Posted by
THE GREAT SATAN on Thursday, August 17, 2006 11:03:50 AM
In an August 15, 2006 Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Ross Douthat describes the “1938ists,” a group “…for whom Iran’s march toward nuclear power is the equivalent of Hitler’s 1930’s brinkmanship. While most ‘38ists still support the decision to invade Iraq, they increasingly see that struggle as the prelude to a broader regional conflict, and worry that we’re engaged in Munich-esque appeasement.”
Writing on the same day in National Review Online, Emanuele Ottolenghi brilliantly describes the perils of appeasement, and the West’s intellectual addiction to it. He is worth quoting extensively: “…Perhaps it is easier to argue that the problem (Muslim anger) has a solution (change of foreign policy), rather than recognize that our belief in rationality and our optimism about human nature are sometimes misplaced. It is a legacy of the Enlightenment that we find it so hard to deal with madness and fanaticism. We are always inclined to seek an alternative explanation: There is a cause — our policies — there is an effect — their anger — and there is a solution — our change of policy. Western impulses to explain away the threat of terror and seek a solution to the problem are empowering in a way. We have a diagnosis and we have a cure. But they are also misleading.”
“…For the political and media responses to the plot to bomb up to ten U.S. airliners in mid air above the Atlantic reflect its two-faced intellectual and philosophical heritage. There is that great optimism in human nature, the belief in rationality and science, the conviction that everything has an explanation and that every problem has a solution. There is the unbending belief that “all men are created equals,” that we are entitled to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Then there is the dark side, not of Locke and Montesquieu, not of the American Revolution and the Federalists, but of the French terror, of the tyranny of ideas over the liberty of men, of the totalitarian regimes that sprang out of Enlightenment philosophy no less than liberal democracies did.”
“…Western inability to look at evil in the face, call it for what it is, and respond to it instead of caving in to its blackmail is understandable. Evil makes little sense to us. It is irrational, illogical, and it defies our expectation that all human beings somehow must want the same things: a job, a house, a decent and peaceful life. Those who defy this logic cannot be crazy. They must be banging on the table because they have been “deprived” and “left out” of the grand bargain that our affluent society has given virtually everyone else. Give them what they want, and we will have our quiet back. This logic is behind the fascination for Hezbollah that is gripping much of Europe’s hard Left. Their romance with the new revolutionaries is driven by their old fetishes: Hassan Nasrallah is a new Che Guevara; American hegemony and its imperialism in the Middle East must be stopped. The freedom of oppressed people must be defended. The aggressor comes from the West, not the East. Those amongst us who attack the West are not evil, just misguided. Their methods are questionable, but their cause is just. If we only indulged them in their political demands, all would be well.
Yet, this logic only leaves us exposed to the dark side of the Enlightenment, that tradition that raised the Idea of Liberty above the Life of the people it was supposed to grant Happiness and in the process murdered untold millions for its triumph. Radical Islam has been rightly labeled as fascist, not only because much of its roots lie in the West, but also because it acts like a totalitarian ideology, whose main aim is to create a new world order based on an Idea, the triumph of which justifies the murder of anyone who stands in the way and the death of million others as sacrifice to the cause. What, after all, is the difference between those who are ready to kill thousands of innocents in the name of radical Islam and, say, Cambridge historian Eric Hobsbawm — secular and Communist — who claimed once that had the triumph of Communism cost the lives of 20 million people, that would have been a fair price to pay? Life is cheap in the pursuit of a grand idea, whichever this idea happens to be. And there will always be intellectuals ready to lend their pen to obscure its true nature.
We should understand this logic. It is part of the Western intellectual heritage. Socialism is not a child of the East — it was deadly in Europe. Fascism is also a child of the West — and it also killed tens of millions across the Continent. The West tried to “address the grievances” of an angry and humiliated Germany in the 1930s. Why do we assume that “addressing grievances” is going to go differently this time?”
In light of the above, the coming conflict between the US and Iran will be put off as long as possible, but once begun, will be bloodier and more destructive than might have been otherwise. Such is the liberal, enlightened West’s historical experience.