When I went to college I had my biggest problem with the discipline of history. It may have started when I was a kid in Hungary and first ran up against official "scholars" who rewrote Hungary's history-renamed the streets in Budapest, rewrote all the textbooks, and reshuffled the holidays, and even completely recast Western intellectual history.

Under Marxism there was room for just one account of the development of philosophy, namely, what Karl Marx and his epigones wrote.

At first I thought that in a relatively free society historians could be trusted a lot more than under Marxism. But I am not so sure about this now.

To begin with, the one major institution of American society that's very similar to what it had been under communism is education.

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In the advertisement "A Renewed American Agenda" (USA Today, May 4, 2006) - placed by The Bedell World Citizenship Fund of Spirit Lake, Iowa - the organization urges us to "Recognize that All Americans Have A Right to Medical Care."

I suppose they mean well but in fact they are perpetrating a gross misunderstanding about individual rights.

Medical care is a value doctors, nurses and other medical professionals would, if they were free men and women, provide to those they would choose as recipients, on terms they regard as acceptable.

These provisions are not owed to anyone. Doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals may not be placed into involuntary servitude to those needing their services. The relationships must be voluntary, no matter how vital those services are to the recipients.

The belief that others may justly be placed into involuntary servitude so as to secure funds to pay medical professionals - who then will service those who need their work - is a gross moral error.

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[To The Point salutes the courageous Chinese lady, Wenyi Wang, who publicly denounced Communist oppression in China to Hu Jintao at the White House yesterday, April 20. 

 

Hu Jintao governed Tibet for several years, brutally tyrannizing the Tibetan people.  One of those Tibetans is Phuntsog Nyidron, who tells her story here.  For information on how to help liberate Tibet, go to FreeTibet.org. ---JW]

I was 19 years old when I made the protest that resulted in my imprisonment for 15 years. It happened in 1989, when my country, Tibet, was under martial law.

Together with a group of fellow Tibetan nuns, I went to the Barkhor area of central Lhasa, and we shouted, 'Long live the Dalai Lama!' and 'Free Tibet.' We had been inspired by the news that His Holiness the Dalai Lama had just won the Nobel Peace Prize, and we wanted to make a statement of our continued loyalty to him.
    

I did not experience freedom again until I was finally released to the care of the D.C.-based International Campaign for Tibet last month on March 15.

On my arrival in Washington, I was told the Chinese government had apparently allowed me to go to the U.S. to help ensure a smooth and successful visit by Chinese President Hu Jintao, who meets President Bush.

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 It is lucky America has more than two centuries of mostly calm experience with self-government. We are going to need to fall back on that invaluable patrimony if the immigration debate continues as it has started this season.

The Senate is attempting to legislate into the teeth of the will of the American public. The Senate Judiciary Committeemen - and probably a majority of the Senate - are convinced that they know that the American people don't know what is best for them. 

The senators should remember that they are American senators, not Roman proconsuls. Nor is the chairman of the Judiciary Committee some latter-day Praetor Maximus. 

But if they would be dictators, it would be nice if they could at least be wise (until such time as the people can electorally kick their regrettable backsides out of town). It was gut-wrenching to watch the senators prattle on in their idle ignorance concerning the manifold economic benefits that will accrue to the body politic if we can just cram a few million more uneducated illegals into the country.  I guess ignorance loves company.

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If surgeons wielded scalpels as carelessly as to day's journalists misuse language, the mortality rate in our hospitals would soar. The latest example of this deadly abuse of terminology was the media's declaration of "civil war" in Iraq.

It was the equivalent of describing vandalism as genocide. The blaze faded, only to be reignited briefly by former Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's statement last weekend that Iraq was in a civil war - a claim he swiftly retracted, to the disappointment of anchormen and -women everywhere.

Perhaps it's time to consider what a civil war actually is.

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Denial is an often useful innate human trait. Few of us would be able to function in the present if we did not put out of mind many unpleasant realities - such as our inevitable death. The Woody Allen character in the movie "Annie Hall" stated the comic extreme version of not using the denial mechanism when, as a child he refused to do his homework because in 5 billion years the sun would explode, "So, what's the use?"

But when a person, or a society, denies emerging or imminent dangers, the peace of mind it gains will be extremely short term, while the harm may be sustained or fatal.

Most of the world today not only is in denial concerning the truly appalling likely consequences of the rise of radical Islam, it often refuses to even accept unambiguous evidence of its existence.

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BAGHDAD.  I'm trying. I've been trying all week. The other day, I drove another 30 miles or so on the streets and alleys of Baghdad. I'm looking for the civil war that The New York Times declared. And I just can't find it.

Maybe actually being on the ground in Iraq prevents me from seeing it. Perhaps the view's clearer from Manhattan. It could be that my background as an intelligence officer didn't give me the right skills. And riding around with the U.S. Army, looking at things first-hand, is certainly a technique to which The New York Times wouldn't stoop in such an hour of crisis.

Let me tell you what I saw anyway. Rolling with the "instant Infantry" gunners of the 1st Platoon of Bravo Battery, 4-320 Field Artillery, I saw children and teenagers in a Shia slum jumping up and down and cheering our troops as they drove by. Cheering our troops.

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