A Second Hand Conjecture

Here’s a five part Uncommon Knowledge segment featuring a superb pairing of Christopher Hitchens and Victor Davis Hanson, to discuss the new World War II revisionism led by Pat Buchanan. While it’s an entertaining exercise for a Saturday, I’ll warn you that there’s a certain weakness to the discussion, given that both Hanson and Hitchens are in agreement. It’s left to poor Peter Robinson as host to present the revisionist case.

But, Robinson probably does as well a job as Pat Buchanan could. As Hitchens and Hanson both deftly demonstrate by different courses, Buchanan is advancing arguments which are largely indefensible and occasionally even crazy.

Part One of Five:

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(photo: Charles Roffey – Charles & Fred)

Someone once said that in Damascus you truly can get a little bit pregnant. It’s a good aphorism, because if you asked the foreign minister of almost any state in the Middle East or the Mediterranean what his government’s policy relationship was with Syria, he would automatically furrow his brow and call it “complicated.” You always seem to be about half-way somewhere with Syria. Lately that appears to be true even for Tzipi Livni. If so for Israel, doubly so for Lebanon.

Surveying it, Jihad Yazigi describes the situation that exists between the two countries as customarily “complicated”, but the dimension of complication he’s seeing is something relatively new. Where before thirty years of Syrian military occupation (and often not very covert political subversion) might be the most obvious locus, Yazigi is today talking about labor and direct investment in Syria by Lebanese:

Syria would probably not be liberalizing its economy and going through a revival of its services sector without the thousands of Lebanese managers that are running Syrian firms. Lebanese managerial know-how is being exported throughout the Arab world and Syria will continue to need it if it wants to further the opening up of its economy.
(The Syria Report)

That’s a very new economic relationship, as historically it is Syrian labor that has traveled to liberal and cosmopolitan Beirut. It is Syrian enterprise that has worked to create a paternalistic relationship between the two countries with one-way investment, generally government directed.

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photo: Tal Bright

Thomas Barnett bemoans the grotesque state of economics education in Europe, which often ranges from the anti-capitalist to the simply fatuous. But consider this item he cites:

Great French HS textbook: “Globalization implies subjugation of the world to the market, which constitutes a true cultural danger.”
(Thomas P.M. Barnett)

Somewhat bemused by this, Barnett asks “why is Europe so antagonistic on capitalism?” Perhaps the better question is why is Europe so antagonistic toward economics, because the item above isn’t really criticism of an economic philosophy. By elevating the primacy of culture over the market, we’re looking at the rejection of the economic premise, which is a concern for the material welfare of mankind. This is what Peter Drucker used to call the dream of “noneconomic man” and in his early work The End of Economic Man, he supplied some explanations for this impulse which might be of enduring relevance to Barnett’s question. (more…)

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