The Special case of Gerhard von Mende.

Gerhard von Mende was a Baltic German scholar who specialized in the peoples and languages of the Soviet Union. During the Second World War, he became an official in Alfred Rosenberg’s Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (Reichsministerium für die besetzten Ostgebiete).

Von Mende was deeply committed to the Nazi racial and political worldview. He became particularly interested in exploiting the ethnic and religious divisions within the Soviet Union and advocated using Muslim and Turkic minorities as political and military assets against Stalin.

His position within the Ostministerium placed him in charge of matters concerning several Muslim and Turkic peoples of the Soviet Union. He worked on recruiting and organizing anti-Soviet émigrés and prisoners of war and supported the creation of political and military organizations that could be used against the Soviet state.

This was not simply an exercise in German military pragmatism. Von Mende was himself an antisemite and an enthusiastic supporter of Nazi racial ideology. He worked under Alfred Rosenberg, one of the regime's principal ideological figures and the head of the Ostministerium.

The Nazi relationship with Soviet Muslims was nevertheless complicated.They viewed  many of these populations through the lens of racial hierarchy, but they were also willing to exploit anti-Soviet sentiment when it served German interests. Muslim and Turkic groups were therefore simultaneously subjected to Nazi racial thinking and courted as potential allies against the Soviet Union.

Von Mende survived the war and, unlike many senior Nazi officials, avoided prosecution.This is where his story becomes particularly interesting.

During the early Cold War, his knowledge of Soviet Muslim and Turkic communities made him useful to Western intelligence services. He maintained contacts with émigré communities and former collaborators who were opposed to Soviet rule.West Germany also became an important center for these networks.

Von Mende's experience and connections therefore survived the collapse of Nazi Germany and were repurposed in the emerging struggle against the Soviet Union. This was part of a much broader phenomenon in the early Cold War, when Western intelligence agencies sometimes recruited former members of Nazi Germany's political, military and intelligence apparatus because of their anti-Communist credentials and specialized knowledge.

His  career illustrates one of the uncomfortable realities of the early Cold War: some individuals who had served the Nazi regime were subsequently considered useful by the very Western powers that had fought against Hitler.

Von Mende’s  activities also intersected with the complicated history of Muslim anti-Communist political networks in postwar Europe.

Among the people associated with these networks were former anti-Soviet activists and collaborators from Central Asia and the Caucasus. Some maintained connections with the Munich Muslim community, which became an important center for Muslim political activity in postwar West Germany.

The Munich Mosque and its associated institutions later became connected with figures such as Said Ramadan, an influential Egyptian Islamist and son-in-law of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna.

It is important, however, not to suggest that the Munich Mosque was simply a Nazi creation or that von Mende controlled it throughout this period. The history is more convoluted than that and involves Muslim émigrés, former anti-Soviet activists, German authorities and, eventually, competing Islamist and anti-Communist networks.

Von Mende's influence declined as these networks evolved. His past also became increasingly problematic as details of his Nazi activities and ideological commitments became better known. He died in Düsseldorf in 1963 after suffering a heart attack.

As a character Von Mende is therefore a fascinating example of a lesser-known figure whose career crossed three very different historical periods: Nazi Germany, the immediate postwar struggle over former collaborators, and the emerging Cold War. His story is particularly disturbing because it demonstrates how ideological enemies could become temporary partners when political circumstances changed.

A man who had once worked for the Nazi regime in its struggle against the Soviet Union could later find himself useful to Western interests for precisely the same reason: his expertise in anti-Soviet political networks.

It is a reminder that the end of the Second World War did not produce a clean separation between good and evil. The Cold War inherited many of the unresolved personnel, networks and political problems of the Second World War—and Gerhard von Mende was one of the more obscure figures who survived that transition.

The West Coast War

 The Japanese did indeed attack the West Coast of the United States during World War Two. The most notable of these incidents was the naval bombardment of Ellwood, near Santa Barbara, California, which targeted the Ellwood Oil Field and caused minor damage to the facility. This occurred on February 23, 1942.

The military installation at Fort Stevens in Oregon was also shelled by the Japanese submarine I-25 on June 21, 1942, although the bombardment caused only minimal damage. In addition, Japanese forces occupied two of the Aleutian Islands, Kiska and Attu, in June 1942, shortly after the Battle of Midway. The occupation was intended in part to protect Japan’s northern flank and extend its defensive perimeter. The Japanese landing on Attu marked the first time that U.S. territory had been occupied by a foreign power since the War of 1812.

So why did the Japanese not go any further?

The defeat of the Japanese carrier force at Midway severely curtailed further Japanese expansion in the Pacific and shifted the strategic initiative toward the United States. However, let us play devil’s advocate for a moment and assume that the Imperial Japanese Navy had emerged victorious at Midway, defeating Admirals Nimitz, Spruance, and Fletcher.

Such a victory would have significantly altered the balance of power in the Pacific in Japan’s favor. It could have delayed or seriously complicated the American counteroffensive, while a weakened U.S. Pacific Fleet would have made the defense of Hawaii considerably more difficult. With a stronger position in the Central Pacific, Japan might have been able to launch additional attacks against the American West Coast and, more importantly, impose a greater naval threat against the United States while the American fleet was rebuilding.

Even in this alternative scenario, however, it is very unlikely that the United States would have sued for peace. The American industrial base and population remained intact, and the continental United States was never seriously threatened with invasion. Japan might have gained time and territory, but defeating the United States outright would have been an entirely different matter.

As for a full-scale frontal attack on the West Coast, that possibility was exceedingly improbable. The planning, shipping, manpower, and logistical requirements would have been enormous—on a scale that would have dwarfed even the Allied preparations for D-Day. The Pacific Ocean presented a formidable geographic barrier, and Japan simply lacked the manpower and industrial capacity necessary for such an undertaking.

Japan's military commitments elsewhere made the prospect even less realistic. Its forces were already heavily engaged in China and across the enormous territories it had conquered in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Its defeat by Soviet and Mongolian forces at Khalkhin Gol in 1939 had also demonstrated the difficulties of conducting a major land campaign against the Soviet Union. These considerations contributed to Japan's decision to pursue a southern strategy rather than open a second major front against the Soviet Union—much to Adolf Hitler's frustration.

Invading the American mainland would have been an even more daunting proposition. This was fundamentally different from attacking and occupying American positions in the Philippines, where Japan could operate from bases relatively close to its existing sphere of control.

By 1942, Japan was already heavily committed across a vast area, having expanded its control over the Malay Peninsula, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, French Indochina, Burma, and numerous Pacific islands. Its more realistic objective after a hypothetical victory at Midway would therefore have been to consolidate its gains, suppress Allied resistance, and establish a defensive perimeter strong enough to contain or delay an eventual American counteroffensive.

Additional raids against the American West Coast were conceivable. A sustained campaign aimed at invading and conquering the continental United States was not.

Japan's best hope was therefore not to conquer America, but to make the cost of defeating Japan sufficiently high that Washington might eventually reconsider its objectives. In reality, however, Japan's strategic position deteriorated rapidly after Midway, and the United States was able to bring its enormous industrial capacity to bear. Any Japanese strategy based on permanently holding off the United States was ultimately doomed.

My Personal Understanding of the Ein Sof

 I have always considered myself, by nature, a scientific rationalist. I seek evidence for what I believe and, as much as possible, try to avoid leaps of faith. At the same time, I recognize that science is fundamentally a method for understanding the material world. Its extraordinary power is also its boundary: science can tell us much about matter, energy, causation, and the observable universe, but it may not be equipped to answer every question about existence itself.

I have dedicated much of my life to science, and I do not intend to abandon that commitment. Quite the opposite. I believe I owe it to myself to exhaust scientific explanations before turning to anything beyond the material. When confronted with a phenomenon, my first instinct is to search for a natural explanation. I am skeptical, but I am not a logical positivist. I do not believe that only propositions empirically verifiable by science are meaningful. Rather, I see myself as a realist armed with Occam's Razor: I prefer the simplest adequate explanation, but I remain open to the possibility that reality extends beyond what science can presently measure.

This tension has accompanied me throughout my life. I personally believe that there is an essence that extends beyond the physicality of the matter-energy universe. Perhaps that inclination is itself a consequence of my individuality—of my genetics, my experiences, and the particular environmental history that shaped me. I have repeatedly tried to dismiss this intuition and surrender myself completely to scientific materialism. Yet I cannot. Something in me continues to resist the conclusion that physical reality constitutes the entirety of existence.

The concept that has given the greatest intellectual expression to this intuition is the Kabbalistic idea of Ein Sof, literally, "without end." I find something profoundly compelling in the notion that to define the ultimate essence of reality completely is, in a sense, to limit it. If we could fully describe or conceptualize the ultimate, then by definition we would have placed boundaries around it.

I therefore think of Ein Sof as the ultimate ground of existence: omnipotent, inexhaustible, and ultimately beyond complete human articulation. It cannot be reduced to a particular image or proposition, yet its presence is, in some sense, ubiquitous. I envision Ein Sof as multifaceted, and this follows naturally from the idea of omnipotence. An infinite reality may be perceived through many levels of experience without those perceptions constituting separate realities.

For me, the transcendent God—the "Spirit God"—is the transcendence from which our souls originate. The personal God is the one with whom I communicate through prayer and contemplation. I do not see these as competing conceptions. They are intrinsically connected: different ways of approaching the same ultimate reality.

I understand individual souls as somehow derived from Ein Sof. Our emergence from the Infinite does not diminish the Infinite, because Ein Sof transcends the material universe. The laws of physics do not constrain Ein Sof; rather, those laws and the physical reality in which they operate are themselves ultimately products of that greater reality. In this sense, Ein Sof provides an answer to the most fundamental question of existence: why is there something rather than nothing?

If our souls are derived from Ein Sof, then perhaps the way we interact with that Infinite reality is through the way we live. We approach it through goodness—not through the accumulation of dogmas, but through the extension of our sense of self, the cultivation of our own being, and the deliberate assistance of others.

I find an extraordinary parallel in the Hindu Upanishadic conception of Brahman. One formulation describes the supreme Brahman as infinite and the conditioned Brahman as infinite: the infinite proceeds from the infinite, and even when the infinite is subtracted from the infinite, the infinite remains. I find this remarkably close to the way I understand Ein Sof.

I am particularly drawn to the Hindu conception of the Atman, the individual soul, as being in its essence a derivative or expression of Brahman. It resonates with my own intuition that individual consciousness somehow participates in an underlying infinite reality. In both traditions, I see a path toward that reality through meaningful action and goodness.

Yet religious insight can easily become obscured by what I think of as cultural noise. Human beings have built enormous structures around their attempts to understand transcendence—institutions, doctrines, rituals, political identities, arguments, and competing claims to authority. Some of these are valuable; others can become distractions from the very reality they were originally intended to illuminate.

Meaningful belief, in my view, has to extend beyond this noise. It must recover the underlying connection with Ein Sof. When it does, it can produce something that is difficult to articulate but easy to recognize: a profound sense of joy and meaning.

The direct approach toward goodness begins, I believe, with perspective. Perspective determines how we prioritize our goals, interpret daily events, and understand our difficulties. In this sense, perspective is a form of triage for the mind. It places our problems into context so that temporary suffering, disappointment, or anxiety does not overwhelm our awareness of the larger goodness that surrounds existence.

Meaningful acts are ultimately acts of kindness—an extension of the self to include another person. Martin Buber's conception of the relationship between "I" and "Thou" speaks deeply to this idea. When we encounter another person not as an object but as a being worthy of recognition, we transcend the narrow boundaries of the isolated self. Such encounters, I believe, bring us closer to Ein Sof and allow us to appreciate something of its magnificence.

Life must also be lived with purpose. In purposeful living, we discover what I think of as the "spark" of Ein Sof: those moments when existence feels connected to something larger than ourselves. We must also cultivate gratitude. I think of gratitude as a consolidation of reality—a conscious recognition of what we actually possess rather than an endless fixation on what we lack. Once that foundation is established, the mind becomes more naturally oriented toward goodness, and that orientation becomes a catalyst for action.

Every morning, for as long as we are fortunate enough to wake up, we are given another opportunity—at least for the most part—to test ourselves, improve ourselves, and contribute something to the lives of others. The simple fact that we are alive is itself worthy of appreciation. We should recognize that gift and use our lives to help other people.

My relationship with Judaism is complicated but deeply important to me. I consider myself Jewish in the cultural, ethnic, and historical sense, and I celebrate many Jewish traditions. I understand Jewishness in much the way Mordecai Kaplan described it—as belonging to a civilization. Religion is one component of that civilization, but it does not encompass the entirety of Jewish existence.

I have never been able to take the revealed-nature argument for religion completely seriously. It does not, in my view, withstand rational scrutiny. Yet this does not diminish the extraordinary intellectual and ethical richness of the Jewish tradition. The biblical tradition, the Tanakh, the Talmud, and the centuries of Jewish argumentation contain profound insights into human nature, ethics, justice, responsibility, and community.

What I find particularly compelling about Judaism is its willingness to wrestle with God. Judaism does not necessarily demand that one approach the divine with passive certainty. There is room for argument, questioning, doubt, interpretation, and even struggle. That aspect of Judaism is deeply compatible with my temperament.

I was born Jewish and remain proud of my Jewish identity. I celebrate many aspects of the culture and take enormous pleasure in studying its history. Throughout my life, I have struggled to understand what exactly I believe religiously. At various times I have flirted with benign forms of atheism and with French Deism, but neither has held me for very long. The intellectual and existential pull of Ein Sof has always drawn me back.

At the same time, I cannot accept every traditional religious claim simply because it has been transmitted through generations. In particular, I have difficulty giving credence to ancient miracles that appear to contradict the well-established laws of nature. I understand the arguments offered in their defense, including the idea that we once lived in an "Age of Miracles," but that reasoning strikes me as carrying a quality of magic and superstition that is difficult to reconcile with post-Enlightenment rationality.

This tension was ultimately one of the reasons I rejected elements of Orthodox Judaism, even while retaining respect for some of its institutions and traditions.

I do not believe that belief in Ein Sof requires miracles. There is, to my mind, enough philosophical and existential reason to believe in an ultimate transcendent reality without suspending the laws of nature. Indeed, I would argue that if Ein Sof is responsible for the structure of physical reality, then miracles are unnecessary. The universe itself is already extraordinary.

Prayer, for me, must come from the heart. I prefer to formulate my own words because prayer is ultimately a personal conversation. Others may find greater meaning in established liturgy and inherited prayers, and I respect that choice. For me, however, spontaneous prayer creates a more direct connection between the person I am and the transcendence I am attempting to address.

Prayer opens a necessary channel of communication with transcendence. It enriches belief by transforming an abstract proposition into a relationship. On a communal level, prayer also creates solidarity among people who share a religious or spiritual framework. Psychologically, it can serve another important purpose: it can clarify thought, organize emotion, and help us see our lives with greater perspective.

I cannot say that a day goes by without my contemplating my relationship with Ein Sof. This contemplation reaches into the very core of who I am. Without that personal dialogue, I would certainly be poorer.

And yet my faith does not come easily.

In some ways, I envy those who possess an uncomplicated certainty about their faith. They seem to have attained a form of contentment that has largely escaped me. My own faith is more like a tug-of-war. It is complicated by the countless rivulets of thought that have shaped my understanding of the world. I constantly interrogate what I believe. Throughout my life, I have moved from one place of intellectual and spiritual comfort to another.

That struggle is itself part of the relationship.

I do not think that wrestling with God or Ein Sof represents a failure of faith. For me, it is faith. The questions are not evidence that the relationship has failed; they are evidence that the relationship remains alive.

Buddhism is appealing. At first glance, there is an extraordinarily soothing quality to its philosophy. It often presents itself in a gentler and more welcoming form than some interpretations of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

One particularly interesting distinction concerns the replacement of an all-powerful judging God with the concept of karma—the idea that actions have consequences. Yet when I examine the two systems closely, I find an unexpected similarity. Both ultimately provide a framework intended to guide human behavior toward what is good.

In the Buddhist conception, harmful actions generate harmful consequences and ultimately suffering. In Western theological traditions, harmful actions may be understood as invoking divine judgment and suffering. The explanations differ, but the ethical objective can be remarkably similar.

I sometimes wonder whether karma could itself be understood as a description of how God or Ein Sof distributes consequences rather than as an entirely separate metaphysical mechanism.

My difficulty with karma as a self-contained explanation is that it can seem too convenient and too mechanistic. It risks turning human existence into an equation in which B can reliably be deduced from A. In that sense, karma can resemble a theological version of classical physics: deterministic, predictable, and ultimately too simple for the complexity of human existence.

I believe the consequences of our actions are murkier. The ultimate decider of our fate is Ein Sof, and I do not believe Ein Sof's logic is simplistic.

There are questions that remain profoundly beyond our comprehension. Why, for example, does an infant die at a very young age? We cannot provide an intellectually satisfying explanation. If Ein Sof exists, then perhaps the explanation exists at a level of reality inaccessible to us.

There is an interesting parallel here with the development of modern physics. For centuries, people believed that mathematics and classical mechanics could ultimately allow us to predict the future state of the universe with complete certainty. Quantum mechanics challenged that assumption. The uncertainty principle, wave-particle duality, and the strange probabilistic nature of quantum reality revealed a universe far more intricate and unpredictable than classical intuition had suggested.

There is logic in the universe, but that logic may be concealed behind a complexity that human beings will never fully penetrate. I suspect the same may be true of the consequences of our actions. There is an underlying order, but it may be vastly more complicated than any simple system of reward and punishment.

I also believe that atheists can develop a genuine spiritual dimension.Buddhism and Taoism, for example, demonstrate that spirituality does not necessarily require devotion to a personal deity. More broadly, a person can encounter a sense of transcendence through their own understanding of reality without identifying that transcendence as God.

A scientist who stands in awe of the structure of the cosmos, the complexity of life, or the elegance of natural law may be engaging in a form of spiritual contemplation. One need not attach a particular theological vocabulary to that experience for it to be meaningful.

For me, however, the concept of Ein Sof provides a language for that sense of transcendence. Another person may find that an alternative  language may be more appropriate. The  Infinite is sufficiently infinite to accommodate different ways of approaching it. This also shapes how I think about monotheism.

God is extraordinarily difficult—perhaps impossible—to define completely. Human beings therefore rely on names, metaphors, symbols, and conceptual constructs to describe divine action. Angels, for example, can be understood as ways of articulating aspects of divine agency rather than as independent pieces of God.

As long as these metaphors do not actually divide the ultimate reality into separate entities, I do not see them as necessarily violating monotheism. They are tools through which finite minds attempt to approach the infinite.

Finally, I believe that free will is essential because it gives us genuine choice. We are not merely automatons moving through a predetermined sequence of events. Free will necessarily carries a difficult consequence: we can choose badly.

Those choices can produce pain and suffering—for ourselves and for others. Yet free will can also lead to lives of extraordinary harmony, generosity, creativity, and love. Both possibilities have to exist. Without the possibility of a bad choice, the good choice loses much of its meaning.

This is where I find some common ground with existentialism, although our metaphysical starting points differ. Existentialism argues that even in a universe without inherent meaning, human beings possess the freedom to choose and must live with the consequences of those choices. I would frame the issue differently. I believe that reality ultimately possesses a transcendent foundation in Ein Sof, but within that reality we have been given enough freedom to make meaningful choices.

We therefore occupy a peculiar position. We are finite beings attempting to understand the Infinite. We are products of the material universe while sensing that there may be something beyond it. We are rational creatures who nevertheless experience wonder, meaning, beauty, love, and transcendence.

I do not claim to have resolved this tension. Perhaps it cannot be resolved.

My intellectual instinct is to question. My scientific training demands evidence. My skepticism warns me against superstition and easy answers. My Jewish identity connects me to a civilization built around argument, memory, ethics, and the persistent struggle with God. And yet beneath all of this is an intuition I have never been able to extinguish: that existence is grounded in something greater than the physical universe.

For me, that something is Ein Sof. I do not pretend to understand it. Indeed, the very nature of Ein Sof suggests that I cannot.

The Infinite cannot be contained by the finite mind. We can only approach it indirectly—through reason, through contemplation, through perspective, through gratitude, through kindness, and through the meaningful use of the brief period of existence that has been given to us.

And so my faith is not a conclusion that I reached once and then stopped questioning. It is an ongoing conversation between reason and intuition, science and transcendence, skepticism and belief.

Did Britain really lose the American Revolution?

The claim that Britain somehow never lost control of the United States after the American Revolution is an exaggerated interpretation of the very real historical, cultural, economic, and political ties that developed between the two countries. The United States unquestionably broke free from British political rule in the eighteenth century. What survived the Revolution, however, was a deep connection between the two societies that has endured—despite periods of intense rivalry and even war.

The War of 1812 demonstrated that the relationship was hardly always friendly. The United States and Britain fought a major war, and British forces famously captured and burned Washington, D.C., in 1814. During the American Civil War, Britain officially remained neutral, but British shipbuilders constructed Confederate commerce raiders, most notably the CSS Alabama, while British public opinion and commercial interests were divided over the conflict. Nevertheless, by the late nineteenth century the two countries were increasingly moving toward cooperation.

Economic ties became particularly important. Britain was for many years the largest foreign investor in the United States, helping finance American railroads, industry, and infrastructure. British capital played an enormous role in the economic development of the United States during the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century. Today, the United States and United Kingdom remain major trading and investment partners, although the global investment landscape is far more diversified than it was during Britain's economic heyday.

The cultural and institutional relationship is even deeper. American law inherited many principles from the English common-law tradition, while the political institutions of the United States developed partly from British constitutional experience. The Founding Fathers were influenced by a range of political philosophers, including John Locke, whose ideas concerning natural rights, government by consent, and the right of resistance to tyranny had a significant influence on American political thought. Locke was English, although it would be misleading to attribute the intellectual origins of the American Revolution to him alone; the Founders also drew heavily upon classical republicanism, English constitutional traditions, Enlightenment thinkers, and their own colonial experience.

The demographic connection is similarly strong. A substantial proportion of Americans have ancestry originating in the British Isles, particularly England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. British ancestry was especially prominent among the colonial population and the political and economic elite of early America. This common heritage helped preserve cultural similarities even after political independence.

The relationship became particularly important during the two World Wars. In World War I, American financial institutions, particularly J. P. Morgan & Co., played an important role in arranging loans and purchases for Britain and France before the United States entered the war in 1917. American entry into the conflict then provided substantial military and economic assistance to the Allied cause.

The relationship was more complicated during the opening years of World War II. Before the United States entered the war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration gradually expanded assistance to Britain through measures such as Cash and Carry, followed by Lend-Lease in 1941. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States directly into the war, Britain and the United States became the principal partners of the Western Allied war effort, cooperating closely in military planning, intelligence, industry, and diplomacy.

After 1945, the relationship became even more strategic. Britain and the United States were founding members of NATO, and the two countries became close allies throughout the Cold War. Britain subsequently supported the United States in major conflicts including the Gulf War of 1990–1991, the 2003 Iraq War, and the war in Afghanistan. The United States supported Britain during the Falklands War of 1982, although the nature of that support requires some qualification: Britain was itself the combatant in that conflict against Argentina, while the United States attempted to mediate initially and ultimately provided important diplomatic and logistical assistance to Britain.

Few individuals embodied the Anglo-American connection more clearly than Winston Churchill. Churchill was British, but his mother, Jennie Jerome, was American. He became one of the strongest advocates of close Anglo-American cooperation during World War II and famously described the relationship between the two countries as a “special relationship.” Churchill understood that the combination of British diplomatic and military experience with American economic and industrial power could become one of the foundations of the postwar international order.

There is therefore a substantial historical basis for describing the United States and Britain as unusually close partners. They share language, legal traditions, cultural influences, extensive economic ties, intelligence cooperation, and a long history of military and diplomatic collaboration.

But none of this means that Britain secretly retained control over the United States. The American Revolution was a genuine revolution in sovereignty. The United States developed its own political institutions, economic interests, foreign policy, and strategic priorities, and it has frequently disagreed with or opposed British policy. The two countries fought each other in the War of 1812, and the United States ultimately emerged as the more powerful partner in the twentieth century.

The idea that the United States is merely a disguised British colony therefore confuses influence with control. British institutions and culture exerted—and continue to exert—considerable influence on American society, but influence is not sovereignty.

Claims that Britain secretly controls the United States belong more properly to the realm of conspiracy theories than serious historical analysis. Such arguments have appeared in various forms over the years, including in the writings of political movements and conspiracy theorists who portray the British monarchy or British financial interests as exercising hidden control over American affairs. Whatever one thinks of particular British policies or institutions, there is little historical evidence to support the proposition that American independence was merely an elaborate façade.

The more interesting historical question is not whether Britain secretly controls America, but why two countries that once fought a revolution and later fought a war against each other eventually developed one of the world's closest bilateral relationships. The answer lies in shared language and institutions, economic interdependence, common strategic interests, and—particularly after the two World Wars—the recognition that their interests were often better served through cooperation than rivalry.

Intellectual Myopia

I often give the human intellect more credit than it deserves.

A friend of mine, whom I have not seen for some time but with whom I have remained connected through Facebook, once  posted a link on his wall depicting an outrageous act committed by people identifying themselves as religious Christians. The details of the incident are not particularly important to the point I want to make, but suffice it to say that it involved a grotesque imitation of crucifixion. Predictably, the incident was either ignored by the mainstream Christian world or broadly condemned by Christians who saw it for what it was: the behavior of extremists and fanatics rather than an expression of Christianity itself.

My friend then drew what he apparently considered to be an obvious parallel. If we can look at an isolated act of violence or religious fanaticism committed by Christians and immediately recognize that the perpetrators do not represent Christianity as a whole, he argued, why can we not extend precisely the same reasoning to Islam? Why, for example, should the attacks of September 11 be treated as evidence of something significant about Islam rather than simply as the work of a fringe group of extremists?

At first glance, this might sound like a reasonable argument. Upon closer examination, however, the analogy begins to fall apart.

The crucial question is not simply whether an act is committed by a person who identifies with a particular religion. The question is whether that act is isolated, how it relates to broader religious and political movements, how it is interpreted by other adherents of that faith, and whether there exists a sustained pattern of similar behavior. An equivalence cannot be established merely by placing two disturbing events side by side and giving them the same label: "religious extremism."

That distinction seems particularly important when discussing Islamist terrorism after September 11. The subsequent history of jihadist violence, the persistence of organizations committed to Islamist political or militant objectives, and the existence of competing interpretations of Islam all complicate any attempt to characterize September 11 simply as an isolated aberration. Groups and movements associated with different strands of Islamism have exercised considerable political, social, or military influence in different parts of the Muslim world. Whatever one's interpretation of their relationship to Islam itself, their existence makes it difficult to dismiss the phenomenon entirely by pointing to the fact that most Muslims do not participate in terrorism.

This brings me to the part of my friend's argument that troubled me most.

My concern was not merely that I disagreed with his conclusion. What disturbed me was how easily an intelligent, highly educated person could construct an analogy that seemed, at least to me, to collapse under relatively straightforward scrutiny. I found myself wondering how he had arrived there in the first place.

Was it wishful thinking? Was it a form of denial? Was he beginning with the conclusion he wanted to reach and then searching for an analogy capable of supporting it? Was there something else at work?

His liberal worldview may have made him reluctant to give serious consideration to arguments made by people who have spent years warning about Islamist extremism. Acknowledging that some of those warnings contained legitimate concerns could create an uncomfortable conflict with a broader commitment to religious tolerance and opposition to prejudice. A person can hold those principles sincerely while nevertheless allowing them to influence the way evidence is interpreted.

That possibility raises a much larger question, and ultimately it is this question that interests me more than my friend's particular argument.

If a highly educated person can become so invested in a preferred interpretation of reality that an apparently weak analogy seems persuasive to him, how many other people are doing exactly the same thing?

Human beings like to think of themselves as rational creatures. We pride ourselves on our ability to analyze evidence, recognize patterns, distinguish correlation from causation, and revise our beliefs when confronted with contradictory information. Much of the time, however, our reasoning seems to operate in the opposite direction. We form an intuitive or emotional conclusion first and then deploy our intelligence in its defense.

Intelligence may actually make us more vulnerable to certain forms of persuasion rather than less. A clever person is not necessarily someone who is better at discovering the truth. Sometimes he is simply better at constructing an argument for what he already wants to believe.

That possibility is what I find genuinely unsettling.

Propaganda does not necessarily succeed because its audience is stupid. It can succeed because people are remarkably good at rationalizing information that conforms to their existing assumptions, identities, and moral commitments. Give someone an argument that reinforces the way he already understands the world, and he may scrutinize it far less rigorously than he would an argument that threatens that worldview.

This may be one reason extremist movements have historically been able to make effective use of propaganda. The propagandist does not have to persuade everyone. He only needs to provide a sufficiently compelling narrative to people who are already predisposed to accept it and exploit the psychological tendency we all possess to protect our existing beliefs.

My concern, therefore, is not simply whether my friend is right or wrong about Islam, Christianity, September 11, or religious extremism. Those are questions that require evidence and careful distinctions. The deeper issue is whether any of us are as intellectually independent as we imagine ourselves to be.

The most humbling realization is that education does not immunize us against bad reasoning. Intelligence does not guarantee intellectual honesty. A sophisticated vocabulary or an impressive résumé does not necessarily mean that a person has learned how to challenge his own assumptions.

I suspect that, in this respect, I am no different from anyone else. I often give the human intellect more credit than it deserves, including my own.

That is precisely why we should be more skeptical not only of the arguments we disagree with, but also of the arguments that tell us exactly what we want to hear.

Why Does Communism Persist Despite Its Record of Failure?

 Communism presents something of an intellectual paradox. Few political ideologies have produced such a substantial historical record of economic dislocation, political repression, shortages, famine, and mass death, yet communism continues to attract adherents in parts of the Western world. The question, therefore, is not simply why communism failed in so many historical experiments. It is why the ideology remains compelling to people who have never experienced life under a communist system.

Part of the answer may lie in the fact that many contemporary advocates of communism have never actually lived under a communist regime. Their understanding of communism is therefore often theoretical rather than experiential. They encounter the ideology principally through books, social media, university courses, political activism, or the rhetoric of its contemporary advocates. The shortcomings of their own society are immediate and visible, while the shortcomings of an alternative system can remain abstract. The grass can indeed look greener on the other side of the fence when one has never had to live there.

There is also a powerful romantic element to communism. At its most attractive, communism does not merely promise a different economic arrangement; it promises a transformed society. It offers an ideal of equality in which exploitation disappears, material insecurity is overcome, and class divisions cease to exist. In this sense, communism possesses an almost utopian appeal. It speaks to the perennial human desire to create heaven on Earth.

The difficulty is that the distance between an ideal and its implementation can be enormous. Human beings are imperfect, incentives matter, information is limited, and societies are vastly more complicated than political theories sometimes assume. Yet the emotional power of the communist ideal can make these practical objections seem like unimaginative defenses of the status quo. The rhetoric of liberation can overwhelm the empirical evidence. The ideology therefore possesses a romantic quality in which what ought to be becomes more important than what experience suggests is possible.

This is particularly evident in the communist preference for central economic planning. Markets can be unsettling because they introduce uncertainty. Prices fluctuate, businesses fail, wages differ, investments sometimes go wrong, and economic outcomes are not always predictable. Central planning appears to offer an alternative: if experts could simply determine what society needs and allocate resources accordingly, perhaps the uncertainty could be eliminated.

But uncertainty is not necessarily a defect of a market economy. It is partly the price of having a system capable of responding to dispersed information. Prices communicate information about scarcity, demand, preferences, and opportunity costs. Millions of individual decisions are incorporated into these signals without requiring a central authority to possess all the necessary knowledge. A central planner, by contrast, must attempt to make decisions using information that is inevitably incomplete, delayed, or distorted.

This helps explain why shortages have historically been such a recurring problem in centrally planned economies. The problem is not necessarily that planners are unintelligent or malicious. It is that no planning authority can possess the constantly changing information generated by millions of producers and consumers. The market's apparent chaos is, in part, a mechanism for processing that information. What looks like irrational uncertainty at the individual level can produce remarkable coordination at the system level.

Communist rhetoric also has an obvious psychological appeal because it speaks in the language of entitlement. It asks not merely what people can reasonably expect from one another, but what they are owed. The distinction is important. A political philosophy that emphasizes rights and responsibilities must wrestle with scarcity and competing claims. A philosophy centered primarily on what people "ought to have" can encourage the belief that every unmet desire represents an injustice perpetrated by someone else.

When expectations are framed as entitlements, disappointment can easily become grievance. Grievance, in turn, can become political mobilization.

One of the more persistent problems for communism as an empirical theory is the tendency of its defenders to redefine the ideology whenever historical evidence becomes inconvenient. When a communist experiment fails, the response can be that it was not genuinely communist, that external enemies sabotaged it, that the leadership misunderstood Marx, or that the particular historical circumstances were responsible. There may be truth in some of these explanations; history is rarely as simple as a single ideological variable.

But there is a danger when an ideology becomes effectively unfalsifiable. If every failed example can be dismissed as "not real communism," then the theory is protected from empirical criticism by definition. This resembles the No True Scotsman fallacy: examples that contradict the proposition are excluded from the category rather than used to reconsider the proposition itself.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent transformation of much of the communist world did not eliminate this problem. Instead, communist ideas have often been reformulated in ways that make them less vulnerable to historical criticism. The economic system may become secondary to questions of power, identity, culture, or social justice. The vocabulary changes, but some of the underlying assumptions remain.

There is another dimension to communism that should not be overlooked: its capacity to identify an enemy.

Marxism traditionally divides society into classes with conflicting interests. This provides a simple and powerful narrative: there are the oppressed and the oppressors, and justice requires the defeat of the latter. Such narratives can be extraordinarily effective because they transform complicated social problems into moral dramas. The individual is no longer simply an individual confronting the uncertainties of life; he or she becomes a member of a larger historical struggle.

This can be particularly attractive to people who understand their identity principally through perceived victimhood. Grievance provides belonging, and belonging provides meaning. The political struggle becomes more than a disagreement over policy; it becomes a struggle between good and evil. In this respect, Marxism can be understood as offering not merely an economic theory but a comprehensive interpretation of human conflict and power.

History also matters enormously. An ideology cannot be assessed properly without knowing what happened when people attempted to implement it. Yet historical memory is selective. In contemporary Western culture, the crimes associated with Nazism are rightly taught extensively, while the history of communist regimes can sometimes receive considerably less attention.

The twentieth century provides an extraordinary body of evidence that deserves to be confronted honestly: Stalin's collectivization, famines, purges, and system of political terror; Mao's Great Leap Forward and the catastrophic famine that followed; the Cultural Revolution; the Khmer Rouge's destruction of Cambodian society; and the political and economic disasters experienced under various Marxist-Leninist regimes elsewhere.

The lesson should not be that every policy associated with the political left is equivalent to these regimes. Nor should historical complexity be ignored. Rather, the lesson is that grand schemes for radically restructuring society can have devastating consequences when political power becomes concentrated, dissent is suppressed, private decision-making is displaced, and ideological objectives are treated as more important than empirical results.

Communism has also demonstrated a remarkable ability to mutate.

Class struggle was central to classical Marxism, but contemporary radical politics can place race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, or other forms of identity at the center of social conflict. These movements are not necessarily communist, and it would be intellectually careless to label every contemporary campaign for racial or gender equality "Marxist." Nevertheless, there are recognizable intellectual continuities between classical Marxist analyses of power and some modern theories that interpret society primarily through categories of oppressor and oppressed.

The same complexity applies to religion and environmentalism. Liberation theology, for example, incorporated Marxist concepts of class and structural oppression into parts of Christian social thought, while elements of the environmental movement have sometimes adopted critiques of capitalism that overlap with older Marxist arguments. None of this means that Christianity or environmentalism is inherently communist. It does mean that Marxist concepts have proved remarkably adaptable and capable of entering intellectual traditions far beyond their original economic framework.

The persistence of these ideas has also been facilitated by what Antonio Gramsci described, in a very different historical context, as the importance of cultural and intellectual institutions. Rather than focusing exclusively on seizing political power, a movement can seek influence within universities, the arts, journalism, education, religious institutions, and government.

The broader point is that ideas acquire power partly through institutions. When particular intellectual traditions become influential within universities and cultural institutions, they can shape the vocabulary through which subsequent generations understand politics and society. Critics of the political left sometimes describe this process as a "march through the institutions." Whether one accepts that characterization in its strongest form or not, the underlying observation is worth considering: political movements that successfully establish themselves within institutions can acquire a legitimacy and cultural influence far greater than their electoral strength alone would suggest.

Finally, communism has characteristics that can make it resemble a secular religion.

It provides a story about the nature of the world, an explanation for why suffering exists, an account of who is responsible, a vision of redemption, and a picture of the society that will emerge after the existing order is transformed. It offers adherents a community and a sense of historical purpose. The individual becomes part of something larger than himself.

This may help explain why communism can retain its appeal even when its historical record is difficult to defend. People do not choose political philosophies solely by comparing economic statistics. They also seek meaning, identity, belonging, justice, and hope.

In a post-Christian society, the desire for these things does not necessarily disappear simply because traditional religious belief declines. It may instead migrate into politics. An ideology that promises redemption through the transformation of society can therefore take on some of the psychological functions once supplied by religion.

This, ultimately, may be the key to understanding communism's persistence. Its survival cannot be explained simply by ignorance of history, although historical ignorance certainly plays a role. Nor can it be explained entirely by economic dissatisfaction. Communism persists because it addresses enduring human desires: the desire for equality, security, belonging, justice, meaning, and the hope that the imperfections of the human condition can somehow be overcome.

The historical record suggests that these desires cannot simply be translated into a political program without enormous risks. Human nature does not disappear when private property does. Scarcity does not disappear when markets are abolished. Political power does not become harmless because it is exercised in the name of equality. And economic information does not become more accurate merely because a central authority wishes to possess it.

The challenge, then, is not to dismiss the aspirations that attract people to communism. Equality, dignity, justice, and solidarity are legitimate human concerns. The challenge is to distinguish legitimate ends from political systems that have repeatedly produced consequences radically different from those they promised.

Communism remains attractive because its promises are attractive. Its historical failures are therefore not sufficient, by themselves, to make the ideology disappear. An effective critique must address not only what communism has done, but why its promises continue to resonate.

The enduring question is not simply why people believe in an ideology that has failed. It is why the dream remains more compelling to some people than the historical evidence.