Britain and America

The Gospel According to Jeffrey Sachs

Joseph Loconte is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a commentator on religion for National Public Radio.  In this post he reviews Jeffrey Sachs' Reith Lectures.

To those of a certain temper of mind, a hope took hold in the years after the Great War that the “world community” was maturing toward a new stage of political and economic cooperation—that of socialism. There seemed to be lots of theorists around who nurtured this notion and no shortage of politicians who swooned under its sway. British Labour MP John Strachey caputured the mood:

“It is clear that man will in the end tire of the inconvenient idiosyncrasies of loyalty and will wish to pool the cultural heritage of the human race into a world synthesis.”

Since then, we’ve seen the “inconvenient idiosyncrasies” of the Third Reich, the Soviet Gulag, the Cultural Revolution, the killing fields of Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and, of course, the rise of Islamic jihad. So much for the world synthesis: Man has not yet grown tired of his irrational loyalties, but the dream that men and nations will do so—and will do so with dispatch—remains too attractive to let die.

Economist Jeffrey Sachs, delivering the BBC’s prestigious 2007 Reith Lectures, is keeping hope alive. His gospel is a familiar message of global cooperation—rich nations delivering money and resources to developing countries—that can defeat poverty in almost no time flat. We need merely to shed our petty rivalries and rearrange our spending priorities. “We can end poverty, at home and abroad, with the technologies and tools that we have, if we trust each other sufficiently, at home and abroad,” he predicts. “The more people understand the real choices the real consequences and the real power that we have, with phenomenal technologies available, the more likely it is that we make the right choices.”

Mr. Sachs’s special burden, a supremely humane one, is to end deprivation on the African continent. He identifies four obstacles:

1. low food production
2. disease
3. deficient infrastructure and
4. overpopulation.

All of these problems, he claims, are “solvable with proven and relatively low-cost technologies.” Each of his lectures, in fact, emphasizes the role of science, technology and economic management in overcoming poverty on a global scale. Each is designed to challenge the conscience of the West in its relationship to the developing world.

Joseph Loconte: A Media Empire At War With Itself

Joseph Loconte is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a commentator on religion for National Public Radio.

Listeners to the BBC’s Radio 4 last night must be wondering what kind of world they’re living in. The midnight roundup, which went on for about 20 minutes, included this twilight zone of terror:

• Five British citizens were given life sentences for a 2004 bomb plot to kill massive numbers of civilians in London and nearby suburbs. Targets included a nightclub, shopping center, and a football stadium.
• Political leaders are demanding a national inquiry into MI5’s handling of intelligence prior to the 7/7 bombings in London, the most devastating terrorist attack on British soil.
• A British soldier convicted of inhumane treatment of civilian detainees in the Iraqi city of Basra has been jailed for a year.
• The head of the British army says that Prince Harry will be deployed to Iraq with his regiment.
• Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says he will not resign, despite criticism of his handling of Israel’s war against Hezbollah militants in Lebanon.
• The U.N. Secretary-General has called on the terrorist group holding BBC journalist Alan Johnston to release him.
• The UK is deploying 1,400 more troops to Afghanistan to counter an expected spring offensive by the Taleban. Government leaders say they need to send more troops because of the reluctance of some NATO members to send forces to southern Afghanistan.

Joseph Loconte: Contempt? The BBC Ignores Blair's Foreign Policy Agenda

Joseph Loconte is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a commentator for National Public Radio, and editor of "The End of Illusions: Religious Leaders Confront Hitler's Gathering Storm".

Earlier this week Tony Blair tried valiantly to prod the BBC to ask him a question about the subject of his monthly news conference: Britain’s strategic role in the world in the post-9/11 era. He set up the event by outlining his government’s just-completed review of Britain’s foreign policy, a 38-page document released the same day. As Blair explained, the report addresses the UK’s strategic alliances, the challenge of radical Islam, and the nation’s willingness to use military power to meet this and other threats.

If BBC political editor Nick Robinson read the report, he kept that knowledge discretely to himself. His question, the first of the news conference, managed to dismiss Blair’s remarks with the subtlety of a brick hurled at a Harrod’s display case: “What is your advice this morning for David Miliband?” (Miliband, the Environment Secretary, was rumored to be considering a challenge to Gordon Brown for Labour leadership when Blair resigns, but ended speculation on Tuesday by insisting he would not be a candidate.) Blair shot back: “You wouldn’t like to ask something on foreign policy, would you?” Not a chance.

Joseph Loconte: No Iron Lady This Time Around

Joseph Loconte is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a commentator for National Public Radio, and editor of "The End of Illusions: Religious Leaders Confront Hitler's Gathering Storm". This essay is adapted from an article in National Review Online.

To measure the political and moral terrain traversed since Great Britain’s Falklands War against Argentina — yesterday marked the 25th anniversary of the conflict — recall the debate in the House of Commons on April 3, 1982. The BBC just aired an audio version of the event, and it is riveting stuff: It reveals a democratic government fully awake to the dangers of unchecked aggression.

The scene is the day after the neo-fascist regime of General Leopoldo Galtieri seizes the Falkland Islands, a British dependent territory in the south Atlantic. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher calls an emergency meeting of Parliament to denounce the invasion in no uncertain terms. “It has not a shred of justification,” she says, “and not a scrap of legality.” Despite warnings that a military response could prove unworkable, the Iron Lady vows that the islands will be liberated by the British Navy.

Abolition and its cultured despisers

Joseph Loconte, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is the editor of The End of Illusions: Religious Leaders Confront Hitler’s Gathering Storm.

There were fearful looks as a lone protestor disrupted the otherwise solemn service at Westminster Abbey marking the 200th anniversary of the Parliamentary act to abolish the slave trade. “This is an insult to us,” shouted Toyin Agbetu, leader of an organization pushing African-British identity, before he was led away by security guards. “You are a disgrace to our ancestors.” Attendees—including the Queen, Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams—seemed stunned and anguished by the unscripted spasm of rage.

It was, in fact, an entirely predictable episode. The clamoring for apologies and reparations for slavery over recent weeks—stoked by steady coverage from the BBC—made Tuesday’s Westminster debacle almost inevitable. The greater sadness, though, is that the bitter recriminations deprecate the decency and valor of what Britain accomplished by ending its part in human trafficking.

Last week, for example, London Mayor Ken Livingstone dismissed the contribution of parliamentarian William Wilberforce in defeating the slave trade and demanded national contrition. Livingstone called on all Londoners to repent of their “squalid” evasion of guilt. In an op-ed for The Guardian, the mayor summoned all residents to join him in “formally apologizing for London’s role in this monstrous crime.”

As wags here put it, Mayor Livingstone has much to apologize for (see this excellent 18 Doughty Street video) —his broken promises on taxes, embrace of communist thugs Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, and alliance with Islamic militants—but slavery isn’t on the list. Nevertheless, at a moment of national remembrance, he inspired a new round of BBC programs devoted to the question of apologies and reparations.

The BBC's Moral Maze, indeed

Joseph Loconte is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a commentator on religion for National Public Radio.

A promotional teaser for the BBC’s weekly radio debate, “The Moral Maze,” proved partially prophetic during last week’s segment on religion and politics: “The intellectual vigor allows us to indulge in abuse!” We should underscore the word partially. There was plenty of abuse—the abuse of history, common sense, and journalistic ethics—but not nearly as much mental vigor. The diversity of views could not conceal the fact that even a showcase of the BBC’s “informed debate” can devolve into petulance and sloganeering.

Each week Moral Maze panelists interrogate several “witnesses” on a topic touching on religion and ethics. Conservative Party leader David Cameron’s announcement that he would send his daughter to a Catholic school was enough to prompt a quintessentially European question: Does religion have any legitimate place in our democratic life?

The alert listener would be rewarded with an answer something like this: If we consider ourselves sane and tolerant people, not much place at all.

“First of all, I think religion is a delusion,” declared Lewis Wolpert, biology professor at King’s College, University of London. “I’m not against people being religious, but I just don’t want their religious beliefs in any way to be imposed on us.”

Iran's nuclear train has left the station

Joseph Loconte is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. and a commentator on religion and politics for National Public Radio.

The reliably bizarre and bellicose rhetoric of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad must have some BBC editors reaching for their medication.

Last week the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that Iran has ignored a UN Security Council deadline to suspend its enrichment of uranium. In fact, IAEA head Mohamed El Baradei said that Iran was accelerating its enrichment program, from research-scale to industrial-scale. That means, despite official denials, that the Islamist government in Tehran is inching closer to possessing a nuclear weapon. Key members of the Security Council met Monday in London to consider a new UN resolution against Iran.

It looks like one will be needed: “Iran has obtained the technology to produce nuclear fuel,” declared the Iranian leader, “and Iran’s move is like a train…which has no brake and no reverse gear.”

How is a modern news organization—committed to rational discourse, conventional diplomacy, and a secular view of the universe—to approach all of this? For now, it seems, by downplaying the most unseemly and unsavory elements of the regime in Tehran. Better to focus on US Vice President Dick Cheney—a figure who seems to frighten European elites as much any Iranian mullah—and alleged American war plans. Better, it seems, to shy away from the hard questions and (to quote Oscar winner Al Gore) the “inconvenient truths” about Iran.

Prayers for Billy Cox

Joseph Loconte is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. and a commentator on religion and politics for National Public Radio.

The startled reaction to a string of youth homicides in south London suggests that Great Britain may be edging into a national debate about the deepest causes of social breakdown. That’s the good news. The debate, after all, is long overdue. The bad news is that, based on the BBC’s coverage of this story, it’s anybody’s guess which voices will shape the outcome of this moment of national soul-searching.

The facts are gruesome enough. Three teenagers were shot dead in separate spasms of violence over a two-week period:  Michael Dosunmu, 15, in Peckham; James Andre Smartt-Ford, 16, in Streatham; and Billy Cox, 15, in Clapham. The last victim, shot in the chest at his home in a southwest neighborhood, was found bleeding to death by his 12-year-old sister. At a church service for Billy over the weekend, Rev. Sue Peake lamented “the hideous pressure on youngsters growing up in our inner cities.”

This is the kind of desperate brutality Britons expect to hear about in south Boston, south-central Los Angeles, or southeast Washington, D.C. Not in London. What are they to make of it?

No Sign of Widespread Panic

Joseph Loconte is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a commentator on religion for National Public Radio.

 

They just couldn’t help themselves. Reprising their role as the nation’s bird-flu emergency alarm system, BBC editors dispatched reporter Mark Simpson to Leeds last weekend during Week Two of the outbreak imbroglio. As manifestly carefree shoppers and restaurant goers strolled past the camera, Simpson summarized the mood: “No sign of widespread panic.” He said this with a straight face.

 

No need to again rehearse here the reasons for public calm during this manufactured crisis. (There is zero—absolutely zero—chance of humans contracting the virus from this recent outbreak if they simply cook their birds properly.) See last week's essay. Nevertheless, BBC editors kept the issue alive and flapping. This is surprising, since there’s little evidence that the public has much interest in the story. The BBC’s own ranking of its most popular domestic stories included David Cameron’s alleged drug use as a teenager, snowfall disruptions, a garrulous parrot, and an Easter egg recall.

Another well-reported story, however, bears a closer look: the news that the U.S. military has accused the Iranian government of supplying roadside bombs to terrorists operating in Iraq. Senior officials told reporters in Baghdad that the bombs had killed more than 170 troops since June 2004. Iran immediately denied the allegations.

 

Several BBC stories emphasized that these latest charges of Iranian-backed terror are being met by a rich harvest of political agnosticism. One story, “Democrats Wary Over Iran Claims,” began by explaining that Congressional Democrats are urging the Bush administration to be cautious about accusing Iran of fueling violence in Iraq.  Senator Chris Dodd reportedly warned that he was “looking at this report with a degree of skepticism.” The quotation that followed, however, was the really provocative one: “I don’t doubt that Iran has been involved to some degree,” Dodd confessed, “and clearly that’s a problem that needs to be addressed...”

 

Well, now. A leading Senate critic of the Bush administration’s foreign policy, an opponent of the war in Iraq, an advocate of the need to “engage” with Iran and other powers in the region, openly admits that the government in Tehran is helping Shia extremists to kill US soldiers and Iraqi civilians. And yet the BBC story began on a note of doubt about the veracity of the charges. In journalism we call that “burying the lede.”

 

There are, of course, grounds for caution about US claims of Iranian weapons flowing across its borders. It is hard to overstate the damage done to American credibility because of the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (a problem compounded by the Bush Administration’s lymphatic diplomacy). BBC reporters have defensible reasons to treat US accusations about Iranian mischief with a measure of skepticism.

 

A measure, yes. Let’s hope, however, that skepticism does not morph into cynicism. A BBC Frontline program called “The New Al-Qaeda,” for example, made this jaded pitch to potential viewers over the weekend: “This program examines Pakistan’s military and political strategy, asking what compromises an Islamic state must make in working to a US agenda and whether torture and human rights abuses aren’t too high a price to pay”  (italics added). Let’s get this straight: The BBC evidently believes that Pakistan, a blazing beacon of Jeffersonian democracy, is being dragooned into a culture of torture and human rights atrocities by that great crusader against human dignity, the United States. One need not be a robotic defender of the Bush administration to be saddened by the sophomoric sensationalism of this appeal.

 

But back to Iran: There are plenty of critics of US foreign policy who have no doubts about Iranian designs in Iraq—including members of the Iraqi government. The real danger now is that a mood of cynicism and apathy will blind Bush critics to the nature of the Iranian threat to peace and security in the region.

 

Liberal and progressive voices made a strikingly similar mistake in the 1930s, as Nazism began its march of aggression in Europe. The appeasement lobby regretted their endorsement of the Great War, the war to “make the world safe for democracy.” They were ashamed of their eagerness to believe reports of the Kaiser’s atrocities, and thus dismissed Hitler’s anti-Semitism as mere bluster. They came to loathe the Treaty of Versailles as a betrayal of their idealism and the source of German rage. They loudly repented of their militarism and vowed to avoid another European conflict at all costs. “In an orgy of debunking,” observed philosopher Lewis Mumford in 1941, “my generation defamed the acts and nullified the intentions of better people than themselves.”

 

Progressives fulfilled their diplomatic vows, right up to the Munich Pact of 1938—to the ultimate horror and desolation of millions.

 

This is not an argument for a military strike against Iran. That may, in fact, be the worst possible choice. It is, rather, an appeal for moral clarity about Iran’s religious regime. No one really knows what the Islamo-fascists in Tehran are capable of. But we do know something of the character of its leadership—its internal repression, its willingness to foment terrorist violence, its feverish conspiracy theories, its apocalyptic visions of a messianic imam. We must add to all of this a vicious anti-Semitism. As political scientist Matthias Kuntzel observes in The Weekly Standard, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appears to believe that he can “liberate” humanity by eliminating the Jews. “The country that has been the first to make Holocaust denial a principle of its foreign policy,” Kuntzel writes, “is likewise the first openly to threaten another UN member state with, not invasion or annexation, but annihilation.”

 

Again, a familiar disease: We face in Iran an ideology that vaunts its contempt not only for the existence of the Jews, but for the democratic freedoms they embody. “The democracies may yet conclude that they will either stay the power of Nazism and Fascism or be destroyed,” wrote Jewish thinker Stephen Wise shortly after Kristallnacht. “Jews may yet come to understand that their position in the world is imperiled as never before in history.”

 

Not to worry, though: At the BBC, at least, there’s no sign yet of widespread panic. Yes, there are significant differences between Iranian jihadism and German fascism. And, yes, accusations that Iran is supporting sectarian atrocities in Iraq should be seriously scrutinized. But let’s try directing a little more doubt where it’s needed most—toward a regime that denies the Holocaust ever occurred, even as it threatens to unleash a repeat performance.

We'll worry about that later

Joseph Loconte is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a commentator on religion for National Public Radio.

BBC reporter Natasha Kaplinsky, live on the scene of the latest threat to the British population, appeared breathless and baffled by the quiet composure—or indifference—of area residents. "Why aren’t more people concerned?" she asked somewhat dolefully. Government leaders, meanwhile, were accused of not being sufficiently tough in their approach to the creeping danger. "I have to say," remarked one official, "they’re not really using the big stick yet."

The missing "big stick" is what the BBC perceives as a lack of seriousness by the British government in confronting and eradicating…the Suffolk bird flu.

In fact, health officials swooped down, like US Navy SEALs, to contain the flu outbreak at a solitary shed on a Suffolk poultry farm last week. They quickly secured the perimeter, killed and incinerated 160,000 turkeys, and pledged to "stamp out" the virus throughout the UK. They set up both a "protection zone" and a "surveillance zone" to restrict unauthorized bird movements. "Our goals in this case are clear," announced Environment Secretary David Miliband. "To stamp out the disease, protect the public…and to regain disease-free status for the UK." BBC News did its bid for Queen and country: Reporters dispatched to the scene promptly "discovered some chickens left outside" about a mile from the contaminated farm.

If only the same martial resolve could be applied to another disease infecting the country—the impulse to rationalize and appease terrorism—but more on that in a moment.

The bird flu story remained the lead item for several nights running. Scientific advisors were trotted out to educate a supposedly anxious or ill-informed public. Lots of "key stories" about the outbreak appeared on the BBC website: "Experts Hunt for Bird Flu Source"; "Fears Raised Over Bird Flu Trucks"; "Farmer Reacts to Bird Flu Threat"; and—my personal favorite—"Bird Watchers Stay Vigilant." Eternal vigilance, after all, is the price of freedom.

The health threat to humans from this latest episode of bird flu: negligible.

Thankfully, the common sense of the ordinary Brit somehow managed to penetrate the fog of crisis talk. Confounding his BBC interviewer with an unflappable calm, a pub patron offered this pearl: "We’ll worry when there’s something to worry about."

One of the marks of a mature society, or a news organization, is that it preserves good judgment about what things are worth worrying about—what issues pose real and lethal threats to large numbers of citizens and to civilization itself. Where should we look to find this judgment today? "The common people are no fools. In fact, they react with a wholesome common sense to the problems of the day," wrote Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr at the outbreak of the Second World War. "The fools were the intellectual leaders of our democracy who talked utopian nonsense in a critical decade in which the whole of western civilization faced its hour of doom."

It’s not as if there aren’t serious contenders for things that ought to concern us. Last week, for example, British police arrested nine men in Birmingham in an alleged plot to kidnap and behead a Muslim soldier—his execution to be posted on the web.

Think about it: the grisly, remorseless barbarism of radical Islam turned against Muslims defending British democracy, acted out brazenly on British soil. Something else to worry about? How about this: The chairman of Birmingham’s central mosque reflexively denounced the arrests as an example of Muslims being "persecuted unjustly" by the government for crass political reasons. "They have invented the perception of a threat," said Mohammed Naseem. "To justify that, they have to maintain incidents to prove something is going on."

So, we have yet another embittered conspiracy theorist leading a Muslim congregation and fanning the flames of resentment and division in British society. We allegedly have men from 12 separate addresses—in the Sparkhill, Washwood Heath, Kingstanding and Edgbaston areas—all colluding together in a terror plot over a period of months, all under the noses of their families and neighbors. Nevertheless, the story faded pretty quickly from view.

"We’ll worry when there’s something to worry about." Well, there are some things to worry about, if we’re willing to look at them straight in the face.