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Why is good dumb?
By Spengler
"Lonestar, now you see
that evil shall always triumph, because good is
dumb," said Lord Dark Helmet in the 1987 lampoon
Spaceballs. No Western leader has tried
harder to be good, but looked dumber, than
America's Lonestar, President George W Bush, over
whom evil is about to triumph. His vision is
crumbling of a democratic Middle East, with
suburban housing tracts and shopping malls
spreading across the desert, and mosques that
preach something like Methodism. "Many will be the
night during his second term that Bush will wish
he were still in Texas, and still drunk," I
predicted before his re-election, and reiterate
the prediction now.
Is Bush personally
dumb, or is there something inherently dumb about
the good? Exclude the former: every insider
account of the Bush White House portrays the
president as a crafty operator, very much in
control. Besides, now we know that the president
earned better grades at Yale than his Democrat
challenger, John Kerry. Even if he were dull,
clever advisers surround him. No one claims that
Vice President Dick Cheney is stupid. Why, then,
does Bush seem dumb? Dark Helmet was right. The
United States of America is uniquely good, and
thus uniquely dumb. Before addressing that issue,
let us define "good" and "dumb" in the context of
world affairs.
The American president is a
good man, in that he wants the whole world to have
the same good things Americans have. "Religious
conversion is the defining experience of his life,
and it is in his nature to convert others. Because
he is a 21st-century American and not a
12th-century Crusader, he preaches the ballot box
rather than the cross," I wrote under the title George W Bush, tragic
character (November 25, 2003). A simple
punitive expedition against Saddam Hussein,
followed by side-deals with the Kurds and Shi'ites
to secure oil supplies, would have served
Washington's "imperial" requirements, had that
been the objective. Bush actually believes he is
building democracy in the Muslim world.
By
"dumb" I mean that Bush could not have done more
to prepare the grounds for Islamist victory had he
set out to do so with malice of forethought. Less
than a year ago, overwhelming support for the Iraq
war forced the Democratic Party to peddle Kerry as
a war hero, while gagging its anti-war faction.
Only 37% of Americans now approve of the
president's handling of the Iraq war, according to
last week's CBS-NY Times poll. Among the Sunnis of
Iraq, a sufficient number of young men will commit
suicide to add two or three a day to the American
casualty list until America's loses its will to
fight (Why Sunnis blow themselves
up, June 14).
Radical Islam, I
have maintained since September 11, 2001, may
triumph yet, if only for a while, for its fighting
advantage is the desperation of a doomed culture.
Washington has made concession after humiliating
concession to groups it deemed terrorist, such as
Hezbollah, the victor in the south of the country
in the ongoing Lebanese elections, and the
Palestinian Hamas, before whose electoral strength
the Palestinian Authority dare not hold a national
vote. The world interprets Bush's recognition of
Hezbollah and Hamas to mean that if a nation backs
leaders who employ terrorism, their sovereign will
legitimizes the use of terror. If suicide bombers
drive American troops from Iraq, Bush's "war on
terror" will meet an ignominious end. It will, of
course, resume before long, but it will be someone
else's war.
What makes the US uniquely
good is that it is uniquely Christian. I do not
mean that Christianity is a unique fount of
goodness - far from it - but rather that
Christianity proposes a universalized form of
good. The Europeans, Latin Americans and Asians
who chose to emigrate to America left the blood
and soil of their origins behind them, unlike the
barbarian invaders who populated modern Europe.
Christians worship a God outside of nature who
loves all of humankind; by contrast, pagans
worship themselves. Self-worship can take the form
of adoration of a man-made idol, or the adoration
of a blond, blue-eyed Jesus for the Germans or an
Indian Virgin for the Mexicans. Spiritual
narcissism is the curse of the gentiles, who feel
justified in exterminating their neighbors out of
a perverse adoration for their own ethnicity. As
the only nation with no ethnicity, America is the
most Christian, and indeed the last Christian
nation in the industrial world as a practical
matter.
The Christianity that Bush
professes is an American original, a true rebirth
without a backward glance. The born-again American
Christian expects every individual on earth to
respond to divine grace in similar fashion. The
kind of evangelical Christians one finds in
Midland, Texas, evince a spirit of charity found
among no other people in the world, sending money
and missionaries to assist the most impoverished
people of Africa and Latin America.
Good
people cannot as a rule understand wicked people.
They do not wish to be wicked, and cannot
understand why anyone else would wish to do so.
American Christians cannot fathom the kind of
wickedness that accounts for the bulk of the
butchery in world history, born of the pessimism
of dying races who will kill without compunction
to delay the hour of their demise.
But
hasn't Christianity slaughtered without pity in
the name of the faith? Cardinal Richelieu's France
offers the worst example, prolonging the Thirty
Years' War between Catholics and Protestants until
nearly half the people of central Europe had died
by violence, disease or starvation. This
exceptional case of Christian brutality proves the
rule. Seventeenth-century France under Cardinal
Richelieu first devised the ghastly idea that God
had chosen one particular nation as the bearer of
Christianity, justifying the most hideous means to
achieve its ends. Narcissism at the level of the
individual as well as the nation is the French
disease, which the rest of Europe caught.
Only one major war in modern history
rightly might be called a Christian holy war,
namely America's Civil War, which took the lives
of two out of five Southern men of military age.
Young men from the North marched to their death
singing that as Christ "had died to make men holy,
let us die to make men free". The slave-holding
states constituted an evil entity, somewhat like
the great Roman estates, and Southern youth died
for an evil cause, namely the right to be rich and
idle. Had the North not fought the war, the South
would have sought to expand into a Latin American
slave empire.
Yet American tourists wander
the battlefields of the Civil War, blinking dumbly
at the scenes of mass slaughter, mourning
Confederate and Unionist alike. Thousands of
Americans dress in Civil War-era uniforms and act
out the awful battles of the 1860s like a mute
chorus in a tragedy written in an antique language
none of them can understand. Americans cannot
absorb the horror that an evil society grew in
their midst, that could be suppressed only by the
extermination of its manhood. As a nation of
immigrants from failed societies, Americans have
lost their memory of what it means when a society
fails. In fact, such failure is the typical case,
just as extinction is the typical fate of animal
species. About 2,000 of the 6,700 languages now
spoken on the planet will disappear during the
next decade, while French, German and Italian will
be in danger within the next two
centuries.
To embrace death is the extreme
of evil. Iraq's Sunnis, as I wrote last week, have
even less hope without control of the country's
oil than had the young men of the American South
without control of slaves. They are the denizens
of a failed culture, and therefore hold their
lives cheap enough to trade for a bombing in a
restaurant or a bank, let alone the death of an
American soldier. Against such radical evil, the
good has no natural defenses.
Can we cite
no example of a good man who also was clever, for
example, Sir Winston Churchill? Churchill surely
was clever, but he was not all that good. That is,
he was a man of the old British Empire, expert at
keeping tribal wars at a low boil in order to
maintain British control with sparse resources.
That is the sort of thing America might have done
in Iraq, but which Bush by his nature never will
do.
For all of Churchill's acumen, he did
not win World War II as much as Adolf Hitler lost
it. Failing to destroy the British expeditionary
force at Dunkirk is an obvious case, but decisive
German error was accepting war with the US.
Suppose that after Pearl Harbor Hitler did not
declare war on the US along with Japan, but
instead offered himself as a mediator between the
two, deploring the Japanese attack but urging
American restraint. Would Congress have declared
war on Germany as well as Japan? Not likely.
Hitler's overconfidence then stood at its zenith,
following the easy defeat of France and the
spectacular success of Operation Barbarossa, and
megalomania got the better of him. That is a
comforting thought. Perhaps the Islamists will
lose the war. I hope that turns out to be the
case, considering that Bush is not going to win
it.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd.
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