Posted on 02/24/2005 12:35:22 PM PST by Alex Marko
The first neighbourhood that I lived in when I arrived in London in the 1960s was Earl's Court. Needless to say, I had much opportunity to acquaint myself with the Australian accent. What struck me immediately was its uncanny resemblance to the speech of my own relatives in Boston. The Boston accent, like the Australian, effectively eliminated the pronunciation of the letter "r" when it came after the letter "a" in a word. So when I first moved to New York as a child, I was ridiculed at school for saying, "pahk the cah", instead of "parrrk the carrr", as most Americans outside of New England did. As children do, I learnt pretty quickly to over-emphasise my "r"s like everybody else.
But when I heard all those Aussies with their broad "a"s and aspirated "r"s, I wondered why these peoples on the other side of the planet from one another spoke so similarly. Could it be that both accents were descended from the same British period roots: that the way they talked in Sydney and in Boston was actually the 18th-century English pronunciation preserved in something close to its original form?
This entirely unresearched, academically unsound theory of mine came back to me as I listened to George W Bush telling Europeans that his campaign for liberty and democracy arose directly from ideals that had originated with them. You could almost hear the injured bewilderment in his voice: this was all your idea in the first place. Whatever happened to your commitment to the values enshrined in Magna Carta and the French Revolution - the doctrine of the rights of man and of government by consent? And if you are still committed to those principles, why can you not see the need to extend them to parts of the world that are still deprived of them?
Eighteenth-century spoken English may or may not survive in America and in Australia, but 18th-century ideas about liberty and the redeeming quality of democracy certainly seem to have found a permanent home in exile.
The enlightenment idealism of Europe was exported to the rebellious colonies and, in geographical isolation, it flourished. While Europeans themselves undermined their own great democratic project with their ancient hatreds and their aristocratic nostalgia, the naïve Americans kept the dream intact, building it into a written constitution (which was an 18th-century idea itself).
Europe has pretty much given up on the whole undertaking now: we tried it and it ended in the Terror. We went through our phase of proselytising democratic revolution with Bonaparte and look where that ended. Spreading freedom? All that amounts to is killing off one generation of autocrats and replacing them with another. Trust the people? They are just as likely to follow a fascist demagogue as to perpetuate the sacred principle of justice.
Better to make your cynical peace with the worst aspects of human nature than to pretend that free men will always choose good over evil. Much better to make a mutually profitable trade-off behind the scenes than to expose political decisions to the popular will. What evidence is there that the people actually know what is best for them? Most charitably, the European philosophy of government - shortly to be permanently installed under the EU constitution - is paternalistic. At worst, it is arrogant and authoritarian.
But whatever it is, it no longer has a belief in real democracy of the kind that Americans recognise - government of the people, by the people and for the people - at its heart.
That is why Jacques Chirac - the very embodiment of corrupt European political cynicism - and George Bush can never, ever find true common ground. When the President tries to give credit where it is due - to the European authorship of democratic revolution - it sounds faintly sarcastic.
I have written before on this page that European hatred of the United States has a great deal to do with jealousy of American self-belief. But there is an element of shame there, too. Because Europe knows that it has sold the pass. It has traded liberty for security: the safety of consensus, the reassuring unfreedom of bureaucratic control and an over-regulated economy.
American talk about spreading freedom is not just gauche; it is a reproach.
But it is too late now. Europe has had disillusionments too great to permit a return to that purist belief in the transforming power of democratic institutions. What was left standing in the ruins of the Bonapartist experiment was effectively demolished by the two world wars. The people - with nothing but the raw franchise - will never be allowed to run amok again. Europeans cannot be trusted to govern themselves. Their affairs will be administered by an EU oligarchy. And if they do not trust their own populations, European leaders are scarcely going to support handing out freedom to anarchic tribal societies that scarcely know what the right to vote is for. (Never mind that the only way to learn the value of democracy is to practise it.)
Europeans have found something better, and more readily controlled, as a substitute for personal liberty. They have found wealth: mass prosperity and the kind of government-subsidised economic security that their countries, traumatised by generations of war and unrest, have never known. Since the Cold War ended, they have been able to consolidate the post-war economic miracle with a "peace dividend": all that money that used to be spent on arms could go into more and more generous welfare and pension arrangements. So now they are not even fit to defend themselves, or to sort out a mess in their own Balkan backyard. Why should they join in any crazy scheme to bring peace to the rest of the world?
interesting read ping
Wow, that was good!
A very good piece; and I think many American liberals are also very cynical about freedom and democracy. During the Elian Gonzales affair, many liberals openly said he would be better off living under Castro's dictatorship than in America. There attitude seems to be: if you have free health care, who needs freedom, who needs democracy, who needs free speech? And if freedom means that you are less "safe" than in a dictatorship, then away with freedom.
Great read. Thanks.
Europe keeps burning the furniture in order to heat the house.
Look at what the EU is doing to the US.
The ending of the Arms Embargo will mean the end of NATO.
As Pres. Bush said in Germany, if you go ahead with this, I will not be in the way of Congress to enact retaliatory measures.
The EU (especially Germany, France and Belgium), will as usual, stand at the sidelines and act innocent. They want a conflict between China, Japan and the US. They figure that weakening those 3 willimprove their bankrupt socialist economy.
I foresee a Trade war in retaliation, disolution of NATO followed up by more intense action.
This is probably the worst situation the world has known since the height of the cold war.
Not a smart move by the EU. Indirectly they are challenging the US through their backstabbing and diatribe.
By the way, Health care in Germany isn't free. They pay 14.6% of income matched by their employer and both the health care system and their social security system (19.6% of income times 2)are broke.
Islam will bring war to Europe within twenty years. And it will take yet another passage through blood and fire before Europe can again join with the free nations of the world and pursue those democratic ideals which they have rejected.
Hits nail on head!!!
Nail-on-the-head bump!
Europeans are to Americans as lap dogs are to guards dogs.
Bttt! Good post!
Old Europe, with its endless Wars of Conquest, with its endless parade of tyrants, taught the people that Human Nature can be known in its worst and in its most powerful.
When democracy gave the "mob" a chnce to rule, the mob followed the same path of tyranny and human nature as the tyrants had followed.
This the legacy that old Europe has left to the planet. Now, their lousy habits are being repeated by Muslims, who think that tyranny is the only way. Tyranny by clerics or tyranny by despots = still tyranny.
With our trade imbalance...we too are burning the furniture to heat the house...the only country not doing so is China, but this is a fixible problem where Europe's is not.
Agreed. However, it's like deja vu all over again, vis a vis, the 1930's. Simply replace League of Nations for the European Union, and the parallels are unsettling. Replace US-Asia trade war with German expansion and false opportunities abound for those who intend to take advantage.
During the early 1930's, the Hawker Aircraft board of directors was convinced that Nazi Germany was going to be a threat to many of the Continental European countries like Poland, Czechoslovakia, etc. Hawker designed the "Hurricane" fighter and planned production for 1000 aircraft to be sold at "export", an unheard of amount in pre-war Britain and America.
The rest is history. No Hurricanes were sold overseas because the British needed them severely by 1939. It's a classic, "be careful what you wish for. Europe will suffer greatly if America and Asia go at it.
I don't trust "old europe, especially France, Belgium and Germany.
I would try to preempt the threat and create new alliances, isolating the EU. Russia, China, Australia, Japan and India do come to mind. Throw a few countries of the willing in there.
In a couple of years, buerocratic Brussels will not let any of the Eurinal countries support us anymore.
True, but if China and the US wind up in a trade war or war over Taiwan, the Chinese will need to burn the house to heat the house. The Chinese may be big, but they are not strong or wealthy. They would sink back into the Red Bog of the 1950's or plead to Japan for help.
"it will take yet another passage through blood and fire before Europe can again join with the free nations of the world"
I hope you're right. My feeling is that the cynicism and trauma and guilt run so deep (in certain countries) that there will be an Islamic dark age on the continent before the dawn comes again. If "freedom" and "democracy" are such empty words to them as the article postulates, then there is really nothing to defend. Post-modernist, relativist thought tells us that no ideology is better the another. Rule by Islamic dictatorship is the same as rule by the democratic masses - who is anyone to say that they are different? What a sad, defeatist mindset.
In every case cited, Europeans brought the trauma on themselves and are going to pay the piper. It is ironic that people who ruthlessly colonized Arabic nations would some day, in turn, be colonized by them. The question is how many American lives these European countries are worth?
And many of them think we're the provincial idiots!
Europe, notably Continental Europe, still has trouble shaking the mud of feudalism off its crudely made boots. Whether King, Duke, Fuhrer, or bureaucrat, Europeans need authority for their security.
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