Safe Haven
Gerard Baker, writing in the Times of London, points out what some of us have been saying for a while now: the absolute safest place in the world to be anti-American is in America. It is a scathing look at the absurdity of the way the world sees America – because of the vitriolic rants of America's own worst critics: Americans.
Anti-Americanism is on the wane at last. All over the world, Americans are being fêted once again as farsighted, liberating heroes.
Al Gore has won a Nobel Peace Prize, an Oscar and an Emmy, the triple crown of recognition from the self-adoring keepers of bien-pensant, elite liberal, global orthodoxy. Michael Moore is treated like a prophet in Cannes and Venice, as he peddles his tales of an America that poisons its poor, sends its blacks off to war and shoots itself. Whenever a loquacious Dixie Chick or a contumacious Sean Penn utters some excoriating remark about the depravity of his or her own country, audiences around the world nod their heads in sympathetic agreement. Bill Clinton, of course, is a god. Though protocol dictates that he may not say things that are too unkind about the country he once led, a nod and a wink will suffice.
It has always amused me that the same people who denounce America as a seething cesspit of blind obscurantist bigotry can’t see the irony that America itself produces its own best critics. When there’s a scab to be picked on the American body politic, no one does it with more loving attention, more rigorous focus on the detail, than Americans themselves.
It has always been this way. The fiercest and most effective opponents of US foreign policy in the 1960s were not the students in Paris or the Politburo in North Vietnam. They were Jane Fonda, Bobby Kennedy and Marvin Gaye.
Today I can only laugh when I see the popular portrayal of George Bush’s America in much of the international media. Supposedly serious commentators will say, without evident irony, that free speech is under attack, that Bush’s wiretapping, Guantanamo-building, tourist-fingerprinting regime is terrifying Americans into quiet, desperate acquiescence in the country’s proliferating crimes.
Do read it – it is brilliant – yet terrifying at the same time. Because Baker points to a really ugly side of the anti-Americans that America shelters, protects and tolerates:
Al Gore wants the US to give up its economic autonomy and submit to rule by binding international obligations to curb its carbon emissions. Some of the Democratic candidates for the presidency want to tie down the American Gulliver under a web of global treaties. The British Government, if recent speeches by ministers are to be believed, is now apparently seriously committed to the idea that only the UN has the legitimacy to determine how nations should behave. In other words, that a system that gives vetoes to China and Russia and honours the human rights contributions of countries such as Syria or North Korea should be accorded a full role in the promotion of the dignity of mankind.
The United Nations seats Zimbabwe on the committee for sustainable development. Bobby's little slice of socialist utopia as a role model for the world. Syria guarding the human rights of the world. We here in America let our dissidents undermine our very nation. Burma does things a bit differently when it comes to free speech, does it not?
Yet some of our most vocal internal critics would make America subservient to the Burmas and the Syrias and the Zimbabwes and the Venezuelas and the Cubas and the Irans – you get the point. Yes, we have free speech. We defend that free speech, obeying the adage of Voltaire: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’.” And we, as Americans must be strong enough to continue to allow it.
But we also must be smart enough not to follow it to our destruction.
Civilization, World news | Gaius October 18, 2007
By Mwalimu Daudi, October 18, 2007 @ 10:19 pm
Those who argue that free speech is one of our country’s greatest strengths don’t seem to realize that in reality it is a double-edged sword. You cannot have a free country without free speech, but free speech can be used to destroy a free country. The irony is that when that happens, free speech is the first thing to go.
I don’t think that there is any kind of fail-safe solution to this dilemma. The best that we can do is to warn people that democracy is a far more fragile institution than they have been led to believe. Believe it or not – what we see in Russia, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe can happen here. As one sage remarked – falling into a totalitarian hellhole is a lot easier than climbing out again. Beware of politicians promising “fairness doctrines”, “campaign finance reform”, speech codes to eliminate “racism and homophobia”, good weather through “control of greenhouse gasses”, and vast expansions of nanny-state government in the name of “the poor”.
By Pothus, October 19, 2007 @ 4:13 am
Mwalimu Daudi, I could not have expressed what you said any better. America has fallen under the spell of Politically Correctness, that feelings matter more than actual fact, and that we live in a “global community”. American’s are constantly bombarded by the LLL, sound bites and 24 hours of Britney Spears. What once was a great country will soon decay from within and be swallowed whole by those who propose to “care for the children”. Socialism is alive and well and she wears a pantsuit.
By syn, October 19, 2007 @ 6:28 am
During my conversion after 9/11, I came across some words which I use to remind me why I will never give in to the emotional blackmailers, no matter how heavy-handed. Many are familiar with these words worth repeating:
“Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance, it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom, and then lost it, have never known it again.” (Reagan 1967)
Or, as some Ukrainian friends from former USSR like to say “If America falls there will be no free place in the world to run too.”
I do hope lawyers and law professors prick up their ears and recognize that ‘fairness’ has nothing to do with ‘justice’, and defending irrational concepts based on esthetical ‘feel-good’ words undermines the value of meaning and reason.