The Senate Goes Wobbly

WITH THE UNITED States Senate voting in one week to let federal judges rather than military commanders determine who is an enemy combatant and to send a sense of the Senate resolution to President Bush to tell them how he plans to get out of Iraq we must look at the possible consequence of “going wobbly.”

Here we are, what Lee Harris calls the western team arrayed against the “eternal gang of ruthless men.” What happens when come of our chaps go all wobbly and work to weaken the current western effort to contain the ruthless men?

We have a historical reference for the current situation, because the history of the twentieth century was largely the story of the western commercial empire battling against the ruthless secular religions of fascism, Soviet communism, and Maoist warlordism.

Except for the advent of Soviet communism, each eruption of the ruthless men could have been easily contained: the Hitler phenomenon in the mid 1930s, the Mao phenomenon at any time up to about 1947-48.

The comparison of the rise of Mao and the current eruption of Islamo-fascism is apt. Mao was a ruthless man who maintained an army in China for twenty years courtesy of the Soviet Union and the vacillation of the United States. When he gained power he used the entire wealth of China to try to project himself onto the world stage as a superpower. But it couldn’t be done. China was an agricultural country, and didn’t have the wealth to sustain a bid for global hegemony in 1950.

If the Islamo-fascists gain control of the Middle East they would, of course, obtain the oil income of Saudi Arabia, say about $180 billion a year. It might not be enough to sustain global hegemony, but it would certainly be enough to cause global mischief and disruption. It might be enough to conquer Europe.

For two hundred years the peripheral world has fought against the emerging global commercial empire, represented in the 19th century by the British and in the 20th century by the Americans. The Islamo-fascists are just the latest reactionary movement that has arisen to oppose it.

For a long generation, since the emergence of the McGovern wing, the Democratic Party has flirted with the reactionaries, only getting serious when they were in the White House.

Maybe we need to elect a Democrat to the presidency in 2008 to force the national Democratic leadership to deal with global reality and stop playing footsie with the Angry Left crazies.

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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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