The Iran Cloud Gets Bigger

A SOMBER MARK Steyn writes about the Iran business, and wonders about what lies ahead as Iran acquires nuclear weapons and the west does nothing. In an article in City Journal he thinks about Facing Down Iran.

For this to be a mortal struggle, as the cold war was, the question is: Are they a credible enemy to us?
For a projection of the likely outcome, the question is: Are we a credible enemy to them?

The problem really is, as it was in the 1930s, that the center ground of public opinion doesn’t want to do anything about the gathering storm. Back then people had had enough of war and they believed that we ought to live in a world without war. Today we have major sectors of educated public opinion in the west that believe that nobody wants war, nobody wants conflict, and if they do it is because they are oppressed victims of the west.

Given the reality of western public opinion and its aversion to conflict we shall not rise to oppose Iran until the mullahs have used nuclear weapons and there is no choice left but to go to war, just as Britain and France went to war against Hitler, finally, when the writing on the wall became the real, live invasion of Poland.

Again and again humans have confidently rung down the curtain on conflict and war. But conflict and killing have always been at the center of life. Living things live by eating other living things. In the west we have pushed the killing out of sight, and there are plenty of people who insist that we eat without killing, or at least without killing animals. (But isn’t killing a plant ultimately the same thing?)

The enthusiasts of Islamism insist that killing is OK if it is in the service of Islam. As Steyn writes, killing is OK even if it means the use of nuclear weapons:

Iran’s hardline spiritual leaders have issued an unprecedented new fatwa, or holy order, sanctioning the use of atomic weapons against its enemies.

Let us take the Iranians at their word, that they intend to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East. That means that the “unthinkable” is going to become reality.

Probably before the United States uses nuclear weapons we will see nuclear weapons used on a non-Iranian city. And then, unfortunately, nuclear warfare will not be unthinkable any more.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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