Humiliation After Humiliation

ARE WE IN A war with the Islamists? Andrew C. McCarthy is worried that we don’t really take the Islamists seriously. But they are very serious about us. There is no doubt about what Sheikh Nasrullah, leader of Hezbollah, thinks. It’s war, war to the death.

“We consider [the United States] to be an enemy because it wants to humiliate our governments, our regimes, and our peoples. Because it is the greatest plunderer of our treasures, our oil, and our resources.... This American administration is our enemy. Our motto, which we are not afraid to repeat year after year, is: ‘Death to America!’”

No doubt there are thousands of Levantine antiquities in American museums that ought, in the fullness of time, to be returned to their lands of origin. But plundering oil and resources. Please! When paying $75 per barrel?

The real beef, of course, is the humiliation, the way it all went wrong and Islam became not the glorious expanding fist of God but a collapsed cultural backwater sustained only by the heroin of oil revenues.

The refusal of the United States to take the Islamists seriously, and to brand them as an enemy—the complaint of McCarthy—is not necessarily negligence: it is yet another humiliation for the Arabs of the Middle East.

As the Israelis uncover the surprising extent of the military infrastructure in southern Lebanon we can understand the meaning of all those reports from Iran about workers not getting paid for months at a time. Now we know where the payroll money went. It was sent to Lebanon to build up Hezbollah. And now a lot of it is being blown to blazes. Another humiliation.

If we review all the brave revolutions of the last century that promised death to America and death to capitalism we can observe a common problem. After all the fighting words there came the problem of delivering. And in every case the revolutionaries never had the power to carry out their boasts. The Bolsheviks wasted the fruitful land of Russia. The Nazis didn’t have the economic and military power to conquer Russia. Mao nearly starved China to death trying to become a world power by selling the seed corn of China’s peasants.

You have to wonder. How close is Iran to economic ruin? All these foreign adventures don’t come cheap.

It is relatively easy to find soft spots in the world and entice teenage thugs into the streets. But you have to create a power base if you really want to strut in the world.

The record of the last century is that if you want to lead a powerful nation then you need to create a powerful, capitalist economy, featuring a free people. It is a lesson that the Chinese seem to have learned in the last generation.

It seems to be the one thing that the Islamists cannot bring themselves to do. It is the final humiliation that the Islamists cannot even begin to face.

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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

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

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

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