The Berlin Wall Has Fallen On Us

The Leftist chattering class is gradually – in fits and starts, one member at a time – coming to admit that Bush has made a positive difference in changing the dynamics of the Middle East. They do this, despite their continued insistence that Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice and their supporters are stupid, ill informed bullies. The conclusion is that they just got lucky. And despite agreeing that the Bush policy worked, they have not lost their faith in the belief system that prescribed the exact opposite of the Bush doctrine in dealing with the problems widespread terrorism fostered by Islamic radicalism.

Belmont Club provides an instructive review of an article printed in The Australian by Michael Costello. He is the former chief of staff of the Australian Labor Party's leader Michael Costello.

Costello's notion of "freedom" is curiously identified with "the democratic approach of seeking the middle ground" as if the essence of freedom was the willingness to compromise. Raymond Aron understood the fallacy. As the Nazi menace began to rise in Europe, Argon argued that the Left made the fatal mistake of believing that the exercise of freedom lay in compromising with the aggressor. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

This is the essence of the issue dividing the Right and the Left today. The Right may not take aggressive action every time we are attacked: Reagan pulled out of Lebanon after the attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut. However, the Left is reflexively pacifist. Even when it reacts, it does so in ways that are ineffectual. While Clinton did attack Yugoslavia, he reacted to direct attacks on Americans with just enough force to prove to Bin Laden and the other Islamist radicals that they had nothing to fear from America.

One of the tragedies of World War II was that it was a war, like so many others, that was avoidable. Winston Churchill wrote “There never was a war more easy to stop than that which has just wrecked what was left of the world from the previous struggle.” The war is the direct result of the failure of the Left in the 1930s to confront a resurgent Third Reich. In fact, the Left was proud of its pacifism in the face of German rearmament and its attacks on its neighbors. As a result, when the storm of global war finally broke, millions died in deserts and oceans, in hedgerows and gas ovens.

And so the lessons of the past go unlearned by our brethren on the Left who wrap themselves in the mantle of an assumed moral superiority crowned with superior wisdom.

With this in view, let us thank God for his providence and His blessing on us as a people and a nation and pray that our sins will not be visited upon us.