BOOK REVIEW
In defense of Turkish cigarettes
Snow by Orhan Pamuk
Those in the West who still view Turkey as a pillar of Western influence in a troubled region should read this novel sitting down. Orhan Pamuk, the country's reigning bard, portrays a Turkey whose center cannot hold because it has rotted away. (Aug 23, '04)

Islam: Religion or political ideology?
Some secularized Muslims say Islam is not a religion but "a political movement set to conquer the world". But it is a religion, and that is precisely what makes it so dangerous: for it is driven to jihad by holy rage. (Aug 9, '04)

Careful what you Bush for
America's Democratic leadership has all but muzzled opponents of the Iraq war, so the battle for the White House will be fought on George W Bush's ground, not John Kerry's. Bush will be re-elected, but only to find himself starring in the next act of a great tragedy. (Aug 2, '04)

When Grozny comes to Fallujah
Do not be surprised to see three or four divisions of the Russian army in Iraq's Sunni Triangle before year-end, with an announcement just prior to the US presidential election in November. The logic for such a development is compelling, and all would benefit from a Russian scorched-earth offensive except, of course, the population of Fallujah. (Jul 26, '04)

America is not an empire
Goethe argued that the first sin was sloth, and this view accounts quite well for the sin of imperialism - whole continents have been ruined to maintain their conquerors in idle luxury. By the same token, it is meaningless to speak of an "American Empire" when Americans incline to sloth less than any other people in the industrial world. (Jul 13, '04)

A Star-Spengler'd apology
An American masterwork puts to shame Spengler's previous gibes at US "hand me down culture", and that is none other than the national anthem. Belonging to the genre of great poems by awful poets, the central question of "The Star-Spangled Banner" remains relevant to this day: Do America's national colors wave over a brave and free people? (Jul 6, '04)

You have met the enemy, and he is you
Perhaps Iraq is not the disaster so many believe, except for the ideologues who argued that America's political model could be exported and assembled in Iraq. And perhaps for the Kurds, who eschew the American "melting pot" model of democracy in pursuit of their own tragic destiny. (Jun 28, '04)

No one expects the Spanish Inquisition
Washington's embarrassment about Abu Ghraib paled beside the Vatican's defense last week of the Spanish Inquisition. Yet the inquisitors were right to fear Protestantism, which now flourishes on the American model while European Christianity heads for oblivion. (Jun 21, '04)

How America can win the intelligence war
The late president Ronald Reagan's CIA chief, Bill Casey, knew that if you want intelligence, first you start a war. In other words, if you apply enough pressure, you'll find out who the enemy is, what it wants, and how it might be defeated. This is what America needs to do now, instead of misguidedly trying to wage war on "terrorism". (Jun 14, '04)

Ronald Reagan's creative destruction
Winston Churchill notwithstanding, Ronald Reagan arguably was the greatest commander in chief of the 20th century. He possessed the decisiveness that depends on strategic vision, and more - the intestinal fortitude to endure uncertainty, and the will to force the burden of uncertainty onto his opponent. (Jun 7, '04)

Socrates the destroyer
The notion that the US can impose a rational constitution on whatever country it pleases draws credibility from the myth of Socratic statecraft as told by Leo Strauss and others. US policymakers would benefit from a few quiet hours with 19th-century Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard, who showed Socrates not as a system-builder but as a destroyer who saw that Greek culture was a failure and set out to tear down its premises. (May 24, '04)

Does Islam have a prayer?
Common modes of prayer provide a standard for identifying cultural conflicts. If the individual Muslim does not submit to traditional society as it surrounds him in its present circumstances, he submits to the expansionist movement. In that sense the standard communal prayer of Islam may be considered an expression of jihad. (May 17, '04)

Mistah Kurtz, he clueless
Unable to reconcile the situation on the ground with its policy of democratizing Iraq, the US is likely to embrace the next best thing - chaos. The results will be infinitely more unpleasant than Abu Ghraib, but at least Americans will be able to sleep in peace. (May 10, '04)

Has Islam become the issue?
Until now, neo-conservatives have carefully toed the White House line that "this is a war against terrorism, not against Islam". But now, as Washington's visions for Iraq's future vanish like a desert mirage, this line is in danger of being crossed, with Islam itself becoming the issue. The neo-cons have already fired the first salvo. (May 3, '04)

Horror and humiliation in Fallujah
As the American military weighs the reduction of Fallujah, there come into focus the grand vulnerabilities both of the Americans and the Sunni resistance. For the Islamic world, humiliation is beyond its capacity to endure. For the West, horror is lethal. (Apr 26, '04)

Why Islam baffles America
American government studies on Islam lack even a sentence on the question: What is the spiritual experience of believing Muslims? Religion for them is an existential matter, of one substance with the smallest details of their daily lives. And to this Americans can come only as destroyers, not saviors. (Apr 15, '04)

'You love life, we love death'
Who precisely loves life and who loves death? Al-Qaeda's taunt comes from a people with one of the highest birth rates in the world, the Arabs. It is directed at a people with one of the lowest birth rates in the world. Al-Qaeda is saying that the Spaniards are too soft to fight for their own future. (Mar 22, '04)

Spain, and why radical Islam can win
Radical Islam has scored its first unambiguous victory over the West with the thrashing of pro-US Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar's party in Spanish elections Sunday. But Spain's death-knell sounded long before the bombs went off. (Mar 15, '04)

Mel Gibson's lethal religion
Rubbing the filmgoer's nose in Jesus' gore, contend the defenders of The Passion of the Christ, follows established traditions of Christian art. But the America to which Catholic traditionalist Mel Gibson is reaching was founded on the ashes of religious art, and it could not have been otherwise. (Mar 8, '04)

Ask Spengler

Dear Spengler,
I am the chief executive officer of the world's largest religious  denomination. Through no fault of my own, a number of pedophiles have found their way into positions of responsibility in my organization. This has caused me considerable embarrassment. What can I do to discourage them? - Wretched in Rome (Feb 17, '04)

Happy birthday, Abe - pass the blood
War ranks among the strangest forms of willful self-destruction, and America's Civil War ranks among the strangest of all. To this day, the US perpetuates two consoling lies about it; God help the United States' enemies if it regains its frame of mind of the 1860s. (Feb 9, '04)

It's not the end of the world - it's the end of you
Americans, unlike breast-beating Greens, tend not to confound their own sense of mortality with the vulnerability of the natural world because they have chosen other means to address the matter of their inevitable death. So don't worry, and tuck into your spotted owl. (Feb 2, '04)

Red harvest in Iraq
Americans like their tough guys to have a heart of gold, which is why Hollywood has had no time for Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op, an unscrupulous misfit who plays very dirty and by his own very warped rules. In essence, just the sort of characters that the US needs in Iraq right now - those with nothing to lose. (Jan 26, '04)

The devil and L Paul Bremer
No one in the Bush administration wants to let slip the dogs of civil war in Iraq. Nonetheless, the tragedy will proceed as Washington at each step discovers that its only viable option is the one that pushes Iraq closer to dissolution. (Jan 20, '04)

Electoral politics as mass suicide: Howard Dean
They call it a revolution, but the "techno-Utopian" helpers that Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean has embraced to launch his campaign have no more chance of success in politics than they did in the disastrous dotcom business. (Jan 12, '04)

   Readers respond

Tolkien's Ring: When immortality is not enough
The prospective death of an entire people along with their culture creates a particularly nasty type of existential angst, the sort that produces a Hitler or a bin Laden. The inevitable demise of races is Tolkien's theme in Lord of the Rings. But America - with no culture to lose - may point to an outcome Tolkien could not have imagined. (Jan 4, '04)

Will Iraq survive the Iraqi resistance?
If the devastating anti-coalition strikes continue, Washington's moment of triumph following Saddam Hussein's capture will fade into a debilitating crisis of policy. Iraqi resistance will no more disappear than Russian resistance in World War II would have disappeared had Josef Stalin been captured. (Dec 22, '03)

Why Americans can't laugh at American culture
The problem is not that Americans do not like to laugh at their own culture, but that they cannot, whether they wish to or not, because they do not quite know what it is. (Dec 15, '03)
  
   Readers' responses

When rabbis liked Hitler: A moral tale for the Mideast
The question of why the Muslim world views Jews in a fashion reminiscent of Adolf Hitler's can be answered by taking a look at pre-Holocaust Nazi Germany, a time when even the rabbis of Berlin sympathized with the fuhrer in his disdain for the moral decay running rampant in society. (Dec 8, '03)

Oil on the flames of civilizational war
"The most dangerous book of the decade" features the writings of German-Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig, who in the 1920s predicted the struggle between Christianity and Islam. It comes at an important juncture, providing sophisticated intellectual support for the anti-Islamic gut instinct of American Christians. (Dec 1, '03)

George W Bush, tragic character
It is hard to label "tragic" anyone as cheerful and optimistic as President George W Bush. Yet tragic he is: he wants universal good, but he will end up doing some terrible things. (Nov 24, '03)

What is American culture?
How do Americans look at the world? Is there a characteristic American way of thinking, an American culture? Through what filter does information reach their brain, and by what mechanism do they respond to it? (Nov 18, '03)

Why America is losing the intelligence war
Unique among America's foreign conflicts, the so-called "war on terror" is an intelligence war. That bodes ill for America, because an intelligence war is the kind America is least capable of  fighting, for reasons inherent in the country's character. That is one more reason why Islamic radicalism yet may defeat the West. (Nov 11, '03)

What the Jews won't tell you
Contrary to popular belief among many Jews, anti-Semitism can't be blamed on a chemical imbalance in the brain. Hatred of the Jews stems from profound roots that will not, unfortunately, disappear with a few sessions on a psychiatrist's couch. (Nov 3, '03) 

Mahathir is right: Jews do rule the world
Just because you are paranoid it doesn't prove that they are not out to get you. Paranoid, to be sure, was Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad's allegation that the "Jews rule this world by proxy" on October 16. Whether Dr Mahathir himself is paranoid, or whether he adapted his words to the paranoia of his audience makes little difference. Through the twisted prism of paranoia, the facts on the ground do indeed suggest that the Jews rule the world. (Oct 28, '03)

How 'cherry-picking' militant Islam can win
Do you wonder what President George W Bush reads at night? Westerns? Methodist sermons? His favorite, it seems, are popular military histories by Professor Victor Davis Hanson, who reads classics in the California state university system. Hanson now advises the Bush administration, reported the London Times on September 20. ( Oct 3, '03)

Civil war: A do-it-yourself guide
Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority's scapegoat-in-chief, so deeply abhors the prospect of a Palestinian civil war that he cannot bring himself to attack Hamas and the Islamic Jihad. Chin up, Mr Abbas: civil war is the sine qua non of nationhood. Permit me to try to sell you on the merits of having a civil war of your very own. (Aug 29, '03)

Catholicism - isn't that a gay thing?
In 1506, the Venetian prostitutes' guild lodged a complaint with the Signoria that homosexuality had become so prevalent as to threaten its livelihood. Civilizations in decline typically take on the characteristics of Bonobo monkeys, Nero's Rome being the most lurid example. No precedent exists to my knowledge, though, for the priesthood to become the homosexual vanguard. (Aug 22, '03)

You say you want a reformation?
Neo-conservatives in Washington think neither of accommodating the claims of radical Islam nor of a war against Islam, but rather of an "Islamic Reformation". The difficulties arise in deciding just how this reformation is going to take place. (Aug 4, '03)

Why radical Islam might defeat the West
The day is coming when great nations will find their numbers dwindling from census to census; when the six-roomed villa will rise in price above the family mansion; when the viciously reckless poor and the stupidly pious rich will delay the extinction of the race only by degrading it; whilst the boldly prudent, the thriftily selfish and ambitious, the imaginative and poetic, the lovers of money and solid comfort, the worshippers of success, of art, and of love, will all oppose to the Force of Life the device of sterility. (Jul 8, '03)

More killing, please!
History, most notably the American Civil War, teaches us that most of the killing in war typically occurs long after rational calculation would call for the surrender of the losing side. In which case, for there to be peace in the Middle East, many more lives will have to be lost. (Jun 11, '03)

Neo-cons in a religious bind
Investigative journalists of the left are sniffing up the wrong tree. They are pursuing a phantom, a mythical freemasonry of Straussians. Hidden in plain sight, meanwhile, is a conspiracy so monstrous in its design and so perverse in its intent that it beggars the imagination. (Jun 5, '03)

The secret that Leo Strauss never revealed
No sillier allegation has found its way into mass-circulation newspapers than the notion that a conspiracy of Leo Strauss acolytes has infiltrated the Bush administration. Supposedly Defense Undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz, a Strauss doctoral student, and other lesser-known officials form a neo-conservative cabal practicing some sort of political black arts. (May 13, '03)

Why Europe chooses extinction
Demographics is destiny. Never in recorded history have prosperous and peaceful nations chosen to disappear from the face of the earth. Yet that is what the Europeans have chosen to do. Back in 1348 Europe suffered the Black Death, a combination of bubonic plague and likely a form of mad cow disease, observes American Enterprise Institute scholar Ben Wattenberg. (Apr 8, '03)

Bush's nerve is going to snap
Had Washington struck Iraq shortly after September 11, 2001, that would have been that. By giving the rest of the world time to form a stop-America coalition, Washington has done something similar. Its choices now boil down to standing down or acting alone upon a stage crafted to place American motives in the worst possible light. (Mar 4, '03)

The sacred heart of darkness
What is it about the French? Even Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, who wears a "world citizen" badge on his tweed jacket like a ski pass, has had enough. He excoriates French "duplicity" at the United Nations, adding, "France is so caught up with its need to differentiate itself from America to feel important, it's become silly." (Feb 11, '03) 

The 'Ring' and the remnants of the West
The most important cultural event of the past decade is the ongoing release of the film version of J R R Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. No better guide exists to the mood and morals of the United States. The rapturous response among popular audiences to the first two installments of the trilogy should alert us that something important is at work. (Jan 11 '03)

Do not click on this link
Most of us play a game with the unpleasantnesses of history: If only this, or if only that, terrible consequences might have been avoided. Sometimes I muse that if a few clever people simply had kept their mouths shut, the world might have been a better place. The old Viennese cafe quip (quoted by Paul Johnson in his History of the Jews) comes to mind: "Anti-Semitism wasn't getting anywhere until the Jews got behind it." (Oct 29, '02)

Singing in the (cold) shower
Hey you! Stop your sobbing! The stock market crash is the best thing that could have happened to America. (Jul 22, '02)

Live and let die
Political suicide is commonplace, indeed endemic, among populations who fail to adapt to changing circumstances. The popularity of suicide bombing among young Palestinians has much in common with other instances of large-scale suicide in recent years. (Apr 13, '02)

Geopolitics in the light of option theory
"Fifteen years ago, the United States was short vol. Now it's long vol," observed an acquaintance who trades options. By this he meant that the United States stood to lose from instability during the Cold War, and stands to gain from it now. (Jan 26, '02)

Sir John Keegan is wrong: radical Islam could win
"In this war of civilizations, the West will prevail," argues the distinguished historian Sir John Keegan, the Defense Editor of the Daily Telegraph, in a commentary on October 8. Why is he so sure? If Sir John were in command on the Western side, I would be inclined to bet on a different outcome. (Oct 12, '01)

Washington's racism and the Islamist trap
"The Arab is a patriot, not a whore," the hardline Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky used to warn his leftwing colleagues back during the 1920s. "He can't be bought off by the promise of economic benefits. And he is just as intelligent as you are."  (Sep 22, '01)

   Spengler replies to his critics (Oct 6, '01)

Internet stocks and the failure of youth culture
The Internet has become routine, mourns a front-page commentary in the New York Times' August 25 Week in Review. Despite the hopes of certain "cultural critics" that the Internet would "democratize media" with its low cost of entry, the dystopian vision of a cultural cybersphere has crumbled. The Internet remains useful as an electronic document retrieval system and electronic bulletin board. (Aug 31, '01)

In defense of genocide
Spengler cannot wish you a happy New Year, but will go so far as to wish you a complete one. Speaking of which, President Clinton has signed a treaty to create a World Court for the prosecution of crimes against humanity. Because the American Senate rather would eat nails than sign this document, it is a mere sentimental gesture, not an act of polity. (Jan 4, '01)

What if Internet stocks aren't a bubble?
What if consumers want to double or quadruple their spending on whatever it is the Internet has to offer every year for the next 20 years? What if they will pay a premium to watch their favorite episode of Pee-Wee Herman or the Lone Ranger rather than the latest sit-com? What if they will spend heavily to explore the cutting edge of anatomical possibility on the porn sites? (Jan 27, '00)