The Strident Centrist Blog

According to the National Post, a hot story in Great Britain is the art forging business of the Family Greenhalgh. The art talent was son Shuan, now 46 and still living at home with Mom and Pop, now in their 80s, who did the marketing.

After many successful years, and scores of sales, the Greenhalghs were caught out by that old devil hubris. Shaun, deeply impressed by his own talent, forgot that serious chicanery requires careful attention to detail. He sent the British Museum what was apparently an ancient Assyrian stone relief showing a soldier and horses with cuneiform writing. It looked great until someone noticed a minor spelling mistake in the writing and someone else said that the harness on the horses was from the wrong period.

If you haven’t run across it yet, don’t miss the piece in today’s New York Times Magazine by Parag Khanna. Here’s but a small sample:

The rise of China in the East and of the European Union within the West has fundamentally altered a globe that recently appeared to have only an American gravity — pro or anti. As Europe’s and China’s spirits rise with every move into new domains of influence, America’s spirit is weakened. The E.U. may uphold the principles of the United Nations that America once dominated, but how much longer will it do so as its own social standards rise far above this lowest common denominator? And why should China or other Asian countries become “responsible stakeholders,” in former Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick’s words, in an American-led international order when they had no seat at the table when the rules were drafted? Even as America stumbles back toward multilateralism, others are walking away from the American game and playing by their own rules.

The self-deluding universalism of the American imperium — that the world inherently needs a single leader and that American liberal ideology must be accepted as the basis of global order — has paradoxically resulted in America quickly becoming an ever-lonelier superpower. Just as there is a geopolitical marketplace, there is a marketplace of models of success for the second world to emulate, not least the Chinese model of economic growth without political liberalization (itself an affront to Western modernization theory). As the historian Arnold Toynbee observed half a century ago, Western imperialism united the globe, but it did not assure that the West would dominate forever — materially or morally. Despite the “mirage of immortality” that afflicts global empires, the only reliable rule of history is its cycles of imperial rise and decline, and as Toynbee also pithily noted, the only direction to go from the apogee of power is down.

This is justifiably getting a lot of buzz. Check it out!

“Fabius Maximus”, who posts frequently at Defense in the National Interest, has some insightful observations on what’s behind the recent riots in the ethnic suburbs of Paris and other French Cities:

What caused the riots?

The French Government abandoned the great ring cities around Paris — funding their inhabitants but ceding effective control over their lives to community groups such as gangs and mosques. Police and social workers seldom go there, so the inhabitants developed their own polity. This is the critical factor. The government is not facing insurgents attempting to wrest control of their people from France. The local gangs and mosques represent the established powers. The government is attempting to regain what it has surrendered.

Therefore the riots are to some extent a geographically based phenomenon, hence the diversity of religions and ethnicities in the rioters – an important and overlooked aspect. Having been abandoned once, these communities – largely second and third generation immigrants – seem unlikely to easily give their loyalty to the State. That opportunity was lost with their parents and grandparents.

Here we see the Decline of the State in tangible form.

I find it troubling that FM and other such commentators, including William Lind and John Robb, seem to accept that the decline of the state is inevitable. If that is so, the alternative brings to mind the legend on the edges of ancient maps: There Be Dragons. Churchill once said that democracy is the worst form of government; except for all the others. Similarly, if one reads the history of Europe up through the Treaty of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years War, one could say that the state is the worst way to politically organize society, except for its alternatives. Perhaps we humans should put more thought and effort into restoring our faith in the state.