Anti-Climacus

QUOTE: Rich Brookheiser takes liberals to task, and rightly so:

"Why should liberal Democrats interest themselves in the Terror War? One reason I would think is national liberation. Over two decades of political gladiatorship, I have often found liberals taking that side of controversial issues. They wanted the black majority of South Africa to have equal rights. They lost no love on pro-American strong men like Pinochet, Marcos or the Shah. And whatever they felt about the Cold War, they didn’t seem sad when Communism lost. Leonard Bernstein conducted a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth in Berlin to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The Terror War has already burst open jails, real and metaphorical, in two countries. Men in Afghanistan can shave their beards, women who wish to can show their faces. Iraqi soccer players are no longer tortured for missing goals, Kurdish children are no longer stuffed into mass graves.

Indifference to the fate of dusky peoples used to be the property of the right, especially its satirists. The classic expressions of such sentiments are the African farces of Evelyn Waugh, Scoop and Black Mischief, filled with comic savages and their jabbering intelligentsia. (Waugh’s white people don’t come off any better, but it his depiction of the Other that stings.) The Tory view of the world acknowledged that people and cultures are different, and that they cannot be homogenized by mere decrees. But in its extreme form it treated different races as different species, and consigned some to eternal darkness. Liberals should not want to be in that role.

Liberal Democrats’ chief interest in the Terror War, however, should be what it means for us. Ordinary Americans, including ordinary liberal Americans, are precisely what the terrorists and their patrons hate most in the world. The Islamist utopia has no room for minorities, deviants, independent women, religious freedom or intellectual expression. Islamists enforce their tastes with murder on their ascent to power, and with capital punishment once they have achieved it. Secular terrorists in the Muslim world may drop a few clauses of this agenda. Iraqi women could wear skirts; they just couldn’t speak, vote or read. "