every December, demonstrators picket selected outlets of this toytown Krupp, calling for the withdrawal of the playthings of mass destruction.)

We all know the sort of households where such concerns prevail. They tend to be grim places, where chocolate is rationed, bread is bran, and the preferred entertainment is PBS. Permitted toys are dully educational, preferably Swedish, and, ideally, made out of (non-endangered) wood. To these folks, war toys are the NASCAR of the nursery: declasse, disreputable, and more than a little dangerous.

Such attitudes are rooted primarily in snobbery and the vague and sentimental pacifism that permeates this culture. They have been around for a long time. Opposition to military toys has, however, been given fresh impetus by Gilligan-style educational theorizing and its even uglier sister, fear and loathing of the exuberant male child. These ideas are nonsense, but they have been skillfully publicized and are now increasingly the stuff of schoolroom orthodoxy. Inevitably, the success of such theories may lead anxious and well-meaning parents to ask themselves the terrible question: Should Joe go?

To which the appropriate response is: Hell, no. It is not possible to say this for all war toys, but—contrary to the fears of many parents-—toy soldiers are a constructive, not destructive, force. They encourage cooperative playing even if the form that cooperation takes—the arrangement of mock slaughter and atrocity—is not one that will bring joy to the heart of Kofi Annan; but as a spur to the imagination and a launch pad for creative thought, these toys are incomparable. These plastic warriors may be heavily armed, but there is not much they can do for themselves. In the era of PlayStation, they are a magnificent anachronism: The only programs they come with are in the heads of their owners.

What's more, the fact that these soldiers are drawn from the real past brings its own educational advantages. Sci-fi action figures are all very well, but the knowledge they encourage relates to Krypton, the Klingons, or the lore of the Jedi. Toy soldiers are, literally, more down-to-earth. They tell the story of what has happened on this planet. Detachments, say, of Union cavalry or World War I infantrymen are not much fun without some knowledge of the conflicts in which they fought. In an age in which history is taught as an afterthought—or, worse, a PC seminar— this is an incentive for children, and particularly boys, to turn to the real thing, glorious, bloody, confused, exhilarating, and endlessly fascinating.

And no, Mom, it will not turn them into killers. To judge by much of today's conventional wisdom, it is only a short step from the Hasbro tank to the Columbine library, a view that reflects the feminist prejudice that the entire male sex is mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Certainly, masculine aggression is a fact of life (I should know, I grew up with two brothers), but it is not a disease or nasty pathology that needs to be treated, repressed, or medicated away. Correctly channeled (and, yes, toy soldiers can be part of this process), it can be a powerful positive force. Hand in hand with associated characteristics such as competitiveness, assertiveness, and a willingness to take risks, it can be a great engine for a boy's development.

Attempts to suppress it are, moreover, doomed to fail. You might as well tell a tree not to grow leaves. Such efforts may be worse than useless: Children generally take great pleasure in doing the opposite of what they are told. I remember, still with some fear, two childhood acquaintances from a household where war toys were strictly forbidden. Before any visit there, my Tommy Gunn (a British equivalent of G.I. Joe) had to disarm. He could be a fireman, but never a commando. Unfortunately for me, however, the family's creed of nonviolence did not always extend to playroom behavior. In the end, naturally, both boys became career soldiers. That's merely ironic; but it is not difficult to imagine similar rebellions taking other, darker forms.

Instead of denying and deforming a small boy's aggressive energy, it would be better to acknowledge and direct it. Another topic must not be ignored: fun, But when it comes to that subject, those who are recommending "nonviolent" alternatives seem to he clueless. The list of suggestions posted on the web by one New Mexico counselor includes "building blocks, crayons, scissors, construction paper, hand puppets, and puzzles." Hand puppets.

This is not to say that there are no undesirably violent toys. Visit any toy store and you will see some lurking there on the shelves. In a secure family environment, I doubt if they would do any child much harm, although the Diamond Dallas Page interactive figurine (one of a World Champion Wrestling series of "Bashin' Brawlers") could certainly be said to be delivering a rather unattractive message to the nation's young: "Punch his gut, and he yells. Grab his nose, and he yelps. Pile drive his head, and he screams." Better than a hand puppet, to be sure, but grim stuff. Give me—and the kids—G.I. Joe.

Hopeless in the U.K.

National Review Online, May 10, 2001

There is always something of the theatre about the announcement of a British election: the trip to Buckingham Palace to secure the Queen's approval to dissolve Parliament ahead of the vote (her Majesty was "graciously pleased to signify that she [would] comply with the request"); the press corps outside Downing Street; the over-excited intrigues in Westminster. Tuesday's decision by British Prime Minister Tony Blair to call an election for June 7th was no exception, but the leaders of the U.K.'s two principal parties both managed to add their own personal touch. The Conservatives' William Hague, a self-styled outsider, leapt on a soapbox and shouted about political correctness. The never modest Mr. Blair, meanwhile, headed for a school called St. Savior's (yes, Tony, we understand the implication) and like so many other minor despots before him, launched his campaign over the heads of some puzzled, but captive, children. Still, for all the theatrics, there was no drama. The audience, the British electorate, already knows how the play is going to end. And that should be no surprise. After all, over the past year or so the achievements of Mr. Blair's government have included a series of financial and ethical scandals, the near-collapse of the rail system, a sharp rise in crime, the biggest increase in taxation in the OECD, the alienation of the rural population, a fuel crisis, massive regulatory overreach, and the effective breakdown of the country's immigration controls. Throw in the weaker stock market, a slowing economy, and Hoof and Mouth's grotesque barbecue, and it is only possible to come to one conclusion. Labour will be driven from office, thrashed at the polls, and left for dead.

Such a conclusion would, however, be quite wrong. Despite its problems, Labour is, in fact, headed for a win which, if some polls are to be believed, would even exceed the scale of the socialists' crushing victory in the U.K.'s last election, back in 1997. Given that the 1997 defeat was the Conservatives' worst showing since 1832, this would, for the Tories, be a disaster on an epic scale, equivalent perhaps to going through Pearl Harbor, twice.

The gap is likely to close somewhat during the campaign. Local factors may also assist the Tories to ensure that their national unpopularity isn't reflected in the final distribution of parliamentary seats. Apathy may also help. After four very mixed years in government, Labour too stirs up no great enthusiasm and the Tories' core voters are more likely to vote than their counterparts on the Left. In his wilder moments, William Hague probably dreams about a Harry Truman-style upset. That is not going to happen, however, and, unfortunately for the once precocious Conservative leader, unless there is a substantial reduction in the Labour majority, the political career of Harold Stassen is a more likely, if unfair, precedent. Mr. Hague will almost certainly be made the scapegoat by his party for any electoral debacle. If this seems harsh, remember what the Tories did to Mrs. Thatcher — and she won elections.

Which for the Conservatives is not as easy as the Iron Lady's three consecutive victories once suggested. Majority public opinion in Britain has for many years been on the center-Left. Part of Mrs. Thatcher's electoral success can be explained by the fact that opposition to her was split between Labour and a smaller party of sanctimonious eccentrics now known as the Liberal Democrats. The effect of this division was exaggerated by the mathematical impact of Britain's first-past-the-post electoral system. Mrs. Thatcher was able to rack up parliamentary majorities that flattered her share of the popular vote. In 1997, Tory unpopularity and effective tactical voting turned this split into a trap. The Conservatives found themselves squeezed between the two parties of the Left, and it was their turn to suffer. This process will likely go into partial reverse this time round, but it will not be enough to save the Tories. For that, they will need another advantage once enjoyed by Mrs. Thatcher: a clear message.

And that is something that they do not have. In the aftermath of the 1997 defeat, the Conservatives sent out the signal that all their core principles were up for discussion. It was meant to make them seem open-minded, but it left them looking opportunistic and, worse, divided. Under Mr. Hague, the Tories have tacked to the Left and the Right, they have sidled up to authoritarians, and they have flirted with libertarians. Now they are surprised that nobody quite knows what they stand for.

At times in the past this would not have mattered. Just being "not Labour" would have been enough. That is now no longer the case. Under Tony Blair the Left has at least made the pretence of adopting some of the Right's more popular policies. As a result it is no longer so easy to make voters' flesh crawl at the thought of the Socialist Menace. Today's threat from New Labour is no less dangerous, but it is subtler, and more difficult to oppose, particularly when you cannot make yourself heard.

If John McCain wants to see what debate looks like when strict controls on political financing leave a liberal media free to set the agenda, he should cross the Atlantic. Of the U.K.'s ten largest selling newspapers, only two can be said to support the Tories, and the broadcast media is, if anything, even less friendly. British Conservatives are treated with the same contempt and, at times, foam-flecked hatred that the GOP must endure. Unlike the Republicans, however, they have to put up with it. There is no alternative. Mr. Hague may be the most effective parliamentary performer in Britain today, but Westminster is no longer the forum that counts. If he is to get his message out he has to do so through the media, no easy task when their normal response is to mock, distort, or ignore.

And that's a shame. For all their faults, the Conservatives do have something to say. A reelected Blair government is, as the Tories are trying to warn, likely to be bad news. To start with, internal pressures are likely to push Labour closer to its more traditionally socialist views, taxes will increase, and with them, the regulatory burden and, in a more modern touch, relentlessly PC social engineering. More malign still will be the growing sense of entitlement amongst the party leadership. As we saw in Clinton's Washington, that seems to be the inevitable consequence of government by a left-wing elite that sees itself as operating on a more elevated moral plane than everyone else. The cronyism and shabby ethics of the first Blair government are likely to prove only a taste of what the Brits can expect from a prime minister who always seemed curiously impressed by our last president. George W. Bush, by contrast, is unlikely to find many fans in a Labour 10 Downing Street. What he will see instead is petty criticism, and a steady attempt to push the U.K. deeper into the heart of an EU that makes increasingly little secret of its anti-Americanism.

I don't know about you, but my flesh is already beginning to crawl.