Posted on 07/28/2013 7:08:35 PM PDT by jfd1776
The President of the United States is committed to supporting the rebels in Syria, in their effort to overthrow the vicious dictator Bashir Assad. No one on earth – not his supporters, not the authors of a dictionary, not his closest friends, would ever argue the point. He is a vicious dictator, a malevolent cancer on the map of the middle east.
So the American President commits to sending American aid – guns and ammo, technology and funding – to support the rebels trying to pull this vicious dictator off his perch. But who are these rebels?
They are loosely known as the Free Syria Army, a collection of militias that oppose Assad’s alliance with Iran and support of Hezbollah. Sound good so far? Well, keep listening. The FSA is essentially a collection of Muslim Brotherhood terror bands, a coalition of Sunni muslim groups that want to replace the bloodthirsty dominance of the middle east by Shi’ites with uncontested bloodthirsty dominance by Sunnis. The rebels are the Morsi wing, the Bin Laden wing – a more modern, more so-called religious version of the Saddam Hussein side of this endless struggle.
So who should we support? Assad has built his career on stirring up his forces to kill Jews, Christians, and other muslims. The Syrian rebellion has built their careers on stirring up their own protesters to kill Jews, Christians, and other muslims. To these cretins, a male western journalist was put on earth to be beheaded; a female western journalist was put on earth to be raped. And these journalists’ home country was put on earth to fund their efforts, either by purchasing petroleum or by donating money and equipment outright. The West is a piggy bank to be raided, until it can be completely taken over as part of the eventual caliphate.
How do we choose between them? When a foreign country is in revolution, the Western press displays videos on the TV, prints pictures on the front page, reports radio updates every hour on the hour. Another five, another ten, another thirty, another hundred, were massacred today by {fill in the blank: gunfire, bombs, riot control}. Surely we must choose a side; the violence is too severe to sit by and tolerate. We must figure out who the good guys are, and support them, before it’s too late.
Every Revolution is Different
Before we choose sides in the revolts of today, let’s look back in time at two of the world’s most famous revolutions, from over two centuries ago, products of The Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment saw many revolutions, but only two are incredibly memorable, locked into our consciousness as key moments in human history: The American War of Independence, known to its supporters as “The Glorious Cause,” and The French Revolution.
Though just over a decade apart, with even a few major leaders in common, the former was a stirring success, while the latter has gone down in history as an errant path, a descent into hell for one of the most ghastly decades in human history.
Why did ours succeed and theirs turn into such a horrific bloodbath?
There are many reasons, but most can be summed up concisely, and they may be instructive as we attempt to evaluate other revolutions.
1) Ours was based on a desire for freedom; theirs was based on a desire for revenge.
The American colonists were proud to be Englishmen –specifically, Englishmen with the protections of the Magna Carta and its successor documents, Englishmen with great distance from central government, Englishmen with almost unlimited opportunity in a wide-open country of abundant natural resources. It was only as King George III worked to curtail these freedoms and opportunities that the American colonists rebelled.
By contrast, the French revolutionaries – the mobs who rose to rebel (at least, after overthrowing the reasonable early leaders like the Marquis de Lafayette) were in it for revenge. Their speechmakers harangued the crowds about taking back the wealth from the upper classes, taking back the power from the nobility, taking back the authority from king and church. They wanted revenge. Now, it’s not fair to say that people who have been wronged don’t deserve revenge; sometimes they do. But it cannot be the principle motivating factor. Even two centuries later, that motivator remains a strong element of many a rebel, of many a political party, not just in France, but across the Pond, here in the USA, as well, as we see from the Occupy movement of recent years, for example.
But not then. Then, the difference between wanting to regain and preserve the rights of Englishmen, vs. wanting to pull down everyone higher up in France, was the key distinction that shines forth in any side-by-side analysis of the two revolutions. The one was honorable, proud, decent. The other was hateful, jealous, uninspired.
2) Ours was rooted in religious observance; theirs was rooted in hatred of religion and of God Himself.
The Founding Fathers of the United States arrived from Europe, for the most part, as a melting pot of Christian denominations. Calvinists and Lutherans, Quakers and Pilgrims, even a couple of Catholics and Jews - most came to these shores at least partially because their particular denomination wasn’t welcome at home. Catholics in Anglican England, Protestants in Catholic France, there were so many denominations that just didn’t fit in, back home in Europe, but they would be welcome here.
The American people were therefore very pro-religion, but tended to be opposed to the idea of an establishment of religion – the taxpayer-funding and government-mandating of any specific denomination. They had seen government mandates go wrong, veering into persecution, so they valued their freedom. Not a freedom from religion, by any means, but a freedom in favor of religion, supporting the choice of denomination.
The French, by contrast, had never left the country to seek more welcoming shores; they were still in the homeland of their ancestors, and many of the revolutionaries had a visceral hatred for the established Catholic Church, particularly with its well-known alliance with the crown, especially during the recent Kings, Louis XIII through XVI. It might be difficult indeed to be raised a pauper in 18th century France and not have a chip on the shoulder about the Church; there was plenty of evidence to support such prejudice.
The goals of these two brands of rebels, therefore, could hardly have been more different, where religion was concerned. The Americans valued their many denominations and wanted them to remain strong; the French largely hated their clerical class, and, fairly or unfairly, wanted to pull them down. Jealousy and a desire for revenge motivated the French in the area of religion as well.
3) An absolute contrast in governmental theory.
While the French revolutionaries intended to replace the leaders of an omnipotent government with their own new leaders of an even more omnipotent government, ours was based on a recognition of the dangers of all government, and a commitment to keep government highly limited, no matter who was in charge of it.
The American revolutionaries, for the most part, were already statesmen, elected to colonial legislatures from Georgia to New England, having had years, decades, whole careers, in which to contemplate political theory. The Americans cut their political teeth in Boston, in Williamsburg, in Annapolis, in Providence… they respected freedom, and understood what kinds of governmental powers – even in the hands of well-intentioned people – could impinge on the liberty of the citizens. They had no desire to raise up one of their own to replace George III as their leader; they desired only a nation that would preserve citizens’ liberties and never, never empower a George III again.
The French had no such experience. Except for a small percentage of the rebels, such as the quickly marginalized Lafayette and the corrupt Talleyrand, the French had been shut out of government for much of a century. Thousands of rebels sought greater power without having learned the skill in lesser branches, without having spent years debating legislation and studying the philosophy of governance. The majority, particularly after the failure of the first legislature and the rise of the Terror, had so little experience that only ever-more-gripping violence could hold sufficient appeal to retain their newfound raw power.
4) Behavior off the Battlefield.
The French leaders celebrated violence and mayhem in the streets, and bloodthirsty attacks on civilians and politicians. By contrast, America’s Glorious Cause was led by peaceful statesmen who strove continuously to restrain the violent impulses of the civilian patriots, and to restrict our bloodshed to the battlefield.
This point truly cannot be stressed enough. The examples we find in the history books are plentiful and profound. While the French convinced children to turn in their parents, and spouses to turn in their spouses to be executed, the American leaders did their level best to keep the civilian population peaceful and tolerant.
George Washington, for example, honorably refused pleas to just confiscate food from farmers for his army; he negotiated with farmers and often paid out of his own pocket, to ensure that this new nation would not be born in an unnecessary abuse of the public by their government.
And consider the time (on May 10, 1775) that a lynch mob attempted to grab college president Myles Cooper to hang him for being a loyalist on a patriot campus. Young patriot Alexander Hamilton, then just a college student (though he had anonymously sparred with his loyalist dean in the local press), delivered a famous and long speech to the crowd – about the need for our revolution to be moral and decent – giving his friends enough time to save Cooper's life…again, in order that our new nation would not be born in needless civilian bloodshed.
Stories such as these fill the accounts of this era. Certainly, there were abuses of loyalists here, just as there were decent people in the French revolution. But both such cases were the exception in their respective circumstances. The effort in America was to create a nation of respect, honor, peace and decency; the effort in France was to destroy, to rule, to dominate. Americans wanted liberty and prosperity to flow like a river; all that the French revolutionaries produced were rivers of blood.
Modern Times in the Middle East
Today, we are faced with a region at war with itself. The arab world is aflame, as Sunnis attack Shi’ites, as rulers attack their people, as people rebel against their rulers.
There are revolutions and tumult in many places, but most significantly in Egypt and Syria, where the terribly misnamed Arab Spring of 2011 gave birth to countless new theaters of conflict
The Egyptian experiment with a 2011 revolutionary government may in fact be over at last. The Muslim Brotherhood’s vicious Mohamed Morsi presided over a lawless, violent nation. Prior dictators Mubarek and Sadat had at least managed to keep the society safe enough for tourism, some commerce, the practice of Christianity by the nation’s Copts (who, by the way, precede the muslims in Egypt by six hundred years).
Under the rebels’ favorite, Morsi, the rabble were given carte blanche to attack Coptic churches, to assault westerners, to scare away the tourism that had often been the only source of foreign cash for much of their poor country. The experiment has been proven to be a disaster, and the army has taken over, in a late attempt to undo some of the damage these revolutionaries have done.
So what of Syria now, having seen the experiment of Egypt end in smoke and poverty and blood?
Looking at Egypt, comparing their revolutionaries to the telltale signs of the USA-vs.-France contrasts above, it is simple, in hindsight at least, to see that their revolutionaries were likely to go down the path of the French. They were bound to become lawless, destructive, violent… all the signs were there.
Syria has a bigger difference in the leadership; Assad has been far worse, both to his own people and to his neighbors, than Mubarek was. So a case can certainly be made that to see Assad removed from the world scene would indeed be a blessing.
But in government and in foreign affairs, there is never so simple a choice. We cannot look only at the removal of the leader and his government; we must look at what will replace it. And there is no doubt that the Free Syria Army is a Muslim Brotherhood ally that has already shared power, weapons, and intelligence with Al Qaeda and other regional and global terrorist organizations. They share motivations, bloodlust, autocratic intent, and warped pseudo-religious hatred with their forerunners in France and their cousins in Egypt.
If we support the FSA, we support Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. If we support the FSA, our American tax dollars and foreign policy backing will be used to directly kill Christians and Jews, and to further destabilize the region.
But there is a bright side: We are not forced to choose between them. We do not have to decide between supporting Assad and supporting the rebels. There is no law that says we must arm either side; we can declare “a pox on both their houses” and stay out of it.
In fact, unless Congress specifically directs action through a declaration of war, we MUST stay out of it. The President’s offer of support to the Muslim Brotherhood’s and Al Qaeda’s forces in Syria are illegal unless Congress authorizes it. If he abuses his office by illegally directing American funds to such terrorist organizations, it would be an impeachable offence. The United States is a bankrupt nation anyway; we cannot afford to blow up billions of dollars we don’t have in a foreign nation where there is no side worthy of our support.
There are two hundred countries on this earth, and too many are in trouble at any given point in time for us to help them all out. When the situation is as sad as this one, we have an obligation to, first of all, do no harm. We must stay out of it, praying for the poor innocent victims of the monsters on each side, certainly… but we must not tie our wagon to either horse.
As evil as both sides are in Syria today, we have no business giving the people of the world the idea that the beacon of freedom on earth would ever consciously identify with either of these bands of monsters.
Copyright 2013 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicago-based Customs broker and international trade compliance trainer. His columns are found regularly in Illinois Review.
Permission is hereby granted to forward freely, provided it is uncut and the byline and IR URL are included. Follow John F. Di Leo on Facebook or LinkedIn, or on Twitter at @johnfdileo.
good essay for the homeschooled children...
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