By Olivia Pierson
[First published on Insight @The BFD 13/9/19]

Recently-fired National Security Advisor John Bolton never liked being referred to as a neoconservative, despite holding many positions which are typical of that ideology. He was an advocate for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, and has called for regime change in both Syria and Iran.  

Bolton made it known that he would support pre-emptive bombing strikes on North Korea’s nuclear facilities. He invoked the Monroe Doctrine regarding regime change in Venezuela, since that is a country existing within the same hemisphere as the United States, and he has said that the only way to deal with Vladimir Putin “is to cause him real pain.” 

It’s hard not to like the guy and it’s easy to see why Bolton has a reputation for being a super-hawk among all the hawks.

Alas, he has now clashed with President Trump one time too many on some major foreign policy issues, the result being: “John Bolton, you’re fired!”

Bolton wholly supported the U.S invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq after 9.11, but was not a fan of the Bush-styled, altruistic, nation-building commitments which followed. 

About the war in Iraq, Bolton said years later that the only mistake Bush made was, “not handing the Iraqis a copy of the Federalist Papers and saying ‘good luck.’”  Though he thought the U.S stayed too long in Iraq before transferring authority back over to the Iraqis, Bolton agreed with the Bush Doctrine of unilateral pre-emptive strikes in order to protect U.S interests and deter foreign enemies.

More recently, Bolton thought President Trump was far too diplomatically friendly with Kim Jong-un of North Korea.  Before he was appointed as National Security Advisor, Bolton wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal making the case for pre-emptive strikes on North Korea before they acquire a nuclear arsenal which could be launched into American cities. 

In April 2018, Bolton said during an interview that Washington was looking at following the “Libya-model" for verification of North Korea’s nuclear sites.  Today President Trump has come out and said that those comments “set talks back with Kim Jong-un very badly” and Chairman Kim refused to have anything to do with Bolton after that. After all, what happened to Muammar Gaddafi (and Saddam Hussein) is probably Kim’s greatest nightmare about the Americans.  

But the main issue which caused the highly publicised firing of Bolton is U.S troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and peace-talks with the Taliban.  

The topic is truly complicated, but here’s the guts:
 
Secretary Pompeo has already held nine gruelling rounds of talks in Doha, Qatar, to get to the point where President Trump invited Taliban leaders to Camp David, along with Afghan President, Ashraf Ghani.  

Trump and Pompeo believe that Bolton, who is extremely well connected to the press, had the story about the upcoming Taliban visit leaked out into media circulation through his aides.

Pompeo’s negotiator, U.S special envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, a former ambassador to Afghanistan, has worked on these negotiations for a year.  So far, peace-talks have been conducted separately between Khalilzad and the Taliban; and Khalilzad and President Ghani.  The enmity between the democratically elected Ghani and the brutal terror group is legendary - they cannot be in the same room together.  

The Taliban’s overt contempt for any peace process was just punctuated by another car-bomb exploding in Kabul, which killed yet another ten people including an American soldier.  The terror group gave Trump, Pompeo, Khalilzad, Bolton and Ghani the finger.

It’s been 18 years of war in Afghanistan, a U.S-led response to bin Laden’s lethal 9/11 attacks on Manhattan. There are still around 20,000 NATO troops inside Afghanistan, 14,000 of them from the U.S. The U.S want the troops withdrawn in stages over time as the Taliban agree to certain conditions including a massive reduction in violence.

The Taliban are trying to negotiate thousands of their fighters to be released from prisons, including GITMO, something Ghani will not agree to; something he should not agree to.

Ghani knows that if thousands of Taliban fighters were released from prisons, his government would risk being overthrown by the darkest forces imaginable, then it’s lights out again in Afghanistan.  

To complicate matters even further, there are those who say that Qatar is playing a very manipulative hand in America’s ongoing peace-talks with the Taliban, and that: 

Afghan officials are the first to sense that the sellout of the Kabul government is impending, and are scurrying to defect to the Taliban (in July alone there were 800 defections).

This is the quagmire that the Bush Doctrine - with its ideological commitment to ongoing nation building - and the Obama Doctrine (“strategic patience,” a.k.a doing nothing outside the status quo, got the U.S stuck-fast in).

The Trump Doctrine is “principled realism,” predicated on the over-arching concept of America First.  What does principled realism actually mean?  Trump spelled it out, as he often does, in his Riyadh speech in 2017, where he described this foreign policy guideline as, “principled realism, rooted in our values, shared interests, and common sense.” 

"Our friends will never question our support and our enemies will never doubt our determination. Our partnerships will advance security through stability, not through radical disruption. We will make decisions based on real world outcomes, not inflexible ideology. We will be guided by the lessons of experience, not the confines of rigid thinking. And wherever possible, we will seek gradual reforms, not sudden intervention. We must seek partners, not perfection. And to make allies of all who share our goals."

The fact that the Taliban have not been totally obliterated in Afghanistan after 18 years of war speaks to something very ominous about how this fight has been conducted.  Perhaps in the name of poetic justice they should be made Pakistan’s problem in every sense, after all, the Taliban were generously aided in their rise and armed to the eye-teeth by assassinated Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto - and it was also Pakistan that, for all those long years while America hunted him, gave sanctuary to Osama bin-Laden in Abbottabad. Pakistan is obviously not on America’s side with anything, and never has been.  Let them put up with a burgeoning caliphate along their northern border - hell, they’re practically a caliphate themselves, with nukes.  

It’s hard to see how allowing American soldiers to die for the ignoble cause of propping up a frail and flimsy democracy, that has been handed to Kabul on a thin, beaten-silver plate, can be anything close to America First policy, let alone be principled realism taking note of “real world outcomes.”

Both Trump and Bolton know that if the U.S withdraws its troops from Afghanistan - even slowly but surely - the Taliban will unleash a bloodbath, as they’ve done before, as they always do; terrorists live for bloodbaths.

Yet, this is exactly what Pompeo and Khalilzad are busy trying to avert through applying the Trump Doctrine of “security through stability, not through radical disruption.”  One can only wish them lashings of luck, guts and wisdom, considering no other doctrine has worked to date in this place called Afghanistan; this well-known graveyard of empires. 

If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book "Western Values Defended: A Primer" ​​​​​​​​​​

By Olivia Pierson
[First published on Insight @ theBFD 5/9/19]

Each and every one of us must make it our personal business to fight for our own individual happiness as if our lives depend upon it, for they actually do.

Individual human rights mean something – our lives are our own responsibility.  Nobody else can, or should, be burdened by that personal responsibility which we owe to ourselves and others to shoulder.

We are each given one life to own, to control and to cultivate.

The ethics of altruism are quite ghastly and our whole welfare system hangs on them, also it seems, much of our social standing does too.

Altruism doesn’t mean doing nice things for others, as we all like to do from time to time. Altruism means dutifully self-sacrificing to others as a moral good.

One can only ask: if all human life is valuable, including our own, why is it so often considered noble to sacrifice our own happiness, resources, goals and desires for the sake of other people? 

I’m not making the case that one should never do such a thing, there are obviously many moments during parenting, for instance, where parents do put the needs of their children before their own needs out of necessity (time, sleep, finances etc), but considering that the welfare of our children is extremely high on the personal values list which adds to our happiness, that can hardly be said to be “a sacrifice.” Our children are an immensely high value to us and maintaining our personal values is rational self interest.  

If people wish to sacrifice themselves for others, then that of course is their personal choice – especially if others may be of value to them, by why is it considered noble?

One often hears it said during obituaries or other summations of a person’s life: “Such-and-such was a good person who never put themselves first, but always thought only of others.” 

Why is that action considered to be “good”?  Only thinking of the lives of others over and above the life that one has been given, may be a mark of chronic lack of self-esteem or abject servility – and that can hardly be said to be good. 

This brand of “goodness” seems to have come down to us from 2000 years of Christian ethics, where the ethos is: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lays down his life for his friends.”

Observe that it reads: for his friends – not any old Tom, Dick or Harry.

About the only contexts that I can think of where laying down one’s life for one’s friends may be a noble act is during war-time, or during an emergency where one saves the life of another (or others) but loses one’s own life in doing so.  But the ethics of emergencies are rare and often chaotic, and they present quite different points of principle than those we can live our normal daily lives by.

To develop this topic a little further, consider the profoundly moving, so-called self-sacrificial acts of the heroic fugitive Jean Valjean, the protagonist in Victor Hugo’s great novel Les Miserables.  Valjean promises the dying young mother, Fantine, a woman he barely knows, that so long as he draws breath he will protect her small, illegitimate daughter and “raise her to the light” in fatherly devotion, despite not being her father – and despite the personal turmoil of Valjean being relentlessly hunted.  

The true heroism of Valjean’s impossibly difficult quest lies in the motive that he feels responsible for Fantine losing her job in his factory, which pushed her into poverty and prostitution, hastening her untimely death. Valjean’s personal integrity demanded that he correct this wrong, deeming it a matter which his conscience just could not ignore.

Another example of the fictional Valjean’s nobleness of spirit, when news comes to him that the known fugitive ‘Jean Valjean’ has been taken into custody and is about to stand trial, Valjean is the only person in the world who knows the authorities are holding the wrong man. Again, his sense of personal integrity in service to his conscience propels him to the scene of the trial where he reveals his identity, rather than suffer an innocent man to receive punishment on his behalf.  Valjean’s internal quandary is: “If I speak, I am condemned.  If I stay silent, I am damned.”

Can it be said then, that Valjean is self-sacrificial?  It could, but it wouldn’t be fully accurate.  He is preserving the engine of his life – the integrity of his soul – which, since his conversion at the beginning of the story, became his highest personal value.
​
There are many terribly altruistic narratives at play during our time, designed to instil guilt in those who are well-off; those who are considered to be shamefully privileged; those who are “white.”

We’re told nothing less than that we must abandon our wicked white ways and sacrifice Western civilisation’s economic system on the altar of remorse:

“We all must also push for a different economic order, given the way that the twin forces of capitalism and colonisation have amplified the power of whiteness.” 
[One guilt-ridden, white, former Rhodes scholar pursuing a PHD at Oxford]

To which I say: No thank you, sir.  This white lady’s not for turning into a sacrificial animal to assuage your mawkish guilt.

The world is what each of us makes it.  Strong, joyful, just and free people remain its most potent inspirational force.  

Ayn Rand said it best in her novel Atlas Shrugged, where she exhorts readers to remember that strength of purpose and efficacy are essential to the happiness of a human being:

“In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of people be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved integrity. 

Do not lose your knowledge that our proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. 

Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it’s yours.”

So long as we count ourselves as valuable human beings, we should all live our lives acting as our own personal heroes towards the goal of attaining our happiness for the short time that we have upon this earth. The principle needs to be clear – live and let live; no sacrifice required.
​

If you enjoyed this article, please buy my book "Western Values Defended: A Primer" ​​​​​​​​​​

By Lindsay Perigo
[published with permission from solopassion.com]

All right, 2019 isn't over yet, but nothing will beat this anywhere in the world: the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra's Beethoven Festival, featuring all nine symphonies by The Master. It ended in Wellington last Saturday. An orgy of joy. No contest.

Of course, the Ode to Joy, with the added attraction of vocal soloists and chorus, was the highlight—apart from all the others. Seven, Five, Three and One might have taken the cake—except that Two, Four, Six (especially) and Eight took it as well. These were four nights of epic heroism and grandeur as the great Edo de Waart soared through some of the most sublime music ever written. The Band responded with exquisite precision and passion. "The total passion for the total height" writ large. The audiences responded with clamorous standing ovations.
​ 
Harold C. Schonberg wrote of Beethoven:

He was of a special breed and he knew it. He also knew he was writing for eternity. And he had what poor Mozart lacked—a powerful personality that awed all who came in contact with him. "Never have I met an artist of such spiritual concentration and intensity," Goethe wrote, "such vitality and great-heartedness. I can well understand how hard he must find it to adapt to the world and its ways." Little did Goethe understand Beethoven. With Beethoven it was not a matter of adapting himself to the world and its ways. As with Wagner later on, it was a matter of the world adapting its ways to him. With this high-voltage personality, coupled to an equally high-voltage order of genius, Beethoven was able to dictate to life on his own terms in almost everything except his tragic deafness.

But life was having a lot to say as well. In her excellent notes for the Festival's printed programme, Feby Idrus observes:

Change is not created in a vacuum, and Beethoven's rupture of the conventional symphony occurred during a time of global upheaval. The year was 1801. The Age of Enlightenment had dawned, preaching values of rationality, freedom, and rejecting established institutions, even literally, as the overthrown French monarchy learned in the Revolution.America had followed suit, violently throwing off the British colonising yoke in its own Revolution. Science was gaining ground over irrational religious dogma; the untitled middle classes were growing. Eight years earlier, Beethoven had moved from Bonn to his new home, Vienna—far away from his abusive, alcoholic father. The past was being left behind and the world was rushing towards a completely new future.

Musically, that future was Romanticism. Bigger orchestras with more instruments, more daring harmonies and rhythms, much more personal expression and individualism, virtuoso soloists, conductors as stars (and tyrants!), the unleashing of emotion ... and most of all, melodies! Tunes, tunes, tunes! Beethoven was part of and instrumental in all of that, especially from the Eroica Symphony on, yet it's hard to classify him as a Romantic only. Romanticism was indeed the pinnacle of Western Music, but Beethoven transcended even that. It's not just a complimentary cliche but a statement of fact to say that his music was quite simply in a class of its own.

If there were a marginal quibble to be had with respect to the grand finale last Saturday night it would probably be to do with the placement of the soloists between the choir and The Band. The balance may have been fine in the live radio broadcast but in the hall the soloists were swamped whenever the full force of The Band and the formidable Voices New Zealand was unleashed. Would Stage Front have been better? Regardless, soprano Sabina Cvilak managed to stand out in the general melee.

As noted, the Ode to Joy was the logical and perfect climax to what were four evenings of unadulterated joy, with the unimpeachably vital and great-hearted Edo de Waart as our joy-master. It is great news that he'll be staying on as Conductor Laureate next year and beyond.
 
In one of the comments on the performance of the Pastoral linked to below, a YouTuber writes:

We don't know what the future holds but for certain Beethoven will be played for as long as human civilisation lasts. He is a high point of human creativity and a genius with no equal.

With the aforementioned Enlightenment values of rationality, freedom and the pursuit of joy under relentless assault, we should savour memories of this Beethoven Fest as being very probably the last time anything like it will ever happen in New Zealand. The joyless barbarians are already well within the gates, here and elsewhere. But be assured that when civilisation falls, someone somewhere will indeed be playing some Beethoven, in a spirit of defiance the Emperor Ludwig would share and applaud.

In the meantime, one can savour The Band this Friday at the Fowler Centre (and over the following week in Auckland, Christchurch and Dunedin) as they offer up this mouth-watering programme:

Asher Fisch Conductor
Louis Lortie Piano
Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18
Richard Strauss Tod und Verklärung, Op. 24 (Death and Transfiguration)
Wagner Overture to Tannhäuser, WWV 70

https://www.nzso.co.nz/concert...