The Statists of Europe still don't get it.
But I suppose that's no real surprise. They believe in the State, in the wise rule of an educated and enlightened class.
Here's a Reuters story on the meeting at Rhodes, EU Must Engage U.S. in Dialogue, Trade--Thinkers
That is the message of three dozen leading intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic who sent their thoughts to European Union foreign ministers meeting in Greece on Friday.
It gets better.
Many contributors suggested a need for a new transatlantic dialogue reaching out beyond governments to parliaments, civil society, universities, think-tanks and business leaders.Greek officials said Papandreou hoped to use the contributions as a foundation to create a new Atlantic Forum of opinion leaders to thrash out policy differences on an agenda ranging from pre-emptive wars to regional conflicts.
Right. The elites are going to get together and decide on the Wise Policy, and then they will advise our leaders, who will of course implement it immediately,. And Americans are going to go along with this.
In their dreams. I really think they've grown more than a little out of touch with reality over there.
Many contributors said the transatlantic rift had been exacerbated by efforts by U.S. conservatives inside and outside government to divide and play Europeans off against each other.
Hmmm. No mention of French or German perfidy, nor their treachery in refusing to come to the aid of NATO member Turkey, nor French lobbying efforts to arm-twist some EU members, nor French comments that Eastern Europe should "shut up". Of course none of those actions constituted an attempt to "...divide and play Europeans off against each other."
Harvard professor Stanley Hoffmann said U.S. global leadership had given way to "a quasi-imperial policy" justified by the notion that since the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, the United States was at war.The problem could not be solved by European "appeasement" of Washington but only by a stronger EU becoming a bigger player in world affairs, he argued.
Fat chance. They'll have enough trouble keeping their pension plans funded. If they want to be a major player on this stage, it's going to require significant military spending...or else the success of the old dream of tying the US down with treaties. Doesn't look like that's in the cards.
Anand Menon and Jonathan Lipkin of Birmingham University said deep divisions on political values between Europe and the United States helped shape their relative international power.They called for a group of wise men to produce a security strategy for Europe, overcoming the divergent approaches of Britain and France which were paralyzing EU foreign policy.
Faugh. There it is, right out in the open and unashamed. The arrogance of the elites.
Folks, don't think that WW4 is just about Islamofascism. The bigger war is really about Statism, with Islamofascism just being one of the more virulent forms. This is, at heart, why so much of Europe, especially Old Europe, sides with Saddam. It's part of why Russia and China sided with France and Germany. Statists all, and admirers of Statism.
They see that this war is really about FREEDOM, and freedom is as antithetical to their Statist visions as it is to Saddams's The Islamofascist war we call WW4 may have started in Iran in 1978, but the larger Statist war has been going on at least since the Russian Revolution. Tens of millions have died, yet Statism continues to thrive and even grow. We have a long row to hoe yet.
Yesterday was Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.
How do you do that? How do you remember a Holocaust?
I don't mean what activities you do, or prayers you say, or anything like that.
I mean, how do you get your mind around it? How can you open your mind even a tiny crack to truly comprehending murder by the millions...without just going crazy?
I don't know.
To make it worse, part of the tragedy is that The Holocaust is sometimes seen as some sort of exceptional event, some cultural spasm, a historic anomaly. Would that it were.
There have been dozens of genocides in the last century. Vast beyond belief. Horror upon horror.
And they continue. Signs say that new ones are preparing in Africa.
It's strange that we in America think of ourselves as well-informed, educated people, fond of facts and with a firm grip on reality. And yet most of these genocides are only rumor, at best, to us. We live in a world of Fords and Chevys and Hollywood and suburbs, Best Buys and Safeways. Genocide is something unreal.
If a hundred million are murdered, and you don't know about it, are you really an informed person? Do you really understand the truth of the world?
I don't know.
But I do know that, however we manage it, we must never forget. Never.
Not due to some desire to wallow in our baseness, or loathing, or self-pity. No. We remember for the sake of the future.
Dean Esmay has an excellent essay here. It's disturbing. That's exactly the point. It has many links to other articles. You don't want to follow them, but you do, and your heart breaks again, and yet again. This is important and worthwhile work. It's part of the work of remembering.
After the grief, should come resolve. Resolve to try to understand how genocide happens, and the forces that produce it. Resolve to fight those forces wherever they appear.
There really is Good and Evil in the world. Let us remember what Evil has done, and resolve to fight on the side of the Good. I know, it sounds corny. It's still the truth.
Edited to add a pointer to this post on the same subject over at the Dissident Frogman's (lovely new dacha, btw), check it out
Ah, the UN. What to say? I'm almost speechless.
In an act of supreme hypocrisy and moral turpitude, the United Nations returned Cuba to a seat on the so-called Human Rights Commission.
Once again a horrible dictatorship is coddled for no other reason than to poke the United States in the eye.
World, hello, listen up! It REALLY IS about Good vs. Evil. We've just seen proof once again. Which side are YOU on?
So says Canada's National Post in an article that tells it like it is about the Axis of Weasels.
Here's the intro, just to wet your whistle:
Not that it should come as a surprise to anyone, but it turns out some of the staunchest international opponents of invading Iraq -- on principle, you understand -- were up to their eyeballs in secret deals with the now deposed regime of Saddam Hussein.
A big Thank You from this American to the National Post!
David Warren of the Ottawa Citizen has posited that the US has a new diplomatic policy, which he terms "...the new 'we don't care' policy".
I hope so.
And it's not as callous as it sounds.
This CP post The Command Post - Op-Ed - A new attitude points off to this article at David Warren's webpage. The newspaper copy is here.
David continues:
...though not the product of committee foresight, I think it may emerge as the most important single element within the "Bush doctrine" that has been assembling itself since the morning of 9/11, and which may long outlive the administration of President George W. Bush. It may even penetrate into the U.S. State Department, over time.Until someone has invented a more pretentious expression, I will call this the new "we don't care" policy. It consists of responding to major rhetorical and diplomatic challenges, including organized campaigns against U.S. interests choreographed through the United Nations, with something like total indifference.
But let me explain, not indifference to the challenge, but indifference to the argument given with the challenge. The U.S. will take note of the opposition, and act to defeat it, but without publicly arguing with it. Actual discussion on matters of significance is reserved to allies.
Example: yesterday, when the defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, cut a verbal Gordian knot, by stating very simply that the U.S. would not allow a theocratic regime to arise in Iraq. One might deduce that it wouldn't matter whether the thing were voted or not voted, before or behind a façade of "democracy"; or one might fail to deduce that. Either way, the thing itself is repugnant, and the U.S. will stop it happening.
Exactly.
For decades, the US has been the strongest nation on Earth, and at the same time we've had this strong desire to have everybody love us.
This (along with numerous other influences) has led to a foreign policy characterized by a willingness to work with just about anyone, and seemingly limitless ability to put up with outrageous backstabbing. The hope was, always, that the short-term compromises would lead to long-term wins.
What has happened now, both in the US government and among much of the US public, is that people have come to the conclusion that this policy has failed. Not just failed in Iraq. Failed in general. Failed long-term.
The recent mess in the UN was the last straw. This was the last chance for countries to stand up and do the right thing, instead of playing the same old cynical games.
We all know what happened. Much of the world lined up with the builder of children's prisons, Saddam Hussein, merely so they could poke America in the eye. This was both morally bankrupt and rather stupid. The Newspeak hypocrisy of the Axis of Weasels has been absolutely stunning, and eye-opening for many Americans, and, I suspect, many British citizens, especially when combined with the now-daily revelations of complicity with Saddam.. Yeah, it's "all about oil", and Middle America now knows for whom. It's all about the sanctions, and international law...when it's time to beat up America. The rest of the time, everyone else, most assuredly including the UN itself, does what they please, international law and sanctions be damned.
So yeah, now we "don't care anymore".
It's not that we don't still love you, world, it's that we've given up on you. We're not going to play the theoretical Newspeak games that you so love anymore.
It's almost like you have a weird sort of mental illness, a state of mind that is willing to make endless sacrifices in the name of a "peace" that does not exist, to coddle dictators and terrorists both. You live in this fantasyland where "legitimacy" is more important than people dying by the millions, where adherence to "principles" will allow you to look aside from any horror, and any threat. You'll happily live in your peaceful bubble, which exists only due to US military protection, and try to undermine America at every turn.
This is crazy. Long-term, this is suicidal for The World As We Know It. And by "we", I mean WE, you, world, and us.
So we're not going to play with you anymore, at least for now. The US is going to do its damnedest to solve certain serious problems, and since you have all shown yourself to be either crazy or perfidious, we can't trust you to help in most ways. After we've been at this a while, if you behave, we can start to get back together. But if it looks like you're going to screw it up, we'll cut you out again.
Until then, butt out. You're in quarantine.
It seems curious, from the left side of the Pond, that (Continental) Europe doesn't seem to "get" freedom.
Oh, they talk about it. They even like the idea (maybe). And yet Socialism, Communism, Fascism and other forms of Statism seem to flourish there. With the EU, Europe again has set her feet on a statist path that leads, in the end, to the death of freedom.
Why is this? Why the appeal of all these approaches, and a concomitant feeling about America that is anywhere from bewilderment to hot jealousy and resentment?
Consider that all these ideologies are strictly top-down. Those at the top, whether they be Wise and Enlightened Leaders of the Nation, or People's Committees, or trained and inbred intellectual elites working for the Good of Society, will decide what is The Good, and will deliver same to The People. This is necessary, as The People are too stupid/unenlightened/uneducated/etc. to know what's really in the best interest of All (especially the elite).
Now contrast that with the American experiment. Whatever its failings in practice, the root idea of the USA is that governmental legitimacy is derived from the consent of the governed. That is, the people are in charge, and the government works for us, and is expected to respond to and express the will of the people. This isn't just words in the Constitution. It's an unshakeable assumption that all Americans have.
And that perhaps is the rub of it. Europe's history doesn't contain any real expression of such an idea. To the contrary, all the major European social systems, from Rome on forward, have been about submission to Higher Authority, with a corresponding implied contract that Higher Authority would take care of the masses. True, sometimes there are elections to decide which members of the elites will have the positions of power, but once elected they still become Higher Authority, not servants of the people.
As a case in point, look at Feudalism. Peasants owed allegiance, and taxes, and potentially everything they owned, to their lord, who in turn owed the peasants military protection, protection of the law, etc.
You see the idea: freedoms (in this case, the freedom from being militarily attacked by invaders, etc), are not something that each person owns. No, they are favors that are bestowed from above, and can as easily be revoked from above.
Americans think of freedoms as being inalienable, inherent, something you are born with, something that you claim from the simple fact of being human. They can be repressed and violated, but never taken away.
So Europeans look at things like transnational organizations and see Legitimacy, that is, a Higher Authority that will decide on and bestow The Good. Americans look at these same organizations and see illegitimate (because unelected) groups attempting to force their will on The People.
"We hold these Truths to be self-evident..."
P.S. Sorry for the Leading Caps in places. I don't usually do that, but it seemed appropriate here.
Headline from Iraq?
Nope. We're talking about Romania. This article in the Sunday Times tells the sad story.
Tomorrow 11 Romanian children suffering from kidney failure will be told that they will no longer receive dialysis and must face a slow and painful death because there are no longer the funds to treat them. Seven people have already died because of the cash crisis.Doctors at St Maria's Children's Hospital in Iasi, in the northern province of Moldavia, have said that half of the 21 children who need regular dialysis to stay alive must now be denied treatment.
The warning follows a meeting of 2,000 medical staff in Iasi, Romania's third largest city, to protest at the government's refusal to use emergency funds to help to clear debts at the region's hospitals.
Since a stand-off with the Romanian Social Democrat government - whose members are mainly "reformed" Communists from the Ceausescu years - began in February, pharmaceutical firms and utility providers have cut off supplies.
This has forced hospitals to plead with charities for cash to augment their stocks. Doctors across the country have been reduced to begging for funds or paying for medicine themselves. In one county last week ambulance services ground to a halt because there was no money for fuel. A doctors' leader in Iasi, Viorel Tanase, said: "We have written to the public health authorities and the national health service to give them notice we have no more money for dialysis. There are 21 on dialysis and 11 will have to be refused."
The news will be given to the parents of the children selected tomorrow.
Isn't that lovely. Where is the international outcry? Woops, not here, can't be distracted from demonizing the United States.
The article includes an address in London where donations can be sent. I think I'm going to cough up for this, how about you?
In the responses to this article, The Command Post - Iraq - Dossier reveals France briefed Iraq on US plans, stunnedbutnot asks a reasonable question:
So what is up with these journalists getting access to all these important sites of potential landmines of information? Is there nobody from US/UK intelligence getting to these places or are there just too many?
Consider this. In the modern military, the "teeth to tail" ratio is about 1 in 10. In other words, for every combat soldier, there are 10 military persons backing them up and supporting them in one way or another. In Iraq, not all 10 of these are in theatre, so let's assume that the ratio is 7 to 1, or a proportion of 14%.
Ok, we have somewhere over 100k US military personnel in Iraq, per statements yesterday. Let's assume 150k, just to be conservative.
What do we end up with? 14% of 150k is about 21k.
So, in a country of 25 million people, the size of France, we have no more than about 21,000 combat soldiers. Let's assume, just for argument, that in order to have an effective combat presence in a place, it takes, on average, 100 soldiers. So now you can be 210 separate places in the country at any given time. Not very many in a country of 25 million.
This force is taking on the entire role of prosecuting a war, force protection, keeping the peace, helping with aid, etc. This could only be termed a very small crew for this work. Just looking at one thing alone, how many cops are there usually for 25 million people? Well, a nice, calm country like Canada has about 550 people per cop. At that rate Iraq would need 45k people just for police work. If it was as calm as Canada (the land of gun control).
So the answer is no, they can't be everywhere. They can't be most where. They can't be anywhere but a very small number of places in the country at any given time. Hence opportunities for enterprising journalists, and God bless 'em. :)