Civilization and its Enemies
Author: Lee Harris
Civilization and Its Enemies is a tour de force by America's "reigning philosopher of 9/11," Lee Harris. What Francis Fukuyama did for the end of the Cold War, Lee Harris has now done for the next great conflict: the war between the civilized world and the international terrorists who wish to destroy it. Each major turning point in our history has produced one great thinker who has been able to step back from petty disagreements and see the bigger picture - and Lee Harris has emerged as that man for our time. He is the one who has helped make sense of the terrorists' fantasies and who forces us most strongly to confront the fact that our enemy-for the first time in centuries-refuses to play by any of our rules, or to think in any of our categories.
About the Author:
Lee Harris entered Emory University at age fourteen and graduated summa cum laude. After years spent pursuing diverse interests, including a stint at divinity school, several years writing mystery novels, and a career as a glazier, he began writing philosophical articles that captured the imagination of readers all over the world. The author of three of the most controversial and widely shared pieces in the history of Policy Review, Harris has emerged as one of the most talked-about writers of recent times. He lives in Stone Mountain, Georgia.
InstaPundit.com
. . . Harris explains why people are trying to kill us -- and why . . . many in the West are reluctant to face reality.
Publishers Weekly
Harris seems to have burst on the scene with a series of articles in the Hoover Institution's Policy Review. These articles, according to the publisher, created a tremendous buzz, and they form the basis of this book, arguing that in the aftermath of September 11, America must regard itself as the legitimate defender of world civilization. Because Americans are so highly civilized, Harris maintains, they "forget" the realpolitik truths of enmity and barbarianism, and he has come to sound the alarm. Western "liberal left" intellectuals mislead, Harris says, by mistakenly dignifying al-Qaeda as political activists instead of dismissing them as a gang of ruthless "fantasists" who don't share any of our assumptions about how the world should work. Generally ignoring the lessons of other countries' experiences of terrorism, Harris dwells instead on the failures of WWI-era liberal internationalism and on the fantasist ideologies of Hitler and Mussolini. Seeking throughout to boost the notion of American cultural superiority, he turgidly presents Greek and Roman models of social stability that he claims inform the civilizing "team player" patriotism of Americans, as opposed to the weaker structures of tribal loyalty of the "old world." Stale assertions apart, Harris is suspiciously defensive when deriding a nebulously drawn figure of the contemporary Western intellectual, whom he sees as sustained by dreamy cosmopolitan utopianism. Choosing not to engage much with such thinkers, Harris instead tries to hoist them by their own postmodern petard. His reasonable-sounding dismissal of the [pst-Enlightenment reign of reason and his assumption that his reader, an American, can be rallied through a potted education in civilization prevent this deeply rhetorical extended essay from accomplishing much true intellectual work. (Feb.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Harris must be very popular with those in the Bush administration. From the publication of his first political essay in Policy Review, "Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology," through this new book-length polemic, he makes a stark and simple argument: we have a ruthless enemy and we need to annihilate him, so get used to it. Although drawing upon the lessons of history and the writings of philosophers, Harris maintains his focus on the dangerous post-9/11 world. In his view, 9/11 marked the beginning of an "ideological epidemic" that has fundamentally changed how we now must approach the world. He expounds upon the nature of the "enemy," the need for ruthlessness in world affairs, and patriotism. He is highly critical of liberal apologists for internationalism and cosmopolitanism, both of which he regards as na ve and ineffectual in the battle to preserve civilization. This provocative and controversial view will appeal primarily to political conservatives. Although Harris is being compared with Francis Fukuyama, his book may not achieve the fame of The End of History and the Last Man. Nevertheless, it deserves a place on library shelves.-Thomas A. Karel, Franklin & Marshall Coll. Lib., Lancaster, PA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A Civics 101 treatise on why we're good and terrorists and their pals are bad. Once upon a time, human societies-oh, say, Sparta-found it necessary to declare certain humans enemies, chase them down, and kill them, maybe enslaving their women and keeping their toys in the bargain. But then, over time, certain soft, pampered, and overindulgent societies came to discover that they had forgotten that, in Woody Allen's resonant phrase, even paranoiacs have enemies. "They forget, in short, that there has ever been a category of human experience called the enemy," intones independent pundit Harris, whose recent articles in Policy Review prefigure this extended essay. "That, before 9/11, was what had happened to us. The very concept of the enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary." Well, perhaps, except that recent presidents up to and including the much-despised Bill Clinton identified plenty of enemies for us to worry about, not least of them the Soviet Union. The notion that anyone really imagined that the world was a safe and flower-paved place is arguable enough, but Harris nonetheless likens us dumb, hapless latter-day Americans to the ancient Aztecs, who had no way of explaining what happened to them when old Cortez came along; just so, the awful sight of civilian airliners flying into tall buildings confronted us with a baffling enigma that put our language and thinking all out of whack. It makes your head hurt, after all, to imagine fighting a just war against people who don't play by the rules. Harris offers, by way of a remedy for our confusion, a tour through the pages of Plato and the "gang ethos" of ancient Greece, a crash course in Roman ideas of patriotismand Hegelian logic, a discourse on al-Qaeda symbology and the virtues of the free market and, to boot, a few asides on the Imperial training in Frank Herbert's Dune-all apparently meant to reassure readers that we are civilized and they are not, and that the US represents the last best hope of all who would be civilized in the future, "a practical design for the next stage of human history: a utopia that works." If Bushite cheerleading mixed with sort-of-learned allusion is your bag, then this is for you.
What People Are Saying
Daniel Pipes
. . . Harris dissects the West's strong and weak points, then . . . draws conclusions about the deep-seated changes that need be made . . .
Arnold Beichman
A learned, imaginative study of the new world of the twenty-first century and the opening gun, 9/11, of WWIII . . .
—(Arnold Beichman, author of Nine Lies About America)
Table of Contents:
| Preface | |
| 1 | The Riddle of the Enemy | 1 |
| 2 | Our World-Historical Gamble | 21 |
| 3 | Defining the Enemy | 37 |
| 4 | The Grand Illusion | 49 |
| 5 | Ruthlessness and the Origin of Civilization | 69 |
| 6 | The Birth of Patriotism and the Historic Role of the United States | 85 |
| 7 | Two Types of Cosmopolitanism: Liberal Versus Team | 115 |
| 8 | How Reason Goes Wrong | 135 |
| 9 | Tolerance: A Case Study | 143 |
| 10 | The Origin of the Enemy | 157 |
| 11 | The Rare Virtues of the West | 181 |
| 12 | Conclusion: The Next Stage of History | 201 |
| Acknowledgments | 219 |
| Index | 221 |
See also: Post Colonial Transformation or Principles of Taxation for Business Investment Planning2002 Edition
Partners in Command: George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower in War and Peace
Author: Mark Perry
The depth and significance of the relationship between George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower has eluded historians for years. In Partners in Command, acclaimed historian and journalist Mark Perry gets to the heart of arguably the most fateful partnership in American military history, a union of two very different men bound by an epic common purpose. He follows Marshall and Eisenhower's collaboration from the major battles in North Africa and Italy to the planning and execution of the D-Day invasion, the crisis of the Battle of the Bulge, and the postwar implementation of the Marshall Plan, and the establishment of Eisenhower's leadership of NATO. erry shows that Marshall and Eisenhower were remarkably close colleagues who brilliantly combined strengths and offset each other's weaknesses in their strategic planning, on the battlefields, and in their mutual struggle to overcome the bungling, political sniping, and careerism of both British and American commanders that infected nearly every battle and campaign. Finally, Marshall and Eisenhower collaborated in crafting the foreign policy and military infrastructure that became the foundation for winning the Cold War.
From their first meeting after Pearl Harbor in 1941, Marshall and Eisenhower recognized in each other an invaluable military partner-by February 1942, Marshall, who was Army chief of staff, had promoted Eisenhower to head the War Plans Division, where his first job was to write the initial plan to win the war against Japan. Within a few months, Marshall selected Eisenhower as commander of all U.S. forces in the European theater. By early 1944, however, a subtle but major shift had occurred: Marshall the teacherhad become Eisenhower's student, Eisenhower having developed the superior grasp of command challenges.
Partners in Command is an extraordinary portrait of an often ignored alliance between two iconic military figures and the ways in which their unusual collaboration would ultimately shape fifty years of successful American foreign policy.
Library Journal
A noteworthy military analyst brings to light an important World War II alliance. Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.
What People Are Saying
Kai Bird
Mark Perry's gracefully written dual biography informs us that as young army officers George C. Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower were wisely taught 'never fight unless you have to, never fight alone, and never fight for long.' Perry casts the Marshall-Eisenhower partnership in a new, personal light, vividly recreating the stark choices facing two of America's most brilliant World War II strategists. Partners in Command is both a formidable achievement in biography and an engrossing account of the dark imponderables of total warfare.(Kai Bird, co-author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer)
