Excerpted from Michael Ledeen’s War & Democracy

The belief in the inevitability of peace and democracy rested on one of the great conceits of the European Enlightenment, namely the belief in the perfectibility of man. In this view, man’s basic goodness (as found in “the state of nature”) had been corrupted by a selfish society (a notion that finds much favor among today’s more extreme Greens), but that once the heavy weight of misguided was lifted, man’s intrinsic goodness would reemerge. In our modern rendition of that Enlightenment folly, an appeal to reason is sufficient to change the world. Back in the Clinton years, it was widely believed that all future conflict would be solely economic; the age of military warfare had passed, henceforth products, markets, and human ingenuity would determine who is rightly top dog and who needs to get with the program. And so the defense budget was slashed, military men and women were treated with contempt by the president and his wife, and we turned inward. After all, if historical inevitability ruled, why bother with national security? Tyranny was considered a passing phenomenon, headed for the ash heap, and certainly no threat to us.

It was all wrong, as are most beliefs in the vast impersonal forces that are held to determine human events. The great constant in man’s affairs is change, the direction of that change is determined by human actions, and many of the men and women who take those determinant actions are evil. Machiavelli is not the only sage who recognized it, but he put it nicely: “Man is more inclined to do evil than to do good.” Rational statecraft starts right there.

The American Founders knew it: recognizing man’s innate capacity for evil, they designed a system of checks and balances to thwart the accumulation of power by any group, lest the entire enterprise fall into wicked hands. They knew the battle for liberty would never end, Benjamin Franklin famously warned we would have to fight to keep our republic.
Continue reading…. War and Democracy

Dropped into a comment by reader Just Another Richard and well worth quoting….

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
C.S. Lewis

From Did She Say That

When I was about 11 or 12, my mother rented all the episodes of ROOTS. I tried to watch it, but I couldn’t. I got real emotional and left the room. My siblings stayed and watched, but my mother joined me in another room. She told me it was O.K. because it was the past. It’s important to know the past. I didn’t watch the complete Roots, until I was 20.

When I was 14, we went to the slavery museum in Baltimore, Maryland. It’s a wax museum with a duplicate of a slave ship. I almost vomited when they started explaining what it might smell like, how long they had to endure these conditions, and how many of them killed themselves. I hated it.

I’m not big on apologies though. I never had to ride on a slave ship. I never wore chains around my feet, waist, and arms. I never had to endure 1/10th of the things slaves had to endure.

If the United States government wants to apologize, do it to all the people that love excuses. I love progression. If it weren’t for slavery, I wouldn’t be an American. If it weren’t for slavery, black people wouldn’t be apart of this great melting pot. That’s the truth.

The real apology should come from us Black Folk. I know I’m going to catch some flack for this, but fuck it.
Continue Reading…U.S. Govenment Apologizes For Slavery; Now It’s Our Turn

If you haven’t read Ligneus’s post on Adam Smith, do so. If men like that governed today in America, we wouldn’t have to deal with pompous pretenders like Obama or McCain. In the comments I remarked as follows:

“Must be the redneck in me, but i could never have conceived that so many would willingly throw down freedom”.

Indeed, it’s the fact that so many Americans are willing to allow the government to control their lives that has me flabbergasted. I have no answers for it, but “Just Another Richard” left an eloquent response, reproduced below.

Ah but zee, you fail to see the human capacity for self delusion, together with its ever faithful companion slothfulness. With a choice between a hard road and the easy way out, people will always rationalize the easy way…its so much simpler, after all, what’s to think about…be happy

The fact that, in the burdensome chores of struggle and endeavor, can be found our own redemption, where the sense of accomplishment can give meaning to existence, where the heavy load of actually thinking for yourself trains the mind to become self sufficient, to be an instrument of its own creation. To free the mind from the irrationality of conspiring minds and petty spiteful dogmas.

Now this does not always result in setting one’s self upon the right path, indeed, many an intellectual’s personal biography can attest to the wasted path to hedonism. But the mind, cautioned by reason and human dignity, aware of its own limitations in a cosmos of such vast and incomprehensible possibilities, does not flee from its own inconsequence, but embraces its own insignificance, for this in truth is what we are; to do otherwise is to rage against our very being, which as you can see, has such devastating and deleterious consequences, crushing aspiration and leaving shattered lives. Just look to those lost souls fleeing their very own lives in pursuit of a release by means of the excessive use of drink or drugs. There is nothing wrong in inconsequence, it is the natural state of being, IT IS LIFE. Those foolish ghosts, forever chasing the ephemeral illusion of fame, celebrity, fortune and power, are the natural born destroyers of what is most sacred in this earthly realm … LIFE.

Like many another, I too struggled in this life to find my meaning, to find my place, and just like most others, I too struggled with my fears, my failings and my doubts. But it was only when I reflected back upon my own soul, that I was able to discover myself. No outside bauble or trinket could satiate my hunger. No greater accumulation of wealth (hah…funny), no position of power in a hierarchy, could gain anything more than fleeting moments of respite from the longing. Only when I came to terms with myself, I cast off the goals of a shallow society, and recognized myself for what I was…just a simple individual, living out this tiny span, did I learn to accept myself on my terms and NOT someone else’s.

The fact that Marxism is a cult of death and destruction is obscured by the illusion that tomorrow we will be one step closer to Utopia if only we believe, is now indisputable and is the most cruel lie humanity could embrace. But for the mind that has cast aside all belief in any greater meaning, or indeed, any meaning, what is there left to do, for when such a mind looks inward it can be filled with nothing but fear and loathing, for there is nothing of substance to be found within; but to join in with the pack to create Utopia upon the hill tomorrow, gives meaning to an empty shell, a meaningless, and soul crushing existence, where that ultimate fear, greater even than the fear of death, must never be faced…the fear of facing one’s self.

I would only add that men cannot make the spiritual journey that Richard describes in a Marxist or Islamic society. The West grants men the freedom to find their way, or lose their way. Sadly, too many Americans are lost.

From….Flanders Fields

Americans can no longer trust their own government, because that government is not operating for the best and vital interests of America. The natural functions of our government have had it’s processes co opted by a coalition of internationalist forces which operate on behalf of private corporate interests. Those internationalist forces and the corporate leftists, which together make up most of the corporatist network, are intent upon establishing a socialized world accountable to their doctrinal command, and they are not of an American-loving, freedom-loving intent. They may have American faces, but they do not have American loyalties. Their loyalty is to themselves and to a leftist doctrine for controlling the peoples and resources of the world.
Continue reading...American Patriotism Internationally Applied

Bush’s ignorance about the true nature of Islam has put all of the West in harms way.

Bush makes some very glib, naive (very Western) assumptions that are quite false: “I believe, deep in the soul of every man, woman, and child on the face of this Earth is the desire to live in a free society. And I also believe free societies yield peace. And, therefore, this notion of two states living side by side in peace is based upon the universality of freedom, and if given a chance, the Palestinian people will work for freedom.”

This very commonly held assumption ignores religion and ideology and their power. The Islamic vision is not one of freedom — which is, in a way, actually anathema to religious Muslims. Islam is about submission. (Islam in Arabic means surrender!) And radical Islam is about imposing that submission. Palestinians passionately committed to their Islam and the word of Muhammad are more concerned with driving out the Jews and controlling the land they believe is theirs than with instituting “freedoms.”

To establish policy without this essential understanding is to miss the boat entirely and to generate an unstable situation.

Arlene from Israel