Posted on 09/08/2002 6:44:44 AM PDT by aculeus
APPROACHING the anniversary of September 11, (I hate the flip-hip term "9/11"), it would be hypocritical of me to harp on about how much we in Ireland share the American sense of sorrow. We are more anti-American now than at any time in our history.
Some of you will be outraged at this observation. You will point out that Ireland was one of the few European countries to shut up shop. Certainly we closed down for a day. After that we opened up on America.
In the aftermath of the attack, Americans who tuned into RTE radio, or read the Irish Times were appalled. They were particularly shocked by the anti-American attitude of our public intellectualism, which seemed to think that in some sense America had it coming.
To tell the truth, I was a little shocked too. True, the Irish Times pundits had got it wrong in the Gulf War, in Bosnia and in Kosovo. True, although they professed to be pro-Arab, they had opposed the American bombings which benefited the Muslims of Kosovo.
But I was still genuinely gobsmacked when the Fintan O'Fisks refused to rally to America's war against Bin Laden in Afghanistan. After all, Afghanistan was not Vietnam, that vicious moral mess redeemed only by the willingness of America's best and brightest citizens to cry, "Stop!"
But there was a credit side. America had fought a civil war against slavery. It had fought two world wars in defence of democracy even the radical Studs Terkel called WWII "The Good War". And the most mindless leftist could not pretend that Afghanistan was "all about oil".
September 11 had no subtle moral shadings. On one side, Osama bin Laden, a rich playboy who saw people as so many pawns in his political project to make the world the way he wanted it. On the other side: 3,000 workers black, white, yellow, Christian, Muslim, Jewish all sacrificed to a rich pup's political project.
So what was the problem for the Irish Times pundits? How could the best brains in Irish society fail to fully support an open society like America against Osama bin Laden's closed system of religious repression? Had they forgotten European Enlightenment's long struggle against Christian fundamentalism?
For a while I was a bit baffled by the failure of the Irish and European left to leap to the defence of a great democracy. But a book and an essay let a bit of light in. In The Passing of an Illusion, the brilliant French sociologist, Francois Furet (who had briefly been a communist) says the most enduring ideology in Europe has not been either communism or fascism, but hatred of the bourgeoisie.
From the French Revolution onwards, the children of the bourgeoisie (that bulwark of parliamentary democracy) had conspired to destroy democracy. Both fascists and communists set out to destroy the democratic middle class. Neither Hitler nor Stalin had time for clerks or kulaks.
After Furet, a major essay by an American commentator Robert Kagan American Power and European Weakness made a lot more sense. At the risk of losing some of his subtle nuances, I should like to attempt a short précis of his principal points. He starts by saying that Americans and Europeans no longer see the same world, or see it the same way.
These differences arise from different perceptions of power. Exhausted by all its wars, Europe now thinks it is "entering a post-historical paradise of peace and prosperity" where any political problem is amenable to argument. America does not share that starry-eyed attitude. America is "mired in history", and sees the world as a hard Hobbesian place where military might is still needed.
In part this is a difference of perception. Europeans (including the Irish) think America sees the world in black and white, reaches for the gun too fast, and has no time for diplomacy. They think Americans prefer coercion to persuasion, the stick to the carrot, and to demand closure of a problem rather than its procrastination. They believe that America is unimpressed by the UN, less inclined to work with other nations for common goals, and more willing to break with the law.
Kagan says the gap between American and European attitudes transcends the left-right divides.
American democrats have more in common with American republicans than they do with most European liberals. They have a darker vision of the world and are more willing to use force.
Even Bill Clinton, the beloved hero of the Irish left, has shown his claws. Clinton bombed Iraq, Afghanistan and the Sudan. And Kagan says that Europe would not have bombed Belgrade in 1999 if the Americans had not pushed them to do it.
That means that Irish liberals who cling to the comforting notion that Colin Powell is a dove suffer from a delusion. Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld have much more in common than Colin Powell and Jack Straw.
All of which strikes me as sound stuff. So let me give my own little own local gloss on Kagan's general argument. Europe thinks like Mary Robinson. It believes in checks and balances, in rights and rules, and that there is nothing that cannot be solved by negotiation.
By contrast, America thinks like Winston Churchill. It believes that there are bad people in the world, that they sometimes get state power, and that democracies have to use force against them. And that sometimes democracies appease too long.
It will not be news that I take an American view of the world. If the Irish liberal-left were really European, in the Mary Robinson manner, I might respect its views. But it is only European in the most despicable way. Not European enough to vote for Nice but European enough to be anti-American.
Nothing now survives of socialism except political correctness and anti-Americanism. And if Irish public intellectuals can live on that pap, they are welcome to it. God Bless America.
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