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Thread 4195

Thread ID: 4195 | Posts: 7 | Started: 2002-12-26

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Zoroaster [OP]

2002-12-26 13:58 | User Profile

[url=http://amconmag.com/12_16/buchanan6.html]http://amconmag.com/12_16/buchanan6.html[/url]

The Democracy Worshipers

by Pat Buchanan

Russell Kirk saw it coming. As the Cold War was winding down, the father of modern conservatism was invited to the Heritage Foundation to lecture on America’s brightening prospects. As he celebrated with his friends the “death of Marxist ideology,” Dr. Kirk pointedly warned us against a new “ideology of democracy.”

“Various American voices have been raised these past few months to proclaim enthusiastically that soon all the world ... will embrace an order called ‘democratic capitalism,’” said Kirk. “It seems to be the assumption of these enthusiasts—many of them members of the faction called Neoconservatism—that the political structure and the economic patterns of the United States will be emulated in every continent, for evermore.”

“Democratic capitalism” is “neoconservative cant,” said Kirk. It is an ideological folly to attempt to recreate in foreign lands with utterly different cultures what 200 years of American history produced here. Said Kirk, this manic drive by democratists to do so in Saigon led to the murder of Diem and the loss of South Vietnam.

Kirk hailed as a peerless Cold War leader that “elderly and eminent conservative,” Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s foreign policy, said Kirk, was “wondrously successful, with the exception of his failure in Lebanon.” Just so. In Lebanon, Reagan intervened in a civil war where no vital interest was at risk, and 241 Marines paid the price.

Kirk also noted the gathering disaster in Africa. Democratists in Europe and America had helped strangle the Rhodesian regime of Ian Smith and were pressing sanctions to bring down Johannesburg.

Was Kirk not prophetic? Was he not right? Today, Marxist-racist Robert Mugabe is seizing white-owned farms in Zimbabwe, and starvation looms. South Africa is a crime-ridden and AIDS-infested nation slowing sinking toward failed-nation status.

Like all ideologues—be they Marxist, socialist, or Wilsonian—democracy worshipers attribute their disasters not to a flawed ideology but a lack of energy. We should, they argue, have gone back into Lebanon in force after the bombing at the Marine barracks and occupied Somalia after U.S. Army Rangers were massacred. But this is folly. There was never any vital U.S. interest at risk in Beirut or Mogadishu worth sending any U.S. soldiers to die for.

Today’s democratist prattle about converting a post-Saddam Iraq into an Arab model of “American values” calls to mind LBJ’s burbling on about “building a Great Society on the Mekong.”

Not long ago, America stood for freedom. When was our love of freedom replaced by this cult of democracy? What do we mean by democracy? Orwell said he might be more enthusiastic about democracy if only he could find someone who opposed it.

What has one-man, one-vote produced in Africa? Virtually all the fifty-odd African states have reverted to tyranny, tribalism, or genocide. Africa was better off under colonial rule.

Look at South America. After repeatedly electing Peronists, Argentina is a bankrupt country whose citizens come out in Buenos Aires at night to scour garbage cans for food. Brazil, $264 billion in debt, just elected a Marxist to solve an economic crisis. In Caracas, the elected president is a Castroite who earlier attempted a beer-hall putsch and is busily immiserating his middle class.

From Algeria to Pakistan, Islamists are winning elections. In democratic Europe, liberated by America, defended by America, free nations are voting away their sovereignties to the socialist super-state EU. Anti-Americanism is rife. Not one European nation has a birth rate that will keep it alive as a true European state through this century. If this is what democracy produces, why should U.S. soldiers die to impose it on Arabs and Muslims? Why should Arabs and Muslims not resist it to the death?

The mark of a “soundly conservative foreign policy,” said Dr. Kirk, is prudence. “Its object should not be the triumph everywhere of America’s name and manners under the slogan of ‘democratic capitalism’ but ... the preservation of the true national interest and acceptance of the diversity of economic and political institutions throughout the world. Soviet hegemony ought not be succeeded by American hegemony.”

Dr. Kirk was an authentic conservative. Is George W. Bush? In his campaign he echoed Kirk: “The United States must be humble ... in how we treat nations that are figuring out how to chart their own course.” Today the President brays like a neocon: “The 20th century ended with a single surviving model of human progress.”

This is the hubris of the best and brightest of the Sixties, and we know what became of them. As Proverbs reminds us, “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.”

il ragno

2002-12-26 17:17 | User Profile

What has one-man, one-vote produced in Africa? Virtually all the fifty-odd African states have reverted to tyranny, tribalism, or genocide. Africa was better off under colonial rule.

Well, it's plain to see Pat has no more Presidential aspirations. Can you imagine what Frum or Krauthammer might make of this?

Polichinello

2002-12-26 17:34 | User Profile

Originally posted by il ragno@Dec 26 2002, 17:17 ** > What has one-man, one-vote produced in Africa? Virtually all the fifty-odd African states have reverted to tyranny, tribalism, or genocide. Africa was better off under colonial rule.

Well, it's plain to see Pat has no more Presidential aspirations. Can you imagine what Frum or Krauthammer might make of this? **

Are you kidding? the Empire-Ho! boys? They'd agree with him; they only difference between them and Buchanan is that they'd demand we take steps to re-install the British Empire.

Best, P

Okiereddust

2002-12-26 22:50 | User Profile

Originally posted by Polichinello@Dec 26 2002, 17:34 > Originally posted by il ragno@Dec 26 2002, 17:17 **

Well, it's plain to see Pat has no more Presidential aspirations. Can you imagine what Frum or Krauthammer might make of this? **

Are you kidding? the Empire-Ho! boys? They'd agree with him; they only difference between them and Buchanan is that they'd demand we take steps to re-install the British Empire.

Best, P**

Then how do you explain the neo cons support for civil rights in the South, which was a similar colonial type situation?

The neo cons are gung-ho about empire, but only an empire in the name of their pet theories on global democracy, run by ideological correct people, i.e. themselves.

The difference between the empires Buchananism is nostalgic about and the neo cons [push is akin to the differences between the empires of Britain and revolutionary France, or the simple, crass imperialism of Teddy Roosevelt and the utopianism of Woodrow Wilson, and of course Trotsky.

Polichinello

2002-12-27 21:31 | User Profile

Originally posted by Okiereddust@Dec 26 2002, 22:50 **

**

Then how do you explain the neo cons support for civil rights in the South, which was a similar colonial type situation?

The same crusading puritanism that could be found in the North in the century before last, and among the Whigs who started the British empire, too, as a matter of fact. European imperial growth in the nineteenth century was usually preceded by some complaint about the barbarity of a local chieftain.

The neo cons are gung-ho about empire, but only an empire in the name of their pet theories on global democracy, run by ideological correct people, i.e. themselves.

What imperialist doesn't maintain as much?

The difference between the empires Buchananism is nostalgic about and the neo cons [push is akin to the differences between the empires of Britain and revolutionary France, or the simple, crass imperialism of Teddy Roosevelt and the utopianism of Woodrow Wilson, and of course Trotsky.

First, Buchanan isn't that nostaligic about the idea of empire. He's simply noting a fact.

Aside from your silly flamboyance about Trotsky, you're right that the necons have a democratizing agenda, but they wax far more nostalgic about those empires than anyone else does. Neocon writings are peppered with quotes from Rudyard Kipling.

Best, P

Leveller

2002-12-28 00:29 | User Profile

Originally posted by Polichinello@Dec 27 2002, 21:31 ... The same crusading puritanism that could be found in the North in the century before last, and among the Whigs who started the British empire, too, as a matter of fact.  European imperial growth in the nineteenth century was usually preceded by some complaint about the barbarity of a local chieftain. ...

The early British empire was more purely commercial than idealistic, but I agree about the later empire. This is especially true of 19th century Africa, where calls to bring David Livingstones 3C's - Commerce, Civilization, and Christianity - to the dark continent were given a major boost by the resurgent Arab slave trade in central Africa, which horrified missionaries and of course just had to be stamped out.

19th century conservatives in Britain weren't particularly interested in Africa, except as a way of safeguarding passage to the east via Suez and the Cape. The real driving Imperial forces there were France, which wanted a West African territory to rival India, and of course King Leopolds private venture in the Congo. Britain was more interested in holding on to what it had without undue expense, but once you get into these things, events take on a life of their own and it's hard to get out.

Incidentally, even as late as the 1960s an African could obtain a 'Certificate of Manumission', which guaranteed him the protection of the British Empire from slavery, which was never entirely stamped out.

Zoroaster

2002-12-28 01:36 | User Profile

The Balfour Decaration of 1917, which promised Zionists a national homeland in Palistine, was/is the basis of the Anglo/American/Zionist Alliance, which has called the shots for Western Civilization since World War One. Its aim today appears to be the establishment of a global economy and the abolition of nation states, except, of course, for Israel, because the rights of Jewish moral supremacy conincide more or less with the vision of a global plantation.

-Z-