home  |  book  |

David Cameron Breathes Life Into Britain's Conservatives Liberal Privacy vs. Conservative Transparency

print view

Iraq Election: Left World, Our World

by Christopher Chantrill
December 18, 2005 at 7:04 pm

|

IT WAS A famous victory, the election of 12/15—for Iraq, for President Bush-in-a-Bubble, for his not always constant supporters, and for the men and women of the incomparable U.S. armed forces. For a moment we can take a moment to savor the emotion of the moment, like that of the Iraqi general, Mustafa Abdul Aziz, who returned from abroad to vote, only to find out that he was not on the election roll. Could he at least dip his finger in the indelible purple ink?

“‘That’s okay,’ they told me. And as I dipped my finger in the inkpot, my eyes watered and tears started coming down,” Abdul Aziz said at the polling center, surrounded by poll workers overcome by his story. “That’s what we always wanted, a chance to live a free democratic life. I and my family had suffered just to have such a day, and now it has become a reality.”

But let us not be distracted by hearts and flowers. Let us remember the Iraqi election of December 15, 2005 as another small step in the advance of global democratic capitalism and self-government.

If our lefty friends seem less than enthusiastic about all this, it is because they experience the advance of democratic capitalism not as the advance of civilization but as an imperial conquest of the kind represented by Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, or Adolf Hitler. But they are wrong.

Genghis Khan rode out on the Asian steppe in the thirteenth century to bring the whole world under his personal rule. But the Europeans who sailed the oceans of the world starting in 1492 spread like the anonymous vectors of an epidemic. Under the commercial empires of the Dutch Republic and Britain, a decentralized infection of global commerce spread from Europe to India and Indonesia, and then to China. Now the western virus, growing stronger over the years, is threatening to overcome the hardy resistance of the Middle East. The left hates it. Why is that?

As Nietzsche taught us in The Birth of Tragedy, the world is a contest between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, the forces of order and bright shining surface versus the chthonic forces of instinct and disorder. But the two opposites need each other. The Apollonian needs the chaotic forces of the Dionysian to save it from sterility, while the Dionysian needs the Apollonian to save it from an orgy of self-destruction. It cannot therefore be a surprise that in the middle of the nineteenth century a dark force arose from the global ooze to oppose the harmonious, ordered, self-governing commonwealth of democratic capitalism. We call this global counterforce the Left.

The Left hates our democratic capitalism and always will. Its well-born fanatics oppose against the virtuous circle of western law and enterprise a witch’s brew of romantic idealism and revolutionary blood lust. They long for a world of perfect peace and caring community while secretly lusting after the homicidal orgasm of the bloodthirsty terrorist gang. And they always will.

This is a good thing. The ever-present Dionysian left forces the Apollonian world of democratic capitalism to constantly critique and improve itself.

But wait, you say. Doesn’t the left believe in non-violence, that “violence never solves anything?” How come it opposes the spread of capitalist prosperity yet passes in silence over the beheadings of terrorists? It’s an interesting question. The left answers it by dividing its world into two. There is first of all the world of “us,” the educated, rational elite in where differences are resolved in facilitated discussions between stakeholders. Then there is the world of “them”—the oppressed—where violence threatens to break out if the just demands of the oppressed and the traditionally marginalized are not met. It’s a variation on the old Billie Holiday song: Comes rage, nothing can be done.

In their world the idea of a risky, sustained effort to extend the commonwealth of democratic capitalism to 27 million people suffering under a brutal dictator, an effort renewed in the face of mistakes, setbacks, and a hail of elite criticism, just doesn’t make sense.

In their world Time has chosen Bono and the Gateses instead of the Iraqi people as Persons of the Year for 2005. Time prefers to celebrate elite Lady Bountifuls and their billions instead of ordinary Iraqis struggling to establish self-government.

But in our world, the world of self-governing families, freedom, commerce, and nations under God, every small advance in the frontiers of freedom such as the late, great Iraqi national election is an occasion to rejoice, just like that former Iraqi general who didn’t even get to vote.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

print view

To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.

To email the author, click here.

 

 TAGS

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

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

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

presented by Christopher Chantrill

 •  Contact