Tuesday - December 19, 2006

On Being A Babysitter

What’s amazing is that I agree with Mr. Patteron’s editorial in the NY TIMES below. The idea that President Bush’s concept of promoting democracy and freedom in the Middle East is a liberal one is almost laughable though. Liberals and Conservatives have that one thing in common. The only difference between the two is that Liberals tend to think of freedom as that happy state of being able to do whatever one wants without any responsibility for one’s actions and the libertine attitude of “anything goes.”

Therein lies the reason why democracy will probably fail in the Middle East. Some people just aren’t wired correctly to be able to handle it. These people need a strong authoritative figure in charge to keep them from going over the edge. Yes, I’m referring to Liberals ... also to most of the Arabs and Persians in the Middle East and Asia. Their minds aren’t capable of handling freedom of expression, religion or tolerance of others without someone making sure they do it. Think of them as children. They need parents.

Saddam Hussein was a bad parent. So was the Ayatollah Khomeini. Osama Bin Laden wants to be a parent of the new caliphate but has already proven to be an abusive parent. On the flip side of the coin, Liberals in the West have had no parent to look up to for guidance for ages. Witness the almost glorification of Bill Clinton and (gasp!) Jimmy Carter. The Liberal establishment here in America has been perfectly willing to sit at “daddy’s” feet and worship their every word, no matter how wrong or deluded they were. Bill Clinton was a bad parent. Jimmy Carter was ... obviously adopted.

Yes, President Bush is a good man for thinking that the people of the Middle East deserve a chance at freedom and democracy. It is indeed a high-minded, liberal concept ... but are they ready for it? The Liberals in the West obviously aren’t ready for it. They have made that clear with demands for “gay marriage”, homosexuals in the military, struggling to remove religion from public view, imposing socialism and nanny states and finally, rigorously demanding politically correct speech from everyone. Too much freedom and no responsibility are traits of the neo-liberal today. Calling it “progressive” is a laughable disguise.

So, can the concept of personal freedom and democracy be introduced into the Middle East? Maybe, but first we have to learn how to teach people to handle it responsibly. A good place to start is with the Liberals in the West. If we can’t train them to behave rationally and accept responsibly for their actions, how can we expect the average man or woman in the Middle East to do the same?

After all, if we can’t keep our “children” here in the West from trashing the house, how can we expect to do the same with someone else’s children in Syria, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, etc.? Our own children are pampered, wild and reckless in their demands. The neighbor’s children are merely wild and reckless. Both are decidedly intent on trashing the sandbox, are easily offended and seem intent on breaking all the rules. As good parents, maybe we need to start administering the discipline that is called for. The “children”, both here in the West and in the Middle East are in dire need of adult supervision. The only question is ... where do we start first?

[موسليم] الناس حمقاء بشكل لا يصدّق الذي يحتاج أن يكون ضربت على الرأس إلى أن يقرّر هم أن يتصرّف [رأيشنلّي]. إن أنّ لا يعمل ، سيتمّ سيف إلى العنق [جوست س ولّ].

God’s Gift?
-- By ORLANDO PATTERSON
_{(NY TIMES EDITORIAL) - December 19, 2006}

One of the more disquieting aspects of the Iraqi occupation is that the president’s final rationale for it is a cherished, though groundless, liberal belief about freedom. As we now know, the war was motivated less by any real evidence of Iraqi involvement with terrorism than by the neoconservatives’ belief that they could stabilize the Middle East by spreading freedom there. Their erroneous assumption was a relic from the liberal past: the doctrine that freedom is a natural part of the human condition.

A disastrously simple-minded argument followed from this: that because freedom is instinctively “written in the hearts” of all peoples, all that is required for its spontaneous flowering in a country that has known only tyranny is the forceful removal of the tyrant and his party.

Once President Bush was beguiled by this argument he began to sound like a late-blooming schoolboy who had just discovered John Locke, the 17th-century founder of liberalism. In his second inaugural speech, Mr. Bush declared “complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom ... because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul.” Later an Arab-American audience was told, “No matter what your faith, freedom is God’s gift to every person in every nation.” Another speech more explicitly laid out the neoconservative agenda: “We believe that freedom can advance and change lives in the greater Middle East.”

A basic flaw in the approach of the president and his neoliberal (a k a neoconservative) advisers was their failure to distinguish Western beliefs about freedom from those critical features of it that non-Western peoples were likely to embrace.

Those of us who cherish liberty hold as part of the rhetoric that it is “written in our heart,” an essential part of our humanity. It is among the first civic lessons that we teach our children. But such legitimizing rhetoric should not blind us to the fact that freedom is neither instinctive nor universally desired, and that most of the world’s peoples have found so little need to express it that their indigenous languages did not even have a word for it before Western contact. It is, instead, a distinctive product of Western civilization, crafted through the centuries from its contingent social and political struggles and secular reflections, as well as its religious doctrines and conflicts.

Acknowledging the Western social origins of freedom in no way implies that we abandon the effort to make it universal. We do so, however, not at the point of a gun but by persuasion — through diplomacy, intercultural conversation and public reason, encouraged, where necessary, with material incentives. From this can emerge a global regime wherein freedom is embraced as the best norm and practice for private life and government.

Just such a conversation has been under way since the first signing, in 1948, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the United Nations. Several Asian nations — some, like China, rather cynically, and others, like Singapore, with more robust reasoning — have vigorously contested elements of the culture of freedom, especially its individualism, on the grounds that it is inconsistent with the more communal focus of their own cultures. The doctrine of freedom, however, with its own rich communitarian heritage, can easily disarm and even co-opt such arguments.

The good news is that freedom has been steadily carrying the day: nearly all nations now at least proclaim universal human rights as an ideal, though many are yet to put their constitutional commitments to practice. Freedom House’s data show the share of the world’s genuinely free countries increasing from 25 to 46 percent between 1975 and 2005.

The bad news is Iraq. Apart from the horrible toll in American and Iraqi lives, two disastrous consequences seem likely to follow from this debacle. One is the possibility that, by the time America extricates itself, most Iraqis and other Middle Easterners will have come to identify freedom with chaos, deprivation and national humiliation. The other is that most Americans will become so disgusted with foreign engagements that a new insularism will be forced on their leaders in which the last thing that voters would wish to hear is any talk about the global promotion of freedom, whatever “God’s gift” and the “longing of the soul.”

Posted by The Skipper     on 12/19/2006 at 10:24 AM   
Filed Under: • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat Leftists • Editorials • Iraq • Middle-East •  
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Not that very many people ever read this far down, but this blog was the creation of Allan Kelly and his friend Vilmar. Vilmar moved on to his own blog some time ago, and Allan ran this place alone until his sudden and unexpected death partway through 2006. We all miss him. A lot. Even though he is gone this site will always still be more than a little bit his. We who are left to carry on the BMEWS tradition owe him a great debt of gratitude, and we hope to be able to pay that back by following his last advice to us all:

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It's been a long strange trip without you Skipper, but thanks for pointing us in the right direction and giving us a swift kick in the behind to get us going. Keep lookin' down on us, will ya? Thanks.

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