Category: World

More insightful commentary from Steven Den Beste on the gulf between European and American culture, and the persistent misunderstanding by Europeans of Americans:

Too many of Europe’s opinion makers are living in a delusional world anyway. They believe that raising taxes and increasing social spending doesn’t stifle economic growth, and that labor laws which prevent layoffs increase employment. They think they can catch up to the US economically by 2010. They think all disagreements can be settled through negotiations and that no one needs or should have a military any longer. They think all citizens should rely on the state to protect them from criminals, and any who try to protect themselves should be punished.

They think they’re still important, and they think that the world views them that way. Amidst that great sea of delusion, it’s hardly surprising that they also think America is becoming more and more European as it finally grows up, and that deep down we admire them and want to be more like them.

Nor will it be surprising that they will continue to find our behavior bewildering and infuriating as they continue to botch their dealings with us.

I continue to maintain that a large part of anti-Americanism is aesthetic in nature. The fact that American popular culture is largely trivial and vulgar make people think that Americans will be that way in all areas, and need European sophistication in politics as well as art.

Unfortunately, not only is American popular culture virulently contagious, the trivial, vulgar, happy-go-lucky Americans have the bad habit of actually buckling down when things get serious, and dealing with problems (usually the cultured, sophisticated European habit of massacring each other or trying to conquer the world) without anyone else’s help.

You’d think they’d have learned to be all noble and arty after having saved the world three times in the past century, but no, it’s back to monster trucks and Sex in the City.

Further consolidating Canada — my, er, default* homeland — in my mind as a third-world country is this article about Canada’s lack of control over the majority of its territory.

Now that the Northwest Passage seems to be opening up for year-round traffic, due perhaps to global warming, this is going to become far more serious an issue than the standard image of stalwart Mounties standing guard over barren wastelands of snow and ice has heretofore suggested.

* I was born in Liberia, but Liberia’s constitution bars me from being a citizen on the basis of my skin colour. Canada was kind enough to let me in, no doubt on the basis of my spelling.

Victor Davis Hanson. ‘Nuff said. Read the whole thing.

No nation has done more to save Muslims — whether in Afghanistan, Kuwait, Somalia, Kosovo, Bosnia, and Iraq. In the last quarter-century we have given billions in aid to Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinians. We are the most tolerant of Western countries to Muslim and Arab immigrants. In Iraq now, we — not Arab intellectuals, not “moderate” Arab governments, and not the Europeans — are bringing consensual government and billions more in aid to the Arab Middle East.

The problem is not “getting the message out,” but having the intellectual courage to tell the truth and not to be browbeaten by faux intellectuals who talk monotonously of mythical pipelines and Zionist aggression. The fact is, beneath the hype, Iraqis will soon appreciate American help and idealism far more than French perfidy. It is never wrong to be on the side of freedom — never.

Nor do we have anything to apologize about to the Europeans. We liberated the continent, sent it billions in aid, protected it from Soviet Communism, supported the EU and German reunification, created NATO in part to keep internal peace, intervened in Kosovo to stop more European genocide, and have well over 100,000 troops there still to protect it sixty years after it nearly destroyed itself. We no longer expect gratitude or even memory of the past, but we do expect maturity and not the patronizing lectures from a Spanish or French foreign minister who should know better — given the respective histories of their countries and our own during the last century.

So, yes, they are our allies. And yes, we must be polite and considerate as we all work together to hunt down terrorists. And yes, we are often undiplomatic when there is no need to be given our stature. But there is a reason for Europeans’ anger and it transcends George Bush — having everything to do with the fear that America is a stubborn, powerful, moral antithesis to their own global socialist utopia. What the Spanish did recently was only an affirmation of what France has done with Saddam for twenty years.

Michael Ignatieff:

Can we define terrorism when one mans freedom fighter is another mans terrorist? There is no moral relativity on this at all: A terrorist targets non-combatant civilians to achieve a political goal. Those who undertake political actions that target civilians are terrorists.

Those, for example, who wage an armed struggle on behalf of the oppressed and do so confining their combat to military objectives can be called freedom fighters. The distinction is very clear, and depends on whom you attack.

Read it all. (Hat tip: Hawk Girl).