Now They Tell Us

THE MUCH-TYPED “surge” is working. Even the global MSM is noticing, as Instapundit Glenn Reynolds observes. “There seems to be a lot of turnabout going on, all of a sudden,” he writes.

Exhibit A is this cover story in Germany’s Der Spiegel:

Ramadi is an irritating contradiction of almost everything the world thinks it knows about Iraq — it is proof that the US military is more successful than the world wants to believe. Ramadi demonstrates that large parts of Iraq... are essentially pacified today.

Well, do tell. Der Spiegel’s reporter Ullrich Fichtner goes on. It’s a story that the world doesn’t really want to hear, he writes,

a different story, a story of Americans who came here as liberators, became hated occupiers and are now the protectors of Iraqi reconstruction.

The glorious thing about the world’s hegemonic class, the international academic middle class and its bribed apologists in the center-left political parties, is that it can turn on a dime.

It can say at one moment that Bush is a liar and the worst president in history. One week it can have a fawning media breathlessly reporting the latest political ploy of Democrats in Congress to end the war.

The next week we can have the same people writing with wide-eyed innocence, that things aren’t as bad as “everyone” thought. Why, maybe Ronald Reagan wasn’t a complete dunce, maybe government control of everything wasn’t such a good idea after all, maybe the Americans are making progress in Iraq.

In fact, the next step is to say that Ronald Reagan didn’t achieve that much after all. Or that if the right people had been in charge in Iraq then the whole thing could have been wrapped up much sooner.

Yes, we’ll be seeing that pretty soon. Democrats will be elbowing people out of the way to get to a microphone to declare that they were in favor of the “surge” strategy all along and had been trying to get the stupid Bush administration to adopt it for three years without success.

What we, the great unwashed, should understand is that the people we are dealing with represent a ruling class in its declining phase. Softened by the perquisites of power they are just trying to keep the game going a few years longer. Almost everything they have foisted upon us has been a miserable and expensive failure: government pensions, government education, government welfare.

But by golly it has got them votes and it has got them power.

You can’t argue with that. For now.

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

TAGS

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

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

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

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

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

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

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

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

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

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

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

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