World War One - a Geopolitical Turning Point

World War One changed the world. Not every war changes the geopolitical landscape. Border wars between Mexico and the United States during the 1800s and into the early 1900s didn’t change the way nations around the world related to each other.

The French and Indian War (1754 to 1763) didn’t change the way power was distributed among the major European powers, and it didn’t change the way they interacted with each other. But WWI did change the concepts which nations used to view themselves and to view other nations.

It seemed, perhaps, that the First World War exposed, or caused, the collapse of a centuries-old monarchical system in a number of European nations, and brought about “democracy” in many of them, as well as a new self-concept of what it means to be a nation.

Different parties use the word ‘democracy’ in various ways and with divergent definitions, so it is worth asking exactly what is meant by that word in various times and places.

Certainly, at the end of hostilities in November 1918, and at the treaty signing in 1919, and into the early 1920s, it seemed that democracy was taking root and blooming in Europe.

Quickly, however, this hoped-for freedom seemed to exhibit a fragility: Russia’s first free government under Kerensky lasted less than a year before falling to Lenin’s socialist thugs; Italy fell to Mussolini’s Fascists; several years later, Hitler’s national socialists grabbed power in Germany.

As energetically as it had begun, the movement toward democracy seemed to collapse in numerous places. Yet Europe did not resume the old monarchies. Instead a nightmarish series of totalitarian dictatorships would dominate the next few decades. One historian, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, writes:

The world-historic transformation from the ancien regime of royal or princely rulers to the new democratic-republican age of popularly elected or chosen rulers may be also characterized as that from Austria and the Austrian way to that of America and the American way. This is true for several reasons. First off, Austria initiated the war, and America brought it to a close. Austria lost, and America won. Austria was ruled by a monarch — Emperor Franz Joseph — and America by a democratically elected President — Professor Woodrow Wilson. More importantly, however, World War I was not a traditional war fought over limited territorial objectives, but an ideological one; and Austria and America respectively were (and were perceived as such by the contending parties) the two countries that most clearly embodied the ideas in conflict with each other.

Why did, in certain countries, the move to democracy get derailed and redesigned into dictatorship? Was there some germ of totalitarianism in this movement?

Given that Woodrow Wilson has a figurehead status, as Hoppe mentions above, it may well be that his schemes included a tragic flaw which would ultimately yield the bitter fruit of political oppression instead of the anticipated liberty.

Wilson had been reelected to the presidency in 1916 under the slogan, “he kept us out of the war.” The voters wanted either peace or isolationism, but they did not want to be part of WWI. Yet, as federal judge Andrew Napolitano writes, that would change quickly:

In April 1917, only a few months after Wilson’s election, however, America had declared its entry into the war. What had happened so that America’s peace candidate and the people who elected him were suddenly mobilizing for war, in one of the greatest historical turnarounds of all time?

Wilson’s reelection slogan would manifest itself to be utterly insincere. His clear goal was to bring the United States into the war. Wilson was not interested in the war itself, but in the powers which would be granted to him as a wartime leader. He imagined that he’d use those extra powers to reshape American society, so that at war’s end, a different nation would emerge.

Not content with redesigning the United States, Wilson also planned to redesign the world. Only by being a part of the war could he have a hand, he thought, in shaping the postwar world.

The truth is, Wilson was never the pacifist he had portrayed himself to be. Rather, his peace platform was a well-devised strategy to get himself elected president. In reality, he had goals on an international scale, which were his top priority, and he was willing to do anything to accomplish them, even if that meant lying about war and then conniving to enter it.

Events conspired against Wilson. In Europe, he was not able to shape the terms of the Versailles Treaty, and several other postwar treaties, to his liking. While he did have a chance to engage in some nation-building, the international framework remained largely the product of the European negotiators.

Inside the United State, the voters were quick to reject both Wilson’s “League of Nations” and his heavy-handed regulation: the election of Warren Harding was a rejection of Wilson. Harding’s major goals were deregulation and returning maximal liberty to the ordinary citizen.

Wilson was a major force behind introducing modern democracy into Europe. His version of democracy, however, was actually driven by his anti-democratic desire to give the government ever increasing control over ordinary citizens, and to have the “League of Nations” take control away from a nation’s voters.

In sum, the version of democracy which Wilson sought to institute in Europe contained inside itself the seeds of a very anti-democratic movement. Thus young democracies soon fell in Italy, Russia, and Germany.

Wilson and WWI: Making the World Dangerous for Democracy

When historians say that the first World War marks a turning-point in history, which they predictably do, what do they mean? In a trivial sense, of course, any event is a turning-point in history.

World War One was and is significant. What makes it significant? It marked a change in governmental structures, and in the worldviews and ideologies which supported those structures, in many nations around the world.

Prior to the war, monarchs controlled most of Europe. After the war, republics structured around freely-elected representatives filled the continent, and the few monarchs who remained were largely symbolic.

Suddenly, almost everyone was eligible to vote. Suddenly, almost everyone discussed politics. As Woodrow Wilson had said, it seemed that

The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.

This explosion of suffrage must have been heartwarming, and its confusion amusing, to supporters of freedom in the early 1920s as Europe seemed to finally emerge into its political adulthood. It seemed as if the era of liberty had finally arrived. One scholar, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, summarizes those years this way:

In Europe, the militarily defeated Romanovs, Hohenzollerns, and Habsburgs had to abdicate or resign, and Russia, Germany, and Austria became democratic republics with universal — male and female — suffrage and parliamentary governments. Likewise, all of the newly created successor states with the sole exception of Yugoslavia adopted democratic republican constitutions. In Turkey and Greece, the monarchies were overthrown. And even where monarchies remained nominally in existence, as in Great Britain, Italy, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries, monarchs no longer exercised any governing power. Universal adult suffrage was introduced, and all government power was vested in parliaments and "public" officials.

The apparent flowering of liberty would be, however, short lived. Russia’s one chance at freedom, the Kerensky government, lasted less than a year before it was brutally crushed by Lenin’s socialist communist Bolsheviks.

Likewise, Mussolini’s fascism and Hitler’s national socialism both ended freely elected representative governments. The world was not safe for democracy. Dictatorships and various forms of totalitarianism were on the rise. Why? What happened to the noble-sounding rhetoric with which Woodrow Wilson brought the United States into World War I?

There was, perhaps, a flaw in the effort from the very beginning. President Wilson’s thinking had been shaped by individuals like the German Chancellor Bismarck and the American writer Herbert Croly. Their commitment to the causes of personal liberty and individual freedom were, mildly put, not strong.

Croly in particular had already been an influence on one other U.S. president, Theodore Roosevelt. When Roosevelt abandoned his “trust busting” image and reshaped his political thinking, Croly was there, helping Roosevelt formulate a “New Nationalism” - behind that slogan lay the concept that the government would regulate large parts of the economy as well as large parts of private life.

Instead of directly opposing privately-owned business, as Roosevelt had done during his “trust busting” days, he would now envision a synergistic relationship between corporations and government, in which powerful business leaders would join forces with federal officials to control the nation’s activities. Instead of free market capitalism, Croly nudged Roosevelt toward crony capitalism.

Croly and Roosevelt abandoned personal liberty and individual freedom, and sought to place control in the hands of an oligarchic group of federal bureaucrats and corporate executives. When Roosevelt’s political career began to wane, and Wilson’s began to wax, Croly joined Wilson. Wilson’s enterprise to make the world safe for democracy was infested by a very anti-democratic ideologue, Herbert Croly. Historian Jonah Goldberg writes:

The most influential thinker along these lines — and another great admirer of Bismarck’s — was the man who served as the intellectual bridge between Roosevelt and Wilson: Herbert Croly, the author of The Promise of American Life, the founding editor of the New Republic, and the guru behind Roosevelt’s New Nationalism.

So it was, then, that America’s entry into WWI was driven by an anti-democratic desire on the part of Herbert Croly to exploit the wartime economy to advance his own agenda of oligarchic control. Despite Wilson’s rhetoric, Croly explicitly opposed the usual American notions of freedom, equality, and democracy.

Echoing some aspects of the French Revolution, which used some of the same words, and harbored the same desire to undermine those very words, writers like Croly ensured that America’s efforts in WWI contained the seeds, not of freedom, but of an elitist government which would seek to manage the personal affairs of citizens. Jonah Goldberg continues:

Croly’s New Republic was relentless in its push for war. In the magazine’s very first editorial, written by Croly, the editors expressed their hope that war “should bring with it a political and economic organization better able to redeem its obligations at home.” Two years later Croly again expressed his hope that America’s entry into the war would provide “the tonic of a serious moral adventure.” A week before America joined the war, Walter Lippmann (who would later write much of Wilson’s Fourteen Points) promised that hostilities would bring out a “transvaluation of values as radical as anything in the history of intellect.” This was a transparent invocation of Nietzsche’s call for overturning all traditional morality. Not coincidentally, Lippmann was a protégé of William James’s, and his call to use war to smash the old order illustrates how similar Nietzscheans and American pragmatists were in their conclusions and, often, their principles. Indeed, Lippmann was sounding the pragmatist’s trumpet when he declared that our understanding of such ideas as democracy, liberty, and equality would have to be rethought from their foundations “as fearlessly as religious dogmas were in the nineteenth century.”

Far from seeking to export the spirit of liberty as the United States had fostered it, Croly steered Wilson’s diplomatic efforts into shaping a government which would seek to gain more, not less, control over its citizens. Wilson’s effort to make the world safe for democracy contained the seed of a movement to erase democracy.

Thus the rise of dictatorships in Europe, and the rise of the Soviets in Russia, were an organic extension of Wilson’s policy.

Joseph Goebbels: Financing Mass Murder

When Hitler’s National Socialist regime took power in January 1933, its repulsive nature was already known, but few could guess what horrifying evil it would perpetrate. Yet the seeds for that genocide were sown early, as the Nazis reorganized society for their purposes.

Each step taken in the Gleichschaltung - the “coordination” - of the private and public lives of ordinary citizens was done with a view toward enslaving the ordinary people to the will of the National Socialist party. In this sense, then, economic policies laid the foundation for the “Final Solution” and the Holocaust.

Early in 1933, Joseph Goebbels, in his official capacity as one of Hitler’s highest appointees, addressed gatherings of leaders from various industrial sectors. He noted that many of them had seen the political instability in Germany during the previous several years as a cause for economic stagnation. Goebbels assured the managers that the Nazis would remain in power for many years, stabilize the economy and the political situation, and thereby create a foundation for economic growth. Goebbels said:

Production would thus have every reason to be secure on the basis of this fact. By the same token, though, there can be no doubt anywhere that the National Socialist movement will intervene in the economy and in general cultural questions.

While assuring the business leaders that they would have the stability they desired, he also warned them that free enterprise, along with other forms of liberty, was on its way out.

In the quest for total control of all areas of life, the Nazis could not tolerate the idea of entrepreneurs being able to take unfettered initiatives to launch new businesses, or new products within older businesses. Even if such government control came at the cost of economic hardship on ordinary middle-class families, the National Socialists would yet demand it.

By flatly stating that the Nazi government would “intervene in the economy,” Goebbels was laying a foundation for a system which would brutally murder millions of innocent men, women, children. To make his message clear, he continued by saying that

The state has the duty to step in as regulator.

The next step in creating an economic basis for the horrifying Endlösung was taxation. For the National Socialists, taxation served a dual purpose. It was simultaneously an instrument by which they could control the populace, and it was a way to fund their plans.

Free discussion about economics, or about nearly anything else, soon was both risky and rare inside Germany after the Machtergreifung in January 1933. But writers in nearby countries were still free to observe and analyze. Basel’s National-Zeitung, located in neutral Switzerland, commented in February 1939:

In addition to the armaments race, in terms of numbers of guns, planes, trained soldiers, cadres, etc., there is another “race” among so-called civilized nations that is frequently overlooked - that is, the monstrous growth of taxes with which the citizens are burdened. In this field, too, the Third Reich has registered top accomplishments. It is devoutly to be wished that those in some capitalistic circles in Switzerland and other democracies who are afflicted with admiration for the “order” existing in dictatorial countries, also occasionally give this problem of taxation some attention. In particular, the 1 per cent arms-defense tax over which we are now wrangling in Switzerland must appear as very moderate when compared with what the “racial comrades” in Greater Germany have to pay for their Führer’s dreams of glory.

Not only did the Nazis impose harsh taxation on the people; they did so at a time when prices were rising faster than wages. Needless to say, the hardships inflicted upon the common middle-class people didn’t concern the elites in the National Socialist party.

The Low Countries were still free, and could publish observations about the Nazi economy, in 1937. They wouldn’t be overtaken until early 1940. In May 1937, the Luxemburger Wort noted:

For the first time in a considerable period, the Institute for Market Analysis has analyzed retail prices and the cost of living in Germany. While several weeks ago it was still maintained that the cost of living had advanced by only 3.4 per cent during the four years of National Socialist direction of the economy, the Institute now admits an actual increase of 7.2 per cent. The figures are based on the consumption of the average worker’s family, but they can be regarded as only conditionally valid for the whole population, since numerous relief measures and special allowances have been created for certain low-income categories.

While the Nazi government proceeded with its plan to regulate the economy while taxing ordinary people despite a rising cost of living, the functionaries within the National Socialist regime felt no pain. While a kilogram of bread cost around 32 Reichspfennige (imperial pennies) in 1937, the Nazi leaders were receiving enormous paychecks. In Budapest, the Hungarian newspaper Pester Lloyd was still free, in February 1940, to report the salaries of National Socialist officers:

On the basis of a new Reich salary scale, according to reports from Berlin, the commander of a department of the armed forces, the chief of staff of the supreme command of the armed forces, and the chief of the German Reich police are now receiving a salary of 26,550 Reichsmarks annually. Secretaries of state, presiding judges of the superior courts, general-colonels, general-admirals, generals, and admirals receive 24,000 Reichsmarks per year.

Not content with general regulation of the economy, the Nazi government began setting precise price controls on various consumer products. Like other National Socialist regulations, these were imposed with strict regimentation. In January 1939, the Frankfurter Zeitung was able to report that

Police administrative offices have been advised to pay increased attention to price control and to entrust this important task to specially qualified police officers, who are to be exempted from other duties.

The Nazi eradication of economic liberty, then, had three main features: regulation and intervention (including price controls), rising taxation, and nationalization of industries and businesses. The last feature is exemplified in the Reichswerke Hermann Göring. Rendering into English as the “Hermann Göring Works,” it began in July 1937 as a government takeover of the Salzgitter iron mines.

From the beginning, the National Socialist government used wiretapping, surveillance, intimidation, extortion, and personal threats to undermine, preempt, and disable competition from the private sector. The “Hermann Göring Works” expanded to takeover other steel factories and manufacturing facilities.

While the government nationalized and took over various production facilities from the private sector, the ever-shrinking room left for free enterprise suffered. In his history of National Socialism, William Shirer writes

Buried under mountains of red tape, directed by the State as to what they could produce, how much and at what price, burdened by increasing taxation and milked by steep and never ending “special contributions” to the party, the businessmen, who had welcomed Hitler’s regime so enthusiastically because they expected it to destroy organized labor and allow an entrepreneur to practice untrammeled free enterprise, became greatly disillusioned. One of them was Fritz Thyssen, one of the earliest and biggest contributors to the party. Fleeing Germany at the outbreak of the war, he recognized that the “Nazi regime has ruined German industry.” And to all he met abroad he proclaimed, “What a fool [Dummkopf] I was!”

The Nazi party was accurate when it called itself the “National Socialist” party - it nationalized an increasing amount of the country’s industry, and socialized sectors like healthcare and education. Regulations, price controls, and increasing taxation inflicted suffering on all income classes - party members were immune, but not even the wealthy industrialists were protected from Nazi savagery.

National Socialist economics laid the foundations for the horrifying genocide. The Holocaust would not have been possible in a land with a truly free market, with a thriving private sector, and with minimalist taxation.

Disney's Swing Kids - Did the Nazis Enjoy Jazz?

In 1993, Disney released a movie titled Swing Kids. Dramatically powerful, the movie told a story about teenagers living during Hitler’s National Socialist reign in Germany. The young people enjoyed American-style jazz, but it was forbidden by the government. The music became a form of resistance, and the students met more-or-less secretly to listen, and dance, to it.

Against their wills, some of these students joined, or were forced to join, the Hitler Youth organization, and later, others ended up in the military fighting for the National Socialist cause. They retained, however, their resisting spirit, and became involved in various secret underground activities to lessen the effectiveness of Hitler’s government.

The film’s plot is both gripping and moving. But is it accurate? Despite the massive destruction of the war, which obliterated some of evidence, and despite intervening seventy or eighty years between current readers and the events in question, there is enough data to allow for a critical examination of the movie’s storyline.

To be sure, many of the upper-level National Socialist leaders, who were charged with the task of sorting out which parts of popular culture were compatible with Naziism and which parts weren’t, viewed jazz with suspicion. This form of music had three strikes against it: it was associated with the United States, it was associated with African-Americans, and it was associated with Jews.

Historians routinely cite the 1938 exhibition, staged in Düsseldorf, and its accompanying poster and pamphlet titled Entartete Musik. Hans Severus Ziegler, better known as Staatsrat Dr. H.S. Ziegler, organized the event to promote the National Socialist view of music.

The Nazis had used the word Entartete - usually rendered 'decadent' - to describe the paintings they rejected as inappropriate. Now they applied it to music.

The poster designed to promote the event has become famous as a symbol of Hitler’s racism and hatred: it features a cartoonish and unkind image of an African-American, with a Star of David on his lapel, playing a saxophone. The image, which was also used for the cover of Ziegler’s pamphlet describing the exhibition, contains multiple ironies, intended or unintended: the saxophone is an instrument of German invention, and the number of jazz musicians who were simultaneously Jewish and African-American was probably zero at the time.

The National Socialist government condemned jazz music and swing music - the two terms can be understood as slightly different - as degenerate. In August 1941 in Hamburg, over 300 jazz fans, mostly teenagers, were arrested. The majority were released soon thereafter, but kept under surveillance; at least one was sent to a concentration camp.

So we have an official Nazi condemnation of jazz music, followed by police actions to disrupt jazz parties and arrest jazz fans: basic facts which seem to justify the narrative of Disney’s Swing Kids, and a romantically powerful narrative of an evil dictatorship oppressing a free-spirited art form.

But as is often the case in history, the facts are more complicated than this simple narrative.

Quickly after the National Socialists took over the German government in 1933, the principle of Gleichschaltung sought to bring all areas of life under the totalitarian control of Hitler’s government. Totalitarianism acknowledges no private sphere and subjugates all matters to the state.

The Nazis were keenly aware of the power of the media - radio and film. While technologically primitive in comparison to the electronic media which are in use nearly a century later, the media of the 1930s were nonetheless powerful in shaping attitudes.

Joseph Goebbels was aware of the popularity and power of ‘swing’ dance music. Rather than eliminate it, his Reichskulturkammer - a government office overseeing both highbrow and popular entertainment - actually organized jazz groups.

The Nazis hoped to have their own swing bands, and thereby displace audience demand for Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, and the Dorsey brothers. Less than a year after Hitler grabbed power, a jazz group called Die Goldene Sieben was organized by the Reichskulturkammer in 1934.

At least one member of Die Goldene Sieben, pianist Willi Stech, was a member of the National Socialist party. In a totalitarian state, with media utterly controlled by the government, a jazz band formed by a government bureau and allowed to record, to give live performances, and to broadcast on the radio was a strong statement.

While some Nazis, like Hans Ziegler, may have found jazz to be ‘decadent,’ other - and more powerful - Nazis like Goebbels and his bureaucracy apparently felt that it was in the interests of the National Socialist government to produce swing music and promote it.

Die Goldene Sieben produced a string of hits and had a career over at least six or seven years. In May 1935, they recorded their hit “Sieht eine Frau Dich an” and in November 1936 they scored again with “Donner, Blitz, und Sonnenschein.” In addition to live performances, radio, and records, they were also filmed.

In May 1937 they had a hit with “Jawohl, Meine Herren.” Their last recordings seem to have been made in 1940. Their career faded when almost all public dancing came to an end as the war grew more serious. The abandoning of dance covered all forms - not only jazz.

Other swing acts were recording and performing at the same time as, and later than, Die Goldene Sieben. Peter Kreuder had success with “Gemeinsam” in 1938. Given the abandonment of dance after 1940, some of the swing artists turned to less danceable types of jazz, comparable to Benny Goodman’s work with small ensembles.

Theo Reuter’s “Wolgawellen,” recorded in 1940, got attention, and he recorded “Pergamino” in 1941, which was also popular.

Willy Berking was in the studio recording “Hallo Fräulein” in April 1943, after the devastating Battle of Stalingrad, and his “Tip-Top,” recorded in September 1943, was also a hit.

As late as March 1944, Ernst Landl, an Austrian, recorded “Tanz Mit Mir,” although wartime shortages made wide distribution impossible.

Historian Matthias Tischer writes that “In Hitlerdeutschland war Swing zwar nicht konsequent verboten” - “In Hitler’s Germany, swing music was never seriously forbidden.”

The teenagers harassed by the National Socialist police in Hamburg were possibly harassed merely because they were unruly teenagers, not because of the type of music they enjoyed.

While it is true that there was some rhetoric about jazz being ‘decadent’ - the Nazis certainly weren’t happy that some jazz musicians were either Jewish or Negro - it is also true that the powerful media offices of the government put energy into producing and distributing their own jazz and swing products.

Greek Weakness Provokes Macedonian Aggression

The Peloponnesian War lasted from 431 B.C. to 404 B.C., and left Greece depleted in multiple ways. Neither before, during, nor after the war was the area of Greece a united nation-state. Instead, it was a collection of competing and squabbling city-states.

The war was instigated by the greed of the Athenian-led Delian league. The Spartans, along with several other city-states in the region, organized the Peloponnesian League and resisted the various taxes, tariffs, levies, and tributes which Athens demanded from cities.

Athens had a powerful navy with which to reinforce its dictates. The Peloponnesian War was a long series of confrontations between the Athenian navy and the Spartan army, with their respective allies.

When the war was over, Greece was weakened: Politically weakened, because leaders and governments had lost credibility and moral authority, and because the people were psychologically too exhausted from the war to generate enthusiastic support; Economically weakened, because wars are expensive and not very productive; Socially weakened, because the casualties from the war, along with its attendant plagues and famines, not only reduced the population, but eroded social structures and the willingness of people to rely on those structures; Militarily weakened, because the war consumed men and material, leaving less for the military, and because men were less inclined to engage in warfare, having seen enough of it.

On paper, the Spartans won, and the Athenians lost, the war. On a macro-level, all the Greek cities lost. Many historians regard the war as the beginning of the end of the Classical “Golden Age” of Greece.

In the wake of the war, the weakened Greeks seemed less likely to generate those works of art, poetry, and philosophy which had marked the apogee of the Classical Age.

The implications of Greece’s post-war condition were not lost on their neighbors to the north, the Macedonians. One axiom of history is that “weakness is provocative.”

Beginning first under King Philip II, the Macedonians proceeded with the military and political conquest of the Greek city-states, one by one. Some negotiated to be annexed into Philip’s empire diplomatically; others were defeated in battle.

After Philip II’s death in 336 B.C., his son Alexander the Great took over and accelerated Philip’s conquests.

Greece lost most of its geopolitical significance, being first a province within the Macedonian Empire, then a province within the Roman Empire, later a province within the Byzantine Empire, and finally a beleaguered independent nation-state, clinging to survival against repeated attacks by Islamic Caliphates.

Although the Macedonians conquered the Greeks, it might be equally true to say that the Greeks did themselves in. Through internal bickering, they created the perceptions in the minds of the Macedonians that they were weak and therefore an easy target.

Any country which is perceived as weak will, of necessity, eventually be attacked - if not by another country, then by some type of organization or alliance. Weakness is provocative.

Buddhism and Text

Studying about Buddhism can be a bewildering experience, and for understandable reasons. The student is confronted with divergent forms of Buddhism: Chinese Buddhism contains considerable infusions of Confucianism; Japanese Buddhism includes a large dose of Shintoism.

Beyond that, motto has been widely circulated that “Buddhism is more of a philosophy than a religion,” leaving the student first with the question of what exactly this proposition means, and second with the question of whether or not this proposition is true.

Proceeding along normal academic lines, a diligent scholar will seek to resolve some of these questions about Buddhism by turning to texts - primary texts, sacred texts, canonical texts, the defining or confessional texts of Buddhism. Indeed, some scholars assert that this is the proper way to investigate and define any religion.

In the absence of close reading of specific texts, it can be argued, little significant study or understanding of any religion is possible. Interviewing adherents of Buddhism will result in a confusing kaleidoscope of subjective impressions, from which no meaningful conclusions can be drawn. Texts are publicly accessible - the letters on the page do not change, even though the readers do - and provide permanency, consistency, and objectivity.

Despite the plausibility and persuasiveness of such a textual approach to religion in general, and to Buddhism in particular, this approach came under fire in the twentieth century, when it was derisively labeled a “protestant bias.”

To confuse matters further, different critics use the phrase “protestant bias” in different ways. Some use it, e.g., to refer to an inordinate emphasis on morality as a part of religion. We will here, however, use it to refer to the question of whether, and to which extent, texts are foundational in a religion.

The allegation was that nineteenth century scholarship had overstated the role of text in defining and determining a religion. The twentieth-century riposte was to deny such a central role to text, and look instead to other ways of defining or describing a religion.

To be sure, it is possible to overemphasize the role of text; a religion also has a founder, a historical setting for its origin, a range or spectrum of varying forms, a community, a way of life, and other factors which must be included. But it is equally possible to understate the centrality of text. To be investigated, then, is the assertion that text is necessarily a part of any religion - that text, perhaps along with other variables, is foundational to any religion.

Potential counterexamples come quickly to mind: illiterate, or preliterate, societies would certainly have no texts to found their religions. There are at least two responses to these would-be counterexamples: first, the definition of “text” can be broadened to include fixed narratives transmitted without being fully written, and to include as “text” paintings and sculptures and Zen rock gardens; second, some such societies may not have a religion proper, but fit rather into a pre-religious phase dominated by magic and myth.

A pre-religious belief system is built around attempts to manipulate (magic) nature and around attempts to explain (myth) nature. A religion proper is built around a relationship with the deity.

Having offered a characteristic which might be part of a potential definition of ‘religion,’ the discussion returns to Buddhism, a belief system which may or may not be a religion.

Seeking to find the foundation of Buddhism, one looks historically for its original form, before the Chinese amalgamated it with Confucianism, and before the Japanese blended it with Shintoism. Buddhism arose in India, and there archeologists have found some of its earliest texts.

More so than some other belief systems, it is controversial to discuss the possibility that Buddhism has a textual basis or canon. Aware of, and sensitive to, such controversy, Richard Salomon explores what the earliest codified forms of Buddhism may have been:

Most Buddhist traditions seem to have developed, at some point in their history, at least a “notional” canon that was conceived as comprising the totality of the “scriptures,” that is to say, the words of the Buddha (buddha-vacana), however conceived. Such comprehensive canons are actually manifested, for example, in the Pali Tipitaka and the Tibetan Kanjur. If we accept as historical the accounts of the communal recitations (sangiti) of the Buddha’s words at the earliest Buddhist councils, this sense of a need to collect the Buddha’s teachings in a complete and standardized corpus would go back to the very roots of the tradition, and hence be fundamental to it. But it must also be kept in mind that the historicity of these traditions is not beyond doubt, and the concept of a comprehensive collection of the teachings is not conclusively proven to be original to Buddhism.

Not long after the time of the historical Siddhartha, groups of his followers probably attempted to distill the essence of his thinking. Direct data about Siddhartha is scant. Precise dates, or even precise approximations, of his birth date, lifespan, and death date are difficult to come by. In the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, L.C. Cousins writes:

From the point of view of reasonable probability the evidence seems to favour some kind of median chronology and we should no doubt speak of a date for the Buddha's Mahaparinibbana of c.400 B.C - I choose the round number deliberately to indicate that the margins are rather loose.

Scholars usually identify this “pre-sectarian” phase of Buddhism as ending around 250 B.C., the time of the third Buddhist council. This pre-sectarian period would be the original Buddhism of the historical Siddhartha.

What defines this original Buddhism? A set of doctrines contained in a set of fixed texts. We will not attempt here to specify exactly which doctrines and which texts constituted this historical Buddhism. Many scholars have done work on this topic, and the reader may consult the work of Donald W. Mitchell, Tadeusz Skorupski, and Gregory Schopen.

While the concept of a textual canon does not necessary play a foundational role in all forms of contemporary Buddhism, this does not entail that the canon was not a central part of early Buddhism. Richard Salomon writes:

The complete canon, if present at all, tends to be more an abstract entity, or at best a set of books that sit, mostly unread, on a shelf, rather than the central focus of the monks’ and lay followers’ daily study and worship. In practice, the number of texts actually read, chanted, and studied in a given tradition is generally quite limited.

Even if the official canon has been replaced, in some practices, by an abridged or variant unofficial canon, canon is still central. Some might argue that merely because a set of texts is regularly “read, chanted, and studied” does not mean that they have dogmatic authority; but their ubiquity within the canon would give them a de facto authority and enormous influence. Even if there were a sect which tried self-consciously to avoid having a canon, the assertion that “we have no canon” would become a canon.

For religion in general, and for Buddhism in particular, canon is essential, even if its necessity is doubted. Salomon seems to agree:

We have, then, evidence of various types of “canons” embodied in the scriptures of various Buddhist traditions. At one extreme is the comprehensive, voluminous, and even (at least in the Theravada case; see Collins 1990: 91ff.) exclusive canon; and at the other, the “canon” is reduced in effect to a single text that is endlessly chanted, copied, and explicated to the effective exclusion of the others. Between these extremes, there is a wide range of intermediate “canons,” including, perhaps most importantly, what Collins calls the “ritual canon,” which “contains the texts, canonical or otherwise, which are in actual use in ritual life in the area concerned” (p. 104).

While text-critical and historical-critical studies will long ponder which exact words, or even which general concepts, may with certainty be attributed to the historical Siddhartha, Buddhists themselves, as an article of faith, do make such attributions. Clarence Herbert Hamilton writes:

According to the oldest Buddhist literature (preserved in the Pali language), Gautama Buddha began his teaching career at Benares with a sermon traditionally accepted as the first exposition of his basic doctrine. It is known as Turning the Wheel of Doctrine (or “of Righteousness”; Dhammacakkappavattana) and has remained authoritative for all Buddhists.

In any case, to answer the question about what, exactly, Buddhism is, and about whether or not it is a religion, one can and will consult that which is, in some form, a textual canon.

Freedom of Speech - Not Only for the United States

Students in History classes are familiar with discussions of “freedom of speech” and “freedom of the press” in relation to the First Amendment. That amendment was ratified in 1791 along with the other nine amendments contained in the Bill of Rights.

But what about these freedoms in other nations? The freedoms of speech and of the press are human questions, concerning people in every nation.

Compared to other countries, the citizens in the United States enjoyed more freedom of expression, and at earlier dates. Already in the late 1700s, political discourse was essentially unrestrained and unregulated. In spoken and written form, citizens were free to criticize George Washington and even the Constitution - and many did so, including prominent Founding Fathers, like Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, and James Monroe.

Elsewhere, such freedoms had not yet emerged: In Germany, newspapers were subject to political censorship in the early 1800s. In France, the revolution which was allegedly undertaken to increase freedom quickly suppressed it. In Russia, czarist censorship morphed into Soviet censorship.

England enjoyed more freedom than some other nations, but even there, the freedoms were not codified as statutes or in constitutional language, but were rather preserved as a tradition within common law.

Thus it was, in 2011, that the Canadian government prosecuted a newspaper reporter, Mark Steyn, because of statements he had made in printed articles. What might be his punishment? He writes that

the statutory penalty under the British Columbia "Human Rights" Code was that Maclean's, Canada's biggest-selling news weekly, and by extension any other publication, would be forbidden henceforth to publish anything by me about Islam, Europe, terrorism, demography, welfare, multiculturalism, and various related subjects. And that this prohibition would last forever, and was deemed to have the force of a supreme-court decision. I would in effect be rendered unpublishable in the land of my birth.

Writers in Canada are both punished for what they’ve written - if their opinions are not the same as the government’s - and they’re also forbidden from publishing again.

Naturally, if a writer happens to have the same political views as the government, she or he is free to write, and no legal action will be taken against her or him.

Any action by a government to reduce freedom of expression is a net reduction in freedom for all its citizens. Convoluted reasoning, which attempts to justify limits on free speech by asserting that such regulation somehow protects other rights, is specious. A government which violates the freedom of speech is obtaining power for itself, and history offers examples which teach us that such a government will soon violate other rights as well.

Germany enjoyed several decades of civil liberty before Hitler took power in 1933. The Weimar government, a coalition-based structure which ruled from 1919 until 1933, is still seen by many as a noble attempt to create a republic with freely-elected representatives. In many ways, the Weimar Republic succeeded. But it succumbed to one of its flaws - limiting political speech. The Nazis would use, among other tactics, that flaw to bring an end to representative government, and to initiate their own horrific totalitarianism.

With doubtless the noblest of motives, the Weimar Republic implemented regulations against “hate speech.” The reasoning was that, by limiting freedom of speech, the other freedoms could be protected: an admirable goal, but flawed logic.

This faulty reasoning - that one could protect the freedoms of some people by limiting the freedoms of others - led to the destruction of almost everyone’s freedoms. Trying to protect the Jews, the Weimar Republic enacted laws against anti-Jewish rhetoric; these laws would be exploited by the Nazis both to topple the republic and to impose their dictatorship on the populace.

The Weimar Republic, with good intentions, limited freedom of speech. When the Nazis appeared on the German political landscape - remember that “Nazi” means “National Socialist” - the citizens had grown accustomed to having their speech restricted, and thus were prone to simply accept edicts from the Nazi government limiting their political expression.

The Weimar Republic’s laws against “hate speech” set the dangerous precedent that the government has the right to restrict individual expression. With that restriction in place, Hitler’s National Socialists had merely to adjust the details of which types of speech were forbidden. Mark Steyn recounts the details:

In the 15 years before the Nazis came to power, there were over 200 prosecutions for "anti-Semitic speech" in Germany — and a fat lot of good it did. But more important than the practical uselessness of such laws is the assumption you're making: You're accepting that the state, in ruling one opinion out of bounds, will be content to stop there.

The temptation to limit personal freedom arises, in some cases, when it seems that by curtailing individual liberty, the government can better serve or protect some alleged victim class. In the case of the Weimar Republic, the effort to shield a group led to the group’s destruction. All citizens, regardless of their demographic or other grouping, are best served by a principled protection of every citizen’s civil freedoms.

The saying, “justice is blind,” refers to, among many other things, the idea that the law should treat citizens equally. The laws must ignore groupings and classes - even the claim that one group is a set of “victims.” When all citizens stand equally before the law, with no special treatments or protections for one class over another, then all citizens have the best chance to exercise their freedoms.

Mark Steyn sees this principle enshrined in the long series of precedents which have informed legal culture in England and North America - the legal culture which gave birth to an unprecedented degree of personal freedom, and codified it in the Magna Carta of 1215, in the English Bill of Rights of 1689, and in America’s Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, and Constitution:

One of the great strengths of common law has been its general antipathy toward group rights — because the ultimate minority is the individual. The minute you have collective rights, you require dramatically enhanced state power to me­diate the hierarchy of different victim groups.

The freedom of expression is seminal because it can be used to promulgate other freedoms. Given freedom of speech and freedom of the press, thinkers who favor liberty can speak on behalf of freedom of religion or other freedoms.

But when free expression is squelched, other freedoms disappear because no defense of them can be verbalized.

As John Milton wrote in his Areopagitica of 1644, "Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties."

Or as an ordinary Canadian citizen said to me, after I testified in defense of free speech to the Ontario parliament at Queen's Park, "Give me the right to free speech, and I will use it to claim all my other rights."

Conversely, if you let them take your right to free speech, how are you going to stop them from taking all the others?

The freedom of expression is a vital part of any civilization, and cannot be compromised merely because some group claims to “feel offended.” If the freedom of speech disappears because some particular opinion is labeled as “hate speech,” other freedoms will soon disappear along with it.

The Jewish Germans during the Weimar Republic would probably have chosen to endure occasional offensive language and live long lives over having the republic’s misguided efforts at protecting them give way to their annihilation.

Polygamy in Modern Africa

The spread of Islam through many parts of Africa established a societal pattern of polygamy which has lasted for several centuries. In 2014 in Kenya, a country in which Muslims are less than 50% of the population, the government passed laws declaring polygamy legal. The Muslim minority had persuaded a few non-Muslim legislators to vote for the bill, which then passed.

The traditional versions of Sharia law which shape Islam in Africa allow a man to have more than one wife, but a woman, according to this law, may have only one husband. Kenyan journalist Moses Wasamu writes:

Kenyans have many approaches to marriage, and in March their government consolidated types under one law that went into effect this week. One change has drawn the lion's share of attention: legalizing polygamy for men — even if the first wife protests.

Africa has a so-called "polygamy belt" that stretches from Senegal to Tanzania. A 2009 government survey indicated that 13 percent of Kenyan women were in polygamous relationships.

The passage of the law has caused concerns among non-Muslims in Kenya. Wasamu reports that non-Muslims predict that

the law will erode recent gains against HIV, and lead to more divorces and court fights over inheritances.

While the Muslims are a minority in Kenya, they hold significant political power there. In some other African nation-states, Muslims are in the majority, and encounter little significant resistance to polygamy laws. While Kenyan Muslims celebrate the polygamy law as a victory for Islam, others still see hope for Kenya:

James Fenske, an Oxford economist who studies African polygamy, thinks church leaders needn't worry. The law will have little effect since polygamy has been declining in Kenya for decades, he said. "I see no reason to expect this trend to reverse."

Barack Obama, Sr. spent most of his life in Kenya, with only a brief stay in the United States. It was during that stay that he married Ann Dunham and became the father of Barack Obama, Jr. - who would later be President of the United States.

When he married Ann Dunham, he was already married to a woman in Kenya. Before his death, he would marry several more women. Barack Obama, Sr., was a practicing polygamist, being married to more than one woman at the same time.

His son, Barack Obama, Jr., the President of the United States, is, however, a monogamist.

A Brief Moment of Hope: the Arab Spring

The Arab Spring has a clear beginning point in time: 17 December 2010. An unemployed Tunisian committed suicide by setting himself on fire, an apparent protest against the bureaucratic regulations which prevented him from trying to earn a living by selling fruit at a roadside stand. Brian Short writes:

The Arab Spring — which began in December 2010 and included Arab, African, and Iranian populations — started in Tunisia. The month before, a street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi had doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire to protest police abuse. Bouazizi had been bullied and beaten by Tunisian police for years. They harassed him constantly about not having a vendor’s permit and demanded bribes to let him continue his daily work.

The wide-scale movement triggered by his death, however, was not about the need for fewer regulations or the benefits which a free-market economy would bring to the residents of the Middle East. The Arab Spring would be a broader response to tyranny.

In quick succession, tyrants in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt resigned or were removed from office.

Although its starting point is precise, there is no precise point at which the Arab Spring turned into the Arab Winter - the point at which the hope for freedom was dashed and at which one set of tyrants simply replaced another set. Like the Prague Spring of 1968 and the Spring Revolutions of 1848, the Arab Spring was crushed.

The details of the uprisings during the Arab Spring varied slightly from country to country - Libya, Egypt, Turkey, Syria - depending on the grievances of the residents: Brian Short reports that in Turkey, protests addressed a spectrum of topics, "censorship, police abuse,"

an unpopular ban on alcohol sales and consumption, and what many protestors saw as the creeping de-secularization of Turkish society.

The Justice and Development Party's influence on Turkey seemed to be in opposition to the modernizations introduced by Mustafa Kemal, known popularly as "Ataturk" and the leader who brought Turkey into contemporary world. The Turks of the Arab Spring were protesting an Islamist political trend that seems to be dragging them several centuries backward.

Present at the start of the Arab Spring was at least one of the causes of its failure: lack of a cohesive vision for what might replace the toppled dictators. An unharmonized mixture of views held by the protestors was

one of the problems that has kept many people's hopes for the Arab Spring from being realized: protestors' inability to cooperate with each once the revolution is over.

Sadly, the Arab Winter slowly emerged as the reality that would replace the Arab Spring. The Muslim Brotherhood replaced several fallen dictators, imposing versions of Sharia law as harsh, or harsher, than the regimes which it replaced.

The new autocrats, some of whom grabbed power via seemingly democratic elections held in an atmosphere of post-revolutionary chaos, and the Muslim Brotherhood as their political organization, have quickly sapped hope from many who had taken to the streets during the Arab Spring.

The attempted revolutions lacked not only a unified political vision for what would be instituted after the overthrow, but lacked also an attempt to address the cultural and societal deficits which have prevented the Middle East from establishing civil liberties. The traditions of this civilization are not a welcoming environment for the establishment of a republic with freely elected representatives.

Until foundational understandings - the value of each human life, personal freedom and individual liberty, the protection of the dignity of each man and woman - are introduced and take root, it will be difficult to establish the types of government the protestors desired. The governments are the symptoms; the deeper cultural values are the causes.

Is Democracy the Answer?

Well-known is Woodrow Wilson's slogan that America's entry into WWI would make the world "safe for democracy." While effective at rousing the emotions, President Wilson's slogan raises more questions than it answers. In hindsight, the USA's involvement in WWI was perhaps more about creating opportunities for Wilson to implement his domestic policies; the war gave him the excuse to operate in a heavy-handed manner as he intervened into the private matters of citizens.

Among the questions raised by Wilson's slogan are these: if making the world safe for democracy is a good thing, what are the anticipated benefits of this democracy? will democracy alone generate these benefits, or are other factors necessary? if so, what are those factors? if not, should we anticipate these benefits in any and every instance of democracy?

Historian and economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe argues that democracy can be, and has been, overrated. Expectations that democracy, by itself, will produce a wide variety of benefits are expectations likely to be disappointed. Concrete evidence is as recent as the Middle East in the early twenty-first century, but Hoppe points to the First World War:

World War I marks one of the great watersheds of modern history. With its end the transformation of the entire Western world from monarchical rule and sovereign kings to democratic-republican rule and sovereign people that began with the French Revolution was completed. Until 1914, only three republics had existed in Europe - France, Switzerland and after 1911, Portugal; and of all major European monarchies only the United Kingdom could be classified as a parliamentary system, i. e., one in which supreme power was vested in an elected parliament. Only four years later, after the United States had entered the European war and decisively determined its outcome, monarchies all but disappeared, and Europe along with the entire world entered the age of democratic republicanism.

So it would seem that Woodrow Wilson's plan to make the world safe for democracy yielded fruit. But which type of fruit was it? Readers educated in the western world are trained to answer that this was progress, that democracy was spread, and that dignity was granted to millions. Many readers will take it as axiomatic that democracy is good, and if a nation embraces, or is embraced by, a democratic system, then this is an improvement.

There are some facts which might cause us to pause and consider more carefully these assumptions about democracy.

In the specific case of WWI, America's entry into the war may have prolonged it and increased the death count. Naturally, dealing with counterfactual hypotheses, e.g. what would have happened if the United States hadn't entered the war, is imprecise speculation and not rigorous history. But there is plausible and persuasive evidence to suggest that the stalemate situation of mid-1917 would have led to ceasefires and negotiations, if the USA had convincingly declared itself neutral and had refused to engage in the war effort, and that such ceasefires could have occurred well before November 1918.

Democracy, then, might be responsible for millions of battlefield deaths.

Some might argue that the regrettable loss of life was, however, in the service of attaining more democracy in the world. The net increase in democracy, as a blessing to the human race, might ensure that those deaths were not in vain.

Yet that assertion is far from self-evident, viewing the course of events after 1918.

If we look at the United States, which Wilson alleged to be the font of such blessings, we see that the century after WWI has yielded persistent economic problems: periods of stagnant or falling wages, massive public-sector debt, problematic private-sector debt, unpaid and unpayable future obligations in the forms of entitlements, and others. Also present are non-economic problems: high or rising rates of divorce, illegitimacy, and a strangling bureaucratic regulatory culture. Tensions exist along racial, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and religious lines.

Those nations which followed the path of American democracy have experienced similar outcomes - in some cases milder, in other cases worse. Ethnic disintegration struck Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. Economic decay hobbled Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland.

Western democracy cannot be defended by comparing it to the USSR, as Hoppe notes:

Further, the collapse of the Soviet Empire represented not so much a triumph of democracy as the bankruptcy of the idea of socialism, and it also contained an indictment against the American (Western) system of democratic - rather than dictatorial - socialism.

None of this, let us be clear, is meant to say that democracy is evil. There are real benefits which are made possible by democracy. Let us entertain this thesis: democracy by itself is insufficient.

The mere fact that one has instituted, within the territorial borders of some given nation-state, a republic with freely elected representatives, does not guarantee civil bliss and political justice and economic prosperity. On the contrary, democracy unaccompanied by other factors may merely place into the hands of people the ability to dismantle the beneficial aspects of their civilization.

The question which remains, then, is this: if democracy by itself is not sufficient to guarantee those anticipated benefits, what is necessary in addition to democracy?

Islam in History

In April 2014, Tony Blair gave a major policy speech titled “Why the Middle East Matters” in which he analyzed the major problems in that part of the world, and why the rest of the world cannot afford to ignore the trouble brewing there. As former British Prime Minister, Blair offers a perspective from outside the United States.

Social media and modern telecommunications have changed the dynamics, both within the Middle East, and between the Middle East and the rest of the world. Technological proliferation has enabled those extremist aspects within Islam to influence a much wider audience than ever before. These radical aspects of Islam have existed, in many cases, for centuries, but were confined to narrow alleys in the less cosmopolitan neighborhoods in the cities in the Middle East. Now those same radical elements use technology to reach millions.

A recent Hamas television broadcast to Palestinian children encouraged them to envision themselves “killing Jews” when they grew up and became adults. Blair addresses this militancy:

The threat of this radical Islam is not abating. It is growing. It is spreading across the world. It is destabilizing communities and even nations. It is undermining the possibility of peaceful co-existence in an era of globalization. And in the face of this threat we seem curiously reluctant to acknowledge it and powerless to counter it effectively.

This technological proliferation also blurs international borders. An imam named Abu Ammaar Yasir Qadhi made a series of statements in 2013 and 2014, encouraging Muslims to engage in a type of jihad in which “the life and property” of a non-Muslim were to be taken without hesitation. This imam studied in Saudi Arabia. Where did he make these statements? In Egypt? In Libya? In Syria? No, in Memphis, Tennessee.

For the most part, a very common sentiment is that the region may be important but it is ungovernable and therefore impossible and therefore we should let it look after itself.

Blair points out that it is tempting to abandon the Middle East as hopeless. Whether a mideast country suffers under a hardline Islamic government, or whether it suffers under a more secular dictatorship, it seems that this region of the world is doomed by its cultural and social structures to be dominated by tyrants. But, Blair warns, if we abandon the Middle East, it will continue to be an incubator for radical Islamic terrorism, which it will export to the rest of the world.

History offers reasons for hoping that a less violent and less tyrannical form of government can be found for at least some of the countries in the Middle East. The British Protectorate in Egypt, the British Mandate for Mesopotamia (Iraq), and the French Mandate for Syria and Lebanon are examples of a better pattern for governing in the region.

But governing the Middle East is only part of the puzzle. Solving the problem of Islam's influence on geopolitics is another part. As long as the establishment of a caliphate remains a concrete goal, and as long as jihad remains a specified means to achieve that goal, the Middle East will continue to export violence. Blair says:

It is in the Middle East that the future of Islam will be decided. By this I mean the future of its relationship with politics. This is controversial because the world of politics is uncomfortable talking about religion; because some will say that really the problems are not religious but political; and even because – it is true – that the largest Muslim populations are to be found outside the region not inside it.

The vocabulary of mideast demography demands nuanced attention. There is a significant difference between Islamic and Islamist. The former is a general adjective, the latter is a violent political ideology. Islamofascism and Islamism are roughly synonymous. People, places, things, ideas, and events properly labeled Islamic can be, and often are, moderate and peaceful. Those which are Islamist are militant and aggressive. Blair explains:

one of the frustrating things about this debate is the inadequacy of the terminology and the tendency for any short hand to be capable of misinterpretation, so that you can appear to elide those who support the Islamist ideology with all Muslims.

While some of the largest concentrations of Muslims are located outside the Middle East - in places like India and Indonesia and Dearborn, Michigan - the ideological center of Islam remains in the Middle East. Physically, Muslims still face Mecca from any point on the globe when they pray. For this reason, Blair says, the Middle East is the key to solving the Muslim problem, even if huge numbers of Muslims live elsewhere.

The reason this matters so much is that this ideology is exported around the world. The Middle East is still the epicenter of thought and theology in Islam.

Those outside the Middle East have long spoken of, and hoped for, significant evidence of moderate Islam. To be clear: moderate Muslims exist. In the Middle East, they are scattered from the highest levels of Saudi royalty to the most humble of the poor, with a few intellectuals in between. But in the Middle East, their numbers are not enough to influence the general direction of Islam, and they do not occupy sufficient positions of influence: even Saudi royals must acknowledge the influence of radical Islamic clerics.

Outside of the Middle East, elsewhere in the world, there are pockets of moderate Muslims. In North America, they are largely middle-class, middle-age, college-educated professionals living in suburbs in the Midwest. Again, however, they do not control the overall direction taken by formally organized Islam, or by informally shaped Islamic culture. As Blair notes, many Muslims

who are probably perfectly content to live and let live, in the same way that nowadays most Catholics and Protestants do, are caught in a vicious and often literal crossfire between competing exclusivist views of the ‘true’ Islam. Where the two views align, whatever their mutual antagonism, is in the belief that those who think differently are the ‘enemy’ either within or without.

Jihadist Muslims whose clear goal is the establishment of a caliphate have several powerful instruments at hand: funding, technological proliferation, their sheet numbers, and their ability to intimidate others into silence. In January 2014, in England, an Islamist named Abu Waleed gave a speech in which he suggested the organized segregation of, and discrimination against, “infidels” in his hoped-for caliphate. He would require non-Muslims to wear marked and demeaning clothing and shave their heads.

The fact that this Muslim voiced such ideas is, by itself, not cause for concern. There will always be someone somewhere voicing odd ideas - that is freedom of speech. But there is cause for concern in the fact that his speaking is funded, and proliferates with technology. He no longer represents only himself as a odd individual with bizarre ideas. He is the voice of a movement - and merely one of many such voices. Militant Islam's voice is loud. Moderate Islam is numerically small, and does not command funding and electronic media. Blair argues that militant Islam is more than merely bigoted or chauvinistic - it is dangerous:

For the last 40/50 years, there has been a steady stream of funding, proselytizing, organizing and promulgating coming out of the Middle East, pushing views of religion that are narrow minded and dangerous. Unfortunately we seem blind to the enormous global impact such teaching has had and is having.

Ibrahim Hooper is a public spokesman for CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Hooper has endorsed and promoted books written by Muhammad Asad, books which state that it is the right of a married Muslim husband to beat his wife. Hooper has likewise publicized a book by Jamal Badawi which endorses domestic violence against women, and a book by Paul Findley which explains polygamy as within the rights of a Muslim man.

Given the nature of such Islamist thought, and famous examples like the “Girl in the Blue Bra” who was publicly beaten in Cairo in December 2011, Muslims in the Middle East may attempt to throw off secular tyrants only to find themselves oppressed by Islamist tyrants - this phenomenon was expressed as the 'Arab Spring' turning into the Arab Winter. Blair phrases it thus:

Within the Middle East itself, the result has been horrible, with people often facing a choice between authoritarian Government that is at least religiously tolerant; and the risk that in throwing off the Government they don't like, they end up with a religiously intolerant quasi-theocracy.

In concrete and specific terms, when a shipment of arms, originally bound for the forces of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya, were diverted to anti-Gadhafi groups including al-Qaida elements, the U.S. Department of State allowed the diversion, hoping to topple the secular dictator. Gadhafi was indeed toppled, but into the ensuing power vacuum stepped the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaida, who used those arms to attack and kill U.S. diplomats in Benghazi in September 2012.

Take a step back and analyse the world today: with the possible exception of Latin America (leaving aside Hezbollah in the tri-border area in South America), there is not a region of the world not adversely affected by Islamism and the ideology is growing. The problems of the Mid East and North Africa are obvious. But look at the terror being inflicted in countries – Nigeria, Mali, Central African Republic, Chad and many others – across Sub Saharan Africa.

The Middle East is hamstrung by its extremists. While Islamists leverage technological proliferation, they do not encourage invention or entrepreneurship. The Middle East lags behind other areas of the world in terms of number of technological patents filed and new technology developed and brought to market. They lag in terms of technical education. Those who do receive a technological education often emigrate, if they can, causing a "brain-drain" as talent leaves that part of the world.

Extremism is possibly the single biggest threat to their ability to overcome the massive challenges of development today.

It would be a mistake to take a strictly Euro-American view of concerns about the Middle East. A more global perspective reveals the pattern. Islamist terrorists killed over 350 people, mostly children, at the Russian school in Beslan in 2004. Bali experienced terrorist bombings in 2002 and 2005; Islamist groups claimed responsibility. China has experienced violence at the hands of radical Muslims. Dozens and scores of further examples can be easily found.

In Central Asia, terrorist attacks are regular occurrences in Russia, whose Muslim population is now over 15%, and radical influences are stretching across the whole of the central part of Northern Asia, reaching even the Western province of Xinjiang in China.

To repeat the obvious truisms, not all Muslims are Arabs, and not all Arabs are Muslims. Yet CAIR persists in acting and speaking as if 'Muslim' and 'Arab' are synonyms. In the Middle East, there are large non-Muslim populations of Palestinians, Syrians, Iranians, Iraqis, Egyptians, and others. In North America, where Michigan has the highest concentration of Arab Americans in any U.S. state according to the Arab American Institute, more than half of the state's Arabs identify as non-Muslim.

While some non-Muslims have risen to prominence in the Middle East, Islam is still a decisive factor in the region's culture, society, and geo-politics.

Islamic unrest had overshadowed both Europe and the British Isles since 2000. The Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered by Mohammed Bouyeri in 2004; the murder was indisputably motivated by Islamofascist ideology, and Bouyeri was indisputably identified as a member of an Islamist terror cell. The publication of a few cartoons was taken as a pretext for rioting and violence; the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten was the victim of an exaggerated and disproportionate response. Germany, France, and England have similarly seen Islamic elements which use any occasion as a pretext for outbursts, and which finally begin instigating violence without even bothering to find any alleged instigating event as a flimsy excuse for their rioting.

The Muslim population in Europe is now over 40m and growing. The Muslim Brotherhood and other organizations are increasingly active and they operate without much investigation or constraint. Recent controversy over schools in Birmingham (and similar allegations in France) show heightened levels of concern about Islamist penetration of our own societies.

The irony, of course, is that Europe, and especially Britain, fostered the notions of freedom, the very notions which these Islamic elements are exploiting in their quest to end such freedom. In short, the Islamofascists are using the dynamics of free societies to bring an end to free societies.

The long list of incidents, of which only a few are mentioned here as examples - Nidal Malik Hasan killing unarmed victims in Fort Hood; Lee Boyd Malvo and John Allen Muhammad killing civilians in the Washington area; Hesham Mohamed Hadayet killing people in the Los Angeles airport in 2002; the Boston Marathon bombings of 2013 - are linked by Islamist ideology. Islam is the lens through which one sees and understands the unifying thread behind these killings. Yet, as Tony Blair points out, there exists

the absolutely rooted desire on the part of Western commentators to analyze these issues as disparate rather than united by common elements. They go to extraordinary lengths to say why, in every individual case, there are multiple reasons for understanding that this is not really about Islam, it is not really about religion; there are local or historic reasons which explain what is happening. There is a wish to eliminate the obvious common factor in a way that is almost willful. Now of course as I have said, there is always a context that is unique to each situation. There will naturally be a host of local factors that play a part in creating the issue. But it is bizarre to ignore the fact the principal actors in all situations, express themselves through the medium of religious identity or that in ideological terms, there is a powerful unifying factor based on a particular world view of religion and its place in politics and society.

Among the many factors which complicate any attempt to understand the role of Islam in the Middle East are the question of nomenclature and the question of categories.

Tony Blair already alluded, above, to the complexities of defining the words we use to discuss this region and its belief systems. Consider this bewildering set of words: Islam, Islamic, Islamist, Islamofascist. Try as we might to define them carefully and precisely, different people will still understand them in different ways. The same is true for the word 'Muslim' and its plural form.

One way to attempt more nuance is to avoid these words altogether, or to use these words with refining adjectives. This requires the use of cumbersome circumlocutions, but may achieve a bit more clarity.

One might, perhaps, therefore speak on the one hand of 'moderate, peaceful, nominal, cultural' Muslims - i.e., those whose connection with Islam consists largely of some external observances, holidays, foods, occasional or ceremonial participations and attendance, framed and conditioned by the culture of a time and of a place.

On the other hand, one could speak of 'orthodox, literal' Muslims, who adhere to the deeper conceptual structure of Islam itself, of the prophet Muhammad, and of the texts - Qur'an, Hadith, Sunnah, Sira, etc. To those, individual subdivisions within Islam would add their own texts, peculiar to Wahabi, Sufi, Sunni, Shiite, etc.

By clarifying vocabulary, we can clarify thought. While sorting through the complex social and political dynamics of the Middle East, Tony Blair notes, we cannot artificially isolate one phenomenon from another; many of them are closely connected:

There is a deep desire to separate the political ideology represented by groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood from the actions of extremists including acts of terrorism. This stems from a completely laudable sense that we must always distinguish between those who violate the law and those we simply disagree with.

But laudable though the motives are, which lead us to this distinction, if we're not careful, they also blind us to the fact that the ideology itself is nonetheless dangerous and corrosive; and cannot and should not be treated as a conventional political debate between two opposing views of how society should be governed.

We cannot simply dismiss the violent elements and hope to conduct constructive dialogue with the less radical elements. The former is an organic outgrowth of the latter. Blair is telling us that this is a different type of discussion. A conversation about culture and politics in the Middle East is not like a conversation about tariff rates between Canada and Brazil, or a conversation about setting bus fares on a city-owned transit system.

The central issues of the Middle East are not "mere" politics to be settled by negotiation or compromise, nor are they dispassionate discussions about one's worldview and one's conception of human nature. What an outsider may fail to perceive about the Middle East is that factions not engaged in violence are still nonetheless Islamist in the sense that they have as a concrete goal the establishment of a caliphate. That goal, held in common with other groups which are violent, blurs the lines which the outsider may wish to draw between peaceful and jihadist elements. Blair put it this way:

But their overall ideology is one which inevitably creates the soil in which such extremism can take root. In many cases, it is clear that they regard themselves as part of a spectrum, with a difference of view as to how to achieve the goals of Islamism, not a difference as to what those goals are; and in certain cases, they will support the use of violence.

Terminology is one obstacle to understanding Islam in the Middle East; as mentioned above, another obstacle is what a philosopher might call a "category mistake" - as embodied in the organization called the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

First, a linguistic examination of the name of this group reveals a confusion of national and religious issues. The term "American-Islamic Relations" is odd, in this way: normally, such a phrase would include nationalities - "American-French Relations" or "Canadian-Brazilian Relations" or "Sino-Soviet Relations" or "Swedish-Vietnamese Relations" etc.

Or, possibly, such a phrase would name two religions: "Hindu-Christian Relations" or "Jewish-Buddhist Relations" or "Sikh-Mormon Relations" etc.

But CAIR has, in the words of the old proverb, mixed apples and oranges. Parallel coinages revealed the oddity: imagine a "Council on Swedish-Hindu Relations" or a "Council on Brazilian-Sikh Relations" or a "Council on Mexican-Buddhist Relations" etc.

The name of CAIR, is, then, a malformed formula. Subsequently, its activities are an attempt to effectuate an oxymoron. By way of analogy, image a "Council on Square Circles" or a "Council on Four-Sided Triangles."

In addition to this category mistake, which renders the name of CAIR to be senseless or nonsense, there is a second set of categories involved: sincere and insincere.

Taking CAIR's published statements prima facie, one might deduce from them a certain set of goals or values; looking, however, at the organization's funding patterns and ties to other organizations, a different set of goals or values would be revealed. What are those goals? Tony Blair explains:

The ultimate goal is not a society which someone else can change after winning an election. It is a society of a fixed polity, governed by religious doctrines that are not changeable but which are, of their essence, unchangeable.

Because the West is so completely unfamiliar with such an ideology – though actually the experience of revolutionary communism or fascism should resonate with older generations – we can't really see the danger properly. We feel almost that if we identify it in these terms, we're being anti-Muslim, a sentiment on which the Islamists cleverly play.

Certainly, the fair-mindedness of Western Civilization demands that we respect the belief systems of other cultures. The spiritual tradition of European culture demands that we place "the best possible construction" on the actions of others. But this desire to honor other societies can be exploited by those cynical enough to take advantage of it.

Right now in the Middle East, this is the battle being waged. Of course in each country, it arises in a different form. But in each case, take out the extremist views around religion, and each conflict or challenge becomes infinitely more manageable. This is where, even though at one level the ideology coming out of Shia Iran and that of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood may seem to be different, in reality they amount to the same thing with the same effect – the holding back of the proper political, social and economic advance of the country.

What is the rest of the world to do? From China to Brazil, from Canada to Zimbabwe, almost every nation on earth will be impacted, for good or for ill, by the direction which the Middle East takes. Tony Blair explains what it means for the collected countries of the world to make a meaningful contribution to the future of the Middle East:

It means supporting the principles of religious freedom and open, rule-based economies. It means helping those countries whose people wish to embrace those principles to achieve them. Where there has been revolution, we should be on the side of those who support those principles and opposed to those who would thwart them.

A contradiction lies beneath the surface of the world's policies toward the Middle East: on the one hand, we work to defend ourselves from the military and terrorist threats emerging from that part of the world; on the other hand, we seek to be friendly and supportive to the governments and societies there. Yet those governments and societies are part of a larger system which supports the violent jihad from which we work to protect ourselves.

All over the world the challenge of defeating this ideology requires active and sustained engagement. Consider this absurdity: that we spend billions of $ on security arrangements and on defense to protect ourselves against the consequences of an ideology that is being advocated in the formal and informal school systems and in civic institutions of the very countries with whom we have intimate security and defense relationships. Some of those countries of course wish to escape from the grip of this ideology. But often it is hard for them to do so within their own political constraints. They need to have this issue out in the open where it then becomes harder for the promotion of this ideology to happen underneath the radar. In other words they need us to make this a core part of the international dialogue in order to force the necessary change within their own societies.

The human cost of Islamofascism is staggering: people are dying in large numbers; others are wounded or maimed, physically or psychologically; women live in a humiliating subjugation because of Islamist ideology; property is destroyed or confiscated; economic burdens ripple around the globe; millions live with peril of Islamic terrorism hovering overhead. A large amount of painful detail is available for those who care to inform themselves - especially about dehumanizing treatment inflicted upon women.

Add up the deaths around the world now – and even leave out the theatre of the Middle East – and the toll on human life is deplorable. In Nigeria recently and Pakistan alone thousands are now dying in religiously inspired conflict. And quite apart from the actual loss of life, there is the loss of life opportunities for parts of the population mired in backward thinking and reactionary attitudes especially towards girls.

Freedom by itself is not the answer to the problems of the Middle East. It is part of the answer, but merely instituting a voting process will not remove the dangers to the rest of the world, or provide dignity to the residents of the region. Freedom must be combined with understanding - a worldview which allows for civil debate, a worldview which values human life, a worldview which promotes personal liberty and political freedom, not for themselves, but because they emerge organically from a concept of the vocation of the humanity.

Freedom by itself is not the answer. The answer includes freedom seen as the innate property of humans, because every human life should be honored and seen as valuable, and freedom seen as the instrument by which humans can fulfill, not their own desires, but rather their function to honor and help each other.

Raoul Wallenberg - His Mind

In the 1940s, Raoul Wallenberg was one of the people inside Europe who worked to save Jews from the Nazis. Many courageous Germans risked their lives to help Jews to safety. But Wallenberg was different: he wasn't a German.

The Germans who formed an underground resistance movement to stop Hitler's genocide had obvious motives: they lived inside Germany and had direct access to information about secret plans for the Holocaust, and had direct opportunities to do something to stop it. Thousands of Jewish Germans and Jewish Poles were saved by men like Oskar Schindler, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Max Kolbe.

Raoul Wallenberg, however, wasn't a German, and didn't live in Germany. His decision to rescue Jews, a decision which cost him his life, is therefore significant. His "special mission" to Budapest saved thousands of Jewish Hungarians. The President of the United States remarked about Wallenberg:

He came from a prominent family, but he chose to help the most vulnerable. He was a Lutheran, and yet he risked his life to save Jews. “I will never be able to go back to Stockholm,” he said, “without knowing inside myself I’d done all a man could do to save as many Jews as possible.”

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that

It is important to recall not just the Holocaust's horrors, but also its heroes: bearers of witness like Jan Karski; rescuers like Wallenberg and Schindler; writers like Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel; and resistors like the Danes and the righteous of many nations who hid and saved many thousands of their Jewish neighbors.

Who was this Swedish Lutheran, who studied in United States, and wound up in Hungary? His development included spending time at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He traveled extensively in Africa. He also traveled in Israel, and after a stay near the Sea of Galilee, he described his experiences in a letter:

The next morning we went swimming in the lake, which is situated a couple of hundred feet below sea level and is the one on which Jesus walked.

Elsewhere in Israel, he wrote about how he spent his reflective time:

Sundays, I usually take a walk up Mount Carmel (where the Carmelite fathers originated) and admire the view.

These travel experiences gave him a global perspective, and his later activities in saving the lives of others takes on a special significance in light of his time spent in Israel.

The details of Wallenberg's efforts, which saved thousands of Jews, have been recorded in detail; great mystery, however, surrounds his final disappearance and death, presumably at the hands of Soviet intelligence officers. What is clear, however, is that his character was a spiritual and powerful one, motivating and enabling him to undertake his special mission to Budapest.

Hitler's Economics

To understand the economic program of the Nazi Party, one must remember the meaning of the word "Nazi" - it was an abbreviation for the long official name of the party, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, translated as the National-Socialist German Workers Party, and also abbreviated NSDAP. The words "socialist" and "worker" in the party's name give hints as to its economic policies.

The Nazi Party generally embraced the notions of regulation, taxation, and income redistribution. Further, it "nationalized" various businesses, meaning that it made some companies the property of the government, allowing ordinary people no influence over such businesses. Thus Nazi economic policy intersected with its mission to have total control over society.

Historian Marshall Dill notes that the Nazis proceeded in two ways. Indirectly, by ensuring that government officials and party leaders were appointed to the boards of directors of major companies, they took control of companies. Directly, the Nazis instructed the government to confiscate and simply assume ownership of some businesses. Marshall Dill writes:

It is instructive to note the infiltration of boards of directors by deserving Nazis: government officials, Gauleiter, etc. The network of interlocking directorates was impressive. On the other hand, the government by no means refused to establish direct ownership and control of industry.

The Nazis, then, were socialists in the sense that they believed that the government should intervene in the marketplace and should own the means of production. The Nazis were clearly opposed to a free market. Marshall Dill continues:

The principle example of direct government participation in industry was the huge Hermann Goering combine, which by the end of its career managed operations ranging from steel mills to the control of canal-boat shipping.

Not only in terms of industrial production, but also in terms of employment, the Nazis wanted the government, and not the decisions of free individuals, to control the economy. Historian William Duiker writes:

Most dramatic were the mass demonstrations and spectacles employed to integrate the German nation into a collective fellowship and to mobilize it as an instrument for Hitler's policies. In the economic sphere, the Nazis pursued the use of public works projects and "pump-priming" grants.

Thus an ever-increasing percentage of Germans became employees of the state, thereby reducing the ability of the free individual to impact the economy. Looking at the rise of Hitler's government and how it took power, and looking at that process from an economic perspective, Friedrich Hayek writes:

The support which brought these ideas to power came precisely from the socialist camp. It was certainly not through the bourgeoisie, but rather through the absence of a strong bourgeoisie, that they were helped to power.

Although the Nazis came to power in 1933, the social and economic forces which gave them control over the Germans began much earlier. Hayek writes that

The doctrines which had guided the ruling elements in Germany for the past generation were not opposed to the socialism in Marxism.

The Nazis opposed Marxism because of "its internationalism" which, the Nazis saw, proved an obstacle to the concrete implementation of certain aspects of socialism. Internationalism reduced the ability of the Nazi government to regulate, to tax, and to eventually own businesses - all of which reduced the power of any free individual to act independently in the economy. The Nazis rejected these elements of Marxism: its internationalism and its democracy. The Nazis saw that these elements were inconsistent with socialism. In this way, the Nazis were developing a form of socialism which was more consistent than Marxism, as Hayek writes, "and as it became increasingly clear that it was just these elements which formed obstacles to the realization of socialism, the socialists" became willing to abandon the program of democracy and internationalism. "It was the union of anticapitalist forces," the socialists and others who opposed free markets and who opposed democracy, "which drove out from Germany everything that was" oriented toward liberty.

In short, the Nazis discovered that a free market and the right to own private property were analogues to political freedom and to free speech. In order to completely control society, which was Naziism's goal as a totalitarian movement, the government had to intervene in the economy, limit the individual's decision-making ability, tax, regulate, and otherwise reduce the freedom and influence of the individual, culminating in government-owned or government-operated industries. Hayek continues:

The connection between socialism and nationalism in Germany was close from the beginning. It is significant that the most important ancestors of National Socialism - Fichte, Rodbertus, and Lasalle - are at the same time acknowledged fathers of socialism.

While the Marxist version of socialism was theoretically internationalist, in the concrete development of socialism, especially after 1914, nationalism was wedded to socialism. In this way, Hitler and the Nazis understood how to make a more effect form of socialism, which would allow them to control spheres of public and private life, and enslave the Germans.

Hitler's economic policies were part of his larger plan to bind millions of Germans who, having lost their freedom to the Nazi government, would be forced to carry out his visions of war, conquest, and genocide.

Ancient Weather, Modern Concerns

The earth's climate is always changing. A few decades with warmer-than-normal temperatures follow a few decades with cooler-than-normal temperatures. Indeed, the change is so constant that it becomes a statistical challenge to determine what ‘normal’ might mean in this context.

Should we take the average temperature of the last 500 years as normal? Or of the 500 years prior to that? How does the 500 years between 1450 and 1950 compare to the 500 years between 1200 and 1700? And which of them might be “normal”? The lack of direct temperature measurements complicates the question further. Prior to a century or two ago, few direct observations of climate were recorded. Even in the last century, large parts of the earth's surface were unmeasured in terms of daily temperatures.

This is true of rainfall as well: it is constantly changing on a micro and a macro scale, over decades and centuries, and observational data are scarce for most regions prior to the last few years.

A wealth of questions and dearth of data: one political question looms over all - could any of this climate change be caused by human activity? There are indeed quite a few policymakers who believe that climatic instability is anthropogenic. How can this claim be verified?

Those who assert that the planet's climate is being disrupted usually assert that this is the result of industrialization. Large-scale use of fossil fuels, and the production of other alleged agents of climate change, began around 1750. The earliest working steam engines date to the late 1600's, and people had burned wood, coal, peat, and charcoal for centuries before that. But the mid-1700's saw an acceleration of industrialization, and if human activity can influence the climate, then this would be the starting date.

One may formulate the question this way: do we see changes in the earth's climate after 1750 which are unlike changes and patterns which occurred prior to that date? If so, then it is at least possible that some climate change is anthropogenic. Jack Goldstone, commenting on research published by Geoffrey Parker, notes that scholarship uses

the geological, biological, and recorded data on regional and global temperatures to show that the “Little Ice Age” of the 17th century was not a mere figure of speech or anachronistic exaggeration; it was in fact an age of dramatically lower temperatures and the advance of ice and glaciers across the world: at one point even the Bosporus froze solid, creating a land bridge from Europe to the Middle East that had not existed for millennia.

Thus documented is a temperature swing, in this case a cooling, greater in magnitude and duration than anything observed after 1750. The early 1600's were the center of this "Little Ice Age," which spanned, according to scholar J.R. McNeill, the years from 1250 to 1850. Nobody is likely to assert that a climate change starting in 1250 was caused by human activity.

The causes and variables in the climate are so many, and their interrelationships so complex, that mathematical and computerized models are still insufficient to reflect them. Current computational models, as complex as they may be, are still oversimplified relative to the actual climate, and do not produce accurate results.

Of the many factors in this complicated climate, Goldstone mentions solar and volcanic activity. He writes that Parker's scholarship

attributes the climate change to both a decline in solar radiation (indicated by a sustained period of low or absent sunspot activity known as the “Maunder minimum” from 1645 to 1710) and to clusters of major volcanic eruptions (in 1600-1609, 1641-1647, 1676-1679, and 1709-1710) whose sulfur and ash further reduced the solar radiation reaching the lower atmosphere. This combination triggered several series of exceptionally cold years in succession, in 1600-1609, 1620-1627, 1641-1647, 1666-1680, and 1695-1699, as measured by severe low summer temperatures in the northern hemisphere.

The example above cites a significant and enduring cold period. Much of the current concerns about climate contemplate, however, the hypothesis of a warming trend. Immediately prior to the “Little Ice Age” was a period of several centuries of atypically warm weather. Here is an instance of “global warming” which occurred at a time which prevents it from being labeled as anthropogenic in any sense. Under the wordy title Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC writes:

Continental-scale surface temperature reconstructions show, with high confidence, multi-decadal periods during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (year 950 to 1250) that were in some regions as warm as in the late 20th century.

Dramatic changes in temperature and rainfall are documented, then, at points in time prior to any possible effects of large-scale industrialization. If current climate trends have yet to reach either the magnitude or the duration of these previous naturally-occurring climate disruptions, then there is little reason to hypothesize that such trends are anthropogenic.