I've heard this guy a few times on The Rusty Humphries Show and I got the impression that he was another academic apologist for the neo-cons, something like Victor Davis Hanson. After reading a lecture he gave at the Heritage Foundation, I am beginning to think better of him and I was very impressed at the conclusions of his lecture:
Lesson one would be that liberal democracies do not make for good neighbors.
Second, the institutions of freedom are very difficult to transfer.
Third, the Romans learned that you cannot govern a world empire with a constitution designed for a small city-state. ... Did they wish to remain a free republic or be a superpower? They chose to remain a superpower and to accept the military dictatorship of Julius Caesar and his successors.
These are not the typical smiley-face conclusions of an apologist.
Monday, January 08, 2007
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As Karl Marx writes somewhere every science which is not a natural science is a historical science and this is certainly true about history of ideas. Unfortunately knowledge history appears to be the Achilles' heel of Rufus and his lectures about history of freedom suffer terribly because of this. In some of those lectures he completely misses the point because he ignores the historical aspect of the issues at hand. One of his "better" ideas is to call Hitler's National Socialism a socialist movement. He obviously hasn't read anything on the subject.
Besides, he is preching not lecturing.
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