Posted on 09/09/2006 5:37:04 AM PDT by A. Pole
"The war we fight today is more than a military conflict," said President Bush to the American Legion. "It is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century."
But if the ideology of our enemy is "Islamo-fascism," what is the ideology of George W. Bush? According to James Montanye, writing in the Independent Review, it is "democratic fundamentalism." Montanye borrows Joseph Schumpeter's depiction of Marxism to describe it.
Like Marxism, he writes, democratic fundamentalism "presents, first, a system of ultimate ends that embody the meaning of life and are absolute standards by which to judge events and actions; and, secondly, a guide to those ends which implies a plan of salvation and the indication of the evil from which mankind, or a chosen section of mankind, is to be saved. ... It belongs to that subgroup (of 'isms') which promises paradise this side of the grave."
Ideology is substitute religion, and Bush's beliefs were on display in his address to the Legion, where he painted the "decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century" in terms of good and evil.
"On the one side are those who believe in the values of freedom ... the right of all people to speak and worship and live in liberty. And on the other side are those driven by the values of tyranny and extremism, the right of a self-appointed few to impose their fanatical views on all the rest."
Casting one's cause in such terms can be effective in wartime. In his Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural, Lincoln converted a war to crush Southern secession into a crusade to end slavery and save democracy on earth.
Wilson recast a European war of imperial powers as a " war to end war" and "make the world safe for democracy." FDR and Churchill in the Atlantic Charter talked of securing "the Four Freedoms," but were soon colluding to hand over Eastern Europe to the worst tyrant and mass murderer of the 20th century.
The peril of ideology is that it rarely comports with reality and is contradicted by history, thus leading inevitably to disillusionment and tragedy. Consider but a few of the assertions in Bush's address.
Said Bush, we know by "history and logic" that "promoting democracy is the surest way to build security." But history and logic teach, rather, what George Washington taught: The best way to preserve peace is to be prepared for war and to stay out of wars that are none of the nation's business.
"Democracies don't attack each other or threaten the peace," said Bush. How does he then explain the War of 1812, when we went to war against Britain, when she was standing up to Napoleon? What about the War Between the States? Were not the seceding states democratic? What about the Boer War, begun by the Brits? What about World War I, fought between the world's democracies, which also happened to be empires ruling subject peoples?
In May 1901, a 26-year-old Tory member of Parliament rose to issue a prophetic warning: "Democracy is more vindictive than cabinets. The wars of peoples will be more terrible than the wars of kings." Considering the war that came in 1914 and the vindictive peace it produced, giving us Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler, was not Churchill more right than Bush?
"Governments accountable to the people focus on building roads and schools – not weapons of mass destruction," said Bush. But is it not the democracies – Israel, India, Britain, France, the United States – that possess a preponderance of nuclear weapons? Are they all disarming? Were not the Western nations first to invent and use poison gas and atom bombs?
Insisting it is the lack of freedom that fuels terrorism, Bush declares, "Young people who have a say in their future are less likely to search for meaning in extremism." Tell it to Mussolini and the Blackshirts. Tell it to the Nazis, who loathed the free republic of Weimar, as did the communists.
"Citizens who can join a peaceful political party are less likely to join a terrorist organization." But the West has been plagued by terrorists since the anarchists. The Baader-Meinhoff Gang in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Puerto Ricans who tried to kill Harry Truman, the London subway bombers were all raised in freedom.
"Dissidents with the freedom to protest around the clock," said the president, "are less likely to blow themselves up at rush hour." But Hamas and Islamic Jihad resort to suicide bombing because they think it a far more effective way to overthrow Israeli rule than marching with signs.
What Bush passed over in his speech is that it is the autocratic regimes in Cairo, Riyadh and Amman that hold back the pent-up animosity toward America and Israel, and free elections that have advanced Hamas, Hezbollah, the Moslem Brotherhood and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power.
In Iraq, we see the inevitable tragedy of ideology, of allowing some intellectual construct, not rooted in reality, to take control of the minds of men.
You did not get it. Winston Churchill misquoted and twisted the original ancient saying. And since he was well educated and smart he did it on purpose.
Yep. Academic liberals hate markets because markets don't reward them to their inflated expectations. And Pat hates democracy because it just doesn't recognize his inflated sense of political genius.
Well, it is YOU who wrote "The vacuum came from not finishing the job in the first place in WWI", Have you forgotten?
Gawd, talk about twisting. Is it a CHURCHILL QUOTE or is it not, no matter what the source of the concept?
right, we minded our own business under Clinton and all it got us was escalation from them.
Yeah, Churchill wasn't a real proponent of democracy. Buchanan's a genius. Churchill misquotes and is doltish. Pat's the Great Man. Why can't the people see it?
The most annoying thing about Patsy is his laugh when he is asked a hard question. Very similar to Her Heinous.
you have a far more complicated epistemologic problem than either Churchill or I. Is that a Chomsky analysis of Churchill?
Yeah, that kind of "If the world worked the way I wanted it to, I'd be the monarch and you wouldn't dare even to address me in that insolent manner" laugh. That kind of "throw him in the dungeon!" laugh.
Indeed...he forms a troika with the late Sam Francis and the still living Joseph Sobran. The three are good writers who share a major distaste for those of the Hebrew persuasion.
Excellent insight...I never saw it that way, but you are correctamundo, DB.
Buchanan is an excellent example of how bitterness corrodes the mind ... such a sour little man now, working right where he belongs, on a spin cycle network.
Mr. Sobran used to write at National Review. He crafted lucid prose then and always enlightened. He, like Buchanan, appears to think they're quite brave for taking on the Jews with their controversial statements. In fact, all it shows is that they have some deep flaw. In Buchanan's case it's at least in part a huge ego and a goof ball sanctimonious streak that let's him think he alone can preach to those Jews and straighten them out. The man is a weirdo.
He's been bitter a long time. He, like many Democrats, was against removing Saddam from Kuwait. Again, like some Democrats, he's a long history of being an apologists for Saddam and his ilk and a basher of America's motives and Israel's in the effort to undermine tyranny in the Middle East.
Well, Pat did learn his Jew-hatred at his dinner table growing up in DC. He learned his lessons from his dad quite well. He is no Johnnie-Come-Lately to this...
How else could you describe a speechwriter who decides he should be President of the United States?
Well, I should have written "an egotistical weirdo." I still remember when he was considering running against Reagan in the run up to the second term.
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