The Lessons of the Versailles Treaty, by Victor Davis Hanson.

In comparison to other treaties of the times, the Versailles accord was actually mild—especially by past German standards.

After the 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian war, a newly unified and victorious Germany occupied France, forced the French to pay reparations and annexed the rich Alsace-Lorraine borderlands.

Berlin’s harsh 1914 plans for Western Europe at the onset of World War I—the so-called Septemberprogramm—called for the annexation of the northern French coast. The Germans planned to absorb all of Belgium and demand payment of billions of marks to pay off the entire German war debt.

In 1918, just months before the end of the war, Germany imposed on a defeated Russia a draconian settlement. The Germans seized 50 times more Russian territory and 10 times greater the population than it would later lose at Versailles.

So, under the terms of the Versailles Treaty, the winning democracies were far more lenient with Germany than Germany itself had been with most of its defeated enemies.

No one denied that Germany had started the war by invading Belgium and France. Germany never met the Versailles requirements of paying fully for its damage in France and Belgium. It either defaulted or inflated its currency to pay reparations in increasingly worthless currency.

Versailles certainly failed to keep the peace. Yet the problem was not because the treaty was too harsh, but because it was flawed from the start and never adequately enforced. …

WWII:

After the Treaty of Versailles, the victorious Allies of 1945 did not repeat the mistakes of 1919. They demanded an unconditional surrender from the defeated Nazi regime.

The Western Allies then occupied, divided and imposed democracy upon Germany. Troops stayed, helped to rebuild the country and then made it an ally.

In terms of harshness, the Yalta and Potsdam accords of 1945 were far tougher on the Germans than Versailles—and far more successful in keeping the peace.

Republican advertisment attacks the Squad. Notice that it implicitly calls them out for racism and identity politics.

It’s going to be all about race. For two decades the left has built an electoral strategy around a coalition of the fringes and anti-white racism. Quotas! Special treatment! Diversity! Black Lives Matter! White civilization is racist, sexist, etc! White religion is bad!

Tolerant whites have looked on but said little. But now that political power and their future is being taken away by mass non-white  immigration in the US, the uncouth Trump is speaking up. Likewise Europe is finding nationalist leaders who are standing up to the racist tide.

The left trashed the politics of Martin Luther King and went tribal. They started this.

The catch-22, of course, is that to stand up to this sort of racism you look racist yourself. Recognizing white identity and celebrating or defending things white — just like blacks, Hispanics, Jews, Cubans, Somalis, Arab, and every other ethnic group — is indeed mildly racist. Need the media to keep on suppressing that impulse for whites:

Identity Politics and Labor in Australia, by Mark Latham.

In political history, 2019 will be remembered as the year Labor lost the unlosable election due to wrong-headed tax policies. …

The clearest example of this process is in the Labor/Green embrace of identity politics, judging people by race, gender and sexuality. Poor people with the wrong skin colour (white), gender (male) and sexuality (straight) are automatically excluded from social justice consideration.

One only needs to visit a public housing estate in Western Sydney to know that straight white men are a big part of Australia’s underclass. Restructured out of manufacturing work and forced into welfare dependency, identity politics has no solution for their poverty. Even worse, it sneers at them as an example of ‘white male privilege’, creating enormous resentment among one of the most disadvantaged groups in society. Social justice never works well as a zero-sum game, when one disadvantaged group can only prosper at the expense of another.

Labor has lost the support of a generation of straight white men (perhaps a quarter of the electorate) who see their needs being wiped by the emergence of employment quotas, workplace discrimination and accusatory domestic violence propaganda aimed at them. That’s a massive constituency shedding, driving the ALP primary vote into the low 30s. …

The rise of identity politics has divided Australia into competing identity groups, making people less inclined to trust in the collective role of government and fair allocation of public resources. It’s been a social justice disaster that Labor should abandon immediately, returning the party to the principles of meritocracy.

Humans Need Not Apply.

The new Boris machine owes very little to Westminster, by Fraser Nelson.

Until now, new Prime Ministers have always arrived in 10 Downing Street accompanied by the team they built around them in Parliament. But Boris Johnson is different. He is the creature of two Blair-era inventions: devolution and referendums. The team he is building around him in No. 10 is from City Hall and Vote Leave, where he was able to pioneer a new style of politics and government. …

He rejected the clannishness that infects Westminster, where loyalists are promoted (epitomised by David Cameron’s notorious chumocracy). Boris chose on talent alone: hence figures as diverse as Lynton Crosby, Munira Mirza and Kit Malthouse joined him in City Hall. He is doing the same in No. 10 and his various advisers will report to Sir Eddie Lister, his chief of staff. This might infuriate MPs, especially those who thought they’d follow their hastily-chosen chieftain into No. 10, but the clannish model has just been broken. …

The result of this will be to reject the old rules: that you govern, then at some stage switch to campaign mode. The Boris project is starting in campaign mode, and I doubt it will ever stop. This is one of Donald Trump’s innovations: never stop campaigning. To apply pressure to the insiders, appeal to the outside. …

And will it work? The odds against it are still huge: May wasted three years on a deal that Parliament would not and was never going to pass. To do a better job in a few weeks with an EU that prides itself on intransigence will be, to put it mildly, a challenge.

Supreme Court Gives Trump Go-Ahead to Fund the Wall, by Tyler O’Neil.

On Friday, the Supreme Court struck down a lower court order, allowing President Donald Trump to redirect military funds to build his wall on the southern border. In a 5-4 decision, the Court allowed Trump to redirect $2.5 billion in military construction funds for wall projects in California, Arizona, and New Mexico. …

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch ruled that Trump could proceed with redirecting the funds while litigation over the issue continues.

That’s less than 10% of the funds required.

What Were Robespierre’s Pronouns? By Peggy Noonan.

We start with the moral and political catastrophe that was the French Revolution. It was more a nationwide psychotic break than a revolt — a great nation at its own throat, swept by a spirit not only of regicide but suicide. For 10 years they simply enjoyed killing each other. …

Scholars like to make a distinction between the Revolution and the Terror that followed, but “the Terror was merely 1789 with a higher body count.” From the Storming of the Bastille onward, “it was apparent that violence was not just an unfortunate side effect. … It was the Revolution’s source of collective energy. It was what made the Revolution revolutionary.” …

Classic case of a leftist purity spiral.

It was a revolution largely run by sociopaths. One, Robespierre, the “messianic schoolmaster,” saw it as an opportunity for the moral instruction of the nation. Everything would be politicized, no part of the citizen’s life left untouched.

As man was governed by an “empire of images,” in the words of a Jacobin intellectual, the new régime would provide new images to shape new thoughts. There would be pageants, and new names for things. They would change time itself! The first year of the new Republic was no longer 1792, it was Year One. To detach farmers from their superstitions, their Gregorian calendar and its saints’ days, they would rename the months. The first month would be in the fall, named for the harvest. There would be no more weeks, just three 10-day periods each month.

Robespierre’s execution by fellow leftists

There is the latest speech guide from the academy, the Inclusive Communications Task Force at Colorado State University. Don’t call people “American,” it directs: “This erases other cultures.” Don’t say a person is mad or a lunatic, call him “surprising/wild” or “sad.” “Eskimo,” “freshman” and “illegal alien” are out. “You guys” should be replaced by “all/folks.” Don’t say “male” or “female”; say “man,” “woman” or “gender non-binary.”

In one way it’s the nonsense we’ve all grown used to, but it should be said that there’s an aspect of self-infatuation, of arrogance, in telling people they must reorder the common language to suit your ideological preferences. There is something mad in thinking you should control the names of things. Or perhaps I mean surprising/wild.

I see in it a spirit similar to that of the Terror. There is a tone of, “I am your moral teacher. Because you are incapable of sensitivity, I will help you, dumb farmer. I will start with the language you speak.” …

Here a handy guide from a website purporting to help human-resources departments in midsize businesses. It is headlined. “Gender Neutral Pronouns—What They Are & How to Use Them.”

He/She—Zie, Sie, Ey, Ve, Tey, E

Him/Her—Zim, Sie, Em, Ver, Ter, Em

His/Her—Zir, Hir, Eir, Vis, Tem, Eir

Himself/Herself—Zieself, Hirself, Eirself, Verself, Terself, Emself …

We are being asked to memorize all this, to change hundreds of years of grammar and usage, to accommodate the needs or demands of a group that perceives itself as beleaguered….

It’s all insane. All of it.

But we’re moving forward, renaming the months and the sexes, reordering the language.

You wonder how the people who push all this got so much power. But then, how did Robespierre?

Read it all. Another leftist purity spiral is clearly developing today, especially in the USA.

Why “Everyone” Wants to Leave China, by Al Fin.

A year ago, only a few manufacturers in China were thinking about leaving. Now the strategic picture has changed [Forbes]:

In December, I had one company getting ready to source elsewhere,” he says. “Then I went back in May. They are all thinking about it now,” he says about the Chinese manufacturers targeting new hubs in southeast Asia. Mexico is also on the radar screen.

“You’re going to see more companies exploring outside of China,” Scannapieco says. “Unless you’re in China to sell to China, why be there? It’s becoming too much of a risk.”

It is not just US companies that are trying to reduce their risk exposure in China. European companies are doing the same thing.

Around 25% of credit in China is “rotten debt,” essentially dead meat. And another 25% is embodied in “dying meat.” Other than foreign investment which has been largely based upon foreign market demand, domestic investment in China is based upon political considerations — which tends to be economically misplaced, and often gets out of control. And as we have seen, foreign investments have been falling away recently, and more of China’s economy is tied up in Potemkin-style artificial stimulus. …

90% of China’s millionaires are close relatives of party officials. The spice must flow, as they say, and spice does not flow from companies that have been allowed to die — even if that is what should have happened.

Like the Soviet Union, it was a “one off” event in its economy:

China’s rapid growth of the past few decades was based upon foreign investment and technology transfer, plus a few historic trends and events which will never happen again:

China’s growth in the last three decades received an impetus from several events that were “one-offs”—by their nature, they can’t happen again. Bringing previously unproductive peasants by the hundreds of millions to work in urban factories, that’s over. Joining the World Trade Organization, that’s over. Enjoying a huge working-age population with few children to raise thanks to the One-Child Policy—not only is that over, it has left a demographic hangover in the form of a gender-skewed citizenry whose median age is rising rapidly, straining the nation’s minimal social security system. __ Decline and Fall

China received a rare series of minor miracles to become as “faux rich” as it has become. Those miracles will never return. And as Chairman Xi’s China grows more rigid and authoritarian in the belief that the Chinese economy and Chinese people will continue to support it no matter how badly it misbehaves — the underlying fundamentals are eroding from under the feet of the dictatorship.

Johnson realises his destiny as Britain loses its credibility, by Paul Kelly.

The bluster, bravado and unpredictability of Boris Johnson, now realising his destiny, cannot conceal the omens of British decline as Johnson seeks to remove Britain from the EU and counter the impression of a nation perilously divided and losing global influence.

“The doubters, the doomsters, the gloomsters, they are going to get it wrong again,” he declared in characteristic fashion after his audience with the Queen. “The people who bet against Britain are going to lose their shirts because we’re going to restore trust in our democracy.” …

Boris in full flight

Johnson won the leadership contest for one reason — while he is unlikely to salvage Britain from its trajectory of chaotic decline, he might salvage the Tory government and keep the conservatives in office, thereby denying power to the loathsome socialist throwback, Jeremy Corbyn. Johnson is a vote winner: he won two elections as mayor of London, a progressive city; he has a capacity to appeal to both conservative and progressive voters; and he spearheaded the successful Brexit campaign, despite having initially wavered about which side he would back. …

Having purged his ministerial opponents, Johnson now leads a “no excuses” pro-Brexit government with his pledge to quit the EU on October 31, “no ifs or buts”.

The opening rhetoric from Boris had a ring of Winston Churchill. The challenge he faces is the most daunting for Britain since World War II.  …

Churchill presided over a country of growing unity in wartime while Johnson will preside over a country of bedrock divisions sure to endure for many years in peacetime. In war, the British people ­accepted huge sacrifices; in Brexit, the people are unlikely to accept economic hardship with equanimity. …

Finally comes the prospect of a permanently fractured polity since much of Westminster, Whitehall, the city of London and the media will be alienated from an outcome they never believed was Britain’s destiny. In cultural and economic terms, Brexit will probably widen the gulf between journalist David Goodhart’s “somewhere” and “anywhere” Britons; that is, ­between nationalists and cosmopolitans.

Folau sacking is just one of many, by Katrina Grace Kelly.

Australian workers are often accused of having poor productivity, and this could be part of the reason — we lead the world when it comes to posting on social media, according to SocialMediaNews.com.au.

About 15 million people are active users on Facebook, with one in two of those using it daily. Nine million people post on Instagram and more than five million tweet on Twitter.

However, when it comes to social media activity and employment, less is best because no matter what precautions are taken there is no such thing as a private social media post. …

Contrary to popular opinion, Israel Folau’s case is not an important test case; it is just another case. The legislation has been around for many years and the boundaries on the social media issue were established long ago.

The Fair Work Commission has taken the view time and again that private posts can lead to a justified job loss, as long as there is a nexus between the post and the employment. …

Australian public servants, according to the federal government, must “ensure their actions don’t provide grounds for a reasonable person to conclude that they can’t serve the government of the day impartially”. Their code of conduct must be followed, employees must uphold “values and principles”, and refrain from criticism of policy or personnel.