0 comment Sunday, November 16, 2014 | admin
Of the commentary I've read on the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, this piece by Andrew McCarthy at NRO makes the most sense -- although I disagree with his ultimate conclusion.
Benazir Bhutto Killed by the Real Pakistan
A recent CNN poll showed that 46 percent of Pakistanis approve of Osama bin Laden. Aspirants to the American presidency should hope to score so highly in the United States. In Pakistan, though, the al-Qaeda emir easily beat out that country�s current president, Pervez Musharraf, who polled at 38 percent. President George Bush, the face of a campaign to bring democracy � or, at least, some form of sharia-lite that might pass for democracy � to the Islamic world, registered nine percent. Nine!
If you want to know what to make of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto�s murder today in Pakistan, ponder that.
There is the Pakistan of our fantasy. The burgeoning democracy in whose vanguard are judges and lawyers and human rights activists using the "rule of law" as a cudgel to bring down a military junta.
In the fantasy, Bhutto, an attractive, American-educated socialist whose prominent family made common cause with Soviets and whose tenures were rife with corruption, was somehow the second coming of James Madison.
Then there is the real Pakistan: an enemy of the United States and the West.''
I agree about the 'real Pakistan' -- but I would go further: I would say 'the real Islam.'
Listening to the various presidental candidates' pronouncements on this event gives me the impression that most of them hope to use this to their political advantage; McCain beating his chest and emphasizing his 'experience' in dealing with military matters, and Giuliani grabbing another pretext for reminding us of his superior leadership after 9/11. Thompson seems to be taking a similar tone, as also Hillary Clinton. It seems that overall, the assassination will be used to try to justify even more military (and political) intervention in the Middle East and to 'destroy Al Qaeda' at whatever cost to us in human life or money.
Only Ron Paul said what seems evident to me: our interventionist policies are at least in part a factor in this assassination and the whole chaotic picture there.
In an interview from a few months ago, Benazir Bhutto herself lent some credence to that view:
Fortunately for her, the West�s urgent fear of Pakistan as a breeding ground for terrorists has given Bhutto the chance to redefine herself. During most of her exile, she was considered irrelevant by Washington. Then she hired Hillary Clinton�s image-maker, Mark Penn, and began playing up to Musharraf.
When Musharraf�s popularity dove in 2007 after his jailing of judges, lawyers and journalists, Bhutto suddenly emerged as America�s "ideal." U.S. politicians needed her�progressive, secular, female, willing to compromise�to put a face of democracy on their support for Musharraf�s autocratic rule.
True to form, Bhutto manipulated Musharraf to erase the charges against her, promising not to return to Pakistan until after national elections. She then broke that promise. But once she sensed that even her stalwarts were appalled at an arranged political marriage to a dictator, she spurned Musharraf and became her own woman again.
I sense a dark reflection in both Bhutto�s psychological history and her country�s constant turmoil�a compulsion to repeat past traumas. A prime example is the way she returned to her country on Oct. 18.
Ignoring warnings of terrorist cells plotting to kill her, Bhutto presided from atop a caravan over a parade that took 10 hours to snake through Karachi. Near midnight, the streetlights went out. The police disappeared. Her feet swollen from standing, Bhutto ducked below into a steel command center to remove her sandals. Moments later, a bomb went off. "I had a sickening, sickening feeling," she tells me. She now believes the bomb was wired to an infant that a man had been trying to hand to her. She recalls saying to the people with her, "Don�t go outside�another blast will follow." It did.
[...]
Despite the corrosion of her reputation by corruption and compromise, Bhutto appears to be America�s strongest anchor in the effort to turn back the extremist Islamic tide threatening to engulf Pakistan. What would you like to tell President Bush? I ask this riddle of a woman.
She would tell him, she replies, that propping up Musharraf�s government, which is infested with radical Islamists, is only hastening disaster. "I would say, 'Your policy of supporting dictatorship is breaking up my country.� I now think al-Qaeda can be marching on Islamabad in two to four years."
It seems to me that our policy of meddling in the affairs of Islamic countries in particular comes at too high a cost and with too small a return. How has our experiment in 'democracy' worked so far? We have no great success stories to point to. A while back we were told that the 'elections' in Iraq were a great triumph, yet we can see now that those elections were not the turning point we were assured they would be. And how many lives and how many dollars have we spent since then?
Bhutto's assassination appears to be another instance of our meddling, in the name of 'democracy' and in fighting 'Islamofascism', resulting in unforeseen complications. Some are predicting civil war in Pakistan now, and even if that civil war does not materialize, Pakistan will still be a chaotic, terror-plagued country, and an unreliable 'ally' at best.
We will see whether this event leads to more military involvement on our part, and whether the hawkish candidates make political hay of this story. I am afraid that may be the case, but it may be just as likely that the substantial portion of the American people who are fed up with our 'war on terror' will balk at the idea of an escalation of that conflict, and a deployment of more troops to the Middle East. It could go either way.
Of course, reading the commentary over at the big GOP forums, it's easy to get the impression that this event whets the appetite for more military involvement. Many of the commenters agree very much with Andrew McCarthy's concluding comments:
But we should at least stop fooling ourselves. Jihadists are not going to be wished away, rule-of-lawed into submission, or democratized out of existence.
If you really want democracy and the rule of law in places like Pakistan, you need to kill the jihadists first. Or they�ll kill you, just like, today, they killed Benazir Bhutto.''
No, I can't agree with McCarthy there, though his piece made sense until that last paragraph or so.
Leaving aside the fact that we are not waging all-out war against jihadists or anybody else, but fighting a politically correct war against a 'few extremists' who are causing all the trouble, there is still the inescapable fact that, even if we were committed to all-out war against Islamic enemies, Moslems number between 1 billion and a billion and a half worldwide. Rather a staggering number, even if we believe that nonsense about only a 'tiny minority' being pro- jihad. How many troops can we marshal against such a numerous enemy, and in so many places? It's foolishness to think we can militarily defeat or wipe out 'jihadists' singlehandedly, or even with the pitifully few allies we have in our current 'war on terror.'
Since we can't destroy them, and since hoping to convert them either to another religion or to a milder, less violent form of Islam (which does not exist, by the way) the best we can do is to minimize involvement in their affairs. They have plenty of Islamic countries in which to practice their way of life; there is no need for them to be given entree to our countries in the West, because in doing so we entangle ourselves in their affairs and we give them political power in our countries. We have to let them run their countries as they see fit; what else can we do? We are not omnipotent, nor should we try to manipulate the whole world to our advantage. Doing so only increases the resentment and animosity that many Moslems and others already feel towards us.
That is far from saying that 'we cause Islamic terrorism', a position which many people try to attribute to Ron Paul, but it is apparent that the more involvement we have with Islam, the more we welcome Moslems into our country and the more we meddle in their countries, the greater the possibility of conflict and terrorism in our countries.
And there is simply the undeniable fact that we cannot work our will around the world; we cannot, physically, impose our way of life, and more importantly our way of thinking on alien peoples. They are not like us; the foolish utopian universalists on the right who imagine that everybody is interchangeable and that 'everybody wants democracy' are living in a delusional world. And even when given 'democracy', many in the Islamic world use it to install some very tyrannical regimes. Democracy in the sense of the vote or representative rule is only a method, it is not a guarantee that a free society will result.
We need to give up our messianism or our paternalism, and leave the people in the rest of the world to do what they like as long as they don't threaten us. But as long as we invade, intervene in, and invite, the world, we will have to deal with unfortunate consequences.
Benazir Bhutto Killed by the Real Pakistan
A recent CNN poll showed that 46 percent of Pakistanis approve of Osama bin Laden. Aspirants to the American presidency should hope to score so highly in the United States. In Pakistan, though, the al-Qaeda emir easily beat out that country�s current president, Pervez Musharraf, who polled at 38 percent. President George Bush, the face of a campaign to bring democracy � or, at least, some form of sharia-lite that might pass for democracy � to the Islamic world, registered nine percent. Nine!
If you want to know what to make of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto�s murder today in Pakistan, ponder that.
There is the Pakistan of our fantasy. The burgeoning democracy in whose vanguard are judges and lawyers and human rights activists using the "rule of law" as a cudgel to bring down a military junta.
In the fantasy, Bhutto, an attractive, American-educated socialist whose prominent family made common cause with Soviets and whose tenures were rife with corruption, was somehow the second coming of James Madison.
Then there is the real Pakistan: an enemy of the United States and the West.''
I agree about the 'real Pakistan' -- but I would go further: I would say 'the real Islam.'
Listening to the various presidental candidates' pronouncements on this event gives me the impression that most of them hope to use this to their political advantage; McCain beating his chest and emphasizing his 'experience' in dealing with military matters, and Giuliani grabbing another pretext for reminding us of his superior leadership after 9/11. Thompson seems to be taking a similar tone, as also Hillary Clinton. It seems that overall, the assassination will be used to try to justify even more military (and political) intervention in the Middle East and to 'destroy Al Qaeda' at whatever cost to us in human life or money.
Only Ron Paul said what seems evident to me: our interventionist policies are at least in part a factor in this assassination and the whole chaotic picture there.
In an interview from a few months ago, Benazir Bhutto herself lent some credence to that view:
Fortunately for her, the West�s urgent fear of Pakistan as a breeding ground for terrorists has given Bhutto the chance to redefine herself. During most of her exile, she was considered irrelevant by Washington. Then she hired Hillary Clinton�s image-maker, Mark Penn, and began playing up to Musharraf.
When Musharraf�s popularity dove in 2007 after his jailing of judges, lawyers and journalists, Bhutto suddenly emerged as America�s "ideal." U.S. politicians needed her�progressive, secular, female, willing to compromise�to put a face of democracy on their support for Musharraf�s autocratic rule.
True to form, Bhutto manipulated Musharraf to erase the charges against her, promising not to return to Pakistan until after national elections. She then broke that promise. But once she sensed that even her stalwarts were appalled at an arranged political marriage to a dictator, she spurned Musharraf and became her own woman again.
I sense a dark reflection in both Bhutto�s psychological history and her country�s constant turmoil�a compulsion to repeat past traumas. A prime example is the way she returned to her country on Oct. 18.
Ignoring warnings of terrorist cells plotting to kill her, Bhutto presided from atop a caravan over a parade that took 10 hours to snake through Karachi. Near midnight, the streetlights went out. The police disappeared. Her feet swollen from standing, Bhutto ducked below into a steel command center to remove her sandals. Moments later, a bomb went off. "I had a sickening, sickening feeling," she tells me. She now believes the bomb was wired to an infant that a man had been trying to hand to her. She recalls saying to the people with her, "Don�t go outside�another blast will follow." It did.
[...]
Despite the corrosion of her reputation by corruption and compromise, Bhutto appears to be America�s strongest anchor in the effort to turn back the extremist Islamic tide threatening to engulf Pakistan. What would you like to tell President Bush? I ask this riddle of a woman.
She would tell him, she replies, that propping up Musharraf�s government, which is infested with radical Islamists, is only hastening disaster. "I would say, 'Your policy of supporting dictatorship is breaking up my country.� I now think al-Qaeda can be marching on Islamabad in two to four years."
It seems to me that our policy of meddling in the affairs of Islamic countries in particular comes at too high a cost and with too small a return. How has our experiment in 'democracy' worked so far? We have no great success stories to point to. A while back we were told that the 'elections' in Iraq were a great triumph, yet we can see now that those elections were not the turning point we were assured they would be. And how many lives and how many dollars have we spent since then?
Bhutto's assassination appears to be another instance of our meddling, in the name of 'democracy' and in fighting 'Islamofascism', resulting in unforeseen complications. Some are predicting civil war in Pakistan now, and even if that civil war does not materialize, Pakistan will still be a chaotic, terror-plagued country, and an unreliable 'ally' at best.
We will see whether this event leads to more military involvement on our part, and whether the hawkish candidates make political hay of this story. I am afraid that may be the case, but it may be just as likely that the substantial portion of the American people who are fed up with our 'war on terror' will balk at the idea of an escalation of that conflict, and a deployment of more troops to the Middle East. It could go either way.
Of course, reading the commentary over at the big GOP forums, it's easy to get the impression that this event whets the appetite for more military involvement. Many of the commenters agree very much with Andrew McCarthy's concluding comments:
But we should at least stop fooling ourselves. Jihadists are not going to be wished away, rule-of-lawed into submission, or democratized out of existence.
If you really want democracy and the rule of law in places like Pakistan, you need to kill the jihadists first. Or they�ll kill you, just like, today, they killed Benazir Bhutto.''
No, I can't agree with McCarthy there, though his piece made sense until that last paragraph or so.
Leaving aside the fact that we are not waging all-out war against jihadists or anybody else, but fighting a politically correct war against a 'few extremists' who are causing all the trouble, there is still the inescapable fact that, even if we were committed to all-out war against Islamic enemies, Moslems number between 1 billion and a billion and a half worldwide. Rather a staggering number, even if we believe that nonsense about only a 'tiny minority' being pro- jihad. How many troops can we marshal against such a numerous enemy, and in so many places? It's foolishness to think we can militarily defeat or wipe out 'jihadists' singlehandedly, or even with the pitifully few allies we have in our current 'war on terror.'
Since we can't destroy them, and since hoping to convert them either to another religion or to a milder, less violent form of Islam (which does not exist, by the way) the best we can do is to minimize involvement in their affairs. They have plenty of Islamic countries in which to practice their way of life; there is no need for them to be given entree to our countries in the West, because in doing so we entangle ourselves in their affairs and we give them political power in our countries. We have to let them run their countries as they see fit; what else can we do? We are not omnipotent, nor should we try to manipulate the whole world to our advantage. Doing so only increases the resentment and animosity that many Moslems and others already feel towards us.
That is far from saying that 'we cause Islamic terrorism', a position which many people try to attribute to Ron Paul, but it is apparent that the more involvement we have with Islam, the more we welcome Moslems into our country and the more we meddle in their countries, the greater the possibility of conflict and terrorism in our countries.
And there is simply the undeniable fact that we cannot work our will around the world; we cannot, physically, impose our way of life, and more importantly our way of thinking on alien peoples. They are not like us; the foolish utopian universalists on the right who imagine that everybody is interchangeable and that 'everybody wants democracy' are living in a delusional world. And even when given 'democracy', many in the Islamic world use it to install some very tyrannical regimes. Democracy in the sense of the vote or representative rule is only a method, it is not a guarantee that a free society will result.
We need to give up our messianism or our paternalism, and leave the people in the rest of the world to do what they like as long as they don't threaten us. But as long as we invade, intervene in, and invite, the world, we will have to deal with unfortunate consequences.
Labels: Interventionism, Islam, Jihad, Middle East, Presidential Candidates, Wilsonianism
0 comment Friday, October 31, 2014 | admin
I noticed that all day, the news channels were covering Iran nonstop, with shaky video footage of the street disturbances. FoxNews seems to be covering it with the most urgency, with CNN slightly less so.
I've also checked in on the FReepers to see what the consensus over there is, and the original poster of this thread
challenges those FReepers who say 'it's none of our business' and asks "...how can we watch this brutality with good conscious [sic] and do nothing to stop it?"
Answers?
I am one of those the poster denounces, who say 'it's none of our business' and 'we can't be the world's policeman.'
Many Republicans argue that as Americans, we are the ones whose job it is to speak out for 'freedom' and 'democracy' in every country, and that when necessary, we have to be ready to intervene directly so that others can also have 'freedom' and 'liberty'. If not, we are hypocrites. Some are saying that Reagan was our exemplar, and he would surely intervene to 'free' the Iranians.
I can't help cynically wondering if some of those who decry our country's lack of action (so far) on behalf of the Iranians simply enjoy being able to criticize a Democrat President for his inaction. Mind you, I am not saying he is wise in his refraining from action; I think he is simply trying to stay above it and not ''take sides'' since he has aspirations to being some kind of world leader.
However, I don't know whether America will perhaps intervene and do something at some point.
And to be honest, I don't follow the internal politics of Iran to be able to judge their situation. I don't see it as a pressing need. We have our own worries right here in our country as to our own liberty.
For me, it all comes down to the question of whether every people is 'entitled' to freedom, or fit for it, or capable of it. Are all people meant to live under some kind of 'free' republican government, or representative system? And if so, should they not also be capable of establishing it themselves eventually? If freedom is obtained for someone without their having done so themselves, will they appreciate it, or more importantly, will they have what it takes to sustain it and preserve it, once having gotten it?
To me, it seems that this idea that we have to go around bestowing freedom and democracy around the world, and be the world's guarantor of what are vaguely designated as 'human rights', is an extension of colonialism in a way. Why should we have to be 'daddy' to the world, whether sugar daddy for immigrants, or Big-Stick Carrying Daddy for the world outside?
Benjamin Harrison spoke truly when he said "We Americans have no commission from God to police the world."
And Kipling said, accurately, that what we get in return for our troubles, when we try to shoulder others' burdens is "The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard".
I've also checked in on the FReepers to see what the consensus over there is, and the original poster of this thread
challenges those FReepers who say 'it's none of our business' and asks "...how can we watch this brutality with good conscious [sic] and do nothing to stop it?"
Answers?
I am one of those the poster denounces, who say 'it's none of our business' and 'we can't be the world's policeman.'
Many Republicans argue that as Americans, we are the ones whose job it is to speak out for 'freedom' and 'democracy' in every country, and that when necessary, we have to be ready to intervene directly so that others can also have 'freedom' and 'liberty'. If not, we are hypocrites. Some are saying that Reagan was our exemplar, and he would surely intervene to 'free' the Iranians.
I can't help cynically wondering if some of those who decry our country's lack of action (so far) on behalf of the Iranians simply enjoy being able to criticize a Democrat President for his inaction. Mind you, I am not saying he is wise in his refraining from action; I think he is simply trying to stay above it and not ''take sides'' since he has aspirations to being some kind of world leader.
However, I don't know whether America will perhaps intervene and do something at some point.
And to be honest, I don't follow the internal politics of Iran to be able to judge their situation. I don't see it as a pressing need. We have our own worries right here in our country as to our own liberty.
For me, it all comes down to the question of whether every people is 'entitled' to freedom, or fit for it, or capable of it. Are all people meant to live under some kind of 'free' republican government, or representative system? And if so, should they not also be capable of establishing it themselves eventually? If freedom is obtained for someone without their having done so themselves, will they appreciate it, or more importantly, will they have what it takes to sustain it and preserve it, once having gotten it?
To me, it seems that this idea that we have to go around bestowing freedom and democracy around the world, and be the world's guarantor of what are vaguely designated as 'human rights', is an extension of colonialism in a way. Why should we have to be 'daddy' to the world, whether sugar daddy for immigrants, or Big-Stick Carrying Daddy for the world outside?
Benjamin Harrison spoke truly when he said "We Americans have no commission from God to police the world."
And Kipling said, accurately, that what we get in return for our troubles, when we try to shoulder others' burdens is "The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard".
Labels: Democracy, Interventionism, Liberty, Middle East, Non-Interventionism
0 comment Monday, September 15, 2014 | admin
In the wake of recent events in Egypt, it is disheartening to see so much eagerness among some to intervene there in the cause of 'democracy', 'freedom, or whatever high-flown concepts. And this is after we have seen the results of our intervening in Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever else we have left our footprint.
I find it troubling that many people on the right apparently do not know that 'democracy' is not only no panacea for all human ills, but that many great thinkers through the centuries have spoken very bluntly against democracy, and not only against democracy, but against representative government in the case of peoples who are ill-suited or ill-prepared for it. It goes against the egalitarian romanticism of our age to point out that not all peoples are able to be self-governing. The idea is -- well, racist and unfair!
And it's good to remind some of the idealists out there that a great deal of evil has been wrought in the name of 'democracy', and a great many scoundrels have pretended to be acting in the name of 'democracy.'
"Democracy does not exist for a long time - it wastes, exhausts and destroys itself. There was never a democracy that didn't kill itself" - Samuel Adams
"The American form of government is the republic. The true freedom does not exist either under despotism or excesses of democracy" - Alexander Hamilton
"Democracy always leads to conflicts and instability, but never provides for the security of the citizens or their property. Usually it is very short at life, and very bloody at death" -- James Madison
"Democracy is the rule of mobs, tempted by newspaper editors" - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Democracy - it's the rule of the wishes of the mob, or to be exact ambitions and vices of its leaders. The Founding Fathers of our constitution created a republic, which is more different from a democracy, than a democracy is different from despotism " - Fisher Ames
"I have been always sure, that democracy sooner or late will destroy freedom, or civilization, or both" - Thomas Macaulay
"Democracy - it's the tyranny of majority, or more exact, the majority party, which through fraud or cohesion is manipulating the electoral process" - Lord Acton
''Without morals a republic cannot subsist any length of time; they therefore who are decrying the Christian religion�are undermining the solid foundation of morals, the best security for the duration of free governments.'' - Charles Carroll, Signer of Declaration of Independence, to James McHenry, November 4, 1800
"Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact." - Balzac
"It doesn't really matter what one writes into a constitution. The important thing is what the collective instinct eventually makes of it." - Oswald Spengler
''The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please; we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations which may be soon turned into complaints.'' - Edmund Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution
"Democracy is undone by the same vice that ruins oligarchy. But because democracy has embraced anarchy, the damage is more general and far worse, and its subjugation more complete. The truth is, a common rule holds for the seasons, for all the plants and the animals, and particularly for political societies: excess in one direction tends to provoke excess in the contrary direction" - Plato, The Republic
"I wish I could give better hopes of our southern brethren. [Mexico]� what will then become of them? Ignorance and bigotry, like other insanities, are incapable of self-government. They will fall under military despotism �" Thomas Jefferson, to Marquis de Lafayette, 4 May 1817
"Before the French Revolution, it was the prevailing opinion of our countrymen, that other nations were not free, because their despotic governments were too strong for the people. Of course, we were admonished to detest all existing governments, as so many lions in liberty�s path; and to expect by their downfall the happy opportunity, that every emancipated people would embrace, to secure their own equal rights for ever. France is supposed to have had this opportunity, and to have lost it. Ought we not then to be convinced, that something more is necessary to preserve liberty than to love it? Ought we not to see that when the people have destroyed all power but their own, they are the nearest possible to a despotism, the more uncontrolled for being new, and tenfold the more cruel for its hypocrisy." - Fisher Ames. The Dangers of American Liberty (1805)
"� it is a great and dangerous error to suppose that all people are equally entitled to liberty. [Liberty] is a reward to be earned, not a blessing to be gratuitously lavished on all alike � a reward reserved for the intelligent, the patriotic, the virtuous and deserving � and not a boon to be bestowed on a people too ignorant, degraded and vicious, to be capable either of appreciating or of enjoying it. � [A]n all-wise Providence has reserved [liberty], as the noblest and highest reward for the development of our faculties, moral and intellectual. A reward more appropriate than liberty could not be conferred on the deserving � nor a punishment inflicted on the undeserving more just, than to be subject to lawless and despotic rule. This dispensation seems to be the result of some fixed law � and every effort to disturb or defeat it, by attempting to elevate a people in the scale of liberty, above the point to which they are entitled to rise, must ever prove abortive, and end in disappointment. The progress of a people rising from a lower to a higher point in the scale of liberty, is necessarily slow � and by attempting to precipitate, we either retard, or permanently defeat it." - John C. Calhoun
"When the men of our State Department, especially after World War II, went all over the world trying to implant our form - freedom, balance in government, downward on cultures whose philosophy would never have produced it, it has, in almost every case, ended in some form of totalitarianism or authoritarianism." - Francis Schaeffer
"Even if it were desirable, America is not strong enough to police the world by military force. If that attempt is made, the blessings of liberty will be replaced by coercion and tyranny at home. Our Christian ideals cannot be exported to other lands by dollars and guns. Persuasion and example are the methods taught by the Carpenter of Nazareth, and if we believe in Christianity we should try to advance our ideals by his methods. We cannot practice might and force abroad and retain freedom at home.'' - Rep. Howard H. Buffett, during the Korean War
"After each war there is a little less democracy to save." - Brooks Atkinson
"If you want government to intervene domestically, you're a liberal. If you want government to intervene overseas, you're a conservative. If you want government to intervene everywhere, you're a moderate. If you don't want government to intervene anywhere, you're an extremist." - Joseph Sobran
"Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. An altogether different set of leaders have the confidence of one part of the country and of another. Their mutual antipathies are much stronger than their jealousy of the government... Above all, the grand and only effectual security in the last resort against the despotism of the government is in that case wanting: the sympathy of the army with the people. Soldiers to whose feelings half or three fourths of the subjects of the same government are foreigners, will have no more scruple in mowing them down, and no more reason to ask the reason why, than they would have in doing the same thing against declared enemies. - John Stuart Mill: Considerations on Representative Government
"There is no social engineering that can radically renovate a civilization and change its character, and at the same time keep it going, for civilization is an affair of the human spirit, and the direction of the human spirit cannot be reset by means that are, after all, mechanical. The best thing is to follow the order of nature, and let a moribund civilization simply rot away, and indulge what hope one can that it will be followed by one that is better. This is the course that nature will take with such a civilization anyway, in spite of anything we do or do not do. Revolts, revolutions, dictatorships, experiments and innovations in political practice, all merely mess up this process and make it a sadder and sorrier business than it need be. They are only so much machinery, and machinery will not express anything beyond the intentions and character of those who run it." - Albert Jay Nock, Journal Forgotten
''[In reference to the 'divine right to self-government' of all peoples]'What troubles me is that any civilized White man should write such nonsense. It discloses a total failure to understand or appreciate his own civilization. He has forgotten, if he ever knew, what centuries of effort it took to develop the capacity for self government. He has no real comprehension of the worth of what his forefathers bequeathed him. Consequently, he can have little pride in himself as the legatee.'' - Carleton Putnam, Race and Reality
I find it troubling that many people on the right apparently do not know that 'democracy' is not only no panacea for all human ills, but that many great thinkers through the centuries have spoken very bluntly against democracy, and not only against democracy, but against representative government in the case of peoples who are ill-suited or ill-prepared for it. It goes against the egalitarian romanticism of our age to point out that not all peoples are able to be self-governing. The idea is -- well, racist and unfair!
And it's good to remind some of the idealists out there that a great deal of evil has been wrought in the name of 'democracy', and a great many scoundrels have pretended to be acting in the name of 'democracy.'
"Democracy does not exist for a long time - it wastes, exhausts and destroys itself. There was never a democracy that didn't kill itself" - Samuel Adams
"The American form of government is the republic. The true freedom does not exist either under despotism or excesses of democracy" - Alexander Hamilton
"Democracy always leads to conflicts and instability, but never provides for the security of the citizens or their property. Usually it is very short at life, and very bloody at death" -- James Madison
"Democracy is the rule of mobs, tempted by newspaper editors" - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Democracy - it's the rule of the wishes of the mob, or to be exact ambitions and vices of its leaders. The Founding Fathers of our constitution created a republic, which is more different from a democracy, than a democracy is different from despotism " - Fisher Ames
"I have been always sure, that democracy sooner or late will destroy freedom, or civilization, or both" - Thomas Macaulay
"Democracy - it's the tyranny of majority, or more exact, the majority party, which through fraud or cohesion is manipulating the electoral process" - Lord Acton
''Without morals a republic cannot subsist any length of time; they therefore who are decrying the Christian religion�are undermining the solid foundation of morals, the best security for the duration of free governments.'' - Charles Carroll, Signer of Declaration of Independence, to James McHenry, November 4, 1800
"Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact." - Balzac
"It doesn't really matter what one writes into a constitution. The important thing is what the collective instinct eventually makes of it." - Oswald Spengler
''The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please; we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations which may be soon turned into complaints.'' - Edmund Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution
"Democracy is undone by the same vice that ruins oligarchy. But because democracy has embraced anarchy, the damage is more general and far worse, and its subjugation more complete. The truth is, a common rule holds for the seasons, for all the plants and the animals, and particularly for political societies: excess in one direction tends to provoke excess in the contrary direction" - Plato, The Republic
"I wish I could give better hopes of our southern brethren. [Mexico]� what will then become of them? Ignorance and bigotry, like other insanities, are incapable of self-government. They will fall under military despotism �" Thomas Jefferson, to Marquis de Lafayette, 4 May 1817
"Before the French Revolution, it was the prevailing opinion of our countrymen, that other nations were not free, because their despotic governments were too strong for the people. Of course, we were admonished to detest all existing governments, as so many lions in liberty�s path; and to expect by their downfall the happy opportunity, that every emancipated people would embrace, to secure their own equal rights for ever. France is supposed to have had this opportunity, and to have lost it. Ought we not then to be convinced, that something more is necessary to preserve liberty than to love it? Ought we not to see that when the people have destroyed all power but their own, they are the nearest possible to a despotism, the more uncontrolled for being new, and tenfold the more cruel for its hypocrisy." - Fisher Ames. The Dangers of American Liberty (1805)
"� it is a great and dangerous error to suppose that all people are equally entitled to liberty. [Liberty] is a reward to be earned, not a blessing to be gratuitously lavished on all alike � a reward reserved for the intelligent, the patriotic, the virtuous and deserving � and not a boon to be bestowed on a people too ignorant, degraded and vicious, to be capable either of appreciating or of enjoying it. � [A]n all-wise Providence has reserved [liberty], as the noblest and highest reward for the development of our faculties, moral and intellectual. A reward more appropriate than liberty could not be conferred on the deserving � nor a punishment inflicted on the undeserving more just, than to be subject to lawless and despotic rule. This dispensation seems to be the result of some fixed law � and every effort to disturb or defeat it, by attempting to elevate a people in the scale of liberty, above the point to which they are entitled to rise, must ever prove abortive, and end in disappointment. The progress of a people rising from a lower to a higher point in the scale of liberty, is necessarily slow � and by attempting to precipitate, we either retard, or permanently defeat it." - John C. Calhoun
"When the men of our State Department, especially after World War II, went all over the world trying to implant our form - freedom, balance in government, downward on cultures whose philosophy would never have produced it, it has, in almost every case, ended in some form of totalitarianism or authoritarianism." - Francis Schaeffer
"Even if it were desirable, America is not strong enough to police the world by military force. If that attempt is made, the blessings of liberty will be replaced by coercion and tyranny at home. Our Christian ideals cannot be exported to other lands by dollars and guns. Persuasion and example are the methods taught by the Carpenter of Nazareth, and if we believe in Christianity we should try to advance our ideals by his methods. We cannot practice might and force abroad and retain freedom at home.'' - Rep. Howard H. Buffett, during the Korean War
"After each war there is a little less democracy to save." - Brooks Atkinson
"If you want government to intervene domestically, you're a liberal. If you want government to intervene overseas, you're a conservative. If you want government to intervene everywhere, you're a moderate. If you don't want government to intervene anywhere, you're an extremist." - Joseph Sobran
"Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. An altogether different set of leaders have the confidence of one part of the country and of another. Their mutual antipathies are much stronger than their jealousy of the government... Above all, the grand and only effectual security in the last resort against the despotism of the government is in that case wanting: the sympathy of the army with the people. Soldiers to whose feelings half or three fourths of the subjects of the same government are foreigners, will have no more scruple in mowing them down, and no more reason to ask the reason why, than they would have in doing the same thing against declared enemies. - John Stuart Mill: Considerations on Representative Government
"There is no social engineering that can radically renovate a civilization and change its character, and at the same time keep it going, for civilization is an affair of the human spirit, and the direction of the human spirit cannot be reset by means that are, after all, mechanical. The best thing is to follow the order of nature, and let a moribund civilization simply rot away, and indulge what hope one can that it will be followed by one that is better. This is the course that nature will take with such a civilization anyway, in spite of anything we do or do not do. Revolts, revolutions, dictatorships, experiments and innovations in political practice, all merely mess up this process and make it a sadder and sorrier business than it need be. They are only so much machinery, and machinery will not express anything beyond the intentions and character of those who run it." - Albert Jay Nock, Journal Forgotten
''[In reference to the 'divine right to self-government' of all peoples]'What troubles me is that any civilized White man should write such nonsense. It discloses a total failure to understand or appreciate his own civilization. He has forgotten, if he ever knew, what centuries of effort it took to develop the capacity for self government. He has no real comprehension of the worth of what his forefathers bequeathed him. Consequently, he can have little pride in himself as the legatee.'' - Carleton Putnam, Race and Reality
Labels: Democracy, Freedom, Interventionism, Republican Government
0 comment Wednesday, July 23, 2014 | admin
Darrell Dow at the Dow Blog has a particularly fine post about 'Guilt, Atonement, and Foreign Policy.'
How has this desire for atonement driven American foreign policy? Through the systematic propagation of guilt, Americans have been indoctrinated with a belief that their history is little more than a series of power-grabs, a desolation of innocents. We are repeatedly assured that our history is simply an account of guilt toward Blacks, Jews, Chinese, Indians, Mexicans and ultimately the entire world.
The result of this defective history is a politics loaded down with guilt, in the face of which the populace assumes a posture of submissiveness. A foreign policy elite than is able to advance its interests by claiming a "humanitarian" justification for military adventurism, effectively placing guilt on one party in the midst of great complexity (e.g., Serbs vs. Bosnians, Russians vs. Georgians, etc.). Thus we are urged to atone for our sins by "saving" a "tyrannized" people from their "oppressors."
The other possibility is to heap the guilt upon ourselves and assume responsibility for every malady on all continents. All the guilt for the starving and oppressed of the world or the ruination and environmental degradation of the planet is thus placed squarely at our feet. Atonement in this scenario leads to foreign aid schemes and similar looting of taxpayers.
Good points. And so many of the Christians I know are heavily into guilt over poverty and want in the Third World, which they deal with by constantly fixating on the Third World in their charitable works, at the expense of charity nearer to home. But there isn't as much glory and applause and potential for patting oneself on the back with doing kindnesses to people right here at home.
But please read the rest of the post at Dow Blog.
How has this desire for atonement driven American foreign policy? Through the systematic propagation of guilt, Americans have been indoctrinated with a belief that their history is little more than a series of power-grabs, a desolation of innocents. We are repeatedly assured that our history is simply an account of guilt toward Blacks, Jews, Chinese, Indians, Mexicans and ultimately the entire world.
The result of this defective history is a politics loaded down with guilt, in the face of which the populace assumes a posture of submissiveness. A foreign policy elite than is able to advance its interests by claiming a "humanitarian" justification for military adventurism, effectively placing guilt on one party in the midst of great complexity (e.g., Serbs vs. Bosnians, Russians vs. Georgians, etc.). Thus we are urged to atone for our sins by "saving" a "tyrannized" people from their "oppressors."
The other possibility is to heap the guilt upon ourselves and assume responsibility for every malady on all continents. All the guilt for the starving and oppressed of the world or the ruination and environmental degradation of the planet is thus placed squarely at our feet. Atonement in this scenario leads to foreign aid schemes and similar looting of taxpayers.
Good points. And so many of the Christians I know are heavily into guilt over poverty and want in the Third World, which they deal with by constantly fixating on the Third World in their charitable works, at the expense of charity nearer to home. But there isn't as much glory and applause and potential for patting oneself on the back with doing kindnesses to people right here at home.
But please read the rest of the post at Dow Blog.
Labels: Democracy, Foreign Wars, Interventionism, Poverty, Racial Guilt