I’m tied up with work this morning (and will post about that in the near future) but for now I invite you to listen to last night’s podcast with James Joyner of Outside the Beltway, Ed Morrissey of Captain’s Quarters and Siggy of Sigmund, Carl and Alfred
On Tuesday night Siggy and I discussed Is Iran a proxy for Russia?
Please also read Christopher Hitchens’s review of Andrew Roberts’s book A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900. Hitchens’s review is titled An Anglosphere Future: How a shared tradition of ideas and values—not bloodlines—can be a force for liberty
Nonetheless, properly circumscribed, the idea of an “Anglosphere” can constitute something meaningful. We should not commit the mistake of “thinking with the blood,” as D. H. Lawrence once put it, however, but instead emphasize a certain shared tradition, capacious enough to include a variety of peoples and ethnicities and expressed in a language—perhaps here I do betray a bias—uniquely hostile to euphemisms for tyranny. In his postwar essay “Towards European Unity,” George Orwell raised the possibility that the ideas of democracy and liberty might face extinction in a world polarized between superpowers but that they also might hope to survive in some form in “the English-speaking parts of it.” English is, of course, the language of the English and American revolutions, whose ideas and values continue to live after those of more recent revolutions have been discredited and died.
More blogging later!