There is the standard article in Newsweek penned by Michael Hirsh outlining the reasons for the decline of America in which he blames Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld's "Black alternative government", and a 'sleeping' congress. The basics being the decision to invade Iraq, our failure to effectively rehabilitate Afghanistan, an unfettered an unrestricted market (the sub-prime mortgage crisis), junk legal reasoning (torture), and junk science (global warming).
In it he makes the allegation that our decision to invade Iraq "that has possibly cost as much in innocent life and limb as the Burma and China disasters put together". The UN estimate, according to USA Today is 151,000 since the start of the war in 2003. The BBC puts the death toll in 'Burma' at 78,000 with 56,000 missing and estimates of the Chinese earthquake death toll are approaching 50,000. So it seems that quite possibly the numbers are close to each other, but what does this mean? And what is his point? That the deaths are meaningless? Pointless? One might also point out that during Sadaam's Al-Anfar campaign against the Kurds from 1986-1989 that 186,000 Kurds were killed by 'theoretically' their own government. I must also point out that no one is alleging that US/MNF-I troops have killed 151,000 civilians... the question must then become 'how many deaths would there be without US/MNF-I presence in Iraq?
Let me then propose an alternative hypothesis to Mr. Hirsh's explanation for his perceived decline of America.
First and foremost, our problems stem from a sense of self-loathing, it's not a personal hatred that we have for ourselves but a cultural hatred. It is a "We are bad, and we are responsible for all the ills in the world" feeling. This position on our society, from the evil and genocidal Christopher Columbus to the evil and genocidal George Bush, is what permeates throughout the liberal left and that is beginning to insinuate itself into the right. It is the position that values the culture of an illegal alien above our own. It is the guilt of the majority, that feeling that since we are on top, we must have done something wrong...after all, we couldn't possibly have built this great nation and civilization of ours on our own, could we? Millions of down-trodden immigrants couldn't have put this together...there must have been some secret society, some "black alternative government", pulling the strings behind the scenes, for their own 'evil' ends, be they profit or world dominance.
Second, it is the failure to see beyond the negatives in the rise of western civilization to the positives. All is evil... that there is good in the world today, that pretty much everyone on the planet has been positively affected by western civilization, is overlooked. Stop for a moment, consider where we would be today if Europe had remained entrenched in the dark ages, that crusaders never left home, that Europe had never colonized the new world, that the United States had never rebelled from colonial rule, that isolationists had prevailed in the US in WWI and WWII... where would we be today?
There is a saying that those who fail to study from history are doomed to repeat it... but there is more to studying history than being able to recite a litany of events, one must also learn from it. One must be able to see the big picture, one evil depraved event can, and does often lead to much good in this world. Ponder for a moment if you would, the elimination of the colonial slave trade. Europeans never captured or purchased slaves and never transported them to the new world. Where would we be? Are we to believe that sometime in the 1920's we would have stumbled across Utopian society spanning the length and breadth of Africa? That there would have arisen out of the blood and ashes of Aztec society, uninfluenced and uncolonized, a great and shining beacon of freedom and democracy? Perhaps, or would there be few million people in stone-age tribes living as they had for the previous ten thousand years, without modern medicine, the horse, or the wheel, and without any impetus to change?
We prefer the dark side, we prefer the blame. We relish it, from the crusades to the inquisition, we dwell on it. There once was a time when American history was taught with pride, a sense of accomplishment, look at what we have built. Now, we teach the oppression of the native inhabitants, we make claims to "biological warfare" and genocide, and neither position is balanced. We focus on the civil war, but we focus on slavery and oppression, overlooking the fact that 360,000 Union soldiers died so that others may be free, and we claim entitlement to 'reparations'. Honestly, do you think we owe money? or do you think that the debt was paid with the blood of 360,000 Union and 258,000 Confederate soldiers?
We, of the west, having built a society based on freedom and human rights, having opened our doors to the 'poor and huddled masses', we turn around and jail our cartoonists for having offended someones religion. Out of a sense of cultural diversity and our basis of religious freedom we allow Imams in the pulpit preaching not religion but politics, not love but hate, not diversity but jihad! Imagine if you would a preacher in a Christian church preaching fire and brimstone, not against our sins but against the heretics and non-believers, of calling for a crusade, for god and for the church and for the reclamation of our holy lands... how is this different than preaching jihad, of calling for suicide bombers to assault the infidel, of calling for sharia law in England and in France.
We tolerate, dare I say encourage, behavior in others we find reprehensible in ourselves. We point in shame at the Inquisition and make excuses for the Fatwah. We shudder so vehemently at the thought of cultural superiority that we pronounce ourselves and our culture not equal, but inferior. We welcome others into our home and expect, not for them to assimilate to our ways, but for us to accommodate theirs. We apologize profusely to our new house guests, I didn't realize it offended it you, I shall no longer cook bacon for breakfast, and certainly... I can take down the crucifix off the wall and put away my bible... I'm really sorry, I didn't realize it was wrong to subject you to such. Sure... I understand, I'll run right out to the hardware store and buy a foot basin for the bathroom.
I've got news for Mr. Hirsh, it is not the decline of America that he is observing, but the decline of the West. It is not due to the war in Iraq, it is due to a complete and utter abandonment of principle. It is not "scratch a theorist of American decline and you will find an Iraq war supporter", but scratch an Iraq war protester and you will find the cause of decline... a self-loathing creature that believes that the west is inherently evil, a conspiracy theorist alleging 'black alternative governments', an idealist who believes in talk and appeasement, and if that fails, more talk and appeasement. For God's sake man... we talked and talked and talked from 1991 to 2003, are we never to be done? You, along with the Bush administration obfuscate the issue with talk of WMD's... the war on terror, when the fact, plain and simple is that Saddam Hussein and his government were an evil on the face of this planet, a boil that needed to be excised. Argue, I dare you, that the Iraqi people would be better off today under Saddam or under one of his sons then they are today, with at least the slim opportunity of freedom and democracy offered to them by American action. Argue that we should not have taken military action at all... and do tell us what your alternative world would look like, and if you argue more diplomacy please enlighten me as to how 2003-2008 would have been any different from 1991-2003. The invasion of Iraq was not George Bush's failure, his failure was to attempt to coax, bribe, appease, and persuade our so called allies to do it instead of simply standing on the principle that it must be done, for who could argue that Saddam's regime was something good in this world that needed to go on. It was a black and white decision colored gray by politics and diplomacy.
We have sacrificed ourselves on the altar of political correctness, we denounce ourselves, our society, and our culture for the sake of accommodation and diversity. We have polarized ourselves into extreme camps not in reality, but in name and name calling, the communist left and the fascist right, when in reality both sides, democratic and republican are fairly close to each other in the center right of the political spectrum (blasphemy?). We, rather than engaging in discourse, villanize each other, despise each other, hate each other, and ourselves. It is the guilt, suspicion and self-loathing that fuels the decline of the west. It is the failure to see ourselves and act as, that shining beacon of freedom and democracy in the world.
We shall continue our decline until we stop flagellating ourselves for our sins and recognize our inherent goodness and act upon it.
~Pelagius~
~S P Q R~
