Rogue regimes; Anti-Americanism

Prince Otto von Bismarck once said: “We live in a wondrous time in which the strong is weak because of his moral scruples and the weak grows strong because of his audacity.”

What would he say today looking upon a nightmare called North Korea which Jasper Becker’s RogueRegime:KimIlandtheLoomingThreatofNorthKorea (Oxford, $27, 288 pages) shows has been ruled for half a century by paranoia and megalomania? In the pre-nuclear age North Korea with a population of some 21 million would be regarded as a minor blip in a world of socio-economic powers with great armories. The Bomb has changed all that. Yet even without The Bomb a lone assassin in Sarajevo armed with a revolver helped start the Great War of 1914.

Jasper Becker, a veteran foreign correspondent has written a book which tells as much as can be known about this hidden Communist dictatorship. The key to North Korea, he says, is in the hands of Communist China.

• • •

ThankYou,PresidentBush: ReflectionsontheWaronTerrorism,DefenseoftheFamilyandRevivaloftheEconomy (World Ahead, $24.99, 370 pages) is a collection of essays edited by Anan Verjee and Rod D. Martin, dedicated to President George W. Bush and written by an all-star cast including such policy-making leaders like George Shultz, Bill Bennett, Gov. Jeb Bush, John Ashcroft and Phyllis Schlafly.

It is not an ad hominem attack book a la Michael Moore. The writers are all unapologetic admirers of the president. One of the most interesting chapters deals with the Bush tax cuts which ignited an economic boom despite corporate scandals and a stock market crash which turned out to be a minor blip on the Wall Street radar.

• • •

This history, Bat Ye’Or’s TheEuro-ArabAxis (Farleigh Dickinson, $23.95, 384 pages) is guaranteed to disturb a reader who hasn’t yet discerned, as has the author, Europe’s evolution “from a Judeo-Christian civilization with important post-Enlightenment secular elements, into a post Judeo-Christian civilization that is subservient to the ideology of jihad and the Islamic powers that propagate it. The villain in this dramatic expose of Judeophobia is France, she writes. Under Arab pressure, the European Union has “willingly made Israel hostage to its own Arab policy and its security.”

Eurabia, a noun the author has coined, designates a new entity superimposed on Europe by powerful governmental lobbies driven by a virulent anti-Americanism. This volume should be must reading by Washington policy-makers.

• • •

Anti-Americanism is not likely to disappear in the near future for a number of reasons including the rise of Arab-Islamic fundamentalism, says Paul Hollander, editor of UnderstandingAnti-Americanism:ItsOriginsandImpactatHomeandAbroad (Ivan R. Dee, $28.95, 384 pages, paper). Another reason is that anti-Americanism has historical roots that go back a few centuries. In other words, anti-Americanism is not some recent arrival.

Distinguished essayists in this reader include Anthony Daniels on French anti-Americanism, Mark Falcoff on Cuban anti-Americanism “Historical, Popular, and Official,” Roger Kimball on “Anti-AmericanismThen and Now,” Cathy Young on “The Feminist Hostility Toward American Society,” Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes on “The Rejection of American Society by the Communist Left” and Adam Garfinkle on the peace movement and the adversary culture. The concluding essays are Sandra Stotsky’s “Moral Equivalence in Education: The Use of the Holocaust in Discrediting American Society” and “Anti-Americanism and Popular Culture” by Bruce S. Thornton.

Arnold Beichman, a Hoover Institution research fellow, is a columnist for the Washington Times. His updated biography “Herman Wouk, the Novelist as Social Historian,” has just been published.

Story Continues →