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COMMENTARY
September 23, 2009
Notes from the front
According to Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis, in a letter correcting the Wall Street Journal, it was a Turkish general, speaking shortly after Turkey joined NATO, who said:"The problem with having the Americans as your allies is that you never know when they'll turn around and stab themselves in the back." Lewis has merely dined out on this quotation, for more than half his life. (He is now 93.) The remark itself is better than a column in describing the horrible night that is descending upon Honduras, where a totalitarian maniac -- Manuel Zelaya -- is being manoeuvred back into power by the international Left. Zelaya was deposed under the Honduran constitution, by the army on direct instruction from the Honduran Supreme Court, before he could stack that court and overturn the constitution. That Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega, and Raul Castro are plotting, occasions no surprise. That president "Lula" of Brazil is now in with them, occasions a little. But that the whole operation is being done with the support of the U.S. State Department, beggars belief. The Americans are once again stabbing themselves in the back, and cutting their allies' throats, while appeasing their enemies. What more can be said? * Bernard Lewis, still apparently as sharp as any tack in foreign policy, at his very ripe age, is known as the guru of "neoconservative" thinking on the Middle East. No man alive, east or west, knows more about the history of the Islamic world; though I must add that his agnostic tone-deafness to genuinely religious or "spiritual" motivations has vitiated an otherwise superbly comprehensive view. He, and a younger generation of men he had educated, were to my mind the only foreign policy advisers around former President Bush who knew what they were talking about -- who could speak and read such languages as Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, and were deeply and personally acquainted with the Middle East. I wanted to mention at least briefly the passing of Irving Kristol, by deserved reputation the "godfather of neoconservatism" as a whole. The term refers to an outlook on political policy that is identical with old-fashioned liberalism: a secular, realistic outlook, that confronts facts honestly, cares a great deal about human liberty, likewise cares about the legal and procedural order upon which secular liberty depends, and is -- well, tone-deaf to religion. Kristol spawned, especially through the extraordinary highbrow magazines he founded or helped found -- Commentary, Encounter, The Public Interest, The National Interest -- a generation of accomplished "policy wonks" who continue to expose the totalitarian premises and irrational workings of the "post-liberal" mind, though more narrowly. Jimmy Carter delivered himself last week of the (both asinine and malicious) opinion that those who oppose Barack Obama are racist. One might, with slightly more justice, argue that anyone who opposes neoconservatism is anti-Semitic, since the leading neoconservative thinkers have been Jews. Neoconservatism, as old-fashioned liberalism, is hard to get positively excited about, for it is essentially negative. It is opposed to the degeneration of politics into sectarian rivalries -- into cock-crow displays of racial, ethnic, and ideological chauvinism. It is against malice. This would help explain its attraction to well-educated Jews, with their historical memory of murderous persecutions. Kristol was defending propositions that are universal in kind -- political, economic, and social principles that can appeal to all men of goodwill, in an entirely unhyphenated way. * I should also like to salute in passing the late Doug Fisher, for many years doyen of our Parliamentary press gallery, who died Friday on the eve of his 90th birthday. Not a neoconservative, but a Canadian "neo-democrat" of long standing, from that lost world when the CCF was animated at least partly by Christian zeal. An old soldier, of both Normandy and the Diefenbaker era, he was a very fine and honest man; the most reliable source for a genuine, humane understanding of what was happening on Parliament Hill. He loved his subject. Love is at the root of all knowledge. There is no one left quite like Fisher: a partisan by nature, as all good men are, but in a spirit so tall and generous that he could see over party lines. To work at all, a democracy depends on more than reliable information, for information by itself is merely a commodity, like ice, or sand. Analytical intelligence is required to make any sense of it: but this in turn requires irreducibly moral qualities in the analyst. Without the courage to speak freely, regardless of peer pressures and intimidation; and the generosity to see whole, regardless of irritations -- no analyst can be useful. Fisher was both fearless and kindly: like another recently deceased great journalist, Robert Novak. The best of that generation is now nearly extinct. We must pray for new lights to replace such people. David Warren
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