Liberals misunderstand true issues in Mid-East

Nathanael Blake

In “The Devil’s Dictionary,” Ambrose Bierce noted that, “War loves to come like a thief in the night; professions of eternal amity provide the night.” With regard to the impending Iranian atomic bomb, it should be appended that professions of eternal irritation don’t do much for prospects of peace either.

The mullahs’ latest defiance may have finally convinced Western liberals that polite negotiations will not slake Iran’s nuclear thirst, though many are like my university’s town of Corvallis. The City Council here is considering a resolution calling for withdrawal from Iraq—more interested in not fighting the last war than in addressing this new threat.

Charles Krauthammer’s jeremiad in a recent Washington Post, in which he predicted that, “The remaining months before Iran goes nuclear are about to be frittered away,” has the ring of a dismal truth. We face, as Victor Davis Hanson wrote recently, “bad and worse choices” and must decide between “a very bad one now and something far, far worse to come.”

As it has before, Western society prattled while locusts ate the years of safety. The leaders of Europe were convinced that if they met Iran’s rulers around a conference table furnished with comfortable seats and strong coffee, that regime’s aggressive impulses would be soothed away. American liberals thought the same. Well, on second thought, they insisted that bottled water be provided also.

And now we are added to the ancient chorus asking, “How did it come to this?” What deluded so many intelligent people, that they should ignore the plain truth that Iran is determined to build an Islamic bomb? What disorder of the liberal mind informed such folly?

In his indispensable work, “The New Science of Politics,” Eric Voegelin attempted to elucidate the nature of the modern mind. Societies such as ours, he declared, “will recognize dangers to their existence when they develop, but such dangers will not be met by appropriate actions in the world of reality.

They will instead be met by magic operations in the dream world, such as disapproval, moral condemnation, declarations of intention, resolutions, appeals to the opinion of mankind, branding of enemies as aggressors, outlawing of war, propaganda for world peace and world government, etc.”

This stinging description is all too accurate. Yet, given their ontological views, the responses of liberals to dangers like Iran are entirely rational. One of the fundamental principles of liberalism is a denial of the doctrine of original sin and the assertion of the inherent goodness of man.

Thus, one who has fully imbibed the suppositions of liberal philosophy will be incapable of comprehending the motives of the mullahs and those like them.

Liberalism is paralyzed by the malignancy of evil because it has left no room for it in its social equations. Instead, it dreams of, in Voegelin’s words, “a mysterious evolution of mankind toward peace and world order.” The result is that liberals fare the same in dealing with wicked governments as someone who had all his life been taught that grizzly bears were as cuddly as teddy bears would upon meeting a real grizzly.

But there is another crucial factor to understand as well. The modern liberal does not believe in heaven (much less hell). Of course, many will answer otherwise when the pollster rings them up, but it is a rote admission at best; they certainly do not live as though they had an eternal soul.

There are, of course, beings who call themselves liberal Christians, but as Malcolm Muggeridge acridly observed, they insist that “when Jesus said His kingdom was not of this world, He meant that it was.”

In the liberal mind, this world is all we shall ever have; thus, they have a pathological fear of war, which is the ultimate negation and refutation of their metaphysical vision. War shows man to be wicked rather than good, destroys the theory of progress and abolishes hope for heaven on earth.

Against this false philosophy conservatives must set their standard, declaring that man is not necessarily good, progress is not inevitable and the true and only heaven (to borrow Christopher Lasch’s phrase) is not and never will be this spinning rock we currently call home.

And as we confront dangers like Iran, we must remember the wisdom of Barry Goldwater, “We cannot…make the avoidance of a shooting war our chief objective. If we do that—if we tell ourselves that it is more important to avoid shooting than to keep our freedom—we are committed to a course that has only one terminal point: surrender.”

Nathanael Blake, of Sweet Home, is a senior in microbiology at Oregon State University, where he writes for The Daily Barometer and The Liberty. This piece originally appeared on the townhall.com national editorial clearinghouse.

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