CIVILIZATION VS. BARBARISM:

Friend Paul Cella has a piece at Tech Central Station, Whither Burke?:

[S]ome conservatives imagine the role of America today as imperial, with a reformulated noblesse oblige, to democratize rather than civilize, animating it. I think this wild idea dangerous, impractical and largely divorced from reality; but even if it were advisable, do we really think that the country could undertake to implement it, with ruthlessness and perseverance? We have not that strength; it is imprudence to think so; the British imperialists, who failed as much as they succeeded, were made of sterner stuff than us. We cannot even get control of our own immigration policy where it concerns immigrants from countries full of our enemies. We can hardly educate our own children. For us, it is controversial to demand that school children be taught English; or to question the wisdom of that tedious old refrain about a certain religion of peace, which nevertheless inspires and countenances bloody mayhem on the occasion of a beauty contest. These are the symptoms of a profound spiritual loss of nerve; one of the more brazen symptoms of which is that hubris which gives rise to the notion that a nation ashamed of its own institutions and traditions, its own founts of inspiration, its own ideals as they developed organically out of a matrix of reason and faith, its own school of experience and inherited wisdom--that a nation ashamed of all these things, can nonetheless successfully export them to those resentful masses who long for our demise.

I share his concern about whether the nations with which we are at war can be democratized before they are civilized and am willing to accept the charge of cultural imperialism for believing that they are not today civilized in the Western sense. Meanwhile, however, on the latter point, it must obviously seem hypocritical for me to argue on the one hand that we should not have fought WWII or the Cold War because as a democracy there was never any chance of our fighting them with the "ruthlessness and perseverance" that they required, but, on the other, to argue that we should fight the war on terror and specifically on Islamicism/pan-Arabism. What, after all, makes it any more likely that we'll behave seriously this time? Look at the craven behavior of our democratic "allies" in France and elsewhere and at the protests in our streets and it does seem difficult to argue that we'll persevere for any considerable amount of time in the current struggle.

However, it is here that 9-11, the first WTC bombing, Khobar Towers, the African embassy bombings, the Cole, etc. enter the picture. For the brutal reality is that either Nazism or Communism could have taken over every each of European soil and never represented much of a threat to our liberties here in America. Either form of anti-human despotism might have slaughtered hundreds of millions of Europeans without ever directly implicating our own self-interest in their defeat. And, so long as we built and maintained a strong defensive force, we might have remained isolated until these evil empires crumbled under their own weight. But we live in a far different world today, one where suicide bombers put us all at risk and create a clear self-interest in taking on this ism, Islamicism, in a way that it was never "necessary" to combat Nazism and Communism. And, unfortunately, there seems little doubt that whenever our enthusiasm for the current war flags a new incident will come along to restore our will to fight. There may be lulls in the war, especially after a major action like the Iraq War, but they'll surely be followed by new terrorist attacks that begin the cycle all over again. The Osamas of the world are not done with us and so we can not be done with them.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 23, 2003 7:28 AM